On Sacks and Murders

[Kilkenne]

There has been a lot of talk for a very long time about the efficiency of using the attacks that have defined both of the main play-styles that exist today. I am talking about Sack and Murder.

Now, before every leader player who has ever graced RWL with their presence gets up in arms, I will give you this warning before I continue: I am out to level the field, and played leaders last turbo round, got a hang of nuking a lot of net in not a lot of time. It felt pretty powerful at the time. The same as sack does when you find that your opponent has nothing guarding his precious money and food because he can't be bothered to buy a single soldier to protect anything until the end of the round.

It is also worth noting that I dumbed these strategies down for the sake of clarity, I don't care if you do something better or differently. I do know these things are feasible, though. ~Math~

Now here's the situation:

You are Johnny Q. Leader. You set out on your magical quest of Redwall: Internet Warlord domination. You plod about at lowish land for some amount of time whilst building up a relatively sizeable force, and then you DROP THE HAMMER ON SOME FOOL - Straight through the troop hole that you deduced quite cleverly from their player status. Those kind people, leaving those troop holes so you can purchase no more than 100,000 rats and send them streaming into the breach.

Now that you've found the troop hole, you find another, and another, because hey, everyone's got one, right? You use troop holes, and if necessary, leader: Attack and get yourself 100,000 land. Anyone who is experienced enough with the game to call themself a "veteran" can handle doing this on either server.

What do you do on that 100,000 land? Oh, boy. What -don't- you do. I'll tell you what you don't do. You don't build anything but huts. You build 100,000 huts, and by god, you are going to fill those huts and it is going to be ~awesome~. It takes you about 100 turns of earnin' dat loyalty, you know, to get ready for what's about to happen. You can never have enough loyalty. Your huts are now just about to the 100 leader/hut mark. They might be at about 90, they might be at *gasp* EIGHTY. THREE. But they're close enough, so we're just going to relax and keep listenin' to old Kilksy. Because you're a prudent leaderer, you use 40 more turns to jack ~43k of your huts. Now you're relaxing with about 57,000 land, all huts.

So now that you've used probably 200 or so turns, and you've diligently marketed however many rats it took to get this far, and sold the rest to the mercenaries so that you do not incur costs, you now have about 10,000,000 leaders, maybe 9,000,000, on 57,000 land. You have it made in the shade, my friend. Sip that margarita and kick back, the PROMISED LAND HAS BEEN ~FOUND~.

Let's say you're a Wolf, and you are mega strong, so you are going to use Enrich so you get 5% more food every time you feast. You are one cool cat. Now because you've built up the loyalty or whatever in your previous (screw it, it takes turns to construct, too) 250 turns of your run, you have plenty of loyalty. You see that "Feast" button and you reach for it. You love it. It is your hero. The only bright light in your otherwise dark, awful life. Let's say you've got the 10,000,000 leaders. What greets you when you slam that button?

Missions: Success
~55,000,000 Food

Whoa, we have a winner here. And that took what, TWO turns? Woo-wee that's a good amount of food. You can literally slam that button 99 more times. But let's be reasonable, you only use it 80 more times. A mere 80 presses of PURE. UNADULTERATED. JOY. (that you can do in 4 runs of 20 if that trips your trigger)

Missions: Success
1,100,000,000 Food

-FOUR. TIMES.

So you've just made 4,400,000,000 food. That's a lot of loaves of bread for your hungry soldiers, ladies and gentlemen.

Did I mention that your leaders  eat .25 food each per turn? Those greedy jerks are quaffing down 2,500,000 food every single time you push a button.
Also, each of those leaders costs you .5 dollars every time you push a button. They are truly greedy jerks. They also kill 5,000,000 dollars every time you push a button.

But you're a savvy warlord, you calculate up everything it's going to cost you to run your next 450 turns with these same 10,000,000 leaders.

It'll cost you 1,125,000,000 food and 2,250,000,000 dollars. In mercenary values, this'll cost you a grand total of 12,375,000,000 dollars.

Whoa, that's a lot of scratch, Lee.

Not so fast, my friend. Let's divide that back down into the food bucket, and see what's goin' on up in here. That's 1,375,000,000 of your hard earned food. That leaves you with a net gain of 3,075,000,000 food this "run". Not so great, not so bad, all things considered. I mean, you still have 40 turns left with which to raise some defenses, or do whatever it is you people do when you find yourself with 40 extra turns.

