Limited Wars

[Poliorketes]

Yes. The general plan and several specific changes have been discussed and approved. I plan on implementing this stuff—war and combat related improvements—this fall and winter.

Wonderful news! 

And combat improvements!... even better!  We will have a system of marshal bonus, or it will be 'battleground/units' improvements, or maybe something totally different?

BTW. I'm sure sometimes this must be somewhat overwhelming! THANKS for your generous efforts! We really appreciated it!

[Peri]

But all the fear you cite—which I agree is real—is because of the mindset of players toward war.

Honestly, I'm not convinced there is any simple change we can make to game mechanics that will make players significantly more likely to be willing to make peace after limited gains.

I think that there are several reasons why we have this current situation, and if you will forgive me for a bit of a ramble, I'd like to enumerate them.

• People are afraid to leave a defeated enemy around to come back and bite them. This can be quite a legitimate fear, as I've seen it come back and bite realms in the past, to the tune of complete destruction. (For a semi-recent, prominent example, see Ibladesh and Perdan.)
• People rarely really know when to stop fighting. A war over ideological differences isn't likely to be stopped because one side changed their mind, because no one in BattleMaster ever changes their mind about anything substantive.
• Relatedly, once a realm is badly losing a war, they have no real incentive to surrender rather than see their realm destroyed. This leads to them demanding utterly absurd peace terms, that sometimes amount to demanding that the winning realm surrender if they want to end the war. Part of the motivation for this is that (somewhat paradoxically, given this topic) realms that destroy other realms are, at least to some, viewed with significant disfavour.
• The difficulty of continuing a war does not scale with how much of a realm you've destroyed. By and large, taking a border region is not meaningfully harder than taking the region next to the capital.
• Destruction—in general, not just of realms—is just too darn easy. Looting regions rogue has become too much of a standard practice, and it leaves those lands a wasteland for, in some cases, RL years afterward.
• There is no reason not to remain at war—in a single war—essentially forever. Your soldiers and peasants suffer no "wartime fatigue" of any kind, nor do your resources deplete (for the most part).

I think these are all very valid points and some might really be the main issue. I think we discussed this somewhere else before, but the limited amount of options the code offers to support treaties are certainly a relevant limitation.

In short: the limitations to sizes of realms, the difficulties faced when attacking far away enemies coupled with the fact that winning a war without total annihilation of your opponent doesn't really lead to any concrete advantage for the winner make war pretty unrewarding or too risky for many realms. (note: I am not saying that limitations to sizes or distance-based penalties are to be removed, not at all. But that they make the problem worse because picking enemies gets hard after a while.)

We all know that several attempts over time have been done by players to somehow implement a vassallage and/or tributary system, but only the naivest among us would propose something like this again without code supporting it. With a more complicated diplomatic system which gives the chance to winners to actually benefit from leaving the defeated realm alive more than vanquishing them and driving everything rogue, I believe wars would be stimulated considerably.

[Kai]

What you gain out of war is space and money and the game has massive excess of both.

[pcw27]

Maybe it would help to make recruitment take longer. I can't remember the last time I saw any realm call a draft. In the middle ages drafts would have been an inevitable part of any war. That might give realms an incentive to reach a stalemate rather then finish off their enemies.

[Jaden]

I think the peasant population need to be tinkered with, they die too easily to looting/revolts/starvation but drafting for recruitment centres does almost nothing to the pop.

[Zakilevo]

How about allowing people to choose who to kill? Maybe add an option to kill healthy young male adults who may serve as recruits? 

Let's say there is a region with 10 000 people. Out of that maybe 2500 are 'recruitable' population? The current option we have is just slaughtering anyone on sight I think but I do not believe they did that. Wars tend to leave orphans and widows but in BM they tend to leave nothing

[Sacha]

Or we could have recruit figures increase by factor 10. Instead of drafting, say 50 men, you'd now draft 500, so the longer a war drags on, the bigger the strain on the population. Units would also get 10x bigger, but I don't see that as a problem if the cost stays the same. This would also make battles appear much bigger. I've always found it a bit silly that an army of 3,000 men is one of the hugest in the game...

[Dishman]

How about allowing people to choose who to kill? Maybe add an option to kill healthy young male adults who may serve as recruits?

