The "Value" of Land

[Gen. Volkov]

All suggestions so far will still hurt the mage strat very badly. The mage strat depends on a good ratio, and if huts are only X% effective, then the huts don't fill fast enough to make the mage strat worthwhile. The other important bit about the mage strat is that it depends on demolishing and building stuff in the space of one run. For example, the get the max troops for your money, you should build 100% huts, get full huts, then demolish down to the minimum huts you need to support your mages and build camps so you can buy more at the bazaar.

Unfortunately, I can't think of any way to make these ideas work so that they do not hurt mages. The best alternative I see is just making it extremely difficult to take land in the first place. (If you are definitely going to change how land works that is)

[Ruddertail]

Perhaps - without overpowering mages - we could limit time graded benefits to production buildings - mines, smithies, farms - and defense buildings - guards - rather then capacity or cost buildings (dens, tents, camps).

How do we avoid that making it ok for mages to grab, though?

[Ruddertail]

Perhaps we could alter den fill rate? So that way, it doesn't hurt mages for switching buildings. If they get hit and lose mages, they have problems, but it's the same problem everybody else faces with getting hit.

[Gen. Volkov]

That's the thing, the mage strat's bread and butter is grabbing land, building it, then losing that land to give them a great ratio. If we take that away, it's going to hurt the mage strat. When I run, I expect to be hit, it actually helps me out to get hit, because then I have the ratio to do horrible things to all the other players.

Altering the den fill rate might work. You just need some way to make it still effective to get land and make mages, and then demolish that land.

[Ruddertail]

Hrm. You really only depend on losing land for offensive missions, though, correct? If there were a war, you'd be losing land anyhow - so you'd still get that ratio.

In any case, we could allow huts to fill to the full 150 or 170 or whatever full capacity is. That would allow magers to get the the mage/land ratio necessary for offensive missions...

[Gen. Volkov]

No, peaceful missions too. If you lose land down to your perfect ratio, your returns on peaceful missions like Feast and Loot increase. It also helps the strat if you demolish your huts and build camps. If camps are ineffective for awhile, that causes some harm.

Yes I suppose letting huts fill to the max 175 ratio would help, and the fill rate would have to be the same as it is now. Otherwise it's hard to write scrolls effectively, and running missions gets a lot more difficult because you don't have a good ratio.

[The Beatles]

Altering fill rates seems to be all that's required.

Is building effectiveness the accepted solution then? That is going to take a week or two to implement for testing anyway, so let me know if you can find a quicker solution.

[Freenhult]

I really don't understand why building times need to be massively increased when you 1. Have a penalty on newer buildings. 2. Land is much harder to gain.

I'd only say that a max of 10x harder at most, but I still don't understand the logic behind it. Especially after all that I posted about...

[Ruddertail]

Volkov - you wouldn't be gaining and losing land. You'd be able to fill to a perfect ratio, or at least a higher spies/land ratio then normal. What you lost switching camps (if anything) would be gained back in the scroll earning portion of the next run. Further, camps are a non - production building, and shouldn't, then, be affected by the turns used building productivity.

Freen - there's no need to up build times if we go for building productivity based on turns used.

[The Beatles]

Yes, the whole point about build times, as I said earlier, is that as it's far easier to implement, we could get on testing it a day after the decision was made, as opposed to 1-2 weeks with the increasing productivity. That shouldn't influence our overall decision, but it's something to bear in mind when trying to fix the higher build times idea.

[Ruddertail]

I don't think the "higher building times" concept even warrants testing, really, as it doesn't seem to accomplish what we're trying to do. It limits land passing, maybe limits it severely, but doesn't eliminate that culture and mentality.

[Gen. Volkov]

Volkov - you wouldn't be gaining and losing land. You'd be able to fill to a perfect ratio, or at least a higher spies/land ratio then normal. What you lost switching camps (if anything) would be gained back in the scroll earning portion of the next run. Further, camps are a non - production building, and shouldn't, then, be affected by the turns used building productivity.

We'll see. This needs testing.

[Nuclear Raunch]

The biggest issue I have with this is that it makes recovery difficult and it almost begs for a tyrant to take it over. Once someone jumps to an early lead it's all over, and that's never any fun for anyone.

You have effectively removed the possiblity of taking out a dynasty and have allowed most of the people to be able to ruin most of the people in a manner that requires weeks to fully recover. Those are 2 of the biggest "fun factors" in the game, removing them shouldn't be taken lightly.

If you guys want to implement it that's fine, just don't do it with an existing server.

EDIT: Calling them fun factors is misleading, one is fun (taking down a dynasty) the other just removes all fun (2 weeks to recover from any empire that decides to hit you)

[Ruddertail]

How does it do that, Nuke? It makes it essentially impossible for one empire to take down a dynasty, but I don't see how it prevents a team from doing so.

[Nuclear Raunch]

OK, some guy gets an early lead and starts to dominate the game, what are you going to do to stop him? You have 1/10th of the land he does, and every single day you get hit down. You can explore back up to where you were before, but your buildings won't produce for a week or two. Which is somewhat inconvenient because you'll have it for about 4 hours before your enemy signs on and takes it from you. So you have 1/10th of the land, and the land you do have is at 50% efficency and his is at 200%.

So all it's gonna require is 40 empires working together to produce the same as he is, but since you only need to focus on 1 troop type and he has to spend it on 4 you can get away with 10 empires, provided he's a complete imbecile and doesn't std you or notice that everyone is maxing a specific troop and compensate for it.

And that's just for a solo enemy, God forbid he gets an ally.