There is no justification for your assertion that the hordes would, if such a situation arose, accept a ceasefire either, that is also fact. Unless, of course, you have some evidence you haven't chosen to share.
That has never been the crux of my argument. Why do you people continue to act as though it is? My whole point has been that we cannot know if the hordes would necessarily do either one. Thus, we cannot rule out the possibility that they would. It's as simple as that.
You are the one arguing for a change in the game system. As the one advocating a change, the burden of proof is yours to show that:
a) the system, as is, is wrong from a historic point of view; and that your proposed change while correcting a historical error, does so without harm to the game playability/difficulty etc.
It isn't so much "wrong" per se, as "unknowable." It's a guess from the dev team that seems to lack justification. My gut instinct is that the only absolute that can be accepted is that there are no absolutes - and thus, the statement that they ABSOLUTELY would not accept a white peace (current system) cannot be accepted as true.
Further, you're not taking this back far enough. Wasn't the same burden on the dev team in implementing this measure in the first place? THAT is why I have a problem with this whole "you have the burden of proof because you're changing the system!" thing. The very implementation of the DW horde mechanics was itself a major change, but there's no historical reason to assert that they would never accept a white peace. Thus, this aspect of the system shouldn't even be here to *be* changed.
b) the system, as is, is not functional from a playability standpoint; and that your proposed change will correct this without doing undue harm to the underlying historic framework of the game, difficulty, etc.
You overstate the burden. I don't have to demonstrate that it is dysfunctional, only that my proposed change would improve the playability of the game and/or enjoyment of the players without doing damage to the historicity of the setting being changed. As I've maintained throughout, my change is not determinably more or less historic than the default setting, because we cannot conjecture effectively as to what would be historically accurate. However, as I've demonstrated earlier, this change would do no harm to playability or enjoyment and could only have potential to improve both. Thus, I've satisfied (b).
You cannot argue effectively that there is evidence supporting the argument that hordes would make wp with non-hordes. This means you are presumably arguing case b.
While your isolated incident may well call for the possibility of such a resolution, you must remember that putting wp as an option in a peace agreement is not conditional, either it is there or not. You can't say "well when this happens you can make wp with a horde" it is either available always or never. So, does adding wp as an option always available to participants in a horde vs non-horde war do more undue harm to the historic basis and/or intended difficulty of the game than leaving the current issue unresolved. I think most would argue that it clearly does so.
Well, firstly, it cannot damage the historic basis of the game, because the option is always up to the players to decide whether to utilize the white peace. If you personally felt that the historic basis of the game would be damaged by accepting a horde's white peace, you can reject it every single time without a problem. If you personally felt it wouldn't, you can accept it (or not) without fear of losing that basis.
Secondly, given how delusional the AI is about white peaces in the first place, I would highly doubt that it could damage the difficulty of the game. I covered that back on the first page; I believe that the AI's stubbornness in peace deals is an accurate reflection of the stubbornness of the leaders at the time, and so any arguments from horde's honor obsession can be covered by this innate stubbornness as it is. The AI isn't going to offer/accept a white peace unless (a) there really isn't any fighting between you two, or (b) it's clearly not going to get anything better out of you. So if you're struggling at all against the AI, it's unlikely you'll get a white peace from them, horde or not. Because you would only reasonably get a white peace in a situation where you have the upper hand or aren't fighting, it can't be said that inserting the white peace would make it less difficult; you'd just have odd situations like the one I've been citing resolved without unnecessary complications.
At this point it is for the devs to decide whether to make a change based on your particular proposal. Since they have already specifically NOT done anything to change the case where you have no option to end a horde war when said horde is 100% occupied by another nation other than concede defeat/offer tribute I think it's pretty safe to say your chances with this smaller subset of that case are pretty slender.
Indeed it is at that point - I don't think it's slender, per se, because there's a number of reasons that could explain why they haven't done it yet, but yes, it's their call right now. Where do I go to bring this to their attentions again? I believe you said before but I've forgotten...
No, largely because the numbers telling the AI to make a white peace if it could is very meaningless, merely a holdover from using the same calculations that it would use if they were a civilized nation.
Not at all! After all, they use those calculations to determine whether or not to white peace between hordes. It can't just be argued that this is a holdover - it still actively gets used to determine actual white peaces for inter-horde fights, not just whether one could be accepted between a horde and nonhorde!
The little tell at the bottom of the screen isn't exactly foolproof either, as I've had it say an offer was acceptable with no terms, but they still wouldn't accept a whitepeace, and even the occasional where it says terms were unacceptable until I added terms.
