[Discuss] Claims

[Timothy Collett]

I would tend to agree that claims are *not* doing what they were  
intended to do.  I think the idea was a neat one, and unlike others,  
I was happy to give it a try, but with the empirical evidence I've  
seen so far, I judge that they're doing just the opposite of what was  
intended.

I also agree that something needs to be done to strongly discourage  
the practice of sending five large realms to attack one small one.   
However, Tom, I think you're looking at things from the wrong side.

If a small realm is pitted against overwhelming odds, *they are going  
to lose*.  Trying to change that without making things completely  
unrealistic and silly is not likely to happen (if you can come up  
with something cool to do it, I'm happy to listen...but I'm not  
optimistic).

We need to look at things from the other side: stop the ganging-up  
realms from, well, ganging up...or at least from doing so effectively.

Now, from here on my post is a collection of random ideas, not  
organized in any real way, or necessarily good ideas...just some  
brainstorming of things I think are worth looking at.

One possibility, counter-intuitively enough, is to make it *easier*  
to take a realm's last regions.  That would mean that a moderate- 
sized realm wouldn't automatically assume that they'd need their  
allies' help to kill them, and thus might not enlist their help.

Another is to make it harder to control armies the more different  
realms there are in them.  That is, with or without marshal settings,  
have more units "misunderstand" their orders and take the wrong  
settings the more units there are from different realms (according to  
some intricate formula, or just linearly with # of realms).  Though  
perhaps it would also have to have something to do with the force on  
the other side: after all, we don't want to prevent the destruction  
(or at least defeat) of large realms, which *really* requires many  
realms allying to achieve.

Create sappers, or something, to allow the defending realm to set up  
"traps" or some such thing to catch a large army trying to invade  
through a single region--turn a field into a marsh, or something, and  
large portions of the army are bogged down and can't go *anywhere*  
for a day or two, and when they can, their travel is significantly  
slowed.  I'm sure we can come up with other useful things for such  
sappers to do, too.  (Aids defenders, though not necessarily smaller  
realms...but *does* encourage traveling in smaller army groups)

Have the soldiers start defecting en masse when they see that the  
enemy's army is 1/10 the size of yours...especially when there are 5  
realms gathered to make that 10x strength (not sure just how to  
implement, but I'm sure we can come up with something).

Make it possible for an infiltrator to pose as someone from a  
different realm, so as to create diplomatic incidents between allies.

...That's all I can come up with off the top of my head.  I'm sure  
others here can come up with more stuff: if there's one thing this D- 
list is good at, it's coming up with random crazy ideas for how to  
make BattleMaster better (for certain values of "better" ;-) )

Timothy Collett
Anaris Family
--

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind
-Einstein



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