it is random. but right when you click your told war will start in 7 hours or 11 etc. so you know when it startsOriginally Posted by Persain
it is random. but right when you click your told war will start in 7 hours or 11 etc. so you know when it starts
My life is better then yours.
Wouldn't like that at all forcing a random start time like that just means that all your players have to keep a 4 hour window of time open for when war "might" start. And when you have people in multiple countries you really screw those people. Example you have a kd of Europeans (GMT+0 to +2) and Americans (GMT-4 to -7)...since a good majority of players come from those 2 regions. Pick a war time that works for both to declare war and give a 4 hour buffer around it? any suggestions that dont force possible 3am hits or missed work? even with a 7 hour notice random start times just cause negative effects.
Its a similar reason that fog doesn't exist anymore it messes with peoples timing to much, delayed war start is fine as long as exact hour of war can be chosen.
War "might" start at any time already. You cannot know until it happens. With the delayed start you would have at least a 7-hour advance notification.
As it stands 1 KD fully dictates when it starts. This way neither KD knows the exact time until it is clicked and both kingdoms have a fair opportunity to get players online. Imagine you go to sleep wake up 8 hours later and are 8 hours late for war start. Now imagine you go to sleep wake up 8 hours later to see whats up and your 1 hour late for war start? IMO right after you sleep has to be the worst declare time, and now you can prepare accordingly for it.
My life is better then yours.
Yea and the strongest elite used to be 7/1 :P 9 point elite was introduced like 2 years ago and only on undead who could not train elites. Then they gave it to orc as well. Prior to the 9 point I believe there was a 3/6 dark elf. But offense creep resulted in defense creep to 7. Then recently faery gained a -10% pop penalty but to help with space efficency for some reason they gained an 8 point elite that is super NW efficent:P
Unless all elites are nerfed I think a 7def point elite is fine, it should just cost a minimum 7nw.
Also I know the game is pretty old but "decades" seems a bit much :P
My life is better then yours.
Only disagree with the random 4 hour window part, not the delayed start. A delayed start of 7,8,9,10,11 hours whatever allows for both kds to get their players online and ready for war. And allowing the declaring kd to choose WHEN war starts only gives them the advantage of fiting the war into their schedule the best. For MOST players there's a big difference between a 7pm war start and a 11 pm war start. with an 11 pm war start i'd have to +4 my first attack and then be 3 hours late for my second hit of the war. For a 7pm war start i can actually hit again at 8am, 7pm, 7am, 7pm....and so on.
Not being able to set a war start on a fixed hour is a big negative, giving a X hour heads up to your enemy meh i could live with that.
I mean if i got waved to hostile why shouldnt i at least get to have the war fit in my schedule, it wouldnt be like now where zero notice means your 8 hours late, you'd still get a heads up for war it just might fall that war starts at 3am since you randomly fight a majority Asian kd ;).
Last edited by Persain; 11-07-2012 at 19:20.
The point is that its that way for everyone. It worked that way for a long time and it was never really that bad. Also is your whole kingdom in the same time zone? Generally any wave time forces a few people to miss/delay a hit or wakeup etc.
7-15 hours is actually an 8 hour window but the slight randomness to it really serves to balance starts. If you know war starts in x hours you can wave right before declare and then declare so armies get back at perfect time etc.
My life is better then yours.
Fix meter decay, now kd's can wave on 24st and meter decay 1 hour later so the other kd must retal with less hits. Make it so that meter start to decay 24 hours after you give/receive relations.
Good point. I suggested that years ago but nothing ever came of it. Added it now.
Tell that to fog :P Its a step in the right direction to allow the war time to be predictable means the game eats less of your life and normal players have a better chance to play against hyperactive kds.
To that end i'd love to see the +hours/gains (which isnt a + hour but + % attack time an issue that needs to be fixed) actually have a mirror to -gains/attack time. I cant say how many times i needed my army to be home 50 minutes sooner but had to instead go with +4 hours and then leave army home for 4 hours while i was at work.
One thing I have noticed is that over the years, though the game mechanics have changed, they haven't consistently been changed for the better. Many times a change is made that is clearly a step backwards, but that change gets kept in place. After a few years it becomes standard, and you have to try to make a good argument if you want it reversed even though players who took part at the time could clearly see it when it happened. Changing from delayed to instant war start is one of them: it shortened war, made the button all-important, and lowered the value of waving. Changing from 12h to 16h attack times was another: also shortening war, meaning semi-active players can only hit once instead of twice a day, and generally making the game less action-packed and more boring. The third such that comes to mind was changing CB to a thief op, and making it random. Each of these was clearly, both at the time and in hindsight, a worsening of game mechanics.
