Make Battlemaster Great Again - War Overhaul

[Chenier]

Through a large number of changes over the years, demographic as well as mechanic, average knights have become less and less meaningful in the face of increasing passive mechanics and gimmicky tools available to a few.

Wars used to run over a pretty simple premise: get more nobles and organize them better and you will win, or at least make steady progress until the few passive limits came into play.

But now? Realm radius was decreased. Colony takeovers were removed. Family wealth cap was increased, which combined with lowered density and "new" (very old now) tax system make a few easily insanely rich (at the detriment of the majority) and actions like buying regions much easier, peasant militias are widespread and practically automatic, etc. The rank-n-file knight with some men used to be able to achieve significant results. Now? It's some kind of click race where, even with an appointed lord, a single noble can buy a region from under a huge coalition army.

This kind of war is not FUN. Not for everyone outside the tiny minority with access to these gimmicks.

Wars were a lot more fun in 2006.

[CryptCypher]

...And 2012. :)

[Vita`]

While we probably disagree about specifics, I do endorse this.

[Zakky]

Doubt there will be too many changes but I do hope the game focuses on player interactions again instead of all these automatic defense stuff. Also, the game is trying too hard to force a certain type of gameplay on people. Not a big fan of that. But good luck bringing changes without bringing in people who know how to code.

[Gildre]

Don't worry Zakky. I am bound to win the lotto one of these days. When I do I will hire a programming team and we can gangbang them from the forums for everything we want.

[Vita`]

Don't worry Zakky. I am bound to win the lotto one of these days. When I do I will hire a programming team and we can gangbang them from the forums for everything we want.

This somehow reminded me of Bender with hookers and blackjack, except its programmer prostitutes and battlemaster.

[Chenier]

1) Make it possible to TO cities with which you don't share a border, possibly automatically creating a new duchy for them, as a new version of the old CTOs
2) Bring back (the option of) communal taxes.
3) Bring back wealth tax
4) Lower the family wealth cap to 5000
5) Make any action that uses family gold for military purposes instead use personal gold
6) Make buying regions only possible in your own realm or in realms you are allied with.
7) Make religious takeovers factor in realm sympathy and a bunch of new factors to make it almost impossible to pull off, at least when done on human-held lands. Enable it anew in rogue lands.
8) Remove peasant militias completely: only player actions should stop player actions.
9) When too much looting is done, instead of peasant militias, locals should run away to nearby regions.
10) Convert 15% of all militia units to local population every week. Reduce this decay by 2% per fortification level.
11) Add a looting option that specifically targets loyalty and control.
12) Return the distance from capital radius to what it used to be, if not larger.
13) Add a "Demesne" alternative to lordships, where a region goes lordless without penalties other than a tax penalty or 100% of it going to the communal pot. Referendums don't run for it in democracies. The game has too many regions like Wasteland and the Desert of Silhouettes that don't deserve putting any nobles to them, but which in some cases must be taken for a number of other reasons.

In short, make wars about the knights again, and not about the gimmicks.

[Zakky]

1) Make it possible to TO cities with which you don't share a border, possibly automatically creating a new duchy for them, as a new version of the old CTOs
-- Actually any region should be possible to TO. With the distance penalty, if you try to TO a region too far away, they will revolt anyway.
2) Bring back (the option of) communal taxes.
--Why? I'd rather see redistribution of gold through region rebalancing. Less gold for cities and more gold for rural regions. We won't see any additional resources being added back to the game so might as well rebalance regions so they don't need to ask for gold all the time.
3) Bring back wealth tax
--Not sure.
4) Lower the family wealth cap to 5000
--I think just lowering it to 2.5k should do it. If people can't buy regions, there is no point on keeping it so high. Or if you want to keep it to 5k, I'd suggest making it so you can't put any gold in as long as your family gold is over 1k.
5) Make any action that uses family gold for military purposes instead use personal gold
--Actually wouldn't mind seeing people using their family gold to recruit units. Maybe make it twice as expensive or even three.
6) Make buying regions only possible in your own realm or in realms you are allied with.
--Not a bad idea.
7) Make religious takeovers factor in realm sympathy and a bunch of new factors to make it almost impossible to pull off, at least when done on human-held lands. Enable it anew in rogue lands.
--No. Just get rid of religion. The game has too few people for religions and priests.
8) Remove peasant militias completely: only player actions should stop player actions.
--Agreed
9) When too much looting is done, instead of peasant militias, locals should run away to nearby regions.
--Instead, I'd just make it impossible for people to loot a place to the ground. Let's say once a region is left with 25% or lower production, you can no longer loot in that region or something.
10) Convert 15% of all militia units to local population every week. Reduce this decay by 2% per fortification level.
11) Add a looting option that specifically targets loyalty and control.
--I think this is what the current unfinished TO will do eventually.
12) Return the distance from capital radius to what it used to be, if not larger.
--I thought it hasn't changed? I'd agree with making it larger especially on Dwilight.
13) Add a "Demesne" alternative to lordships, where a region goes lordless without penalties other than a tax penalty or 100% of it going to the communal pot. Referendums don't run for it in democracies. The game has too many regions like Wasteland and the Desert of Silhouettes that don't deserve putting any nobles to them, but which in some cases must be taken for a number of other reasons.

