The "Value" of Land

[Nuclear Raunch]

Foreign Aid

[Devari]

Ohhh! Of course, I forgot that.

Well, the #1 suggestion applies - drop extra land in war, making it take more time to pull off. Further, the increasing value of land proposal that Rudder made could certainly be used to provide an incentive to holding the land... Nuke, do you have any other ideas how that could be counteracted?

[Nuclear Raunch]

1: Decreasing the amount of land gained from attacks (except in war)

Aside from the obvious bit about abusing war slots just to have normal landgrabs, there's another facet that may be overlooked. While you get less land per attack, you also lose less land per attack. Why waste all the resources to hold land when the worst that happens is someone takes 5k land from you? We could all just continue on as we have been, with no noticeable changes other than that networths will be lower than in the past. Those who hold land will still waste resources and therefore finish lower than if they had not held land.

[Devari]

Good point... Then, what about the longer build times?

You seem to be good at picking apart these suggestions, I must say. Do you have any ideas of your own...? Or are there really no solutions? Will nerfing the whole storing thing be enough, do you think?

[Ruddertail]

The point is that you wouldn't waste all your resources to hold land. The point is that it would A: Be not worth grabbing land at the start of your run, unless you could hold that land for a while, and B: Being taken to low land would be both harmful and an act of war.

Nuke, the concern about abusing war doesn't come up because taking a bunch of a person's land would really be an act of war. Therefore, using a war setting to land grab would be an act of war. It'd really hurt the target, so you don't have to worry about people being too friendly.

Point three is even more insurance to the above, and removes the land pass with buildings completely. The other obvious solution is to remove any ability to take buildings.

[Nuclear Raunch]

Good point... Then, what about the longer build times?

You seem to be good at picking apart these suggestions, I must say. Do you have any ideas of your own...? Or are there really no solutions? Will nerfing the whole storing thing be enough, do you think?

That goes back to the STD thing. You'd almost have to do it to come close to keeping up if you were a mage since land fluctuations are their bread and butter.

I have an advantage in this one, I've been through this discussion a few times and have already heard all of these suggestions mentioned and all of them had flaws pointed out. All I have to do is remember what was flawed with each one, not necessarily think of any myself

I have not yet heard of any effective measures to prevent this that did not make the game nigh unplayable. Sorry I couldn't be of more help to you.

[Nuclear Raunch]

The point is that you wouldn't waste all your resources to hold land. The point is that it would A: Be not worth grabbing land at the start of your run, unless you could hold that land for a while, and B: Being taken to low land would be both harmful and an act of war.

Nuke, the concern about abusing war doesn't come up because taking a bunch of a person's land would really be an act of war. Therefore, using a war setting to land grab would be an act of war. It'd really hurt the target, so you don't have to worry about people being too friendly.

Point three is even more insurance to the above, and removes the land pass with buildings completely. The other obvious solution is to remove any ability to take buildings.

So long as land will produce for you it's always worth grabbing land at the beginning of your run.

With the nerfed land grabs it's impossible for anyone to take you to low land. And people will only consider it an act of war until they realize that by land passing everyone does better. Remember when we all started playing? We all thought getting hit was a big deal until we realized that by working together we would all do better. Same concept.

Let's say average land is 20k and you can get up to 30k land by attacking without war settings. Player A stops grabbing land from others after he hits 25k land and then using war settings he gains 5k land from each of his 2 friends (Players B and C) by hitting them to 15k land. After Player A's run he'll have 35k land on him so Player B can use war settings to hit him for 20k and have enough turns left over to get another 5k from others leaving him at 40k land. Then Player C hits Player B down to 15k land giving him 40k land and grabs another 5k land from others and ends up with 45k land.

Player D, who is unaffiliated with the other 3, signs on to see players A and B are at 15k land and Player C is at 45k land. He can either get a clan, declare war, and hit Player C down to 15k land and run with 45-50k land, or he can stay solo and hit him without war settings and run with the same old 30k land. If nobody abused war settings then the next day Player C would have 30k land to start with, so they are in an even better position than they were the first day, not to mention the fact that players A, B, and C ran with 1.5X as much land as everyone else.

