Shadow's Big Suggestion List

[Shadow]

I have quite a few suggestions for improving the game here. They aren't intended as a criticism, they are just idea for discussion that will hopefully get some popularity once I explain my reasoning for each one. A few have been seen before but have been lost over the last while as people lose interest in topics.

1) Food net solutions:

Food storing has been discussed before, and a solution implemented, but i am not sure if it is still in place. If it is, disregard this one. Anyway, sacking needs to be affected by ratio as a prcentage. If your def ratio is 200, sack works at 200% efficiency, etc. 40-200 should be the range. It worked well before.

2) Open atk op:

Right now leaderers have way too many advantages over indiers - indy is only effective right now as a team strat due to the new aid limits. In the interest of balance, open atk op should be affected by raised shields - 1 atk opened if shields are raised, 3 opened if they are not.

3) Defense:

The group attack thing has to go before general defense can be a strategy again. I know it is condensed right now, but even having the option takes away any possibility of having a good defense. I know it would be a very hard change to make in the code, but it should be something that is looked at if there is ever time to do it.

4) Market:

The public market is one of the most underused resources in the game, mainly because it is set up as basically a storehouse at the moment. With an altered code, the market becomes the basis for an entire suite of strategies that would add a lot of diversity to RWL, as well as promoting trade and discouraging storing. First of all, I think the old display needs to be brought back (anonymous sellers, only the cheapest of each unit displayed until it is sold). This makes competition much more intense for control of the market. Secondly, to discourage storing, the pull penalty should be upped well over the 50% range so that only stuff intended to be sold is put on the market. This opens to door to the reseller strat for RWL, that would work quite well with marten and give the race a point beyond pure cash storing that never really got it anywhere solo anyway.

5) Race Changes:

There are a few badly underused races at RWL right now because they are underpowered compared to the other strats. Some races aren't effective at one of the two major strats (indy and leader) and so fall into disuse. A perfect example is the wildcat. It is a very vesatile race that can leader well but still make an army effectively, but it is basically useless next to the rat as far as troop output goes, and can't compete with any of the major leader races as a masser. The wildcat spell should be upped to a 15% worker conversion based on multipliers and training settings to get a better balance. The other underused race is lizard, which is a good race for defencebut has a rather weak race spell that could go a long way to making it more used in the game. I don't have any ideas for this at the moment, so fire away and we'll see what we can come up with.

6) Aid limits:

Unlimited aid without any cut-off point makes clans waaaay too powerful compared to soloers. There should be a cutoff. Maybe 5x your net for aid within the clan?

7) Clan hopping:

Clan hoppers suck, basically. To get rid of them, we need people to be locked IN a clan for 72 hours regardless. No boots, nothing. To make it even, we need to rework the system of joining clans to be more like a facebook confirmation. This has a few drawbacks, which should be discussed here.

Please bear in mind that all these aideas are designed to work together. Alone they are sometimes a bad thing. Consider how they work together before posting ideas about any single concept.

Discuss. Arguments, alternate ideas, etc are welcome.

P.S. Don't hate me Shael :D

[CobyCopper]

For wildcat, I'd say look at 20% or just double or triple all multipliers. In older codes Wildcat was potent--flexible and able to solo incredibly well, and one aspect of it was magnified in team or partner play, at the expense of that flexibility.

[wolf bite]

Shadow, Sheal loves you. She pointed me here to review.

I am all for change, if done slowly and with foresight. I have said all along that many of the changes we put in to place to make the game more exciting only helped a few strategies and reduced the options within the game. It is agreed we need to take out some of the changes or create fixes if we want to keep them.

Food net solutions:

Disagree. The reason for Sack is to help non leader strategies against the leaders. Leaders can steal but can't easily be stolen from. If I understand you right, non-leaders will gain LESS food from sacking Leaders. I think you are turned around on this one. Let's work on it.

Open atk op:

Agreed, I never liked abuse of open attack. Once opened, the target can be murdered to make the next open attack even easier. Maybe even step this one up that open attack only works once if defenses are raised?

Defense:

Agree to an extent. On one hand grouped attacks make it impossible to hold land. On the other hand, it does make it possible to take some land from someone holding a ton of armies. Maybe make the attacker losses 1.5 times as much armies if grouped attack is used?

Market:

Agree to an extent. Rarely does anyone actually buy anything on the market and it is a store house now that can be abused by market theft. Friends only buy from friends which harms new people whose goods are over looked. Only the lowest goods should be seen without stating who owns them. I think the penalty of removing goods at 20% is fine. However we can keep goods being sold if we reduced the max price placed on the goods.