In short, make wars about the knights again, and not about the gimmicks.

[Chenier]

1) --Actually any region should be possible to TO. With the distance penalty, if you try to TO a region too far away, they will revolt anyway.
2) --Why? I'd rather see redistribution of gold through region rebalancing. Less gold for cities and more gold for rural regions. We won't see any additional resources being added back to the game so might as well rebalance regions so they don't need to ask for gold all the time.
4) --I think just lowering it to 2.5k should do it. If people can't buy regions, there is no point on keeping it so high. Or if you want to keep it to 5k, I'd suggest making it so you can't put any gold in as long as your family gold is over 1k.
5) --Actually wouldn't mind seeing people using their family gold to recruit units. Maybe make it twice as expensive or even three.
7) --No. Just get rid of religion. The game has too few people for religions and priests.
9) --Instead, I'd just make it impossible for people to loot a place to the ground. Let's say once a region is left with 25% or lower production, you can no longer loot in that region or something.
12) --I thought it hasn't changed? I'd agree with making it larger especially on Dwilight.

1) No, you need a border. The exception to this is Testing, with sea regions, as realms with coastal regions can take other coastal regions with which they don't share a land border. That doesn't allow inland TOs, and that doesn't apply to Stable.
2) Some rebalancing of the regions could be good, but that does nothing about the fact that some regions can be devastated which will have an extreme effect on the few who settle there. Equally, few people want to be lords of some key regions or border regions, because the war, militia, or other factors make it that they make little income. On Dwi, this is even worse, where many regions are completely depopulated, but that also exists on EC and BT. Manual transfers are tedious and unfun, giving realms at least the option to use either a balanced or a mostly communal system would help keep everyone engaged in realm activities, and not leave poor knights and lords (of sometimes potentially rich regions) just missing out because they tire of begging and their region gives them no taxes.
4) Sure? I mean, the cap used to be 10k, which was raised afaik to 20k. The logic behind it I'm not sure, other than "a lot of people reached the cap, so might as well raise it". I have always hated family wealth. It's the result of parasitic nobles funneling gold from where it could be used to achieve something fun to a barely touchable safe haven abroad where, if it is used, will likely be used by another realm.
5) I would mind it a lot. As per the previous point, nobles squatting high titles to farm gold in order to finance the activities of another realm on another continent are not only unfun for that other realm's competitors, as there's nothing they can directly do about it, but are also unfun for the sponsor realm's other nobles, who see the realm parasitized and left with little to do something with. Family wealth could be used, like fame, to give new characters a higher starting h/p, and better starting unit stats, but should otherwise absolutely not have a direct use in warfare.
7) That's clearly not going to happen. A softer approach would be adding a new subclass (Cleric, Crusader, Inquisitor, something of the like), available to all classes (including priests, warriors, and adventurers), that gives non-priests a greater ability to involve themselves in the religion game. Especially with the new limit of 1 noble per continent, the "you cannot have a unit" restriction on priests makes it extremly unappealing, even to people who would want to involve themselves in the religious game.
9) I'm actually in favor of being able to loot a region to the ground, but would also like a way to bring it back up. I think wars would be a lot more interesting if you could more reliably bring production to zero, but if such extensive damage could be fixed in about 2 months. Perhaps a forced deportation looting option. As a mix of this point and another, I don't think regions should ever revolt on their own, there should be a lower cap under which stats will not go on their own, but player actions should be more easily able to make the stats go below this cap and revolt.
12) It was significantly reduced, which has absurd effects on some realms.

