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Rio is large, has plenty of gold yet can not even attract enough nobles to have a Lord for every region they control. They are ripe for someone else to actually challenge them. People need to stop simplifying human/player behaviour into one absolute. It takes but 5 minutes of looking across the continents to see that such things are simply not true.

Looking across the continents you see a steady trend of small realms coalescing into larger ones over time.

It's the law of preferential attraction, or the rich get richer. In the case of Battlemaster, realms that get big become more powerful, allowing them to get even bigger, and so on. In the beginning, when every realm is small, multiple small realms could exist on that peninsula. But sooner or later one realm among them would begin to snowball and gobble the others up. Sooner or later there wouldn't be any realms to challenge it, it would just be one big realm isolated from the rest of the continent.

I vaguely remember that a few years ago the Devs increased gold output by 25%. Even back then, gold was in overabundance and the move was questionable.

Generally this leads to constantly shifting alliances as one realm gets the upper hand, as was seen in original war island.

Then it becomes a game of diplomacy, which can seem equally arbitrary as noble count. It's in the best interest of the two weakest realms to kill the strongest realm, so the strategy becomes about influencing that perception. You want to appear weaker than you actually are, and the two realms that appear the weakest will want to kill the one that appears to be the strongest.

Once that is done, the strongest competitor has been killed off and the remaining two realms are in the same position they'd be in if there were only two realms to begin with. That is, it becomes primarily about noble count.

Noble count isn't just random. I suspect that Ikalak gets far fewer nobles in part because some players recognize its bad topographic position and don't want to be on the handicapped team. Another influence is the atmosphere of a realm, where realms that are active and fun attract and retain more nobles than realms that don't. Atmosphere doesn't just mean roleplays and banter; having a general who is competent helps augment it. In any case, the noble counts of Taselak and Sandalak have been close to even for awhile, although Taselak's seems to be diminishing as the war comes to a close. I think that when two realms occupy roughly even territories on the map, and when they both meet rough standards for atmosphere, as Taselak and Sandalak do now, they will attain roughly equal totals of nobles.

I like the idea of a two-realm war island. I like it because it diminishes the diplomacy component and therefore increases the importance of everything else.  A four-way island would also be a good option, as it could turn into an equal 2vs2 war or a true free for all. Three-way wars would logically end in what I described above, the two weaker realms killing the strongest to optimize their own odds, then fighting a delayed  1vs1 - but with a guilty conscience.

Don't the other two have essentially the same issue? How long does it take to get from Moeth to Seggelin?

It takes three turns, or half as much time as it takes Ikalak.

Their main weakness is that it takes them so long to move from one battle front to the other. If their army is in Neralle fighting Taselak, say, and they get attacked in Triewa by Sandalak, it would take them at least six turns to respond to Sandalak. It's the bane of a crescent-shaped empire.

You could alleviate this disadvantage to some extent by adding a sea route from Kail to Unagae, or thereabouts.

Ikalak is in a weaker location than the other two realms, that's why it always loses (in BM as well as the War Island minigame).

I prefer Battlemaster's dark color scheme and its Age of Wonders map layout over what I've seen in M&F. Sometimes people try to discount aesthetics, saying that what matters is gameplay, but I think that's a mistake, like saying music is unimportant to film.

The subscription fee to M&F is also off putting.

[also]

While your main point—that characters in BattleMaster tend to be defined at character creation time, and never really change their personalities thereafter, and that this is unrealistic—is quite true, and sometimes problematic, I'm afraid this is actually exactly wrong.

At least in general, when authors say that "characters write themselves," they do, in fact, mean exactly that, and the opposite of what you're saying. For instance, I have, for some years, been on an email list (a rather large one) devoted to the works of Lois McMaster Bujold, of which The Author Herself is also a member. She has frequently described instances in which she had intended a story to go a particular way, but when she got to a certain point in them, one of the characters essentially stood up and said, "Nuh-uh!" The direction she had been thinking of for the story would have required characters to do things that was, well, out of character for them. So what she ended up writing was strongly influenced by the way the characters she had established thought and acted.

Now, she's a good writer (four-time winner of the Hugo Award good), so her characters also grow and change over the course of her books. This is realistic and as it should be—a feedback loop that goes both ways.

But never make the mistake of thinking that when authors say that the characters wrote themselves, or the characters wrote the story, they mean the exact opposite.

Of course characters, plot, setting, and everything else that goes into a story are all wound together. They all have to be taken into account when telling a story. But as 'authors', players have a large degree of control over how their characters respond to things. It isn't nearly as deterministic as some people imagine.

Just because you have an honorable character, doesn't mean they always have to stick by their ally. It's always possible to come up with a reason for your character to change its view - what matters is good taste. So if the game would be funner if in this instance you neglected your ally, or even started your character on a downward path, than that's an option that should be considered.

Creative writing is an art, not a science, and hard rules can't be laid out for it, except for in the very general sense. It doesn't surprise me that you found a contrary example to mine, but then I don't think it contradicts the overall point.

