User:Il Duce
This is the player of the Sforza family (again). I forgot the password of my first account on the wiki :)
Dwilight RP ideas
I sent this to the realm's main council in Pian en Luries, but I figured I'd make it into a wiki page as well to let others read and discuss is. Basically it's a few ideas to keep the SMA atmosphere on Dwilight intact when the politics and the wars kick in, to keep it from turning it into just another hardcore strategy island where RP is secondary to winning.
1. Alliances are based on convenience, and dissolve as soon as it is no longer convenient. It was like that in the actual middle ages as well, there was no such nonsense as alliances that have lasted for longer than most players can remember and polarize the entire continent. No such nonsense as 'this realm has been our loyal ally for ages, we will not even think about breaking our alliance'. Instead, it should be 'our allies have served their purpose, we no longer need them'. Likewise for enemies. After beating them, instead of holding grudges, reconsile. Why have an enemy on your border when you could have a friend, perhaps a trade partner? And same with allies, once he has served his purpose, attack him again. Hopefully this should keep giant alliances off Dwilight and spice up the political scene across the island.
2. Helping an ally by other means than sending your entire army off to war. Consider other ways: send them money and food, exercise political pressure, have your assassins pick off their enemies, or send limited military support in the form of an expeditionary force. Hell, have one of your Dukes join your ally to keep your own hands 'clean'. This serves two purposes: one being that it will balance the wars a bit, as there will be fewer cases of giant alliances coming down on a realm a with combined force of 50,000 CS. Second, the idea that you'd send your entire army abroad to help an ally is ridiculous. No king in his right mind would leave his own realm undefended, even if he were surrounded by allies. Third, this will mean that there will be more hostilities between more realms, see also point 3 below for that.
3. Fewer wars of annihilation. Wars in the Middle Ages rarely ended with one side being wiped off the maps. Instead, beat your enemy and force a peace treaty on them. That way, you still gain land, but you keep a potential enemy around. If you keep destroying all your enemies then eventually you will have none left, which, as we have learned, makes for boredom in the game. Also, this adds more variation. Instead of the usual few huge wars that last for months, you'd have more small, short wars. Third, it makes the borders more fluid. Some realms on Atamara have literally not had their borders change for years, and if they have, it was through friendly means, i.e. handing over a region. Fluid borders lead to more tensions and more wars, as realms that lost one or two regions in a war with realm A may seek to gain them from realm B.
4. Religion. I'm probably going to step on a few toes here and there, but I find the idea that almost every single realm seems to have the need for it's own religion is preposterous. If you look at the spread of any particular religion laid out on a map, you can almost draw the realm borders freehand. The religions barely spill over into other realms except for a few border regions. Dwilight will likely see quite a number of different realms. I rue the day when all these realms create their own religions.... Wouldn't it be much better if we create just a handful of religions, that spread across entire areas of the map instead of ending at the realm borders? Most religions in the game are nothing more than a means to wage war, and are barely roleplayed. Some are a bit more elaborately written out on the wiki, and one or two I find to be quite interesting, but they are still mainly just tools of war. Religion should be a motive, not a tool. An example could be Magna Serpaensism: it spreads across two - three if you count the now-dead Protectorate of Magnus - realms and is starting to convert people in a third, and it was a major factor in the run-up to the war between Caergoth/Suville and PoM. We need more wars like this! Crusades! Schisms! Splinter religions breaking away from the flock!
If you have something to add, or if you have criticism, please post it to the talk page! I'm particularly interested in hearing opinions from the people at the top of the realms of Dwilight, as they will need to be on board if we want to keep Dwilight from becoming another failed RP experiment like FEI...
