"but otherwise it is going to come to its knees the second a decent group of realms decide to fight us."
So if it's done during a war, it's bad, but if it's done in preparation for an eventual war, then it's all legit? The act and intent is the same, the only thing that differs is timing.
The issue of distance between one border and the other has also been mentioned as a reason for splitting up. This is blatantly military in reasoning, it's just other words for saying that having the capacity to recruit closer to these borders would help defense should a war happen.
Well, that *is* the nature of most of the arguments that have been given. Nobody mentioned "distance from the capital" as a reason. People *did* mention how undefendable such a large mass was and how travel times from one side to another were too long. That the war has yet to be declared is of little importance in my eyes if the action is done as a preemptive measure for an eventual war.
Imo, this kind of thing should either be allowed, or we should remove the rule altogether. It's pretty darn impossible to prove that a secession was strategic. People will *always* be able to make up whatever kind of RP or historic motivation to justify what is, at the core, a strategic action.
I'm hearing a lot of talks of people wanting to break up large realms in order to form big strong alliances. After all, it's been proven that this helps reduce control issues, increases tax tolerance, and decreases tax tolerance of foreigners. If it starts becoming a fad, I would hate to see the people who are better at covering their intent or who keep any incrementing discussions on IRC or MSN be able to do their thing while other players of good intent be punished for not properly motivating what is essentially the same thing.
Yes pretty much it is bad if you are at war, and not much of an issue otherwise. Arcaea had to continually put off their plans to split up, which are mostly based on Jenred wanting to make his Queen a recognised Queen throughout the island because we were at war, and the new realm would have a capital close to the CURRENT front line. I am sure the rule could also be applied if a realm was to split off and declare war on a realm now noticeably closer to the new capital if it all occurred within a small time frame, so no, it can't be done in preparation for a war, though proving that would be much harder. In this case though they are not preparing for a particular war, they so far as we know are not going to declare war on some realm and are just waiting for the split to be finalised for it to happen.
Like many rules yes you can get around it by hiding your intent, that is life, no rule based system works in 100% of cases. Tom has created the rule, we generally know the intent behind it, it is largely up to us as a player based to play fair and adhere to it.
As an aside I guess if the Duchy that splits off is further away from the battle front then the current capital, that would be okay too
