Land flow

[The Beatles]

I wanted to spin this off from the main Discworld theme thread. Also we have only had 5 billion threads on this topic, so it seemed like we really needed a new one this week.

I'll quote Rudder to kick off:

No one's proposing an HPR style game. If we do revamp, my thought would be that there are too distinct stages; building up, and war. War wouldn't be mandatory - you could get through a round by just defending yourself, which would probably mean fighting at least one or two wars - but those who fought a number of successful, victorious wars and gained the spoils (land, and we should add some credit for victorious battles - use the experience system to add to NW?) would have an advantage. . . assuming they didn't wear themselves out in the fighting. It'd be a balance between expansion and maintaining power, just like in real empire building.

But, yeah, that'd be a lot of work, and might not work without totally remaking what this game is. So if we don't want to go that route, that's cool.

In terms of what we do otherwise. . . I'm somewhat hesitant to just slightly modify land flow. I do NOT want to see increased defensive bonuses, or, just as bad, increased troop losses. Troop losses are obscene beyond all proportion right now, for the attacker - it may be necessary for balance, but it's ridiculous. In either case, it becomes too easy to lock land. Sure, having an emperor to fight is good, but making him impossible to beat is not.

As far as reducing land flow by cutting land gains, well, we did that. It overpowers spies beyond all measure. If we nerfed spies across the board in terms of production, we could balance them with casher/farmer, but indies seem to come out a little on the weak side. Long-term buildings are cool, but they raise the issue of how they are protected/taken/destroyed. It might be workable, but we'd have to be careful.

I want to make it clear that I'm fine with the only viable strategy being war. This is a war game. We don't want HPR. But I think it's ridiculous that a run is grabbing a ton of land, using it, and losing it immediately you log off.

Here are my ideas, in decreasing order of importance:
- Nerf turns. If you get 100 turns per day instead of 500, you simply can't grab a lot of land at the beginning of your run. Nerfing turns also makes the game harder. Presto, slower land flow without changing a jot of the game dynamics. Also cut the turn bank to a small amount or scrap it entirely.
- Nerf the private market. If you want an army, build it. Cash is not king.
- Up building times and building costs. If it takes more effort to reconfigure or put gained land to good use, attacks become less productive and more rude.
- Decrease troop losses. If fewer troops are lost, not only does attack become easier, but so does defence.
- Up the aid limits. You should be able to send more aid more often. Ideally get rid of aid limits entirely.
- Increase specialisation. Nerf HPR strats, especially mages. Mage scout is OK, but kill mage food/cash production, or really weaken them. Full maging should not be a viable strat, at most useful for bare survival if outside a team. Within a team, a mager would be a useful asset. Make sure cashers can't survive alone.

Thoughts please.

[windhound]

Easiest way to nerf HPRs is to simply make food and cash worthless as far as networth goes. This leaves you with your army and land as the main networth makeup.
imho, there's nothing wrong with a slightly nerfed HPR. You shouldn't beable to rule the game as one, but getting by with minimal attacking should be possible. Just imo ofcourse.

When you do modify cash / food, remove or greatly reduce the amount of cash/food that can be stolen at a time.
's the one thing I really, really disliked about playing the new-er style FAF - impossible to keep resources out in the open. I mean even as little as 5 bil cash, I logged back in and I had 100 mil left. It was impossible to keep enough for even basic upkeep.

A long while back (~4 years ago?) my roommate showed me a sudo-promi-ish game, can't remember the name. It had a fairly large playerbase, in the thousands iirc.
Anyways, in this game you sent out your army on missions and they were _gone_ for however long it took. Meant you never, ever sent all your army out else there was nothing to defend your empire. I like this idea, stops the "send all" when attacking and forces some strategy in determining what to send out.

As Discworld has an actual map, you can determine times by how many territories you have to walk through. I'm honestly not sure how this would effect where players moved. I suspect the more aggressive players would move to the more populated regions so their armies were out for the least amount of time, the more passive players would move to the fringes so they were less likely to be attacked.

Just some ideas. It complicates some things and changes game dynamics by quite a bit - maybe more than is needed atm.

As far as turns... do you mean make the turn cap 100, or the cap remains 500 with the refill rate at 100/day?

