Messages

5446

Dwilight / Re: Is Dwilight really SMA?

« on: June 24, 2011, 03:50:49 PM »

You're not going to get people to accept something that they may have no concept of in this age. Yes, religion still plays a major role in our lives. But in our modern age a lot of separation has occurred that makes us take mundane matters often more seriously than spiritual ones.

I know.  That's why I simply said that that was what the problem was, rather than saying we need to force them to change.

It's definitely a problem, and I don't know what the best solution is.  It's possible that, in the long term, the best solution is to switch the SMA designator to a different, smaller, island, make sure that anyone going there fully understands the implications of it, and be ruthless in enforcing it.

5447

Dwilight / Re: Is Dwilight really SMA?

« on: June 24, 2011, 03:06:09 PM »

Where are you pulling this "majority of players don't take it seriously"? Players take any powerbase seriously and will take religion seriously when it threatens to rid them of their power (e.g. The gigantic SA bloc.) The current problem the original poster has mentioned is that some people wish to stop organized religion because of religion will become a new player in the power structure of realms. This is only a problem in areas where religion has not already penetrated.

This is a problem because medieval times were pretty much characterised by religion being a major player in politics.

There's a huge, enormous difference between "taking religion seriously" as a political power, and actually taking religion seriously.

No matter how cynical and power-hungry the medieval nobles and religious powermongers were, they really believed in God.  All of them.  Atheism or even agnosticism was just not even a concept in the minds of the time.

The problem with religion in BM isn't that people don't take it seriously as a political institution.  If your religion needs help doing politics, that's your problem.  The problem with religion in BM is that a great many people don't have any notion of just how serious religion was as religion in the milieu we are trying to represent.  Many of them barely even pay lip service to the Gods they purport to worship.  Or not even that.

That is the problem with religion in BM.  It's nothing to do with politics.

5448

Dwilight / Re: Is Dwilight really SMA?

« on: June 23, 2011, 07:30:32 PM »

(off topic: obama's re election chances are slim? Pray tell who has a real chance beating him? Mitt,pawlenty, bachmann? The GOP candidates are a who's who of unelectable characters. Truthfully if I had to pick a republican I'd say Ron Paul. And if I had to pick who had the best chance, scarily enough I would say bachmann... )

Can we try and keep the OT US Politics stuff to a minimum, please? If you want to discuss it, there's a perfectly good General Talk board for that.

5449

Development / Re: Taking new regions becoming historically harder

« on: June 23, 2011, 04:26:52 PM »

Even if that duchy is not neighboring? That seems contrary to current practice. I would have gone for closest city.

Not sure.  Bedwyr, Indirik and I were actually having a discussion about this last night; in general, I'm in favour of keeping duchies contiguous, but if this made a significant difference in the ability of a realm to take a region and not see it go straight rogue again, then I would be more than willing to consider it.

5450

Helpline / Re: Archer targeting weirdness

« on: June 23, 2011, 04:08:36 PM »

Yes, that might well have to do with the order in which things happen in the combat script.

Not sure there's a lot to be done about it short of a wholesale overhaul of the script.  Which is probably needed, but not going to happen soon.

5451

Development / Re: Taking new regions becoming historically harder

« on: June 23, 2011, 04:07:30 PM »

OK, I've skimmed the thread, and aside from the estate overhaul (which I will try to work with Foundation and the rest of the devs on getting started over the next few weeks), here are a couple of additional suggestions for relatively simple things that could help:

• Allow regions without Lords to have their base caravan offer settings changed by the Banker.  Or possibly by the Duke if they're in a Duchy; either could work.
• When a new region is taken, the army that the game calculates as having done "the most work" toward the TO (something like "has the most troops there for the most time") adds that region to the Duchy of its base region.
• Bedwyr suggested military presence preventing riots disrupting courts: this is a good idea.
• Only relevant for taking rogue regions, but if a region has been rogue for some time, it should be more willing to accept being taken over by any realm (Note: This should actually be happening already, to some degree, due to some bugs in sympathy calculation that were fixed a month or three ago. Take a look, you might be surprised.)
• Subsistence is probably something I should revisit.  It's supposed to maintain regions without food, and with very low population, but without other disruptions, in a steady state.  It may need some sort of "buffer zone," whereby if the population drops below (say) 100 in region X, it goes into subsistence mode, but it won't come out of it until it goes back above 200.  ...Also, it should be noted that subsistence won't be that helpful on Dwilight, with the constant monster attacks.

