Delayed Blast Self-Spells
I was reading the "Suggestions for your Suggestions" thread, and noted the following:
Quote:
Other things we are thinking on, and constructive suggestions would be nice:
5) Making gameplay competitive options for less active players. Not that we should or would punish activity, but options that make it competitive if not 100% to login less.
I have an idea that would fulfill this requirement in a simple and subtle way, by A. Offering competitive players more opportunities to sleep at night, and B. Offering less competitive players a chance to do a little bit better. In either case, I'd expect players to generally appreciate the mechanic for making certain particular logins less critical.
For now, I'll call this "Delayed Blast Self-Spells."
How it works: Players would have the option of renewing a self-spell upon its expiry, or having one's own province cast a self-spell at the beginning of a particular tick. In other words, the self-spells are "scheduled" ahead of time.
A particular example I might have for this is, say, Minor Protection. Your MP expires 3 ticks after you go to sleep. If you cast a new one now - it's inefficient for your province; if you wait 3 ticks and wake up in the middle of the night, it's inefficient for your real life; and if you don't cast it, it could hurt your province. By being able to renew the spell when it expires in 3 ticks, you're doing what you'd want to do anyways without inconveniencing your sleep pattern or being inefficient.
Now I've anticipated some objections to this, and will list them here in order to clarify what I am and am not saying.
A. In principle at the moment I only have duration spells in mind - I suppose instant spells like Paradise or Tree of Gold could be included, but this is a level of complication I don't want to get to just yet, or that requires further discussion.
B. Self-spells ONLY renew at a particular tick - either the one you specify, or at the end of the spell's natural duration.
i. This means that the spell would NOT automatically renew if a Mystic Vortex is cast on the province (thus making the Mystic Vortex pointless).
ii. If a Mystic Vortex is used on the province, the spell will simply renew when you timed it for, perhaps a few ticks later. This means that actual activity during a war (such as when receiving spells like MV) is not challenged or castigated by this mechanic.
C. Some parameters would need to be set down for the autocast in case of failures.
Regarding C - perhaps the renewal could take the following forms, according to the player's desires:
1. Make up to 3 attempts and then quit after that.
2. Cast until successful.
3. Cast until drained of runes/mana.
4. If failed on desired tick, cast every tick thereafter until successful.
Since the mechanic only bears in mind the original expiry date of the spell, spells like Mystic Vortex would not suddenly drain ALL of your province's mana just because the spell is missing (this is the converse of B. i. above - no abuse is possible). While self-spells can certainly be scheduled in advance to predict certain opponents' actions - in principle there is no difference between this and predicting an opponent's actions while online; scheduling in advance is an inferior model. Therefore, the only real advantage of this model is that it truly extends the length of self-spells to their full duration, so they don't need to be re-cast before time is up or needlessly interrupt players' sleep cycles.
So, to recap:
A. This is a scheduler for renewing self-spells.
B. The scheduler only fires at specific times scheduled by the player according to certain parameters. The scheduler has no knowledge of the actions taken by other players against one's own province.
C. This will improve the efficiency of the provinces of less active players and more active players alike by simply making the awkwardness of sleep during the game more malleable. An expected result of this is that more players would enter back into the game.
D. The system is designed to not be abusable.
That is all - thank you.
-Gidoza
