http://forums.earthempires.com/Forum.php?threadid=18644

ttt

q

QZ - YOU ARE RUINING MY LIFE!

but i like 15s kr's...:(

interesting

bonus

i'm confused... @_@

bonussssss

+1 bonus points.. hehe

i think this is a good idea it'll make it mor interesting and harder to kill also it'll minimise suicider damage on countries me thinks

You forget that this simply widens the gap between the strength of the FS (unchanged by much, according to Qz), and the strength of the CS (which is severely weakened), especially in a blindside situation.

This simply causes alliances to opt to go for the earlier FS, and cause earlier and earlier wars, because this upcoming change makes the FS that much more important than having a severely weakened CS.

I do understand the pros of being able to actually stonewall if you manage to login within that 30 second kill run... but that's only if you can login that fast to begin with. I feel this doesn't solve the overall alliance server issues - it should have been how to make kill runs slower.

I also understand there are benefits to this change, such as a sole suicider being far less effective because the first few hits essentially do very little damage.

Personally I think the only solution to weaken FS which isn't gonna make kill runs impossibly long would be to reduce the number of turns you can store.
As for discouraging early FS via the game mechanics we are opened for suggestions. Not allowing special attacks for 500+ turns was one idea but not really a popular one.
The other idea was to make your initial readiness gain much slower so you wouldn't hit 100% readiness until turn 500 (or something, 500 is just a number thrown out without much thought). At least that would limit how many attacks you could make early on..
Honestly neither of those are probably great solutions to that issue though.

I know it would likely require a lot of work on the game code, but why not just ban wars until week 6 or so?

Say, something along the lines of limiting the number of hits between tags to like 500 per week and the only way to go over it is one tag declaring war on another tag, and then you could enable that function only around week 6 or so.

New game mechanics like that could even be used to totally do away with blind sides.

That would just limit land grabbers too. Why not just put a delay in the attack again button so hit speed goes down? Make it just for alliance server if the FFA people whine.

As for promoting later wars.... dunno

I would really go with lowering the maximum amount of stored turns (applicable to Express too).

100(60), two days worth.

I would even suggest 90(70) to lower the strength of an FS. Might also be prudent to alter the diminishing returns on explore rates to compensate from smaller batch explores.

The turns(storage) is balanced so that it's a long weekend's worth of turns. If we changed the turns(stored) we'd have to change the turn rate.

And I don't see how lowering the turn rate or turns(stored) would be particularly different from increasing the readiness lost during attacks...

tbh i like fooglmog's war weariness idea

Either works, everyone seems to pretty much agree that something needs to be done about the strength of a full turn first strike.

Increasing readiness lost is another way to do it. Or even readiness loss in an escalating scale. The only thing is that it doesn't mass missile strikes and I don't think that those should make you lose readiness either.

That's fine, missiles take effort and time to stockpile.

Xin: true: as long as they aren't allowed on the market:P

No one has explained why restricting special attacks until you have played X amount of turns is a bad idea.

Seriously.

It's like it has to be a complicated fix or the admins won't consider it.

Why should alliances be allowed to FS in the first 800 turns? It's stupid. If you want to special attack in the first 800 turns, you should have to declare war country-to-country. After 800 turns, free for all.

That would fix early wars in a single stroke. Stop the idiocy of earlier and earlier wars.

Also, the attack speed is a simple solution - do not count any consecutive attacks within a 0.5 second timespan. Simple solutions are often the best.

setting an arbitrary date before attacks can start sucks and we've yet to think of any good mechanic that ramps it up....

maybe something like limiting the number of special attacks (or total attacks?) within a given time period and having that time period expand over the course of the round...? sounds almost like a secondary layer of generals and PS mechanics the way i described it there.

either way, i'm not super keen on being too restricting when players can attack because that's a big part of the game and we don't want to lock that down entirely from players for too long. there are other ways to address FS's and I'm leaning more toward the number of turns being a problem :p

Anything but readiness loss please...

War is already not enjoyable, making readiness even more annoying will just make it insufferable.

Not to mention how completely uncreative it is.

If you hate it so much then perhaps you should actually try to get wars to happen later by not initiating them on day 4.


Anonymous, perhaps that could be made by making spyops more effective or a bigger part of war... or making missiles more plentyful but less effective?

you say you need 240 turns for a long weekend. what if you did 60(180). weaken the fs,but still not lose turns.

No, curbing the turns means playing is less fun.

There are ways to keep the game fun and fix the problems. Stop looking too hard at the issue and use the simple solutions.

Pang, your logic of "being too restricting when players can attack " already exists in the game. Can you attack in turns 0-100? No - why? Because I guess Mehul thought attacking with undeveloped countries was stupid. Same rule applies on an alliance level - offense and defense before true skill can be shown through in building your country is dumb and is the #1 cause for this game going nowhere.

5 Simple Ways to Make Alliance More Fun and Promote Member Growth

1. Do not let a country hit more than twice a second by filtering/ignoring any additional attacks made within that span. Think of the system that doesnt allow you to forum seach twice every 8 seconds? You guys already have a working implementation!

2. Do not let countries use special attacks until they have played 800 turns or have declared war on the target (yes you can still AB LAF - just one country at a time)

3. Give restarts MORE bonuses. Currently, the balance is out - not enough cash/resources to rebuild means cashing meaningless turns for the first day or so and relying on aid. Take away the turn based cash granting system and give restarts 10% of previous resources (cash, tech, bushels, oil). Reward well built countries.

