Just want to get peoples views on this:
Should anything be done to the game mechanics to discourage this or at least make it harder to do? (for alliance)
And by early wars I mean like week 1 maybe week 2...

Please answer one of:
yes
no it's a political problem
no things are fine the way they are
~~~~

Early wars happen because FSs are too powerful. If FSs are made less powerful, the need to be the one getting the FS because much less important, so people can afford to wait longer and risk getting FSd.

The problem is that FSs are too powerful, early wars are only a symptom of that problem, not a problem themselves.

Most of the "early war" crying is a way for people to complain that they weren't ready. Alliances that aren't flexible to the change in reset to reset politics will always have a difficult time if things don't go 100% according to plans. If you change this they will simply find something new to complain about.

If there is a change to game mechanics restricting "early warring", it shouldn't be more than 7 days OOP.

Yes: only for the first 7 days OOP.

no things are fine the way they are

yes

We already have protection until turn 100 clocks over.

I like it the way it is.

no it's a political problem

The game was design to have protection till turn 99. There are many ways to 'war' or 'net' countless perhaps. OOP war is just one of them. It is much less enjoyable for netters as its a really sucky way to play. Not much cash or tech or military or land and stuff like that. But this IS how the game works. People may not like it, but that by no means its broken.

Political issue..

Personally, I think we've made too many changes to the game already.

Its something that I dont think even the warring alliances like. Perhaps it is political, but at least removing some of the effectiveness of a super early FS would persuade alliances to revert back to later wars.

If you want the game to grow, the issue will be addressed regardless of if its politically fuelled or not, as all early FS'es achieve is demoralising players to the extent that they just stop playing.

See my sig, it summarizes the whole purpose of early wars.

i think it goes both ways

as a netgaining alliance leader, we were getting demoralized by blindside FSes from warring ones.

we couldn't do anything about it for the longest time.

we now found something that the warring alliances didn't like (early wars) and giving them a taste of their own medicine in an attempt to force a mutual agreement.

i think we are finally getting through and talks are on the table now.

let's hope something good can come out of it

i think the physics of the game shouldn't be effected by political or religious beliefs.

physics?

mechanics would be a better word?

I wasn't aware that the game had any kind of physics engine:p

regarding weakening fs globally I think that's probably subject to a separate discussion.

Its not separate. The reason for early FSs is to make sure you are the one getting the FS, which occurs because FSs are too powerful. If it was easier to withstand a FS and hit back, people wouldn't be in such a rush to make sure they get the FS.

Well any solution that would dissuade early wars would have to weaken an fs, at least early on in the set. But that can probably be done without weakening fs after a certain number of days for example...

DIE ALL

i prefer to TAP ALL.
has something to do with my MANLY MAN attitude.
i don't want anything stuck in my die.

I personally don't like early wars because it feels like the wars go on forever if it's not a straight up gangbang and dealt with quickly. On the other side of the sword, if you're on the losing side you end up getting farmed for weeks until the set restarts.

Early wars have had their purpose in the past though, and I think that they should still be allowed and unaltered. The most recent early war I organized was to basically beat up on SOL after they wiped the floor with us the previous set. We came back and lost, but we fluffed their countries for the eventual later war. That was very satisfying. :P

The point is, most alterations that have been suggested to make FSes less powerful, kills take longer, wars more gimped all hurt the small and midsized alliances the most.

And before any of you say "recruit and get bigger" all I can say to you is it's hard to recruit when your alliance introduction basically says "prepare to die every set, multiple times".

does the game enforce pacting yet?

should be a set period of time to set up pacts, then the game should enforce the rules for that type of pact.

it is a political issue, and sometimes is an alliances only shot at beating someone.

what would help the game is adding some type of official in game war declaration between alliances, much like utopia has with declaring war on another kingdom.

this way you could also code in something that puts an alliance at an increasing disadvantage based on how many more members that alliance has over the alliance they attacked. this way no matter the numbers difference it would help make fights more fair. coming up with such a thing might be complicated in order for it to not be able to be exploited.

Fine the way it is...

