Taking new regions becoming historically harder

[Indirik]

They would probably that some of their region maintenance issues ease when they have battles--or have these realms forgotten the dreaded "too much peace"?

TMP has been modified too remove the region-destroying effects.

[vonGenf]

The problem is that it's not "a valid alternative". It's become the only viable way. Even if you manage to take a region peacefully via FTO, they almost always drop out the bottom very quickly, with no practical way to rebuild them. So realms do't do it anymore. The only reason to TO a region is to deny it to your enemy, or destroy it.

I was going to say it's a generalization, but I have a hard time finding an example of  TOed region that did not require a 2nd TO a few days after.... so ok, I am convinced.

[Foundation]

So... we recognize it is a problem, suggestions on how to improve?

[Phellan]

I think we need to revist how Estates and other issues related to it work - the mistake I think in the changes made, as poined out already, is that to "encourage" desired behaviours huge negative effects were applied to things.   Whether it was TMP or Estates, the failure is that negative punishment is used.   Not getting Knights?  BAM bad things happen.  Not fighting wars?  BAM bad things happen.

This is the wrong mentality to be enforcing - we should be reenforcing the desired effects by providing positive things when you have knights and war.   Taking over regions becomes extremely difficult because the negatives applied to them due to the inability to get food, knights, lords, and a duchy given to them.  Much like holding onto any region - it becomes a fight just to manage the region with police work and courtier work.

To make this easier - and to encourage more war and expansion (along with smaller realms being viable again) we need to place positive benefits to having Lords, Knights, Duchies etc applied to a region - rather than negatives (which are what happen when you lack them, and most Realms do).

Estates should provide bonuses to the region's stats, rather than be required to KEEP the region stable.    Duchy allegiances could provide control, loyalty, production, etc style bonuses (perhaps chosen by the Duke or based on the City/Ducal centre type).    Perhaps Estates allow for higher taxes to be extracted without a negative influence?   Or reduce the upkeep of buildings, or the cost to construct new buildings?   There are a large number of in game mechanics that Estates could provide as bonuses to a region where they are - Ducal Knight Estates could even be created to give Duchy wide bonuses.   This would make having Ducal knights something desirable.   Estates could influence religious beliefs, effect TO functions, and even increase the range/weapon/armour of units recruited from them (by small amounts obviously).    Increase wood/metal etc production for when those are implemented.

The key here is to make having Knights and Estates beneficial to a region, something the players will WANT to have, but that will not destroy a Realm if they don't have enough knights (or lose players to attrition).

Obviously though there would be diminishing returns - having one estate supporting something would provide good effects, but as you stack the same type of estate you see a smaller and smaller gain.   This would encourage diversity and provide a wider range of uses for Estates.

Regardless - the idea here is that too many of the in game mechanics punish - reducing the enjoyability of the game and making players focus on meeting game mechanic requirements (which is tedious and boring), rather than focus on other players and the enjoyability of the game.

[Bedwyr]

So... we recognize it is a problem, suggestions on how to improve?

There are a lot of possibilities, but my personal preference would be to make a takeover mean a lot more.  When you finish a takeover, you should pretty much be guaranteed that unless something happens (like another army starting a takeover to take it back) you can keep the region for at least a week.  Some sort of mod to control so that it stays at a level where revolts won't happen.  And that's for all TO's.  A Friendly takeover should end with morale and loyalty in the middle and actually stay there.  I'm not sure exactly what's causing all of the problems, so I'm not sure what needs to be fixed, but that right there would be a big step in the right direction.

Other ideas would include: Making disruption of Courts held by the lord not happen if there is a large enough military presence (hard to riot when there are several hundred troops standing guard), assign the region to the duchy the Lord came from, or provide some option to raise loyalty/morale by pumping gold and/or troop effort into the region (yes, civil work helps until you hit the max production for the population, which often happens quickly and leaves loyalty and morale still in the toilet).

Alternatively, if we want takeovers to stay at the crappy situation afterwards, then it should happen in one day rather than a bloody week.

