Overarching alliance blocs, pile in and risk aversion

[Greybrook]

Hello all,

This is an open post I hope can be the beginning of a conversation that can hopefully push the game forward in the right way.

Even before the "great reset" of war declarations, warfare in Battlemaster has been a game of arguably overarching alliance blocs. What I mean by this is that realms whom are friendly, have great history or some other element circumnavigate the alliance bloc limitations to fight in the same war and against the same enemy. What this means for different islands can be observed below:

• For EC, this was the North (overarching alliance bloc) / South (overarching alliance bloc) war which abruptly come to an end with the "great reset". Reasons for war largely forgotten by many players, discussions arising from this reset have shown that no realm is prepared to re-declare war due to the fear of continental warfare once again where everyone will "pile in" or new war breaking trust with old allies.
• For BT, this was seen through the recent Thalmarkin-Irondale war where just before the "great reset", I think four realms were at war with Thalmarkin at one point. While this has calmed down to Thalmarkin vs Irondale/Nothoi, the problem has not gone away and was highlighted.
• For DWI, the most recent continental war of Tol Goldora (supported by Lurian Empire) vs Westgard (supported by the Alliance of Free Nations) drew all the realms into many fronts which were all part of the dispute over one city region. With peace, the Alliance of Free Nations (an overarching alliance bloc of five realms maintained via guild) has created a deadlock in continental diplomacy.
• Unfortunately, I do not play in the Colonies and cannot comment.

In my opinion, the above indicates many traits the game currently adopts:

• The most common war declaration and victory condition is arguably the takeover of territory. Yet, with the density currently at 2.0, only a few realms would accept the risk to declare war for land of which they can realistically govern. There are also realms which fall short by varying degrees of this density limit which also impacts their capacity or desire to declare war. What is the solution for this? Would reducing the density undermine the reason for it's increase in the first place - encouraging active realms.
• With existing realms with years of history, how do realms choose to govern themselves IC to not pile in or join overarching alliance blocs when their ally or common enemy is struck? Is there a way to govern such?
• With the risk of pile in so high, rulers are very risk averse and are not prepared to create war, which ultimately is a large part of Battlemaster.
• With the above points, diplomacy is very likely to be deadlocked and new creative ways to declare war or create new story is very likely to be met with one of the two above.
• Would introducing new frameworks for war remove a player's agency for choice? Battlemaster is a sandbox to so many to be free with RP - would the line be crossed with an arbitrary game mechanic?
  
• Finally, is peace a bad thing? Or is it only good in small doses?

Therefore, I hope we can start this conversation and think about OOC what we can do as a community, or perhaps even not to do about this. If I have missed anything, please post in the post.

If there are any incorrect statements or you perceive as bias, please check the Greybrook Family for the characters I represent in each continent.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,

Greybrook Family

[Nikola]

Hey Grey,

I'm glad you've brought this up, even if I enjoy the current peace.

I feel that the easiest change would be to loosen the density limit. When I joined, it was at 1.4, meaning that even the adolescent Perleone always had the *capacity* to desire another region, even if they wouldn't immediately act out on it.

The issue with a density limit, as it is right now, is the fact that it doesn't actually do anything to incentivize realms to be more active. It just punishes realms after they've reached a point by making further expansion impossible, even if it'd make them more vulnerable and thus a better target for another realm.

To address your points in order:

• Would reducing the density undermine the reason for its increase in the first place - encouraging active realms?

I don't believe it would. The density limit as it is does nothing to incentivize inactive realms to suddenly become active; quite the opposite, really, at least from what I've seen. Overextension brings issues in and of itself, as does distance from the capital, and if your realm is inactive you won't be able to defend in wars from a foe with less wealth.

At the very least, I think the density limit doesn't do its job well.

• With existing realms with years of history, how do realms choose to govern themselves IC to not pile in or join overarching alliance blocs when their ally or common enemy is struck?

This just seems like something you'd see emerge in the player culture. If the rulers don't want to dogpile onto people and agree such a course is against a moral code, I see nothing wrong with it. It could be flavored via religions as the Gods speaking in favor of fair fights for all kingdoms of man. Perhaps make joining a war require an explanation in the same way that starting one does?

• With the risk of pile in so high, rulers are very risk-averse and are not prepared to create war, which ultimately is a large part of Battlemaster.

Addressed in the previous point -- and it's important to understand the psychology of risk aversion. If nothing is to be gained by war, why wage it?

