A number of mechanics suggestions

I mentioned that repeatedly therock! The changes to exploration (double cost) and war (range limit) are the main reasons for gameplay worsening the last two ages.

However I don't want to be entirely critical. The removal of fakewar had a significant positive effect on gameplay, a few ages ago. It was a big step forward, and had my full support from the start (I'd like to claim it was my idea, but someone else probably did mention it years ago). The changes of the last two ages are easily remedied; in fact, the most important of the changes I've proposed here are extremely easy ones for the developers to make.

I suppose I should prioritize them soon.

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Originally Posted by jdorje

You haven't been watching then.

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I have. Last age had more wars in the top kds than in quite some time.

Some opinions from a non-top kd perspective: I think this is a very well thought through list. I support the majority of the suggestion here as very good for the game. Even if a bit more negative I will just list the one's I do not support and the rest can be assumed to be agreed for.

* The plague change - having plague randomized on affecting and easily planned to counter (can always keep 20% mana and you're sure it'll go away if you're active - this way you turn it into a mana penalty for an active enemy instead of at least potentially a defensive penalty) decreases it's usefulness vastly and removes a fun aspect of the game, keep NB as it is.

* War changes done this age was great, good job on Devs. Exception is war-range, I see no reason for it not to be 200/50% up/down, using war range to either bottomfeed or topfeed is both bad for game

* The suggested surrender change has flaws, if enemy knows you pressed a WD button (in whatever way they find out) it's vastly overpowered that enemy cannot retal or change their mind if you suicide 1 min before WD date and then immidietely get in land. That said, last minute max gain wave is overpowered indeed

* MP is silly and fine as-is - war is fought until won

* You suggest war is beneficial to growth - imo it already is. using my own kd as example, we would like to remain smaller than we are but successful warring (without OOW exploring) puts us in top 10 whether we wants to or not. Successful warring atm forces growth by all standards but that of the top 6-7 kd's (we're 8th :)). It was the same last age, when we got into top 10. This is interlinked with e.g. other kd's intra razing, so I see other ways to address the issue of forced growth when winning wars (it's relative position that matters, if everyone who won wars ended up on our acreage we would have sufficient people to war, atm we have 0-2 targets which is the reason to stay small if enjoying to war). I don't think a change should be made solely to faciliate war amongst these 7 kds

* I'm unsure about the exploration thing. It forces certain setups for sure. Gotta think more on that one

Jdorje how do you feel about provinces being able to aid acres in EOWCF? Maybe only from over 120% kd median to under 80% kd and 5-10% are lost with every move? Would this be to easy to abuse at the top with cows? I feel that in the ghetto level this would allow kd's to go to war faster and keep more acres in the game since people will be less inclined to use intra razes.

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Originally Posted by Bishop

I have. Last age had more wars in the top kds than in quite some time.

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Last age was the exception, yes. This age has reverted to (and beyond) the norm.

Even last age, almost every single top war resulted in both kingdoms netting huge negative acres. A kingdom that diced all age with no conflict would have won the age by 75k acres. Only the perfect storm of balance in the top and incompetent diplomacy all around made things interesting. EDIT: The removal of fakewar a couple ages prior contributed as well.

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Originally Posted by Elurin

You suggest war is beneficial to growth - imo it already is. using my own kd as example, we would like to remain smaller than we are but successful warring (without OOW exploring) puts us in top 10 whether we wants to or not. Successful warring atm forces growth by all standards but that of the top 6-7 kd's (we're 8th :)). It was the same last age, when we got into top 10. This is interlinked with e.g. other kd's intra razing, so I see other ways to address the issue of forced growth when winning wars (it's relative position that matters, if everyone who won wars ended up on our acreage we would have sufficient people to war, atm we have 0-2 targets which is the reason to stay small if enjoying to war). I don't think a change should be made solely to faciliate war amongst these 7 kds

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This is the only thing you say that I disagree with. The purpose of the proposed growth-mechanics changes is to bring together the way the top and the midlevel play. The only reason your kingdom avoids the top is because it is dominated by politics, ceasefires, and dicing; there's always one set of kingdoms that dices and one that does not and being the biggest of the kingdoms that doesn't dice puts you in a boring position with few war targets. Under the proposed changes that would no longer be the case and you would have no reason to "avoid the top".

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Originally Posted by boz

Jdorje how do you feel about provinces being able to aid acres in EOWCF? Maybe only from over 120% kd median to under 80% kd and 5-10% are lost with every move? Would this be to easy to abuse at the top with cows? I feel that in the ghetto level this would allow kd's to go to war faster and keep more acres in the game since people will be less inclined to use intra razes.