4. Do not let alliances hit their own countries for DR, or spy on their own countries for DR. Do not allow re-entry into a tag for 48 hours once exited. While you're at it - restrict FA packages to only FA pacts.

5. Do some work on an alliance vs alliance war dec system. Make it a token system (to start) with a [DECLARE WAR] button for tag admins and then an announcement in an alliance news bulletin.

Any change is a good change at this point.

It will be interesting to see.

1) sure although only alliance or FFA will be mad again.
2) could be better solutions but meh. Could just not war on day 4.
3) Restarts get enough.
4) Everything is silly. GSing is something used by small clans typically or people being mass farmed. Why take it out? Why disallow reentry. Pointless. Restricting FA seems another pointless solution and I don't see the problem it is designed to fix.
5) I don't see the point in doing it halfway personally.


Also, any change is not a good thing. A good change is the only good change,

Delete the game, add bunnies, really anything is good when you dont touch it for several months.

Further explanation of my restart ideas

1. Wars need to be more even and last longer
2. Reducing turns is reducing fun
3. Keep turns the same, give restarts more bonuses (10-15% of resources), restrict the amount of FA packages per 24 hours to 2 (only to the 2 FA alliance slots) but give the country more of what it had before to compensate.
4. This would create a more gradual, rolling networth curve whereby a country is killed and not 95% of it's networth dies, but say 70%.
5. This promotes building a big country, keeps the country in the fight and more importantly, keeps the opposing alliance in the fight long enough that skill is rewarded (not blindsides or calling in every alliance on your pact list).

Nothing beats fluffY BUNNIES
:P

I'm perfectly fine with dagga's 5 suggestions, I've even recommended some of them myself.

Pang, too many turns is really the issue. Consider this, if Alliance server had the ruleset of Express, we would all be swimming in 360(360) turn FSes, an alliance could probably FS and kill 1/3 of any similarly sized alliance and finish up the next 1/3 in the followup from the stored turns.

People including me have long suggested changing 360(360) to less storage turns, and just less turns in general because storing that many just creates inbalances where people stockpiles turns to take advantage of market price changes, and leads to a much more volatile market (prices changes drastically very quickly - compared to Primary, which has the most stable market). Cashers would try to run all 360 turns as late as possible in the reset, and drive up the price quickly as they try to do it all in 1 hour. Techers and commies continually undercut each other because they need to sell every X turns to play, but turns come in too quickly.

Reducing maximum turns/storage turns/rate of turn acquistion reduces the strength of FSes, as well as makes the market less volatile - applies to all servers.

the problem with no special attacks before x turns is farm wars

but my current favourite to weaken FS's is just to cap readiness regain, if you want to keep hitting feel free but your going to be stuck at 25% after you do you normal 30-31 hits a day where you get readiness back for the first 72 turns if you did an extra 10-11 hits

Xin:

Alliance/etc are balanced for one long weekend worth of storage; express I could definitely see us lowering, as if you're gone for a long weekend you miss basically the entire reset...

Most people seem to be confusing "too many turns" with "too many attacks"; the first leads to the second, but *doesn't have to*; we can easily make readiness consuption or turn consumption higher, or readiness regaining lower, and thereby reduce attacks without touching turns at all.



As for no specials before turn X; why X=800? we could make it no specials before turn 2000? or no AB before 1000, no GS before 2000 and no BR before 4000; it does seem a little artificial though...

I'd say make a more applicable implementation of the declare war function, either on an alliance level or a country level.

I like dagga's ideas. I also particularly like the declare war option. I for one think it is particularly cowardly for a clan to do an FS and then come here and declare war after the fact. Even declaring here while your clan is already hitting is cowardly.

I say, declare and when the opponent clan accepts, they set a date and only then do special attacks get allowed.

if you want to penalise early wars consider inverting the restart bonuses

so that if you kill too early you do no real damage but later on restarts arnt as strong

the only real reason not to declare war instantly is so people dont say 'lol you only got 2 kills' or judge an fs poorly, even something simple like declaring alliance war costs everyone $10/acre each and gives 10% attack bonus and no gdi restrictions to any target in the declared tag would obviously encourage war decs

would be nice to have the enemy then show up with red tag on attack page, and green tag for self tag , blue for allies and so on but i can propose things in about 30 seconds, people need to both want the change and the person who volunteers to write the code has to want it enough to write it too :p

I like that idea Enshula. A restart gets a much bigger % of stuff back on day 1 if it is killed and it gets smaller till it reaches this point or less.

Yea, the problem is the tag system isn't written that way yet; that's something I'd like to do, but it requires redoing a significant chunk of how alliances currently work.

+1

Dagga must be a cheater. A Laf player supported him.

bonus

since this basically turned into a giant "this is how to make the game better" thread

What about adding readiness into civs killed, units destroyed, etc. in addition to just their overall strength?

People, less turns to play or less attacks to make = less fun as well.

Nevermind how many people get worked up about how many hits they make or civilians they kill or whatever...

There are other ways of fixing the flaws without touching turns or readiness.

Xinhuan must be too coz Alin +1 his post. :P