How to help Dwilight.

[Indirik]

Sea travel: There are many sea zones that take 13-14 hours to sail across and you can't auto set your next travel like on land. I would suggest increasing the travel speed so that most can be sailed across in 12 hours or less. Adding the ability to set your next destination would also be appreciated.

Yeah, the sea travel mechanics are kind of odd. Basically, a sea region takes one turn to cross, or two. "13 hours" is misleading. 12 hours takes one turn, 13 hours takes two.

[Constantine]

You also can not change direction or turn back while sailing between sea zones which can only be an oversight.

[Chenier]

I think some further thoughts need to be put in how to improve Dwilight.

As it has already been said a few times by a few people, distance is a major issue. It's hard enough to fight one's neighbor, let alone a realm that isn't next door. While, historically, I tended to oppose such measures, the context has dramatically changed since. Back in the days, this was mostly the demand of the northern block who, having eliminated all dissidents, found themselves surrounded by seas of fellow theocracies, and thus sought to travel impossible distances to continue on this model. This no longer applies, as the removal of the West has made a pretty linear continent, where all realms basically have just two neighbors at most, and where deserts, mountains, and seas separate them all. If this war was to end, even a powerful realm as Luria would have limited options should it wish a new war. Reducing the habitable continent size might have increased density (I don't think it has), or reduced its decline (perhaps), but it also means that each realm has a lot fewer realms to interact with. In the old days, I had a dozen of rulers I could write to, seeing how short the list is now was quite a shocker upon my election.

Distance which can be broken down into different factors.

• Travel times: Pretty straightforward, travel times between regions could possibly be universally reduced, say by 20% or any other number. This would mostly help reduce the impact of the continent's major geographic barriers (deserts and mountains), as one still can't move more than 1 region per turn, no matter how small the travel time.
• Troop morale & wear: Distance from realm can incur serious morale loss, stacked on top of high equipment wear. Reducing wear from travel and morale penalties can help realms be effective afar.
• Sea zones: the travel system is unintuitive. The sea zone limits are as well. Aside from the tweaks proposed of allowing one to turn back and the like, one could make it so that all sea zones take exactly 1 turn to travel, and the borders could be re-drawn to minimize zigzag paths the current ones favor. I had already proposed better sea zone limits some time back, I could dig these back up.
• Seasons: the travel penalties could be revisited. I don't think BM really has a Scandinavian climate, so the travel modifies don't need to act as if the troops must cross through two meters of snow.

Then there are other things that can also affect fun, for example, the prospect of recolonizing the West. By this, I don't mean having every western region part of a realm as it was before the invasion... while reducing the habitable continent size might not have increased density much, increasing it would have a certain effect. However, maintaining the possibility of limited establishments would open many opportunities. I haven't seen the size of the western hordes in quite a while, so it's hard to comment, but PvE has always been a significant part of Dwilight, and most realms had or still define themselves by their achievements over the overwhelming hordes of the days, of having beat the odds to settle something stable. Many of these failed, but it is undeniable that overall, the prospect of colonizing impossible lands seduced a great number of players, and made Dwilight unique. I think we need to bring this back.

• Monster spawn tweaks: Make it so that (massive) rogue spawns don't occur in held land. There will always be plenty of rogue regions for them to spawn in, I don't think it necessary for them to spawn in realm-held lands as well.
• Monster size tweaks: Huge hordes that no coalition of realms could ever defeat are not much fun. I don't know what the situation is right now, but more numerous smaller hordes than fewer larger hordes offer more possibilities of a struggle against them, instead of an instant total wipe out.
• Monster behavior tweaks: huge static hordes that can't be displaced aren't much fun. In the west at least, rogue units should frequently travel, perhaps every single turn, and not simply squat regions. Monsters blocking the path to one's destination? Wait and pray they don't come your way. Cleared some land? Don't assume the neighboring hordes will stay away. Additionally, rogues shouldn't just be waiting on the shore for the ships, as an organized army would. Disembarking onto a coastal region from the sea that's held by rogues shouldn't incur the same penalties as doing so in an enemy region would.

