A deeper Peace Treaty / Settlement Occupation system (long post)

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Bleyck

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TL;DR: In Bannerlord once you take a settlement, it instantly becomes part of your faction. This results in snowballing since the attacker faction immediatly have acess to the settlement's resources and is allowed to take a great ammount of territory from a weakened enemy without peacing from the war. By contrast, in real life medieval times provinces where only lawfully added to another realm after they were explicitally given in a legal treaty. Probably a system where expecified settlements are awarded only during a peace deal might be the way to deal with the snowballing problem, make the game deeper and historically accurate.

King-John-Magna-Carta.jpg

Introduction
We all know how Bannerlord gets stale at end game when a Faction owns half of the map. Everybody who played for a few hours went through it. A weakened Faction, with a bunch of noble defection, money problems and too many casualties are pretty much a free prey to be stomped. Its hard for it to not lose more settlements and even harder to make a comeback.

I was brainstorming on why such snowballing happens in Bannerlord and not so much in some games like Crusader Kings 2 / 3 (obligatory comparisson) and Europa Universalis 4.

Thats when I understood the main balancing problem: once you siege down a settlement in Bannerlord, it instantly becomes part of your faction.



How Bannerlord currently deals with land occupation

B2C80DABC71A167DA9B74B2932A73702F7D853CB

After sucessfully sieging a settlement, it flips instantly to your Faction. Sure, the settlement will be weakened and if you actually want to be owner of it you have to win a election against other "claimants".

But your Faction will have acess to the majority of the settlement's resources to fuel the war effort against the already weak enemy. From taxation, recruiting and trading, almost everything will be availiable after conquering. The entire place instantly becomes loyal to their new nation, virtually no question asked.

This also means if you still have enough money and troops, you can conquer 2/3 of an enemy land AND later ask for money tributes to make peace too. Since the land you occupied isnt part of the peace treaty, you can bleed the enemy dry. This can make an already big Faction into an unstopable war machine.

xrbpbjuw55251.jpg

And do you think anyobody in Calradia cares if you take 3, 5 or even 10 settlement in one war? Nope, nobody bats an eye. The most logical thing to happen would be either to other factions to be outraged from such expansion or to have a limit of how much land to take in a war, but there is no such thing.



Legal explanation on how real land occupations work (Boring stuff)

98318438_105515644502145_6802672333606617088_o.jpg

Game mechanics aside, having a province being legally considered part of your realm after being sieged down and without no peace treaty its not historically accurate based on records we have from the medieval era. During these times and even up to this day, land occupation worked similar to the De Jure and De Facto concepts.
Rhetoric question: If a bunch of guys went to your house, kicked you out and stayed living there, would it make your now occupied house into... their house?
Answer: Well, yes but actually no.

The first thing we have to understand is that there is a difference between De Jure and De Facto.

De jure
means "by law" and means something recognize by law. In the example above, you are the De Jure owner of house even if someone forcefully kicked you out. Thats because you have the ownership papers, you are recognized as the legitimazed owner by the goverment and by your peers.

De Facto means "by fact" and represent something taking place in reality even if it is not recognize by law. Again in example above, the De Facto owner of the house is the guys who are forcefully staying in your house. If you ask anybody from your goverment or your peers they all will agree that the house is yours, because you have the legimitime legal right to own the property. But undeniably, who is currently controlling your house are the invaders.

But hey, maybe the guys that occupied your house made an offer you cant refuse and you want to legally give the house to then. Ignoring for the sake of the argument anyone would probably call the police on these crazy burglars LOL :iamamoron: , how could you legitimally give your house to them? Simple. You write legal papers transfering the ownership to them. Now these guys in occupying your house own the property by legitimate means, as the De Jure owners.

I hope you understood how this example applies to Mount & Wars and peace treaties and how it could be more like it.



