Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - Chenier

Pages: 1 ... 500 501 [502] 503 504 ... 532
7516
Feature Requests / Re: Rebellions, real upheavals
« on: June 21, 2011, 01:21:12 AM »
Yep.
Close, but not quite. You can rig a ban with the proper circumstances to prevent a secession. Assassinations, wounds in battle, in prison, away from the city, etc., would all let you get rid of a duke without allowing the to secede or change allegiance first.

Right... but it's still a fair compromise. Extra options could be nice, but we can work with the tools at hand good enough as it is.

7517
One question now that we say Dukes have so much power. Can the ruler still doubt the nobility of anyone not of royal rank? Because if that still exists then the duke is not very safe anyway?

Short answer: no, he can't anymore. Judges can still ban all non-royals, though.

7518
Let's face it, "realm as team" is ingrained in the deepest structures of the game. And it is also ingrained in the habits of the players. I'm not an "Ohioan", I'm an "American". And other players are Canadians, Germans, Australians, etc.

I'm not Canadian, I'm Québécois!  8)

7519
Truth is, as one of the people who started off in Fontan, for my first 1.5 years doing not much else beyond setting my unit and going into battles, it's not fun. The letters were either long, or pointless, but all of them were stupid. At a certain point I just filtered types to orders because I knew I wasn't missing out on anything else. I will make a gamble in the belief that what people like seeing is their unit, as part of a bigger group, crush other people's groups, in actual tangible ways.

Same here. Lot of adrenaline over these battles, and knowing if we'd succeed or not, how many men I'd lose, what would the next orders be and so forth. Every little battle was an event worthy to mark on the calendar.

7520
BM General Discussion / Re: Government system misleading?
« on: June 21, 2011, 12:32:28 AM »
Customizations of elections options left many other things rather pointless, while the only IC "benefit" is that rulers can now praise themselves for being "democratic"  by switching more and more positions to elected ones.

That is mostly counterproductive. It is anyhow hard to remind people to separate RL understanding of being democratic from medieval background, and more options to being "democratic" makes things only worse.

I cannot easily understand how that customization was accepted at all.

Or I can, seeing how swiftly gender sign (which really has little to do with medieval things) came on top of messages  :(

Name aside, the different government systems do work differently. Democracies have more peaceful dissent (protest instead of riot), but harsher police work is more difficult, while kings help with morale and control simply by being present in a region, for example. The rules from who can appoint himself to what also varies greatly according to the government system, and as such you can never have a ruler in a democracy, no matter how tyrannic he is, appoint himself as a duke.

That being said, I do think that the government details are way too *easy* to switch, and have always said so. That might just be me being too old school, though. I otherwise like customization.

7521
Well the issue seems to be, partially, that new players are not involved enough or that the prospects for becoming "someone" are too small in large realms. When you have multiple small realms, there are simply way more positions to hand out... for starters. Next to that, it just sounds like fun to me. I mean, no huge battles and such, but rather smaller clashes. I think it would intensify the "feel of play" for many people, because they can relate more to a smaller realm.

Big monolithic realms tend to have lower social mobility and such new characters have a hard time going up the ladder of power, but I believe divided and conflicted realms tend to scare most new players and don't integrate them as well. Theoretically, I would think it should be the opposite, but I guess that's just because of my style of play. Instead of being excited about all the strife going on, they seem to just be too confused and intimidated, with a general feeling that the realm is basically too incompetent to work together for a common goal. Most of the new players from which I had feedback that started with some characters in divided realms seem to react like this. They don't feel like they are part of a smaller team, they simple feel there isn't any team at all.

Personally, though, I tend to prefer smaller realms. I've grown a liking to Enweil, in part because of the power it allows me to wield, but overall I feel small realms are best. But nationalism is something you just can't defeat by saying it's bad, because every ruler and council member has every reason in the world to promote it. It is usually the easiest way to get anything done. And really, it's just a pejorative word for team spirit. If you want to end nationalism, it means you want to end team play being on the realm level. At which point you are basically turning the duchies into realms. How far down should we kill nationalism?

I think you've been accostomed to the bm-standard of what a small realm is. When I'm saying small realm, I mean 1-5 regions or so.
If it has 7 like Medina and D´Hara or 10 like Libero Empire, it is not small, more like medium.
13+ is large. 20+ is huge empires. 25+ is insane.

You are correct that Asylon, Barca and Aurvandil are small realms (in my opinion) but I am mostly speaking about EC, FEI and Atamara now since Dwilight and Beluaterra has special conditions (all the monsters/undead and still colonizing).

I agree, I don't consider D'Hara to be a "small realm", especially considering that 3 of its 7 regions are decently-sized cities. That being said, I like medium realms as well, they tend to hold most of the small realms' characteristics, but on a larger scale.

Can indeed, but since the Dukes have been put their by showing their loyalty to the ruler, I think most just stick with that character trait.

When the western duchies of Enweil got neglected by the central government time after time after the invasion, it got organized. Despite being tiny border cities with big control problems, constant spawns, and a whooping 3 regions in their 2 duchies, they pulled all of their nobles out of the main army and created the Western Defenders army, which also got knights from the duchy of Fengen belonging to its western regions. Now, the army is moving in an organized matter, the constant rogue spawns are dealt with almost always immediately, Iato has fully recovered from its long rogue occupations and regions are being added to the west to allow its duchies to grow. Since the Army of Fengen was still big enough to deal with all the rogues of the east and north, the Western Defenders just don't bother with these anymore, sticking purely to their area.

