Feature Requests/No More Big Alliances

Throughout BattleMaster history, much of the game has been dominated by large realms, and alliances of several large realms. This has led to serious frustrations, both among members of those realms the large alliances decide to make their enemies, as they have little chance of successfully fighting back, and, often, within the large realms, as their size leads to other realms being unwilling to oppose them, and to a lack of opportunities for advancement.

I believe that in order to change this, we must ensure that large realms cannot easily gather allies around themselves.

First, while we must, in the implementation, decide what we believe counts as a "large" realm or alliance, for the purposes of this, I don't feel it's particularly important, so I'll just talk about "small", "medium" and "large" realms and alliances.

The peasants in a large realm will start to be upset if the realm has too many allies, or too large allies. After all, the realm is already large, and should be more than capable of handling its business without the need to call for help from all these others. "Upset" should mean: increases in independence, decreases in loyalty, decreases in morale, increases in troop recruitment costs (this last is particularly important). "Too many/too large" should mean that the total number of regions of the realm itself and all its allies is greater than (approximately) the size of the realm itself, plus the minimum size of a "large" realm, and should begin with grumblings below this and increase to catastrophic effects at very high numbers of regions.

Small realms, on the other hand, will enjoy having the help of allies—up to a point. With allies up to a certain threshold of regions, the peasants in small realms will decrease independence and recruitment costs and increase morale (though not loyalty). These effects should be somewhat less than the "regular" level of peasant discontent in large realms for having large allies—just enough to notice. When the alliance reaches a large size, the effects begin to fade, and if the alliance becomes significantly larger than twice the size of a "large" realm, similar effects to those felt by large realms with large allies will be felt.

Will not EnhancedDiplomacy take care of most of this, by making things more complicated than just "alliance" ?

Hard to say offhand, but I'd guess not. However, it certainly makes sense to try some of EnhancedDiplomacy before implementing this, and see if it has the desired effect. ~ Timothy

I think if you put a game mechanic in to limit the size of alliances, Rulers will simply move to Peace and behave like they are in an alliance. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but I tend to favor more the idea of giving incentives to break up large realms into Duchies, which will then have more reason to be in conflict with one another, and so naturally limit alliances. Don't know if that will work either, but it's more the avenue I would explore.