Title:
Rewards for winning wars, a formal system
Summary:
Currently wars are rather impromptu. War is declared via diplomatic changes, and then the realm is at war with another. It doesn't actually matter who wins or loses a war in the grand scope of things beyond region exchange. Most wars are forgotten, and even if they are recorded few actually will ever read about them.
Details:
Instead there needs to be a formal system for war. This would allow for keeping track of war wins and losses for a realm, as well as what realms entered and left the war when. But most importantly, it would give the winners of a war the ability to be rewarded for winning the war. The existence of a leaderboard of most winning realms, most winning generals, most daring realms that take on realms larger than them, most bloodthirsty realms that declare war the most often, etc would be created.
Honor, prestige, fame, gold, etc would be rewarded based on length of war, size of opponent(s) fought against. There would be titles bestowed to realms, nobles holding government and military positions of the realms based on various feats, etc as a result of the war system.
There would also be formalized surrender agreements allowing the exchange of regions, food, gold to the agreed upon party(ies).
Part of the war system would include being able to put bounties on a realm. Bounties to see a city taken or sacked, to destroy walls, to loot and burn fields, etc. This would help give incentive to see a realm attacked, destroyed, disrupted. To avoid extremely wealthy families from having too much sway, put a cap on how much gold can be put into a bounty by any single family on a continent, say 2000 gold for starters.
Such a system would allow for more oversight of wars as well, which would be used to generate regular reports for players to look at. Where battles took place, how regions changed hands, nobles wounded, nobles killed, etc could be sent out in a weekly report to a player's email address and kept in a compendium for reference and history.
Benefits:
Overall this would make Battlemaster more fun, would give players more to strive for than the current fame, wealth, honor, prestige points, and would make players choose realms differently based on how they want to be at war or not. It would also greatly reward and emphasize the military strategy aspect of Battlemaster.
Possible Downsides/Exploits:
Realm rulers colluding and making 'fake' wars that one side throws just to increase their stats or gain war win rewards.
