would be nice to see the return time

would suck to have all your goods return just before say cashing 100 turns

makes it a hassle to play small amounts of turns at one time or take a bigger risk

i thought some guy was from pandora

i think at a certain point you have to forget about the bad things that happened

like RD and the bots, if someone was a multi in rd or used bots sure thats not the best thing for the game

but there was a time where everyone didnt think much about multying in 1a 1b, playing multiple countries in tourney, multiple strings in ffa, i think there was even a time when you could only play 1a or 1b legit

pans got members away or something and going down hard, and sof has a lot of 1a type players starting up late so this could be interisting

yeah there are 3 options:

1) lower the tempo by making countries take more turns to kill
2) delay the time when you can start serious attacks
3) reduce readiness/turns/attacks

ergh just thought of some weird ones:

4) give countries lives, so after you kill it once it comes back to life with say 24 hours protection
5) like EVE you could have a country enter reinforced mode at x% of civs, then it would come out a certain amount of hours later
6) use combination of 4&5 and like ideas until 2 came into effect

and some expansion:

1) obvious thing here is lower % returns for gs br sr cm
1) medical tech should really reduce pop losses
1) potentially a building type reduces pop losses somewhat

2) could add an extra type of attack limit either per country or per tag
2) make a feature to declare war either country or tag to raise the limit, then the delay would serve merely to limit FS damage to perhaps 1 days attacks/24 hour rather than 3.4ish

3) hard cap of attacks/time period, so rather than storing turns to load all attacks into the start of a war before the enemy responds holding turns would revert to being something you do when you cant play, this would reduce the impact of being caught unprepared with no turns saved

used to be 1 turn/30 minutes, with 80(60) max turns i think and 2% readiness per turn

so on the FS:

86*2=172
126*3=378
188*2=376
276*3= 828

172/7=24.57 (old FS)
378/7=54 (new FS)
376/7 =53.71 (old 24 hr FS)
828/7 = 118.28 (new 24 hr FS)

so the game has made it just over 2x more effective just in the first chat alone, and 2.2x more effective in the first 24 hours, i hear actual attacks to kill might have gone down as well

this means the tempo of first strikes is more than double what it was in the past

it should be possible to kill approximately 1/3 of your country count in under 24 hours. that means for "fair wars" you probably want to have the attackers be 80-95% of the members of the defender for it to go down to the wire

obviously the simples option to reduce tempo is drop readiness regain to 2%

which makes demo once again viable in war

but the downside of doing that is its a long term effect on the war rather than only the FS like most of the others, and with falling player base and alliance sizes efficiency drops off as more players need to participate on each kill

this bit you talk about land trading being ok, then implying that it is related to bottomfeeders getting retalled

when land trading is about the building gain and grabbing people who can retal you, or maybe can, the buildings make it ok

while for bottomfeeding the buildings just make it better / make it so you gain more than the target loses

and yes i agree that land trading does not have to be pre organised, its basically in between topfeeding and midfeeding in grabbing terms

also consider the option of a 4th and 5th and 6th one

4th for tag internally, so you could slightly reduce the effectiveness of hitting anyone in the same tag to reduce internal farming and trading

in theory if someone quits and you want to keep their land you can detag then farm if your not happy with the gains, or farm 1 day then wait for dr then detag and farm

dont want to be too aggresive with that because of reps land and farming down retaliators and so on, could make this one only apply to 1a, teams or ffa or whichever one of those its considered the biggest problem

in teams the multiple tags nature of it would seem to render it moot, in ffa there isnt a lot of farming if you wanted to run extra tags and you have enough countries to put retaliators in each, in 1a things revolve around pacts and i assume most alliances wouldnt want to give someone 2 tags in a pact for farming reasons

5th for countries on the same account in FFA, you dont even need to make this one particularly harsh, just a little bit here and a little bit here to change the benefit ratio, since some people will want to move around retal land and people could just trade with eachother anyway

