Simians Vs Sanctuary

[Luc]

At the risk of completely derailing this thread, I don't see how you could have gotten a win against rage. They had no incentive to withdraw being down acres but with stronger military. Bio might have been able to turn the war around, but I doubt it - it was just a matter of time before you'd have had to withdraw anyway. Of course this ties in to everyone's complaint about how war wins are completely meaningless - making a war win chart when it's so advantageous to lose wars is really premature.

You have a perspective issue here though. You consider the war win meaningless because you only care about land. That's not the case for everybody else. If you're not trying to win the nw/land charts, withdrawing with gains is usually not a priority at all. Plenty of kd's would even prefer to not gain a lot of land, since they'd risk growing out of range from other war targets.

It all comes back to the kd goals, and that's the problem. You can't possibly design a system that forces everyone to accept a single definition of a war win. Some kd's want land, so a win for them is gaining land. Others want honor, so a win for them is getting honor. Some care only about the competition, and a win for them is simply forcing someone else to give up. Some only care about denying their enemy of whatever it is they want. Land is a bad measure for most kd's, because they have no chance of charting anyway, so why should they give a ****? Honor at least has positive effects for your provinces. I'd say most kd's war because they want honor and to force someone else to give up.

I'd argue that if a kd that wants land wars a kd that wants honor, they can both win a war at the same time. Who gets the war win on the kd page is irrelevant, because their definitions of what's a win differs. Each kd will decide for themselves if they won the war or not, because the game can't ever do it with any credibility. If you have a clear goal, and you achieve that goal, you've won. For a lot of kd's, the war win on the kd page means you've forced your enemy to give up, and if both kd's had the goal of doing that, the number itself actually has meaning.

I suspect we don't really disagree about much of this, so I dunno why I'm writing all this :P