King's Peace / Vassal Wars crown law group overhaul

[zijistark]

King's Peace laws, thanks to EMF's scripted trigger hooks into all of its CBs, have the relatively unique property of it not even being necessary to use the hard-coded implementation of them; we already don't for vassal kings, since the hard-coded implementation allows them to skirt the law freely on external realm targets. Thus, we can do more with these crown laws than, say, Protected Inheritance or Free Infidel Title Revocation.

I propose expanding the law group from the current None -> Internal -> Complete (which all require Absolute CA) to:

King's Peace: None -> Very Limited -> Limited -> Internal -> Limited External -> Complete

On the Very Limited and Limited settings, which would be available at Medium and High CA respectively, the liege may demand that warring direct vassals whitepeace (and indirect vassals with Limited).

This would be event-driven (after the initial targeted decision to demand that they stop -- they'd get an alert that it was available, BTW). Based upon numerous factors, they may refuse (e.g., if they hate the liege and are about to win anyway). The liege might try to spend a favor or similar to convince them. On Very Limited, they are more likely to refuse. Perhaps if they refuse on Limited, the liege might gain a righteous reason to revoke one of the titles, if any, gained in the war -- except not the normal way, it'd revoke the title from the attacker and then auto-redistribute it to the prior title holder. Or he could just gain an imprisonment reason on the attacker (but applied after the war, or else that could be silly).

At the Internal setting, available at Absolute CA (the current case too), such internal realm war declarations (i.e., attacker & defender under the same crown law title holder and, implicitly, in the same realm-- with the attacker and defender both being required to actually be under a crown law title with Internal or higher) are completely blocked. This is more or less the law we have in place for king_peace_1 except that it'd not auto-block war declarations on vassals subject to a different crown law title which does not have at least the Internal law. Makes players think twice about holding kingdoms and empires at the same time, and generally makes things more challenging if you're a king with multiple kingdom titles.

At Limited External (this could really use a better name, I think), available at Absolute CA once you already have Internal, we block external realm war declarations by all vassals with a few exceptions. Namely, vassal kings, landed relatives and friends could still declare external realm wars.

In this case, I'd like to have the attacker send a letter to their crown law title holder effectively asking for endorsement of the external war they've just started. [I guess this is a thing we could do on Limited too, but it'd be spammy, and there's a lot less legal pretense for seeking endorsement.] If the crown law title holder refuses to endorse the war, the attacker may try to spend a favor or similar in return to get it, but otherwise except in extreme circumstances (e.g., rivalry), they'll acquiesce to lack of endorsement and their war will be invalidated.

At Complete, available at Absolute CA after Limited External, all wars -- internal and external -- are automatically blocked unconditionally, with of course the implicit exception throughout this issue description that vassals may always declare war on their de facto liege.

Does this seem like something people would like? What kind of modifications would you make to my proposal? Suggestions?

[zijistark]

Just trying to flesh-out how these more granular settings of the King's Peace laws would work. Here's some thoughts on a "Limited Peace" option. Nothing groundbreaking but thinking it through.

What do we think is a reasonable stepping of this expanded law group before what is currently known as Internal King's Peace? That is, what should the ruleset be for a "Limited" option (which requires much less Crown Authority to unlock, probably around Medium CA)?

The big difference here between "Limited" and regular internal realm peace is that the wars won't be outright blocked. Vassals will still wage war like usual on each other for the most part (let's just assume entirely like normal).

Since it's technically against the law to wage war on other vassals but said law has little authority, I think the attacker should at least risk getting a righteous reason to imprison (but not execute, banish, etc.) opinion from his liege / the crown law title holder (should the liege choose to apply it via event -- if the liege doesn't care or even wants the vassal to win, obviously they wouldn't pursue such an option).

So what happens when a vassal declares war on some other vassal illegally?

We can't spam the liege about this stuff every time, because this will happen plenty. Thus, either the liege might get an alert about it (i.e., a named high-priority targeted decision to try to enforce the law against the [potentially multiple] vassal wars could appear), or they simply need to pay attention. I'm in favor of the latter; they should probably just need to pay attention. OK, let's assume that for this discussion.

The liege should be able to target any vassal war attacker with a new diplo-interaction for essentially "Enforce Peace" (but needs a different name due to Conclave's 'Enforce Realm Peace'). Taking/sending the decision basically means "I want this guy to quit his war ASAP, and my default disposition on the matter is quite unhappy, because he's broken the law."

At this point, the attacker receives a letter from the liege indicating that he's invoking the [limited] internal peace law. Valid responses might be:

• Fine, fuck you, try to imprison me. I'm doing this. [Ignore liege request.]
• Try to bribe with literal gold.
• Try to bribe by offering to owe a favor.
• Acquiesce.

In the bribery cases, the liege must first accept, of course, but assuming he does, in all 3 cases but the 1st, the war will end in automatic white peace. However, if the defender has highly positive warscore (>50%) at the time, it should end in a reverse_demand.

I feel like powerful vassals and/or councillors shouldn't be subject to quite the same treatment perhaps. Indeed, perhaps the ultra-limited peace law simply doesn't apply to them. Thoughts on that part anyone?

Other concerns:

• We could end up giving out a lot of righteous imprisonment reasons here (and possible event-assisted actual imprisonment attempt with a relatively high degree of success when the vassal refuses to stop). This could stick a lot of vassals over time in prison. OTOH, this isn't terribly dangerous without righteous title revocation (or worse) reasons too.