• Would introducing new frameworks for war remove a player's agency for choice?

Having it be loose, like the current casus belli system, would stop that. Hard measures such as the density limit are in my opinion a greater threat to player agency because they are punishment and a hard cap, not an incentive.

• Finally, is peace a bad thing? Or is it only good in small doses?

In my opinion, no. Players should be capable of creating tension and/or engaging with others without the need for outright military conflict. I think the main issue here is that there aren't many game mechanics that support this. Having events pop in lordships during peacetime where the lords have to take sides without resulting in assured revolts would engage lords, as would having more control over the way they fluff their estates, recruitment centers, etc. Perhaps being able to work on a 'treasury' like in Crusader Kings could give more gameplay-focused players a treat, as could mock-battles for the army on a larger scale. [/list]

Just my opinion on the matter and some ideas.

Cheers,
House Orneithian.

[Constantine]

Here's my 50 cents.

1. How to make old realms with many regions and few nobles not be afraid of wars? Make them slowly lose regions which go beyond their density to deteriorating control. Nothing to lose, no reason to choose greed over fun.

2 and etc. Don't see an issue with pile ons.
As a ruler with experience of pile-on wars (the receiving end) I want to note that my frustration never stemmed from the fact that there was a huge coalition fighting us. My frustration was solely rooted in the fact that the same old !@#$ was happening for two rl years. It felt like someone was trying to kill you by gently tapping you with a spoon for two years. If the North went and bloody conquered Perdan and made peace, that would be unfortunate but absolutely fine for gameplay purposes.

Thus my opinion, as I previously voiced it many times, is wars need to be made structured and limited in time and scope. I don't care if ten realms want to declare war on one realm. If the goal is to "go and conquer that one city" and timeframe is "no longer than 4 rl month" then it can get some people butthurt but it won't make the gameplay stale and disgusting.

I think the recent change made a step in the right direction, but also made two steps in the wrong direction. It did force realms to come up with more realistic goals, which is good. But it did imply that wars need to be balanced and we all know that in a balanced war there is usually no winners. That's like forcing the North to send less nobles to Perdan to make sure they have even less chances to conquer Perdan city and make sure the war continues for 5 more rl years. No wonder they don't even want to start it.

Remove the "no pile-ons" clause. Throw in limitations on time and scope. Instead of one huge war between equal enemies that never ends, we can have a series of small-time wars with betrayals and major gangbangs which will change the map but not completely reshape it. Lower stakes and limited timeframe for wars will make the landscape more dynamic.

/50 cents

[PolarRaven]

Where is BattleMaster headed???
Firstly, I would invite everyone to look through the "ANNOUNCEMENTS" section of this forum.
It is the area where the Devs announce changes to the game.  Where they define the recent changes that are being/have been implemented.

From MY point of view;
We have seen many features added to the game that have been restrictive to the "wargame" aspect of BattleMaster.
Increasing density restrictions, alliance bloc size restrictions, increased costs of funding both militia and normal fighting units, more stringent requirements for declaring war, nearly impossible restrictions for allowing secessions of a duchy to name those that come readily to my mind.

On the other hand, we have seen many new features added that seem to cater to the RP writing aspect of the game.
Discord was added as a medium to allow  better communications as a "community".  There have been constant "improvements" to Discord to better facilitate the actions of this "community".  We have seen several improvements to the in-game messaging system.  We now have "graphic content warnings" to allow more involved/graphic roleplays to be written while not offending those who would prefer NOT to see such content.

What reason does the average realm have to want to go to war?
The vast majority of wars over the years have been fought in an effort to see some "gain" by the victors, land gains being the foremost on the list.  With the density restrictions land gain is no longer possible for most realms.
A disgruntled Duke used to be able to secede which would often lead to a war.
A religious war is currently not a possibility within BattleMaster.  Alliance bloc restrictions would prevent any chance of a Daishi vs Mordok war for example.  Daishi has many followers spread throughout various realms, which would prevent them from forming a "religious bloc" due to the alliance bloc limitations.
The alliance bloc limit also discourages the need of "diplomacy" when dealing with other realms.  I understand the need to prevent "dogpiling" any given realm, but if that realm makes no attempt to maintain civil relations with those realms not currently involved in the fighting, why should the (non-involved) disrespected realm(s) remain uninvolved?  (ie."We are fighting a war here, and I don't really care if you don't like us traveling through your lands to get to the front")

"The enemy of my enemy is NOT necessarily my friend."

