Author Topic: Make Battlemaster Great Again - War Overhaul  (Read 31984 times)

Anaris

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Re: Make Battlemaster Great Again - War Overhault
« Topic Start: February 13, 2018, 08:10:11 PM »
1) Maybe. They were always awkwards, though. A city in the middle of enemy lands is hard to make a viable realm in off the bat. No RCs, no economy, right next door to the rest of the enemies...

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.

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2) Maybe simpler, less-gamey, and more hybrid form. Ex: allow rulers to give to all troop leaders half of their realm share taxes, which when selected, also allows them to double the max tax rate they can impose on their dukes (and so on down the line).

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

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4) Gold past the new lowered cap need not be completely removed. You could have a decay of maybe 10% of the excess per week, during which time half of the decayed gold is shared between the active characters of the family. Gotta remember, though, people with 20k gold are people who horded key positions in their realm, and instead of helping their realms do stuff, they were parasites that funneled funds elsewhere. BM would probably have seen a lot more wars if the super rich had nowhere to send their gold other than in-realm (especially if wealth taxes were back).

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.

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6) Yea, I think it does need discussion. An alternative to buying regions would be to bribe referendum results, but I'm not sure if undermining elections is something we really want to do. In any case, my general feeling is that one-player gimmicks should not easily undermine the collective actions of a large number of players.

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.

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8 ) I am referring to two things: peasant militias that spring up in reaction of looting, and peasant militias that spring up for the mere presence of enemy nobles from realms they hate. On EC, one priest/ambassador in particular has gone to a few regions and made them utterly hate every single SA realm, and utterly love every single northern realm. Just entering those regions causes 10k of militia to appear, and holding them after a TO is practically impossible due to the insane amount of protest debuffs. We are starting to counter with out own ambassador work, but it's super gimmicky that one noble can build an impenetrable trench line that even one of the largest armies of the continent sitting in the region doing police work and civil work cannot stabilize it and prevent it from revolting.

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.

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12) and 13) These points are actually intertwined. I'm still in favor of density, in some form, but just not for the sake of it. Density is a tool, not an end in itself. Thus the idea is to allow realms to continue expanding into each other, otherwise once the density sweet spot is reached all incentives to fight a neighbor are almost gone, without necessarily giving a title to everyone for it. In other words, realms could keep expanding to 10, 20, 30 regions, even if they only have 15 nobles, but they would either be dissuaded or prevented from appointing all 15 nobles to the various lordships. And that even when all nobles have the titles they can have, the realm still has incentives to acquire new regions, because these would feed the communal taxes, and thus make everyone richer. Remember, the goal of increased density is, among other things, make sure that realms don't become filled with people that have nothing more to gain. But the current density mechanics kind of still do this in an indirect way (on Dwi).

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.
« Last Edit: February 13, 2018, 08:15:41 PM by Anaris »
Timothy Collett

"The only thing you can't trade for your heart's desire...is your heart." "You are what you do.  Choose again, and change." "One of these days, someone's gonna plug you, and you're going to die saying, 'What did I say? What did I say?'"  ~ Miles Naismith Vorkosigan