May 19th 2010, 20:32:50
I have toyed with this idea for years and now that we have an environment where widely accepted ideas can receive implementation I thought I would gauge others' opinions on this idea.
Basically the way it would work is that there is a fixed amount of land for the entire server to control. The most practical factor for setting what the land cap is would be number of countries in the server. I think something on the order of 15,000+/-5000 acres per country would be the appropriate quantity of land to make available. So for a server with 800 countries there would be 12,000,000 acres available in this scenario.
There is no doubt this would encourage land grabbing (which on the other hand may be a detriment to the game if the lazy player base can no longer remain competitive by purely exploring) which I think is something this game needs. To further encourage grabbing, exploring would be limited to something like 10,000 acres. That means if every country only explored only 2/3 of the land pool would be used (so to actually have some semblance of realism it would be necessary for people to grab to access all the land in the world). This cap on exploration could be thought of as exploring up to your neighbors borders if you like pretending things are in some way realistic as I do.
To protect late starters from having 15,000 acres added to the land pool and immediately explored out from under their noses it might make sense to add 10,000 acres to the free land pool and then reserve a 5,000 acre private pool for that country to tap before accessing the main land pool.
Ghost acres would clearly need to be eliminated.
I feel this would idea would be augmented with a revised land gains formula which is dependent on defense/acre. As a countries defenses become increasingly concentrated it becomes more difficult to seize its land. This would also require revision of military losses as bottom feeding would result in a feedback of increased gains.
Potential effects of this are certainly increased grabbing. Anyone who wants a top country will have to get it at the expense of smaller countries. Who will then suffer an end in the land. This theoretically could lead to farming to death (in a non-literal way) but would potentially be countered by a necessity for war (and thereby dead countries releasing their land back to the pool).
Tech would become more important as a means of separating one country from another, particularly for warring. This would certainly add hiccups to market trends.
Thoughts? Independent of the land pool idea I like the idea of making land gains dependent on defense/acre.
Basically the way it would work is that there is a fixed amount of land for the entire server to control. The most practical factor for setting what the land cap is would be number of countries in the server. I think something on the order of 15,000+/-5000 acres per country would be the appropriate quantity of land to make available. So for a server with 800 countries there would be 12,000,000 acres available in this scenario.
There is no doubt this would encourage land grabbing (which on the other hand may be a detriment to the game if the lazy player base can no longer remain competitive by purely exploring) which I think is something this game needs. To further encourage grabbing, exploring would be limited to something like 10,000 acres. That means if every country only explored only 2/3 of the land pool would be used (so to actually have some semblance of realism it would be necessary for people to grab to access all the land in the world). This cap on exploration could be thought of as exploring up to your neighbors borders if you like pretending things are in some way realistic as I do.
To protect late starters from having 15,000 acres added to the land pool and immediately explored out from under their noses it might make sense to add 10,000 acres to the free land pool and then reserve a 5,000 acre private pool for that country to tap before accessing the main land pool.
Ghost acres would clearly need to be eliminated.
I feel this would idea would be augmented with a revised land gains formula which is dependent on defense/acre. As a countries defenses become increasingly concentrated it becomes more difficult to seize its land. This would also require revision of military losses as bottom feeding would result in a feedback of increased gains.
Potential effects of this are certainly increased grabbing. Anyone who wants a top country will have to get it at the expense of smaller countries. Who will then suffer an end in the land. This theoretically could lead to farming to death (in a non-literal way) but would potentially be countered by a necessity for war (and thereby dead countries releasing their land back to the pool).
Tech would become more important as a means of separating one country from another, particularly for warring. This would certainly add hiccups to market trends.
Thoughts? Independent of the land pool idea I like the idea of making land gains dependent on defense/acre.