[Foundation]

I think we need to revist how Estates and other issues related to it work - the mistake I think in the changes made, as poined out already, is that to "encourage" desired behaviours huge negative effects were applied to things.   Whether it was TMP or Estates, the failure is that negative punishment is used.   Not getting Knights?  BAM bad things happen.  Not fighting wars?  BAM bad things happen.

This is the wrong mentality to be enforcing - we should be reenforcing the desired effects by providing positive things when you have knights and war.   Taking over regions becomes extremely difficult because the negatives applied to them due to the inability to get food, knights, lords, and a duchy given to them.  Much like holding onto any region - it becomes a fight just to manage the region with police work and courtier work.

To make this easier - and to encourage more war and expansion (along with smaller realms being viable again) we need to place positive benefits to having Lords, Knights, Duchies etc applied to a region - rather than negatives (which are what happen when you lack them, and most Realms do).

Estates should provide bonuses to the region's stats, rather than be required to KEEP the region stable.    Duchy allegiances could provide control, loyalty, production, etc style bonuses (perhaps chosen by the Duke or based on the City/Ducal centre type).    Perhaps Estates allow for higher taxes to be extracted without a negative influence?   Or reduce the upkeep of buildings, or the cost to construct new buildings?   There are a large number of in game mechanics that Estates could provide as bonuses to a region where they are - Ducal Knight Estates could even be created to give Duchy wide bonuses.   This would make having Ducal knights something desirable.   Estates could influence religious beliefs, effect TO functions, and even increase the range/weapon/armour of units recruited from them (by small amounts obviously).    Increase wood/metal etc production for when those are implemented.

The key here is to make having Knights and Estates beneficial to a region, something the players will WANT to have, but that will not destroy a Realm if they don't have enough knights (or lose players to attrition).

Obviously though there would be diminishing returns - having one estate supporting something would provide good effects, but as you stack the same type of estate you see a smaller and smaller gain.   This would encourage diversity and provide a wider range of uses for Estates.

Regardless - the idea here is that too many of the in game mechanics punish - reducing the enjoyability of the game and making players focus on meeting game mechanic requirements (which is tedious and boring), rather than focus on other players and the enjoyability of the game.

Yep, this was considered and Tom began coding something of this sort (details vary).  I will consider taking up finishing this change in estate and talk to our dev team about it.

[Chenier]

Use diplomats/ambassadors/priests to improve loyalty at an astonishing rate. Your realm decided it could allow several faiths and has no hegemony? Tough luck.

Their efforts are useless when all stats reset to 1% at TC. I'm an ambassador with excellent oratory skill, and using those tools is a waste of time. I'm better off using my dozen or so men to do police raids, anything else before a lord is chosen is a waste of time.

I have in the past used traders and the black market to feed a region if it has no lord. I've never seen 96% of food stolen, generally I consider 20% loss on a ox cart to be bad. We have also never had a problem finding a knight willing to take up an estate in a ruined region, unless we already have a shortage of knights, in which case it is kind of mad to be trying to take a new region. Can always just offer to subsidise his/her share for a while, or promise to fast track their own advancement up the ranks for their service. Our biggest problem these days is the actual TO seems to take forever to complete. Could be something about the size of the realm.

Subsistence levels seem to be something not to rely on. Every full turn the region improves a little, which ends subsistence levels, only then they starve back to to them, or so it appears.

If you like to elect Lords, one way to solve it is to have an election before the region is TO'd and then appoint the winner, though I really don't love that option. Perhaps we need some code to reduce the negative effects in a region until a lord is elected? I would imagine the code would need to hold the region in an almost stable position to stop people using this to try and get a few days were they can really invest time to bring a regions stats up though.

Enweil is surrounded by rogue regions. But we can't really expand because we lack the nobles. But so does everyone else, so nobody is taking these regions. And since we can't increase our income by expanding to compensate for the loss of two cities during the invasion, we can't restore our economy, meaning a stalemate is the best we could wish of any war. It's rather stupid. And the region is question was taken in order to increase my duchy. It was taken by the western army for the western duchies, without the support of the main army and without the ruler being there to appoint anyone. How are dukes to gain greater independence if they suffer so many penalties from being part of a realm? And even if we had been sponsored and it was organized by the whole realm, I've seen enough times how even that is way more difficult than it should be. This particular case just made me realize how tired I was of how this issue evolved and how nobody was saying anything about it yet.

