Overarching alliance blocs, pile in and risk aversion

[Matthew Runyon]

As a further elaboration on Delvin's idea (which I very much like, and helped discuss some of the ideas on), I want to talk about the hierarchy aspect of these proposed new Alliances.

What I was envisioning with this is reminders, from the game, that you should be behaving as inferiors/superiors.  Little bits of text in various places making it clear that if you're writing a letter or RPing with someone in a lower-ranked realm in the alliance, you should not be treating them as an equal.  If you're writing to someone from a higher-ranked realm, you would be reminded to be extra respectful to your social superior.

That kind of thing would certainly rankle with quite a few characters, and other characters would take full advantage of their superior status to be pains about it, leading to significant friction.

In addition, I think there should be mechanical benefits to being a character in the top realm in the alliance, possibly related to prestige gains, but the main thing is to mechanically incentivize people to want to be the top of an alliance.

Between those two things, I think having hierarchies would better simulate the petty politicking that led to so many low-level conflicts.  Right now, alliances are often "round table": All realms in them often are treated as equals, ostensibly, even when that's obviously not the case.  This would create a lot of potential bickering over who sits at the head of the table, and who gets to be closest to them.  If you have to publicly state that your realm is of lower status than three other realms to join an alliance, you may well think twice about doing that, and even if the Ruler doesn't, it provides an opening for a challenger who wants to see their realm restored to full status.

[Ketchum]

Thank you for the first post and I also read Constance post and agree with the part "enemy of my enemy is not friend".

If we really wish to make things fun, we should have attempt to make not 15 nobles number require to secede.

1) Case one.
Nivemus on East Continent. I have been stuck where I cannot get my dukes to secede. Nivemus has 4 cities. A new realm can have 2 cities. Then look at number of Nivemus nobles. Not enough to secede. 15? Might as well give lands to other realm nearby and merge. Then we have land to nobles density which implemented to make things "fun". Now you see we have so many rogue lands in North of East Continent. Not to mention so many rogue lands in the East of Dwilight. That is cause and effect.

2) Case two
Irondale in so called alliance with Nothoi on Belueterra. Sirion and the rest of North realms in East Continent. Outer Tilog and its ever changing nearby realms on Colonies. Arnor and Alliance of Nations in Dwilight.

When there are so many new things implemented, inevitably there will be causes and effects. It has been said we can loot food and gold in rogue lands in Dwilight when we need them. See how my character managed to loot so much food from Nighogg Mark in Dwilight. New trend, "no need take the region, loot them to rogue and loot them when rogue".

About the big alliance. Ever wonder why all smaller realms nearby survive? By friending the nearby bigger realms. When on East Continent Sirion finally beaten Fontan without any development changes while Caligus ate Fontan city and kept it for good, it is inevitable that a realm of previous Sirion realm size will grow big. Then to control more lands, of course Sirion need to create new realm. When not put restrictions in place at that time, we can see many new realms such as First Oligarch, Nivemus from ashes of SoA, then Shadowdale. When put restrictions, then you have merger. It looks like players just implement and move along with what changes coming up. You do not want new realm with such restrictions, then we give you merger instead.

Spoken from my experience of merging Morek into Arnor, Caelint into Irondale. I have been merging realms and about to do another. Thank you for this new trend.

3) Case number 3
Players good standard, never do wrong characters and no evil characters.

On Colonies, as past ruler of Oritolon who consistently annoyed Colonial Senate for their inability to punish any realm who broke their rules, I had my character Ash Ketchum got Himoura the infiltrator to wreak havoc on Outer Tilog, Oritolon realm long time nemesis. Of course one of my characters May Ketchum was responsible for Colonial Senate founding pre-events where Outer Tilog and Lukon attacking Oritolon and she opened the gate where Oritolon defense was strongest at Iglavik. That was when we could play two characters and I played Ash as honorable while May as the hidden motive character. Given the low number of players and high number of rogue lands that cannot be claimed, cannot bring two neighbor realms together who divided by rogue lands, do you think there is interaction between two neighboring realms? That is cause and effect of the changes. You want us to be closer, maybe by merge but rogue lands make us wider. How far Arnor from Swordfell? Many rogue lands.

I do want to say, bring back two characters on an island. It is like Ying Yang. One character good, one character bad. Why can't trust your players to play the evil characters?

Case number 4
How many evil characters we have met in our characters life? Do we encourage this? There are too many heroes and heroines, honorable nobles. There should be some mischief among them to spice things up. When we need use heavy hammer rules and changes to force characters interactions, we force characters to change. The Duke character jumped to Obia Syela on Belueterra, Thalmarkin facing outnumbered odds. And suddenly some changes happened on that island and all other islands.

