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Join Nothoi or Caelum!

They are fighting the good fight against the tyranny of the King of Kings!

Stand fast good men against the tyranny of autocracy!

;)

Yes.  But then they would be vulnerable to Thalmarkin sending a fleet and conquering one of those coastal cities down there.  That is one of the problems I have with the sea zones in Beluaterra.  It makes it too easy for one large power to project their power ANYWHERE...

Wouldn't have happened.

My OOC goal was to break most of the realms into 1 or 2 city nations either by encouraging secessions or by just smashing them until something broke and then walking away to find the next target.

I never sought the destruction of any realm.

Heck, I was "this close" to announcing that I would be giving a certain city to Minas Leon in order to force a breakup in Tara.  My final goal was to see three Taran realms.  One centered on Foda, one on Aja, and one on Tucha or Shanandoah.  I and the duke of Shanandoah actually talked about it, in full IC.  And he is not the only duke I talked to about secessions from their parent realms.  NEVER to join Tara.  I didn't want Tara any more powerful than we were.  That is why I was so quick to ally Tara with Wayburg.  That secession was a total surprise to me, but it was the kind of thing I'd been working towards for a year.  Breaking up all the powerful realms so we could get some wars going on again.

The alliances, the federation, the big realms, they were all too limiting.  They all had to go, and I never would have supported wiping out any nation simply because it dared to secede from an ally.  A new Darka would have tickled my funny bone.

But yeah...I've been playing cards REAL close to my chest for a year now.  These comments on this forum are the closest I've come to revealing them at all.  Even my closest allies and friends in game never heard all of this.  Just the bits I was hoping they would help with.  Nobody knew the whole picture.  Even I didn't actually.  I just knew things couldn't stay the way they were, so I was banging walls and knocking on doors to see what I could shake loose.  And finding people who were happy to help.

While at the same time doing it all just small enough that I didn't turn Tara into the whole continent's new target number ONE....That was honestly the most delicate part of the entire tap dance...

The north end is pretty good with lots of places to go.

But the southern end is strait jacketed a lot more...

Yao Ling never heard about that.

I didn't know about it either actually.  It's news to me.  ;)

As for the scrolls...she's against that too.  And she's asked people to send her reports so she can deal with those who have used them.

She hasn't gotten any reports yet...

8)

I think in many ways that Atamara is the best continent geographically to play on.  It offers so much interesting terrain and really massive war fronts are available.

Heck, it was so good as a geographical thing that they made Beluaterra on it.

The problem I have with Beluaterra is that losing so much of the land has caused a lot of...shall we say...problems...there are fewer options for war fronts now.  I think it would be very interesting to see the sunken lands return to Beluaterra as the whole map really is very amazing from a gameplay purpose.  I think it's good enough that losing it as a map to play on is bad for the game.

I think I actually agree with most of your points when it comes to religion.  I also like the idea of fewer religions than nations because as you said it makes the religion game different from the nation game...

As for how the diplomacy stuff messed with the war in the south...yeah...that federation stuff was a bugger to work against, and Strombran was much better than we were at figuring out ways to stiff it to the other guy...

And I was better at ordering that Tara respect each individual little bit of the federation we could and just WAIT for Strombran to pull something tricky....and when they did I was really good at protesting the dishonesty of such disloyal tactics and such...and then unleashing my general to do the same thing right back...  hehehe

Ah...the Elder Channel in the League of the Eagle was a warzone...from a player perspective it was awesome...:)


On Daishi and such?  Absolutely.  The more the merrier.  Yao Ling runs the religion as...nonaggressively as possible.  Priests are banned from raising the people up against secular rulers...since it is of course the mission of Daishi to protect the common people from the Destroyers of mankind, the monsters, the undead, and the daimons.  ;)  When it comes to the beliefs and tenants of Daishi...well...the really basic one is that there are gods fighting a war against enemies that would break our sanity if we saw them.  The monsters, undead, and daimons are lesser servants of their enemies that sometimes slip through the battle lines and we must defeat them.  If we cannot, the gods may have to step in and their weapons are powerful beyond imagination.  Yao Ling teaches that the loss of the lands under the Blight was the gods doing.  They saw that we could not defeat the daimon blight and chose to remove it from the earth to give us a chance to survive.  She doubts they will be able to do that again if we should fail once more.  And anyone who dies in service to Daishi will go on to the next realm where the gods battle and be given the honor to fight at their sides in the greater war beyond our own.