Or we could have recruit figures increase by factor 10. Instead of drafting, say 50 men, you'd now draft 500, so the longer a war drags on, the bigger the strain on the population.

I like both these ideas, but they don't really address limited wars. They seem to limit war in general.

[Sacha]

I don't see how raising troop recruitment numbers limits wars in general, unless you're in a realm stuck with a bunch of severely depopulated regions. Of course, under the current looting system it would give realms even more incentive to just mass slaughter peasants, so the looting aspect of the game would need to be tweaked for this to be viable.

But, if killing 1,500 peasants a day in a region is no longer possible, I don't see too many issues with it. People will say that big realms will have an edge, but they have one already so I feel it's kind of a moot point. Also, this would make realms more inclined to take enemy regions as undamaged as possible, reducing the perceived need for mass looting campaigns, which in turn will - hopefully - foster less irreparable hatred between realms, reducing the number of wars fought til one side is absolutely destroyed.

[Zakilevo]

I think if we somehow can incorporate 'war fatigue' to the game, we can limit the war but if we want to add this similar to the real world, the game will have to change quite a lot. I am sure the devs don't want that since it will require a lot of coding.

I think the easiest solution will be enforcement like Europa Universalis or CK2. EU uses 'war score' to enforce your demand. Maybe we can do something similar. I think we know from the accumulated game history people hate losing and mostly would rather see their realm destroyed than admit their defeat. We can maybe allow people to set how the long 'peace' period would last. Of course we do not want to prevent people from declaring war during that time but there should be some kind of punishment for dishonorable actions such as breaking peace before it expires. Maybe 25% honor and prestige loss for every member of the realm wouldn't be so bad.

Or if possible maybe the dev team can program something that would track the casualties, maybe when the casualty rate reaches certain percentage compare to the total population, it would pop a message saying something like 'war is draining too much manpower' which makes the realm lose 1~3% drop in production realm wide every day? Reducing the number of recruit you get won't be bad either.

[egamma]

What if we added a "metal" resource, that was gained by each region automatically? And each new recruit--and every repair--would drain the metal, so that a long war would deplete it, so that you couldn't repair your equipment or have RC's gain new recruits.

[SaDiablo]

A metal resource could be a good thing or it could backfire but it is a good idea.  Why don't you tie it to population, the longer the war could lead to less population growth so less men to be available to recruit and fight. 

[Vita`]

Some may recall that there was a previous attempt to bring in metal, wood, and other new economy goods....

[Geronus]

I think if we somehow can incorporate 'war fatigue' to the game, we can limit the war but if we want to add this similar to the real world, the game will have to change quite a lot. I am sure the devs don't want that since it will require a lot of coding.

I think the easiest solution will be enforcement like Europa Universalis or CK2. EU uses 'war score' to enforce your demand. Maybe we can do something similar. I think we know from the accumulated game history people hate losing and mostly would rather see their realm destroyed than admit their defeat. We can maybe allow people to set how the long 'peace' period would last. Of course we do not want to prevent people from declaring war during that time but there should be some kind of punishment for dishonorable actions such as breaking peace before it expires. Maybe 25% honor and prestige loss for every member of the realm wouldn't be so bad.

Or if possible maybe the dev team can program something that would track the casualties, maybe when the casualty rate reaches certain percentage compare to the total population, it would pop a message saying something like 'war is draining too much manpower' which makes the realm lose 1~3% drop in production realm wide every day? Reducing the number of recruit you get won't be bad either.

Building off of this, make all war decs identify specific regions as targets, and limit their number to something like, say, five (arbitrary, could be anything reasonable). When all those regions are no longer under the control of the target realm, the war immediately ends. Then stick some cooldown period on the function so that one realm can't repeatedly war dec another.

Almost by definition, any mechanic we add to limit wars is going to be punitive, so we may as well define the limits clearly.

[pcw27]

How about allowing people to choose who to kill? Maybe add an option to kill healthy young male adults who may serve as recruits? 

I actually really like this idea.

Another thought along the same lines. Suppose recruitment could be tied to peasant satisfaction with a war. If a realm is at war with a hated enemy then recruitment stays steady, however if the war is unpopular recruitment drops significantly, requiring drafts, which in turn will lower morale and damage production in the realm waging war. This could also go region by region. If a particular region hates the war then their RCs will be just about empty. This makes looting more risky as it could end up flooding the enemy armies with new recruits.