1: Decreasing the amount of land gained from attacks (except in war)
2: Increasing the time it takes to build on land
3: Giving land little value to start with (say, 10% of now) and having it increase the longer you hold it. Thus, attacking for land isn't very usefull, unless you know you can keep it.

1: War settings can be abused. Holding land is even less important because they can only take a little.

2: STD attacks can abuse that, so the slower the build times the more you make solo play a lost cause. Slower build times without changing the "block building" is pointless, removing block building absolutely kills the mage strat.

3: I don't want to say impossible, but certainly an unenviable task of coding.

Lets say Player A is skilled and he spends the resources to hold land. Players B, C, and D all landpass with each other. Even though he's skilled, Player A will not be able to keep up with the production of players B, C, and D and before long he will be unable to keep them from attacking. End result, players B, C, and D all have decent troops/resources etc, Player A is a step behind from wasting resources holding land, and the networth from possessing the land for a few days is now gone.


Bleh, need to just upload audio, all this crap takes too lonmg to write out. If this aint enough I'll type more later.

[The Beatles]

Suggestion 3 is actually fairly easy.

[Nuclear Raunch]

Is that with keeping track of which land is new and which is old? For instance if I run on 35k land and get hit to 15k land every day is it going to give me credit for holding 15k land for 3 weeks when in reality I haven't really held any land other than what the hit limit allowed all set? Or will you be able to get it to "roll over" so if I hold 30k land for a day then I lose 10k and I get 10k back every day, does my held land ount go 30k for 1 day, 20k for 2 days, 10k for 3 days, and 0 for 4 days? Otherwise it's gonna be real hard to balance the networth values between too small to be effective and overpowering since there won't be much land difference between those who hold and those who do not.

To me it seems like it would be pretty tricky getting that aspect of it down and nailing the networths to a point that makes it a balanced gameplay. I know this isn't very well written, I'm having a hell of a time putting my thoughts into words.

[The Beatles]

Yes, the latter.

Any variation is actually simple, e.g. saying that an attack destroys X% of "finished" buildings and 100-X% of "unfinished" buildings. Multiplication is commutative. The first one you describe is X=0, the second is X=100.

The implementation would go much as you would think of it conceptually in a real war. Some % of buildings have been built, the rest are still in progress and are not 100% effective (we can vary their effectiveness between 0 and 100%; time dependence would be very memory-consuming). As time goes by, some unfinished buildings are always converted to finished buildings, depending on when they were built. This sounds like you would have to keep track of when each building was built, but you don't: just store an "effectiveness/efficiency" percentage for each building type; then just make sure you get the formulas for updating that correctly. But since multiplication is commutative, it doesn't matter in what order updates to the efficiency % are made, or which % of buildings are at what % of efficiency -- all that matters is that the set of, say, farms, as a whole has a certain efficiency.

[Nuclear Raunch]

Are you saying that buildings don't produce until they have been held for X amount of time?

[The Beatles]

Either that or they produce at a lower intensity. Either is possible, X needn't be 0 or 100%. Did I misread Proposal 3? Rudder proposed X=10, and I do admit I expanded on his proposal a bit. Completely rebuilding at the beginning or end of your run would hurt you under my scheme, but not his. If we implement his, it's actually easier, we just set an efficiency % for all the land.

[Nuclear Raunch]

I think one of us misread Rudder's proposal, I thought he was talking about net. Rudder, can you elaborate for us please?

[The Beatles]

Ah, it was a touch ambiguous: "value". I interpreted that as production, you as net. I still like my interpretation better, btw.

[Ruddertail]

Production value, yes. The idea was to have the production value of land based on the amount of time it was held. This would be a modifier for the buildings built on it.

For example, when it was first taken, it might have a production value modifier of .01

The buildings would then produce only .01 of normal. After some hours, it might go up to .10. After several days, you'd be up to 1.00, and eventually it'd go up for 1, maybe 1.50 or even 2.00, but that's be after being held for weeks, perhaps months.

Beatles, you were planning to have the length of time the building stood function as this, rather then the length of time the land was held? That might actually be a better way to do it...