One thing that is clearly needed is for a way for bankers to control the markets of lordless regions and for new lords to be able to switch duchies immediately. One week of being imperial is just aggravating, when you consider that this first week is when it'd be most useful.

Yep. I agree. This really slows things down a LOT. Most realms fighting wars these days don't really try to take and hold land anymore. War has changed to a game of beating your enemy to a pulp, removing their ability to fight a war at all, and then dealing with the region TO issues in the post-war-peace-treaty period.

I've been heavily involved in military affairs on a different occasions, and this is *exactly* how I adapted my strategy. "Kill Riombara and DoA first, then we can slowly think about setting up friendly colonies there, when everything is rogue and no one is left to bother us and interrupt repair efforts".

I love looting, and was not the least sad to pick this as the general strategy, but as others have said, it sucked that no alternative was viable. Hell, we even tried a colony takeover in Rines, but they are so bloody difficult to pull off. Does anyone know why they are so frigging difficult? Colonies should be encouraged, if you ask me, but that's a different discussion altogether...

[Zakilevo]

Like what everyone said, I think many updates made things too complicated. 3 or 4 years ago things were a lot simpler. Too many things are getting in the way for a realm to start a war with another. This is BATTLE Master not Bureaucracy Master

[Kain]

Yep. I agree. This really slows things down a LOT. Most realms fighting wars these days don't really try to take and hold land anymore. War has changed to a game of beating your enemy to a pulp, removing their ability to fight a war at all, and then dealing with the region TO issues in the post-war-peace-treaty period.

Indeed. When I began playing in 2005, TO:s were a viable during-war strategy. From what I remember, you did not have to work that hard to get the stats back in order even when you used brutal TO:s. That allowed realms to almost always have a TO running, if they were at war (which basically everyone was all the time) and had an army that was alive.

All the take overs were done during the war and as such you didn't need any long maintinence periods between wars.

I liked the old way when regions shifted hands often and when a looted region wasn't destroyed for a year afterward.

[Kain]

I liked the old way when regions shifted hands often and when a looted region wasn't destroyed for a year afterward.

I just noticed something which illustrates the changes very well. Back in 05, rogue regions were somewhat rare on EC. One here, one there but in no great numbers. Now it is 2011 and at the time of writing, EC has 12 of them, including 1 city, 1 townsland and 1 stronghold.

[Shizzle]

How about allowing knights to have more than one Liege? Doesn't sound historically incorrect, nobles often owed fealty to one Lord for this estate, and to another for a different property... That way you could have multiply estates for one knight, and need less knights to maintain your regions :) Of course diminishing returns would be needed.

[fodder]

i'm thinking it should be possible for raids to be profitable without destroying the region.

ie. not necessary to TO a region to reap its benefits

[vonGenf]

i'm thinking it should be possible for raids to be profitable without destroying the region.

ie. not necessary to TO a region to reap its benefits

Under this scheme, it would be more profitable for two friendly realms to be constantly at war than to maintain peace.

[vonGenf]

How about allowing knights to have more than one Liege? Doesn't sound historically incorrect, nobles often owed fealty to one Lord for this estate, and to another for a different property... That way you could have multiply estates for one knight, and need less knights to maintain your regions :) Of course diminishing returns would be needed.

An interesting way to do this would be have no diminishing returns under, let's say, 70%, but diminishing returns afterwards. That way, it would always be profitable for a realm to gain a new region, no matter its number of knights, and always profitable to gain new knights.

We should be careful that it should not be possible for a single player to hold a whole realm!

[Shizzle]

An interesting way to do this would be have no diminishing returns under, let's say, 70%, but diminishing returns afterwards. That way, it would always be profitable for a realm to gain a new region, no matter its number of knights, and always profitable to gain new knights.

We should be careful that it should not be possible for a single player to hold a whole realm!

Well, of course, but that's easily cancelled out: unit CS rapidly drops with increasing numbers. Even with the money of a whole realm, I doubt a unit could go far over 2-3K CS...

Or we could allow Lords to also have an estate in another Lord's region? Though that sounds kind of artificial