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There has been a lot of mentality of a "gamer" in this game, but it is in no way a traditional game. It is a political simulator, a role playing game, a diplomatic sandbox.

I think you are getting out of touch with the game's root. BattleMaster is a war game, first and foremost.

BattleMaster is a team-oriented browsergame merging strategy and roleplaying.

Politics and diplomacy are irrelevant without the mechanics to back them up. And they are only expandable within the scope of the mechanics. RL didn't force a nation to have so many nobles. RL didn't prevent nations from expanding greater than a certain (very medium) size.

Free-form roleplaying games exist, and they can be great. I've had a lot of fun with some FFRP boards back in the days.

But that is not what BattleMaster is, or ever was. It's predecessor, SpellMaster, largely was, but that just further reinforces that game mechanics are a fundamental aspect of BattleMaster.

The events on the South Island has reminded me of this rules issue... I don't play on the South Island (thank god), but it seems like, yet again, players who mean no harm, and do no harm, got smitted for using the wrong keywords in their arguments.

That the rules focus so much on intent is really a source of great injustice, because those who know the letter of the rules well, and some precedent, can weasel their way into bypassing most of them. No friendly merger? No problem, they'll sling a few insults around for pretense, and then make amends. Can't punish for activity? No problem, they'll make something else up, and cover it up. And so on. Meanwhile, players who aren't as rules-savvy try to do the same thing, and often think they are doing the exact same thing, but, "whoops", they used the wrong keyword. And thus get divine fury for what another would have quite easily gotten away with.

So there's this guy, who would get appointed to lordships, patch up the new regions, and then step down for the next challenge. And he got punished for it, basically called a bad player.

But who did he harm? Did anyone ask for a chance to build up a region, only to get told "oh no, only the designated fixer upper can get new regions"? If that's the case, an argument could be made, though I'd still disagree with it. Fixing up a region is not a fundamental right, after all. More to the point, most people don't like that kind of duty. You get forced to do maintenance work. You get no income. It screws with your unit. It takes you out of commission. Very few people like patching up regions, and since the "new" estate system, it's really a huge, huge burden.

And that's not even what the placeholder rule was about. Taking titles seriously is an SMA thing, the placeholder rule was about stopping players from circumventing things that temporarily denied a player X his title, back when the game was much different than it is now. Say ruler Bob got wounded, lost his title. BAM, instant election (remember, no referendum mechanics back then), George is now ruler. People are upset, the moment Bob is healed, they demand Bob gets reinstated. THIS was common, and THIS is what brought the rule. The other similar issue was "X needs a lord now, we want to give it to Y, but Y isn't available right now. So we'll give it to Z, but as soon as Y is available, we'll force Z to step down."

The placeholder problem was always a situation that benefited one person specifically, and usually revolving coercion to take out someone the game had placed there or buy time for admissibility to change (ex: ruler deleting his old character, creating a new one, letting a placeholder in place until the new character is eligible).

Someone shifting lordships to be a serial region fixer could certainly be an SMA violation, but that only applies to Dwilight. It certainly doesn't fit the type problem the rule was meant to prevent.

Now, I've got zero stakes in this issue, I don't even have a character on the island at all, not do I even remember who the player sanctioned was.

But I heard that the realm is once again plunged into drama, and it's gotta be asked "was it worth it? what was gained?" Are the rules beneficial to the game? Or harmful? And I don't mean the idea of rules in general, I mean the specific rules that the game currently has. Rules are supposed to help keep things fun for everyone. I'm not sure this guy was harming anyone's fun, I'd think it more likely he was doing everyone a favor.

It could be an interesting feature if combined with treaties. Make it so that all diplomatic relations, excluding war/hatred, require the signing of a treaty and the treaty has a set amount of time until expiration. To pick an arbitrary number out of thin air, a 6 month limit. When a treaty is being signed the choices will be something like, 4 weeks, 6 weeks, 8 weeks, 10 weeks, 12 weeks, etc to 24 weeks.

