Next Round

[Shoot]

Or... just prevent people from land dropping themselves to less than 5000 acres so people cant easily game the 500 acre std rule? It's a mindblowingly simple solution and one that doesn't require 87 different code changes and the removal of core game mechanics to fix nor disrupts normal gameplay in any way ::)

[windhound]

Loophole still exists then, just requires more effort to lower someone to below 500 via attacking. 
Still very doable with a clan, you'd just have the mule run or use a turn once every 7 days or whenever. 
Again, I'm nuking this from orbit. 

I proposed three changes, none of them exactly hard to implement, none of them affect legitimate gameplay as far as I can tell. 
- No aid to players with less than 5000 acres if they have greater than 50 mil net.  (one line of code plus a closing bracket, I might make this 100 mil net)
- Dropping land currently has a floor of 250 acres, that's being raised +1000 every 10 mil net.  (altering one line of code)
- Remove Standards under 500 / No Kills.  (already present, just flipping a switch in the control panel) 

Oh, and Drakus -

Removing kills is mostly due to Sevz early this round, he was bored so he killed a couple random players. 
Yes, you can respawn, and it was early round so they didn't lose much.  It's still a lance move and will drive players away,  we're small enough as is. 

[Sevz]

Ouch. The land dropping change is extremely painful.
Any way we can fix it up for scouting purposes?

[Shadow]

The whole land flood thing was never really an intended feature either, I'm not overly sad to see it go.

[Sevz]

I only have two strategies for making a server have abundant land.
One of them is to play highly defensive which forces everyone who can't break my defense needs to scout new land into the game.
Locking land right now would be easy to do and devastating to redwall. It is my traditional style

The other is I happily generate acres early in the round for others to get a headstart and I play catch up later on.

On a side note
Could we have a brand new theme?

A round called 'Hunt Sevz'
I'll create my own race.
Windy can set a few bots onto me and everyone is on a mission to team up and kill me
Repeatedly kill me

[windhound]

How bored are you Sevz? 

The landfarm constantly scouts land into the game, so there's your third option to just keep the landfarm low on land.

[Sevz]

Do you think it would be interesting if we changed the themes regularly?

Put me on 500k land and a bunch of networth see if the server can catch up?

Random theme idea to consider

Whoever wins a round keeps their final networth?

Bring back clan storehouse?

Or admin selects a daily winner and gives them a game changing aid package?

Bot buddies for new players? Windy sets bots that can protect them and collect retals? Tinker around you could leak the land back to the player they're protecting.

Plenty of ideas if you feel like trying new tgings

[Drakus]

to be fair we couldn't break 250k land emp last round

[Graceclaw]

Re: Removal of market/use of market for storage

Maybe it's just because I'm a noob, but with such a small playerbase, clan play doesn't really seem to be the center focus (except in suuuuuuuper fun rounds where some group tries to stop Sevz and his shenanigans and it results in a completely ethical performance by both clans).

That said, clans are the most reliable way to store/build up NW. My problem is, if I want to play Indy and feel like I'm not wasting time/treading water for the entire round, I have to store the fruits of each run's labor SOMEWHERE. Last round, that was the market, because it was there and I could convert it to NW. This round, I have an idea, but it's probably also not really in line with what Windy has in mind by not wanting to use the marketplace as storage.

The point I'm trying to make is that, because of the costs associated with keeping up an army (ridiculously expensive runs) and the threat of having food stolen away that you are storing for NW lategame, there are very few reliable ways for an indy player to build NW for the endgame in an indy-dominated round. As a result, it feels kind of pointless for someone like me to play indy for 2 out of the 3 months;  I can build up just about as much NW within the last month as I could have tried to squirrel away in the other 2 months, if there's no market on which for me to store it.

But, like I said, maybe it's just because I'm a noob who doesn't know how to hide/store/generate NW throughout the round. There's probably some secret technique that good players know, but aside from the tactic I'm going to be using this round, I can't really think of one.

[windhound]

Sure, Turbo rounds were fun in part 'cause of the varied themes.

1)  You basically want me to give you control of an emp.
Given the server couldn't take down a static emp last round that would seem to be a bad idea.  I can already tell you the answer, the the server as it now stands could not catch up.  If you just sold all the troops then focused on food production with the land you'd very easily keep out of range.

2)  Keeping the proceeds from the previous round just sets up a lock for the next.  If we had 50+ players this could actually be doable, as by sheer turn quantity and mild cooperation most emps can be taken down.  We don't have 50 players.

3)  Storehouse rounds are kinda boring aren't they?  It's just players stashing away as much as they can all round.

4)  I guess we could do large random aid drops, but there is zero chance me and/or Shadow wont be called out as being unfair cheating admins -- even if we use a random number generator. 

5)  The bots need a fair amount of work before they're ready, I'm hoping to have some time in the upcoming month.  If Shadow wants to he's more than welcome to play around with them.


As mentioned previously, the biggest problem is that promi as a game doesn't work all that well with a small playerbase.
And most of our past Turbo round themes don't cope well with limited players either.  That, and most of them were kinda obnoxious; tolerable for a month, but three months is stretching it.

There's not a whole lot we can do about the small playerbase, our two main sources of new players has largely dried up.  Most Promi games are dead, still can't believe we outlasted QMT, and the ROC has basically disbanded.
We actually get a handful of newbies each round, the last few rounds I've been sending them a message with my playing account welcoming them and asking if they need any help, along with sending aid if they break protection.  Most of them don't reply or break protection.
/shrug.

[windhound]

Graceclaw, that is a legitimate gripe and has been one for years (and years).

I don't really have an answer for you, other than to team up with a leader player.
RWL sorta balanced Indy vs. Leader with Sack, but the current strategies in play sorta null that out.  Certain attacks were designed to be 'last resort' war-time attacks, but we've lost basically all RP-aspects and people pretend like they're at war all the time with everyone.
You could be murdered or poisoned because someone is bored and noticed you had a bunch of stuff on you.
Or if you're playing leader you could be sacked to death because someone saw you had resources and wanted them.

Unless we completely remove poison and murder there's no way for an indy to protect their goods.
And with Sack there's no good way for a leader player to protect their resources.
We're basically in a free-for-all 100% all-out and imo the game is less fun for it.
But there's not many ways to fix it without breaking the game, esp at low player levels.

[Shadow]

I think if we were going to make the bots relevant we would have to let them cheat a bit. Which might not be the worst idea ever, since the point would be to make an NPC that provides interesting gameplay to the real players, which is difficult to do when the best use of turns is not always something you can write into an algorithm easily.

We could think about making bots do very specific things, like a bot that always aggressively targets the guy in first place and gets an edge in breaking them with leader missions, or a bot that sends aid to the bottom few players periodically, etc. I think we could make some pretty interesting dynamics happen if we do away with the notion of trying to make a bot perform well subject to the same constraints as regular players and focus instead on making them do interesting things that enhance gameplay.

[Death]

Wait, Sevah killing random people was a problem? In that case I've got to defend the guy, there was a stretch of many many months where 75% of the server at QMT would decide to just randomly kill him for no reason. I think maybe we broke him.

[Shadow]

Haha so we have you to blame. Good to know. Brb coding a bot to kill Death all the time.