As for individual thoughts on Daishi and such?  The gods reveal themselves to everybody in different ways.  There has never been a case of any member of Daishi being kicked out or even threatened with the charge of apostasy.  There are no tenants that everyone must believe, no chants that must be done verbatim to prove you are a true believer or anything like that.  The only requirement is that you stand against the undead, monsters, and daimons when they come.  Anything else can be worked with.

I've been a priest in a Realm-Religion and we did get a lot more involved in the wars.

I've also been a priest in religions that spanned continents.  Sanguis Astroism over in Dwilight.  I was one of the priests that helped write their ten or however many prime tenants.  That was fun.  But we were divorced from the realms because we were priests first and realm nobles second.

My current priest is the High Priestess of Daishi.  That used to be a realm-religion started to protect the core of a nation after there was a rebellion and the priests went over to the rebel side and started driving the loyal regions rogue.  It morphed into an anti-Daimon religion when the Invasions came, and the Daimons did everything they could to wipe the religion out entirely.  Almost succeeded too.  They just missed one temple.  After that, Daishi became a non-realm religion and is now the dominant religion of the continent.  I could go into any realm and destroy them if I wanted to.  I have that kind of power.  But as Daishi is purely an Anti-Daimon religion that does not interfere in temporal decisions, everybody knows I won't do that.  So all the other religions have just faded away.  Nobody fights Daishi because Daishi doesn't fight them.  We are just...everywhere.

Daishi actually covers a similar role the one the League of the Eagle does on Atamara.  The League has people from every nation in it and it is the quickest way for people on one end of the island to talk to the other side.  It is the same with Daishi.  We have nobles from just about every nation in our ranks.  Heck, there are two of us who share the top position in the religion.  Our nations have been at knock down drag out fighting war for as long as either of us can remember.  We never have a cross word for each other.

What someone said above about republics versus kingships and the like.

Tara is a Tyranny.  Basically the Tyrant can do anything he wants.  Within reason.

And when I broke with the federation in the end, there were no protests.  Strombran's actions against Caergoth made that easy in the end.  There was a lot of "if they want to betray the federation let them break first" thoughts going on.  In the end though, because Strombran and CE shared so many characters I knew they just were never going to do that.

The politics of the federation were interesting.  Tara and Cagil were the longest and oldest allies and had fought as brothers forever.  But there were very few players that had characters in both realms.  So even though they were brother realms, they didn't SHARE a lot in common.  Strombran was formed by Cagil and many of those in power in each realm had characters in the other realm.  Cagil and Strombran were very much two sides of the same coin.  One giant two-nation realm if you will.

Strombran could do ANYTHING and Cagil would never break federation with them.  And if Tara broke federation we would be destroyed by both of them.  A year ago, when I first became Tyrant, our only allies were Talerium and Caergoth.  Not counting the Federation.  Cagil and Strombran were allied with everybody else.  If I had stood up to them at that time, Tara would have been destroyed.  Period.  End of Line.

So instead I started a year long effort to chip away at the alliances supporting Cagil and Strombran.  I put pressure on them.  I talked to other rulers.  I put pressure on them.  Just a little bit.  Never too much.  And as the months went by, Cagil was so secure in their position that they let them all go.  And Tara tested our armies against Minas Leon and then Suville.  We taught our people how march again and we turned Tara's army into a seriously potent force once more.  And then Strombran pissed away their last alliance.

And that left Tara the only nation with allies outside the League.  Allies that had experience fighting and just might be able to tip the balance of what a combined CE-Strombran army would do to Tara.

Basically, I spent a year working to turn the politics of Atamara sideways.  And I got a lot more help from the other rulers than I really expected.  Everybody disliked the status quo.  It's just that nobody knew how to end it.  Even I didn't know how to actually BREAK it all in the end.  All I knew how to do was weaken and pressure it...and for months people have seen that pressure going up and up and up.

Everybody wanted a change, but nobody knew how to do it.  Then the leader of CE started up an OOC discussion in the League about breaking everything up.  We never came to an agreement about how to do it, but we did come to an agreement that something had to be done.  And then that slow ratcheting pressure that was slowly breaking up the federation got turned up one more notch by Strombran and...snap...

I pulled Tara out of the federation and it was GOTIME.