We have heard the idea of "HINTERLANDS" for a while now.  Sadly, from the little I have heard about hinterlands, I suspect that it will fall short of what many people are hoping for.  We will see how it pans out once it is implemented, we can only hope for improvement.

The war aspect of BattleMaster needs "more carrot and a lot less stick".
The Devs have done well in boosting the RP aspect of the game in recent times, maybe now it is time to do the same for the war aspect as well? 

[Greybrook]

Two comments as I thought of as I read these comments:

I) Make negative density more harmful rather than an inconvenience, make realm tax decrease for example or increased rogues etc.

II) Pile ins themselves are not a bad thing - agreed.  Arguably it is about the war declarations being correct. I believe on BT, Irondale and Nothoi have the same declaration?

[PolarRaven]

Two comments as I thought of as I read these comments:

I) Make negative density more harmful rather than an inconvenience, make realm tax decrease for example or increased rogues etc.

Sadly density restrictions have different drawbacks for larger realms and smaller realms.
In a larger realm where there are many players, it is fairly easy to keep "inter-action/action" going to keep players engaged in one way or another.
In a smaller realm, the density restriction severely hinders the "inter-action/action" choices.
Forty people in the same realm are much more likely to find ways to interact, while a realm of ten people will have much less opportunity for interacting. 

I understand that many of the players feel that the smaller, less active realms deserve to die off because they are "boring".
Consider this:
The game is fickle.  Realms rise and fall.  Activity increases and dwindles.

Lets look at some history.
Luria Nova (Dwi) formerly a great power on the continent that was large enough to split off a new realm (which has since been absorbed back into Luria Nova), is now but a shadow of its former self.
D'Hara (Dwi) on the other hand was one of the smallest realms on the continent not so long ago, but now boasts the most nobles on the continent.

Thalmarkin (BT) was recently up to near 50 nobles, but not so long ago, they too were very low on nobles.  Things changed and they got much larger.  (not sure where they are at now, no noble on BT). 
Obeah Syela a former powerhouse on BT is now greatly reduced in nobles.
Irondale (BT), a group of smaller realms that were "forced" to band together to continue their existence.  Now a powerhouse on the continent.

The density restrictions affect the smaller realms much more than the larger realms.  Are the smaller realms really so bad that they should be punished for being small. 
Do we really want only two or three larger realms on each continent? 
This could certainly be better for interaction "within the realm" as more people would be in each realm.
Sadly, with only two or three Rulers on each continent there would not likely be much friction between the realms as it is much easier to come to an agreement with only two or three people involved.

On the other hand, if each continent had 10-15 rulers trying to sort things out, there is a lot more likelyhood that there would be disagreements and friction among the group.  The more people there are in the decision making, the harder it will be to come to an agreement.

The real question is larger vs smaller.
The Devs have sent conflicting messages with their actions.
We want bigger realms (less smaller realms), but smaller alliance blocks (and sadly these blocks are determined by region count, NOT noble count)?  Confusing to say the least. 

How much war would we see on the War Islands if alliances were allowed?
(I haven't played WI for a while either, so my info there is limited as well.)
Though there are no set alliances, there has been "co-operation" of sorts, at times, there.
The two "smaller" realms avoiding fighting with each other to concentrate on reducing the size of the "larger" realm.
An "unspoken agreement" that benefits both smaller realms while increasing pressure on the lager realm.  This dynamic changes of course as the sides and advantages change from one realm to another over time.

[Matthew Gagnon]

Boy do I have a lot to say on this subject.

Let's start with this: over the tenure of a game with as long standing a history as this, and as "crowdsourced" a makeup, it is only natural that hundreds of things have come up, identified as "problems," and had "solutions" dreamed up to address them. In each case these motivations were without question pure and altruistic.

The problem, though, is that like an overburdened government with too many laws and regulations on top of laws and regulations, we now have -- in my opinion -- layer upon layer of solutions that have tried to fix one thing, but in so doing have broken two other things. These are now built one on top of another, and have cascaded into system failure.

That is Battlemaster right now, IMHO.

Let's start with what ails the game the most: too little war.

The response from GameMasters to this has been, if I am being honest, pretty negative and threatening to players. Rather than asking what might systemically be wrong that takes fundamental incentives away from war, they are saying "invent reasons or we will remove you as ruler." That is backwards.

So, why isn't war happening?

The answer is REAAAAAALLY simple: no one can really conquer much (if any) territory -- due to the noble ratio limitation -- so what the hell are we warring over?

In addition, the maps are so big and the overall player count so low that even if you can expand, you probably don't even necessarily have a neighbor you are really bumping into, so your real target is NPC rogues, not other realms.

In Nothoi, if I had the noble count to take regions right now, my first target would not be another realm. Instead, I would be taking one or two rogue regions nearby that no one else is even bothering with. At current, we cant even conquer regions directly adjacent to our capital because of the noble count issue. I briefly had a chance but lost it because I was out fighting Thalmarkin... then I lost it. Being at war meant I missed a chance to improve our contiguousness and earn more gold/food, which would be the thing that could help attract more nobles. So in this case, I guess war actually decreased my ability to conquer new territory, weirdly.

In any event, do you want to know why Thalmarking got "gangbanged" initially? It was because NONE OF THE REST OF US WERE AT WAR.

If we were all busy with our own little wars with each other, it wouldn't have been either smart or practical to join up in a new expedition. Nothoi and Vordul Sanguinis should be at each other's throats and fighting an all out war over territory right now, but neither of our realms can even capture enough regions next to us to bump into each other. We had a potential conflict brewing over the region of Tindle, but in the end, if I declared war over the region, I couldn't even take the damn thing, so what incentive did I really have to potentially start a war over a region I can't claim?

In any event, neither of our realms could benefit territorially, and there is a ton of rogue land in between us, so there just wasn't a reason to do it. Sure, the rulers could invent slights or RP reasons to fight, but that isn't the way we really want to do thing. Invented, phony, false reasons for war are hollow and empty, and often times we would have to contort ourselves into illogical and irrational actions just to force something to happen that has no reason to really happen.

Anyway, back to the territorial issue -- think of it this way. Why does anyone play Risk? How about any game in the Total War series? It is to battle and conquer territory. To see that map flying your flag over new places. If you can't do that, war becomes not just less imperative, but outright pointless. This is what the original lure of Battlemaster was -- a slow paced, roleplay heavy battle simulator of battle and territorial conquest.

But today, most of us can't even think about taking over anything. And we wonder why there are no incentives for war. We NEED to run into each other and fight over scarcity to truly inspire war.

Let's go beyond, though, because this was originally about alliance blocs, and supranational organizations like the Eastern Continent informal alliances, the Dwilight Alliance of Free Nations, or the fluid quasi-alliances of the south on Beluaterra.

I understand why people have an issue with Alliance bloc size. I really do. I get it. You don't want the Roman Empire coming in and wiping everyone out. But in my opinion, Alliance bloc restrictions, while well intended, ignore very basic fundamentals of human nature.

I have several good friends in this game -- as do all serious players -- and you can talk all you want about "preventing " alliances in a technical, mechanical sense, but any game that makes use of human relationships and then expects realistically to stop cooperation between friends and groups of players who enjoy playing with one another is at a great misapprehension about human nature.

All the mechanics in the world won't stop the fundamental social nature of human beings. I like certain players, our characters have worked together in multiple places, so yeah, whatever the bloc limitations say, it is pretty likely I'm going to help them out when they need it, or vice versa.

This fact is WHY things like alliance groups form beyond limits through every means available, be it guilds or just informal groupings of players that get along. You can try hard to force that not to happen, and I myself try very hard not to fall prey to that impulse. But it is also naive not to acknowledge that even the best players will end up doing it, even if it is just "subconsciously."

If I had a nickel for every time I have read "House [this] has longstanding ties to House [that]" in this game from players who like each other and whose "Houses" really have no ACTUAL long standing ties, I would be a rich man.

This is reality, whether we want to admit it or not, which means that however well intentioned, the system doesn't function the way you want it to, and it never EVER will.

So to these twin issues, how do you deal with it?

In my mind, there are a few things that would naturally fix this, and wouldn't involves GameMaster lecturing and threats, which are inappropriate in a free volunteer based game, and are terrible for player affinity and morale.

The two that come to mind are:

1. Complete destruction of existing maps to make the continents radically smaller. This would end the vast rogue territories that allow realm isolation, and would force region competition. Like it or not, our player base is much too small for every single continent.

2. Eliminate all rules that disincentivizes greed for territory. Goodbye noble limits, or at least make them a sliding scale of some kind. Or, perhaps, change the nature of it to allow different ratio counts to capture different numbers of regions per month. Low count realms can still conquer but maybe slower, thus encouraging the expansion of realms while also providing more of an incentive for healthier realms.

There also could be -- and I have thought a lot about this idea in the past -- a revised limit system to make the region limitation restrict the capture of rogue territories, but if a realm is in a declared war, that realm can capture any number of enemy territories, thus once again incentivizing greed as a motivator, while also disincentivizing peace. Something like that would provide a powerful advantage to war over peace.

---

Now this is all back of the napkin, and I realize these are somewhat radical. But the reality is that however well intended all these mechanics are, they have conspired to make war less likely, and less profitable, and thus robbing the incentives to do it.

In addition, as much as I love the design and thought and work that was put in on things like the estate system, I think it is time we admit that virtually no one uses it. The Lords manage their region... the knights just choose their estate, and after that do virtually nothing with it, and even in populated realms, tons of estates remain empty, or regions are manipulated by lords inefficiently to financially benefit themselves. While that is historically accurate, I suppose, it doesn't really make the game more fun.

If the estate system went away, than perhaps the ratio could be dropped to simply 1:1 with immediate requirements for appointment upon capture of a region, thereby getting rid of the "untended region" problem, and making everything more simple. Would make for larger realms, more realm spread, make realms bump into each other more, and just create a more rich environment for war.

Ultimately, that is the issue. Gangbangs happen because smaller petty wars aren't happening. If Nothoi was fighting with the Vorduls or the Shattered Vales over territory, we wouldn't even be able to join the Irondale/Thalmarkin war. If Sirion could attack Nivemus for that open territory, the stalemate would be gone AND we could move on from North vs. South mega bloc. If Westgard moved northeast it would bump into Avernus, or south into TG again. Heck it would be easier to found a colony in Darfix, which would then run into both Westgard and TG and make war more likely.

In short, the lack of incentive -- and the massive presence of disincentive -- for war is the real problem here. It isn't alliance size. Alliance size limitations have never existed, even with the mechanical limitation. Obsessing over it is fools gold. The self interest of realms means blocs both form and break up on their own, formally or informally, with or without the blessing of game mechanics. So let's stop caring about them.

Our job is to try to inspire as much war as possible, and the key to that is limited land, limited resources, and an actual ability to acquire those limited things, so we start competing over them.

The only other thing I will suggest outside that for mechanical solutions, if we insist on adding more rules rather than fixing the broken system, than just put in a mechanical limitation to only one declared war with one realm at a time, and make alliances impossible.

But I favor a more fundamental reform.

[BarticaBoat]

How about we use the fancy new coordinate system for the maps to create changes to realm control and introduce tangentially controlled (occupied/hinterland) regions. Let's reward contiguous realms, smart location of capitals, and use terrain features. Realm is long and thin? Control penalties in the distant regions. Mountain range or Badlands divide the realm in half? Other side of realm away from capital has control penalties. Have a geographic centre and a control centre for realms. Control propagates according to distance from geographic centre and according to region types.

I've said it before - too often we are trying to restrict the actions of players rather than changing the environment to create opportunity for more exciting gameplay. The changes we've made over this long decline are reactive and frequently serve only the most vocal minority of players. We are saying "play this way" instead of modifying the game's parameters. Obviously this has not worked well.

[Zakky]

Let's be clear here. This game was never designed to be what it is today. That is the first failure of the game. It had no goal in mind. Although it is called 'battlemaster', battle and war are this game's weakest points. Not to mention this game built around the idea of never letting anyone win by conquest. So if you want to conquer the whole continent, you are looking at a wrong game. This is a light-weight war game with more focus on roleplaying.

I don't see risk aversion as a bad thing. If you lack that you will see wars constantly. Wars are very tiring in this game because only a handful of people do all the work due to how it is designed.

The biggest issue with this game is the fact that there isn't much to fight over. Most wars in this game starts with one realm going nuts(for the sake of making the game more interesting in many cases), others ally up to fight the realm that started the war. Why would any sane player want to start one if the player knows that others will just gang up on the player's realm? The reward simply doesn't outweigh the risk. It takes months or even years to become a ruler and some people want you to throw all that way just to make the game 'interesting'. Those who did it ended up expressing their frustrations at the end. It might have been fun at the beginning but once the gangbang starts it isn't so fun anymore.

