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Territory Warring - a Incentive to fight.
I want to bring up something I've been thinking about for a while regarding Territory Warring, Raiding and the way faction politics currently work in Torn.
This isn't about making Territory Wars easier, nor is it about preventing alliances from working together. Alliances are part of Torn and always will be. And people who knows me, knows where I stand in regards to alliances.
The question is whether the current mechanics actually encourage factions to fight each other — or encourage them not to.
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Remove Raiding.
Raiding is probably one of the least used forms of faction warfare in Torn, and I think there's a reason for that.
There is very little positive value in actually starting one. And Torn has evolved away from this type of warfare over the years.
You don't raid another faction to gain territory. You don't raid them for Ranked War rewards. You don't gain respect from the attacks. The entire mechanic is fundamentally destructive — you sacrifice your own potential respect gains in order to remove more of somebody else's respect. Whats the point, if this can be exploited to pin down areas on the map and make a stalemate kind of warring environment among factions. No movements, no nothing and people now complain about a boring warless Torn City.
So what purpose does Raiding realistically serve today?
Most of the time, its biggest value isn't actually using it. It's the threat of using it. And I believe this has an unintended negative effect on Territory Warring simply because Alliances can use it to avoid 1 solo strong faction or smaller alliances from assaulting their territories.
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Territory Warring should create conflict and content.
Territories are one of the few faction systems where there is something physical on the map that factions can actually fight over, that should naturally create conflict. Faction A owns something Faction B wants, Faction B assaults it and Faction A defends it.
Maybe Faction A's allies help them. Maybe Faction B brings allies of their own. Faction B wins the territory.
Faction A retaliates by attacking one of Faction B's territories and so on.
Suddenly you have rivalry, politics, alliances and actual wars developing naturally. That is the content right.
But Raiding gives alliances another option.
Instead of responding through Territory Warring, a sufficiently powerful alliance can effectively make the consequence of attacking the faction much larger than the Territory War itself. (See back to when HT got attacked by nameless alliances and NS interfered or when Monarch Punished Damaged INC with a raid for something they did during a Territory war).
The question for a smaller faction or smaller alliance therefore stops being:
"Can we take this territory?" --> "What happens to us afterwards if we take this territory?" or "What happens to us afterwards if we fail?".
That distinction matters. The threat can be stronger than the mechanic itself. This is where I think Raiding hurts Territory Warring despite raids themselves being relatively uncommon. A mechanic doesn't have to be frequently used to influence player behaviour or in this case faction behavior.
If attacking the wrong territory risks escalating into several factions raiding you, then the rational choice for many factions is simply not to attack. So instead of creating conflict, the system can reinforce the existing status quo. Large alliances control areas of the map. Smaller factions understand the potential consequences of challenging them.
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What happens if Raiding disappears?
This is where I think the interesting part starts. Removing Raiding does not remove retaliation, It changes how retaliation happens.
"You took our territory?" --> "Fine, We'll take yours."
"Your allies helped you!" --> "Fine. Our allies will help us."
"You pushed into our part of the map! We'll push back into yours."
Suddenly the most effective way of settling faction disputes becomes fighting over territory.
And isn't that exactly what Territory Warring should be designed to achieve?
Instead we have: Territory attack → Raid threat → Don't attack again.
You create: Territory attack → Retaliation → Counterattack → Escalation → Rivalries → More Territory Wars.
This doesn't remove alliance power or alliances in general. They could coordinate walls, reinforce each other, control strategically important territories and retaliate against factions attacking their members by dropping chain bonus hits on their factions. Nothing prevents that.
But instead of having a separate destructive mechanic hanging over everyone, alliances would have to exercise more of that power through the territory system itself. It creates more contested territories, It gives alliances reasons to attack each other.
It gives independent factions more reason to take risks and attack bigger alliances.
And most importantly, it gives the City Map a reason to actually change. Even if current Territory warring with fake walls are as they are.
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IB as an example.
I'll use my own faction IB as a example, because obviously I can only speak confidently about our own decisions.
We're willing to fight factions significantly larger than ourselves, We're willing to lose. We will adapt, evolve and come back again.
For us, losing a Territory War isn't necessarily a problem. That's part of the game.
What changes the calculation is when attacking one faction potentially means dealing with retaliation from an entire alliance or the strongest faction in game through a completely separate destructive mechanic. And specially if it means to attack the very top and force them to work for their Rackets and Territories, win or lose.
Without Raiding, I'd personally be far more willing to look at the map and think:
"Fuck it. Let's attack them and see how they react and if they fight back."
And I suspect we're not the only faction that would think this way. The funny thing is that removing a war mechanic could potentially result in more actual wars, even with the fake walls and such being a big problem (this could very well be sorted out in the future).
Raiding had a purpose — but does it still improve Torn in a positive and content creating way?
When Raiding was originally introduced, it was explicitly designed as Torn's destructive form of warfare. The concept was that factions could seriously damage another faction's respect, potentially even destroying it.
And mechanically that's still basically what it is today. Torn's official wiki describes Raiding as purely destructive, So perhaps the question shouldn't be whether Raiding technically works as intended.
It clearly does.
The better question is: Does having this mechanic produce better faction warring gameplay today?
Because if a rarely used destructive mechanic indirectly discourages factions from engaging with a system that could generate considerably more wars, politics and player-driven content, perhaps Torn would benefit more without it?