I guess it just seems absurd to me that asking a defeated realm to be content with what regions it has managed to retain is "pushing them too far".
It seems like, in general, you are expecting the winning realm to make major concessions in order to achieve peace: granting multiple regions, allowing crimes to go unpunished, abandoning the very goals the war was started for.
Now, like I said before, I've seen some unreasonable surrender terms in my time. I know it happens, and I know it's a problem. But I really think you're being unreasonable by lumping the terms Kindara and Cathay have been given in this game along with them, and from what you've said here, I suspect that you're letting your experience in M&F colour your perceptions of this too much.
So what, exactly, were they doing to them that made that make sense?
And if Kindara and Cathay were winning this war, I might expect them to do the same, because it is they who were unjust in starting it. Even with some pretty impressive stretching of the truth, I can't see how one could characterize Zonasa and Arcaea's fight against Cathay and Kindara as an "unjust war."
For what IC reasons? All of this is just being given without context, and context is vital in situations like this.
If it was really all done purely because of OOC reasons, then I'm sorry, but I can't condone it. I would rather have BattleMaster collapse to a one-island game, or die off entirely, than have major decisions like those made on a regular basis for OOC reasons without a solid IC justification. If that ever happened to it, it would mean most of the reason for the game's very existence had died anyway.
And here, you're just sounding condescending. "I know you poor, unenlightened savages here in the backwards game of BattleMaster are still clinging to your notions that a war should have some kind of purpose, or meaning, but we superior beings over in the shining city on a hill of Might and Fealty know that its true purpose is just to give fun to the players, and then be over without any consequences!" That may not be your intent, but it's certainly what this sounds like to me.
And yeah, sorry, not buying it. When you remove the IC consequences for war, you remove the IC purpose and justification for war, and everything just becomes a meaningless wargame where you're moving tokens around on a sand table. That's not what BattleMaster was ever meant to be.
I'm sorry Anaris, but as someone who's played Might & Fealty for a short time, I can tell you that the atmosphere in that game is a hell of a lot better than in this game. We aren't saying that wars shouldn't have meaning, but the fact is they're trying to build an IG, IC culture that allows for people to have wars with consequences that don't immediately escalate into continent-wide gangbangs. Because that's all that Battlemaster has become, continent-wide alliances where realms have little choice but to join one of two sides or be ground to dust in a merciless gangbang as one mega-alliance brings in all of its allies to kill off that one realm and claim its lands as its own so that the other alliance can't hold it. The one continent that was relatively different was Dwilight, and that's because of how incredibly massive it was compared to other continents. Now that it's been cut in half, that's what I see for its future.
By the way, there are consequences. The realm that conquered Red Forest was The White Company, which was a mercenary realm. It basically was contracted into taking three regions and forcing a surrender from Red Forest. They went well beyond that (I should know, I was commanding it at the time), blitzing through the realm and taking all of their regions save for one. This backfired as the realm that had contracted it did not want Red Forest destroyed, merely diminished. This lead to massive diplomatic repercussions, and I'm pretty sure that the White Company collapsed after I left.
