Boy do I have a lot to say on this subject.
Let's start with this: over the tenure of a game with as long standing a history as this, and as "crowdsourced" a makeup, it is only natural that hundreds of things have come up, identified as "problems," and had "solutions" dreamed up to address them. In each case these motivations were without question pure and altruistic.
The problem, though, is that like an overburdened government with too many laws and regulations on top of laws and regulations, we now have -- in my opinion -- layer upon layer of solutions that have tried to fix one thing, but in so doing have broken two other things. These are now built one on top of another, and have cascaded into system failure.
That is Battlemaster right now, IMHO.
Let's start with what ails the game the most: too little war.
The response from GameMasters to this has been, if I am being honest, pretty negative and threatening to players. Rather than asking what might systemically be wrong that takes fundamental incentives away from war, they are saying "invent reasons or we will remove you as ruler." That is backwards.
So, why isn't war happening?
The answer is REAAAAAALLY simple: no one can really conquer much (if any) territory -- due to the noble ratio limitation -- so what the hell are we warring over?
In addition, the maps are so big and the overall player count so low that even if you can expand, you probably don't even necessarily have a neighbor you are really bumping into, so your real target is NPC rogues, not other realms.
In Nothoi, if I had the noble count to take regions right now, my first target would not be another realm. Instead, I would be taking one or two rogue regions nearby that no one else is even bothering with. At current, we cant even conquer regions directly adjacent to our capital because of the noble count issue. I briefly had a chance but lost it because I was out fighting Thalmarkin... then I lost it. Being at war meant I missed a chance to improve our contiguousness and earn more gold/food, which would be the thing that could help attract more nobles. So in this case, I guess war actually decreased my ability to conquer new territory, weirdly.
In any event, do you want to know why Thalmarking got "gangbanged" initially? It was because NONE OF THE REST OF US WERE AT WAR.
If we were all busy with our own little wars with each other, it wouldn't have been either smart or practical to join up in a new expedition. Nothoi and Vordul Sanguinis should be at each other's throats and fighting an all out war over territory right now, but neither of our realms can even capture enough regions next to us to bump into each other. We had a potential conflict brewing over the region of Tindle, but in the end, if I declared war over the region, I couldn't even take the damn thing, so what incentive did I really have to potentially start a war over a region I can't claim?
In any event, neither of our realms could benefit territorially, and there is a ton of rogue land in between us, so there just wasn't a reason to do it. Sure, the rulers could invent slights or RP reasons to fight, but that isn't the way we really want to do thing. Invented, phony, false reasons for war are hollow and empty, and often times we would have to contort ourselves into illogical and irrational actions just to force something to happen that has no reason to really happen.
Anyway, back to the territorial issue -- think of it this way. Why does anyone play Risk? How about any game in the Total War series? It is to battle and conquer territory. To see that map flying your flag over new places. If you can't do that, war becomes not just less imperative, but outright pointless. This is what the original lure of Battlemaster was -- a slow paced, roleplay heavy battle simulator of battle and territorial conquest.
But today, most of us can't even think about taking over anything. And we wonder why there are no incentives for war. We NEED to run into each other and fight over scarcity to truly inspire war.
Let's go beyond, though, because this was originally about alliance blocs, and supranational organizations like the Eastern Continent informal alliances, the Dwilight Alliance of Free Nations, or the fluid quasi-alliances of the south on Beluaterra.
I understand why people have an issue with Alliance bloc size. I really do. I get it. You don't want the Roman Empire coming in and wiping everyone out. But in my opinion, Alliance bloc restrictions, while well intended, ignore very basic fundamentals of human nature.
I have several good friends in this game -- as do all serious players -- and you can talk all you want about "preventing " alliances in a technical, mechanical sense, but any game that makes use of human relationships and then expects realistically to stop cooperation between friends and groups of players who enjoy playing with one another is at a great misapprehension about human nature.
