Messages

As usual, the truth is that the Alliance of Free Nations was developed before the alliance limits came into being.  It was a way for all of the people involved to easily talk to each other and share information.  After the limits went in place, and the continental war came to an end, the Free Nations changed their entire mission.  The Free Nations mission had become about helping the realms cooperate against the rogues long before the recent name change.  The Free Nations were explicitly NOT AT ALL geared towards getting everybody together for fighting other human realms.  Direct policies against that in fact.  Any portrayals of the Free Nations that do not include that fact are dishonest portrayals.

I say this being greatly in favor of working to deconstruct mega-alliances.  I helped to break the great Taran-Cagilan Alliance that had dominated Atamara because I agreed with that idea.  And I've fostered several rival religions to the one I inherited on Beluaterra.  Granted, most of that has been by me taking certain annoying stances to others, waiting for others to form their own religions, and then sitting back and doing nothing about them until they feel their oats enough to start attacking my religion.  At which point, I really can't help but slap back in some way.  ;)  I love having actual competition in the religion game again over there, and have so far managed to tread that line of OOC support for them while IC rhetoric preaches about their evils.  And also a whole lot of "I as a player know what they are up to, but the character I play has not figured it out yet.  SHE can't read wikis like I can."  Hehehe.

One issue to stopping mega-alliances, is obviously our human wish to join others.  We are herd creatures.  We like to join together in groups before we go out to beat up other people.  And the larger our group is, the better for us.  That can lead to some severe mega-alliances when in a game like this.  And it truly is a natural impulse we all have.  Trust me.  I've been there.  I've helped build some pretty mega-alliances in my time.  Just as I've helped bring them down.  A time or two I've helped bring down an alliance I helped build.  That is a surreal experience, let me tell you.

I wanted to congratulate everyone involved in the transformation done to the East Continent and to all the rps and events that brought us up to it.

Very well done, and I wanted you to know that as a player I think it is a good job done.

As a character, Benjamin may have some bones to pick with you, but me the player loves it.  :)

Congrats man.  :)

Writing a book is a great achievement.

Publishing it is even more so.  :)

I do not agree with everything the Titans et all. do.

I also do not disagree with everything they do.

Sometimes I fully hate it.  Other times I think it is justified.

And if you look far enough back in my history, you will even see an Honest To Tom lightning bolt in there.  In my defense, I will note that others were doing the same thing we were doing.  We just copied them, because it was an effective tactic.  *sighs*

The biggest thing I've learned in the decade + that I've played this game is that I don't try to win.  I've held every government position, and lead one of the largest religions in the game, but if other people want to lead, I love to let them.  I give suggestions and my thoughts on matters, and they do what they want.

And I have actively worked as a player against the best interests of my characters to increase competition in the game.  So other people have their own things to do and have fun with.

Right now, I have nobles on three continents.  I'm a priest on two, a bureaucrat on a third, and a banker on all three.  Because the best way for me to contribute right now is to make the realms I'm in run as smoothly as possible so the other players can have fun.  And I must say, I rather enjoy the weekly or monthly reports about how well the food situation is going in each of them.  ;)

In the end, we all have to choose whether we are going to play this game or not.  I have chosen to play for over a decade.  I have not yet chosen to end that practice.  Your choice is yours, and yours alone.

I would love to see something like this.

The religious wars ideas.

I understand why it is low/no on the list though.  It would be hard to do.

That said, I would love to see more boosts/negatives for people who are part of religions.

Something as "simple" as combat bonuses if you are in a region where your religion is the majority religion.
Economic boosts if your lord, and knights, are part of the majority religion.

There are numerous small things that could bring the religion game a bit more into the life and breadth of the full game.

Speak for yourself guys.

My characters have seen miraculous recovers of dead people.

Heck, my characters have seen the gods come down and wipe out entire sections of the map to kill the Daimons.

Miracles my characters have seen a many.  ;)

I support this idea.

I like this idea.  :)

These are very good ideas.  :)

I'm strongly in camp three.  Granted, I would have preferred the island not be sunk at all, but I do generally agree that some islands had to be sunk due to the dropping player base.

As for the timing, I agree that somebody should have done something to fix the issue before we did.  What I will say is this.  I had no idea what it was like on the continent when I was just a player.  All I saw was us playing around with the Cagilans and marching around from time to time to do things.  Was it super active compared to other continents?  No.  But we'd built something good and could have fun if we looked for something to do.  Which I did.  I became the Duke of Foda and did stuff.  I think I held tournaments and arranged stuff and...you know...did the stuff players do when they aren't in the middle of a continent-spanning war.  As a player in Tara, I didn't see a problem, because things looked pretty good.  If other people complained that it wasn't fun, it didn't match my experience so I kinda brushed it off.

