No one, myself included, is proposing that you wouldn't be able to knock someone out of a war. People don't like that it can take several RL months to recover the population of a devastated city. I would think that knocking a realm out of effective production for three to six months would be more than sufficient.
Wars take months to wage. Many, many months. And the only kind of damage I have really seen do the devastation some complain about is realm-wide starvation. And even that was nerfed since. A heavily-looted realm might take a while to re-obtain maximum production, sure, but that also doesn't mean it's unable to fight in any conflict. It's too easy to blame everything else than the players choosing not to go to war themselves.
I would counter this with two arguments:
1. Bigger realms should win against smaller realms, all else being equal. If you're fighting a war with someone twice your size, with no off-setting advantages, then you should lose.
2. Maybe people would actually agree to something approaching reasonable peace terms if they personally were facing H/P losses.
1. Sure they should win. Doesn't mean they should be able to completely crush the other realms' characters' personal stats. It's outright griefing.
2. Define "reasonable". I suspect that winning realms would make much greater demands if they knew that continued war meant personal damage to the other nobles. And while production can be restored in many ways, h/p can't, and since recruitment is tied to these stats, it's even less reparable damage than what we currently have.
Lords already take h/p hits when their regions are lost. I don't think that this path would be a good one to pursue if we keep fun in mind.