In other instances (rare!), bad changes have been instantly reversed after a single age. Semi-flat gains and halved dicing are the only two that come to mind here. Unfortunately most changes if they survive the first age, seem to be come immortal.
Limiting the war range and doubling explore costs are two bad changes from the last two ages. These need to fall into the second category, not the first.
Of course, there are also changes that receive such universal acclaim that they are later seen as major innovations. 2% ops in hostile/war and banning fakewar fall into this category.
Last edited by jdorje; 12-07-2012 at 23:02.
I like it.
"Go back to the gym because you f'king suck at utopia, noob." -Godly
My classic black theme for Utopia - Updated 5/13/15
Greatest strategy thread/question of all-time.
A number of mechanics suggestions
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.
*** 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 8-point defensive elite should be 9 networth; an inflexible 9-point offensive elite should be 8 networth. Without sticking to these ratios, races can get offenses and defenses that are really out of whack relative to their networths.
All races should have their best defensive troop be either 5 or 6 points and their best offensive troop be between 5 and 9 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. 5/0+0/5+3/6 is okay. 4/0+0/5+8/3 is okay. 3/0+0/5+3/8 is not okay. 5/0+0/4+9/2 is not okay.
I don?t think set all races to 5/6 points is good. There need more variations every age ever if its less balanced. Most important is game to be interest. Having perfect balance is bad!
Being sat should not hide online status. This is a major bug.
Agree.
The declare range networth limitation needs to be removed. This was added solely to prevent fakewarring, at the cost of worse gameplay. Fakewarring was removed but this limitation was left in by accident, and has since been narrowed even further due to poor understanding of game mechanics. This is incredibly bad design - bad enough to qualify as a bug in my opinion. The way a limitation should work is that when the meters are maxed, both sides get the button *only if they are within dragon range of each other*; if they are not in dragon range, then a ceasefire should automatically be entered, ending the hostile (flogger's suggestion - if it's too complicated, then neither side having the button when meters equal/maxed and OOR is also ok). Along with the removal of the limitation, the 50% auto-win will have to be removed (this limitation is useless in any case - has it ever happened?). This absolutely needs to be fixed asap and is the #1 change in this list.
Complete wrong. Declare range is must. Its for protect one ghetto from other main. Most kds don?t hit top land kds and ever if they did it, top kds know how to deal. Auto win is one from best new changes in game for past 20 ages. If you try to play in ghetto you can see often one kd to refuse to declare or just cant because don?t have king. So both kds are in never end war. Rule should evolve: if one kd don?t have king in war for over 24h its auto win for second kd too.
The removal of exploration needs to be reversed. This change (changing the exponent on the explore formula from 1.03 to 1.12) was presumably intended to weaken cowing, but it actually has the opposite effect. A polynomial formula (it's not exponential, though people get confused on this) means the difference in 400 acres and 4000 acres is the same as the difference between 4000 acres and 40000 acres, which means that the difference between core provinces and cows is much smaller than the difference between core provinces and new provinces. In other words, the only people who can afford to explore now are cows (charts clearly back this up). My suggestion is to remove the polynomial exponent (currently 1.12) *completely*, making explore costs linear, and add another multiplier to weaken (but not destroy) exploration by large provinces. This new multiplier is "MAX(1, acres / (2000 + 10*tick)". In other words, there is a size cutoff (2000 at age start, growing 10/hour) beyond which exploration becomes costlier. The exact amount of the size cutoff here (10/hour) assumes growth mechanics are changed as below...otherwise said cutoff should be smaller (about 5/hour).
Agree. New explore cost is so high. Its don?t matter for cows, they will find way to make it, but ppl in ghettos want to explore too and its so hard for them now.
The way growth works currently makes most wars among top kingdoms unproductive. Repeatedly, players have complained about this and suggested changes, but the majority of these changes fail to account for the necessity of growth. In addition to fixing exploration as above, the following changes should address this:
* Grow the pool of each kingdom by 125 acres/hour (or, 5 acres/hour for every province).
* Diced acres come ENTIRELY from the pool. If there are no pool acres, paradise is not available. Double the power of dice (giving 10 acres on average), but make it require more guilds than it does now.
* In war, 10% pool gains come out of *your own* pool.
The result of this change is that, rather than penalize warring, successful warring becomes hugely beneficial to growth. And since the pool renewal encompasses about the same daily growth as kingdoms get now, there is no stagnation.
New war win reward work perfect for all kds who play for honor, war win or for fun. Its don?t fit only for top land kds. Mean its affect only 5-10 kds in server. Will be cool if there is ?land reward? working same way like books. You/every province have them and you can choice to get it or not get . Just restrict them to be available in wars (can be in post war)for avoid abuse.
