These have been in the works for a while. Except where noted, each is a standalone change that would improve the game. I've now sorted them into high priority (should be fixed ***for next age***), middle, and low priority. I am open to feedback on all of these, preferably well-reasoned objections and suggestions. Speaking to me through irc (I am often on #tactics, and always on irc.absalom.info) may be a better way than mass debate on the forums.
There are several overlying goals (direction) to these changes:
1. Improve top kingdom play without any cost to regular kingdom play, and most importantly make "top play" something that regular kingdoms and players think is fun rather than something they avoid or get tired of and quit after a few ages.
2. Improve specific instances of bad mechanics that would be an improvement to all were they changed. Overall - spells, thief ops, and buildings do not have to be equally valuable but they should all be of some use.
3. Repeatedly remind the developers of bugs that need to be fixed, even if they are minor.
*** High priority ***
These changes are either easy and important, or very important.
Networth of troops needs to remain balanced. The current standard is 0.8 networth-per-offense for ospecs and 1.0 networth-for-defense for dspecs. Elites are stronger than specs and should always have a higher ratio than this. For instance an inflexible 6-point defensive elite should be 6.5 or 7 nw; an inflexible 7-point offensive elite should be 6 networth. Without sticking to these ratios, races can get offenses and defenses that are really out of whack relative to their networths.
Based on 4-point specs, All races should have their best defensive troop be either 4 or 5 points and their best offensive troop be between 4 and 7 points. Making a race that cannot attack nor be attacked is very bad for the game, as is making a race that cannot run any defense. 4/0+0/4+3/5 is okay. 4/0+0/4+7/2 is okay. 4/0+0/4+3/6 is not okay. 4/0+0/3+7/1 is not okay.
Being sat should not hide online status. This is a major bug. In a related bug, sat provinces always show as inactive (+) to the monarch.
The declare range networth limitation needs to be further toned down. My suggestion is to lower the meter cap back to 60 or possibly 100, thus preventing week-long retal wars.
Exploration cost needs to be balanced. This has its own thread: http://forums.utopia-game.com/showth...xplore-formula
Gaining acres from winning a war should not be optional. Winning should grant 5% acres and 5% honor, not the choice of 10% acres or honor. Both should be clipped at a minimum of 5k and a maximum of 10k.
*** Middle priority ***
These changes are either easy, or important.
1-x mechanics should be changed to 1/(1+x) mechanics, in most cases. This change is rather large, and one paragraph is not enough to explain it, but here goes. Specifically for GS, mills, rax, hosps, tds the current mechanic multiplies gains/costs/attack time by a factor of (1 - building effect). This means going from 15-20% gs or mills gives you a much bigger boost than going from 0-5% does, which is the opposite of how it's supposed to work. Instead change them to divide by (1 + building effect). The bonus value of the building should be modified so that the building remains at about the same strength it is now when at 15% of the building and 100% BE. Similarly with lightning strike, it should not destroy 60% of runes because when you add on +50% bonus now it destroys 90% - much bigger than a 50% bonus. Rather it should destroy 1-1/1.6 of your runes, and with the 50% bonus it instead destroys 1-1/2.4 of them. Thus a 50% bonus to LS gains means 2 ops now does the same work as 3 ops used to - the way it should be.
Acres incoming at EOA (from attacking) should be added to the provinces. Although this change encourages last-minute waves, the current situation absolutely discourages any last-week fighting, which is no fun.
Show the target province on all successful offensive ops. Spells like greed, thief ops like night strike, etc - it would be a matter of moments to change the text to add the province in there.
Make sure there is a link to all pages on the left menu. Currently getting to important pages like your military advisor or the kingdom news takes two clicks from most pages. Utools has a nifty way of adding these that seems intuitive; there's no reason everyone shouldn't have that.
Votes should be shown on the vote page - that is, which province each player has voted for. This is a strategy/war game, but definitely not a democracy game; we don't need to be worried about intimidation tactics. The ability of kingdoms to work together is much more important.
Losing wars is still overpowered, despite the changes that benefit winning. Whether it is a close war or not, the kingdom that withdraws first can usually get a 3-5% edge in land, and for good kingdoms with perfectly synchronized waves this can be 10% or more. This proposed change is very simple and small: increase the time needed to withdraw by 1 hour, from 2 hours (3 ticks) to 3 hours (4 ticks).