An interesting thing that I want to point out.  While most people say the League of the Eagle won the game back in the day, it wasn't the League that actually...held sway.  Or it wasn't the League that really stagnated the island.  It was the federation.  In the League we could still go our separate ways and do stuff.  In the federation, we were lockstepped to each other in ways that are really hard.  Especially when Strombran and Tara detested each other as much as they did.

The League did not have to die to break Atamara free of the stagnation it was in.  The federation had to die.  That is a very interesting difference.  Most people see them as one and the same, but they really never were.  The League was an alliance of nations that mostly worked together.  The federation of Tara and Cagil were the two most powerful nations locked together in ways that nobody else could break.  Except themselves.  And that would never happen until the playing rulers decided it had to be done.  And we did decide that.  And we did it.  Because we knew it was the only way break the stagnation that had fallen over Atamara.

It is sad that the devs decided to sink the island after we spent a year making it more exciting.  But that's not on us.  We did what we needed to do.  We made Atamara better.  And we were on track to putting it back on top as the best island to play on if my projections are right.  And considering that it took ten years to build the situation we were in, the fact that we broke it in one year is pretty awesome in my book.

It's just a damn shame the devs shut it down after we succeeded.  Or least made one big step on the succeeding ladder.  There were a lot more steps to take.  And we were well and truly taking them.  Hehehe.

One reason that most people do 1 warrior and 1 priest is because the priest game is so separate from the rest of the game that one can often become heavily detached from the actions of the realm.  It is much closer to the adventurer game than the noble game which is why so many people begged you to treat priests as adventurers.  When I had a single priest in one realm with no one else, I literally lost track of the realm.  When I brought in a warrior to the realm it helped to anchor me to realm and made me a much better player in support of the realm.

If you can only have one noble in each continent, very few people will pick a priest to be that one noble.  Most people who have priests, have one warrior and one priest.  That is what I do.  With the new rule, that is not allowed.  Priests are simply not an interesting enough class for most people to want to play ONLY THAT.  Which means the number of Priests that we have will drop with this new rule, and that will probably cause some religions to disappear altogether...



One another note about the war and such.  I was very clear in my orders and they were followed.  No Taran unit ever crossed Strombonian lands to attack Suville until after Suvillan and Strombonian troops crossed Taran territory in missions against Caergoth.  I was very clear.  Tara would not be the first nation to violate that gentleman's agreement, and we were not.  I wanted it stamped in scouting reports that we were not the first to violate that, and we got them.  Strombran was caught red handed in our territory on an attack mission against Caergoth.

That was when I unleashed my general to cross into their territory as much as he wanted.  And boy did he want to...;)  He was an awesome bad cop to my goodish cop...of course he was a Carelian...he probably wanted the League burned down as much as the southern realms did.  I never asked him though.  I was just happy to have someone even more aggressive minded than me as general.  He did such a good job ratcheting up tensions in the league.  It was awesome.  :)

From a player perspective of course.  Hehehe.

The religion game is about to die with the new rules...

The rest...we shall see...

The devs killing off the one island that was working really hard to change has left a lot of people angry and disillusioned.

I've already seen a lot of people saying they won't go elsewhere.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

I don't know what I will do, but one thing I am doing is trying to organize things so my people at least who want to can go somewhere else and have fun.  No idea if any of my characters will go with them, but I owe it to them give them as good a chance as possible.  Even if it is the last thing I do as their king...

I will note some things that Indirik said that are wrong.

I play Regstav Pryde, the ruler of Tara.

Regstav never EVER threatened or in any way suggested that the alliance with Caergoth would be ended if they did not do what Tara said, suggested, or ordered.  Period.  End of Line.

Regstav always considered them a true ally.  And never forced them to do anything. 

Regstav also never offered up all of Suville to Caergoth.  Regstav wanted Suville weakened since he considered it too strong.  Weakened but not destroyed.  I worked to get Riverholm returned to Caergoth but nothing more.

The raiding campaign against Suville only started once Strombran started sending individual units to keep the Taran army from joining Caergoth in attacks.  There was much anger over that.

And when Tara tried to replicate the tactic in Caergoth, Stromban just used murderous settings to start the fights, and due to the diplomacy the Taran forces were shifted to attack Caergoth.  There was...more anger over that.

And so we started just raiding Suville because that was all we could do.  Short of ending the federation with Cagil that Regstav was not willing to do.