Finally, it's not something that's simple, but claims need a rework, and having a more sensible claims system might make it easier to get someone appointed that the Ruler/Duke actually wants as Lord faster.

5452

Feature Requests / Re: Political Parties

« on: June 23, 2011, 03:51:55 PM »

No.

Totally out of place in the milieu, easily achieved through other means, and just generally not a good use of valuable coding time.

5453

BM General Discussion / Re: Government system misleading?

« on: June 23, 2011, 03:47:52 PM »

We've had some plans for some time to eliminate the named systems altogether, and add more customization options. 

But, well, you know how it is with plans that have been sitting there for some time...

5454

BM General Discussion / Re: Too much peace too much for Dwilight

« on: June 17, 2011, 02:15:25 PM »

Fissoa wouldn't mind better relations with PeL

Then I hope you're willing to give up your claims on Maf and Irvington...

5455

Dwilight / Re: Barca

« on: June 16, 2011, 07:57:25 PM »

Which honestly says more on the bunch of bullies than on them. Anyone with the least bit of pride would not have participated in this gang bang...

So they should just have ignored all the awful things that were said about them? By this piddly little upstart realm?

Any realm that says such things to/about such a massive behemoth should expect to get squashed.  (Honestly, I'm frequently surprised Riombara didn't get squashed long ago for the things I said about Enweil—and they weren't a tenth as bad as what Thulsoma was saying )

And, as Indirik said, they were able to abuse family gold and new-character troops to bring their army size up to a staggering amount for such a small realm, and build up their walls to (I think) level 7.  This made it absolutely necessary to bring a truly massive army against them.

And what would you have had Tom do? Just delete all their troops?  You know he doesn't operate that way.  The loopholes were closed, and people were advised to handle it IC.  Which they were already doing.

5456

BM General Discussion / Re: Too much peace too much for Dwilight

« on: June 16, 2011, 04:25:05 AM »

Why would we go to war with realms that sell us food? That's obviously bad for business.

We do fight Monsters occasionally, but now I'm seeing lulls where Monsters do not spawn anywhere near us for weeks. Did the rogue spawning code get a tweak lately?

Nope, no tweaks.

You're in D'Hara?  Your eastern border is a set of single regions in a corridor, which means that monsters are less likely to get in that way.  Your western border is in the southwest, which is becoming much less monster-ified due to the expansion of civilization in that area.

If Aurvandil falls, expect to see more again.

5457

Development / Re: Infiltrators

« on: June 15, 2011, 11:46:34 PM »

Sounds like you guys want another class. One that has less risk, less training time, and less damage output to compensate.

Basically you want "infiltrators for dummies".

Well, really, what is desired is a way to simply increase the range of risk, training time, and damage output on the lower end.

5458

Feature Requests / Re: New Unit Type: Pikemen

« on: June 15, 2011, 07:48:18 PM »

I've been die hard adapting to changes in the past 8 years. I saw the New World created because the other islands were getting too crowded. I don't mind seeing it close again. 

Was that BT or AT?

5459

Helpline / Re: 'Dying' status

« on: June 15, 2011, 05:41:04 PM »

The problem is that another realm religion has declared her faith to be evil.

Fixed that for you.

If you're getting beaten half to death every time you preach, then you're fighting against a superior foe.  You clearly need to get more priests in there, both in your region and the surrounding regions.

Don't have enough priests? Then your religion is probably doomed to be eclipsed by this stronger one.

5460

Feature Requests / Re: New Unit Type: Pikemen

« on: June 15, 2011, 01:50:58 PM »

Then I pity them, for they do not truly live and breathe BM. Never fear though, the true faithful will always remain, and once the trials for mind control technology are complete we will soon have the means to restock the player base.

Hey! Shh!

You're not supposed to tell them about that!