Your run has yielded you a net gain of approximately 58,500,000 net worth.

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All you did was get to a good ratio with 57,000 huts. I know that there are people who are able to run on more, and I know that there are people who can run on considerably less. Here's one other thing that I know: My calculations are completely wrong in that you can probably get yourself up to 100k land if you are smart on Reg in 50 turns, not 100. You can get your leaders to that 10,000,000 mark fairly easily, or even get them well above this number before dropping land back down, if you're a smart player. You'll also be raising your defenses while you run, and you will keep practically 0 troops on hand, you'll have sold them all on mercs or stores them on the public market. In all likelihood, if you were in fact "diligent" like I said.

You gained 58,500,000 net in one run. Bravo, but the reality is that this isn't necessarily how all runs work, indeed if you are clanned with multiple wolves, or if you go well over that 100,000 land mark and down to say 70k of huts, or if you let someone else knock you to the ratio, then you will have even MORE turns in which to press the Feast button. You could theoretically feast up 100,000,000 net in a good run. Maybe more. Most likely a little less. But let's keep things reasonable with my cut and dry numbers, because you know what, that's how I do to prove a point. Let's say that you ended up with that 3.125 billion food. You added it to your pile of net worth, and assume that no one else will take it.

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Now, David A. Indy logs into Redwall: Internet Online Warlords on the internet. He's a pretty strong indy but is pretty dumb in some ways.

He sells the troops that he previously made, because he was smart and had 30% of his land made into camps. Bam, from ~300 million networth (where he last ended, I didn't say he was Lucy, I said he was a pretty okay indy) he is greeted with a pile of money that will surely buy the kind of hedonism that would make Caligula blush. This totals to about 62 billion internet warlord dollars. He is a stupid indy, though, and for the sake of simplicity of this, he drops ten billion cash on the market buying one billion food for 10 dollars apiece. So let's say he starts his run with about 52 billion internet warlord dollars in his pocket.

BUT WAIT, DAVID A. INDY WANTS TO SAVE SOME 'O DAT NET

So, because he was sitting on all those troops at once (with defenses raised, just in case) he drops the maximum amounts that he can on the market for later. This totals 25% of his total troops, so that sell value drops to 46.5, then down again to 36.5 because he was stupid and had to do the food thang. That's cool though, right? It's all good. No big thing, 'cause he's an indy and he's mega strong. In total he's marketed 63.75 million in troop value, because 15% of his networth is not based on troops. It is food and land and miscellany at this time. When that net comes off the market again, because it takes an additional 20% hit, it will be worth 51 million networth when added back into his army. This is remarkably comparable to the 58.5 million networth that the leader player stockpiled, and indeed the leader player actually made. Don't be fooled by the "well the leader player doesn't also have cash in his pocket" this is fundamentally wrong, and where a lot of people get caught up. A leader player piling food at a high networth will pay the same amount of upkeep that a leader player at a lower networth will pay, that is to say - Not a whole lot.

Now, where were we in the David story? Oh yeah, our strapping young lad valiantly strides forth, smiting his less troop-heavy foes, valiantly viewing their biography infos so that he might hit them in the appropriate troop type and not lose his precious troops. David is a pretty sweet indy, and Steve the Indy had all the land grouped up for him anyhow, because he's a cool guy like that. David runs himself up to 131,000 land. Again, not an incomprehensible number for those of you counting at home. He builds 1,000 huts along the way to generate loyalty in a habit that most indies have, wherein to regain health after their attacks, they tend to raise defenses to get their health back up, whenever loyalty permits. At the end, let's say for simplicity that he's rocking on 100,000 barracks (30% camps for next run, again this is for simplicity's sake). There has been a rampup to this point, and he's diligently maeking Stoat at this point. Why Stoat, you ask? They're a good balancing troop for the purpose of this exercise. They're relatively heavy on net worth, and it's simple to use the following:

Code Select Expand


(barracks * troop training %) * 0.3 * 4 * race ind %
= number of stoats per turn


To figure out exactly how many Stoats this fine fellow is going to end up getting per turn once he's at his 100k barrackses.

Using this math, he's going to get 150,000 stoats per turn (He's a rat, like all smart indies, so he gets a 25% bonus to his troop production).

