Plan for next round

[Shadow]

As promised, here are the changes planned for next turbo round.

While I am very pleased with how the economic mechanics work out and I think that this round was an excellent proof of principle, there are clearly some balance issues that need to be addressed. I will summarize them in point form below, and go into more detail of the rationale for each one where necessary below.

Economic and Industry Balances:

• Cash production of workers reduced 20%
• Food output of workers roughly doubled
• Food output of foragers halved
• Food output is networth dependent like cash (lower returns past 100m net)
• Markets and foragers hold 85 workers each, camps hold 90
• Troop training requires 33% less worker death
• Cities are no longer constrictible

Market Balances

• Reduced troop amount in mercs by 33%
• Public market commission is now dependent on the size of the seller (max of 50% if you are 50x the median networth), and is reported in the news when things are bought

Attack System Balances

• All offensive leader missions return, except open attack op, with a few changes:
  
  
  
  • Murder affects health as it does now
  • Steal takes both cash and food
  • Spell base loyalty cost increased so that it is not possible to earn more loyalty than you spend while doing missions
  • We may or may not end up keeping the leader land attack, depending on how things play out
• Max of 21 attacks, but attacks only count toward hitlimit if they take land
• No more penalties for attacking someone near hitlimit
• Removed loyalty costing attack buffs
• Power of sack increased slightly - it will take on average 0.5% of resources instead of a max of 0.5%
• Weakened shame losses

New Features

• Overdraft protection - if you run out of cash, it will take from your savings and loan before your army deserts

Display/Bug Fixes

• Fixed buff turns loyalty cost consistency check bug
• Removed "leader power" field in manage army, replaced with defense ratio
• News reports more accurate for new mission types and market commissions
• Fixed clan size bug where clans could increase past max size if requests were pre-existing

Rationale:
The idea behind the economic balances is based on people saying that they had an easy time keeping cash green but a hard time keeping food green. This setup means that a race with no boost to income or foraging will produce $20 per 1 food if they build all markets or all foragers respectively. This may change as the round goes on - I have a feeling that food output will  be a little too high like this, so I may decrease output of both sometime during the round and make the cash:food output ratio 15:1 instead. We'll see.

The reduction in the worker cost of troops is in response to people saying that indy was too weak since you could not keep enough workers around to have a good economy. This change means that you will have both a better economy, and more troop output for the same building spread.

Cities had to go, they were too easily defended and they broke the worker system this round. They will likely be back, though in a different form. I know it seems like we are getting rid of a lot of features, but it really is easier to balance the core of the game and then build features back in a few at a time, so bear with us.

The market commission is in response to people using the market to get around aid limits. If they try that next round, they will find that if the person they are aiding through the market is very high up, they are losing a significant portion of their profits to market commission. The average player will probably not notice a big change.

The attack system this round was problematic - the attack buffs were not very well used, and the system for their success was not well thought out. Bringing back leader missions provides a more balanced attack system since it makes it harder for people to pull ahead without a team. At the same time, since going heavy huts is so inefficient, I don't expect to see any all leader players, so this should not cause problems in that area. If it does, we will re-adjust again.

The biggest change is that only attacks that take land will count toward hitlimit. This idea was because as things are now, you could choose to murder, or attack for land, but not really both because of the penalties. Leader mission are much less destructive in this version (nobody hordes resources, so steal and poison are less of a concern, and murder doesn't kill troops) so it makes sense to allow people do do as many missions as they please and only count the damaging land attacks. This also means that troop suicides will work, though I wouldn't recommend them.

Pillage was overpowered, sack was underpowered, so I took the middle road and got rid of pillage while making sack stronger.

Note that the attack system is still in experimentation mode - while the rest of the stuff is just balance tweaks, the attack system is probably going to see major changes, so mess around with everything a lot this round to find out what works and what doesn't.

The only real new feature of this round is overdraft protection - you should find running out of cash to be less devastating, though be careful since once your loan fills up, you're back to square one.

Concerns, comments, criticisms, complaints,... cwestions?

