Messages

...

Hey, I don't think it's cool to share cherry-picked in-realm IC messages on the public forum, even if some of them are fairly old.

What did I even do to you? :(

This is why so many sensitive discussions these days happen among a few trusted nobles, while most new players get cut out of the fun. Too many players think "to everyone in the realm" = public.

Such hard restrictions are bad in a political game because they are easily abused. I.e. the loser can break the peace terms without fear of retaliation.

We can have them be rules rather than enforced game mechanics.

How about something more standardized?

The attacker has to specify which of the defender's regions are the war goal. War goal regions must collectively be connected to the attacking realm.

The defender may counter-declare their own war goal regions that are owned by the attacker. These regions must collectively be connected to the defending realm.

Duration of the war should be N months for N war goal regions.

Each side can claim at most 1 city / stronghold, so at most 2 cities / strongholds can be contested per war.

Cannot claim an entire realm (and possibly destroy said realm) unless it's down to its last city / stronghold.

At the end of the N months, the war automatically ends. War goal regions are retained by their current owner, non-war goal regions are returned to their original owner. Note that regions are not guaranteed to be returned in their original state. The other side can and probably will strip a region of anything useful before returning it.

War declarations in response to another war declaration may just state that the realm is joining an existing war. May be rolled back by the Titans at their discretion, to prevent one-sided slaughters. I would personally consider wars where one side has more than twice the nobles of the other side as badly imbalanced.

Realms joining in as co-belligerents do not stand to gain or risk losing any regions by the end of the war. At the end of the war, war goal regions that they have taken are given to the side they supported, and non-war goal regions are returned to their original owner. They may still temporarily lose regions during the war, of course.

After the war is declared, war goals can only be changed by mutual agreement between the initial attacker and the initial defender.

Either side can end the war at any time by surrendering, in which case, the winner gets all war goal regions.

The war can also end in white peace, by mutual agreement between the initial attacker and the initial defender. In that case, all regions are returned to their original owners.

After the war is ended, enforce a ceasefire period of 1 month, between all realms involved in the war.

Hear, hear. I have had a similar experience on BM's Discord channel. I was contradicted or actively dismissed by cliques of players, nearly every time I dared to express an opinion. Some folks just straight up shouted social-contract-breaking things at me, and had to be muted by the admins. It's like people think BM's rules didn't apply because they're on Discord. I was told that I would have to report any rules-breaking messages directed at me, because there were so many messages that the admins could not audit everything.

I didn't want to cause any more incidents like that, so I stopped visiting.

The most frequent word I've seen players use when describing that environment is "toxic".

Anyway, I'm sorry if I'm being too negative.

I guess I'm just still put off by that war declaration. I would have preferred it if Perdan just said, "Yeah, we're taking some of your lands because we can. What are you going to do about it?" This "We're going to borrow some of your lands, and maybe give them back to you later, if you're good little boys" just completely rubs me the wrong way, as if our regions are not even good enough to be worth conquering.

[- achieve and fortify a land-bridge to Nivemus, denying these lands to the Eponllyn war machine- capture Eponllyn assets in order to restrict their capacity to retaliate and force capitulation]

Rulers of the East Continent,

The Kingdom of Perdan hereby commits to a war of passage against the Kingdom of Eponllyn.

Accordingly, Perdan will:

- achieve and fortify a land-bridge to Nivemus, denying these lands to the Eponllyn war machine

- capture Eponllyn assets in order to restrict their capacity to retaliate and force capitulation

- pledge to conduct only goodly takeovers, attack only war assets and denounce unwholesome looting options.

- consider the war completed in their favor when Eponllyn concedes defeat and requisite treaty conditions are signed (which must include a mandatory safe period for the Alexandrian colony).

- agree to consider provisional return of Eponllyn assets;

            - once the colony has been safely established

            - on the condition that Eponllyn and its allies conduct themselves with nobility and

            - neither betray this agreement or impede the establishment of the colony.

- consider the war lost when Perdan concedes defeat and signs to mutually agreeable conditions for ceasefire.

Perdan has no interest in permanently diminishing Eponllyn unless they continue to block access for the colonial effort.

So Eponllyn is just supposed to continue fighting Shadowdale while Perdan "borrows" our regions?