*** 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 too lengthy to go into detail here. It was proposed in another thread and probably needs yet another thread to be fully hashed out.
Intel should be allowed through in-game ceasefires. Currently when you have a ceasefire with someone, you go around trying to find a friend or multi to take intel for you to see if you should give notice. Whoever has the most friends or multis is likely to have a big advantage here. Intel is completely harmless and simply allowing sot/som/sn/sos/inf/sur to work through in-game ceasefires would make things a lot less tedious at no cost in gameplay.
Agree. Its can reduce multi es too.
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.
Don?t agree. Its will bring only more deal break in top last minute. No point to make game more dirty.
Show the target province on all 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.
Its going to make t/m life so easy and not fun for target province.
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.
Its will be cool but don?t really matter.
Votes should be shown on the vote page - that is, which province each player has voted for. This is a war game, or possibly a strategy 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.
Being king in ghetto is like being god. So many intra wars for get monarchy. Keep votes invisible is way to save your life and stay neutral.
Losing wars is 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. People use it to justify losing a war, but the real problem is that losing should not give you that advantage. 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).
Don't agree. You already have your war win reward. If some one can cover part from his losses before he WD its ok. If some one win his war but decide to WD with extra land gains he loss free books/spec/honor. Fair enough.
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).
Maybe this can be abused from kds with cow vs kd with no cow if they feed with solds a lot.
I dont see why we need this change? If one kd really grow 20% nw in war mean second losing bad and they will WD for sure.
Either remove MP or have it display as a tie on the kd page, and have it grant both sides half of the bonuses of a win (currently that'd be 50 bpa and 1.5 cpa). 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. How many MP's have there been in the most recent age? Any?)
Get half WW reward from MP is good idea. Bring another reason for ppl to war more.
*** Low priority ***
These changes are either hard, or not as important.
Show defense left home on the war page.
Intel ops should show their error percentage, so that when they're passed around to your kingdom mates they know what they're looking at. For instance on CB an additional field "Error: 3%" would be easy to fit in.
This will be cool for less bonce hits :)
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.
Agree.
Conquest should have a chance of moving the meter 2 points. Currently all conquests are 1 hit, but a big conquest can certainly be worth more than that. An x% conquest should have an (x-50)*2 % chance of moving the meter by 2 points. So a conquest sending 70% of the defense would have a 40% chance of being 2 points and a 60% chance of being 1 point.
Its don?t matter for top kds because they don?t use CQ in hostile and in ghettos none bother with meter. No much difference from all this change.
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.
Sounds reasonable change.
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.
When you have active NB its should have chance to remove plague every tick. Increase hospitals % for remove plague too.
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.
Agree.
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.
Don?t agree. Its gave advantage to aggressor and he is aggressor because he is stronger. Help bully weaker Kds wont make game better.
Really the "surrender" of a war should be effective the following tick so that if you "surrender" during the 2nd your kingdom can no longer hit after the end of the 2nd and the other kingdom can then hit for however-long (currently 2 hours) until the surrender is finalized. Better still, the monarch should be able to halt hits by hitting the surrender button (hidden from the other side), and have the surrender automatically take place after the requisite number of hours have passed.
Click surrender for auto stop hits from your kd is good for all ghetto kds. Make monarch life more easy. But if you already stop all hits for 2h its should be instant.
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. (Thief ops already do work this way.)
Agree.
Thief gains capping should be done before bonuses or penalties to thief gains. Specifically this applies to the bonuses from watchtowers (-x% losses on successful ops) and some race bonuses (+40% thief sabotage gains). Currently these mods are applied pre-cap, meaning that the maximum amount of sabotage gains is unchanged by them; +40% gains just means you need to send fewer thieves while opping into wts just means you need to send more thieves, to get maxed gains. This is basically a bug that makes such mods nearly worthless.
Not sure.
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)
Not sure.
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.
Sounds reasonable.
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).
So complicated for me :)
The reason for this is that the game has never had a clear design direction. It has always been a case of just doing what seems like a "good" idea at the time to whoever was making the changes rather than saying "this is the type of game we want to achieve" and working towards that.
The only reason remaining for the declare range is to stop top kingdoms from running multis to get farmwars. But this was very rare even before this limitation was added, and is almost equally rare (not nonexistent) since. It's possible after one age we will see it won't work and can go back to a 50-200% limitation, or propose another means whereby more hostile hits are needed when the kingdoms are out of range. One thing everyone agrees on though, is that a 75-133% declare limitation is completely broken.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote