Land Farm

[krazilec]

This has been confusing me for a while, so I need someone to help explain to me how landfarm keeps re-gaining land.

[Ashyra Nightwing]

If anyone drops land it goes to the land farm.  :)

[Marell]

Yeah, like Ashyra said, leaderers(mages) often drop land to improve their leader/hut ratio, as a higher ratio increases production from spells among other benefits.

[krazilec]

If anyone drops land it goes to the land farm.  :)

I understand why people would drop land, but I don't see that button :0
does it only show up when you have excess land?

and related to excess land, I believe it is unfair and further imbalances the game for players to be able to drop land immediately.  I believe in Valhalla, you had to have it for 12 hours

[Shadow]

To drop land you just demolish unused land in the demo menu.

[krazilec]

ok, thanks

and any opinions on my proposal?

[Marell]

and any opinions on my proposal?

Hmm well it is no small change...would revolutionise the whole leader strategy in fact. It would balance leadering and indying significantly, but there would still be a number of negative effects.

i) Leaderers would usually gather a lot of land to gain loyalty and leaders, and then dump land so as to get a good ratio. Without being able to do this you may end up with a leader/hut ratio of like 60 or 70, and not even be able to cast any of the spells! They would have to demolish huts and build other structures, and with a lower leader/land ratio their production would be severely damaged (and I realise this is the outcome you were hoping for but perhaps it would reduce production too much?).
ii) Dropping land to the land farm provides a good target for new players and people getting started who are on low networth.



But perhaps it is something we could incorporate into a turbo round, and see if it balances the two strats.

[krazilec]

and any opinions on my proposal?

Hmm well it is no small change...would revolutionise the whole leader strategy in fact. It would balance leadering and indying significantly, but there would still be a number of negative effects.

i) Leaderers would usually gather a lot of land to gain loyalty and leaders, and then dump land so as to get a good ratio. Without being able to do this you may end up with a leader/hut ratio of like 60 or 70, and not even be able to cast any of the spells! They would have to demolish huts and build other structures, and with a lower leader/land ratio their production would be severely damaged (and I realise this is the outcome you were hoping for but perhaps it would reduce production too much?).
ii) Dropping land to the land farm provides a good target for new players and people getting started who are on low networth.



But perhaps it is something we could incorporate into a turbo round, and see if it balances the two strats.

I see part 1 as a good thing

For part 2, could we have land farm gain like, 500 turns per hour and use them only to scout? 
at about 4 land per turn, it'd throw in another 2k land per hour.  we could then make a ratio to how many players there are in game.
say there are 40 players.  there are 9 players over 100mil net, leaving 31 under 100 mil net.  of those, another 12 are between 100-50mil net.
the other 19 are under 50 mil net.
*players in protection do not count*
each player under 50mil counts as one, and each player between 50-100 mil counts as .5
you would end up with 19(1)+ 12(.5) or 25.
Land farm would continue to scout until it reached exactly 25k land.
What do you think of this?
and should this topic be moved?


Edit 1:  By throw in, I mean add another 2k land to the game.  I re-read it and I confused myself.  Reason for the edit.

Edit 2:  *I forgot the other part of how to make sure this isn't exploited*

Going back to the players under 100mil net, we know there are 31 of which 19 are below 50mil and 12 of which are between 50-100 mil.  Since most players between 50-100mil have more land than those below 50 mil, lets set-up a 5:3 ratio (about 25k land to 15k land is what I approximated)  Each 1 in the ratio stands for 5k of land
19(3)+12(5)=117.
117*5k is  585k land.  This becomes the base minimum of land necessary in-game.  Land farm will scout for more land if the land total for players under 100mil net is 585k. 
For players between 50-100 mil, their run generally needs 35-50k land.  I approximated 40k max, or a number of 8.
For players under 50mil net, they generally get 25-30k land.  I went with 25k or a number of 5.
19(5)+12(8)= 191
191*5k is 955k land.  (called max)  Considering that at most, only 2 or 3 people could run of those under 100mil net, land farm will take the max-min (955-585)k land or 5(191-117) and multiple that by 10-30% depending on game activity and round speed.  For turbo right now, let's put it at 20%.
The difference between max and min is 370k land.  Multiplied by the modifier of 20%, we get 74k land.  Land farm adds that to the minimum, and we get our new and more realistic max of 191k land.  Once the total land for players under 100mil net goes over 191k, land farm stops scouting.

*Man, I had so much fun typing this and doing the math.... I feel like a total nerd/geek...


3rd edit:  Didn't really respond to your post part 1 all that much.

As far as I understand the leader-strat, isn't it a breakdown of two parts?  First run, you gather land, build huts, and get a crapload of leaders and loyalty.  Use the rest of your turns after gaining land to spread propaganda.  Next run, you are hit lower on land and you have an insanely like ratio (most likely over 3,000 that will quickly drop to 160-175 as your leaders leave).  Your leader to land ratio will also settle nicely in the 160-175 ratio and you cast your spells then.
Or you could do the 2 parts in 2 separate weeks.