[Anaris]

1) Make it possible to TO cities with which you don't share a border, possibly automatically creating a new duchy for them, as a new version of the old CTOs

Ehhh...maybe. I'd rather just reimplement CTOs.

2) Bring back (the option of) communal taxes.

In some form, maybe. The way they used to be, no.

3) Bring back wealth tax

Strongly supported.

4) Lower the family wealth cap to 5000

Nope. I'm not going to do anything that's just going to take thousands of gold from mostly long-running families.

I might well put in some things that act differently when your family gold is high, though. Like increasing ransom dramatically, having bandits sometimes actually capture you and try to ransom you from your family, that sort of thing.

5) Make any action that uses family gold for military purposes instead use personal gold

...Which military actions use family gold now? I can't recall offhand. I'd rather have them use army gold.

6) Make buying regions only possible in your own realm or in realms you are allied with.

That's the opposite of the direction we went a while ago, and though I won't say "no," I certainly won't say "yes" either. This, I think, needs a detailed explanation & discussion.

7) Make religious takeovers factor in realm sympathy and a bunch of new factors to make it almost impossible to pull off, at least when done on human-held lands. Enable it anew in rogue lands.

I would say not almost impossible, but a lot harder than it's been. Otherwise, yes, I support this.

8) Remove peasant militias completely: only player actions should stop player actions.

I presume you mean the automatic type that pops up on looting? Yeah, I'm still not happy with those, or with the consequences of looting generally. I might open a topic about this for general discussion and brainstorming.

9) When too much looting is done, instead of peasant militias, locals should run away to nearby regions.

See, like that. That's a fantastic idea! ;D

10) Convert 15% of all militia units to local population every week. Reduce this decay by 2% per fortification level.

Mmm, no, I think not, though I do have some Thoughts on changes to how militia work that would, at least in a geographic sense, drastically reduce their prominence.

11) Add a looting option that specifically targets loyalty and control.

I don't think that's looting. I think that's some kind of propaganda engine. Which I have some ideas for, too.

12) Return the distance from capital radius to what it used to be, if not larger.

So we can have huge hollowed-out realms again? I lean toward "no," but I also lean toward "I have ideas for making that restriction much more nuanced."

13) Add a "Demesne" alternative to lordships, where a region goes lordless without penalties other than a tax penalty or 100% of it going to the communal pot. Referendums don't run for it in democracies. The game has too many regions like Wasteland and the Desert of Silhouettes that don't deserve putting any nobles to them, but which in some cases must be taken for a number of other reasons.

I have a plan in mind that's very similar to thisâ€"and if you can tell me why you call it "Demesne", I might even use that name for it, because I didn't have a good name yet.

In short, make wars about the knights again, and not about the gimmicks.

That's great to say, but always hard to actually implement.

[Chenier]

Ehhh...maybe. I'd rather just reimplement CTOs.

In some form, maybe. The way they used to be, no.

Strongly supported.

Nope. I'm not going to do anything that's just going to take thousands of gold from mostly long-running families.

I might well put in some things that act differently when your family gold is high, though. Like increasing ransom dramatically, having bandits sometimes actually capture you and try to ransom you from your family, that sort of thing.

...Which military actions use family gold now? I can't recall offhand. I'd rather have them use army gold.

That's the opposite of the direction we went a while ago, and though I won't say "no," I certainly won't say "yes" either. This, I think, needs a detailed explanation & discussion.

I would say not almost impossible, but a lot harder than it's been. Otherwise, yes, I support this.

I presume you mean the automatic type that pops up on looting? Yeah, I'm still not happy with those, or with the consequences of looting generally. I might open a topic about this for general discussion and brainstorming.

See, like that. That's a fantastic idea! ;D

Mmm, no, I think not, though I do have some Thoughts on changes to how militia work that would, at least in a geographic sense, drastically reduce their prominence.

I don't think that's looting. I think that's some kind of propaganda engine. Which I have some ideas for, too.

