The Quirky Dynamics of Being Emperor

[taekwondokid42]

You have become our peasents, because we successfully acquired control of the land in the game.

My question is, why such a strong backlash? Everybody seems upset. That wasn't the goal at all, I was hoping for some fun and a challenge. We barely pulled it off and Ruddertail was the only person who really put forth some effort.

Ruddertail was the best part of the experience. We had something of an alliance set up, then some stars aligned and sevz/snare/idunno/me decided to lock land, so I told Ruddertail and he instantly declared me an enemy, at least temporarily. Clean, simple, professional, and totally understandable.

Shadow was the worst, because he's playing passive and I really don't want to attack passive players. Except at one point he had enough rats to break idunno and we couldn't let those rats sit in the game, lest someone trade him for them. I wanted to leave him alone but 15m rats and 100k skiffs, my suspicions were strongly stirred so I organized a takedown. At that point I wasn't even 100% sure it was Shadow, I just new it was a guy claiming to be a passive player yet sitting on enough troops to break us.

On the off chance that Shadow was indeed holding them for Ruddertail then I hope you consider my takedown a risk of doing business together like that. If there was indeed no intent on Shadow's part to ever trade the rats away then my apologies, but I think my aggression is understandable. But you aren't really passive when you are the only person all game who's had a large enough army to break the guy locking land. Or at least, if you truly are passive then that's both a coincidence and pretty impressive, and you should be able to forgive the misunderstanding.

As for reverse desertions, I think the idea is great and that it would make locking land a lot harder, except the mechanics were screwed up a bit. If you fixed them like shown below, I think they would work a lot more in your favor:

1. reverse desertions happen starting at 3x NW not 1.5X NW.
2. 1.5% is still minimum desertion, 3% is still max desertion (but happens at 3xNW and 6xNW respectively)
3. If you attack with rats, only rats desert, ditto for the rest of the unit types. You only get all troop types if you std attack.

The way it is now it's mathematically impossible to prevent someone from causing reverse desertions unless you have so many troops that they can't break you at all. Assuming you both have only rats, they only need 1/2 of your troop NW in order to break you, and that doesn't even account for the fact that you need to hold on to the other 3 troop types as well. So basically anyone you can break at all is vulnerable to your army thefting until they are literally below 20m NW. It makes it relatively easy to keep everybody well out of reach of the nerevarine.

And seriously this is crazy stressful. Why aren't we all friends?

[Ruddertail]

I can clear things up on Shadow's behalf on at least two counts:

1) The "Passive thing" is him wanting to simultaneously tweak code and playtest. For this reason, he's refusing to attack anyone or formally team with anyone. Which brings me to
2) The troops. Which is me paying him for food (perhaps overzealously, though I guess we can call a bunch of it advance payment). For the record, he refused to accept troops to hold, so I'd have had to find some way of buying them back.


As far as the general playerbase apathy, I think your team mates' name summarizes it best: I dunno. I broke you guys at least two days running, but I'm pretty sure I was the only one to do so. I had limited help from Firetooth on one of the runs, and Shadow cut me some good deals, but I didn't really have a team to fall back on, and there wasn't another team out there seriously fighting. Even when I broke you some time before your run, I don't think people did much of anything with it. Maybe people just want to solo net in peace for a set or two? I thrive on the whole coordinated takedown/buildup thing, honestly, so I don't really understand that. Maybe part are just sick of fighting Sevz (on every level)?



As far as reverse desertions, I think it actually worked more in your favor - it made it hard for me to hold a proper breaking army between runs, which means even the times I broke you, I was down to maybe 200 - 250 turns before I got the seriously good land.

[taekwondokid42]

I broke you guys at least two days running

That would have been the end of us if you had turns to do something with the land. Or a teammate to use the turns for you.

I thrive on the whole coordinated takedown/buildup thing, honestly

Me too, it's quite exhilarating to see a bunch of teamwork come together in an effective way.

Maybe part are just sick of fighting Sevz (on every level)?

I think this might be a big part of it.

As far as reverse desertions, I think it actually worked more in your favor

It definately is working in our favor right now, because when you are trying to break me you have to hold most of your army as rats (or stoats), and I can just drop down to 5m NW with a few skiffs and take everything away from you with almost no running costs if I use the storehouse and/or aid a teammate. But if you changed it so the required NW gap was higher, and you changed it so I had to standard attack you /slash/ geurilla strike you in order to get your rat NW it would have worked much better in your favor.

We still would have been able to take advantage but it would have been more expensive.

[Shoot]

For as long as I've been here, nearly every round has been the same thing. A group of hardcore players team up and coordinate together to dominate a playerbase that consists primarily of very casual players, most of which don't take winning seriously at all as long as they have some fun out of it (nothing wrong with that, if that's what they find fun).