4th Edit:  Comparison with turbo as of now:
2 players between 50-100mil net
17 players under 50mil net
Using my ratio, 2(5)+17(3)=61 or 305k land min.
Current land total: 332576 or about 332.5k land
Using my ratio for ur(unrealistic) max, we get 2(8)+17(5)=91 or 455k land unrealistic max.
Then using the max-min, we get 150k land.  150k*20%=30k land.
Add that to the min and we get 335k land max before land farm stops scouting (off by only 2.5k land or .75 of a %).  I'd say that is pretty darn accurate, and if we implemented what I just wrote, it would work with our game.
Note:  Another way of calculating this if we skip some unnecessary steps and get straight to the r(realistic)max:
x= # of players between 50-100 mil
y= # of players below 50 mil
z= % of our modifier; in this case, 20%
[x(3)+y(2)]z + [x(5)+y(3)] and we get the rmax

[Shadow]

The thing about your leader fix is that it gives stoats (who can make leaders) a massive advantage over all other leader races. Stoats can get good ratio whenever they want, other leader races are subject to hoping they don't get hit too low. Your fix would balance almost everything except stoats, who would be back to being an uber race.

Also, flooding the game with land is generally a bad thing - sometimes being on top depends on having all the land. Emping is darn hard already without the land farm handing the opposition tools to take you down. I think the land balance is good as it is now.

[krazilec]

I realize how hard emping is, but isn't it already near-impossible on turbo?  And I thought the point of turbo was to be able to keep a spot in the top 10.  And the more people that pass the 100mil net mark (which isn't all that hard), the less land would be scouted.

I heard that stoat academy was already nerfed a lot, but we could make it create even less leaders?

[windhound]

Um.  Have you tried Academy lately Shadow?
Its horrible.

I used it on reg to get volky's stats.
Now, I probably wasnt being terribly efficient, but I did start at 200k leaders and 12k acers and ended up at 7 mil leaders on 50k acers...  after 20 mil loyalty and 350 turns.

Academy is nerfed beyond usefulness, unless I was doing something terribly wrong.  I did have 10k tents to make workers.

Anyways, I run leaders and I almost never drop land.  I just earn loyalty and wait to get attacked.  It does depend on people not being too bloodthirsty though.

...
Flooding the game with land isnt productive.
Plus, the landfarm already scouts for land.  Just not in enough quantity to make a real difference.
http://www.redwallwarlords.com/forums/index.php?topic=6261.0
It gets the same turns as all of us and spends them scouting, in addition to catching all the dropped land.

[Shadow]

Emping isn't that much harder on turbo, it just requires more time investment so people don't do it as much. Nerfing academy any more would make it a fairly useless leader ability, it would take all your loyalty to get a good ratio and then you would be left with nothing, so stoat would be better off not using it at all, which defeats the purpose of having it in the first place.

Basically, RWL does not like land floods. A few people tried to do it a wihle ago as a tool to a takedown, and some got disabled, and it was more or less viewed as cheating. I could think of a few ways to exploit your math there - flippping land around the game to different net levels to force the land farm to output more and more, it's too exploitable.

The amount of land in the game grows steadily - each warlord scouts about 7-10k, and with the number of active players, that translates into maybe 150k lannd for a good run by end of set. Other themes involve more land, but I think that the rate of land gain of the game as a whole is one of the better balanced aspects of the game. I have played promis where there is always land flooding in, and I really disliked them - it turned into a boring net fest where anyoe could take anyone else down whenever they wanted because there was always so much land to be had, and large amounts of land started trumping skill, which is lame.

Windy - there is a limit to academy - once you pass 120 leader/land, it's not worth it. However, 10k tents isn't much. Without giving the competition too much, you were being pretty inneficient if you stayed at 10k tents over the whole stretch.

But if you couldn't drop land to improve ratio, a stoat could probably double the production capabilities of almost any other race for food, and at least match marten for cash.

[krazilec]

well, I don't exactly think its land flooding when it would never add any more than 30k land tops.  That would still require 15 hours ASSUMING land farm got 500 turns an hour.  As it is, the 30k land would only be achieved by the middle of the game when players are generally above 100mil net.  At that point, it would only help the newer people.  And we could have landfarm recalculate how much it needed to scout on a daily basis.

edit 1:  Oh, and you said we'd be flooding land.  Going back to my earlier post, it would simply add 2.5k more land to the game... Not really flooding. 

edit 2:  Oh, and I think we would need to completely rebalance the races anyway?  The numbers don't seem to match up

[Shadow]

The races do need some work, althoug they aren't too bad as they are. The problem is that our coder Shael semi-retired because of real life, and our new guy nev is pretty busy too, so any changes we give them to do have to be quick enough to do on the fly (which  major change like this isn't) or we need to catch them at really good times. So your ideas have potential, for sure, but a change like that is bound to have unforeseen consequences that would need a lot of careful balancing. Keep posting them, though, because there will come a time when we can make all these changes and the more ideas we have to work with the better.

The land thing is probably a no-go though. Most of our members are pretty happy with the way the game blanaces itself - a slow growth that takes skill to keep ahead of. Land does get pretty abundant about halfway through, it's just a matter of scraping it up.

[krazilec]

awesome... should we just leave this topic alone for now then?