Dear FEI

[Indirik]

FWIW: There's a TL;DR at the end...

I literally quoted something you said, and said it was wrong. Now you're saying that the thing you said is not what you're thinking?

Yes, you literally quoted one small part of one post, and claimed that it summed up my entire position. You lasered into that small piece of the issue with surgical precision, stated that that tiny piece was wrong, and therefore my entire position was invalid.

Let's assume we just let Sorraine and Coralynth roflstomp Ohnar West with nary a peep.

To be clear, lets set up the whole situation here:
Ohnar West and Coralynth both had, I think, about 7 nobles when the ball dropped. (OW had *5* when we started planning this. 5 nobles (three players, I think) for a 6 or 7 region realm. They gained some exiles from Kindara and/or Cathay, and they're up to 10 now. Coralynth had 10, double that of OW at the start. That shifted that to about 8 each when it finally started. Both realms are so small that even a single character moving in or out is important.) A war of 8 nobles against 8 nobles, when both realms already have basically as much land (if not more) than they can control. And both realms have at least one priest. I can't imagine a more boring war that was ever fought in the history of the game. They would both be totally ineffective against each other, and unable to reach any kind of decisive resolution. A war of OW against Coralynth is non-event. OW takes Nbasah and the war ends there. Neither one could effectively cross the ocean.


Every other realm on the island is *way* bigger than OW. Sorraine against OW? Sorraine wins. An inevitable lingering death for OW as they are squeezed and starved out. The final assault against Sasrhas may be difficult, and may take a couple tries before OW runs out of money, walls, and recruits.


IF OW gets into a war with *anyone* other than Coralynth, they get wiped out. Not to mention that the only people they *can* fight are Sorraine or Coralynth. So unless we institute some kind of sterile, institutionalized, no-risk "realm duel" system, they *will* get wiped out as soon as they get into a fight.

Then what?

We move on to something else. How about a meaningful war that can actually involve realms that can, you know, actually fight a real war against each other.


The major problem with picking out wars on FEI is the huge disparity in realm sizes and noble counts. Almost any war that anyone can get happen is a blowout. FEI has a huge problem with this. The worst by far. The only "fair" war that can really happen is Sorraine v. Cathay. Literally every other war is a blowout. You want to try a Cathay v. Zonasa right now? (Now, not next year when Zonasa finally finishes rebuilding.) How about Arcaea v. Zonasa? You think Zonasa could survive either of those short of some Imperial decree that makes it illegal to wipe out another realm? (And that gets us into some lame, ritualized "realm duel" scenario.)


So how do you get around that? You equalize some of the realm sizes. Sorraine picks up a couple rurals, but nothing too serious, and gets a tiny bit closer to Arcaea's size. Coralynth gets a city foothold on the mainland, preventing them from being a completely marginalized and ineffectual island-only realm. Sets up a possible Sorraine/Coralynth v. Arcaea thing. Maybe even the next attempted Sartanian takeover of the island, given the anti-Sartanian movement in Arcaea, and the apparently now-active anti-Sartanian CoH.

People aren't going to just sit around and do nothing forever

Wanna bet? They have no choice, because you just killed war on the FEI. You pulled the exact same gang-banger stunt that we've been railing against all over the game for years. Someone went to start a war, and every realm not already in that war, jumped them! And what makes it even worse, is that two of them said "How dare Realm A attack Realm B! You used dishonorable tactics! We're going to register our displeasure with Realm A by attacking Realm C!"


How long do you think it's going to be before someone else gets up the nerve to try a war again? Probably a long time. And when they do, it's going to be a sanitized, risk-free, "friendly" war, completely devoid of meaning. Hell, this war was halfway there, with declarations like "It's OK, we're not going to take any land" and "of course you can loot my land, no hard feelings, I'll understand completely". The only people who want to change the status quo are Sorraine and Coralynth, who got jumped by everyone for wanting to do so. Arcaea and Zonasa just want things to go back to the status quo. Cathay is just pulling the standard opportunistic land grab, declaring that Sorraine is evil for doing just that. (Which isn't too bad, actually. We need more opportunistic land grabs.) Arcaea and Zonasa are spending too much time complaining about Sorraine's blatantly greedy land grab to object to Cathay's blatantly greedy land grab. (Or maybe they are complaining and I just haven't seen that yet. But I doubt it.)

It is intended that most realms should be involved in one war or another most of the time, and the Far East just doesn't have that many different matchups available to it right now.

No kidding. It has exactly one possible "fair" war right now. Instead we ended up with what has become the typical BattleMaster-style dogpile-on-the-instigator war. Sorraine will knuckle under or get wiped out, while trying to get the Imperial Blessing to limit the war to Sorraine v. Cathay. (Which will be a boring war, as both realms stall at matched, fortified cities and turn Lenamaziel into a ritualized battleground. Which leaves Zonasa, Arcaea, Coralynth, and OW sitting around twiddling their thumbs, uninvolved in any war. Coralynth will shrivel to nothing in their insignificance and impotence. OW will go back to being the cesspool of the FEI, collecting the traitors and refuse of all the lost wars on FEI. Arcaea will sit smugly in their own land, congratulating themselves on being top dog, and waiting for the next upstart they can smack down. Zonasa will ... make a killing selling frozen cocktails to the people observing the only war that cold possibly happen on FEI without being called a total blowout. Or whatever it is that Zonasa does while also shriveling up into irrelevance.