So we can have huge hollowed-out realms again? I lean toward "no," but I also lean toward "I have ideas for making that restriction much more nuanced."

I have a plan in mind that's very similar to thisâ€"and if you can tell me why you call it "Demesne", I might even use that name for it, because I didn't have a good name yet.

That's great to say, but always hard to actually implement.

1) Maybe. They were always awkwards, though. A city in the middle of enemy lands is hard to make a viable realm in off the bat. No RCs, no economy, right next door to the rest of the enemies...

2) Maybe simpler, less-gamey, and more hybrid form. Ex: allow rulers to give to all troop leaders half of their realm share taxes, which when selected, also allows them to double the max tax rate they can impose on their dukes (and so on down the line).

4) Gold past the new lowered cap need not be completely removed. You could have a decay of maybe 10% of the excess per week, during which time half of the decayed gold is shared between the active characters of the family. Gotta remember, though, people with 20k gold are people who horded key positions in their realm, and instead of helping their realms do stuff, they were parasites that funneled funds elsewhere. BM would probably have seen a lot more wars if the super rich had nowhere to send their gold other than in-realm (especially if wealth taxes were back).

5) Buying regions, namely. On Dwi it got pretty silly how widespread it was used. On EC too. I vaguely seem to recall something else, but it's not coming to mind right now.

6) Yea, I think it does need discussion. An alternative to buying regions would be to bribe referendum results, but I'm not sure if undermining elections is something we really want to do. In any case, my general feeling is that one-player gimmicks should not easily undermine the collective actions of a large number of players.

8 ) I am referring to two things: peasant militias that spring up in reaction of looting, and peasant militias that spring up for the mere presence of enemy nobles from realms they hate. On EC, one priest/ambassador in particular has gone to a few regions and made them utterly hate every single SA realm, and utterly love every single northern realm. Just entering those regions causes 10k of militia to appear, and holding them after a TO is practically impossible due to the insane amount of protest debuffs. We are starting to counter with out own ambassador work, but it's super gimmicky that one noble can build an impenetrable trench line that even one of the largest armies of the continent sitting in the region doing police work and civil work cannot stabilize it and prevent it from revolting.

9) Fight or flight! The natural response of people towards invaders is to flee. If peasant militias defending their homes really needs to be a thing, I think it should be a form of drafting where the lord pays a lot of gold for it, and where it does huge region stat penalties.

11) Propaganda or simply killing off all the loyal government officials (without bothering to put new ones in place). Could use TO mechanics, but easier and not limited by having a border.

12) and 13) These points are actually intertwined. I'm still in favor of density, in some form, but just not for the sake of it. Density is a tool, not an end in itself. Thus the idea is to allow realms to continue expanding into each other, otherwise once the density sweet spot is reached all incentives to fight a neighbor are almost gone, without necessarily giving a title to everyone for it. In other words, realms could keep expanding to 10, 20, 30 regions, even if they only have 15 nobles, but they would either be dissuaded or prevented from appointing all 15 nobles to the various lordships. And that even when all nobles have the titles they can have, the realm still has incentives to acquire new regions, because these would feed the communal taxes, and thus make everyone richer. Remember, the goal of increased density is, among other things, make sure that realms don't become filled with people that have nothing more to gain. But the current density mechanics kind of still do this in an indirect way (on Dwi).

As for why that specific word, I looked up "crown lands" or something like that in Google, and was offered that as an synonym. It seemed feudal yet less overtly monarchic, thus better fitting with non-monarchy government flavors. In the early days of the new estate system, there were imperial regions that relayed directly from the ruler, who could be a region lord without being a duke. It's somewhat inspired from that, but also mechanically very different.

de·mesne
dəˈmān/
nounhistorical
noun: demesne; plural noun: demesnes

    1.
    land attached to a manor and retained for the owner's own use.
        the lands of an estate.
        archaic
        a region or domain.
        "she may one day queen it over that fair demesne"

[Vita`]

I should point out that it's already approved to bring back wealth and property taxes as *options* for governments, not mandatory like before.

Also approved, but never implemented, are the option to have council shares of ruler/realm distribution. It's not a big jump from that to my preferred form of reimplementing communal taxes being having the government option of subsidizing classes and subclasses from the ruler/realm distribution. Yes, currently those are nil, but I don't think it'd be impossible to have public pressure on dukes to contribute more heavily if it was subsidizing the realm. And pressure from council members if it boosted their incomes.