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Flogger had a proposal on this I believe. Rather than allow moving acres from one province to another, it'd be better to make use of the pool on small provinces easier in postwar. Under the proposed changes exploration is already going to be pretty easy, so with a few mills little guys can double up in 4 days without a problem. I think flogger's suggestion was to remove the postwar double-explore-cost penalty for small provinces - this benefits keeping a balanced core as using pool this way is very efficient. But we never worked out what defines a "small province".

Nice collection of very interesting changes. Most of them I agree with and would very much like to see implemented, I will reflect just on the ones I dont agree with or are unsure about.

-Dragons = misunderstood originally, like this change

-Plague - I dislike proposed change for the very reasons Elurin pointed out. However I like its current form and randomness of NB even less. Mostly cause I feel it greatly penaliteses magic users and decreses their offensive magis potential too much. 9/10 times if playing a/m and not UB I just tank the plague personally. Not rly sure how to go about this.

-WD timing. While I do agree winning KD should have as much as half a wave time to make their hits and mitigate damage done by WD wave I dont like the idea of "surrendering" and preventing your side from making hits and thus allowing suicide fest from oponents. While this would be minor factor 90% of the time it could have huge effect when winning KD's core is composed of races with deffensive elites. Better alternative seems to be to prolong no-hit period before wd-ing to 6 hs and maybe offer gheto monarchs some instant surender mechanics that would incure serious penalties (ie original sugesstion).

-Claiming victory - this suggestion I strongly disagree with. First off I am against any form of "forced" victory to begin with, imo war is won when other side concedes and presses the wd button. I do recognize the need for such mechanics tho to avoid KD's getting stuck in eoa wars against shells. But suggested conditions are waaaaaaay to tight and benefit certain setups greatly.
From the top of my head KD composed of Orc tacticians tanking dragon and maxgaining from day 1 should have no problems forcing such victory against KD runing hybrid core and slaying 2 early dragons. Stock building credits, keep baren lands and rape all the land you can, build all your land in one big batch 15hs before mintime, time your 5th wave well and 9 times out of 10 you have a win.
Imo forced victory should only exist as last resort for KD's which clearly destroyed their oponent and should in no means be allwed against KD's that still have a fighting chance.

Anyway nice set of changes, keep up the good work.

Should probably start a new thread for this as its been edited a ton:

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Originally Posted by jdorje

These have been in the works for a while. Except where noted, each is a standalone change that would improve the game.

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.

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Effects max 2-3 kingdoms an age, I think this is low priority and the only reason I like it at all is to balance war spoils waves at eoa.

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Originally Posted by jdorje

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.

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I do like this, personally I lack friends and multis so it sucks against many kingdoms they have your intel but you will not have theirs.

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Originally Posted by jdorje

Show defense left home on the war page.

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extremely low priority... I would not bother with this until tons of other things are done if at all.

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Originally Posted by jdorje

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.

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Yes please, helps thousands of irc users / pimp users / forum users.

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Originally Posted by jdorje

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.

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I play primarily on my cell phone and I still don't mind the extra 1-2 clicks every login, not a huge fan of pushing through convenience changes.

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Originally Posted by jdorje

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.

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Pretty well anyone sharing intel could use this. * I have posted before I think it would be more game friendly if there was just 3 different wordings when you take intel. *precise (tact in war) accurate (20% thieves sent) inaccurate (anything less then 20% thieves sent) *just changing the wording at start is less ugly then adding some funky #% accurate message.
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.

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Originally Posted by jdorje

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.

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I think if I am reading this correctly I like it. A dragon ravaging the land will still have full effects but its points to kill decreases each hour? So if you killed it 90% it would die on its own in 12 hours?

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Originally Posted by jdorje

A similar change should be done to plague. 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.

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I like plague as is. It makes it powerful that you get owned by it for long periods.

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Originally Posted by jdorje

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.

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I think at a minimum elites should have 1 NW per defense value and .8 per offense. If an elite is high in both it can be higher then this. AKA faery elite should be 8 NW and Orc elite should be something like 7.5 where as a 5/5 elite would be something like 5.5. The only one really broken atm is faery. Halfers could use a bump to bring it to 6 nw also.

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Originally Posted by jdorje

On a related note, 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.

