Why not reward those who go to war then? Boost production, morale, and control as your armies win more battles maybe?
Because that's the same problem applied in a reverse matter.
Giving bonuses to winners just makes losers lose more. Big realms bulling entire continents used to be a pretty big problem: "don't do anything, or we'll destroy you". Such mechanics, instead of preventing the small realms from waging efficient war, would have made it easier for the big realms to enforce their no-war policy. End result is the same: no war.
Superpowers are less of a thing now, though, but still. War is favored by a multiplicity of similarly-powered realms, and giving bonuses to victors tends to just make lopsided battles even more lopsided.
Not saying that the entire concept was completely unworkable, but it's hard to think of a perfect code that will be perfectly fair. If I remember correctly, one of the last nails in that mechanic's coffin was when it started applying to small realms that were already at war with a bunch of nations and under siege from the daimons, "too much peace" was hitting what might have been the most militaristic realm on the continent of the time. But the thing is, the more you code the mechanic so that no innocents are hit, the easier you make it bypassable, and a mechanic that is too easy to bypass does no good whatsoever.
So it boils down to this: can you think of a mechanic that doesn't harm people in a way to dissuade them from waging war, doesn't overpower the strongest in a way that would dissuade others from war, and is not easily bypassable by gimmicky false wars and the like, and does not penalize people during a normal peace cycle after (or before) an important war? Because as it is, the most straightforward answer to "too much peace" is the grassroot one: players that are bored from too much peace should replace their leaders with others that will give them less peace. The Dev team can only do so much hand holding. And a lot of players are quite content with doing absolutely nothing year-round.
I think what has more potential is not looking at mechanics that regulate wars, but more indirect matters. For example, making militia far less effective, siege engines far more effective, travel times lower, salaries lower, penalties from distance from the realm lower, and such things. "Just fight someone closer" used to be the automatic response to those saying fighting realms far away is too difficult, and there's a lot of truth in that. But the declining player base has changed the continental dynamics some. Many realms have no immediate neighbors that would make sense to fight. Take Fissoa and Madina, for example... Adjacent cities are utterly stupid for this, I must insist. Neither realm would ever want to aggress the other, because both of them have their capital adjacent to the other's. As soon as one realm turns on the other, both will never be able to have their army leave their capital, out of fear of a surprise sneak siege that would destroy their realm. They have zero choice but to be friends, or just about. But then who else could they fight? They are so far from everyone else, especially Madina, that even if they did magically grow a pair, they'd never be able to even scratch their next neighbor. Another point I've made many times is the impact of lowered player counts on the feasibility of sieges; we now have people leading way, way more men than before. Instead of 20 units of 25 men with 1 siege engine each, we have 5 units of 100 men with 5 siege engines each. Though the number of men the army has is the same, the CS is much lower, and the travel times much higher. While in the defending realm, the city will still have a ton of militia units without size penalties, and since all realms have less nobles, the wealth is usually concentrated more into the lords and dukes, who in turn tend to invest much more readily into lots of militia for their cities. So you've got weaker and slower units marching against better defended cities than back when BM had its highest player count. Wars are therefore harder to wage than before, simply by player demographics, and adjusting the mechanics to bring things back in balance would seem appropriate to me. We should be favoring player vs player battles, not player vs militia battles. If militia units gradually decreased to about 50% morale (after say 10 days of being made militias), maybe we wouldn't have quite as much of them, and players would have more gold, and mobile armies would be more potent. Or maybe increasing their decay so that every month half of the men are gone. Of course, we need to make it so that militia isn't so weakened so that realms are afraid of having their armies leave their capital, but as it is, realms don't leave their capital because their armies are too weak to accomplish anything anyways.