i think all attacking should be removed from the game!

be a hugger not a slugger

boo @ game supported/enforced politics.

What it really is that makes this game great is its simplicity in mechanics, leaving everything else (politics/strat) up to the players, adding depth to the game much like a game of poker.

One of the reasons why I dislike gdi 2.0

get rid of the external game feeds and it'll be more simplistic.

fog of war. force the idiots to develop their own intel.

take out GS BR and AB attacks from the game until a certain number of turns has turned over.

I think it is a political problem, not a game mechanics problem.

I don't mind change in general though, as long as we know and can plan in advance. For example, enable only SS and PS attacks for the first week perhaps and GS/BR/AB don't get enabled until later?

political problem, not a fault of the game

they don't op for land kills during the first week or two?

Martian, there are a few MAJOR ways of preventing early wars, or weakening the FSes, but you have to be prepared for radical changes.



A) If a country loses 30% of his NW, he becomes immune to all attacks except countries that he has attacked in the last 24 hours, which may retal until the country loses 50% of his NW. You can define "% NW loss" as being divided against the max NW attained in the last 24 hours, and only NW loss from defending and harmful spyops are counted.

Declare War will NOT work around this, as the whole point of it is to limit damages to a country, but a organized clan can still organize chain gangbangs on a country to further weaken it by 30% everyday, necessitating a completely new warring style, focused on crippling.

This will also limit damages that can be done by a smaller suicider, and also limit the amount of times a large country can bottomfeed a smaller one. Many games have some sort of immunity system to prevent being griefed. It is NOT fun to lose 2 months of work in a few minutes, or wake up and see it ruined to pieces with no chance of decent recovery.



B) The focus on FSing an alliance can be shifted away by making kills less worthwhile, by allowing countries to restart with a portion (say 20%) of their previous country's stuff with 100 turn protection. This will force wars to focus on effective crippling during a kill because if you do not cripple a country enough, he could still have an effective mid-sized country on returning 2 days later.

There will be very little incentive to kill a 500k NW country to have it return with 100k that can build back to 500k within the 100 turn protection.

This will make GSes less useful though, so this can be offset by making GSes kill 10 civs and BRs kill 5 civs (ie. swap the civ killing values) or some other proportion. Or make GSes destroy 1% tech or something as well (i.e it can be changed to destroy some infrastructure).



C) Reduce the number of turns in general. 72 turns per day, 120(120) store is a lot of turns. If you half that to 36 turns a day, 60(60) store, FSes immediately become less effective and crippling becomes more effective. This also reduces the usefulness of landtrading, as a reset will have fewer turns and the finishing NWs will be far lower to warrant land trading.




D) Add significant DR to special attacks that goes lower and lower and disappears by the end of the first month. This discourages early wars by making it impossible to civ kill in the first week (imagine doing 5 civs per hit after 12 GSes, or 5 buildings ABed after 12 ABs, etc)

This adds a very small advantage to a CSing alliance as their CS will have a lower reset-DR with more effective attacks.

(A) would make everyone go close to 0 D all the time. I like the idea, but make it so that countries with less than 200 defence points per acre loses the privilege to losing 30% max. Perhaps lose 60% max will suffice?

Like your changes except of C.

Suggesting C is something i've been saying for a long time, alliance server politics are always going to be changing, but if you want to give an alliance that is blindsided a chance, the way to do it is that even with 0 online and completely unprepared they are still in a situation to try and fight back with activity/walling/etc. Back in the day you could do that on 1a, since ec came about, fs's became much more overpowered.

You could end wars by simply disabling special attacks for whatever period of time and limiting alliances to 5 LGs per country during that period.

That's not true diez. A country with 0 D would become a very attractive grab whenever it isn't in 30% immunity (which has a sliding window of the last 24 hours worth of losses like current DR), and stand to lose even more land. The key thing is, if you spend enough turns and gained enough NW, you could exit immunity (say you entered immunity at 31% loss, you logged on and built 100 acres bringing you to 29%, you have exited immunity, and can be hit again.

