Yea, Zakky, I'm sure that's why you are sitting in the realm with a bunch of the best regions on the continent, and didn't go to Highmarch to live off all those crap regions. Because Highmarch is "balanced" by being "strategically important", right, it has soooo much appeal?
I would like a TO alternative to instead turn a region rogue rather than taking it. But sometimes, especially small realms, need to take some buffer regions, either for strategic reasons or just in order to get contact with better regions. Because often realms start out with poor cities, and would love to migrate to a nearby bigger/better city, but the game would now tell them "no, stay forever in your !@#$ city, never expand"?
Seriously, guys. Just because we want people to fight more wars and to fight wars for other reasons than territorial expansion doesn't make this wish a reality. Removing motivations for war doesn't lead to their substitution, people won't suddenly want to go to war for other reasons just because they can't expand anymore. Instead, they'll have less reasons to go to war.
Armies can already loot regions rogue. Realms almost never do so. And certainly don't enter a war for this purpose. Adding a pseudo-TO mechanic is convenient, but adds nothing fundamentally new. It won't make people go to war.
"Get more players" is a !@#$ argument. BM's population is dwindling. Most sudden increases are done with cliques/clans, which are toxic to the game.
The game should just adapt to its dwindling player base, and I don't think that the solution is turning half of the continents rogue. Just look at Dwi: the vast rogue expanses that seperate all the realms make it hard for them to interact with each other. Or BT, same thing. Is that what we want on EC and Colonies too? A bunch of tiny realms, where every noble has 3 titles (yay, promotions!), and where cities are never sieged, and wars almost never waged, because people know it'll be pointless?
All of this glorifying tiny realms is ridiculous. When you look at the tiny realms the game has had, they have rarely been a source for war. Sometimes bigger realms have used them as pretexes, but not the small realms of themselves. On BT, wars were largely brought by the large and superlarge realms. Riombara. Enweil. And other central large realms. On Dwi, a continent that hasn't a super great history for wars, it's again a lot around the big guys. Astrum, mostly. Luria some. On EC, Sirion has been involved in a lot. FEI and AT, too, large realms got !@#$ for blocking peace, but they were also made by wars, and largely responsible for the wars that were had.
Large realms move the game. Their wars are meaningful, they can change the face of the continent. Why? Because they aren't stuck to a single city-capital, that they are forced to overstuff with militia (because losing it means dying), because they can funnel a lot of wealth from safe hinter regions that allows them to fund significant armies, armies that can attack anywhere without fear of random militias defeating them.
This game was designed around realms that have at least 20k CS mobile armies. The tiny realm obsession is deeply misguided. Density is good. Density for density's sake is not. That's like saying "poor countries don't have enough daily calories, let's send them a lot of free sugar". It doesn't solve the problem. It can even make it worse. Because what matters more than noble:region is noble:title, because we want people competing for titles for a realm to be dynamic. But there's more titles than just lordships. Ever realm has basically a fixed minimum of 7 non-lord titles: ruler, general, banker, judge, duke, marshal, vice-marshal. Some realms will have more, if they have more duchies or armies.
So if you constantly force realms to be smaller, when back in the days you could have had 30 nobles for 15 regions in a realm, instead you'd have two 15 noble realms... the title:noble ratio decreaes from 1.36:1 to 2x 1:1.03. Title density decreased by a third, and every one of these nobles has half the amount of people to interact with. But, "yay, more smaller realms!"
Some of the old big realms were problematic. But you are all fooling yourselves by jumping to "big=bad, thus small=good". Small realms are not proportionally any better than larger realms were. A lot of big realms were bad, but so are a lot of the small realms. And the smaller your realm is, the more it has to loose, thus the more risk-averse it will tend to be. Because, once more, when your only city is your capital, and you don't own much land around it, you really can't risk doing much or going too far without putting the very survival of your realm in peril.