Most stick with blind following, but to a certain extent. I've seen others organize whenever they see their duchies in trouble, as being duke grants considerable power and wealth (not to mention being a permanent position as long as the city doesn't revolt) and nobody wants to lose this. Not so much motivation for most lords, but there is considerable incentives for dukes to say "shove it" to the rest of the realm if they feel neglected.

As such, from my experiences, dukes of stable cities tend to be very loyal to the ruler as such obedience guarantees that their reign is not threatened. However, if their risk of losing their duchy is greater from staying loyal than from standing up, then we see a lot more dukes actually standing up for themselves. Isolated, neglected, starving and/or revolting cities were the source of a great number of the game's secessions, I believe. Dukes often prefer a secession than having their cities turn rogue (and then risking not getting it back).

7522
Dwilight / Re: What is and what should be SMA?
« on: June 19, 2011, 08:23:19 PM »
Actually, as much as it is kinda contrived, I like what Asylon is doing. Between Terran's guild-obsession and Asylon's religious weirdness, Mesoccidens could really start to be a fun place eventually, kind of like Maroccidens is now.

And D'Hara's food obsession?

7523
No, it would mean that duchies would still wave the flag of a certain realm, but could engage in interducal wars and diplomacy. I.e. the centralized power is heavily reduced and will be replaced by several dukes with more power, that can (but therefore not should) fight amongst one another over regions or whatnot. It would inject a massive amount of fun into huge empires, I believe. I mean, imagine you would actually be fighting for your /duke/ instead of for your realm. Much more accurate, too. Medieval nobility didn't fight for their kingdom. They fought for their liege. That bond is not enough stressed in Battlemaster.

Declare a secession and then have similar-looking flags? Agree to a supra-national government system? Wish granted?

7524
Beluaterra / Re: next invasion
« on: June 19, 2011, 07:33:00 PM »
Considering the war islands were, in the eyes of many at the time, the antithesis of roleplaying, I am not sure why that would surprise you.

I don't really see how they were the antithesis of roleplaying. I played in Taselak, on the SEI, and I honestly saw a lot more roleplaying there than most other places.

I'm not surprised, just disappointed that such a good opportunity was wasted.

7525
Lies!  ;)

But the penalties are hard enough, in my opinion. Hence forth players should be encouraged to create smaller realms, for roleplay reasons. Which at some point I am going to do with Ibladesh, but I need to resolve this rather difficult war first. Our enemies aren't friendly... maybe because I told them I would wipe them out on East Continent. 8)

I've been a big fan of ducal independence for several years now, and the devs always tell me that "it's a plan for the future". But I'm tired of waiting. Too bad. Ducal independence would tear empires to shreds in no time.

Ducal independence? Isn't that, you know, a secession?

7526
Feature Requests / Re: Rebellions, real upheavals
« on: June 19, 2011, 07:22:46 PM »
Royal status seems to remain and it probably should.  After all, if you throw out the bums and have a new ruler but don't have a problem with the old-old retired ruler they still command great respect.

You could just give a 60 day window for kicking out Royals after a rebellion, but really, you could drop metric tons of fines on them.  It should be amazingly hard to remove a duke who was one a king who didn't declare during the rebellion.

Hmmm... Royal dukes... you can now kick them out and force a secession, right? That's basically the same as banning them.

7527
Development / Re: Retention Revisited
« on: June 19, 2011, 07:21:34 PM »
So I got bored recently, and I kind of have a thing for spreadsheets. So I made one, charting out registration and activity on each continent based on the game-generated graphs. I made one chart for registration, one for the 3-day activity, and one for the day-to-day activity. I was particularly curious because the game-wide chart shows a strange divergence whereby registrations have been increasing lately, while 3-day activity has been declining.

Too long, didn't (yet) read it all. However, I did see and have a personal interpretation of the player count stats. I believe, from vague memory, that player count always goes up at the start of summer, which I assume to be linked to students finally having some time off after their exams and looking for new games to occupy their time. However, they don't all stay, and it's also a good time for many older players to go on vacation. This, I believe, would explain why registered accounts grow, while activity trends aren't the least affected.

Overall, this early-summer player count boost has no significant impact on player count trends. Seems like an equal number of people leave as the extra that come for the season.

7528
Dwilight / Re: Barca
« on: June 19, 2011, 07:17:23 PM »
The ROC decided to massively elect a party with total disdain for democracy and transparency, and on the provincial level it's an even bigger circus right now. Canadian politics are mind-numbing, to say the very least.

Can't wait to see our tax money spent on the visit of the royal family...  >:(

7529
Dwilight / Re: The Crusade against SA
« on: June 19, 2011, 07:14:13 PM »
We've only gained 7-8 Averoth nobles so far. And yeah, starvation could strike but we might be able to buy food.. maybe.

What happened to Zereth, are these rogues annoying or what?  ::)

The low rate at which these northerners switch to Caerwyn makes me really suspicious as to how authentic these accounts are...

7530
Beluaterra / Re: next invasion
« on: June 19, 2011, 07:12:09 PM »
Or a powerful sorcerer.  Though magic has faded from the BM world ICly, there are still old wizards still running about.  Perhaps there are young ones fiddling with magic and...  Oops.  Sank the islands beneath the seas. >.>

This twist has potential. Sadly, no effort to RP the closing was made in any way.

Pages: 1 ... 500 501 [502] 503 504 ... 532