How other games deals with land occupation

ship%20occupy.jpg

(Europa Universalis 4, the Grand Strategy game Ive played the most)
Everything I will say down bellow kinda applies to all of the Paradox's games with a few exceptions. In contrast with Mount & Blade, games like the Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings series uses a system of land occupation more close to the reality "de jure" and "de facto" thing Ive explained right above.

After sieging down a province, it does not become automatically yours. It still is owned by the enemy BUT is occupied by you, the invader. You can maybe raze or raid it, but the major owner interactions cannot be done util the war is over and the province is explicitally given to you during the peace treaty.

Talking about about peace treaty, since you dont get ownership of provinces after siege, the occupied land and stuff like battles wons counts as war score. War score represents how well someone is doing in war and can be used to while making peace to receive gold tributes, make useful treaties, receive land, etc.

Eu4demandtribute.jpg

Finally, you cannot conquer an entire empire in one war just even if you have occupied all provinces. There is a limit of how much stuff you can take from the enemy in the peace deal, since every consession has its price and the max ammount of War Score is 100%.

And also, if you try to take too much land other nations receive a Agressive Expansion penalty. If Agressive Expansion reaches above a certain value, allows other nations to join a "Defensive Pact" / "Coallitiion" to deal with your megalomaniac ambitions.


Conclusion

To fix such a big problem like snowballing we need more than adjustments to existing systems. The current way of how settlements are occupied and peace treaties are done work naturally in favor of strong Factions steamrolling weak Factions.

I think Taleworlds Developers could take example of some other games to develop new system similar to the concepts explained in this thread. Maybe one of them take it as an inspiration for a deeper, snowballing proof and historic accurate peace treaty / settlement occupation mechanic :wink:

Yes, the other games examples are very different from Bannerlord.
And no, I'm not implining that anyone should blatantly copy features from any competitor company's game.

The only thing I want is for the game to be even more fun than its already is :razz:
 
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I think you're thinking about a legitimacy matrix. Considering we don't even have negotiated settlements, or faction end goals, I think this might be a bridge too far at this point.

Perhaps a negotiation process where resources and land as well as cash can be traded for peace in the same way we barter between players. Where settlements of your own culture, have been recently lost or that are a faction goal have more value. This would bring it into line with Total War games for example, and probably achieve the same ends. e.g. "We'll accept peace if you give us one of the 3 cities you just took off me plus tribute"

Otherwise, I didn't see Genghis Khan seek a final negotiated peace when he built a pyramid of skulls. That pyramid was the peace.
 
At least the game should have some rebellions in the first years,mainly if the settlement belongs to other cultures. A mechanism should also be put in place, through cultural buildings, and laws, to change local culture over time,like a colonization. But given the lack of progress in implementing new features, I don't believe in any of that, the game will remain as simple as it is today.
 
There is a limit of how much stuff you can take from the enemy in the peace deal, since every consession has its price and the max ammount of War Score is 100%.

When playing CK3, this often felt very artificial to me. There were instances where I conquered ALL the lands of the enemy to get my warscore to 100% but I could only keep a small part of it when making peace, despite me totally dominating them. They were effectively destroyed, yet I had to resurrect them to make peace with them. It felt very contrived and unreal.

Your analysis of the problem is spot on, but instead of a De Jure system I'm in favor of an assimilation/rebellion system instead. Recently occupied lands should be a liability during the war, and assimilation should only be possible when at peace. Assimilating recently occupied lands should also be a motivator to make peace for both the Kingdom AI and the player.
 
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When playing CK3, this often felt very artificial to me. There were instances where I conquered ALL the lands of the enemy to get my warscore to 100% but I could only keep a small part of it when making peace, despite me totally dominating them. They were effectively destroyed, yet I had to resurrect them to make peace with them. It felt very contrived and unreal.

Your analysis of the problem is spot on, but instead of a De Jure system I'm in favor of an assimilation/rebellion system instead. Recently occupied lands should be a liability during the war, and assimilation should only be possible when at peace. Assimilating recently occupied lands should also be a motivator to make peace for both the Kingdom AI and the player.

