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.
