A number of mechanics suggestions

[goodz]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Show defense left home on the war page.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 but it should also be a pretty low %.

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

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.

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

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).

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.

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.)

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.