Exactly, i 'm not in favor of CK3/EU4 peace deals in Bannerlord, it's not supposed to be a grand strategy game, so stuff ought to be less complicated, for the AI and the player.

Let's wait for the rebellions mechanics, also the pillage/sack towns which will destroy more prosperity and leave the towns as useless hunks after a war.
 
I wouldn't really like a CK3/EU4 system you completely decimate a nation yet for some reason I can only hold to the smallest portion
 
I can see rebellions being a thing for newly conquered settlements and the more you have and the lower the loyalty the more likely the rebellion. I'd be all for that. But I feel a system like CK wouldn't really fit into BL.
 
A HOI4 peace conference like system? You take castles through out the war, and then at the end there's two phases, peace negotiations between the two factions, tribute price etc, and then the castle delegation which you use your influence to try and claim as usual.

Not sure if it would really work, but it's something.
mdcgb3devrc11.jpg
 
I will adress these replies together, since they are related.

When playing CK3, this often felt very artificial to me. There were instances where I conquered ALL the lands of the enemy to get my warscore to 100% but I could only keep a small part of it when making peace, despite me totally dominating them. They were effectively destroyed, yet I had to resurrect them to make peace with them. It felt very contrived and unreal.

Exactly, i 'm not in favor of CK3/EU4 peace deals in Bannerlord, it's not supposed to be a grand strategy game, so stuff ought to be less complicated, for the AI and the player.

So introduce Crusader Kings mechanics into the game? No. I don't think that would be a good idea. You took the settlement. Its yours. Much simpler and it works.

I wouldn't really like a CK3/EU4 system you completely decimate a nation yet for some reason I can only hold to the smallest portion

The main goal of this thread is to create a debate about different ways peace treaty and fief occupation could be implemented. I dont want to give you the false impression to want to just mindless throw features from other games into Bannerlord. The examples stated are from very different games, and obviously some mechanics that work in them would not fit into the Mount & Blade series. Im actually just showing how other games deal with it and how it usually worked in real life.

Lets adress first the elephant in the room: limits of the ammount of conquered land based on the max warscore. Yes, it could very well have the impact of decreassing the steamrolling of a faction in one war, but I agree that it also could not fit well into Bannerlord.

In contrast on how the warscore land limit does not seems to fit the game, there is two features that if made similar could very well benefit a lot Bannerlord. Agressive Expansion and land ownership only after the war. We could take inspiration to make features based on these concepts.

The first one is Agressive Expasion penalty which results in Coalitions/Defensive Pacts, a reactive and easy to avoid penalty that penalizes careless play and extesive conquests.

The second one is giving only full fief ownership during the peace deal after the war is done, which does not allow you to use all the settlements resources to fight the same enemy and means you need the upperhand of the war if you want to take away a lot of land after the peace negotiations.

And finally about argument in favor of simplicity, Im sorry but I dont agree with that at all. Bannerlord could use more depth to its mechanics to make the world feel more alive and dynamic. However adding more complex mechanics should be done with caution indeed, as more complexity does not necessarily mean more fun.
 
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Your analysis of the problem is spot on, but instead of a De Jure system I'm in favor of an assimilation/rebellion system instead. Recently occupied lands should be a liability during the war, and assimilation should only be possible when at peace. Assimilating recently occupied lands should also be a motivator to make peace for both the Kingdom AI and the player.

At least the game should have some rebellions in the first years,mainly if the settlement belongs to other cultures. A mechanism should also be put in place, through cultural buildings, and laws, to change local culture over time,like a colonization

I can see rebellions being a thing for newly conquered settlements and the more you have and the lower the loyalty the more likely the rebellion. I'd be all for that.

Let's wait for the rebellions mechanics

I totally agree about adding a system of rebellion or time to assimilate other settlements too. That is indeed something that could make the game more interesting and could possibly also decrease snowballing.
 
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Considering we don't even have negotiated settlements, or faction end goals, I think this might be a bridge too far at this point.

Perhaps a negotiation process where resources and land as well as cash can be traded for peace in the same way we barter between players. Where settlements of your own culture, have been recently lost or that are a faction goal have more value. This would bring it into line with Total War games for example, and probably achieve the same ends. e.g. "We'll accept peace if you give us one of the 3 cities you just took off me plus tribute"

Yes, I would love this since it would bring more flavour to diplomacy. However we do indeed already have the ability to negotiate settlements:

Mount-Blade-II-Bannerlord-Mount-and-Blade-II-Bannerlord-trade-skill-economy-resources-trading-bartering-trading-settlements-everything-has-a-price-perk.jpg

Right now the current limitation of giving settlements is that you can only give to people from the same faction.

The biggest challenge for development would be to limit ownership of sieged fiefs util the war is done and to actually just give them to the faction in the peace negotioations. But seems to be doable for a company like Taleworlds.
 
Good work putting this together but all the responses so far have been in the negative.
Thanks.
But thats not entirely true, people seem to have mildly enjoyed it in reddit.

I'm just saying, it's not that kind of game. It's more immediate. You take a town. It's yours.
Strategy is still undeniably a big part of what is Mount & Blade. But even then, the main concept of the argument its not even that complex, dude.

In basic terms: You take town. Town is occupied but still owned by enemy. Cant use town to fuel the same war against the enemy. Make peace with the enemy. Actually receive town in peace deal. Town is now actually yours.
 
An excellent post, although this goes against the fast action gameplay TW is looking for.

Thank you. But what if that "fast action gameplay" is causing the snowballing? If we decrease the speed of how fast new fiefs are conquered, in theory should decrease snowballing too by giving factions more time to recover.
 

Although I partially disagreed, I do appreciate the thread. It's an important discussion.

The first one is Agressive Expasion penalty which results in Coalitions/Defensive Pacts, a reactive and easy to avoid penalty that penalizes careless play and extesive conquests.

It's sad that something like this isn't in already. Even Warband had something similar where "curbing the other faction's power" was a valid reason for war.

An excellent post, although this goes against the fast action gameplay TW is looking for.

I'm not sure they are looking for that. Why else introduce the heir system if they do not intend campaigns to (be able to) last for multiple generations?
 
TL;DR:
In Bannerlord once you take a settlement, it instantly becomes part of your faction. This results in snowballing since the attacker faction immediatly have acess to the settlement's resources and is allowed to take a great ammount of territory from a weakened enemy without peacing from the war. By contrast, in real life medieval times provinces where only lawfully added to another realm after they were explicitally given in a legal treaty. Probably a system where expecified settlements are awarded only during a peace deal might be the way to deal with the snowballing problem, make the game deeper and historically accurate.

King-John-Magna-Carta.jpg

Introduction
We all know how Bannerlord gets stale at end game when a Faction owns half of the map. Everybody who played for a few hours went through it. A weakened Faction, with a bunch of noble defection, money problems and too many casualties are pretty much a free prey to be stomped. Its hard for it to not lose more settlements and even harder to make a comeback.

I was brainstorming on why such snowballing happens in Bannerlord and not so much in some games like Crusader Kings 2 / 3 (obligatory comparisson) and Europa Universalis 4.

Thats when I understood the main balancing problem: once you siege down a settlement in Bannerlord, it instantly becomes part of your faction.



How Bannerlord currently deals with land occupation

B2C80DABC71A167DA9B74B2932A73702F7D853CB

After sucessfully sieging a settlement, it flips instantly to your Faction. Sure, the settlement will be weakened and if you actually want to be owner of it you have to win a election against other "claimants".

But your Faction will have acess to the majority of the settlement's resources to fuel the war effort against the already weak enemy. From taxation, recruiting and trading, almost everything will be availiable after conquering. The entire place instantly becomes loyal to their new nation, virtually no question asked.

This also means if you still have enough money and troops, you can conquer 2/3 of an enemy land AND later ask for money tributes to make peace too. Since the land you occupied isnt part of the peace treaty, you can bleed the enemy dry. This can make an already big Faction into an unstopable war machine.

xrbpbjuw55251.jpg

And do you think anyobody in Calradia cares if you take 3, 5 or even 10 settlement in one war? Nope, nobody bats an eye. The most logical thing to happen would be either to other factions to be outraged from such expansion or to have a limit of how much land to take in a war, but there is no such thing.



Legal explanation on how real land occupations work (Boring stuff)

98318438_105515644502145_6802672333606617088_o.jpg

Game mechanics aside, having a province being legally considered part of your realm after being sieged down and without no peace treaty its not historically accurate based on records we have from the medieval era. During these times and even up to this day, land occupation worked similar to the De Jure and De Facto concepts.
Rhetoric question: If a bunch of guys went to your house, kicked you out and stayed living there, would it make your now occupied house into... their house?
Answer: Well, yes but actually no.

The first thing we have to understand is that there is a difference between De Jure and De Facto.

De jure
means "by law" and means something recognize by law. In the example above, you are the De Jure owner of house even if someone forcefully kicked you out. Thats because you have the ownership papers, you are recognized as the legitimazed owner by the goverment and by your peers.

De Facto means "by fact" and represent something taking place in reality even if it is not recognize by law. Again in example above, the De Facto owner of the house is the guys who are forcefully staying in your house. If you ask anybody from your goverment or your peers they all will agree that the house is yours, because you have the legimitime legal right to own the property. But undeniably, who is currently controlling your house are the invaders.

But hey, maybe the guys that occupied your house made an offer you cant refuse and you want to legally give the house to then. Ignoring for the sake of the argument anyone would probably call the police on these crazy burglars LOL :iamamoron: , how could you legitimally give your house to them? Simple. You write legal papers transfering the ownership to them. Now these guys in occupying your house own the property by legitimate means, as the De Jure owners.

I hope you understood how this example applies to Mount & Wars and peace treaties and how it could be more like it.



How other games deals with land occupation

ship%20occupy.jpg

(Europa Universalis 4, the Grand Strategy game Ive played the most)
Everything I will say down bellow kinda applies to all of the Paradox's games with a few exceptions. In contrast with Mount & Blade, games like the Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings series uses a system of land occupation more close to the reality "de jure" and "de facto" thing Ive explained right above.

After sieging down a province, it does not become automatically yours. It still is owned by the enemy BUT is occupied by you, the invader. You can maybe raze or raid it, but the major owner interactions cannot be done util the war is over and the province is explicitally given to you during the peace treaty.

Talking about about peace treaty, since you dont get ownership of provinces after siege, the occupied land and stuff like battles wons counts as war score. War score represents how well someone is doing in war and can be used to while making peace to receive gold tributes, make useful treaties, receive land, etc.

Eu4demandtribute.jpg

Finally, you cannot conquer an entire empire in one war just even if you have occupied all provinces. There is a limit of how much stuff you can take from the enemy in the peace deal, since every consession has its price and the max ammount of War Score is 100%.

And also, if you try to take too much land other nations receive a Agressive Expansion penalty. If Agressive Expansion reaches above a certain value, allows other nations to join a "Defensive Pact" / "Coallitiion" to deal with your megalomaniac ambitions.


Conclusion

To fix such a big problem like snowballing we need more than adjustments to existing systems. The current way of how settlements are occupied and peace treaties are done work naturally in favor of strong Factions steamrolling weak Factions.

I think Taleworlds Developers could take example of some other games to develop new system similar to the concepts explained in this thread. Maybe one of them take it as an inspiration for a deeper, snowballing proof and historic accurate peace treaty / settlement occupation mechanic :wink:

Yes, the other games examples are very different from Bannerlord.
And no, I'm not implining that anyone should blatantly copy features from any competitor company's game.

The only thing I want is for the game to be even more fun than its already is :razz:

Basically I agree with what you say.
The de jure / de facto system would quite balance the balance of power during a war.
In fact, a faction would not benefit from 100% of the conquered territory until the peace is signed and the territories together with their populations do not accept the new lord with greater tolerance.
This system also leads the other factions to warn the conqueror that he is taking the longest step in case he wants to invade a territory that is not his "de facto" or "de jure".
In addition to this thread I would like to suggest some of my threads related to logistics and geographical coverage (the marching formations of the armies in the campaign map). The thread aims to balance the power relationship between the factions but also to make the role of the campaign map deeper and more strategic. I hope not to be inappropriate:

ECONOMY , LOGISTICS and WARFARE SUGGESTION LIST

When playing CK3, this often felt very artificial to me. There were instances where I conquered ALL the lands of the enemy to get my warscore to 100% but I could only keep a small part of it when making peace, despite me totally dominating them. They were effectively destroyed, yet I had to resurrect them to make peace with them. It felt very contrived and unreal.

Your analysis of the problem is spot on, but instead of a De Jure system I'm in favor of an assimilation/rebellion system instead. Recently occupied lands should be a liability during the war, and assimilation should only be possible when at peace. Assimilating recently occupied lands should also be a motivator to make peace for both the Kingdom AI and the player.
I understand what you mean.
In my opinion, and I also say this to the creator of this thread, the "de facto / de jure" mechanics must lean slightly in favor of the "de facto" in the sense that: If X conquers 70% of the territory and negotiates a peace, in the negotiations he must be able to ask to annex all that 70% with the risk of being rejected.
Obviously, the more territory you conquer and annex, the greater the reaction of the other factions must be.
In short: nothing must be prevented automatically. The problem you raised arises because there is no system that prevents you from advancing during the campaign along the enemy territory and as a system to prevent you from erasing them from the face of the earth they have placed this "barrier of the law" that prevents you from saying "everything is mine because I cut everyone's heads off. " The simple "army cohesion" currently in game does not impose a "location" on you, since the cohesion of the army can be identified as "a maximum radius within which one can move from a given point called the center, where we are with that given value of cohesion ". If, on the other hand, one had a support line management system, then this cohesion, or more precisely the ability to advance into enemy territory, would depend on the solidity of one's ability to defend one's support lines and forward them into enemy territory. And such lines would be identified on the map and materially existing.
Furthermore, additional parties and non-assembled armies would make more sense, as they would serve to cover a greater front in order not to be bypassed and hit on the supply lines.
In this case, not only entering enemy territory and maintaining control would be difficult, but what is conquered would be "truly conquered" and then your claims on that territory would be more than fair, because if "on paper it says that the territory does not it's yours "basically" you got it. After that it is up to the other factions to decide whether this claim of yours not supported by the law should be tolerated or not.
The links for the thread with the suggestions I speak of I have inserted above, in case you want to read them.
 
Thank you. But what if that "fast action gameplay" is causing the snowballing? If we decrease the speed of how fast new fiefs are conquered, in theory should decrease snowballing too by giving factions more time to recover.

I was alluding to the point that it appears that TW wants more of an action game in general I guess. They don't seem to be very keen about strategy features.
 
what's stopping the occupying force from taking taxes from the town? law? people refusing to pay? i question the validity of your claim that it happened irl. i believe it has to do with gameplay mechanics not irl stuff.
if you want to stop recruitment from newly conquered settlements and tie it to loyalty, i can understand that but taxes?
maybe they should make having a large garrison in an occupied town a requirement to take taxes before the peace deal? maybe even larger garrison to allow recruitment?
maybe the garrison should still required to do those things after the peace deal if the loyalty is low?
maybe they should also tie militia to loyalty? why would people volunteer to defend a town for a lord whom they're not loyal to?
 
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