What was the impact of the changes for this age

[Spahrep]

http://forums.utopia-game.com/showth...ential-changes

Thats a list of what changed from last age to this age.
How do you feel it impacted the game play this age?

[Snp]

No impact,since there were barelly any changes.

[Soul_Hunter]

Certainly much more humans and orcs in the top flight, less clerics and dwarves.

[wolfie1010]

Emptying the explore pool meant you could climb several levels in the land charts quite easily.

[Bishop]

No impact,since there were barelly any changes.

Are we playing the same game?

[elixer]

Undead!

[Robar1980]

It could be me, but I have the feeling that there were less wars than in previous ages. I know we had a more than unusual tough time finding war. And in my opinion all the changes the last ages forcing kingdoms to grow more have led to kingdoms being more spread and having less options to war than normal. I can't base it on facts though. Would it be an idea for utopia to publish statistics like that? It's a nice benchmark to see what the effect on changes actually is. Average kd networth, average size, wars fought, etcetera... I like to see that.

[jdorje]

From the point of view of top play.

The pool changes had close to the effect predicted. War is no longer a stalling technique; the war winner has gained acres in almost every war.

Where it breaks down however is in the explore formula, which remains a silly linear formula up to a certain cap after which it becomes exponential. This means kingdoms empty their pool at almost no cost constantly, since they are all below that cap. Dicing is nonexistent, since it actually costs something to dice whereas exploring is basically free. We need a fixed explore formula, and one where it costs the same to empty your pool regardless of what size you are. You know, linear: .01 soldiers per acre per acre and 1.5 gc per acre per acre as a baseline. This means at 400 acres your costs are 4s/600gc; at 4000 acres they are 40s/6k gc, and so on. Additional multipliers based on median, being over an "explore cap", and so on are okay but they need to be balanced (i.e. also linear), not exponential. The fact that you can double up 8k->16k provinces almost for free if you have the needed ceasefires means that cowing is stronger than ever under this broken formula. Fixing it to be linear would give benefit to exploring smaller provinces more evenly, and would solve most of the mechanics problems we have seen this age.

The second place it breaks down is with war win & postwar bonuses, which are now slightly overpowered. This has been somewhat concealed this age because with the broken explore formula whoring has been extremely powerful, but with a fixed explore formula it'd come back into play fully. War win bonuses should (1) be mandatory, not optional, and (2) be capped, probably at about 20k acres and 10k honor. The minimum win bonus is no longer needed due to the pool change; just winning is already a bonus enough. Note that with a fixed explore cost kingdoms would actually struggle to empty your pool after war though. Whereas now you just double up your provinces that are closest to the cap for almost free in postwar, with a fixed (linear) cost you would not be able to do this and would probably put the acres on chainees.

In short: fix the explore formula to be linear (additional linear penalties can be added on based on median province or acre cap), cap war win bonuses, and do not add on any new postwar/war win bonuses.

[Spahrep]

I agree with the explore pool needing to be fixed. I never found it costly to explore, and our pool was always empty and noone diced. Now i know that our KD is an extreme example, but still, our biggest people never found it costly either.

I was playing with the idea of the cost of exploring being based on two factors,
KD Size
Province size relative to KD median.