It's the manner in which these things happen that can cause problems. The insistence on harsh, humiliating terms with no alternatives and no negotiations. Even back in those couple times that Perdan was beaten back to a tiny little realm and forced to surrender, we had the opportunity to negotiate and provide our input, and conduct actual negotiations. and *never* did tell us to switch sides in the war and betray your allies or be destroyed.
Which is the point I'm trying to make. If you really *want* someone to surrender, you need to provide them with terms that are something to which they can actually agree.
No, that's human nature. When you say something, you don't get to control how the other person feels about it, and reacts to it.
I'm not going to comment on the particular terms offered to Caligus (although, from what I've seen, they stood to gain as much land as they'd lost), but I agree with you about surrender terms needing to be an incentive to give in and the negative impact realm destruction can have on our numbers of players. However, this is a problem of established patterns of behaviour that have been set up over the years, and they're not likely to change now unless there's a significant shift in player behaviour across the board. Setting aside the EC, a similar thing is happening right now on FEI with unacceptable surrender terms, little-to-no negotiations, and potential negative impact on the player base of the island. It's a game-wide problem.
What I mean about the established patterns of behaviour is that the players have been conditioned to think in this way by years of such play in the game. Sirion wanted the SOA gone, so they destroyed it. Perdan and Caligus wanted Ibladesh gone, so they destroyed it. Hell, Caligus wanted Fontan gone, so they destroyed it. I remember back during the last Fontanese war, the Perdanese and Westmoorian armies were in Krimml and Fontan was offered pretty reasonable surrender terms considering they'd been virtually knocked out (I was actually there when the surrender was offered, so I know it happened). But Caligus wanted Fontan's remaining lands to create Dunnera, so they besieged Krimml and destroyed Fontan. Then they later destroyed Dunnera.
Realms/players have been acting in this way for years - destroy the target realm without offering surrender. It'll be a monumental task to now get everyone to change the way they play. And it would have to be
everyone. It couldn't be a case "Oh, we can't destroy Caligus", and then a few months later, another realm decides they're going to destroy OI, Perleone, Fallangard, etc. I use the newer realms as examples because I've noticed a strong bias in the past that people seem to be much more inclined to raise objection when it's an older realm threatened with destruction that they do when one of the younger realms is threatened.