Now let's consider how much real net worth he is generating per turn at the apex of his run, and we're going to assume also that he has no other type of troops except for stoats, alright? Alright! He's making a ~blistering~ 628,600 net per turn, and that's just maekin staot.

Unfortunately, each consecutive turn adds another 600,000 cash in debt to his cycle, and as it would turn out, 52 billion dollars/450 turns doesn't go as far as it used to go back when Caligula would throw orgies in the Circus Maximus. He goes back to his 300 million net, socks away some of his cash (his turns are spent at this point), and then three hours later logs back into redwall: internet warlords to un-market his gain so he looks cooler in the eyes of his peers. He is now at about 350 million net after unmarketing. The smart play is probably actually just to keep marketing or whatnot and then do a different troop and unmarket it again, but hey, he's not very smart and chills with his stuff out of the market, not unlike a boss.

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BUT KILK WHERE ARE YOU GOING WITH THIS?

Hey, you! Back on the shut up train for another few minutes, I'm not done with you yet. Now we're heading into the good part.

Here's some sack math for you.

Code Select Expand


       if ($act == "sack") {
           $rand1 = mt_rand(15, 25) * 0.00001;
           $lcash = ($enemy[cash] * $rand1) / (($users[wizards]/$users[land])/100 + 0.04);
           $lfood = ($enemy[food] * $rand1) / (($users[wizards]/$users[land])/100 + 0.04);


Hey, what does this mean in non nerd talk?

Here's what this means. You're going to get a random value of between 15 and 25 for the first value which is "$rand1". User in this case is the person that receives the sackening. The rest should be pretty self explanatory. And you can use order of operations (PEMDAS!) to work it out. Let's do the maximum and minimum for a sack on a player who has 300,000,000 solely in food net sitting out in the open, shall we?

Say a player has 100,000,000 net in unprotected food (This would never happen, but let's just do it for the sake of argument, shall we?) That's about 5,000,000 food for those of you counting at home.

Therefore, here's our equation for both the minimum sacked and the maximum sacked (For this I used what our indy would be at the height of his run, just to show, also Mr. Indy has 1,000 huts so he has 100k leaders on 130k land):

food sacked  = (5,000,000,000 * .00015) / ((100,000/130,000)/100 + 0.04);
food sacked = (750,000) / ((.76923/100) + .04)
food sacked =  (750,000)/(.047692) = 15,725,907

That is the low end, so real quick let's do the high end (You can do this yourselves at home):

Food sacked = 26, 209,846

And this is on the max end, of someone getting sacked that is holding 5 billion food. Note that if the leader player also had cash they would lose cash at a similar rate. Please also understand that no matter how few leaders the indy has, or if it's a leader that's doing the sacking, it's that ".04" that ends up being divided out of the end that is the important modifier.

The leader player is losing both land, and 499,235 net worth of food every single attack at maximum. This at 100,000,000 is approximately .5% of the player's networth. You can extrapolate this up or down, depending how much food a leader player is sitting on. Now that I've done that in certain terms, I'll illustrate one more situation, which would be a player on 350,000,000 food net-worth getting sacked. (~17.5 billion food)

55,040,677 Low (hey that's 1 feast on 57k huts as a wolf!) = 1.101 million net = 0.3146% of the defender's net
91,734,462 High (Almost two feasts) = 1.835 million net = 0.5243% of the defender's net

Why would someone be sitting on 350 million unprotected food net? I really have no idea, but the average between those two numbers is .41945%. Let's keep that number in our minds as we move forward, shall we?

Now we're going to see the effects of someone who is on 350 million troop net getting murdered by the same player.

Let's use the number 83,522,727 stoats. That's 350 million net worth of just stoats. CAN YOU FEEL THAT POWER?

The leader player that is attacking selects: Murder, luckily the target is shielded.

835,227 stoats go out of existence, or 3,499,999 net worth. Basically equivalent to 1% of the murdered person's majority net net worth.

