So TMP is gone. Are you enjoying all the new wars?

[De-Legro]

I may be suffering from selective memory here, but as I recall only Coria and maybe Talerium was suffering from TMP significantly. CE and allies conquered Falasan, and was in the process of curb-stomping BoM when six other reams piled onto CE and its allies.

If you have such good relations with every other realm in the bloc, then ask them to kick your target out of their bloc. If they refuse, then I guess you were not such good friends after all.

And your hypothetical scenario seems unlikely to me. Group-think tends to settle into an alliance bloc pretty quickly. People are social creatures and want to agree with their friends.

If an even bigger bloc declared war on your bloc, jumping ship will suddenly look a lot more attractive.

And what's wrong with ignoring a war declaration? Under-the-table negotiations with the "enemy" to stay out of the war de facto seems perfectly reasonable and BM-ish to me, especially if your allies are preoccupied enough to let you get away with it.

Look, we're not going to reduce the number of possibly confusing diplomacy configurations by making the system more complicated.  And if we make things more simplified, the diplomacy system will not be as expressive as before. We're going to have to balance between clarity and nuance here.

Sure, but the whole REASON for the diplomacy changes was to make power Blocs and group thinking LESS appealing, not reinforce them via game mechanics.

[GoldPanda]

I thought the reason was to make attacker/defender resolution during battles less of a guessing-game for humans. :P

I honestly don't know how you go about discouraging alliance blocs, short of disabling alliances. Every island I have a char in (Atamara, EC, Dwilight) have alliance blocs. BT had blocs the last time I played there. The first order of business for a new realm anywhere is usually, "are we in a bloc, and if not, how do we get into one?"

I hear FEI is the "lol-so-random" island, so maybe things are different there. Colonies seem to be too small to have significant alliances.

[De-Legro]

I thought the reason was to make attacker/defender resolution during battles less of a guessing-game for humans. :P

I honestly don't know how you go about discouraging alliance blocs, short of disabling alliances. Every island I have a char in (Atamara, EC, Dwilight) have alliance blocs. BT had blocs the last time I played there. The first order of business for a new realm anywhere is usually, "are we in a bloc, and if not, how do we get into one?"

I hear FEI is the "lol-so-random" island, so maybe things are different there. Colonies seem to be too small to have significant alliances.

The need to maintain new treaties or they dissolved was designed to prevent large blocks from forming without SIGNIFICANT effort to maintain those treaties. This combined with the fact the new treaties are more specific results in a mass of treaties being needed to replicate the current Alliance and Federation status, and an accompanying burden of maintenance.

The unintended effect of more specific treaties is that it generates a even larger set of conditions to be checked for when battles are calculated. Thus the statement that perhaps we have made it too fine grained.

FEI politics are rather easy to follow. The main difference is that FEI has a good amount of rulers that consciously avoid forming power blocs in the AT sense. They did have a issue with too many allied realms though, even though the realms were not operating as a single empire, it did allow 1 or 2 realms to basically prevent any wars because they were allied with almost everyone, and could make threats of entering any war against the aggressors. Thankfully that realm proved to be so boring it fell apart.

[Vellos]

Dwilight blocs? Hah.

I hope you're not counting Luria as a bloc? It's a mini-continent, not a bloc.

Sanguis Astroism is a bloc... mostly because they've had an ample supply of people putting targets on their own back. Give'em a while to get frustrated at each other and they'll do it.

The Moot is a bloc, but even we struggle to keep unified.

Mostly, Dwilight blocs are just a prisoner's dilemma solution. If we cooperate, payoff is better for both, nobody loses, because payoff can be found in the wild. When the wild starts to run down, at least some realms will start to find asymmetric payoffs to violence, and start wars to capture those distributive anomalies.

[De-Legro]

Dwilight blocs? Hah.

I hope you're not counting Luria as a bloc? It's a mini-continent, not a bloc.

Sanguis Astroism is a bloc... mostly because they've had an ample supply of people putting targets on their own back. Give'em a while to get frustrated at each other and they'll do it.

