Quote:
Frabby writes:

Ares Conventions.
Answered (with link) over at the BattleTech forum.

No link made it.

The Ares Conventions were introduced in the 2300s and suspended in the 2570s, then officially repudiated by the Houses in 2787. Their cover sheet basically said, "don't use WMDs on habitable planets," "try not to kill civilians," and "be cool to POWs."

The full, detailed Ares Conventions turned warfare into a nearly-bloodless game - the Ares Conventions' phase of the Age of War (2312 to 2570) killed about as many people as the 2-year Fourth Succession War, and the Fourth Succession War didn't breakout the WMD party favors like the early Succession Wars. There were timeouts and forces were willing to surrender when sufficiently outmaneuvered, i.e., when checkmated.

The First and Second Succession Wars (2787-2822 and 2826-2864, give or take) broke out all the big guns. Over 200 Inner Sphere planets were nuked off the planet. Interstellar civilization was almost brought to its knees because the Houses worked so hard to destroy each other's JumpShips and critical factories.

The Third Succession War and most later wars brought back more restrained conflicts because everyone was so traumatized by the early wars. There were no official international treaties behind this that everyone agreed to like the Ares Conventions, but the new rules were generally, "No WMDs," and "try to preserve rare technology like JumpShips." This was quite different than the Ares Conventions, which would let you nuke a military JumpShip in deep space. The modern, unwritten rules of war were often quite bloodier - the 4th Succession War was a pretty clean war, but still killed a lot more people than the Age of War under the Ares Conventions, something like 100 million dead in 2 years.

Mercenaries have tried to enforce a code of behavior that uses the cover sheet of the Ares Conventions: be nice to prisoners, don't use WMDs on habitable planets, try not to kill civilians. However, they don't use the full Conventions or their fights would be nearly bloodless, and they're not.

Quote:
ghostrider writes:

But to show you how well they were followed, Sun Tzu Liao's sister Kali used nerve agent against the St. Ives Compact and nothing was ever really done about it. He used the revived Star League defense forces to avoid others from interferring with his attacks.
They blamed the cult she was part of, but she was not convicted, and he was not charged.
Standard politics?