Eliminating the private market I'm fine with, forces people to use the public market. Though that does make recovery from a hard smashing more difficult if there's little on the public market to buy.
Be interesting if you could pickup soldiers while out scouting for land, as a replacement for the private market.

Decrease troop losses, sure.

[Ruddertail]

I started writing this post assuming all your ideas are linked to land flow. Now I'm not sure. If I miss-addressed a point, let me know.


Turns: Would have to nerf turn limit, as well. Otherwise, it's RWL Reg - people do a standard run once every five days. It's still more effective, if it can be made to happen, then five micro-runs. Besides, what do we get out of shrinking the land flow? It'll still be gain land - use land - lose land, which sounds like your problem with it in the first place.
Aside from that, what does this do to the "fun" of the game. If you do attack at the start of your run, you feel cramped. If you don't, you're HPRing. And besides, if you take land at all - even if you make a "war run" getting land - you're liable to lose it again with the current attack system.
That said, cutting max turns back might be an interesting idea. It just won't do the job on its own.

Nerf PM: Interesting. Done stand alone, however, I think it risks the possibility of forcing everybody to the same strat. That is, make your own troops and the food and cash to support them. Also, troops are the only really viable way of getting NW. So, everybody has to produce troops or buy them off of indies. Either way, I'm not /really/ sure how this cuts down on land flow?

Building times: Not sure how this would work. Yes, it makes land attacks less attractive. Are we thinking that people will only attack for land if they're sure/think it likely they can keep it? If so, what are we doing to defenses? If somebody gets to the point where they can hold land, won't they naturally get to the point where they can hold all the land? Is this where's we're envisioning a pure mage as the counterpoint to this?

Losses: Good idea, especially if it becomes harder to get troops. Having to supply troops long term, rather than having them be here today and gone tomorrow, is generally good. However, how does this decrease land flow? It seems to me we're still in the place where only one guy can be successful on defense. Maybe we have to make it require a team effort to really take somebody's land at all? Or reconfigure combat a little bit, so you can easily stop people taking your land, whether or not you have the most troops out there? (I.e., you can stop a larger military from taking your land, unless he makes a massive, multi-run resource consuming, effort.)

Aid limits: Good.

Specialization: So, indy makes troops, passes them to farmer/casher, who give him food/cash in return, and mage is. . . war specialist who contributes nothing otherwise? Do we really want to make solo or mostly solo play impossible? Especially with the player base?

[Slasher]

Think I'm with Windy on all of this really, it seems a good idea - we can't scrap too much because otherwise we will completely lose the promi base all together (well, what's left of it) but I'm up for giving anything a go - 100 turns a day is a bit harsh mind but why not make certain things cost more than just 1 turn, building for example, could cost more turns per structure or whatever, while the produce things remain the same, attacks could use 10 turns, or maybe more health - might be a good idea to setup a test server (if you need another database give me a shout) to experiment on with a totally new theme and what not without messing the whole thing up, just to get opinions, etc

[Shadow I]

Just a quick point about turns:

New players aren't going to stick around for a slow game. We saw this recently at RWL, where we ran a poll asking people what the turn rate should be. The vast majority of new players wanted a faster game.

Making it slow works perfectly well for veterans who know the game, but a new player just learning it is not going to stick around if they have to invest a month learning the game.

So if your focus is to balance the game for vets, then go for it. If the purpose of the changes is to build on your member base, then you may want to consider other ways of slowing things down.

[The Beatles]

Both. I mean lower the refill rate, and the cap should be set in line with it: always about 2 days' worth for WOA, 1 day's worth for BFR (plus another day in stored turns). And that 2 days' worth shouldn't be enough to do what I've just described. See I don't like runs with specific start-up action, farming action, and ending action. Sure, you'll need to do recovery if you're attacked, but I mean that attacking for land which you know you won't have a hope of keeping, land you're just getting so you can use it for a few hudred turns -- that I want to nerf.

As to lowering the amount of food/cash that can be stolen, agreed, it doesn't make sense for those to be as easily captured. We could lower it to a tenth or fifth, or just make it dependent on the number of farms or camps you have. If you have more farms or camps, it's as if you stored them there. So each camp can store up to X units, and people can only attack and capture things that are outside those X units, or if they capture that type of building.