I like the idea of high wealth families being more subject to kidnapping and extortion attempts, reimplementing a system allowing for simpler new realm creation than secessions but am neutral on CTO vs Chenier-suggestion, opposed to lowering family wealth limit, opposed to reducing distance from capital limit, and I'm in the same boat as Anaris regarding buying regions in-realm or in-alliance realm. Anything not specifically mentioned can best be described as being considered, ambivalent, apprehensive but not rejecting, needs further discussion et cetera.

[Chenier]

I should point out that it's already approved to bring back wealth and property taxes as *options* for governments, not mandatory like before.

Also approved, but never implemented, are the option to have council shares of ruler/realm distribution. It's not a big jump from that to my preferred form of reimplementing communal taxes being having the government option of subsidizing classes and subclasses from the ruler/realm distribution. Yes, currently those are nil, but I don't think it'd be impossible to have public pressure on dukes to contribute more heavily if it was subsidizing the realm. And pressure from council members if it boosted their incomes.

I like the idea of high wealth families being more subject to kidnapping and extortion attempts, reimplementing a system allowing for simpler new realm creation than secessions but am neutral on CTO vs Chenier-suggestion, opposed to lowering family wealth limit, opposed to reducing distance from capital limit, and I'm in the same boat as Anaris regarding buying regions in-realm or in-alliance realm. Anything not specifically mentioned can best be described as being considered, ambivalent, apprehensive but not rejecting, needs further discussion et cetera.

Optional is fine by me. Not sure the communal taxes would need to be as complicated as before, with the option for more "weight" to some (sub)classes or titles than others. I don't think government members really need extra gold either, though I guess that the increased income for them could help increase competition. Then again, with more customization comes greater player agency. As long as there's something to help ince into realm activities, at the very least, the extremely poor (lords/knight of regions that are either terrible by design, forced to be filled with militia for strategic region, or utterly devastated into non-production).

[Chenier]

Also in line with this topic: https://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,8082.0.html

Removing some of the intent-based rules to let people just lug it out without regards to how good they are at weaseling legalese into being granted the right to do something others would not.

Additionally, a return on the realm radius issue: with a declining player base, it's much easier to maintain a large per-realm noble count with sprawling empires, which limits the number of council positions and thus increases competition, than with a large number of tiny realms that don't have much leadership potential and where many completely delegate many responsibilties to foreign parties. Large does not always equate stagnant and hollow.

[Anaris]

1) Maybe. They were always awkwards, though. A city in the middle of enemy lands is hard to make a viable realm in off the bat. No RCs, no economy, right next door to the rest of the enemies...

Yeah; something different needs to be done, and perhaps some of my other ideas about changes in region ownership should play into themâ€"with the basic idea be that you essentially half-take-over the city and some surrounding regions, then declare them en masse to be a new colony.

2) Maybe simpler, less-gamey, and more hybrid form. Ex: allow rulers to give to all troop leaders half of their realm share taxes, which when selected, also allows them to double the max tax rate they can impose on their dukes (and so on down the line).

Yeah, something along those linesâ€"optional, like Vita says, and working with the new system, not trying to replace it.

4) Gold past the new lowered cap need not be completely removed. You could have a decay of maybe 10% of the excess per week, during which time half of the decayed gold is shared between the active characters of the family. Gotta remember, though, people with 20k gold are people who horded key positions in their realm, and instead of helping their realms do stuff, they were parasites that funneled funds elsewhere. BM would probably have seen a lot more wars if the super rich had nowhere to send their gold other than in-realm (especially if wealth taxes were back).

I'd still rather not just make the excess gold decay away.

Frankly, it sounds to me like what you really want isn't so much the removal of family gold, but the removal of the "buy region" option, and that's something I am open to, though I'd like something to replace it withâ€"not necessarily another way to take a region, but something that's sneaky and highly disruptive.

6) Yea, I think it does need discussion. An alternative to buying regions would be to bribe referendum results, but I'm not sure if undermining elections is something we really want to do. In any case, my general feeling is that one-player gimmicks should not easily undermine the collective actions of a large number of players.