All the mechanics in the world won't stop the fundamental social nature of human beings. I like certain players, our characters have worked together in multiple places, so yeah, whatever the bloc limitations say, it is pretty likely I'm going to help them out when they need it, or vice versa.
This fact is WHY things like alliance groups form beyond limits through every means available, be it guilds or just informal groupings of players that get along. You can try hard to force that not to happen, and I myself try very hard not to fall prey to that impulse. But it is also naive not to acknowledge that even the best players will end up doing it, even if it is just "subconsciously."
If I had a nickel for every time I have read "House [this] has longstanding ties to House [that]" in this game from players who like each other and whose "Houses" really have no ACTUAL long standing ties, I would be a rich man.
This is reality, whether we want to admit it or not, which means that however well intentioned, the system doesn't function the way you want it to, and it never EVER will.
So to these twin issues, how do you deal with it?
In my mind, there are a few things that would naturally fix this, and wouldn't involves GameMaster lecturing and threats, which are inappropriate in a free volunteer based game, and are terrible for player affinity and morale.
The two that come to mind are:
1. Complete destruction of existing maps to make the continents radically smaller. This would end the vast rogue territories that allow realm isolation, and would force region competition. Like it or not, our player base is much too small for every single continent.
2. Eliminate all rules that disincentivizes greed for territory. Goodbye noble limits, or at least make them a sliding scale of some kind. Or, perhaps, change the nature of it to allow different ratio counts to capture different numbers of regions per month. Low count realms can still conquer but maybe slower, thus encouraging the expansion of realms while also providing more of an incentive for healthier realms.
There also could be -- and I have thought a lot about this idea in the past -- a revised limit system to make the region limitation restrict the capture of rogue territories, but if a realm is in a declared war, that realm can capture any number of enemy territories, thus once again incentivizing greed as a motivator, while also disincentivizing peace. Something like that would provide a powerful advantage to war over peace.
---
Now this is all back of the napkin, and I realize these are somewhat radical. But the reality is that however well intended all these mechanics are, they have conspired to make war less likely, and less profitable, and thus robbing the incentives to do it.
In addition, as much as I love the design and thought and work that was put in on things like the estate system, I think it is time we admit that virtually no one uses it. The Lords manage their region... the knights just choose their estate, and after that do virtually nothing with it, and even in populated realms, tons of estates remain empty, or regions are manipulated by lords inefficiently to financially benefit themselves. While that is historically accurate, I suppose, it doesn't really make the game more fun.
If the estate system went away, than perhaps the ratio could be dropped to simply 1:1 with immediate requirements for appointment upon capture of a region, thereby getting rid of the "untended region" problem, and making everything more simple. Would make for larger realms, more realm spread, make realms bump into each other more, and just create a more rich environment for war.
Ultimately, that is the issue. Gangbangs happen because smaller petty wars aren't happening. If Nothoi was fighting with the Vorduls or the Shattered Vales over territory, we wouldn't even be able to join the Irondale/Thalmarkin war. If Sirion could attack Nivemus for that open territory, the stalemate would be gone AND we could move on from North vs. South mega bloc. If Westgard moved northeast it would bump into Avernus, or south into TG again. Heck it would be easier to found a colony in Darfix, which would then run into both Westgard and TG and make war more likely.
In short, the lack of incentive -- and the massive presence of disincentive -- for war is the real problem here. It isn't alliance size. Alliance size limitations have never existed, even with the mechanical limitation. Obsessing over it is fools gold. The self interest of realms means blocs both form and break up on their own, formally or informally, with or without the blessing of game mechanics. So let's stop caring about them.
Our job is to try to inspire as much war as possible, and the key to that is limited land, limited resources, and an actual ability to acquire those limited things, so we start competing over them.
The only other thing I will suggest outside that for mechanical solutions, if we insist on adding more rules rather than fixing the broken system, than just put in a mechanical limitation to only one declared war with one realm at a time, and make alliances impossible.
But I favor a more fundamental reform.