Which is actually a thought. We could make a building called granary, or rename one of the existing useless ones, and make it store food. If they were captured, the enemy would get the food in them. And you couldn't accumulate more food than could be stored in your granaries. Bingo, instant casher nerf. Thoughts?

As to your idea of a map-like thing, I think having troops out not only is hard to code up, but changes game dynamics. But we could make campaigns more realistic in one sense.
1. Scrap the open gate close gate stuff.
2. Define distances between each area, in miles, and put up a map page for reference.
3. Define troop losses based on distance. If they have to march more, the march kills more of them.
4. Define resources used for the march. An army marching will need to eat more, and more per mile. Probably need more gold too.

5. Maybe: use more turns for a longer march. I personally don't like this.
6. Maybe: allow ships to attack only between certain eras. I don't like this so much either, I'd rather scrap ships and call them some other unit.

It could also be done easily enough in code. Again, thoughts?

[edit] I had this window open for hours while I had meetings, so I missed some posts.

New players aren't going to stick around for a slow game. We saw this recently at RWL, where we ran a poll asking people what the turn rate should be. The vast majority of new players wanted a faster game.[

Well, a lot of people stuck around for RWL even with the low turn rate, because it was new and fun and the dynamics meant it could be fun on few turns. Our current dynamics wouldn't be fun on few turns, because it's all hit people for land, run turns to produce, repeat. As long as they can log in every day and do something, it'll be fun. Sure, everyone wants more turns, but I am completely unconvinced that that has anything to do with how many people play.

[Ruddertail]

Beatles: I like increased costs for longer attacks, and I'm in favor of any sort of special buildings/cities/etc. taking more than just two turns to capture. I'm still not sure how we solve the issue of people either being 1) Not able to hold land, or 2) Able to hold land, and thus able to progressively take over the game. It seems life will be a perpetual state of teaming up to break the top guy, and that gets tiresome and time consuming after a while.

We want people to 1) not attack for land every run, 2) Only attack for land they can hold, and 3) Be able to hold land. How do we get around everybody just stacking one troop type as sort of a deterrence - "I know I can't stop you from breaking me, but if you do, I'll break you too. And I'll make it really, really suck for you."

[Freenhult]

- Nerf turns. If you get 100 turns per day instead of 500, you simply can't grab a lot of land at the beginning of your run. Nerfing turns also makes the game harder. Presto, slower land flow without changing a jot of the game dynamics. Also cut the turn bank to a small amount or scrap it entirely.

Nah, reducing the turns given is a really bad idea. Shadow has it right on, every one wants more turns. The best thing to do is just make everything take longer. Maybe 5 turns to attack, 2 turns to build each round, 2 to produce, etc.

- Nerf the private market. If you want an army, build it. Cash is not king.

Agreed, but only if there is a way to nerf the amount of money you make. Otherwise having lots of cash does nothing for you. A solution would be to figure out what more to spend it on.

- Up building times and building costs. If it takes more effort to reconfigure or put gained land to good use, attacks become less productive and more rude.

Same as above about turns.

[Freenhult]

- Decrease troop losses. If fewer troops are lost, not only does attack become easier, but so does defense.

Hm. Not so sure about this.

- Up the aid limits. You should be able to send more aid more often. Ideally get rid of aid limits entirely.

This is reasonable

- Increase specialization. Nerf HPR strats, especially mages. Mage scout is OK, but kill mage food/cash production, or really weaken them. Full maging should not be a viable strat, at most useful for bare survival if outside a team. Within a team, a mager would be a useful asset. Make sure cashers can't survive alone.

Agreed.

One thing I know that's very popular in games, especially Travian is how you attack people. You always attack for resources, and occasionally to take cities. What about making taking land a lot more harder. A specialized attack that incurs you large losses and then smaller raids that take resources from people. The best way to do this would be to assign sacking values to the units and then they take a volume of resources per troop. Sackable resources could be cash, food and runes. The only problem with this kind of a move, and even with the one we're talking about is that lack of resource sinks. As it stands, even now its possible to almost have too much of everything except money. With a nerf of the markets. We could possible introduce other resources that are consumed only when attacking or building perhaps. This would maybe open the idea of a expanded public market and also give a stronger reason to attack for resources and not land.

I think some of these ideas work well with thoughts that Janos and I had with a revamped Stock market. Regardless, we should consider how the metagame should look like, and I think that the smaller details will become clear.

