Fix leadering

[Juska]

You can change leader losses to be dictated by the empire with the lowest amount of leaders.

If someone has 100k leaders and someone else 1mil leaders the losses are only calculated on the first 100k of the guy with 1 mil.

That's my suggestion on that end, this would reduce the extreme effectiveness of leader suicides as well.

Personally, I don't feel that every one of my suggestions benefit me, but rather hurt leader players. And because of that it's natural that I am to be labeled bias because the majority of the active players/posters play leader. I feel that the RWL Code is heavily centered on using leaders and using leaders only and that by doing that you lose 3/4th's of the possible strategies with the Promisance game. If Leaders effectiveness was lessened I feel it would broaden and deepen the level of play.

Lower feast returns and create a race with a good bonus to foraging and you open the road to a farming strategy here.

Create a race with large Income bonus and relatively good market bonus and open the road to a cashing strategy.  

Reduce the Market bonus of races that create cash very well in their respective areas and give one race relatively few bonuses but a good market and you open the road to a reselling strategy.

If your careful in the way you do race bonuses all the strategy will be more or less balanced in raw effectiveness (cash/networth generation wise).

The Rat Race is overpowered imo, but PA has an entire topic to devoted to why it is not and I'm sure once upon a time I made a post saying that, which obviously doesn't benefit me (as an indy).

Edit: Lol, went searching for that post about The Rat Race, I think I've made everyone of these suggestions at least 3 times already. And Leader losses due to attacks are balanced somewhat with the land drop code.

[Shadow]

The merc bonuses are a bit silly, but fixing them would actually get rid of a few viable strategies - because either you have to lower the rat sell price or raise the marten buy price, both of which damage major strats. Actually, rats make a lot of cash as-is, so maybe lowering rat sell price wouldn't be so bad. But either way, I think mercs need to stay around where they are now for the sake of strat diversity, at least until we figure out a way to get the public market back into play. (Playing with merc prices alone won't be nearly enough). But it is rather silly, I'll give you that.

Leader losses are a touchy subject - on the one hand, losses are insane. On the other, if we make losses dictated by the lower level, than indiers can no longer suicide leaders, which means that indiers will now have absolutely now way to damage leaders at all. So I don't think that that is a good fix either.

I don;t think leader strat effectiveness needs to be lessened, I think we need to boost foragers and markte/tent combinations until cashing and farming are viable.

Rat is a little overpowered, which is why I think it could stand to lose a few points off merc sell prices to balance things out ^_^

If capture and sack get fixed, indies are back in business. Especially defensive indy, which depends heavily on capture.

[Juska]

Leader losses are a touchy subject - on the one hand, losses are insane. On the other, if we make losses dictated by the lower level, than indiers can no longer suicide leaders, which means that indiers will now have absolutely now way to damage leaders at all. So I don't think that that is a good fix either.

Ok, suiciding a leader doesn't help an indy at all shadow.

If I'm indying and want to hurt a leader player I'm going to beat him into the ground so he can't hold his leaders.  I'm not going to suicide him because it gets me no land: which gets me no net, costs me loyalty: which I have very little of and need to prep. raiders and keep a continuous shield, all the time it's using turns and health I could spend on landfat targets and if the leader is untagged and has land well there it goes and gets locked because of the attack limit.

If for some reason I did decide to do it I'd have to spend half my run suiciding then grab lots of land build huts on it then drop for a decent ratio so that I could possibly poison/steal/murder w/e the leader and even then not only did I waste that run because odds are I didn't do enough damage. The whole time it's far easier to suicide another leader as a Stoat, make leaders and take their net than it is for an indy. I'd have an easier time killing the leader than suiciding and taking down his net.

At best if I'm working with a leader player I could grab land then spend my last 200 turns suiciding our enemy make some decent net on the land I alreadly got and then have my buddy come in with a good ratio and large amount of leaders and do the work on him, but two leader players can do that just as well and not run into such loyalty/upkeep problems.

[Shadow]

Ok, suiciding a leader doesn't help an indy at all shadow.