But yeah, more to your point, everyone should be involved in one war *or another*. Everyone doesn't always have to be involved in the same war, though. How about some people find themselves that "or another" war and get involved in *that* one instead?


Let's face it: In order to start a war, someone has to do something bad. Something that Dudley Do-Right would charge off and try to fix. But the problem is that too many people in BattleMaster are trying to be Dudley. As soon as someone does something that may be mildly offensive, all those Dudley clones instantly condemn them, and charge off to right the world's wrongs, and shut it the !@#$ down before it can gain any traction. Who cares if they have a multitude of perfectly valid, historical, and RP reasons to have made that first attack to begin with.


If everyone keeps playing Dudley Do-Right, then no one will ever be able to get any traction to get something going.

Thus, to be perfectly honest, this seems to me like one of the best, most interesting wars we could reasonably have expected coming off the last war.

Sure, if you define "most interesting" as "no risk at all for Arcaea, Zonasa, and Cathay" and "complete blowout of Sorraine and Coralynth".

People keep saying how Sorraine and Coralynth are, despite their size, really terrible at warfare, so it's possible this will be just as much of a roflstomp as it looked like you two vs OW would have been...but if that's the case, then I'm not sure there's really much we could have done for you anyway.

We all like to have a good chuckle at the incongruity of the worshipers of the god of war being really bad at war. It's a BattleMsgter trope by now. But, really, have you seen the size of the armies that Arcaea tosses around? Have you seen the size of the armies that everyone *else* has to make do with? Arcaea tossed half their nobles into Sorraine, which comprised an army larger than all of Sorraine put together could muster. It doesn't matter *how* good you are at war, when *one* of the four realms you are at war with sends in an army that is larger than your entire mobile force. And when that realm happens to be your intimate neighbor, you're screwed. Oh, and don't forget to add in your other neighbor who tosses in an army that is equivalent to your own, too.


Yes, Sorraine has land. It's also got some !@#$ty geography, poorly positioned to either attack Arcaea or defend itself. It doesn't have lots of nobles. It also has a priest and a couple courtiers. So, maybe 13 actual combatants. (One of those just arrived today.) You think 13 people can possibly stand off against Arcaea? Even at 1,000 CS each for all 13 of those, it'd barely match the single army Arcaea tossed at it, which comprises less than *half* of Arcaea. Assuming perfect movement from every noble in Sorraine (as if you could get that in *any* realm), facing off against the most active people in Arcaea, Sorraine still gets trounced simply because a *part* of Arcaea has more than Sorraine could ever muster.


And that's your idea of the "best, most interesting war" that FEI can produce? That right there is the ultimate indictment of how much FEI sucks.



==TL;DR==
Go find your own damn war.

[GundamMerc]

I read the entirety of your post, but didn't want to quote it since it would take up so much room.

I see you've finally converted to the dark side, young apprentice. See now how frustrating it is from my end? This is the same frustration I feel for Dwilight. This is why I railed against the death of Barca. The stillborn death of change, new politics, and new powers.

[Antonine]

Thing is, on Dwilight at least it was a genuine attempt to make things better. It might not have worked necessarily but at least it had good intentions and no one knew what the outcome would be.

The same can be said the FEI empire concept.

The problem is that right now everybody knows that dogpile wars suck for the game as a whole but people are doing it anyway.

I'm pretty much on the verge of telling Sorraine and Coralynth IC that they should surrender since there's no way they can win (and they'll probably listen) and then we'll be back to twiddling our thumbs in bored silence. But I'd rather have that than see FEI become Atamara.

[Indirik]

I already proposed that to Sorraine yesterday. Only got one comment, and that guy wasn't too happy about it. Thing is, it only got *one* comment. To me, that's even more important than the fact that the guy didn't like it.

[Indirik]

Topic split:  http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,6393.0.html

[Kainaq]

Indirik i do hope your finding FEI a bit more interesting over the last two weeks :D

however i do believe that there is a better then average chance that FEI could start to transform into Atamara 2.0 over the next couple of months....

[Anaris]

That depends very strongly on how the various realms react to the events of the past few days.

[dustole]

I think the dynamics are changing.  Arcaea still has the disgruntled Sartanians within their realm to deal with.

[Anaris]

I think the dynamics are changing.  Arcaea still has the disgruntled Sartanians within their realm to deal with.

Indeed. One of the worse-case scenarios, from my perspective, would be for that faction to actually gain the upper hand within Arcaea and start using it to spread Sartanism.

[Sacha]

When I hear people talking of Sartanists as a threat, I always picture these guys:



"No, Arcaeans, these men are Sartanians. there's nothing to be afraid of."