In war, land/nw/honor changes since war start should be shown to the kingdoms. Unlike the old "war meter", this should work by showing the percentage change in land/nw/honor since the instant of declare. The best place to show this is on the kd pages, where it is visible to everyone.
In war, allow a kingdom with a significant networth edge "claim victory" and end the war immediately at any time. A significant networth edge is a 20% improvement in the nw ratio from war start to end; i.e., "(kd1_nw_current / kd2_nw_current) / (kd1_nw_warstart / kd2_nw_warstart) >= 1.2" allows kd1 to "claim victory" at any time (this shows as a win). This should replace the current autowin mechanics, and would work extremely well with land/nw changes since war start being shown as in the previous suggestion.
Either remove mutual peace or have it display as a tie on the kd page, and have it grant both sides half of the bonuses of a win (books, credits, land, honor). Currently MP counts as a loss, and offering MP gives the other side the chance to either laugh at you or accept it at a time of their choosing, so there's little reason for anyone to ever use it. Simply having it show on the kingdom page as a tie, would be a big improvement. (Some data on this would be interesting to see. When is the last time any war ever ended in a mp?)
Trad march gains need to be symmetrical with respect to networth. Currently the gains hitting at 60% are the same as 140%, but this means that someone who bottomfeeds 60% is essentially immune to retal since the attacker has to topfeed 166% to retal you. A very small change to the formula would correct this: treat a 150% topfeed (1.5x your nw) as a 66% bottomfeed (1/1.5x your nw), i.e. invert the networth ratio for topfeeds.
*** Low priority ***
These changes are either hard, or not as important.
Show defense left home on the war page. Currently it shows offense sent; adding on defense-left-home should be easy.
Bounces should give GBP just as ops and hits can do - an x% chance of a bounce giving the same gbp as a massacre/plunder/learn if x% of the necessary defense was sent.
Dragons - rather than having dragons fly away after 121 hours, make the dragon strength decrease by (base points) / 120 each hour; this would give partial benefit to kingdoms half-slaying it rather than making that half-slaying useless. Dragons are additionally too powerful - the cost to send a dragon and to slay one (at 400 gc per 5 points) should be the same.
Rather than make NB randomly cure plague, make it drop the duration. So when you get plague it will be 12-24 hours, and each NB will drop that by 5 hours. And hospitals should be changed to reduce plague duration - every 1% hosps reduces incoming plague duration by 3.5%, subject to DBE. Hospitals and NB thus complement each other nicely as a way to counter it.
Propaganda should not have its returns be random. This is the only thief op that is random, inexplicably. It is okay to have the troop type taken be random, but the number of troops taken should not be.
War declaration should be delayed, probably by 7-15 hours. So when a war is declared on February 1, you get a message "Kingdom A has declared war with us! The war will commence on February 12th!". The reasoning for this is to remove the gross overpoweredness of button control and make waving & declaring more desirable. It should make wars more common.
Monarchs should be able to force their kingdoms to hold hits in order to surrender. This could work OOW too, to enforce hostiles and prevent multis or noobs from being used to give button - a big bonus! The way it would work is the monarch goes to an opposing kd's page and toggles a button to "prevent his on this kingdom". After that no provinces from the monarch's kingdom can hit into the other kingdom. The monarch can go back to the kingdom and toggle it back at any time to allow hits.
Repeatable spells - specifically paradise, tree of gold, fireball, tornado - should remain as the default spell even after a successful cast. It would be harmless for all spells to behave this way, and would make playing from mobile a lot faster. (Thief ops already do work this way.)
Super-science should be weakened - slightly. My simple suggestion is to switch to a cube-root instead of square-root formula past 100 bpa in a particular category. So:
* 0-100 bpa: MODIFIER * sqrt(bpa)
* 100+ bpa: MODIFIER * cuberoot(10 * bpa)
Meter decay shouldn't happen until a hit has been around for 24 hours. The best way to do it would be with hourly decay rather than daily decay. Have an array of 24 fields for the hits of each of the last 24 ticks, and another field for the leftover. Each tick move every hour's totals down the line (no decay here), and decay the leftover by a small percentage (around .7% - this field has to be a floating-point). The 0th hour is then reset to 0 and new hits for the upcoming tick are added on there. The total hostility is equal to the sum of all 25 fields (which can then be rounded off).