Does plenty of damage to the leader player though. Murdering an indy doesn't help a leader player at all, and yet they do it anyway ^_^

If I'm indying and want to hurt a leader player I'm going to beat him into the ground so he can't hold his leaders

Assuming you can break, which is unlikely if you are considering suicides as an alternative. A solo indy can pave the way for a leader player to open up the land.

If for some reason I did decide to do it I'd have to spend half my run suiciding then grab lots of land build huts on it then drop for a decent ratio so that I could possibly poison/steal/murder w/e the leader and even then not only did I waste that run because odds are I didn't do enough damage. The whole time it's far easier to suicide another leader as a Stoat, make leaders and take their net than it is for an indy. I'd have an easier time killing the leader than suiciding and taking down his net.

Why do you think leader players get indier to do the suicides? An indy can just keep demoing huts and suiciding -after- grabbing lots of land, so they get fill production out of their run while still doing damage at no ccost to their leader defense since it didn't exist in the first place. A leader doing that sacrifices both production and defense, unless they are a stoat, in which case they sacrifice only production.

At best if I'm working with a leader player I could grab land then spend my last 200 turns suiciding our enemy make some decent net on the land I alreadly got and then have my buddy come in with a good ratio and large amount of leaders and do the work on him, but two leader players can do that just as well and not run into such loyalty/upkeep problems.

Again, much more efficient to have an indy/mage teams than two mages.

Seriously though - if we take away the ability of an indy to suicide, what do you have to retal against a defensive leader player? Nothing. That's not to say we shouldn't rethink leader losses, it just means we need a lot more balances that so far, none of your suggestions are addressing. You need to think out your suggestions in terms of something other than how it affects indy ^_^.

[Juska]

If a defensive leader player can get enough rats to stop someone(s) from breaking them then good.

And murdering an indy helps a leader because it destroys net while doing very little damage to themselves.

The only defensive leader who's locked land recently was W.S. in turbo at the beginning of this set. I actually tried to leader suicide him and then murder him, but was unable as a leader.

Me and Genevieve broke him with troops later as indies. Not suicides.

[Shadow]

And murdering an indy helps a leader because it destroys net while doing very little damage to themselves.

And suiciding helps an indy because it does damage to a leader while doing very little damage to themselves. You would be surprised how much damage simple suicides do to a leader player who is not a stoat.

The only defensive leader who's locked land recently was W.S. in turbo at the beginning of this set. I actually tried to leader suicide him and then murder him, but was unable as a leader.

It is difficult, but it can be done. I've done it before. Bob did it over at some prom that is now dead IIRC.

Me and Genevieve broke him with troops later as indies. Not suicides.

And if you had suicided him regularly in that time at the end of your run, you would have broken sooner at no cost to yourself. Just because you don't use it yourself doesn't make it useless :P

[Juska]

Lol Shadow, it was easier to break with troops as an indy than with suicides as a leader, why would I use suicides as an indy?

If I drop you to 5k land you lose a lot more leader than if I suicide you 5 times.

If I hit you for land then suicide you all I do is kill leaders that would have left anyway.

I just see no advantage in a indy suiciding a leader, at least in turbo because of turns and hit limits. On reg. I can see how it would be somewhat annoying, but there I need every turn to make net. If I was a crappy indy just looking to make a few people mad then yeah I suppose, just like if I was a crappy leader just looking to make people mad by murdering them.

And I explained why suiciding as an indy hurts an indy already shadow.

[The Obliterator]

Hehe you dont get it.
It is way more productive for an indy to suicide with cash and loyalty sent from a leaderer than for a leaderer to go out and do it.
What you do it you get land first and then while you are suiciding you keep making troops.
I have done it many time with Snare and Shade and it is a very useful tactic.

[Shadow]

Lol Shadow, it was easier to break with troops as an indy than with suicides as a leader, why would I use suicides as an indy?

If you are fighting a locking enemy, suiciding them regularly will shut them down in a few days as they burn through their loyalty recovering. If you -can't- hit them to 5k on account of them -locking- it is the next most damging thing you can do.

If I drop you to 5k land you lose a lot more leader than if I suicide you 5 times.

Hitting someone to 5k land takes a [haties] of a lot more than 5 attacks - if you are goig to use that as a comparison, use something like 40-50 attacks vs 40-50 suicides, and you will see the damage you caused. You will kill 70% of their leaders in those attacks, versus the maybe 5k land you would have gained from hitting them so low. Of course, that all depends on them being clanned - 21 land attacks takes only half of their land (which does no damage at all and even helps a leader player), while 21 suicides kills half their leaders, which is more than enough for a leader player to jump in and own, regardless of whether or not you planned it that way. So if you are figting in unclanned enemy, suicides are going to be at least equally damaging, and opens the door for even more damage, whereas land attacks are only stopgap measures at best.  And if you are fighting a locker, which is really the only time that suicides are called for, you need to get murders in or else you are going to fall behind eventually.

Which means that you have really only one option, that benefits you in all kinds of ways. First off, suicing them means that another player might come in and mop up. Not a sure thing but alwyas an added bonus. Secondly, they are going to have to work twice as hard to recover. It is freaking hard to keep a lock up with you are getting suicided every day. Try it and see. If all you do is grab their land, they can just take it back and make their already big army bigger, and you will, sooner or later, fail mmiserably.

If suiciding as an indier hurts you significantly after you have grabbed your land, you are doing it wrong. Suiciding at the start of your run is stupid for an indier.

But ok - get rid of the suicides, and ill play a locking leader strat and we can go head to head. Lol.

[Juska]

At best if I'm working with a leader player I could grab land then spend my last 200 turns suiciding our enemy make some decent net on the land I alreadly got and then have my buddy come in with a good ratio and large amount of leaders and do the work on him, but two leader players can do that just as well and not run into such loyalty/upkeep problems.

Wow, I hate having to quote myself.

[Shadow]

Your quote is stil just as wrong as it was before. Indy/leader team is much better than two leaders. Marten and wolf can't suicide without ruining their runs completely now that capture is so weak (this needs to be fixed I agree) and stoats can only suicide at massive loyaltty cost since loyalty cost scales up with number of huts. Leaders will have more of a loyalty problem. As for the upkeep problem, you won't have one at all assuming you have been indying more than a few runs, because you will have more than enough cash for a full run of attacking, and this one, since you take less land, will be even less costly than usual.

And you still haven't addressed about 90% of what I said.

[Juska]

What haven't I addressed?

If the leader is supplying the indy then fine a indy/leader team will be more effective than a leader/leader team as long as you can kill enough of the enemies leaders in 30-40 suicides.

Still makes suiciding pretty worthless for a solo netting indy in a normal game situation and an emp situation.

[kell]

good to see the same old arguements are still going on. heck there must be fifty topics about this now

[Shadow]

No it really doesn't. I challenge you to play a non-stoat leader strat with someone suiciding you between your runs. It is a lot more damaging than you think.

What all this boils down to is the fact that suicides allow indiers a chance to retaliate to leader players, even if it is indirectly. If indiers can't suicide, then how could they find a leader player to do the damage for them? The leader isn't going to volunteer lol. Suicides need to stay as a deterrant to random destruction by leader players. I know I have campaigned for your side in the past, but I have rethought my logic.


ohmygod kell, welcome back haha.

[Neobaron]

Just so long as you're not suggesting that suiciding is "good enough" for indys.

Seems to me an indy shouldnt have to sacrifice the turns doing effectively nothing to improve their own lot.  <-- Note the bold part before you suggest that I said theyre doing nothing at all.

You havent forgotten the extreme reliance on food and land, and the necessity to squeeze every tiny bit of use out of all turns have you?

While a leader is explicitly designed to maim his enemy, a retaliating indy must intentionally fail attacks.

Just so long as you're not suggesting this isnt broken...

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EDIT: Added nt to should.