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As for limits on the realm size, well back around 2010ish, there was no limit on how large you could get. You could see realms with 36 or so regions. To be honest, I really don't see the problem with this. I don't even know why we are limiting realm size by density. Just limiting new realm creation with 15 nobles in a duchy would have been good enough along with the lowered base tax limit. Why? Because you can only move 1 region per turn in this game at most. Meaning if your realm gets too large and you are bordering multiple realms, you can't defend all your border regions. In some cases, it might take you 4~5 days just to reach the outer edge of your vast realm. While you are defending one side, enemies could hit you from the opposing end. Big realms back then quickly lost their border regions when a war started because those regions were quickly looted to the ground. You simply did not have the time to sit and TO those regions back. Sooner or later you will reach the natural maximum size due to distance even without all the limits we have. That is probably why the hinterland idea is being worked on. That should probably change how we conduct war in this game.

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@BarticaBoat
I think at one point there was an idea going around about limiting how many units can be in a row depending on which region you were in. With mountain regions limiting the most. Not sure what happened to that idea. I think the simplest approach would be to add damage modifiers to all the region types. Maybe in mountain regions, cavalry and ranged will only do 30% damage. In rural regions, cavalry will do 200% etc.

-------
For years we've been told to encourage others to do something rather than forcing them. I hope we get the same thing from all the coming features. I hope we get incentives rather than limits.

[BarticaBoat]

...

Amen!! My idea of control limits provides reasoning for realm sizes and shapes beyond "yeah, that's far enough" but adding the combat differences would also change this. The idea of cavalry being more effective on plains adds RP incentive and tactical considerations.

[Greybrook]

So to summarise the above, here is what I understand:

1) Density needs to be reworked (and/or bring in Hinterlands) to enable greater territory conflict in a meaningful way. I.E. enabling a realm to attack it's neighbor and to take a city for example.

2) To enable the above, redesigning the estate system to accommodate a greater spread of nobles across regions but allowing "tall" to still exist.

3) Overarching alliances and *pile ins* are human instinct and difficult to stop. Therefore, providing incentives to prevent them forming out of choice or allowing them to collapse can be a step in the right direction.

4) With the above, changing how war works will support dynamic politics. One great idea is for terrain to impact battles, such as width, bonuses to cavalry in rurals or even stronger siege equipment.

[Qureshima1]

My take on this is that the Devs have tinkered a lot to overcome the true Geopolitics of realms. Realms have real problems and goals based on where they are situated, how many knights they have and who their neighbors are. The Devs have tried to institute rules that ignore these real situations and impose an artificial order. For example alliance limits.

The solution is not to tinker with the rules to restrict realms, it is to change the geopolitics to provide new problems that will automatically change realm behavior.  I think the Devs should create more challenges. We need Daimon & rogue invasions like in Beluaterra. Also I have a great Development idea that would really open up the game, I think that if a rogue horde takes a a city or a stronghold, it should immediately create an NPC realm and start expanding. that would provide lots of war and fun for the players.

Our problems are that we have more land than players, to we need to provide new pressures to restrict that land, and i think that auto generated rogue realms would provide that needed challenge. You could have auto generated Daimon, Monster and undead realms all with different units and tactics. They would gobble u pall surplus land and human realms would have to band together to survive. Every now and then the rogue realms would declare peace to grant players a breathing space. It has to be thought through, but I think that it would really improve the game.

[Anaris]

I've been doing a lot of thinking the last few days, and one of the conclusions I've come to is that I believe we, the devs/admins, have made a mistake in the way we implemented alliance bloc restrictions and war declaration rules. Specifically, those changes don't go far enoughâ€"not as in "don't restrict enough," but more like "paint the restrictions on a flat wall," when what we really need is a recognizable tangible thing that helps players to feel more immersed in the milieu, while still encouraging the behaviour we're seeking.

To that end, I've come up with a proposed new feature that takes these ideas and moves them furtherâ€"and it's along the lines of some things many of you will have heard of or even advocated for yourselves in the past (to some extent, it will look a lot like the scrapped Treaty System). As a whole, I would call it an Entity-Based Diplomacy Overhaul. Please bear in mind that this is all very preliminary, so if there are serious flaws found in it, there's plenty of time to fix them or scrap the whole idea (though the latter would be somewhat disappointing).

Right now, we have what I, as a programmer, would describe as state-based diplomacy. That is, "war" is a status you can have. It doesn't tell you anything except that you and one other realm are at war with each other. We've added a reason to that, but it's still fundamentally just a bandaid on top of the existing system.