Again, this isn't to spread the current player base over twice the land once more, but to return a limited form of PvE back to Dwilight. Make it possible for the realms to reclaim the coastal cities with reasonable effort. Make it possible for the realms to reclaim a few adjacent non-fortifiable regions with great levels of effort, often failing and often having to restart. Lurians might find the current war fun, but no one else does. PvE, however, has kept Dwilight vibrant for most of its history.

[Sacha]

I'm not sure where you got the impression that Luria was ever poor, or producing a major food deficit. As someone who's played in PeL and LN in the first five years of Dwilight, there was plenty of gold from the get-go, and starvation was mostly the result of Lurian lords screwing each other over. Poryatown and Giask starving as Askileon sat on 5000 spare bushels, that sort of thing.

[Chenier]

I'm not sure where you got the impression that Luria was ever poor, or producing a major food deficit. As someone who's played in PeL and LN in the first five years of Dwilight, there was plenty of gold from the get-go, and starvation was mostly the result of Lurian lords screwing each other over. Poryatown and Giask starving as Askileon sat on 5000 spare bushels, that sort of thing.

Where did I say that?

Feels like Luria got filthy rich after the region value update, but I never claimed it was poor before. Double so because it feels like the rest of the continent got much poorer, or at least I know I haven't seen D'Hara sitting on gold in any way as it once did. As for food, that always seemed to be thanks to Giask being repeatedly screwed over and intentionally starved.

[Chenier]

I'd also merge Valkyrja and Yggdramir into a single region, and allow the rouges to cross those bridges.

I would'nt favor implementing any of these changes before the current war came to some sort of settlement, though.

[Chenier]

Also, regarding the rebalance, I think it's a good part due to the fact that it favored coastal regions a lot, and Luria is basically all coastal, and has a buttload of regions. D'Hara, on the other hand, was always a concentrated economy, with but a few regions surrounded by sea, and the loss of just the traditional Paisly duchy (without the land absorbed from Terran) amputated it from a third of its income, with no possible way to compensate in any other direction. So while all D'Haran regions got richer, there were too few of them to make much of a difference.

[Fleugs]

Isn't war the thriving factor for a continent, regardless of that being a PvE or PvP war? If the "stalemate" or distance is boring, you can always create an enemy close at home. There's still so many "empty" lands that could split off and form new realms to blow life into, say, the entire Northern part of inhabited Dwilight atm. In the end whatever greatness you achieve in Battlemaster is not worth keeping it, as this is a game, and creating an environment of war which the game is centered around is prefferable over wishing to stabilize and monopolize land with your realm.

[Chenier]

Isn't war the thriving factor for a continent, regardless of that being a PvE or PvP war? If the "stalemate" or distance is boring, you can always create an enemy close at home. There's still so many "empty" lands that could split off and form new realms to blow life into, say, the entire Northern part of inhabited Dwilight atm. In the end whatever greatness you achieve in Battlemaster is not worth keeping it, as this is a game, and creating an environment of war which the game is centered around is prefferable over wishing to stabilize and monopolize land with your realm.

All realms of the League have rogues at their doors.

While this is a typical response from a Lurian player, no, splitting off is not a solution. Luria Nova has DOUBLE the number of players of the second-most populous. The others just don't have enough nobles to split into multiple viable realms.

Also, weakening themselves, or turning themselves against each other, would leave them all completely merciless to Luria's will. I'm sure you would find that fun, but players usually don't enjoy that all of their realms are so weak that a foreign superpower can do whatever the heck it wants.

[GundamMerc]

All realms of the League have rogues at their doors.

While this is a typical response from a Lurian player, no, splitting off is not a solution. Luria Nova has DOUBLE the number of players of the second-most populous. The others just don't have enough nobles to split into multiple viable realms.

Also, weakening themselves, or turning themselves against each other, would leave them all completely merciless to Luria's will. I'm sure you would find that fun, but players usually don't enjoy that all of their realms are so weak that a foreign superpower can do whatever the heck it wants.

It is getting wearying hearing the typical naive responses from Lurian players, right?