[The Beatles]

Nah, reducing the turns given is a really bad idea. Shadow has it right on, every one wants more turns. The best thing to do is just make everything take longer. Maybe 5 turns to attack, 2 turns to build each round, 2 to produce, etc.

How is that even different than nerfing turns?

And I still disagree with what Shadow said. Yeah, everybody wants more turns, so do I, but maybe it's actually less fun when we get what we want.

I mean remember nolimits. Everybody got what they wanted: unlimited turns and hence unlimited resources. And it was fun for basically an afternoon. The gameplay just wasn't as much fun.

Up building times and building costs. If it takes more effort to reconfigure or put gained land to good use, attacks become less productive and more rude.

Same as above about turns.

How same as above? You were just saying to up build times along with other things.

My goal is very simply for one run style to die. And that's to attack for land you won't hold, farm it for resources, and give it up at the end undefended. I think if that dies, the incentive for random grabs dies and attacks actually mean something. I mean today we don't get offended if someone hits us 30 times. It's part of the game and we will be getting it back with the troop they don't have any of for no losses. I want that to change. And I remember how much fun RWL and Warbands -- and even Duels did not have that dynamic -- were in the early days when attacks meant something and were somewhat rude.

Don't get me wrong, if we can get back to that without nerfing turns, I'm all for it. I just suggested it because I was thinking of everything that was different to how things used to be, and that happened to be one of them.

[edit] Quote tags work for me. Also, I forgot to reply to the rest. Sorry.

One thing I know that's very popular in games, especially Travian is how you attack people. You always attack for resources, and occasionally to take cities. What about making taking land a lot more harder.

Rudder said when we tried that it only overpowered the other strats. I don't know, it might work if we nerf the other strats though. So it might work.

[Ruddertail]

Rudder said when we tried that it only overpowered the other strats. I don't know, it might work if we nerf the other strats though. So it might work.

That was in regard to simply cutting land gained per turn. I actually like the idea of attacking for resources; but I'm not sure about it as the model for everything. I think it would be fun to have a specific strat based around just building military buildings and raiding other people's lands, but not make this the ideal way for everybody to operate.

On the one run style, the problem with trying to kill it is making it so people can hold land. And when making people able to hold land, we need to deal with the reality that if nobody can break somebody, there's really nothing to stop the unbreakable dude from grabbing all the land and becoming the super emp. And I think we'd rather avoid making it so the game is in a constant state of "stop the emp." That would mean that it's nearly impossible to make a run without coordinating to take down an emp.

Also, if grabbing land become less casual, wouldn't we tend to see people spending most of their runs (% wise) not attacking? That is, building up resources, preparing for a land grab? And if so, would this be unacceptable HPRing? Or are we cool with this? I have no objection to such, but how about the rest of us?

[The Beatles]

No, not necessarily. If you think back to the old days at RWL and Warbands and Duels -- sorry to sound like a broken record -- it was all about war. And when I say war, I mean actual considered war, not polite land grabs that nobody cared about. I think it would still be violent, which is good. I think the game today is actually less violent, because we all know each other, nobody cares about land grabs, and people often even post what troop they have nothing of to make grabs easier. So it's relatively more friendly, or just as friendly, even though there are a lot of attacks and nobody can hold lan.

[edit] And paradoxically, I think increasing the amount of land gained in an attack, but making attacks cost more, would help. Say an attack gets 300 acres, costs 2 turns and 6 health points. Now suppose instead an attack gets you 1500 acres, cost 10 turns and 60 health points. Same cost but a bigger decision, so it's riskier. And if the turn cap is lower, it's also a higher proportion of your turns.

[Freenhult]

Nah, reducing the turns given is a really bad idea. Shadow has it right on, every one wants more turns. The best thing to do is just make everything take longer. Maybe 5 turns to attack, 2 turns to build each round, 2 to produce, etc.

How is that even different than nerfing turns?

And I still disagree with what Shadow said. Yeah, everybody wants more turns, so do I, but maybe it's actually less fun when we get what we want.

I mean remember nolimits. Everybody got what they wanted: unlimited turns and hence unlimited resources. And it was fun for basically an afternoon. The gameplay just wasn't as much fun.

Up building times and building costs. If it takes more effort to reconfigure or put gained land to good use, attacks become less productive and more rude.

