It has been said that territorial conflict is a key feature for the upcoming MMO. "Battles" between Kingdoms to fight over land that they both claim is a core concept that will drive Realm v. Realm action.
However, we have also been told that monuments are the method for improving the size of territorial holdings for a realm.
post42506/#p42506The numbers show that clans will be able to control only 85 cells from their monument in any direction, at the maximum possible size of their realm (the Tier 4 "Glorious Monument.")
That means that walking from the very north tip of a realm, to the very south tip of a realm, is only 170 cells. A cell is 2x2 meters, which would figure that the largest possible realm is less than .4 kilometers across, a distance that someone jogs in two minutes time, or sprints in one.
The world is planned to be 21x21km. That is 441,000,000 square meters (or 110,250,000 cells.) Even if a full half of this was water, there would still be over 55 million cells of land.
You don't need to see the sheer size of the numbers to see why this might be a problem - Try to imagine how many people are going to opt to build realms within a few hundred meters of one another - Not many.
There is an immediate problem that there will likely almost never be a realm that touches another realms territory unless people consciously choose to build right next to one another. They *might* happen every now and again, but not enough to build gameplay around.
Certainly, it would be unfortunate to build a really nice city out in the mountains, become a powerful realm, and have no reason to battle for territory because nobody else lives within a couple hundred meters!
Without frequent abutting borders there won't be battles over territorial control, and as far as I know the territorial control system has never been explained to include any method of border expansion beyond upgrading your monument.
Is there some other mechanic for expanding a realms territory beyond upgrading a cities monument? What plans do the devs have to create, and provide incentive for, conflict? Is there some other reason to declare battles beyond territory conflict and bragging rights?