[Fleugs]

Mock it all you want, you seek difficult solutions while the easiest ones are right in front of you. And for what it's worth, I'll speak as a real Lurian player now and say you this:

I don't care whatsoever if you guys cry about how boring this has become. It was your choice. You may try to deny it all you want, but someone from the League pressed a little button called "war!" and now we are where we are. It is not my duty to care about the players of the League or how they are enjoying themselves. It is my job to thank them for adding another thirty nobles to the ranks of Luria Nova, much against their will, and turning it into a powerhouse with the capabilities to singlehandedly change the dynamics of Dwilight.

If the players in control of the League foresake their duties towards their other players, that is an issue that should be resolved amongst yourselves. Name Luria a scapegoat all you want, this situation is not Luria's choosing. It was forced upon it, and it payed out handsomely with about 60 nobles now populating it. That's bigger than, say, Sandalak, a realm in which theoretically one third of the playerbase could play a character. It is due to the dedication of people such as Renodin and his merry band of roleplay fetishists, who keep creating wonderful and in-depth content for their characters, allowing you to have a good read if you want (or scroll further if you don't). It's about having opened our doors to new players, to new characters with their own traditions and history, and respecting them and incorporating them from the very first day. It's about conceptualizing yourself as a caring player, who desires every new character that joins, be they new players or old, to stick around for the ride. It's about building a team, about maintaining that spirit and that content creation which keeps your group of players going. Which keeps them coming back daily because they enjoy Luria. It's about not hogging all the power for you or your (ingame) trusties, but allowing other people with entirely different views to speak out and represent yet another portion of the playerbase. It's about merging that together, sometimes with great ease and sometimes with great difficulty, only to conclude that in the end we work as a team as long as someone is there to be called a collective enemy.

It disgusts me that in the past month or two there have been voices going out claiming Luria is driving Dwilight into the abyss by not conceding a thing. It furiates me, firstly, that this could even be an out-of-character discussion. It is a matter that directly involves the gameplay of Dwilight and should be done entirely in character.

But you know what is the worst part about blaming Luria for the misery? It is denying the endless dedication of so many players who have worked towards creating a good and nice environment to ensure that people stay interested. For that reason alone you should be ashamed to even imply that Luria has a root in the "decline" of Dwilight.

[Chenier]

Mock it all you want, you seek difficult solutions while the easiest ones are right in front of you. And for what it's worth, I'll speak as a real Lurian player now and say you this:

I don't care whatsoever if you guys cry about how boring this has become. It was your choice. You may try to deny it all you want, but someone from the League pressed a little button called "war!" and now we are where we are. It is not my duty to care about the players of the League or how they are enjoying themselves. It is my job to thank them for adding another thirty nobles to the ranks of Luria Nova, much against their will, and turning it into a powerhouse with the capabilities to singlehandedly change the dynamics of Dwilight.

If the players in control of the League foresake their duties towards their other players, that is an issue that should be resolved amongst yourselves. Name Luria a scapegoat all you want, this situation is not Luria's choosing. It was forced upon it, and it payed out handsomely with about 60 nobles now populating it. That's bigger than, say, Sandalak, a realm in which theoretically one third of the playerbase could play a character. It is due to the dedication of people such as Renodin and his merry band of roleplay fetishists, who keep creating wonderful and in-depth content for their characters, allowing you to have a good read if you want (or scroll further if you don't). It's about having opened our doors to new players, to new characters with their own traditions and history, and respecting them and incorporating them from the very first day. It's about conceptualizing yourself as a caring player, who desires every new character that joins, be they new players or old, to stick around for the ride. It's about building a team, about maintaining that spirit and that content creation which keeps your group of players going. Which keeps them coming back daily because they enjoy Luria. It's about not hogging all the power for you or your (ingame) trusties, but allowing other people with entirely different views to speak out and represent yet another portion of the playerbase. It's about merging that together, sometimes with great ease and sometimes with great difficulty, only to conclude that in the end we work as a team as long as someone is there to be called a collective enemy.