Race Changes:

Agreed that some raises are much more powerful than others, which makes picking the wrong race a deadly mistake. Do you feel that maybe the answer is to reduce the super powers of the races would solve this better? If we simply devalued some races then people could not need to revolt to make a strategy change. Right now if someone wants to try a new strategy they must revolt and lose most of their stuff. All strategies should be workable (to some extent) with any race.

Aid limits:

Agreed. I have been against unlimited aid.


Wolf Bite

[CobyCopper]

I think what Shadow was saying with the races is that some races used to be awesome--you had flexibility and could effectively change general strat one day, and the next change to another. They could do anything, effectively.

I was thinking for leaders, do a sliding scale based on attacker and defender NW. If an attacker has $100m NW and defender has $1b, the attacker can do 10% the damage normally dealt or something to that extent. Ensure that they can be hit, but it's not going to be a first-or-second-run account that takes down an emperor--it's a number of accounts that have been around for a while that does that.

[pippin the mighty]

Unlimited aid can be good or bad, it can help indiers out alot, but it's not doing much for leaders. So maybe that is a good thing and balences out open atk's.

And wolf, that's Shael :P

[Shadow]

Shadow, Sheal loves you. She pointed me here to review.

I am all for change, if done slowly and with foresight. I have said all along that many of the changes we put in to place to make the game more exciting only helped a few strategies and reduced the options within the game. It is agreed we need to take out some of the changes or create fixes if we want to keep them.

Food net solutions:

Disagree. The reason for Sack is to help non leader strategies against the leaders. Leaders can steal but can't easily be stolen from. If I understand you right, non-leaders will gain LESS food from sacking Leaders. I think you are turned around on this one. Let's work on it.


Race Changes:

Agreed that some raises are much more powerful than others, which makes picking the wrong race a deadly mistake. Do you feel that maybe the answer is to reduce the super powers of the races would solve this better? If we simply devalued some races then people could not need to revolt to make a strategy change. Right now if someone wants to try a new strategy they must revolt and lose most of their stuff. All strategies should be workable (to some extent) with any race.

Wolf Bite

About food net, I think you misundersand me. I am saying that if the person being sacked has a ratio of 200, the person doing the sacking gets twice as much as usual. That means that sacking a leaderer after they have been broken for land will make you gain a lot more, making it possible to do partial takedowns on a masser while you are not playing leaders without having to actually break their leaders. This balances the ability of leaderers to take land from troop massers without having to break their troops, and gives non-leader players a way to retaliate if a leaderer starts doing offensive missions. On the flip side, an indier who is being sacked will lose very little resources because their ratio tends to be very low.

Abot races, I think the major ones are quite well balanced as it is. It would be much easier to change to two underused races than to change all the popular ones. If all the changes I suggest are implemented they will work together to create more diverse strategy possibilities that will see a few more races being used more often (marten as reseller for example). I realize they are not perfect suggestions, which is basically why I made this thread. More ideas for balancing them and making them better are welcome.

I think you know that I take the same stance you do on changes - they should be well thought out and thoroughly tested before being implemented or you get imbalances. Don't suggest that I am rushing things along here, I don't expect to see any of these changes for a good long time, if ever.

Bob, I see what you are trying to do, but it isn't realistic to basically punish people for having high net.


About open atk ops: kell made a good point to me last night saying that if atk op is nerfed, it will become much harder to take down leader fighters. Once again, the changes I am suggesting are designed to work together. Alone, nerfing open atk op might be a bad thing - you have to give other means for takedowns, like the increased sack gains and removing the possibility of storing from the public market altogether. I think open atk op has it's place in the game, so making it only work once might be a bit much. I play FAF where there is no equivelent spell, and the flipside to that extreme is a bad thing as well.

Late edit, sorry: For your market suggestion, a 20% pull penalty is extremely low with the old market code where you could put 80% of your goods on the market. If we leave the penalty, people are going to use it to store no matter what the prices are unless they are lower than mercs, which ruins the reseller strat. I suppose if we leave it that you can only put 25% of your goods on the market the low penalty is fine, but that also kind of takes away from the strat, and my suggestions here are aimed at diversifying the strategies that are viable.

