Topics

Removed April's fools

I currently see the following message:

With your current unit and/or entourage, it would cost 81 gold and take 13 hours to procure and board ships.

I though this meant a two-turn embarking time, but it seems I am forbidden to board a ship at all. Is this intended behaviour?

I though any religious Elder could be invited to give a sermon, but it seems a "not reknowned enough" limitation exists. What is it related too? Reknown usually is linked to prestige, but that seems a weird metric.

I thought I had put everything in order, but I can't find the button.

Since strongholds can be capitals it seems to me that they should but the question has been raised and now I am uncertain.

I wanted to have my EC character emigrate to Dwilight but there is already a character of the same name there. Will a name change request for this reason be accepted?

[Title]

Title: Increase allowed amounts for fines

Summary:

When a Judge imposes a fine on someone, he can choose an amount somewhere between 10 and 200 gold. For many this is little more than a pittance at which they can laugh. I propose that the ceiling be increased.

Details:

I propose additional options up to 1'000 gold. The exact ceiling can be discussed. There probably was a time when 200 gold was already extremely high. I think it is clear that there is on average more gold available in the game now, although I don't know by how much.

Note that I don't ask for the removal of the ceiling. A character who amasses 10'000 pieces of gold should be relatively immune from fines. However it seems it should be possible for them to hurt even a little bit.

Benefits:

Give some teeth to the fine option when dealing with rich characters.

Possible Downsides/Exploits:

This could be used to lay out crippling fine to a knight who doesn't actually have that much gold. This could be fixed if there was a moving cap at, say, the weekly revenue of the knight. However the page makes you decide the amount and the recipient at the same time, so I imagine that would be harder to code.

I have recently built a Tournament grounds. I can call a tournament with a maximum prize of 800 gold. I seem to recall that a few days ago it was only 250 gold.

I am also quite certain I have seen tournaments with higher prizes in the past.

What determines the maximum prize? Can I do anything to increase it?

When you pay to change your apparent CS, is the apparent value only supposed to appear on scout reports, or is it meant to appear everywhere, in particular in the data marshals have access to?

The player of the Telrunya family asked to post this:

Out-of-Character from Marche Telrunya   (6 hours, 30 minutes ago)
Message sent to everyone in your realm (33 recipients)
Can't post on the forums using a proxy apparently. Can someone please post this on the forums? I can read them fine, I just can't post anything:

Ever since yesterday, the Battlemaster website (+wiki, +forums etc.) has been down for me. Every time I try to connect to the website, it just tries to load for a long time and then times out. At first, I thought BM was just having some issues, but it's still going on today. Hence I went and checked and managed to connect to BM without problems through a proxy server, but this is of course not ideal for playing BM. I tried to flush dns settings, as I remembered something like that from a while back, but that did nothing. No other websites so far have had similar issues.

Does anyone have any ideas what I can try to do to fix this issue?
Bart Taal

I don't have this problem personally, I don't know how widespread it can be.

Yesterday

Pierre, still uneasy in his ill-fitted plate armour, reviews the men he has just hired. All 175 of them. The size of the troop was staggering, unlike anything he's ever seen before.

"-Isn't there someone else who would be better placed to lead them?
-They want to be with you, Milord. They are all volunteers, and they wouldn't trust anyone else. Your name gives them trust you know. They know you are brave and will care for them.
-Brave I'll try, Stars willing, but what they should be looking for is experience.
-But... you have lead men before?
-Archers in the forest, mostly. And that was 10 years ago. Can you believe I had never manned a wall before I came to D'Hara?
"

The troops positioned themselves in the weakest position of the fortifications, to bear the grunt of the assault. They were not the most deadly, but they did exactly what was required, and no Novan could go through. By noon there were a hundred bodies making makeshifts barricades , but the battle was won.

More would come back at sunset though. The remnants of the Novans, backed by some fresh reinforcements, had another go. They hurled themselves at the wall, but this time the wind had died, and even though the battle was one-sided the centre infantry was exposed, and suffered badly. Yet there was no time to rest, they would come back in the morning.

Of the mighty troops only 14 were left standing when the sun rose. The battle had only started when Pierre was hit by the first arrow. Slightly hurt he looked to gauge the enemy, and entered a great rage when he noticed, right in front of him, a rag-tag troop of infantry not larger than his own, sporting the same Bloodstars emblems, their sleeves embroidered "Rendorian Shieldguards", climbing the walls on their siege engines and breaking the defenses.  He shouted at their leader Aldraker Renodin:

-You hypocrite! You proclaim yourself faithful and fight for a heretic! You shall be thrown back to the depth of the sea far from view of the Stars with your mistress Jonsu!

But that is all he would say, before a sword cut him in the guts. He expired in less than a minute.

Thus died Pierre von Genf, Luminary of the Auspicious Star, former Duke of the First Temple, former Regent of the Faith, defending Qubel Lighthouse from Novans attacking in support of the heretic Jonsu Himoura.