Same as above about turns.

How same as above? You were just saying to up build times along with other things.

My goal is very simply for one run style to die. And that's to attack for land you won't hold, farm it for resources, and give it up at the end undefended. I think if that dies, the incentive for random grabs dies and attacks actually mean something. I mean today we don't get offended if someone hits us 30 times. It's part of the game and we will be getting it back with the troop they don't have any of for no losses. I want that to change. And I remember how much fun RWL and Warbands -- and even Duels did not have that dynamic -- were in the early days when attacks meant something and were somewhat rude.

Don't get me wrong, if we can get back to that without nerfing turns, I'm all for it. I just suggested it because I was thinking of everything that was different to how things used to be, and that happened to be one of them.

[edit] Quote tags work for me. Also, I forgot to reply to the rest. Sorry.

One thing I know that's very popular in games, especially Travian is how you attack people. You always attack for resources, and occasionally to take cities. What about making taking land a lot more harder.

Rudder said when we tried that it only overpowered the other strats. I don't know, it might work if we nerf the other strats though. So it might work. While attacks would become more Violent as Beatles states, I think they will be too casual if there isn't a major penalty for doing so. Otherwise, why not just attack when you can?

Its different because its all about appearance. If it looks like you have a lot, but we make it so its not. Sure its simpler just to give everyone 100, but I really think that aesthetics will win the day. 500 should and probably will mean more players than 100 turns. Hence, turn nerf.

Upping build times is part of the turn nerf. I thought it was pretty simply to follow. If it costs more and takes more turns to build and re-arrange then it uses more turns out of the 500 to make it more like you only had 100.

This idea does both things. It keeps the turn limit higher, and reduces their effectiveness so you have to be more careful on what you spend on. Everyone wins here, yes?

I think nerfing turns is long over due. The game doesn't have a lot of depth now. I think its not a bad thing to address one of the bigger dynamics of the game and change it. Once you horde cash you really don't do much until you win. Turning the game from land flow into a resource management style I believe would really do well to up player base. A vast majority of us do enjoy micromanagement. We really don't want to recruit 15 year olds looking for a pub stomp game. We want people around our age, with semi-decent experience in these games. As such, we should have a game that respects our given abilities and theirs. Adding more things, and new levels would fit in really well with that model, and I think that's what were beginning to do now.

That was in regard to simply cutting land gained per turn. I actually like the idea of attacking for resources; but I'm not sure about it as the model for everything. I think it would be fun to have a specific strat based around just building military buildings and raiding other people's lands, but not make this the ideal way for everybody to operate.

On the one run style, the problem with trying to kill it is making it so people can hold land. And when making people able to hold land, we need to deal with the reality that if nobody can break somebody, there's really nothing to stop the unbreakable dude from grabbing all the land and becoming the super emp. And I think we'd rather avoid making it so the game is in a constant state of "stop the emp." That would mean that it's nearly impossible to make a run without coordinating to take down an emp.

Also, if grabbing land become less casual, wouldn't we tend to see people spending most of their runs (% wise) not attacking? That is, building up resources, preparing for a land grab? And if so, would this be unacceptable HPRing? Or are we cool with this? I have no objection to such, but how about the rest of us?

I really agree with this last point. Let's face it, regardless of what we do, having more land should equal winning more. The best case senario is to make it so that its hard and costly to do this action. Maybe adding a war weariness modifier in for so long that it drops your production by a % for a long time, thus making it un-attractive to attack unless necessary.

[The Beatles]

OK, understand your point. Sounds fine to me if we nerf turns in all but appearance. It also helps micromanagement.

Do you think just combining attacks as I suggest above would make it more costly? I don't, but I think it's a start. So here's what we have so far for ideas as to making attacking costlier -- one or several of these might do it:
- Slash land gains.
- Make attacks happen say 10 at a time, all or nothing.
- War weariness factor
- Longer attack times to areas that are farther away.
- Cash/food cost per attack
- Troops die on attacking marches.

[Gen. Volkov]

I hate to be all gloom and doom, but this sounds like an excellent way to make it so that the first people to start playing a set have a massive advantage. Also and excellent way to create a game that can be used to set up a nearly invincible emp. I think either we keep the promi code as is, with maybe some minor tweaks, or revamp how the game works entirely.