The new system would create fully entity-based diplomacy, where every war, alliance, and other kind of diplomatic relationship is represented by a full-fledged database object, with names, start dates, end dates, reasons, participants, etc.

To flesh this out a bit more (again, bearing in mind that all specifics are still open to discussion):

• All realms start at "neutral" with respect to each other, which, in the new system, essentially means "no relationship."
  
• If you want to be allied to another realm, you need to form an Alliance.
  
  
  • Each realm can only be in one alliance.
  • An Alliance can contain multiple realms, but defines a strict hierarchy among them, to ensure a clear chain of command on the battlefield.
  • Alliances have official names
  • If alliances are small enoughâ€"under 1/3 of the total nobles on the continent, with buffers for shifting realm sizesâ€"members of the alliance can send messages to each other with a standard option on the Messages page.
  • Alliances can specify a variety of levels of support: for instance, whether members will aid each other in combat only in defense within member realms, defending in neutral territory, defending in enemy territory, or even joining in to attack together.
  • They also specify how changes to the alliance, including changing the name, adding and removing members, and adjusting the conditions, can be made, with possibilities like "dictated by the top realm in the hierarchy", "majority vote by member realms," "unanimous vote by member realms", etc.
  • It will keep track of the complete history of the alliance, with every change remembered and dated.
• If you want to go to war with someone, a realm or alliance can declare a War against a realm or alliance. Wars are mirrors of Alliances in many ways.
  
  
  • Wars are automatically named by the game while they're underway, but once they're finished, the victor gets to set the name recorded for posterity
  • They can specify where the parties involved will fightâ€"only the attacker's regions, only the defender's regions, only neutral regions, or some combination
  • They can specify which regions can be taken over, including "all" or "none"
  • Unlike alliances, changes to wars happen unilaterally, including joining as an attacker; however, once the war is started, the only way to join as a defender is to join the defender's Alliance
  • All attacking parties must give a reason for attacking or joining the warâ€"if an Alliance declares war as a whole, individual member realms don't need to give reasons
  • All participants in a war (whether realm or alliance) must clearly state their goals; defenders are automatically given a war goal of "obtain peace terms from the attackers", and can then change that
• Peace Treaties will exist, but be much simpler (they just state "we will not fight each other if we end up in the same region")
• Defensive Pacts will exist, allowing small groups of realms that are not allied to specify conditions for triggering an automatic alliance
  
  
  • Considering making alliances only able to be active as part of a warâ€"either you found one to declare a war, or to defend against a declaration, and as soon as the war is over, the alliance is automatically dissolved
• Parallel to this, a simple state-based "cultural diplomacy" will be created, to allow realms to unilaterally indicate which realms their nobility likes and dislikes. This will have no mechanical effects, but will be informative both to current and new players.

It is my hope that a system such as this would be able to address many of the concerns that currently plague BattleMaster, especially related to the war declarations and alliance restrictions, though I certainly recognize that it would be far from a panacea. In particular, Hinterlands is still desperately needed to create a much safer way to lift the density restrictions and allow realms to take regions without worrying about their noble count.

[Zakky]

I think you should add a bit more for realms staying under the 1/3 total noble limit.

You can probably combine this with the hinterland idea. Giving those staying under the limit ability to travel faster within the allied territory.

Giving incentives to stay under the limit can probably be called 'highly cohesive' state of alliance.

Alliances can specify a variety of levels of support: for instance, whether members will aid each other in combat only in defense within member realms, defending in neutral territory, defending in enemy territory, or even joining in to attack together.

We can probably apply the same concept here as well.

defending in member realms - low cohesion (Realms with >30% of total noble count)
defending in neutral territory + defending in enemy territory - high cohesion (Realms with <30%)

If people even under the new system choose to form a mega alliance, it might be a good idea to add some extreme stuff like allowing realms staying in the highly cohesive state to cash bonds in any city within the alliance.

[BarticaBoat]

Large alliances should have control penalties associated with level of cohesion. Highly cohesive (ie federation) should have the peripheries of the alliance experience penalties in their regions. Lower cohesion has lower penalties.

Region control should follow the current paradigm but hinterlands are fixed at "occupied". They don't contribute to realm size (maybe tax size/population should be explored as the realm size parameter?) But taxes and food collected are .25x (excess production is stored in the region). RCs in hinterlands should be unaffected I think.