[Title:]

Title: Improve Ducal recognition in elections

Summary: There is often very little feeling of attachment of Region Lords to their Dukes, especially so in realms where Lords are selected through election. Because the election is realm-wide, you could be forgiven for barely knowing who your Duke is. While this is a general issue that cannot be solved by a game-mechanic magic bullet, I believe the following small change could help.
   
Details: When an election is called, add the bolded part to the election text:

The region of Kepler in the Duchy of Keplerville is currently without a local lord. In accordance with the realm's laws, the next lord will be chosen by a referendum among the lords of the realm.

Interested candidates can announce their running starting immediately. The winner will become a vassal of Duke Kepler unless he is of equal or higher rank.

You are invited to vote in this election.

Benefits: Better duchy recognition.

Possible Exploits: None, this is a text change.

[Title:]

Title: Refugees instead of militia

Summary: There is already a mechanism for peasants to travel from one region to another to escape warfare. Tweak this mechanism such that, in cases of looting or takeovers, more peasants will be refugees than forming militias.
   
Details: The mechanism already exists, this is just a matter of tweaking numbers.

One possible issue could appear when all neighboring regions are already at max pop. I think the game can handle this, since I have seen regions go temporarily above max pop. I imagine the peasants would move back to neighboring regions when the situation there improves; if they can't (for example if there is continuous warfare), eventually this population pool would die as the actual population decreases slowly to the maximum amount. That's ok.

This is how I imagine it works; not having seen the code it is possible it isn't and that new code would be needed.

Benefits: This would make war less devastating. Currently it is easy to completely ravage an area. Normal looting and takeovers push peasants into militia which get easily slaughtered; breeding back this population takes a very long time.

With this mechanism, the population would not disappear but become refugees. If the enemy army goes away they could easily repopulate the region, bringing it back to full production more rapidly.

This would have several advantages:

-It would incite losing realms to sign peace, as they could more easily rebound afterwards.

-It would force those who wish to permanently destroy an area to actually use the brutal looting options with the consequences attaching. It is now much too easy to act all honorable and do nothing but takeovers, while in fact genocoding the population.


Possible Exploits: With the absence of peasant militia it would become easier for small units to loot alone effectively.

It is generally received wisdom that there aren't enough wars in BM. While I also share this gut feeling, I would like to put some hard numbers on it.

If you have two characters in the same realm, please count it as a single war. By active war I mean one where battles are actually taking place at least semi-regularly.

Here's a question:

I am the Duke of Kepler, Earl of Kepler. The region of Kepler gets taken over, so I lose the Earlship but remain Duke of Kepler. Kepler is then taken over back by Keplerstan, but the game automatically assigns it to the Duchy of Brahe.

Is there any way for the Duke of Brahe to transfer the region to the Duchy of Kepler without assigning a Lord to the region? I want to get back the region for myself.

Pierre was my second character, after a first one in Atamara. Morek was dirt poor back then, and it was impossible to get by with the 2-3 gold per week my Ashrak estate gave. Once my starting unit was killed I had no gold, no troops, and not even enough honour to become a courtier. Allison was Duchess then and she handed me gold, but not in a haughty "I'm rich, you're not, now go fight my battles" way I have seen elsewhere. She took the time to know what my character wanted, and helped him achieve it. Sure, she would call back later on to ask for favors when she needed them, but she truly cared in the first place. On an IC level my character always kept a soft spot for her because of that, even when she descended into madness he remembered he would be nothing without her. On an OOC level I knew getting an interaction with Allison may be the best thing to happen to anyone  who may find themselves a bit bored by the game, as she would lead them into the inner circles of power quicker than anywhere else.

This is the end of an era for Dwilight. It's quite sad, really.

Then again, for some reason, I can't get this song out of my head:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHQLQ1Rc_Js

I can't see the "All unread topics" and "All new replies to your post" on top of the forum main page. I don't know if I misclicked something or if they're gone.... can anyone help me?

It looks great! I have a few questions:

However, overall, there will be around a 25% food surplus on each continent,

Can we be told if that corresponds to an increase or a decrease? There was a comment in the food rebalance thread that said the continents were not standardized in that respect, can we get a rough break of how that will play out by continent?

Also generally, will this yield relatively more or less food to the cities and townslands compared with the rurals?

You can expect to see this rebalance coming live in the beginning of April.

Please wait at least for the 2nd to avoid confusion..... but you probably thought of that.

In one realm I am in, the idea has been emitted to ask the Lord of one particular region to build a temples of all religions present in the realm in order to create a "center of religious tolerance". He would do this by joining every religion in turn and leave it after building the temple.

This is not on a SMA continent. Nevertheless, the idea seems iffy to me. Joining a religion should be more serious than that.

Can I get opinions on whether this should be allowed or not?

I kinda-sorta remember to have used in the past a feature where you could pay 50 gold in a foreign city to use all of its facilities (banks and repair shops) for a day. Yet my character is in a city and I can't find it. Am I looking in the wrong place? Has it been removed?