The main problem with (A) is the loss of land generation, making all-explorers more powerful, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. L:L will need to be scraped in this situation, focusing on 1:1 retals instead, because you can't overretal a country past 30%, and (B) the game becomes more about looking for the best land trading exchanges (gain land by benefiting more after the retal) - ghost acres need to be significantly reduced or removed. (C) Pacts will be changed to allow single hits between countries, but no double taps.

This motivates countries to actually defend their land, because they can always be grabbed (but not double tapped). The end result of this tends to be the countries on top will tend to stay on top.

martian, you are asking the wrong question. The current question will have LaF, SoF and Imag players defending their 'right' to have OOP wars. A common claim is that early war 'is a useful tool' or the fact they occur is a 'political issue'. The best question should be, why is alliance level war allowed before the time it takes (at least 14 days) to build a reasonably developed country.

It is a useful tool for suiciders. It is a useful tool for alliances who don't have the skill to challenge alliances in a fair manner or who aren't really interested in war, just ruining other player's reset. It is a useful tool to get people leaving the game.

Those one-eyed people here claiming it is a political issue are showing their ignorance or lack of knowledge of the history of the game. In the past, alliances largely stayed out of early blindside wars because generally the community didn't accept it and there were enough players and alliances out there to counter it in defense of the blindsided alliance. Now that the game is stagnant with veterans leaving and a trickle of new players - the cost of allowing these type of cowardly actions to continue will simply be reaching the point in the game where it the game itself just folds under the weight of it's own hopelessness.

There is no skill in doing what the LaF/SoF coalition are doing right now. It is cheap and talentless. Idiots who argue a lack of preparation are serious in wanting every alliance to store 120 turns from Day 5 and make sure military levels are, what? 100k troops/turrets and 20k tanks. That'll work!

Sure, if that's the way you want the game to go, keep allowing these ridiculous resets to continue.

does it take more skill to topfeed a netgainer for 15k acres dagga? :D

Dont change anything

Maybe you can use that to justify another 6 day war in 2019 hanlong?

Your forces invaded myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44)! (LaF)
They broke through the defender's defences!
They took:
15,416 Acres(22,695 Gained)
15,129 Buildings(7265 Destroyed)
57,977,841 Bushels
$26,006,219
196,702 Technology Points

Hope that didn't cost you a decent finish. Yum.

Someone fed land from their alliance whining about topfeeding, priceless.

Is hanlong one of the LaF leaders who also force their members to FA him to the top 10?

Priceless.

They do it either because they love him or they hate evo. Not sure which. Doesn't really matter either, doesn't it?

Gotta give him credit. They finally found a way to succeed at something. Netgaining and fighting on an even battlefield wasn't working.

I guess it doesn't matter that imag were the first to master the blindside OOP war.

if you die your should goldfish die. i gaureentee you people will be more selective of an fs time. that or stock up on the fish in which case you should just open your very own ee goldfish store

no leave it alone

If you have nothing to contribute, stay out of the thread Dagga. If we were really opposed to the idea of preventing early wars, we wouldn't be offering suggestions in this thread, or several suggestion threads on the B&S boards.

Emergent behavior always arises due to the underlying game mechanics. In this case, it is because FSes are too powerful, so alliances want to get the one-up on each other and FS first. As mentioned earlier, an alliance down by 20 countries can still FS and win an unprepared one - I'm not sure if this is the case of an FS being too big of an advantage, or if its just the defending side not being war-prepped.

I've said before earlier, the game mechanics are broken, as Hanlong aptly put it a month ago, Earth is like a game of Starcraft if 8 players are thrown into a FFA map, and allowed to do whatever for 1 hour, and at the end of the game, the game displays a list of stats like minerals harvested, gas harvested, workers killed, units built, resources used/lost, etc and the players are left to determine who has won the game based on the stats. It's meaningless.

The fact that countries can be so easily suicided on even in Express or Primary servers (and alliance obviously) makes it not newbie friendly and slows the growth of the game. The lack of an in game tutorial (new players do not want to read 1000 wiki pages) is barely improved on from 10 years ago and the steep learning curve is another problem.

Martian is taking notes right?