As Enlightning Man said:
"The current system is clearly not logical. The problem is, however, that the "perfidious act of war" is always started by the one who doesn't win the province. There is no easy way to tell that this situation is different from any other "no right of way"-situation. We will see what we can do to straighten this out a little."

What if we changed the way right of way was handled?
1) If you arrive in a location where you have no right of way it starts war
2) If you leave a location where you have no right of way nothing happens

This way right of way would behave exactly the same as before, but you would be able to leave a battlefield without starting a war.

The problem I see with this is that one could leave the battlefield on any side, maybe entering territory of the other player that is not well defended.

To make this more clear, let's get back to the situation of the previous thread:
"Let's name our players A, B and C. A owns the province and has some troops in the province city. B and C both have armies fighting the army of A in the city.
A-B war
A-C war
B-C neutral"

When B wins the fight, he will not allow C to pass his troops into roads leading to B's provinces (or in general: where C has no right of way). But B will have no problem if C retreats troops to roads leading to provinces where C has right of way so C can retreat his troops.

Another option that would be much easier to implement would be to give a warning to C before he starts a war.
Thus if C tries to move troops out of the battlefield he gets a message "Moving these troops will be seen as a perfidious act of war! You can avoid this by establishing right of way with B, then you can retreat your troops. Do you want to move them?" or something like that. (this also matches the idea of advisors that someone else posted)

Then nobody could claim they didn't know what would happen...

i dont think its an issue now... ask or give right away and the losing armies leaves without starting a fight...

A and B fight C, B wins and captures the province... well A and B DO NOT automatically fight, they will sit there and have a love in forever if u let them...

its not an issue, and it doesnt result in an automatic fight...
frack, ive had a game where the other player didnt move his troops for almost 2 days and we didnt fight the whole time

im gonna guess that 'real world' if two separate armies (not allied) attacked a third; that after one of them wins, a period of negotiation would occur to ensure that the remaining two armies 'peacefully' parted...

if you dont want to be in that situation, either A withdraw your army prior to combat or B attack with a force large enough to beat the enemy in a timely manner

Nobody said armies should start fighting immediately. Nobody said they do now.

The armies only start to fight when one player moves his forces, for example when the troops are retreated. The point is that you have to know that retreating your troops will start a war if you do not ask for right of way first. Somebody that is unaware of that would retreat his troops in good conscience without the intent to start a war. Then in the DE it says that the person retreating his troops started a war. This is what I guess happened between you and JMax.

I can see your point that nations would negotiate a peaceful retreat. The only problem with that right now is that players don't know they have to negotiate right of way before retreating until this situation has happened to them first.

Do you see why it would be beneficial to change this situation?

no issue with a warning... but that is not what happened between myself and JMAX... and even if it did (which again it didnt), it would only be incidental fighting and not enough justification to break the rules and encourage other players to cheat

you will note in 2822 that on day 6 that i captured fez according to the de at 2:45 am... after i captured fez our forces did not start fighting; as noted in the de he moved his forces (causing a second battle)at 11:51pm... and keep in mind that right way was offered to him at or around 4 am game time...

so our forces stayed side by side without fighting FOR HOURS! then either he moved them or his account was hacked and the troops moved on there own... ill let u guess what is more likely...

you will also note that in the post that i quoted JMAX he doesnt even identify that the 'mechanics of troop movement' as the issue, according to his post the ISSUE is whether or not player B should even be allowed to fight C if player A gets there first and starts an attack...

his original claim is that the first attacking army gets 'exclusive battle rights' (or how ever u want to word it)... so in other words, although my much larger army (107 troops vs 54 of his) traveled for two days to get to the target and arrived on target only four hours after his did... his claim is that he has exclusive rights to attack and I have no right to attempt to capture the province...

which is great if admin wants to do that; set it up so that the first army to attack gets exclusive 'battle rights' and any other army that comes in afterwards is not given the option to fight/battle until the first fight is over... completely unrealistic and dumb in my opinion, but hey thats only my thought...

and if you want to support that concept then why are we fighting for and trying to capture resource based provinces? either the provinces have value or they dont, if they are valuable and capturing the right resources is critical to winning the game then how on hells earth can you say that it is unethical to attempt to capture these resource provinces before a non ally does...

if u like that, then do away with resource based land grabs and make the game more like risk, this way we all get the same resources each day and we only fight to gain a certain number of provinces to win...

Please don't start it again...

The point is not at all about exclusive battle rights (I will delete _every_ post concerning this topic in this thread without fully reading it).

The point is, that there are players out there, especially poor little newbies, that simply do not know that "retreating" in such a situation will cause a war.

That is the whole point here and that is what we have to change. And that is what we will change since Zara has already quite some ideas about finally making it possible to retreat armies. In the meantime I fully agree with pmees when he suggests that giving a warning similar to what you get when giving an attack on a peaceful country, would suffice for the time being.

as much as i disagree, as i think it should be dealt with, i have no control over the deleting of posts... so i think we should get rid of resources in the provinces... go to land grabbing game only (like the game Risk)...

the 'issue' of whether or not its fair for a second player to come in and fight for a contested province has not been settled and its only going to happen again... so if we remove the resources and just fight for strategic positioning then we wont have a reason to fight or argue about when someone has 'rights' of ownership (on a AI province) over all other players...

instead, all players just get a daily allotment of resources based on the number of provinces they own... the more provinces they own the more of each resource they get...

and it would make the game much easier for new players as they wouldnt have to figure out which resources they need to 'get' in order to win... and it would avoid resources fights/battles amoung players... there would be less chance of conflict between players over a simple land grab concept... in addition, weak economic players would find it easier to be competitive as they wont have to worry about trying to figure out how many building/energy provinces they should have


regardless of whether you owed 5 or 50 provinces, the ones u did own would always produce the minimum needed to survive... upgrades would increase the base level by a % as they currently do...

i find it quite funny, cause i always thought it was simple and that you could only claim 'ownership' when a province turned to the color of your country...

31Alpha, I think you are talking besides the point here. We're not discussing who should get what province under what conditions. We're discussing what should happen if two neutral armies try to separate. Currently the game starts a war, which is unlogical behavior. I'm glad to hear the admins will be changing this behavior. As far as I'm concerned that solves the problem.

Concerning your topic, I don't think that there should be something like "exclusive battle rights". So in that matter I agree with you. I hope that can put this "hot" topic to rest now.

I think that if two armies without right of passage meet on the battlefield, the default reaction should be declaration of war/figting.
Let's take the example bellow to illustrate:
Army A is fighting army B. Then army C is showing up on the horizon. How would react army A? They would logically ask their goverment/etat-major if army C is friendly. Not having any right of passage, the goverment/etat-major would not be able to say if army C is friendly or hostile and recommend a defensive reaction (if you come any closer without clarifying your intentions we open fire).
They would surely not invite army C to fight alongside and then start shooting at the army that tries to leave the battlefield. (like it is currently the case).