What is this I don't even

[Sevah]

Your a girl. Redwall warlords where we make it impossible to kill a nearly dead WARLORD. Sick of you guys. I'm out.

[Rakefur]

LOL (Volk style)

killin is not the point. it's more fun with alive enemies.

[windhound]

Your You're a girl. Redwall warlords where we make it impossible to kill a nearly dead WARLORD. Sick of you guys. I'm out.

FTFY (yes, gonna be that guy)

Cheers Sevz, see you next round

[cloud]

I agree with pretty much everything Sevz has said. There have been a lot of changes to make this game all "Carebear". Mercs, Markets, Sacks, and kill changes to say the least.

You wonder why no one's aggressive Shadow? It's because it's not worth it to be. The top 5 are always going to be leader players and it's more profitable to take a few hits each turn and exponentially recover what you've lost. Kill runs used to be efficient at bringing down large targets, now it requires 3-4 good leader players to pull off enough suicides/murders/poisons to do enough damage to be meaningful, and it's just not really worth it most times.

[windhound]

Fine.  Lets break it out
Sevz, Cloud, anyone else with issues, please explain. 
No, really.  Explain.  Complain again without substantiating it and I'm just going to ignore you.
Just shouting that things are broken is not going to change anything, ever.

Mercs - This has been covered fairly extensively.  The change was necessary, refilling rats at the same rate as skiffs was stupid.  This necessitated a change in the quantities refilled, it is currently low, yes.  This can be adjusted, we're looking for feedback.

Markets - I like the new market, please explain why it is bad and Carebear. 

Sacks - Again, covered fairly extensively.  And in your next breath you complain about how leaders rule the game.  Sack is a leader nerf, and you don't like it? 

Kills - I've always been anti-kill.  I'm sorry, I know some people feel like they're fun.  I know for a fact it drives people away from the game. 
Killing Shadow obviously will not drive him away, focus here.  Kills are still entirely possible, it just usually takes two or three people and some army if you're nuking someone large (standards under 500).  I feel this is acceptable, Shadow is dead so obviously kills are possible.  Sevz did most of the work himself, so it was a nearly solo kill anyhow. 
Being able to kill someone with no skiffs but tens of millions of other troops is retarded, standards under 500 is a good thing.

Now, get through those.  All of them, since they're all apparently major issues.
Done?  Cool.  Now come up with some solutions. 
For example, the fact that the top 5 is always going to be leader players. 
I agree, it is silly and the administration has put forth effort into trying to make other strategies viable.  And some have been successful. 

[Sevah]

The reason other races don't work is because the mission known as Open Attack Opportunities. Leaders can't be hit so bad in comparison which nullifies the purpose.

Sacking doesn't fix anything, all it does is make life real easy for someone to break protection late in the round and ignore any investing skills they used to have.

The minimal landgrab is ruined. The maximum is nurfed. Killing is what the game's about. The challenge is to use diplomacy to avoid such conflicts and win the game.

Forcing everyone to thrive from another players support is one thing but destroying the perks of the game is rude. I feel like your taking away peoples rights to have an enemy in a game about war.

[Shadow]

Too sleepy right now to address all of this, but I would like to point out that no change whatsoever has been made to the amount of land that is taken in attacks. Any difference you see is imaginary, or bad luck. Actually, the maximum land grab available (drive) was increased by 10% when we did the race balancing. You are making this stuff up as an excuse to complain.

Making kills harder did nothing to change the way the game interacts with solo leaders who can't be killed anyway, and never could be. Really have no idea what your actual criticism is here. Why should one player be able to take out a stronger player in a single run by stacking something they didn't? I have played proms where kills are common like you suggest, and most of them have a player base that is dying out much faster than ours, which has actually grown in recent months.

Everyone pretty much stopped being aggressive long before these changes started, and we have been trying to gear them toward making short term gain more important than long term, which promotes conflict. But the base of it is that leaders in their current form are not balancable against the rest of the game. There are lots of ideas and plans to address this, but you have to be patient - we are all mostly in university or working full time at this point, so things happen slowly. That, you just have to deal with.

Don't like being sacked? Buy a defense and actually interact with the game instead of being a carebear and hording cash all round til the end. It might not stop everyone but it will certainly stop the ones breaking protection. Afraid you can't spend it all because mercs are small? Spend some during the round and use it to have a battle instead of cash hording and being, as you say, a carebear. Use it to do some damage to other cashers so that what you do have will go farther in the end. We've also repeatedly said that mercs will be made larger in the future. It's just a matter of coding time. You are contradicting yourself about what you want out of this game. Defense is too difficult? We're working on it.

Please abuse the changes. That is how we figure out what needs changing. We usually let game abuse slide as long as the people doing it are forthcoming with the details and only do it once. For example, Blood wake clan hopping this round showed us that a fix we put in a while ago got over-written or was not made properly, and we will remedy that soon.

Echoing windy: if you have a problem, by all means offer a solution. Just complaining about it is not helpful and is unlikely to yield you results. I am getting really sick of people whining about things without being constructive, and I am pretty much just going to ignore such nonsense in any decision making we do. If you don't like something, tell us in detail why, and offer a solution. And if you can't do it civilly, don't bother.

[Firetooth]

I like the changes. (but I do think mercs should refill a bit faster)

There's a huge inbalance between leader and every other strat, which I think is a fundamental flaw. As for these changes being "carebear," as Shadow said they actually encourage people to try to defend their land if they don't like being sacked. I have had to done so as Marten in the past since the addition of the changes because I was losing so much money.

