idea for next round

[austfit]

I miss the old days, of 1k land = 1 mil networth, and a max of 3 attacks per warlord for "farming", anything more than that was cause for retaliation. Windy and others, what if we::

Disabled Mercenaries
Increased "scout" benefits
Made larger bonuses for clan involvement (i.e. 3 attack maximum unless clan war)
Forced clan involvement from outset of round
Capped leader benefits at 100 leaders/hut instead of allowing massive overages from 175/hut

I don't want to nerf leaders, per se, but way back then it was considered useful to have towers and a balanced army, and you'd always worry about your army composition and then one weasel turd would invade and break you with weasels. Land is so transient nowadays and armies are bought and sold so there are no defenses- it's all just "run" fodder. Any ideas?

[Drakus]

i don't think we should be actively trying to limit certain playstyles

[windhound]

Appreciate the sentiment Aus, but those days are gone for multiple reasons. 

Mostly 'cause the players have optimized the game (partially at the expense of any honor code and RP). 
Part of the charm of the early rounds was noone knew what they were doing and we all made it up as we went. 
The playstyles listed in WolfBite's Journal would no longer be competitive. 

Check this out - link 
This was ~3 months into that round of reg, the ROME round which was fairly active.  Most of the top 10 was below 100 mil net, and that was a time where there was an active top 50..  iirc ~80 active players, ish. 
Lookit Nero's defenses, 50%!  He held 100% for a while that round (<3 Nero)

The game previously worked on an honor system with an RP element to it.
You could always attack someone 21x, but didn't because it was seen as a serious offense. 
Murder, steal, poison, sack, capture, etc were all designed similarly and most people didn't use 'em unless seriously at war. 
Now those are basically every day attacks.

And there's def. an individual advantage to playing all-out; if enough players play that way it becomes impossible to play competitively unless you join in. 

I've put a little thought into this, about trying a retro-rules round except where the rules were actually rules and not guidelines.  There's issues with most of it though. 

Limiting attacks wont really work. 
An unclanned skilled player that gets a solid run in, attacking everyone 3x, can amass a decent (relatively) amount of land.  How does another player take that land back if they're limited to 3x attacks?  It'd lead to land locks. 

And everyone clanned, allowing unlimited attacks, makes everything worse. 
One of Snare's clanmates just got the snot murdered/poisoned/stolen out of them for apparently no reason.  Damage wouldn't have been nearly as bad if they hadn't been clanned. 

Nerfing leaders I guess could make an impact. 
I'd be more tempted to nerf food value (as much as that'd make me sad) so networth had a little more meaning. 

[austfit]

What if we limited the amount of land gained through attacks? 250 land max per hit?

[Shadow]

We tried that over at FaF a few years ago. All that happened is people attacked more.

[Shadow]

That, and it became really easy to lock land if you had a decent team of scrapers do even a single run for you. You didn't even really need a defense.

[austfit]

Okay, I'm sure this is a worse idea, but what if we had a land maximum for everyone? Just had everyone have a max land amount of, say, 30k?

[Shadow]

could be an interesting theme idea to see how people handle being limited like that, but I can't see it being very fun long term, since you stop getting rewarded for playing well.

[austfit]

I appreciate you all humoring me with this-- what about lowering maintenance drastically for troops to increase viability of "Holding" troops for defense? Would that change, in any way, the standard "mage food and money to get nw" that we all do in the game?

[Shadow]

Starts getting tricky in terms of balance, in that case. Once someone gets ahead with a large army it would be pretty difficult to stop them, I think. Right now at least you need a team to lock in an active server since you have to send armies around, but if upkeep is low it could happen solo.

I've toyed with various ideas for making holding armies viable over the years but I've never come up with a good solution to the runaway locking problem.

[Gorak]

Necro because ideas

a possible solution to the upkeep would be to vastly improve upkeep bonus for camps. Indy's and farmers trying to hold large army would have to sacrifice production capability to do so, and leader's would have to sacrifice leader land ratio. Would make it a little more difficult to lock and defend solo.