The Moot is a bloc, but even we struggle to keep unified.

Mostly, Dwilight blocs are just a prisoner's dilemma solution. If we cooperate, payoff is better for both, nobody loses, because payoff can be found in the wild. When the wild starts to run down, at least some realms will start to find asymmetric payoffs to violence, and start wars to capture those distributive anomalies.

If Bloc's functioned like the ones on Dwilight, they never would have been an issue. On Dwilight while powerful, they are also fragile, much like RL power blocs. Under the new system they will still exist, just they won't have that stale momentum that we sometime get with power blocs, where they have existed forever and feel like they would never change even if all the rulers started hurling insults at each other.

[JPierreD]

Since TMP is gone, I have not seen wars diminishing, at least in the continents I play in. In Dwilight we have seen the start of a Lurian war, and in Atamara we have seen Suville winning the war against Carelia and now taking Riverholm from Caergoth. Beluaterra is under invasion, so hard to use it for comparison.

I am /very/ satisfied with the end of TMP, my characters have lately gained much more H/P than they used to.

[GoldPanda]

If Bloc's functioned like the ones on Dwilight, they never would have been an issue. On Dwilight while powerful, they are also fragile, much like RL power blocs. Under the new system they will still exist, just they won't have that stale momentum that we sometime get with power blocs, where they have existed forever and feel like they would never change even if all the rulers started hurling insults at each other.

You should ask Caergoth (Atamara) how its "stale" alliances are doing. Or Norland... oh wait.

[songqu88@gmail.com]

Hey, remember when people said they were gonna destroy CE or something?

Good times, man.

[Ketchum]

Is there any new wars starting up? Everyone, mostly the people I know all are busy tending to the region maintenance. The war took quite a toll on lands. Something sort of rebuild, recruit, then we fight again. Nobody fight to the death anymore, everyone scare die, haha ;D

[Geronus]

Sanguis Astroism is a bloc... mostly because they've had an ample supply of people putting targets on their own back. Give'em a while to get frustrated at each other and they'll do it.

We already have. The last time we had a period of significant peace, Corsanctum and Morek almost went to war over Unterstrom. Then there was the Entai secession incident. Summerdale and LE really, really want to fight each other at some point. And then there was that time when the whole church almost fell apart. Or was that several times... ?

Things might be stabler in the east now with Allison out of the picture, but I predict that they'll start fighting soon, politically if not with actual armies.

[Chenier]

For the record, I am happy TMP is gone.

I advocated it strongly when it was first implemented, but then ended up realizing it did not do or behave as I expected it would. Mostly, it was punishing realms who could not go at war and often it was realms that wanted to go at war (or even who were already at war and fighting!). I'm happy that's gone.

I have not seen any decrease in warfare since. Is there much more? Perhaps not, I don't know. But a system that punishes small realms that are at war, for not being at war enough, just didn't have its place. RP should dictate how we play, not code that cannot factor in subtleties and context.

[De-Legro]

To really know the effect, we would need to wait for the wars that were started DURING the TMP period to end. Most the large wars are still a continuation of those.

[Chenier]

To really know the effect, we would need to wait for the wars that were started DURING the TMP period to end. Most the large wars are still a continuation of those.

Indeed.

On the other hand, you haven't seen any of these wars end, just because they weren't being pushed in the back anymore, either.

[De-Legro]

Indeed.

On the other hand, you haven't seen any of these wars end, just because they weren't being pushed in the back anymore, either.

Much harder to end a war. Once they are going they tend to have momentum to continue, if for no other reason then people generally want peace terms that favour their realm. The problem has always been establishing that momentum

[Indirik]

Most the large wars are still a continuation of those.

So... which large wars are these? The only large war I know of is "Let's all kill CE." On every other island, the wars are all ending, with no new ones starting. Yes, TMP had it's problems. But without it, or something to replace it, all I see are wars ending, with none starting. And how long has it been since TMP was removed?