It disgusts me that in the past month or two there have been voices going out claiming Luria is driving Dwilight into the abyss by not conceding a thing. It furiates me, firstly, that this could even be an out-of-character discussion. It is a matter that directly involves the gameplay of Dwilight and should be done entirely in character.

But you know what is the worst part about blaming Luria for the misery? It is denying the endless dedication of so many players who have worked towards creating a good and nice environment to ensure that people stay interested. For that reason alone you should be ashamed to even imply that Luria has a root in the "decline" of Dwilight.

"Our choice". Right. We CHOSE for Barca to be annihilated. We CHOSE for D'Hara to lose a third of its economy. We CHOSE to have half as many realms to interact with. Right? We chose all of this.

I am not "blaming" Luria for anything. But allowing Luria to gain CE-like hegemony is NOT the solution either, and yet all of the "suggestions" from Lurian players tend to be in that direction. "Hey, allow us to become unchallengeable, that's fun!"

You will also note that none of the suggestions target Luria. Some of them would even benefit Luria. PvE defined Dwilight for most of its history, and the desire to fight them seems very, very widespread. We don't know the difficulty for this, yet, but the horde strengths have been modified a great number of times in the hopes of making things more fun.

So bring your persecution complex elsewhere. In my posts where I brought suggestions, I named Luria only twice, once to say they could benefit from the measures and the second time to point out they are the only ones who appear to be having fun. If you call that "blaming Luria for all of our problems", you have a problem. And if you want to completely disregard how geography, updated region stats and dev-decided monster invasion has benefited your realm and given it an insane advantage, and want to hog all of the success on just how great players you are, sure, go do so. Think that every other player on Dwilight sucks, and that if only they were as good as Lurian players, then everyone would be having fun. Because they just aren't trying hard enough, right? If they keep losing, it has nothing to do with the fact that they lost a good chunk of their economies and military infrastructure, right? And that a lot of the allied nobles just quit because of the hordes, they aren't worth anything either, because despite what they all said, they couldn't have been having fun.

Seriously, Fleugs. The players of Luria aren't being blamed for anything, except for their lack of perspective.

[Eldargard]

It sounds like a chief advantage Luria has is in the huge number of upper nobility (player characters) it possesses. Can anyone think of a way to lure some of these nobles away? The only think I can think of off the top of my head is to give the refuges within Luria what they want more quickly than Luria can.

I can imagine a good number of players could be lured if they were convinced that by joining the league they would be quickly allowed to establish their own realm in southern Morek (or northern, or western, or eastern). Sure, you technically lose some land but if this new country honors the agreement and fights on the Leagues side, the land is not really all that lost and you will have more players than before. Maybe not the best of ideas but the first I could think of. Additionally, these refugees will want their own land sooner or later. Eventually Luria may be forced to try and carve out a piece of land for them.

I would be curious to hear of other ideas that could get players to join the League...

[Chenier]

It sounds like a chief advantage Luria has is in the huge number of upper nobility (player characters) it possesses. Can anyone think of a way to lure some of these nobles away? The only think I can think of off the top of my head is to give the refuges within Luria what they want more quickly than Luria can.

I can imagine a good number of players could be lured if they were convinced that by joining the league they would be quickly allowed to establish their own realm in southern Morek (or northern, or western, or eastern). Sure, you technically lose some land but if this new country honors the agreement and fights on the Leagues side, the land is not really all that lost and you will have more players than before. Maybe not the best of ideas but the first I could think of. Additionally, these refugees will want their own land sooner or later. Eventually Luria may be forced to try and carve out a piece of land for them.

I would be curious to hear of other ideas that could get players to join the League...

1) Luria doesn't have an advantage because it has lots of nobles, it has lots of nobles because it has an advantage.

2) Again, another Lurian idea that would make Luria even more of a hegemony.

[Eldargard]

I was actually looking for an IC way of getting more players on the League side of the war. I have a hard time believing that Luria losing players while the league gains players would do anything but better the Leagues odds! I did not at all suggest that the league give the refugees in Luria in land with the condition of them becoming a subservient state to a non-existent Lurian hegemony. That would be plain stupid! Granted, it may not be the best idea but it is something that could be done by the players, IC and right now.