[CobyCopper]

I was more or less protecting them from people with high-NW. By having a first-run leader able to take down an emp I think is unbalanced. Maybe as an alternative, when someone suicides, it divides NWs so the higher loses less leaders. Or base it on attack/defense ratios--so you can't have an indy with 500 huts keep destroying to stay >50 ratio, and decimate someone with 50,000 full huts. I think the leader-suicides are also too powerful--but maybe include a troop-based espionage such as "Standoff" where there's a 50% chance that the enemy attacks. No land taken but a way to get an idea on how to attack, so the only opaque people are those with massive armies of troops and leaders. Something like you need 2x OP vs their DP to see in with troops instead of leaders.

[Shadow]

It might be a simpler solution to just make it so that you can't kill more leaders than say, 4x what you lose. But if that did happen and someone got a decent lock going, they would be untouchable. I really think that a nerf of open atk op would go a long way toward fixing this problem as well, without changing anything in the loss calculation. No need to overcomplicate things.

[wolf bite]

First, my comment about making changes too fast was concerning how we got into this mess, not your well intended attempts to fix them.

As far as the sacking, I did have you backwards. Your idea works.

On the races, we will agree to disagree. All strats should be somewhat workable with any race. To have a race set to just one strat, it forces a person to stay in that strat for the whole game and restricts imaginative play. New people picking a fun named race could make even the most basic bargainer strategy not workable for them. Pros know what strategy a person is doing based on their race.

I myself got a major education in this on the imperium game where they had our program but used different names. Before creating an account I checked the top ten and noticed one of our players and knowing what strat he used, I assumed it was a Stoat. Trying to run a Stoat strategy when I was really a Wolf let me scratching my head why things were not working. Hehe.

Also another fix that should be discussed here is using turns to Drop land. Right now a person can have nearly a full leader ratio, dismantle most huts and lose only some leaders. Then drop the land with no use of turns and no leader loss. By doing this a person can leave themselves over a 200 ratio! However if drop land uses turns, people will still lose leaders and will need the extra turns at the end of their run.


Wolf Bite
Coby and Shadow posted before me again. I still make this post with out reading the updates yet.

[Shadow]

On the races, we will agree to disagree. All strats should be somewhat workable with any race. To have a race set to just one strat, it forces a person to stay in that strat for the whole game and restricts imaginative play. New people picking a fun named race could make even the most basic bargainer strategy not workable for them. Pros know what strategy a person is doing based on their race.

I agree that it is something to look into. But I'm going to assume you agree with me that wildcat and lizard need some changes to bring them back into play. Juska brought up that the race bonuses are imbalanced in some cases, maybe taking a look at those and changing all strats with more focus on versatility should be something to consider as well.

Stoat is an excellent example os a race that has huge versatlity - good leader bonuses, but can also indy on par with lizard.

[wolf bite]

My thoughts here is to take the overpowered races and reset them to work with any strat, then we have the level we need to raise the underpowered races to.


Wolf Bite

[CobyCopper]

How about balancing races based on weakpoints? Reduce the weaknesses--so Wolf and Marten have a +0% training bonus, rat and lizard have a +0% leadership bonus, and then balance Painted One to include 2-3 weaker spells that are versions of others--such as a half-powered Academy, that extra-lottery-tickets spell, and Frenzy. Make Painted One a true any-strat race, but make those strats less potent and give the advantage of complete flexibility. There's no doubt--there are race-specific strats that well outdo basic strats. That's something that should happen--but I think there should be more advanced strats as well.

Other than that, I do think it should take a leader to wreck another leader's ratios. For indiers, I'd say include a troop-espionage attack and replace or augment a Standard attack with counting as 0.50 attacks while still removing 6-8% health. Doing some special attacks like that, it draws twice the health and you HAVE to have a larger army to take advantage of it. Perhaps if a person's ratio is >250 they should have 2-3 more attacks automatically available, so that they don't just sit maxed with a great ratio and be invulnerable.

[pippin the mighty]

Maybe you could intercept aid if too much has been send over a period of time, that could be interesting.

[Shadow]

My thoughts here is to take the overpowered races and reset them to work with any strat, then we have the level we need to raise the underpowered races to.


Wolf Bite

That could work, but I don't think we should nerf the races that are used now. I don't think they are overpowered, only overpowered when compared to the underused ones. Most of the useable races are pretty balanced, I wouldn't want to mess too much with them. Some changes are in order to bring them on par for other strats, but I think the thing that defines which race becomes popular for which strat is the unique spell. Making a wolf good at indying isn't necessarily useful, since the spell has nothing to do with troops at all.

[wolf bite]

Agreed. But I am not saying to nerf anything. Just first make them playable (somewhat) from any strategy. If we need to downgrade them slightly so that the additions we will give them does not way over power them, then fine. After adjusting those, we can then figure out what needs to be given to the lesser races.


Wolf Bite