That first one means they wouldn't actually accept it - I've seen it before, the instant you add a term and remove it, you'll see whether they would accept a white peace. I would assume likewise in reverse, add a term and remove it to see the actual result. (I haven't seen this latter occasion myself, but it would make sense that it's analogous to the first one, which I have seen plenty of times.) And yes, for the record, I did add and remove a term to check if it were actually a white peace or not. It should be taken as a given that the AI would accept a white peace in this situation; I haven't determined this in error. The argument is about whether or not they should be allowed to accept it.
Such a assumption would be unwarranted. 1) was solved by claiming that there is no analogue and thus irrelevant to take history into equation. This is a cop-out and a refusal to even approach the mind-set of the East- and Near-Asiatic tribes.
It is *not* a cop-out. You know, and I know, very very well, that the situation I posted is entirely a result of the abstraction that naturally follows from this game. Land is divided into rigid province boundaries which gets colonized and at an exact point of settlement population (1000 people), all the land in the territory flips ownership. These divisions are arbitrary, some moreso than others. It is a necessary act of arbitration to make the game function at all. But it makes no sense in reality to just arbitrarily flip an arbitrarily-divided chunk of land from "nomadic" to "Mamluk" or "Byzantine" or whichever. In reality, if this had taken place, we would say that the Mamluks settled the southern Caucasus/northern Iranian lands after successfully beating back the Timurids. The one spot there would not be inhabited by Timurids, but would be left uninhabited, awaiting Mamluk habitation. We would say that the Mamluks were expanding into this one final stretch of uninhabited land the Timurids used to roam in, a stretch of land that bordered the boundary which the Byzantines would claim as sovereign.
To then say "Therefore, because the Byzantines' border touches this uninhabited piece of land which used to have Timurids in it and was slowly being settled by Mamluks, Byzantium was at war with the Timurids" is absurd. There wouldn't be a war until the Timurids came back and reclaimed the land, then marched on Byzantium. The entire notion of even *being* at war would be ludicrous. It just would not be a war, plain and simple. And it is just not possible to speculate with any credibility that the Timurids would not only consider themselves at war with Byzantium but would refuse to stop considering themselves at war with Byzantium. No amount of glimpsing into their mindset with scholarly evidence is going to produce any scenario that's remotely analogous to the game abstraction, analogous enough, at least, for reasonable conjecture about how they would have acted. It isn't that the history is irrelevant, it's that if we're honest with ourselves, we can't say what they would do in this hypothetical abstraction, because that abstraction is too far removed from reality to build a reaction from how they acted in reality.
The proposal raised in 2), I responded to by claiming that added options used at the players discretion is flawed since it is changes the idea of games as rule-set you use to it's max effect. This "option system" does not even take into account that the AI is unable to ignore a beneficial option and it might completely crash the current set-up. If a country is at war with 6 countries, it will always seek WP with a few because the standard AI believes peace is the natural state. However, Hordes are not meant to think in this way and giving them the option of WP (which they will use) would -- most likely -- annihilate the concept of the constant threat that is your tribal neighbor.
...but if they're overwhelmed by wars with everyone and looking for white peace, then by definition, they're no longer a threat anyway. That's the reason it works. The AI at present does not ask for a white peace unless it either recognizes it must get peace somewhere to keep from total annihilation or it recognizes that you're not fighting at all and haven't been for years. In the first case, to refuse to allow hordes to white peace would mean that you think hordes would not seek to stop their own imminent annihilation. I submit that this is not a reasonable understanding of the hordes. In the second case, you're not fighting - in reality, this would mean you're not at war. Signing a white peace to end a "war" that doesn't really exist might seem a bit awkward when discussing hordes, sure, but it makes more sense to have a ceasefire than to have one side or the other concede that it "lost" a "war" that didn't really exist. In either case, the white peace option is clearly beneficial.
And, again, I must assert that if you personally believe you should never white peace with hordes in order to capture the full gaming experience, that option is not taken away! It is still always within your power to refuse white peaces offered to you. So you lose nothing from this proposal, nor does anyone else from your position. It just enhances the gaming experience for those of us who feel this system would be improved by this feature.
At this point, I think it's clear that you do not want the revise even the sillies of arguments like "the Timurids want peace because the old code says so."
That's clearly not what I've said at any point in here. It's not just "the old code" that you can haphazardly dismiss; it's still actively used for nonhorde-nonhorde, horde-horde, and horde-nonhorde. I've further made extensive arguments detailing why this would be beneficial, and I would appreciate more than your extremely disrespectful straw men in responding to my statements.