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I think this is very bad for the bottom 30-50% of the game. Thief mage is a super popular role to the point that you have about 1/4 of most ghettos as T/M. These dudes need to be hard to break. They don't need to be NW efficent to the point that they break the top, but 7 points or 8 points with the pop penalty is ok by me.

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Originally Posted by jdorje

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.

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The problem in lower kingdoms is that people do attack you for not voting for them etc. In top kingdoms it shouldn't be hard to get people to check their vote. The kinda lower tier warring kingdoms might have the odd issue where a nub is too lazy to check where his vote is despite multiple requests but I don't think the change would help enough to be worth the trouble it causes for nubs. They spend enough time as is complaining about larger monarch provinces being !@#$s

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Originally Posted by jdorje

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.

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agree but it should also be a pretty low %.

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Originally Posted by jdorje

Being sat should not hide online status. This is a major bug.

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agree

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Originally Posted by jdorje

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.

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Random war start imo helps the game more then any of these other changes. No one on any level likes button games.

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Originally Posted by jdorje

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. My suggestion: change withdrawing. The monarch can "surrender" at any point after min time, halting hits from his side but the other side gets to continue for 6 ticks (5 hours instead of 2).

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I disagree with how this is handled. I think more balanced would be granting the winning kingdom 480 explore pool acres for every day of war. But with some kind of catch that the explore pool acres expire at end of EOW cf. I also think the bottom 5 provinces should be able to explore at half cost during EOW CF. Provinces 16-20 can explore at normal cost. No province from 1-15 ranked by land can explore during EoW CF. These acres will come from a seperate war explore pool and will disappear at the end of EoW CF.

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Originally Posted by jdorje

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.)

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one of the few convenience elements I would like to see changed as it is a huge pain to do these things on a cell phone. It is hundreds more clicks a day rather then 4-5.

Got too tired to continue going through list. Is too long.

duplicate :(

dorje I think you should consider posting your changes in 2-3 topics. Categorize into what you hope to accomplish with each change.

Balancing / growth changes / convenience

as it stands it is hard to take much of what your trying to do because it is so much information in one long post.

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goodz

duplicate :(

dorje I think you should consider posting your changes in 2-3 topics. Categorize into what you hope to accomplish with each change.

Balancing / growth changes / convenience

as it stands it is hard to take much of what your trying to do because it is so much information in one long post.

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THIS ^
AND THIS V is what i thought was the best suggestion there !!

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.

and a lot more fun =0 but the range should be more so 2-6 hours after declare

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Originally Posted by JAZZE

THIS ^
AND THIS V is what i thought was the best suggestion there !!

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.

and a lot more fun =0 but the range should be more so 2-6 hours after declare

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7 to 15 hours means they can retal your wave and then declare. Both kingdoms have army home for declare that way. It is also enough notice to get people waking up. The funnest wars were when you had 45 people online with armies home all at once just knowing bad things were about to happen :D

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Originally Posted by goodz

A dragon ravaging the land will still have full effects but its points to kill decreases each hour? So if you killed it 90% it would die on its own in 12 hours?

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Correct.

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Originally Posted by goodz

I think this is very bad for the bottom 30-50% of the game. Thief mage is a super popular role to the point that you have about 1/4 of most ghettos as T/M. These dudes need to be hard to break. They don't need to be NW efficent to the point that they break the top, but 7 points or 8 points with the pop penalty is ok by me.

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T/ms have been around for decades with 5- and 6-point defense. Having one race be "the t/m race" and make it unbreakable is not the way to go. If you don't run offense, you can get more defense/thieves/wizards even with regular numbers.

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Originally Posted by jdorje

T/ms have been around for decades with 5- and 6-point defense. Having one race be "the t/m race" and make it unbreakable is not the way to go. If you don't run offense, you can get more defense/thieves/wizards even with regular numbers.

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Part of the problem if that Orc/Undead offensive numbers and abilities are so ridiculously strong that a t/m race needs strong defense in order to survive. Otherwise, people shouldn't bother playing Faeries at all, no matter how buff their t/m abilities are.
Of course whether a race that can't attack and exists to be defensively unbreakable is worth having in the game... I'd rather not have that...

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Originally Posted by goodz

7 to 15 hours means they can retal your wave and then declare. Both kingdoms have army home for declare that way. It is also enough notice to get people waking up. The funnest wars were when you had 45 people online with armies home all at once just knowing bad things were about to happen :D

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As long as its not random i'd support it. I hated when it was a delayed declare and you had no idea when it would start.