Suggestion: War Goals

[Goosius1]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

• SiegeWar is now quite effective at supporting HOW wars are conducted.
• However it currently provides no support at all for WHY wars are conducted.
• It has become evident over time, that is an important area where Towny warfare could be improved:
  • Toxicity:
  • In most war-servers today, roleplaying is not strictly enforced, nor is that realistically possible.
  • Thus, when players make geopolitical decisions, they often merge in their minds the concept of real-life-relations with geopolitical-relations.
  • This is toxic because geopolitical enemies come to be seen as personal enemies, leading to bad vibes and bullying.
  • Staleness:
    • The same dynamic causes geopolitical staleness, because geopolitical friends come to be seen as personal friends, and nations become unwilling to turn on each other even when it makes sense geopolitically.
    • Geopolitical staleness is further exacerbated if a server has set their material war-costs to be high (e.g. loss of inventory on death, big plunder on siege loss). In this setup, personal alliances are cemented by a tendency for nations to gravitate towards snowballing mega-alliances. These alliances thus become unbreakable and static etc.
  • Absurd Wars:
    • Sometimes a group will make war on another simply because it wishes to fight in PVP. (e.g. a PVP clan)
    • In this scenario there is neither a Roleplaying nor Geopolitical motivation for the attack.
    • Naturally for any players who signed up to a server for RP or GeoPol, this type of war is an absurdity, and will demotivate them from playing on the server.

Describe the solution you'd like

• Automatically provide War Goals for individual nations
  • These are things like "Capture 2 towns from Nation X"
• War Goals will be automatically changed by the server every 2 weeks or so
• War Goals must be followed or some punishment will result.
• Any nation which conducts war outside of their set goals, will be punished.
• War goals should help ensure that:
  • There is less drive to perceive geopolitical enemies as personal enemies. Because the system decides who your key geopolitical enemies should be,
  • There is less drive to perceive real-life friends as geopolitical friends. Because the system decides who your key geopolitical friends should be.
  • Absurd wars are discouraged, since wars outside the system-determined goals will be punished.
  • Consider having "public war goals" and "secret war goals" to encourage a healthy amount of suspicion and backstabbing etc. moo hoo ha haaa
  • In implementing this idea, it will be important (as always) to be careful of players exploiting it. In particular, try to ensure that real-life friends end up genuinely competing ... rather than say simply surrendering sieges without fighting .... Think further on this bit.
  • Possibly utilize a single-prize pattern, where at the end of a particular period (e.g. 2 weeks), only ONE of the friends can receive the prize.
    • Such a prize would have to be non-transferrable.
    • Perhaps a money gift to each individual player in the team
    • Perhaps a chest of items which have no effect if used by players from other teams (e.g. armour does not protect, potions do not work)
    • Or some long-term/permanent benefit to the nation(s)on that team, such as a claims bonus.

Describe alternatives you've considered N/A

Additional context

• A hint of this idea can be found in popular calls for player-determined, free text "war goals", to "justify" particular sieges. But this idea is worse than a band-aid, because it simply forces attackers who don't have goals to make them up, and make public the nonsense reasons, which I predict would only further increasing toxicity.

[Goosius1]

This feature is on hold for now, as I am pursuing another method of providing the WHY, but we may return to this idea at a later date.

[Goosius1]

• The TownyResources plugin was recently released, which provides good non-toxic war objectives.
• However it is not the last word in war objectives.
• Some form of automatic matchups/objectives may still be a good addition
• There's probably very little chance of this being implemented soon, due to time capacity of the SW team.
• However I see no reason to rule out this idea as an optional feature, so I'm removing the "won't fix" label, and perhaps in the far future it might be picked up.