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I think you might be surprised what efforts people will try to make when their favorite island is at stake.

Ok but even if you're right the effects of this would be seen only on the very long term, while it seems Tom is looking for a solution in a relatively shorter timeframe. Don't you think?

Bumping this since it went ignored...

I totally agree with most of what you said, but I can't imagine a petition to be a reliable way to solve the issue... one can't simply expect people to start playing "better" because someone pointed out that this might help the game. Unfortunately, vice versa is also quite true: simple game mechanics changes won't really push people into changing their game style. The means to create interesting dynamics are already out there, yet almost everyone (me included) are ignoring them.

What I guess could be the only way out of this I can imagine is to have new and motivated players, who would experience many of these dynamics for the first time and engage in them with the enthusiasm most of us lost simply because we already had our fun with them. Attracting new players and keeping them thus seems the most natural solution to the issues you raised. However, an uninteresting environment hurts a lot more player retention than any other fix can help, and low player retention means less potentially interesting characters coming up.

It's pretty complicated..

But all the fear you cite—which I agree is real—is because of the mindset of players toward war.

Honestly, I'm not convinced there is any simple change we can make to game mechanics that will make players significantly more likely to be willing to make peace after limited gains.

I think that there are several reasons why we have this current situation, and if you will forgive me for a bit of a ramble, I'd like to enumerate them.

• People are afraid to leave a defeated enemy around to come back and bite them. This can be quite a legitimate fear, as I've seen it come back and bite realms in the past, to the tune of complete destruction. (For a semi-recent, prominent example, see Ibladesh and Perdan.)
• People rarely really know when to stop fighting. A war over ideological differences isn't likely to be stopped because one side changed their mind, because no one in BattleMaster ever changes their mind about anything substantive.
• Relatedly, once a realm is badly losing a war, they have no real incentive to surrender rather than see their realm destroyed. This leads to them demanding utterly absurd peace terms, that sometimes amount to demanding that the winning realm surrender if they want to end the war. Part of the motivation for this is that (somewhat paradoxically, given this topic) realms that destroy other realms are, at least to some, viewed with significant disfavour.
• The difficulty of continuing a war does not scale with how much of a realm you've destroyed. By and large, taking a border region is not meaningfully harder than taking the region next to the capital.
• Destruction—in general, not just of realms—is just too darn easy. Looting regions rogue has become too much of a standard practice, and it leaves those lands a wasteland for, in some cases, RL years afterward.
• There is no reason not to remain at war—in a single war—essentially forever. Your soldiers and peasants suffer no "wartime fatigue" of any kind, nor do your resources deplete (for the most part).

I think these are all very valid points and some might really be the main issue. I think we discussed this somewhere else before, but the limited amount of options the code offers to support treaties are certainly a relevant limitation.

In short: the limitations to sizes of realms, the difficulties faced when attacking far away enemies coupled with the fact that winning a war without total annihilation of your opponent doesn't really lead to any concrete advantage for the winner make war pretty unrewarding or too risky for many realms. (note: I am not saying that limitations to sizes or distance-based penalties are to be removed, not at all. But that they make the problem worse because picking enemies gets hard after a while.)

We all know that several attempts over time have been done by players to somehow implement a vassallage and/or tributary system, but only the naivest among us would propose something like this again without code supporting it. With a more complicated diplomatic system which gives the chance to winners to actually benefit from leaving the defeated realm alive more than vanquishing them and driving everything rogue, I believe wars would be stimulated considerably.

Astrum and Morek have no reason to fight. Their one-time rulers, Brance and Bustoarsenzio, were close friends. There was really only one incident, many years ago, that saw Morek and Astrum at odds.

8)

What are the practical experiences with this? Can a war with someone that is around 1500 miles away be waged without morale hitting rock bottom?

Morek's troops deserted systematically in the surrounding of Chesney (2300 miles not in straight line) and in the surroundings of Kid's Rock (2000 miles almost in straight line) attempting to fight Aurvandil and Asylon, respectively.

The idea for moving to the current system was to stop nobles from being mules, who just shepherded caravans around. They are now intended to be brokers and facilitators, not caravan guards.

I think they were much better brokers before, since they could see the amount of food stored and really go around and speak with the people, convincing who had a lot stored to sell, selling to those who were starving at higher price, smuggling out of large producing region the day after harvest and so on.. They had more opportunities..

Now it's basically a sit and wait until some is gentle enough to put a sell offer with a reasonable price without really matching directly any other buy offer.

That is probably correct, but it is still quite hard for me to clearly understand the central problem. What's your opinion on the system before the change? And do you recall Rob what was the ratio behind the change? Was it to make it more decentralized, am I right?

Probably this was already mentioned, but I didn't really have time to go through the whole thread. In my opinion:

- trade could be cooler, but does not really need to. I think most would agree it's not a priority to make it better for the sake of itself.
- however, the moment someone can play the trader subclass, playing this class should be fun. At the moment I don't think it is. Simply put: no one sells food. Or if they do, is at insane prices. The amount of gold to be made simply doesn't justify the potential problem one would incur into if this is discovered, because the penalties of not having food are terrible. Additionally, traders can't even "break in" people's deals since lord to lord transactions are quite common, restricted to realm, rarely over distances such that a lord can't make it and anyway not anonymous.
- The black market option was really cool. I think many people enjoyed it, and it gave a good trader a usefulness to a realm on many sides. Moreover, it directly put a threat to lords stockpiling food like hell, as smuggling out of their region was ridiculously easy and cheap. (now there is just the hassle of the granaries). While I agree it is something devs are still thinking about and not easy to implement the trader class without the black market option is just meaningless..

Added a couple of descriptions of scrolls I ran into with my advy. And noted the "accident" scroll as implemented, since I could cast it.

Or make sure you stir troubles in a realm that wouldn't be listened to even if they bring the case to your judge or ruler.

My infiltrator has stabbed multiple other nobles, and started a couple wars. No one even has a clue that he's an infil, as someone else has always taken the blame for it.

Ok Indirik but you should keep in mind that your char trained both infiltrating and swordfighting skills till 80% at the academy, something only a handful of nobles can afford to do. The average infiltrator commits many completely useless infiltration actions because he wants to improve, so your example is a bit the exception.

Regardless, I do not see a huge problem with the way infiltrators work now. It involves more than simple clicking, just as basically everything in battlemaster.

But Morek and Iashalur cant march that far south.  There is nothing to fear from them.  Astrum and Corsanctum might be able to make it.  The purpose was to scare the peasants when there was no actual threat.

I do not know how planned the whole protest thing was from the other sides, but as far as Morek is concerned, we truly believed we could have concretely helped. To the point we had to see all our men deserting under our nose before realising that we were unable to fight actively.

Well played, Mathurin. Clever phrasing. Gotta love how different people see different interpretations in the same, short sentence.

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Left without option Allison Kabrinski, Duchess of the Maddening Star (which encompasses whole Kabrinskia) joined Astrum with her Duchy, thus putting an end to her namesake realm and sending Astrum's region count to an astonishing 36. Astrum is now the largest and most populated realm of Dwilight, stretching hundreds and hundreds of miles from Norrdir to Demyansk.

And should the capital be coastal, odds are the attackers will have started a TO to prevent any use of the walls.

I think this does not happen anymore with the new TO system. There was a discussion with Tom some time ago and he pretty much stated it was never intended that a takeover could deny defenders the use of walls.