Author Topic: Discussion on Monsters  (Read 33260 times)

Vita`

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Re: Discussion on Monsters
« Reply #30: July 11, 2018, 06:04:08 AM »
I...like that. Why didn't I think of something so simple before? ???

EDIT: I think I like a two-stage process, first a red text warning on start takeover page, and then blocking takeovers once at a certain lowness.
« Last Edit: July 11, 2018, 06:06:54 AM by Vita »

Zakky

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Re: Discussion on Monsters
« Reply #31: July 11, 2018, 08:29:01 AM »
Why not just disable region take over if density too low?  That will force the hand and make it where people can't expand.

That sounds so much better than endless monsters... What the...

Anaris

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Re: Discussion on Monsters
« Reply #32: July 11, 2018, 03:00:40 PM »
Why not just disable region take over if density too low?  That will force the hand and make it where people can't expand.



...Yeah, that's a good idea. You get a cookie.

I think it probably needs to be slightly more complex than that (perhaps a mechanic to explicitly abandon a region if density is low, so that you can prioritize keeping the ones you actually care about, and potentially even move the realm bit by bit if part of the problem is your location), but yes, I think we should implement that, and soon.
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

Foxglove

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Re: Discussion on Monsters
« Reply #33: July 11, 2018, 03:09:54 PM »
I think it probably needs to be slightly more complex than that (perhaps a mechanic to explicitly abandon a region if density is low, so that you can prioritize keeping the ones you actually care about, and potentially even move the realm bit by bit if part of the problem is your location)

Definitely, because without some ability to control which regions your realm governs, it could easily end up with isolated realms separated/surrounded by rogue regions with the realms unable to close the gaps because their takeover option is disabled.

Also, it might be worth thinking about whether the takeover option would be disabled just when trying to take a rogue region, or whether it would apply to all regions. If takeovers were also disabled when your low density realm was in a war with a high density realm, it could be pretty frustrating. Essentially not being able to fight back in any constructive way.

Anaris

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Re: Discussion on Monsters
« Reply #34: July 11, 2018, 03:22:20 PM »
Definitely, because without some ability to control which regions your realm governs, it could easily end up with isolated realms separated/surrounded by rogue regions with the realms unable to close the gaps because their takeover option is disabled.

Also, it might be worth thinking about whether the takeover option would be disabled just when trying to take a rogue region, or whether it would apply to all regions. If takeovers were also disabled when your low density realm was in a war with a high density realm, it could be pretty frustrating. Essentially not being able to fight back in any constructive way.

Unsure about that last. Might be worth making the takeover option in that case send the region rogue (and call that out on the low-density realm's TO pages) instead of adding it to the low-density realm.
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

Medron Pryde

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Re: Discussion on Monsters
« Reply #35: July 11, 2018, 05:21:44 PM »
I like the idea.

Though maybe instead of making it a really hard "can't TO" thing, maybe we could make some kind of "resist TO" code where nations with a low Noble to land ratio would just find it harder to TO a region.  Say either the TO options don't do as much, or that there is a "TO LOSS" rating running at each turn change with a higher loss for low density realms.  Would that be easy to code?

Another idea would be to have an increased loss of region control for low density realms with the loss increasing drastically the farther the region is away from the capital.

Basically between the two it would drastically increase the regions that go rogue while making it harder to TO until the noble to region density increases to the target amount you wish to promote.

That would be a code that, once implemented, would be self regulating to the level you want it to be.  You would never have to change it manually, once the bugs are worked out of it of course.  ;)

Zakky

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Re: Discussion on Monsters
« Reply #36: July 11, 2018, 06:38:43 PM »
I like making it harder to TO a region. Either make the progress of TO a very long one when your density is too low or increase the number of men required by a lot might do it. Making TO long as in will require like months to TO one region unless you have enough men. As for selecting which region to give up, once a realm falls below a certain level, they should definitely get a warning message first. Once it falls below the threshold, then the ruler should be given an option to let a region go rogue.

Vita`

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Re: Discussion on Monsters
« Reply #37: July 11, 2018, 07:52:51 PM »
I prefer the simplicity of warning message, then no takeovers. I like the concept of a ruler Abandoning a Region. I like low-density realms blocked from TOing being able to TO a higher-density realm's region into rogue status.