Gadlock flipped to Eponllyn today. It was not a consideration in any of the war declarations.

And instead of running a TO on Troyes, Perdan's armies literally parked themselves in Eponllyn's capital. If there is some trick to this where Eponllyn can continue to fight Shadowdale without being "distracted" by Perdan, please tell me. :(

We could have had some fun, relatively balanced wars going in EC. Sirion and Nivemus fighting Perdan. Caligus and Eponllyn fighting Shadowdale (after the Titans tell Perleone to withdraw). But then Perdan just had to declare war on Eponllyn. Now Eponllyn is forced to cooperate with Nivemus just to defend its lands, even though Eponllyn's leadership's every intention was to respect the alliance system restrictions and not interfere in the Perdan-Nivemus war.

If Perdan didn't want to attack Nivemus through the choke-point, then Perdan should have declared war on Eponllyn first. Declare Troyes and Poitiers as your war goal. Heck, declare the entire Westmoor duchy as your war goal. Then it would have been Perdan fighting Eponllyn and Caligus, still a relatively balanced war. Perdan would have more nobles. Eponllyn and Caligus can attack from two fronts but also have more regions to defend. If any other realm tried to interfere, players from one side or the other would be asking the Titans to stop the interference.

But you can't dog pile unless there is a really good justification like the realm getting dog piled provoking every realm that is attacking them.

Every realm attacking Thalmarkin had perfectly valid IC reasons to do so. The Admins put a stop to it anyway.

If realm A + B are fight realm C + D, instead of jumping in to attack either AB or CD, you should go for realm E or F or others.

And Perdan is in the wrong for interfering in the Shadowdale-Caligus war. Had Perdan declared war on Eponllyn first, it would have been Shadowdale that was in the wrong, but that's not what happened.

[Title]

Title: Restrict alliance blocs by number of nobles, not number of regions.

Summary:
Instead of restricting alliance blocs to be no larger than holding one third of all human controlled regions on the continent, restrict alliance blocs to be no larger than holding one third of all nobles on the continent.

Details:

• Remove the current alliance bloc restrictions.
• Prevent realms from allying with each other if the resulting alliance bloc would contain more than one third of the nobles on the continent.

Benefits:
A realm's military potential is much better represented by its number of nobles than its number of regions. An alliance bloc consisting of less than one third of a continent's regions but more than half of the continent's nobles would likely crush all opposition. Restricting alliance blocs by the number of nobles would make for a more fair distribution of power between the different blocs, and thus lead to fewer wars where one side is hopelessly outmatched and has no hope of winning.

Possible Downsides/Exploits:
A realm's number of nobles tend to fluctuate more than its number of regions. We may need a soft limit, where the alliance bloc's Rulers are warned that the bloc is growing too large, and a hard limit, where the alliance bloc is forcibly dissolved due to its member realms having too many nobles.

Inactive nobles tend to get auto-paused.

While they were being pushed back for a while, GX's fate was pretty much sealed when Crownguard, the lord of Isadril flipped control of the city to Vix in July '17, following some internal disagreements in GX. Within a month, GX was pushed back to Xavax city, and instead of a last stand for Xavax city a la First Oligarch, Selenia's group headed north and made a deal with Sirion to take over Oligarch City for a new realm, Redhaven.

There was no internal disagreement. Crownguard just didn't want to lose his city, and figured the best way of keeping it was to turn traitor.  >:(

Here is an idea from Crusader Kings 2 that we can borrow:

Let the Family/House of each player get its own honor and prestige values. Every time one of your nobles die, their honor and prestige get added to your Family/House's honor and prestige. This is the only way to make your Family/House's honor and prestige increase. The honor and prestige for your Family/House do nothing. They are just for bragging rights and "high score" comparisons.

Existing dead nobles can have their honor/prestige retroactively accounted for, assuming that the game still remembers them.

Possible exploits: People could make a bunch of nobles and then delete them. Maybe make it so that retiring a noble that you've played for less than a month does not increase your Family/House's honor and prestige.

[Greater Eponllyn]

That's Greater Eponllyn to you, dear sir.  ;D

What happens if the limit gets adjusted and we're over the limit again? How quickly do we have to come back into compliance?

Oh, we're still around.

Does this mean that the armor rating for all the RCs in Ibladesh have been reset to 0?  ;D