Sorry for if I am too honest. Here's my honest feedback as player of rulers past and current. Yes, it can be not fun playing in small realm but have you ever considered some players want that kind of style? Facing heavy and outnumbered odds. On East Island or Continent. So many realms just to beat First Oligarch. Even now Nivemus is gaining nobles as we face outnumbered one to three odds against Shadowdale. We have so many possibilities to be explore not only for Nivemus, but even Thalmarkin.

Let us see another realm example without any change intervention. See how Halcyon got reduced to Duchy of Alowca on Colonies island, they lost Duchy of Alebad which has highest infrastructures and do they complain? No. They bide their time, every big realm has their glory days and fallen days. What's Transformer quote? I rise, you fall.

[Zakky]

Sounds like the game lacks incentives for people to strive for personal gains.

There is not much to gain by being evil or selfish in this game unfortunately. After the game doesn't really support the feudal hierarchy. It is pretty centralized.

[Cavendish2]

This has been my long-standing view, and I have seen a couple of posts here that seem to also have sussed what I feel the true problem is:

Turn Battlemaster from a top-down game to bottom-up one.

If rulers & judges would release their death grip on everything and let small groups of nobles go on border raids against each other, or ride off as mercenaries for a cause that interests them or their religion, the whole gridlock thing would be a moot point.

Let nobles have incentives to go loot and attack what is around them. When it goes back and forth for a while, and builds up - viola! reason for war.

The game has always been too much "smoky back rooms" where a few people plan everything. As other posts have pointed out - these people are risk averse, and at the moment there is no reason to start a war for gain.

So - let small groups of nobles go off and raid, and if they bump into a raiding party from another realm, they fight over the right to loot the region. Bring things down to the individual noble level.

Let them role play about it, and RP outrage, or RP bloodlust to go get some loot, or whatever. Let tensions build organically.

Get rid of the automatic fines and the council members shouting to "get in line!" at everyone, and let people go make their own fun.

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I see the recent dev initiatives as well-intentioned, but like The Ice and many other things, doomed to fail because - you can't legislate morality, and you can't force player behavior in Battlemaster

[Cavendish2]

What I would *really* like to see - and I suppose this is just a pipe dream - is to pick one island & turn off the ability to fine/ban nobles, and just see how characters react when they don't have the threat of a hatchet over their necks.

Just as a social experiment. I'm guessing you could learn from it the same way that MIT didn't put in sidewalks at first, and just watched where the grass got worn down, and then used those paths

I don't think you'd have the crazy chaos that everyone fears. i think you'd have a game where people were enjoying themselves a lot more

[Anaris]

BattleMaster is intended at its fundamental level to be a team game, with the realm as that team.

Not only is that very difficult to change, from a code standpoint, I have no interest in doing so. If you want to play Might and Fealty, you are more than welcome to go play Might and Fealty, but BattleMaster is not going to become an every-noble-for-themselves game. We've experimented with smaller team sizes beforeâ€"back when we actually had the players for itâ€"and even then, it turned out terribly.

If you don't like what your realm is doing, then a) work to change it, b) find a realm that's doing something else, or c) get enough like-minded people together to found your own realm.

If you can't get at least 14 people together who agree with you, you're not going to have enough for a particularly interesting war anyway.

[Cavendish2]

I was expecting that response

1) I didn't suggest any code changes (the second idea was merely to turn off a couple of things)

2) The point being, the way it was designed isn't working very well, to the point of having the Admin micro-manage relations now.

So why not trying something different, instead of ramming through the same non-working idea?


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So - let's try it? Rulers of East Continent, just announce to one another that you're going to start doing this & let's try it for six months. It doesn't actually require any intervention or approval from the admins

Tell your Councils & realms you're not going to punish "minor discretions" & see what your players come up with on their own.

I predict you'll end up with groups of players working together to do much the same thing, only the fights will be organic & come about much more quickly than they do via Ruler negotiations like we do now

The only thing that has *ever* been stopping this is punishment from your councils. So - stop punishing and let the game play itself from the bottom up.

[Gildre]

Personally, as a player, this sounds like an awful idea to me. Why would you ever want random groups of nobles running around attacking and looting independently? I like playing as a character in a feudal hierarchy, working together as a team with my realm mates.

[Cavendish2]

What would be stopping you from doing that?

[Gildre]

You mean, besides the fact that the realm would be splintered into little groups operating in near anarchy? Nothing I guess.

[Zakky]

From battlemaster to banditmaster!

[Gildre]

I am in no way saying that if there was a BanditMaster clone that I wouldn't play it haha