Let's recap: In one sack, a leader player stands to lose ~.42% of their primary net worth. In one murder, whilst shielded, an indy is going to lose ~1% of their net worth. Please do not tell me that this number goes down in consecutive murders, because it works the same way with sacks. Eventually if you sack someone 20 times they will have less to sack and the effect will be different. It is the exact same way as murders, but what I am trying to illustrate to each and every one of you in slow terms that you can actually understand is that Murder is not equal to sack in any way shape or form, and is essentially a tool that leader players can use coming out of protection to effectively destroy players who are not playing leader strategies. It is not nearly as feasible to demolish net via sacking, and here's why:

If you're looking to "destroy " net via sacking, you are sadly mistaken. You would be better off going to leaders and suiciding/murdering your opponent, or if you can get a better ratio and more land as a leader, poisoning his food. Why, you ask? Well, because of another awesome fact: Attacks (let's say this is on Turbo, although we've been using Reg) cost you 4% of your life. Leader missions cost 2% of your life. As something to think about, here's a fun fact: As a leader player you literally gain  your loyalty back by about 400%  every time you choose to Murder another player.

Kilk, where are you going with this? Where I'm going is explaining to you all that the math behind sacks and murders is completely skewed in the direction of the leader. Leader missions are grossly overpowered compared to their troop based counterparts. This goes in several directions. In one, it makes solo indying not at all viable because you can't "hide" as much troop net on the market as you can food net, just due to the amount that you are allowed to put on. Another interesting direction it goes into is the culture of "SACKING BEGETS MURDERS" that we have gone into. I would contend that this is a complete and utter misunderstanding of the way that the sack system works. It hurts leader players significantly less as far as recovery time as well, and I'll be frank about that. I illustrated already that a leader player can Feast on 57k huts TWICE and that would get back the amount sacked at maximum by another 350 million net player against their 17,500,000 food that they're chilling on with no defenses. For those at home, that's 4 turns. Do not come to me and tell me that LOYALTY IS SUCH A PROBLEM, KILK. I'm sorry. It's not, if it is, you are probably doing it wrong. With the way troop holes work, etc, you should have plenty of time left at the end of your run as a Wolf or whatever leader race you are to run as many Feasts as you need to run. That indy that got himself murdered (that cost 2 less turns with health included than the sack and did twice the total net damage)  lost (in this case) just under 6 turns worth of troops at 100,000 barracks, which for those of you who have indeed indied, is a pretty high number to have.

So I have illustrated two disparities between the destruction between Sack and Murder. First and foremost, the fact that Sack destroys ~.42% of a leader's net, and that Murder destroys ~1% of an indier's net (Note again that I understand math, and it's less each time, in both cases, I'm not stupid.) I have also illustrated, albeit more briefly, but what should already be in way better common understanding, that the turn cost for a sack versus a murder (in health) is twice as high.

Before someone tries to tell me about how WELL YOU ALSO DESTROY CASH NET!!!!! Spare me. If you can't figure out what to do and have billions upon billions of cash being sacked out of you (Or poisoned out of if you, if you are on the indy end of this) at high networth (I know who will respond to this part with this, stating that he plays Turbo at present as a Marten and gets sacked for a lot of money, let me finish), you probably don't understand what I'm trying to say here anyhow. The key here is high networth. If you are sitting on a pile of cash at 350m net, and with the banking changes you don't have 25 billion socked away, I don't know what to tell you. Sitting with that amount of cash is dangerous, but honestly if anyone is all cash net at 350m or higher, I tip my hat to them, because that is 875 billion cash that you've not hid away as food or as anything else. And then I'm going to call you a liar, because I doubt that that is even possible to get to because another leader player would find it.

Anyhow, more importantly, I'm leaving cash out of this because the total networth value of cash is very, very small compared to food. If anything, if someone is running as a leader both high on cash and food, they will have a pretty decent balance of both, and the averages will even out to gain about .42% of their net per sack starting with the first one then going downward. If you're too dim to figure this math out on your own, I will do some more simulation for you.

Kilk; Why are you using 350 million net as an example? Because this is about what net that these things really start to come into perspective at, the low net portions are confusing, and I can use more round numbers up here. This is also the networth that I'm most familiar working with numbers with, because that's what I crunch numbers for when I'm doing a thing on either server.

Kilk; It's all well and fine to point this out, but what are you trying to accomplish? Simple. I am tired of seeing the phrase sacks = murders. It's even in my own clan on reg, and it's crap. It is cancer, and I will excise it. I have legitimate suggestions of my own that I will outline in another post in this thread to balance Murder versus sack in power and scope.