[Rakefur]

"attacks only count toward hitlimit if they take land"

*Likes. That clears up a lot.
_____
Someone's going to say this, but anyway: "I ain't got no cwestions"

[cloud]

"Market Balances

•Reduced troop amount in mercs by 33%
•Public market commission is now dependent on the size of the seller (max of 50% if you are 50x the median networth), and is reported in the news when things are bought"

Dislike...makes it way harder to run solo now. >:(

[Shadow]

at your current position the market commission would only be about 10%, as opposed to 5% now. The market commission will only be noticeable at all to people who are way above the rest of the game.

[Colonel Yuri]

So we've finally decided to compile a list of all the different themed rounds we've had in Turbo. Here new players can look up what these themes mean, and old players can go through this list and decide which rounds would be cool to do in upcoming months.


Race to Badger Gold
An emperor account is of the race Badger, with reinforced stats and a ton of gold.

Custom Race
Upon logging in for the first time, each player sets the stats and name for their own custom race. You are given an amount of race points which you can allocated to different race traits, and choose any race ability. You can edit your stats for as long as you are in protection.

Definatly lets do the custom race

[Shadow]

I think we need shael around to run that one, I am not really sure how the code needs to be set up to get that working or if it would even work with 3.0.

I am trying to tailor themes to the testing process - race roulette this round was so that people could play around and see how different races respond. Making custom races while balances are still being worked out would make it very hard to see what imbalances result from the code and what imbalances result from the custom races.

That being said, custom race is very fun, so once things are more stable in 3.0, we will definitely do that one, promise :)

On a related note, I would like to hear feedback from players about whether or not the above addresses most of their concerns or if there are still issues that you found this round that were not addressed. There is some talk about murder killing troops again, but I would like to remind people that murder was the reason the indy-versus leader gap existed (that, and loot+feast mission), so I would appreciate if people would give it another round before jumping on that option. It's not off the table, but I would like to try to get things working without it first.

[Colonel Yuri]

Thanks...Shadow. I would also like to see food being able to be placed in the bank

[Rakefur]

Shadow, I wanna to see how the Communist theme would work in 3.0.

[Colonel Yuri]

yes

[Shadow]

Yuri, remember the thing about posting more than one word at a time?

Rakefur, remind me what the communist theme was again?

[Rakefur]

http://www.redwallwarlords.com/forums/index.php?topic=10075.0
sounds interesting.

[Shadow]

right now, murder works like this (shielded):

health after murder = floor(health - 0.01*health)

for shields, replace 0.01 with 0.03.

This means that shielded murders currently kill 1% health every hit, while unshielded ones kill 3% until 67% health, 2% between 67 and 40% health, and 1% below that.

I would like to propose the following formula shielded)

health after murder = floor(health - 0.02 * health * health / 100)

this means that at high health, you hit for on average 2% per hit until about 70% health, and 1% after. For unshielded,

health after murder = floor(health - 0.06 * health * health / 100)

which means that you can hit down to 40% before you are only doing 1% per hit, and you get there significanly faster. As a comparison, 20 murders would leave you with the following health given the 4 options:

current, shielded:
80% health left after 20 murders
100 murders needed to reduce someone to 0 health
murder does only 1 damage after the 0th murder

current, unshielded:
48% health left after 20 murders
60 murders needed to reduce someone to 0 health
murder does only 1 damage after the 28th murder

proposed, shielded:
65% health left after 20 murders
85 murders needed to reduce someone to 0 health
murder does only 1 damage after the 15th murder

proposed, unshielded:
38% health left after 20 murders
58 murders needed to reduce someone to 0 health
murder does only 1 damage after the 19th murder

You can see that while the amount of turns needed to take someone to 0 does not change very much, the damage in the new system is much quicker while their health is still high, and usually taking someone's health down to zero or even close to it would not be necessary.

Feedback please:) If people like this I'll put it in this round.

[Colonel Yuri]

http://www.redwallwarlords.com/forums/index.php?topic=10075.0
sounds interesting.

Union might be a good one to test out

Yuri, remember the thing about posting more than one word at a time?

Rakefur, remind me what the communist theme was again?

Sorry sir...wont happen again sir

[Shadow]

The communist theme would be really cool in 3.0, since people actually have an income. Definitely one to revisit as well. I think this next round will be themeless just because it makes balancing easier, but we'll pull out some of these ones once Shael is around to tweak them to work in the new code :)

[Ian2424]

Would Custom Races be good too?