Then several Tyrants in a row got elected and disappeared, and I could tell that Tara was....in trouble.  So I decided to buckle up and see what I could do stabilize things.  I don't know if anybody ran against me, but I won pretty easy, and then I had access to all the reports of a ruler.  And access to the ruler channels.  And everything else that goes with that.  I started looking first at the entire federation, then the entire alliance the federation was part of, and THEN the nations outside the alliance and I started realizing for the first time that something really was rotten in Atamara.  For one thing, it was almost impossible to really start a war because every nation had allied up with at least one member of the central alliance.  That was just one little thing and there were many others.

As a character, Regstav was still utterly devoted to Cagil, but as a ruling player I could see that the Cagil-Tara federation had to die to shake things up.  The trick was figuring out how to do it.  So I started talking with other rulers who wanted to kill it, and did everything I could to shake things up.  And at the same time, the other rulers who could see the same thing I did started to realize the same thing.  We were literally talking in the main alliance group that had something like a third of the island's population in it about how we were going to kill this thing.  ALL OOC of course.  IC, we were arguing about which one of us was loyal to Cagil and which one was betraying Cagil.  ;)  Which ended up being the stick we used to break it in the end.  Hehehe.

Absolutely, something should have been done earlier.  But it wasn't.  So it ended up being my generation of rulers and governmental leaders who did it.

The main sticking point for me in the end, is that we didn't get to see how things turned out.  It would have been awesome to have seen that one, last glorious war go down and see who fell.  I was privately giving Tara a fifty-fifty chance of surviving, though I was doing everything in my power to tweak those percentages.  I will note that when I became Tyrant, I privately gave Tara a zero chance of surviving a fight with a wet noodle bag due to that succession of Tyrants who got elected, popped up, saw the state of Atamara, and logged out until their characters paused because they did NOT want to deal with THAT crap.

As for what to do now in our current setting to keep Atamara from repeating?  I don't know.  We players got things shaken up in Dwilight and got some nice wars going on, split across the entire continent.  They may have all been one war originally, but they were effectively two or three smaller regional wars from the beginning, which they still are to this day even after the alliances were forced to split up.  I'm rather proud of having helped start up that little rumble in my time as ruler there.  And then Regstav finally found a battle that could kill him after facing battles on three continents that always seemed to miss the mark.  :)

But the East Continent hasn't changed at all with the new alliance rules.  The Sirion alliance or community or whatever still goes all over, blasted anybody it wants to into dustbunnies.  And half the time we can't even engage them in combat because of battle rules that stop us from fighting.  I don't know how to fix that continent.  Granted, I don't have access to the ruler information, but I see enough as a banker to have a good idea of what is up.  And I'm really at a loss as to how to fix it.  I'm on the verge of just voting for "giant meteor" hitting....oh...maybe Evora and wiping out everything within two or three regions of it.  Erase the populations.  Destroy every guild hall, recruitment center, or other city building.  Level the walls.  Put roads straight to worst case.  Maybe even make the regions entirely impassable to force the north and the south to stop fighting each other and let the various simmering local disagreements kick off into smaller wars without the worry of some massive juggernaut crossing the wastes and blasting them while their back is turned.

[Cagil and Tara were brothers.]

And that's the problem.

We've heard your opinion on this many times now.  I get that, from your point of view, it was a laser-focused military prowess that managed to oppress the continent for years.

But seeing it only as that is NOT any good for BattleMaster.

Say it with me.

Cagil and Tara were brothers.

Period.  !@#$ing.  Dot.

It wasn't a mere military alliance.  It never was.  It was two federated brother nations that had fought to defend the other for over a decade of real life time.  When I started playing in 2006, Tara was down to 3 regions and only the fact that Cagil garrisoned Foda kept the realm alive at all.  It was with Cagilan aid that Tara expanded and took over the nations intent on destroying us, and a decade later their federation still stood when I was Tyrant of Tara.  If there is a single federation in all of BattleMaster that lasted as long as the Cagil-Taran Federation, I'd love to hear about it.  The characters and players who spent all that time fighting at each others' backs, often against alliances three or four times our size, had never known a time when Cagil and Tara were not brothers.  Literally.  Fight to the death to protect the other because we knew the other would do the same for us.  Fighting each other wasn't just unthinkable.  It was unimaginable.  I actually would have kicked off a civil war in Tara to remain brothers with Cagil if anyone had suggested breaking our federation.  I'm not joking.  This was roleplaying, pure and simple, exactly what we are supposed to do in BattleMaster.

I get that you don't like it, because in the end it led to a static situation in Atamara.  But stop blaming the players for playing their characters and the game exactly the way they were supposed to.  I don't think anybody expected us to actually WIN the bloody continent the way we did, and we had no clue how to undo it once we did.  On the war continents, we just reset it so the losers get another go at winning, but it wasn't suppose to be possible on a continent the size of Atamara, so there was no PLAN to reset it.  And I totally get that when that didn't happen on Atamara, it DID affect the enjoyment and fun of other people on the continent.  No one wants to lose and to know they never have a chance of winning.

