Author Topic: Make Battlemaster Great Again - War Overhaul  (Read 32158 times)

Chenier

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Re: Make Battlemaster Great Again - War Overhault
« Reply #15: February 13, 2018, 09:29:40 PM »
Yeah; something different needs to be done, and perhaps some of my other ideas about changes in region ownership should play into them—with the basic idea be that you essentially half-take-over the city and some surrounding regions, then declare them en masse to be a new colony.

Yeah, something along those lines—optional, like Vita says, and working with the new system, not trying to replace it.

I'd still rather not just make the excess gold decay away.

Frankly, it sounds to me like what you really want isn't so much the removal of family gold, but the removal of the "buy region" option, and that's something I am open to, though I'd like something to replace it with—not necessarily another way to take a region, but something that's sneaky and highly disruptive.

No, I definitely don't want to start undermining referenda. But yes, I tend to agree with your general feeling.

However, I would also say this: If the one-player gimmick required a lot of time and effort to set up, its payoff should be proportional to that. So if there were an infiltrator option that required several days or even a week or two of RL time for setup, but that allowed you to, say, wound all or most of the troops in a region (simulating poisoning a water supply or something similar), that is something that I would consider as probably viable.

There are a few different things going on here, and yes, I think all of them need some kind of overhaul.

One thing that would help a lot is to increase the game's memory further—not as in RAM, but its ability to remember what happened when. Then we wouldn't be working with simple numbers like loyalty and morale all on their own quite so much.

So I have the first outline of a way to strongly encourage, without mandating, dense realms. The basic gist is this: A fully-controlled (non-city; cities should be handled at least slightly differently) region is one that has at least a Lord and one knight. If the capital has even one non-fully-controlled region (of those belonging to the realm) adjacent to it, all non-capital regions suffer a certain amount of penalty. If the capital is fully surrounded, then check if all those regions have fully-controlled regions around them. If not, then all regions beyond that first ring suffer similar penalties, and so on.

Essentially, it puts strong pressure on a realm to concentrate its Lords and knights in the regions around the capital.

However, as I said, in addition to adding this higher control state, I would also like to add a lower control state, like demesne or crown lands, or possibly call it hinterlands, that more or less consists of regions that your realm claims, and can extract a small amount of benefit from, but doesn't really own in any very meaningful sense. As soon as someone else comes in and stakes a claim with a military presence, the region becomes part of their demesne.

So if you can only really hold regions with a Lord and a knight, and those have to be concentrated around the capital or you risk unrest and red tape, but you can extend your realm's influence with very little limit, that makes warfare a much more dynamic experience, not measured in weeks spent taking over each border region as you tediously push through your enemy's outer regions, but in days marching across them, planting your flag and briefly intimidating the peasants, and moving on toward the lands they are actually willing and able to hold onto in the face of an army...

I think that makes it much more about the knights and the fun.

Edit:

Had another idea about family gold (or remembered an idea I had some time ago): Right now, once gold goes to the family, it is essentially removed from the game until it is spent.

What if it existed just the way gold getting ready for taxes did?

It shouldn't be anywhere near as easy to steal, but families need to have a home (and if they don't have one, we can force them to pick one, or just pick one for them, if they're dragging their feet about it), so shouldn't their gold be there?

Perhaps we should even let families have estates, that exist as regular estates within a region, help with efficiency, and generate gold (at a vastly reduced rate, due to expenses) for the family, but don't confer the same benefits that having a knight there does (like my fully-controlled regions above). Then the family gold is divided between all the various family estates, and if you happen across one when you're looting, you have the opportunity to try to rob its vault.

4) I really dislike both the "buy region" option and the amassing of family wealth. I never liked the amassing of family wealth, because it encourages people to have secondary characters who have no other purpose than to farm gold. These characters are parasites that decreases the realm's ability (and will) to take risks and go to war. As for "other things to do with family gold", I know there was calling family aid, that I just remembered. I think that was nerfed since Thulsoma abused the hell out of it, but I think it still allows for one character to fund another on another continent. Continents should work independantly, I don't like the idea of some people on some continents helping other people on other continents. All continents need war, and all realms need their tax gold for it.

6) I think that would be way overpowered. Balancing great gains with great risks only goes a certain way, it still comes down to "risking/wasting 1 noble to potentially destroy a realm". Because if you can wound a whole foreign army without even fighting them, and you prepared for it, in many cases you can outright kill them, or just about. And I don't think a few weeks of RL time to setup is all that much either, compared to typical refit times.

One player gimmicks, in my opinion, should target one other player. Like assassination attempts. A key strike can have a huge impact, but it's still only just affecting one player, and largely works around how much power people are concentrating. I'm fine with the existence of specialists who can do things that maybe the masses can't do, but I also think that their impacts should be, overall, small compared to the masses of troop leaders.

12/13) I think the details for any system addressing this will probably be tricky to sort out.  There's also the issue of balancing them around changing demographics. Some features that didn't make sense back in the days could work now, and vice versa, just because of how many (active) players we have now vs then.

I'm not sure how I think about very quick TOs. Seems like to could be rather demoralizing to players if everything they have can be taken in a week.

Then again, if regions were less binary in control, maybe it wouldn't be a big deal. For example, taking over a region takes only 3 days instead of about 7, but when the TO is "finished", you only have 30% control, which means you only get 30% of the taxes you otherwise would. If you really want to, you can continue "takeover options" to bring it to 100%, or you can move on to the next region. Regions could directly work from control: takeovers first deplete the current control pool, and then begin to fill your own, but having low control doesn't mean it will revolt and that all your work will be wasted, just means that the region won't give much until control is increased.
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