The small handful of players who choose not to align with them that are actually capable of posing a threat to them on their own are marked for coordinated takedowns or kill runs to ensure they have little hope of inflicting any sort of damage on them resulting in them running away with the set.

Taek, I know you just came back here recently so this doesn't apply to you so much, but for the people who do this all the time, do you guys really find it fun doing it round after round? I, for one, have participated in this scheme once and I can say that was bored to tears the entire time. Being on the opposite end of this and trying to fight this nonsense 1 v 7 a few months ago, the moment I was even remotely a threat, I logged into a dead empire within hours with sevz asking me to join his clan when i remake... Seriously?

I don't have a problem with any of you guys personally, but I just can't understand how it could possibly be fun steamrolling everybody over and over with little resistance. I must be missing something here, but I personally prefer having some sort of reasonable competition.

[taekwondokid42]

Perhaps that was my mistake, assuming that there'd be more resistence and not realizing that most people here prefer casual play.

I should have guessed though.

[Ruddertail]

For some of us, myself included, the coordinated fight really is the whole point. It's not fun without somebody to fight, though, and that's the problem - those who like the coordinated fight often end up coordinating together, and then become reluctant to fight each other.

[Shadow]

Part of it is small playerbase and apathy. When there are lots of players there is always someone willing to form an opposing team, but when the playerbase is small, it's not always the case. The net result is that someone -can- run away with it, the rest of players get bored with the status qho and leave. Hence my frustration when I see this sort of thing, because it saps our already small community of players.

I wish there was a code solution to address it, but I'm not really sure there is, short of a sort of random blue-shell nuke that takes out the top few people for no reason (windy suggested this as a theme a while ago). I may put in a much harder cap on aid limits next round, and I will also stop clanning the land farm in favor of having it unmax faster so that clans can't use it to pass land as easily.

Of course, you're teaming up with a guy who kills anyone and everyone who clans up just because he can. There will always be some backlash from that. For which their is a simple solution: don't team up with jerks.

And yes, the theme is actually having the opposite affect to the one I intended, which was to make locking it down a little harder.

[taekwondokid42]

One idea that I had for making land-locks harder was to make it so that scouting produced land based on how much land was already in the game.

It's pretty much not worth your time to scout right now unless you are below 5k land. But if you make scouting more powerful, it'll be a tool available to warlords with lower land amounts so that they can keep up. If all the land gets collected into one place (IE emp) and gets locked down, scouting will be much more potent and the emping team will have to scrape regularly in order to hold their advantage. This gives them more places where they are vulnerable.

It's not a perfect solution but it makes resistance easier on low land. The trick would be finding some ramping equation such that scouting is still not usually worthwhile if you can collect most the land through attacking.

[Shadow]

that doesn't really address the coordination vs lack thereof issue, which is really the entire problem. Historically, scouting for the resistance almost always ultimately strengthens the emp, since the more coordinated team can collect and use the scouted land much more easily than the resistance.

Anyway, I guess it's not all over yet, I forgot that murder got a boost this round. So at least that change is working as intended ^_^.

[taekwondokid42]

idunno didn't run last night, the murders wouldn't have been successful if he had. Increasing our ratio beyond mathematical reachability was on the agenda and would have been achieved.

I didn't run either because the backlash has been a little overwhelming. But I can reassure you that as a coordinated team we wouldn't have let this happen.

which brings us back to the other problem. When one team coordinates and no counter-coordination occurs, that team completely dominates.

this is the way that it should be. We just need to tweak the game so that domination isn't so depressing to the people being dominated. If the land is only mostly locked up (but you can still pull off 10-15% every day) then maybe it won't seem so hopeless. The problem I think is that people start to feel hopeless and like the entire round for them will be a waste.

So the solution I think is to make it such that even when one clan has a firm grip over the game the rest of the game the casual, loosely organized players can still deal damages to the emp and claim little pieces of land, get pieces of food and cash

and some ideas:

1. no upwards limit on attacking
2. 0.2% minimum land takeaway when attacking
3. sack always takes things in proportion to amount of land taken (1/10th the %, perhaps)
4. capture always takes leaders

something like that

[Sevz]

Being on the opposite end of this and trying to fight this nonsense 1 v 7 a few months ago, the moment I was even remotely a threat, I logged into a dead empire within hours with sevz asking me to join his clan when i remake... Seriously?

Come on mang that was funny aye?
Turbo is dodgy. If you lock it you can hit massive networths or passing land settle for under 300m networth. I left clan

[Shadow]

Anyway, sorry if I came across angry. It's just frustrating to have someone always trying to prove a point instead of just playing and enjoying the game, imperfect as it is.

[taekwondokid42]

imperfect as it is.

it'll get better

[Pippin]

Not allowing anyone to clan within the first 3 days could prevent that kind of domination from happening in the future

[Shadow]

interesting idea