Rats

[Peace Alliance]

The top three ranks are rats! and there are 4 in the top 10.

this has to be the first time i've ever seen that in my entire time here on RWL!

[Ruddertail]

Meh, statistically, rats are the best for netting indy...

Stoats have good off/def, but that doesn't count when you're trying to get troops for net.

Anyway, very cool. Especailly with the leader imbalance these days...

[Wolf Snare]

err. yeah, rudder basically summed up what I was going to say..

[Gen. Volkov]

Well rats is bestest when no leaders are present.

[Peace Alliance]

What i wish we could do is get them this powerfull when leaders ARE involved.

[Ruddertail]

Well, I suggested to Retto that we up troop production from barracks by 25% - 50%, thus evening indy out with leaders. I think he was going to do it this next Turbo set. When that will be, I don't know...

[Peace Alliance]

There would be a lot of evening out i would do to make other races playable. But its not just balencing building productivity, but race abilities need to be balenced too.

[Ruddertail]

Meh, racial abilities are of little importance to an indy, under the current system. They involve leaders, which means indys won't bother with them.

While there would still be balancing to be done to get other races playable, this would increase the number of good, playable races from 2 (Marten and Wolf) to 4 (Marten, Wolf, Rat, Stoat), and allow indy strats to be run in such a way to compete with leader loot/goldmine.

[Peace Alliance]

Correction, racial abilities require a leader Ratio. you don't necessarily need a lot of leaders. We could give the rat an ability that won't be aomplified by the number of leaders you have. we could even make it work at lower ratio's then normal racial abilities.

It would be interesting (and probably quite difficult) to build an indy race that requires carefull balence using many of the buildings. As opposed to the leader stratagy which uses only one building. With the current setup, right now i'm using 4 buildings on turbo, and 5 if i use towers (i think towers should be buffed too, they don't seem to stop anything these days)

Maybe if we gave one of the indy races a racial that simply upped their leader defense. that way they wouldn't be so volnerable to leader attacks.

[Ruddertail]

Meh, a leader race with a balance of buildings might be interesting, but why? Indy already requires more buildings then leadering - barracks and foragers at the minimum. It would seem that simpley upping barrack production would balance indy and leaders, and racial specific abilties to be add/adjusted to compliment this even further.

Racial specific abilities activated other then leaders could be done. Assuming, of course, we have people who will code them.

High leader defenses wouldn't really help, as leaders PWN through leader loot/goldmine, not through smashing indys. Now, better sack abilties might be nice, though leader looters could still just buy troops at the end of their runs.

Edit: Yes, I know leader missions require a ratio. However, the indy player is unlikely to have either a large number of leaders or a good leader ratio.

[Mortal]

erm
im not playing with rats

[Peace Alliance]

But ridder, the ratio for the leaders ability would be the only requirement... you could have 15000 leaders on 200 acres of land and it'd still work.

[Ruddertail]

Ah, I see your point.

On the other hand, very few indys will have enough leaders to achive a decent ratio without getting knocked to 200 acres.

Further, when an indy is knocked to 200 acres, they probably won't have any huts at all, resulting in all of their leaders leaving. In addition, with such low land, missions far are less effective then with, say, 20k.

Therefore, it's really not practical to have missions for indy players that are activated by hawks, unless you require a ratio similar to that of raise defenses, which most indys will probably have the leader ratio to do.

On the other hand, if you have a seperate page for accessing them, and make it require, say, a certain % of your land in barracks, it would work out well. Or maybe a different method of activation. I don't know about that.

[cloud]

or they could just build 100 huts in one turn and destroy all but one giving them a great ratio for the cost of about 5 turns.

[Ruddertail]

Don't leaders/land, or huts/land have something to do with it? Because otherwise, I could have 500 huts on 50k, demolish them, and get a major ratio... which doesn't seem right.

However, you're still stuck with very low yeilds for any food/cash/troop generating mission. If it's just a one time thing (like then next 20 attacks have + 25% offense) it might work, but if it's something like pressgang, you're not going to get much with only a few leaders...