Something should have been done to shake things up when it became clear what had happened on Atamara.  I totally agree with you.  The difference is that I don't blame the players that didn't know how to fix it for not fixing it at the time.  I get that the admins tried to shake things up with their ice ages and other stuff, but it was much too little, much too late.  If you (admins) had decided to do something drastic years previously, we almost certainly would not have congratulated you at the time.  But breaking up the Cagil-Tara Federation (like the admins have now broken up other large alliances) could have shaken things up.  Doing something drastic like an ice age (call it a volcanic eruption) that separated Cagil and Tara and erased their border areas also could have shaken things up.

But since you didn't do anything drastic to force a change, it came down to the players to muddle our way into finding a way to do it ourselves.  Which we did.  We players chose to sacrifice the one defining trait of our nations over more than a decade of gameplay, and even figured out how to do it in a way that made sense for our characters.  All for the good of the continent so we could revitalize the game and kick off the biggest war in years.

And then the admins thanked us by telling us they were going to sink the continent.

I remember one of the players from Cagil I think saying something after the announcement came down.  It was to the effect of "If we'd know this was going to happen, we wouldn't have betrayed our oaths and just remained brothers to the end."  It's a bittersweet statement that holds true now just as much as it did then.

Years later, people like you continue to blame us for the problem that we went WAY out of our way as players to FIX.

If we'd known you were going to do that, we would have happily remained brothers to the end and given you the collective middle finger as you sank our island around us.  Because that's the kind of brothers Cagil and Foda were to the very end.  The kind of brothers that took no guff from anyone and were always ready to rumble.  Brothers like that made the game FUN, and I will always miss them in these modern days of wishy-washy friends and acquaintances whose words aren't worth the electrons they are printed on...

Ok.  The right way to say it would be that the dev or admins didn't like what the Cagil-Taran Alliance had DONE to Atamara in years past.

Which was...namely...WIN.  Previous generations of players forged an alliance of brothers between the two realms so strong that that they were inseparable and had done so well in war and politics that they'd done what we all thought was unthinkable outside the war islands.  Win.

I've long maintained that the admins should have congratulated the winners, exactly what is done on the war islands, and reset the island back to its beginning state.  But neither that nor anything else was ever done to force a reset on the island.

So the players decided to create our own reset by breaking up the alliance for the betterment of the island.  We put together an awesome roleplaying reason to do it, kicked it off, and sent the entire island into a rapidly escalating civil war that had already engulfed most of the realms.

And THEN the admins announced they were sinking the island before anybody found out how everything shook out.

I have no idea when they DECIDED to sink the island, but I do when the admins made their intentions to sink the island known to players.  And it was a long, LONG time after we'd put a massive amount of work into FIXING the problem with the island on our own.

Which was...a bit of a kick in the teeth to the players that had worked so hard to fix everything.

There's also the issue that not everybody agrees on what the "right way of playing" is.

Every time you place a hard restraint in, some people will like it, and some people will hate.

I'm always proud of what we did in Atamara for instance, breaking up the Cagilan-Taran alliance and starting a continent-spanning civil war to drag in every nation.

Then the Devs then announced that they were going to sink the island because they didn't like the Cagilan-Taran alliance.   ::)

To this day, some people like that decision, and some people hate it.  I hate it because we never got to see how the civil war shook out.  That's more of a roleplaying or storytelling issue, though.  I dislike it when a story is halted in mid-chapter.

On the other hand, with the dwindling player base, it was the right decision to close down some islands.  So...your mileage may vary.

And now we have Sirion doing exactly what Cagil and Tara did in the old days, and they have the benefit of our handsight on the issue.

On the issue of noble counts, I would greatly wish that priests and perhaps other "support" nobles not count towards the 1 noble per island limit.    Granted, I am an example of somebody who would benefit, since all three of my noble characters run in that area.  I have taken those roles because the realm or religion NEEDS people to do it.  Somebody had to do it, so I chose in the end to do it.  Because most people want to run around and shoot stuff with their archer or infantry buddies.  Honestly, I would love to do that to, and wish I could.  But because the game still requires support nobles to keep the realms and religions working, I choose to help keep them running so the other players can...well...play.

I like all of these ideas and any of them introduced would make things more interesting.

One tweak I might add to number 1 is perhaps...not linking them to an individual unit.

But more to a realm.  Imagine if you will, an upcoming battle.  Two realm armies are coming together to fight.

Send in the adventurers to get ground information and send it back to the army.  This is the roleplaying version.

The gameplay code idea is that for each realm adventurer in a region where battle is happening, the realm warriors get a small boost in combat power.  Not a gamebreaking amount of course, but enough to encourage players to do it.  Either make it a set amount for each adventurer, or possibly base the shift on each adventurer's adventuring skill.  That would be the more complicated way to code it, but it would make longer-lived adventurers more valuable than the young punks.

Note that if the adventurers swarmed into enemy territory before the battle (as they would have to) there is a non-zero chance that they would be arrested by patrols at turn change.  Which...well...is a risk.  ;)

I was able to upload an image and use it a day or so ago, so I'm betting that fixed it.