There's something that's always bugged me around here. It's the way that people justify their characters' actions, saying that they had to do what made sense from a roleplaying angle, that their characters had personalities that were deterministic to a large extent, meaning they simply had to follow through on. From reading this forum, one gets the impression that this manner of playing is the pure and wholesome way to play, while casting an eye to gameplay, doing things that make sense from a gaming or metagaming perspective, is the barbaric and ugly way to play.

To give a generic example (and this has happened many times before), Realm A will declare war on Realm B. The characters of realms C, D, and E are roleplayed by their players as being honorable characters, as most characters are, and so, as they are in a pact with Realm B, they do the honorable thing by standing by their friend and gangbanging Realm A.

This mentality seems to be given credence by the idea that 'character's write themselves,' a claim that a lot of authors make. There is a misinterpretation here. When authors say it, what they mean is not that their characters define the story, but that the story defines their characters. In Macbeth, for instance, Macbeth is an honorable lord. At the start. He does not stay that way for long, though, as the story calls for action and drama, and an honorable character can't always provide those things. According to the needs of the story, Macbeth's personality changes and he becomes treacherous and loathsome, then is quickly eaten up by guilt. It is not the character that is writing the story here. The story has requirements that the character must bend to meet, and that is what it means for a 'character to write itself'. Characters are malleable to a large degree. As we can see in the example of Macbeth, even the most honorable characters can become villains, if the story calls for it.

In Battlemaster, most players like to play their characters as being honorable good guys. Their characters rarely grow much throughout their lives, even when opportunities for change present itself. The honorable kings, as well as their dukes and knights, tend to remain honorable forever. They never think of causing tension in either their own realms or abroad, except for when its done for a noble cause, such as coming to the aid of their honorable allies. This not only negates their own opportunities for dramatic interaction, it actively kills the opportunities for others, as the honorable allies, the unbeatable majority, are driven by their honorable nature to clamp down on any change.

So it seems that the mentality people have is problematic.

But how can it change?

Well, instead of considering characters pure and infallible, we could instead consider them small pieces of a larger story. The story could be considered all-important, and characters could undergo changes in order to augment the story. This, I think, should be the true goal of roleplaying.

You seem to be more in favour of colonial wars, where an empire would pretty much steamroll some country oversea, steal all their land and never give a damn. You're welcome to practice that, but that sort of war will only be fun to you and fun won't even last long because this sort of military paradigm eventually leads to Atamara.

This is exactly what Battlemaster politics remind me of: Victorian era politics. Big blocks of alliances, with half the kings roleplaying dapper statesmen (and the other half uncommunicative). It's why it takes months to organize a war. They need to go through the long dance that all sophisticated politicians have to, with all the proper etiquette and protocols, accords and ultimatums. A real king, one with an iron crown and a pelt slung over his shoulder, would just declare war and be done with it.

This was the intent of the proposal I made awhile back, to have human led monster invasions in order to destabilize extremely stable continents. It's clear that regular politics tend to stagnate, that realms deadlock themselves politically with mazes of political alliances and chummy relations. Having an evil realm or a monster invasion could periodically break things up.

It's kind of a campy idea, though.

Perhaps a more compelling idea, from a narrative standpoint, would be to introduce nomadic invasions in lieu of monster invasions and evil realms. Have realms situated on difficult-to-traverse deserts or steppes, representing nomadic societies or barbarians, which would periodically emerge to reset the board, to some extent.

Harking back to the days of the War Island minigame, the best map was the four player one. The three player maps were more often than not resolved by two players beating up on the third, and when that was not the case, when there was a more or less even three-way standoff happening, each player would hunker down and the game would drag on interminably. That seems to be the state of affairs in any three way game. It's the strategically optimal way to play.

So in the future I think it would be better to have a four realm island, with one realm being at Toren Stronghold. Even though it's not the ideal place for a fourth realm to be, it would still improve the strategic dynamic.

Well there are some selection factors at work. Realms that don't indulge in convoluted defensive alliances and gang bangs are less competitive than those that do, so they are selected against and slowly disappear.

So up until recently monster invasions were conducted by a few select players from the community, who I will call mods. These stopped happening because the mods said they were too much work and they didn't get enough thanks for the effort they put in. The players didn't always like them, many saw the invasions as being unfair, partially because they didn't affect every realm equally and partially because the invasion forces often couldn't be beaten conventionally, instead requiring some McGuffin device.

What if instead of instead of having mods lead invasions, you had regular players lead them? Regular players not already playing on Beluaterra could create a daimon character there, those daimon characters would be tasked with causing trouble for the humans. They would have separate mechanics from regular characters and would have to rely on their organisational skills and mechanics to make the most of limited resources at their disposal. This would mean that they could be defeated through conventional means.

Now here's the kicker: what if you didn't limit daimon invasions to Beluaterra, but allowed invasions wherever there was too much peace. Atamara, for instance. This could be a sub-game like adventuring, but for busting up hegemonies and gigantic realms.

I think that for Beluaterra this would be very fitting, not as a tool for busting hegemonies (that continent still has interesting politics), but for continuing the tradition of invasions, as it would circumvent the issues that past invasions kept running into. As for busting hegemonies, that I will admit is a wild suggestion but I think it could be worth a try. The trend of this game is for realms to grow big, very big, but for the overall number of realms to decrease, and this invasion mechanic could be a way of intermittently resetting this trend.