My only concern with a few of your suggestions is that they seem to imply implementing mechanics that effectively punish wars that go on too long, by making TO's harder, or affecting region maintenance, troop morale, etc.
I don't recall offhand what all the ideas were that Tom approved, but they did not include making region maintenance harder.
If you want to disincentivize wars-to-the-death in code, then I'm sorry, but from where I sit, you
have to have some kind of mechanic that makes a war harder to sustain as it goes on longer.
Unless you simultaneously succeed at incentivizing people to start more wars more often, you're actually going to reduce the amount of war in the game in the aggregate.
That is at least as important a part of the war improvements package the devs discussed, and while, again, I don't recall the specifics off the top of my head, Tom definitely approved some changes to push in that direction, too.
Part of this problem is that you're dealing with human nature here... A lot of the behaviors exhibited in the game are a function of rational action given certain incentives and disincentives. You have to determine what those are and how to alter them if you want IG behavior to change. Anaris has his finger on some of them, but the biggest one is quite simply that people are inherently risk-averse. They tend to avoid wars that they're not highly confident they can win, and then once in them they usually do everything they can to mitigate any future risks that might result, which often implies completely destroying your opponent or otherwise ensuring that he'll never be a threat to you again, or at least not for a long time (See: Eston). I do not see any way around this that wouldn't involve implementing systems that significantly depart from reality.
Well, actually, the other way you can do it is to make the system move much
closer to reality. After all, if the fear is of losing everything the character has gained, and the character is going to
definitely die within another 10-30 game years, and his heir isn't someone you control...you might be more willing to take some risks to gain more while you're alive.
But, in general, you're probably right. And I don't have a problem with making changes that reduce realism, so long as they make BattleMaster a
better game.
For instance (just to give a relatively extreme example), I don't think it would be totally beyond the pale to say that once Realm A has taken 1/4 of Realm B's regions, or 5 of Realm B's regions, whichever is more, Realm A cannot take any more regions from Realm B until Realm A has had a period of at least 3 RL months at peace to consolidate its hold on those regions. (I'm not entirely thrilled with mechanics like this because of the arbitrary magic numbers involved, but I think it gives the general idea.)
