Yes, we genuinely come at this from totally different angles. I know this is why Velax will never see where I'm coming from with it. Again, my thinking on this is deeply coloured by discussions and happenings over in Might & Fealty. We've come to realize that pushing defeated realms too far was making people quit the game.
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.
In a couple of recent cases, wars have ended with pretty much no surrender terms imposed because the losing side has said, "What the hell are you doing to us?" causing the winners to back off.
So what, exactly,
were they doing to them that made that make sense?
One winning realm recently made reparations to the losing side for an unjust war.
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."
And Hawks has just returned all the territory it won from Red Forest in a war about two months ago (I realise the realm names will mean nothing to people here).
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.
I fully accept that this sort of "no win, no loss" scenario is completely alien to BM players, and I recently said over in M&F that the import of BM war culture is what was damaging the M&F outlook on war. In this case, I wish some of M&F would rub off on BM. But I seriously doubt that it will.
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.