War and conflict can't and IMHO shouldn't be expected to be driven
just by roleplay though. Or if it was pretty much everyone involved would have to be a power hungry control freak or bored, self-destructive psychopath...though there are of course more than enough of the latter in the game.
If instead you're playing a realistic character you might get all worked up about a personal situation but you're at some point going to have some practical thoughts about your wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around you before resorting to openly murdering people whose friends are capable of murdering you back. If there were an actual objective reason or something to be gained by attacking another town I guess you could always use that as an excuse to drum up support for your personal crusade, but...there's really not, ever. Even assuming you won a complete victory with no chance of retribution, you've just taken your handful of active citizens, killed off the target's handful of active citizens, and now have all you've done is lost half your population because they need to stay there to occupy an empty town full of stuff you don't need.
I've played unscrupulous characters with lots of ambition before, in fact I'm playing one right now, but they're usually smart enough not to tip their hand too early. Why risk it all starting an open conflict when you can get literally everything you want with a little flattery and at most a private murder or two somewhere down the road? I've had characters who have been fully equipped the first day of spawning and handed keys within a week. In my experience most towns have more vehicles, buildings, and resources than they know what to do with and are only too happy to give them away - so what rational human being is going to risk their life fighting for something they can get for free?
Now if I had a character in a forest or on a mountain with a chronic food shortage and the potato farming neighbors were for whatever reason refusing or ignoring or outright taking advantage of our attempts at trade, THAT would be a strong incentive for even 'good' characters to march to war. But of course resource shortages in this game are basically unheard of so there's never even a remote chance of anything like that ever happening. v:|v
Though I play non-bloodthirsty characters for the most part, it's because I really do find it more realistic, interesting, and IMO helpful for the 'society sim' part of the game than the alternative with the way major conflicts usually play out now. I enjoy diplomacy and working out agreements, or around them...of course I get very few chances to actually do anything with that because there aren't many conflicts to mediate, and when someone does decide their character is a trouble maker who believes or acts a certain way they're usually going to hold onto that without compromise even in the face of death.
But it's fun sometimes just having characters break laws sometimes to see if they can weasel out of the consequences so at least there's that.
And then there's the sad fact that you can't stir up much trouble in a town if there isn't much of a town to begin with. Sure I could click everyone in a tiny community to death, but then there'd just be one more ghost town and that's not interesting for anybody. Stick it out there though and try to help it grow and you create an environment to support future RP. Boring as it may sound, I've even begun to feel like EXCITING!!!! roleplay and drama are overrated...everybody's got their disabled character or their sociopath character or their slutty character or their ambitious character or whatever their quirk is, what we don't have a lot of are reliable workers that are needed to keep towns from stagnating. (it's far too late for businesses, I used to love having characters try to start them until I realized supply and demand isn't really a thing that works in Cantr anymore, if it ever did)
