Maybe, but I also don't think every unresolved grievance has to either be dropped or result in a war.
I think that what I'm trying to get at here is that I believe you and I have different ideas of what "a war" really means.
I see War, in BattleMaster, as being
any armed conflict beyond entirely incidental looting, particularly anything that has a specific reason ("They insulted our chickens!") and goal in mind ("Defeat their armies four times on the battlefield, and loot 400 gold from their regions").
It might be helpful if you would explain just what you
do see War as meaning—and, if relevant and possible, why.
I'm not sure that always works.
To offer an example, if Nivemus merges with Sirion or Eppy, that will be a bloody behemoth of a realm spanning 25-30 regions and still remaining way below minimum density.
To me, that's less an indictment of the principle I articulated, and more an indictment of how badly Nivemus has been mismanaged and permitted to fall into decay. Frankly, unless something can happen
extremely soon to turn it around, I think it would be healthier to see Nivemus collapse entirely and its regions go rogue than any other easily-described fix I can think of.
I'm actually more worried about realms who want to declare a war but are clearly unable to pull it off on their own, like Eppy vs. Perdan. And even with support, they're unable to take over regions. So what's the point?
Maybe they wouldn't declare a useless war if they had other options of hostile interaction.
I understand where you're coming from here, but...they
do have other options. War
does not require regions to be taken. It is an extremely open-ended diplomatic stance in that way. I'm not entirely sanguine about such things, but I've seen a number of wars declared in BattleMaster with no actual intention of ever setting foot in the enemy's territory—the declaration was simply to show solidarity for an ally, particularly in cases where the realms in question were very far apart. (This, I think, is another case where a purely
cultural relations table would be helpful.)
Given the situation, and granting that we are both simply speculating wildly on this point, I think it much more likely that, if Hostile had been a valid diplomatic stance since before the start of the referenced conflict, Eponllyn and Perdan would still have wanted to be at war, and would still very much intend to take each other's regions.
It may be that there are situations where having a "Hostile" option would have changed the diplomatic landscape; however, given what I know about the situation on the EC, I frankly think it's quite unlikely that any of the major recent conflicts there fall into that category.