Then Strombran took Riverholm via ducal secession and claimed it and there was MORE anger.  Then they took Ser'quea via ducal secession and that was just it.  Done.  Put a fork in me.  Just done.

I told Wayburg and Caergoth that I didn't think I could protect them from Suville because I didn't think Tara was going to be in any position to project power in the very near future.  I suggested to both of them that they ally with Suville so they could look after each other, and then I relaxed relations with Suville so they could do that.  And have slowly been relaxing relations with Suville ever since.  No alliance...but...that's asking a bit much of Regstav...but certainly a "if you look after our friends I won't lay a finger anywhere near you" kind of thing.

And then Tara broke the federation and instantly attacked Strombran.  Strombran really couldn't do much.  But then Cagil jumped in.  They may have been a paper tiger a few months ago.  I can say from experience they are NOT a paper tiger now.  Not at all.  And I was VERY right to assume that Tara would not be in a position to protect either Wayburg or Caergoth.  Cagil is a tough opponent.

I would actually say that with the Cagil/Taran conflict going on and the Strombran/Wayburg/Suville/Caergoth conflict going on, things are fairly close to even between the two sides.  Basically everybody is getting their tickets punched while the northern realms watch.

It's rather impressive to see how much things are changing.

As a player, I wanted the federation gone the moment I became Tyrant.  Before that, all I could see was from Regstav's perspective and he wanted it strong and whole.  Then as a ruler and a player I saw how it stagnated the island.  And from that moment I as a player wanted it dead and buried.  So I started working to slowly take apart all the entangling alliances that have crippled the island.  Things actually worked pretty well on that regard, though each one took a while to get through.  The last and hardest one was obviously the federation.  That took some extreme work to get broken, and I don't know if that would have been possible without Strombran acting so...badly.  So props on the rulers of Strombran for giving everybody good reasons to hate them...;)

It's too bad the devs decided to shut everything down once it got interesting, but at least I can say one thing.

We did good.  One year ago, the League had an unmitigated lock on diplomacy on the island.  Every single nation was allied with at least one member of the League.  That mad warring pretty much impossible.  A year later, most of those alliances are gone.  Thanks in no small part to Cagil and Strombran being very helpful when it comes to breaking alliances when I or others put a little pressure on them.  Tara's alliance with Caergoth is actually the only one still active.  The federation itself is fractured, and there is war inside the League.

Atamaran politics have been smashed well and truly.  I would have loved to find out where they went after this.  But the devs decided not to let that happen.  That's on them.  We players did the math and chose to make a change that worked very well.  And I'm real proud of that.

It took a decade to build the League into the most powerful alliance very possible in the entire game.  It took us one year to break it.  And if we did sorta decide in the end to do it via some OOC communication, I can say without reservation that everything was IC when it broke.  There were tensions for years, and we just finally decided...you know...for the good of the game...for the good of ALL the players on the island...let the tensions break.  Let's see where it goes.

It went good.  I'm happy.

This was the first real time I was ever an actual ruler.  I've ruled before, but never for more than a few days.  I've never really sought the position.  This was the first time I really did.  And it was because Foda is my home as both character and player.  It opened my eyes a lot to how people have to play.  To how rulers have to play.  Rulers have two jobs in a lot of ways.  One is to make their realm strong.  The other is to make sure there are other realms to fight against.  Which have to be some challenge.  Because if the OTHER guys aren't having fun your guys won't either because they'll run out of people to fight against.  So rulers really HAVE to take a step back into OOC just a bit because we have to make sure our players can have fun.

And this game is BattleMaster, not PeaceMaster.  So it is our job to make sure there are people to fight.  For one year, the entirety of my time as Tyrant of Tara, I've pushed for that.  And other rules have helped.  We all worked together to make sure that we could break the stranglehold of alliances that had Atamara crippled.  And we did it.

As a player, I'm down right proud of that.  Regstav the character is bloody unhappy about it.  But Medron the player is giggling with joy at seeing the biggest alliance in all of BattleMaster lying in ruins.

And it never would have been possible without the other rulers taking the same step back I did.  We worked together as players to give everybody a chance to fight and have fun.  And we had lots of ideas for the future.  Maybe we'll just have to replicate them elsewhere now.

;) 

dang....Tara or CE joining Luria would be insane.  they would be unbeatable i bet.

i am not suggesting that in my realm by the way...

Instead of complaining about everything why don't you appreciate the changes?

Because we don't like them.