On Unjust War and Community Recourse

The OP starts this thread by quoting opk referring to genocide and comparing the thrashing of an alliance to a person in danger. On the face of it this sounds reasonable but in reality it is a comfortable trap. Comparing digital actions and digital consequences to real life is enticing and easy but unfounded. Not one person is dying from the actions of anyone playing Illyriad.

opk goes on to say that a civilized, democratic player base should and does have a vested interest in the outcome of this "person's" predicament. First of all, we are not democratic. We are consumers. The only vote we get is to buy into the premise wholly designed and offered by the Dev's. Perhaps, of the two terms "civilized" has the best chance of applying somewhere but it's a stretch. We can be polite on our keyboards but there is just too much room for interpretation in the key strokes.

The OP uses the opk quote to frame an argument for community activism. This concept is attractive to some players. It's true that many members of the community watch for "foul and unjust" actions and rally others to do something about it but in truth the community is fractured and rarely gets behind a single idea. As T_D rightly points out the only impact the community has is moving armies.

There is a real disconnect going on with Hath and Co. and unless they reign in their egos there won't be anything anyone in the community can do to save them.

Yeah, Illy should remove siege machines and replace them with unhappy birdies or digital pets that need to be cared for routinely.  Maybe more farm activities.

if you remove war i know about 300 people that would quit right away..

well thats your opinion :)

I believe the devs fully intend to support this play style with the Care Bear Forest in Broken Lands. From a purely practical standpoint, it's probably impossible to retrofit a Care Bear Forest into Elgea because the land mass is already broadly occupied, people have built cities to rely on sovereignty, and alliances have established broad zones of regional control.

I think the siege mechanics are also generally fair. It's possible to lose a city, but how many have really been lost? It seems to me that if you siege a determined defender, you've got to commit at least a half million troops. There's nothing casual about mobilizing that many large players against a single target for several days (including travel time). The attackers are also committing--and often losing--a huge amount of resources and build time, represented by their troops, maintenance cost and support sov.

I'm not commenting on the rationale or fairness of the war itself, but I don't really think that battle mechanics themselves are broken.