No, I definitely don't want to start undermining referenda. But yes, I tend to agree with your general feeling.

However, I would also say this: If the one-player gimmick required a lot of time and effort to set up, its payoff should be proportional to that. So if there were an infiltrator option that required several days or even a week or two of RL time for setup, but that allowed you to, say, wound all or most of the troops in a region (simulating poisoning a water supply or something similar), that is something that I would consider as probably viable.

8 ) I am referring to two things: peasant militias that spring up in reaction of looting, and peasant militias that spring up for the mere presence of enemy nobles from realms they hate. On EC, one priest/ambassador in particular has gone to a few regions and made them utterly hate every single SA realm, and utterly love every single northern realm. Just entering those regions causes 10k of militia to appear, and holding them after a TO is practically impossible due to the insane amount of protest debuffs. We are starting to counter with out own ambassador work, but it's super gimmicky that one noble can build an impenetrable trench line that even one of the largest armies of the continent sitting in the region doing police work and civil work cannot stabilize it and prevent it from revolting.

There are a few different things going on here, and yes, I think all of them need some kind of overhaul.

One thing that would help a lot is to increase the game's memory furtherâ€"not as in RAM, but its ability to remember what happened when. Then we wouldn't be working with simple numbers like loyalty and morale all on their own quite so much.

12) and 13) These points are actually intertwined. I'm still in favor of density, in some form, but just not for the sake of it. Density is a tool, not an end in itself. Thus the idea is to allow realms to continue expanding into each other, otherwise once the density sweet spot is reached all incentives to fight a neighbor are almost gone, without necessarily giving a title to everyone for it. In other words, realms could keep expanding to 10, 20, 30 regions, even if they only have 15 nobles, but they would either be dissuaded or prevented from appointing all 15 nobles to the various lordships. And that even when all nobles have the titles they can have, the realm still has incentives to acquire new regions, because these would feed the communal taxes, and thus make everyone richer. Remember, the goal of increased density is, among other things, make sure that realms don't become filled with people that have nothing more to gain. But the current density mechanics kind of still do this in an indirect way (on Dwi).

So I have the first outline of a way to strongly encourage, without mandating, dense realms. The basic gist is this: A fully-controlled (non-city; cities should be handled at least slightly differently) region is one that has at least a Lord and one knight. If the capital has even one non-fully-controlled region (of those belonging to the realm) adjacent to it, all non-capital regions suffer a certain amount of penalty. If the capital is fully surrounded, then check if all those regions have fully-controlled regions around them. If not, then all regions beyond that first ring suffer similar penalties, and so on.

Essentially, it puts strong pressure on a realm to concentrate its Lords and knights in the regions around the capital.

However, as I said, in addition to adding this higher control state, I would also like to add a lower control state, like demesne or crown lands, or possibly call it hinterlands, that more or less consists of regions that your realm claims, and can extract a small amount of benefit from, but doesn't really own in any very meaningful sense. As soon as someone else comes in and stakes a claim with a military presence, the region becomes part of their demesne.

So if you can only really hold regions with a Lord and a knight, and those have to be concentrated around the capital or you risk unrest and red tape, but you can extend your realm's influence with very little limit, that makes warfare a much more dynamic experience, not measured in weeks spent taking over each border region as you tediously push through your enemy's outer regions, but in days marching across them, planting your flag and briefly intimidating the peasants, and moving on toward the lands they are actually willing and able to hold onto in the face of an army...

I think that makes it much more about the knights and the fun.

Edit:

Had another idea about family gold (or remembered an idea I had some time ago): Right now, once gold goes to the family, it is essentially removed from the game until it is spent.

What if it existed just the way gold getting ready for taxes did?

It shouldn't be anywhere near as easy to steal, but families need to have a home (and if they don't have one, we can force them to pick one, or just pick one for them, if they're dragging their feet about it), so shouldn't their gold be there?

Perhaps we should even let families have estates, that exist as regular estates within a region, help with efficiency, and generate gold (at a vastly reduced rate, due to expenses) for the family, but don't confer the same benefits that having a knight there does (like my fully-controlled regions above). Then the family gold is divided between all the various family estates, and if you happen across one when you're looting, you have the opportunity to try to rob its vault.