Basically I've provided you with reasoning and math, if you don't understand something, or say that I've done something completely wrong, you'd better be able to prove it, or I'll chalk it up to your ineptitude. I assume that both of these situations are with established players that know how to generate their own resources, and I am not taking into account team Indy or team Leadering, both of which exist. I also went as far as to make the indy in that situation not even scrape, and have a pretty godawful run. If you would like me to run it again where he runs himself up to like 450m, then he'll just lose more total net every time he gets murdered by the Leader Ion Cannon™, so that argument is pretty poor. It's also a poor argument saying that it's hard for a Wolf to scrape enough land and be that clean cut with their net gain: Again, I don't care, I will chalk that up to inexperience or ineptitude or a will to not get 100k land.



                         

[Shadow]

Minor nitpick with all of this. Comparing percentages killed directly is not a good way of going about this. Leaders take a lot longer to build up that net than an indy. Indy can recover much much faster than a leader. 21 shielded murders will go completely unnoticed by a good indy, whereas at a certain point, 21 sacks will actually be taking more than a leader player can make in a run.

I am not disagreeing about the imbalance, just with the method of comparison you used.

[windhound]

Eh.  21 Shielded murders is still approaching 20% net loss.
Murders are trivial to do in ratio, loyalty cost, and health cost. 

But then again, so are sacks.  And sack is more socially acceptable in the game than murders
Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place, but I always notice more sacks than murders going around. 
And while murder:sack may be 2:1 loss at best, that's still a lot of stuff we're talking about.

Possibly the worst thing about indies is that they can never win. 
It would be suicide to stack troops and resources on an indy, a leader player would tear them down in an instant. 
Its possible for a leader player to solo-win turbo or become an emp on reg.  Its not for an indy.
And I'm not sure how to fix this.

So yeah, I see the imbalance.  Its been there a long time, and people have still indied.
Look forward to hearing recommendations towards actually fixing things

[Kilkenne]

I have a few ideas that I intend to put on the table tomorrow when I have another 1.5 hours to hurf out 4,000 words on an internet warlord game. Rest assured that I didn't post a post for no reason. I'm just setting the stage for some grand ideas that are easy enough to implement.

Also, 21 murders generally doesn't go unnoticed. I am probably bad though. Furthermore, and more importantly, you have to be sitting on about 800 million of food net before you start seeing the kind of losses from 21 sacks that completely erase an entire run's effort. Generally if you're that high, people will think twice about sacking you that many times...Or they'll sack you that many times.

Something that we've discussed in the past is the fact that the market is used by both parties to hold stuff, and I am under the belief that it is indeed skewed towards the leader set, as far as what networth you have to "show" and make vulnerable. I've posted enough on this though that I'd be beating a drum that I know no one wants to listen to. The fact that I feel that food net is disingenuous to the game is no secret, but I'd rather do what I'm doing now to even the odds, than try to make people understand why stacking food into the market alone an entire round is dumb enough that they might as well load promisance on their local box and just push a button every day when they log in.

[Shadow]

Adding a troop attack that destroys food/cash instead of stealing it would go a long way toward balance. It would basically force leader players to sell food to buy armies each run. Of course, our strat diversity goes down in that scenario.

[Juska]

Entertaining read, thank you.

My opinion.

NERF FOOD NET!!!!!!

[Firetooth]

Entertaining read, thank you.

My opinion.

NERF FOOD NET!!!!!!

I concur.

(I didn't actually read much of Kilk's post, my mind imploded trying. I'll edit a proper reply in at some point)

[Shadow]

Entertaining read, thank you.

My opinion.

NERF FOOD NET!!!!!!

Nerfing food net doesn't solve the problem, it just makes it take a bit longer to manifest itself. The fundamental imbalance is still there.

That said, I am not opposed to nerfing food net, as long as it is only part of a solution we develop, not the entirety.

[Neobaron]

Eh. Try to not derail this thread guys.

Food net is stupid and should be nerfed into the ground, but this thread is about the distinct and obvious imbalance between sack and murder.

[Genevieve]

this thread is about the distinct and obvious imbalance between sack and murder.

But that's not even a thing. Of course murders do more damage than sacks. The sole purpose of murder is to destroy stuff. I don't use sack to hurt another player, I just use it to get stuff while I get land, which I have to do anyway. The problem (if there is one), is people thinking that if I sack them, I deserve to be murdered, because they're the ~same~. They're not.