I'm not sure how I feel about the idea in general, I'm getting rather annoyed with how the game is increasingly trying to force people to play a certain way (what's the next step, handing players a script to play out?).

But this variation of the idea feels like it has the most potential, to me. Especially if you include an "indefinite" option. Right now, a lot of realms are chicken !@#$, and barely anyone dares to throw the first stone and start a war. If their previous peace agreements had been automatically terminated by the game, it could make the next steps much easier in some cases. For example, if two realms agreed to "end their war for the next 4 months", well there'd be a whole lot of pressure against them resuming their war at the end of that, but if the game automatically brought them back to war... that could be a whole other story.

Of course, the main problem is just player laziness in wanting the moral high ground and dogpiling whoever dares to break out of the mold, but that's harder to fix.

If they are important should not your character (ie you) be takinig manual actions to preserve them. Otherwise it is just like RL, if you don't file away important stuff you lose it.

The ability to manually archive reports is something I can support, much better then having a folder of copy/pasted notes and reports.

Sure, but people usually archive stuff in their downtime. Emails, reports, receipts, whatever, nothing IRL really lasts as little time as BM scout reports do. As it is, one can't even wait to do it on weekends, most reports will be deleted already by then.

Yea, RCs, other buildings, walls, militia, faiths, and a bunch of other data are fairly static.

Yea, stupid rogues. I've got many options against human armies, not so much against rogues.

Also rogues don't talk back. Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame.

Also for those not aware, the realm has an up-to-date and fairly detailed wiki page (with many subpages). Suggestions welcome.

http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Westgard

Instead of longer life for scrible notes, can we have battle notes to last longer? I think they are worth keeping around longer.

I don't understand the distinction? Battle Reports are one form of scribe notes?

http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Priest_Game#Temples_and_Shrines

There's a cap. It isn't "preaching won't allow followers to rise above X cap", but a semi-softer "followers above this cap will very quickly lose faith".

Temples cap the follower count. Have you looked up the limit on the wiki to compare it?

It seems like a fairly ridiculously hard cap, if I look at Wudenkin. Follower % is pretty much almost exactly what the temple allows.

How useful is it really to have a scout report of a region that's a week old?

By that point, any troops in the region are likely to have moved on.

Depends on the context and for whom.

I more or less regularly look up old reports for insights. "How many troops does X have? Well, Y fought then 20 days ago, and they brought Z troops then..." Cross-checking old reports with various fresher info allows a lot of extrapolation.

Like, right now, I'd REALLY like to look at those battle reports for Unterstrom (12 days ago for the first one). There's a few things I want to check, but can't, because I didn't think of looking at them in time. So instead I have to ask some of the players there to copy-paste it into pastebin or an xls file to send it to me out of game (which I'm not really expecting any of them to do, tbh).

Also it's nice to save some battle reports for posterity, but usually the battles occur in intense moments, when you don't really have time/attention to bother archiving, and by the time you do, they are gone.

It would be nice if scout reports and battle reports lived longer. Battle reports are already saved in the message log for a month, it'd be nice for them to last in the scribe notes for the same time.

Scout reports, and other scribe notes, tend not to live very long at all. Not sure if that's a DB memory issue (I think memory is cheap and that they don't use up all that much data?), or what? Would be nice to have them longer too.

The only issue I'd see would be clogging up the new scribe sharing mechanism, I guess, but that one could have a stricter cut-off.

I recall this one. It's a bit silly. It's number of religions you've founded. I think someone on dwilight has founded two religions.

LOL

When I hover over it, it says "You have founded a religion". What confuses me is how it can vary. It only mentions founding the religion, it doesn't seem to take into account how successful the religion is, or if it does it gives no indication.

Mysteries within mysteries lol

Probably how successful those religions are relative to the other religions on the continent. "Measured by followers through time" would be a likely metric, given how most of the other fame values go.