I'm thinking of warning message for realms below 3 nobles per region and blocked takeovers/converting-region-to-rogue takeovers for realms below 2 nobles per region.

EDIT: Upon further reflection of some realm densities on certain continents, I might be more inclined to block TOs/allow converting to rogue TOs for realms under 1.5, and raise it to 2 at a later time.
« Last Edit: July 11, 2018, 08:20:45 PM by Vita »

Chenier

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Re: Discussion on Monsters
« Reply #38: July 11, 2018, 08:39:03 PM »
Let's not forget that the various maps on BM are HIGHLY unequal, with various pockets of pretty crappy regions. Poor cities are usually surrounded by poor regions. Often, for a number of reasons, those poor cities end up being capitals.

The more successful realms that start out in poor capitals try to eventually expand to take better lands nearby, sometimes they eventually migrate their capital to their better conquests.

To put a hard limit on realm expansion would force all the people in crappy regions to forever be stuck in crappy regions, because they'd never even be allowed to expand up to better lands.

Also, what motivations will be left for war, if conquest is out of the picture? Remember all those wars that realms wage to plunder their neighbors? Yea, I don't either. Regardless of what we would want realms to fight over, the one thing that ever truly motivates war is territorial conquest.
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Zakky

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Re: Discussion on Monsters
« Reply #39: July 11, 2018, 08:41:14 PM »
Let's not forget that the various maps on BM are HIGHLY unequal, with various pockets of pretty crappy regions. Poor cities are usually surrounded by poor regions. Often, for a number of reasons, those poor cities end up being capitals.

The more successful realms that start out in poor capitals try to eventually expand to take better lands nearby, sometimes they eventually migrate their capital to their better conquests.

To put a hard limit on realm expansion would force all the people in crappy regions to forever be stuck in crappy regions, because they'd never even be allowed to expand up to better lands.

Also, what motivations will be left for war, if conquest is out of the picture? Remember all those wars that realms wage to plunder their neighbors? Yea, I don't either. Regardless of what we would want realms to fight over, the one thing that ever truly motivates war is territorial conquest.

There are poor regions that are actually strategically important. Not all regions' worth are determined by stats alone.

Anaris

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Re: Discussion on Monsters
« Reply #40: July 11, 2018, 08:42:17 PM »
Also, what motivations will be left for war, if conquest is out of the picture? Remember all those wars that realms wage to plunder their neighbors? Yea, I don't either. Regardless of what we would want realms to fight over, the one thing that ever truly motivates war is territorial conquest.

That's already effectively limiting you if you don't have enough nobles.
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

Zakky

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Re: Discussion on Monsters
« Reply #41: July 11, 2018, 08:57:03 PM »
Expansion sounds good but what you really want seems to be is something to motivate you from waging wars. There are plenty of those without the need for expansion.

What you really need is a sense of progression. Once your realm can't expand anymore, you will need to find other things to keep you busy. Poor regions can be rebalanced at some point or maybe that feature where you can add additional buildings to your estate can fix that issue a bit.

Chenier

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Re: Discussion on Monsters
« Reply #42: July 12, 2018, 04:19:33 PM »
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.
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Anaris

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Re: Discussion on Monsters
« Reply #43: July 12, 2018, 04:29:12 PM »
I have some plans for how to improve the situation and better adapt to the smaller playerbase; I have a major message-system-related project I've been working on for a while that I need to finish up first, but once it's debugged and live, I'll give more details about what I plan to do to address the broader issue.
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

Chenier

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Re: Discussion on Monsters
« Reply #44: July 13, 2018, 08:54:15 PM »
I would reiterate, though, that I think that having continents half-rogue is a really suboptimal solution, as is forcing realms to be small. On Dwi, it's okay. Kinda. Not sure how I feel about it on BT yet, but it is justifiable. But on EC and Colonies? No way...

I would far rather let realms take regions that have a novel status ("demesne" in a previous feature request, or imperial, or however you want to call it), where it  belongs to a realm, but doesn't count against any caps, with the tradeoff of not yielding much. No lord. Maybe knights, or not. Reduced production.

Denser realms would have an advantage, but the game would not place a hard cap that forces successful realms to stop what they are doing.
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