And the new market is far better then the old one, which was just a storehouse for food. Another change that isn't "carebear" and actually makes a feature work as it should, and stops making food massing the best (and laziest) strat around, because somebody marketing their food all round then de-marketing at the end for a top 3 finish is not fun for anybody and requires very little skill.

Kills have never been used much, and tbh they are a lazy and unskilled way to take down an opponent. I think takedowns require more skill and more team work and ultimately result in more skilled players who understand how to leader better as opposed to people who just use kills to takedown opponents. I've only recently learned how to do proper takedowns (the math) and before was more reliant on kills. As for those saying kills are impossible, I was killed in reg a few months ago. So definitely possible. Kills have a place, but they have the potential to drive people away (especially if you get idiot vets like Ryu killing newbs for fun, though cloud wasn't around when that happened) and if people can't handle the feature, it's probably best for the site's activity to make it more difficult to use.

I think clan play has been balanced as well, though, but I can't remember if aid credits got left in.

I think the problems people have aren't to do with the changes, but more to do with the fact solo leadering is so OP, as before the changes people were complaining and calling for solo leaders to be nerfed. (from somebody who usually solo leaders) Personally I think the best way to fix it would be to start making indy more powerful before weakening leadering, but this works too. I'm also happy he admins are actually trying to make the game more interesting and balanced to play, and I think even if you disagree with the changes you should be a bit more civil with raising your concerns. Calling the staff retarded, for example, is not going to motivate them to listen to your concerns.

[Sevah]

There's instant problems with making indies stronger. It's a dead end so they start relying on a leaderer to keep things safe. I can run any strategy whether it's solo or teamed.
Solo leaderer stacking cash isn't worth doing. Teamed players simply abuse the game by merging abilities together and the mercs are so expensive that it isn't worth buying defence.

I don't know how much easier I can explain this next bit.
At this turn rate make it so there's 2 or 3 attacks per hour and the maximum attacks is 33 instead of 22

This will balance out the unclanned leadering and be far more suitable for the dynamics of this game. Doesn't take a genius to figure out that charging indies to substitute for the opening attack ops dilemma has bad side effects

Base rate for the mercs should be 500/1000/2000/3000 before race modifier. fox should sit at -24% and with full camps have prices around 260-280 for rats on the mercs. Refil rate should be slightly improved but well done so far.

[Firetooth]

I agree, indies need some way to defend their net as well, but unfortunately that's difficult without rewriting most of the code.

I also don't think maximum attacks should be much higher then they already are, but should unmax quicker.Maybe 24/25 with a faster unmaxing rate? If you put in to many attacks then solo play is ineffectual.

[Sevah]

22 hits maximum is designed for slower servers.
simple change to 33max/2ph would completely fix the game. You'd soon see the true flaws in the server. All these previous fixes are useless and created around bigger problems
Not being able to store food is bad for an indier. Bank accounts should be bigger for people with tents or cities. Insert bank robbery mission.

[Shadow]

22 hits maximum is designed for slower servers.

We tried 33 attacks. It was just a land-passing fest, it didn't really add much. However, we have talked about faster unmaxxing in the past and I would be more than willing to give that a try.

Bank accounts should be bigger for people with tents or cities. Insert bank robbery mission.

The bank IS bigger people with markets (up to 40% bigger, as was said in one of the very early dev threads). We could add cities and tents to that effect as well, that's not a bad idea.

I would rather not do market stealing spells, I am quite happy with the slow leak and delayed market theft possibility at the moment, I think that that it working rather well.

The merc prices were chosen very carefully to avoid the possibility of the troop loop. A lot of thought went into the current race and price setup, so please don't assume that we chose those numbers arbitrarily. In other words, we can't lower than without introducing the potential for exploits. Really though, they are only on average about 8% higher than when we started, so I don't see what the big deal is there.

Making indies stronger is not really the answer, not in terms of net output anyway. That just makes aiding to a win easier than it is without actually helping solo indies - the problem that needs to be addressed is from the leader side. And it will be, sooner or later.

[Sevah]

Standard attack sack should take maximum cash and food, std capture more leaders

If the server was at 33 attacks it'd completely prevent alot of issues. Indies merc prices shouldn't be so extreme and changing setup from flat leaders to leaders over camps should pay off better which doesn't
max discount isn't enough to ever compete in reselling prices. Best resellers are indies or indy fed. You've completely denied people from buyin from the mercs and selling on the market which should be a critical aspect of financing, that along side of sacking for funds pretty much makes it implausible to to run any race at it's true intentions.

[Shadow]

Standard attack sack should take maximum cash and food, std capture more leaders

We originally left special attack types off standard because of its power, but I would be ok with adding them back in if others feel the same way.

If the server was at 33 attacks it'd completely prevent alot of issues.

Like what? Again, we already tried this, and it sucked.

Indies merc prices shouldn't be so extreme and changing setup from flat leaders to leaders over camps should pay off better which doesn't
max discount isn't enough to ever compete in reselling prices. Best resellers are indies or indy fed. You've completely denied people from buyin from the mercs and selling on the market which should be a critical aspect of financing, that along side of sacking for funds pretty much makes it implausible to to run any race at it's true intentions.

There are plans in place to address the reselling side of the market, after we have finalized the changes we put in already. So be patient on that front. The merc discount is not bad, really. A marten at 40% camps get 32% off base price.

[Sevah]

wolf financing an indier is 5x as cheap, especially after sacks damage stockpiles and the holders stockpile is defended, rebuilding to defend against sacks isn't worth doing unless it's after loyalty's spent and rats over towers.
Basically the cap stinks. No way a sack should take someone's land and more than 250m cash. 500m cash if it's standard attack