6th for multiple countries from the same tag grabbing the same country in a period, combine that slightly with forgottens 2nd and/or 3rd ones to slightly reduce the incentive for 5 people from one tag to all hit the same target each day, keep it to a small prorportion to start with then see how it goes

potential abuse with tag changes so dont make it too harsh, and perhaps have some disincentive for constant tag changes as well

remember not to reduce DR1's effectiveness too much though, since part of the goal should be too help new players get hit less and damaged less

as well as to make it undersirable to hit the same country 10 times every day

if the additional DR's were heavy enough it would be possible to increase the reduced losses due to networth countries currently have without it benefiting landtraders and self farmers

in alliance i would even suggest having a reduced losses modifier for every country that is untagged, given how much more frequently the untagged get hit than the tagged im sure 10% would be safe to start with and it could even go higher than that

it would not be very abusable since early set the amount of land grabbed isnt very high and late set running untagged even in the top 100 is very risky

also consider a tech equivelant to military strat that reduced % of land you actually lose when you lose land, medical, perhaps at 50% effectiveness would be my suggestion

the question should be whether the troops and tanks only counting if you send some of those units is better

since they cost more to grab with than jets

and as far as i knew you didnt get free offence at swirve

as to defence i always calced max double each differant mil category, and used 1/4 of what combined allies had on hand

so i presume now you dont have it set up that way and you just total them then divide by 4 then limit to max 100% bonus

no html on this forum

applying DR's to ghost acres is a good idea, you could do that pretty easily to reduce gains between repeated trading

not sure if people would like the other change to AB BR GS though

particularly BR and AB that suceed, failed of those or gs's are more abusable of course

also would be interisting to have fails cause less DR in general

llaar its not an either or choice, nothing implemented has to ruin anything, except maybe stockpile suiciding i guess

make some suggestions to make the game more fun for vets

personally i think turns speeding up causes more problems since the FS alliance gets a larger advantage, but theres a long thread about it on here if you want to contribute

as to the untagged farming, its never going to be better to play untaged than in a tag, but we can make it less bad so that anyone who does join has a better experience, personally i want to see bots or countries that arnt real countries but are grabbable

would be nice if all untagged just lost 10% less than they currently do yet you grab the same amount when you hit them

and if there was some sort of option like GDI that penalised you in some way, be it exploring, and definately reduced attack gains, but reduced non pop loss damage you took so it couldnt be used for walling

i only did 4 hits at .15, guess ill try again with more hits

(edit: just removed a kind of useless suggestion about having the set start instantly and more turns on hand, part of my dumb delay for no reason posts)

you could have the first 24 hours of each set where everyone gets X turns to start with but doesnt gain turns

and protection lasts for that many turns +1

and make sets start immediately when old ones finish if they dont already (i assume its 24 hours?)

that way anyone can play as soon as they like, and make protection a bit longer without making the game in effect start later

because someone logging in at 17 hours shouldnt be disadvantaged compared to 18, bonus turns should be pro rata'd based on when you login, as at the beginning 6 turns matters but 6 turns at the end is only about .15% and people who want to logon at the end can gradually move their play time if they want anyway

not that i really like bonus turns

up to protection turns +1 days turns on hand in my opinion, with extra bonus stored turns up to perhaps 2 days turns to make it so you only have to play with 72 hours of the set starting

could use a similar formula for restarts to let them come out of protection immediately then have turns from when they were killed perhaps

just dont want to make a situation where dying or self deleting is beneficial

ie if you could send FA's to restarts to get them in range you could self delete over and over to use the 20 free turns after protection to finish targets, dont want to make things too exploitable

(edit: wasnt too bad, just a little vagueness to fix)

as long as the turns arnt more out of protection than you would have got since the last time you played or your country died its ok since you could never get free extra attacks but thats not really neccessary to add in

{{this bit is also about restarts}}

that said their is a better solution, make protection longer as the set goes on

so then countries can get more starting turns as the set goes on without the risk that its better to die than keep playing

say at halfway in the set, people might be 10m nw

normally a restart can make perhaps 80k nw i forget, if we let restarts play an extra 100 odd turns in protection perhaps they could be about 250k or 300k instead, and a lot more useful in wars

plus any new players that join late can grow a lot more before being farmed

id consider making it allowed to sell on market in the second protection period so more starts are viable

and make it so that second protection doesnt start until at least long enough in the set it wouldnt be abusable with 0 defence starts or whatever

(edit: yay this post wasnt stupid)

one thing to keep in mind is that at some point it becomes efficient to FA someone and let them grab, which they cant do if they are stuck in protection

but if they are only in protection basically for the free/starting turns then they can grab

the middle ground is to make an opt out additional protection that people are put in automatically later in the reset

that way people in wars can leave it and hit if they want to

i think scaling free/starting turns and longer protection later in the set is a better option

perhaps that combined with a smaller carryover bonus, the good thing about a carryover is it reduces the incentive to make a new account to get some other bonus that new players might get

as to the levels and % things id keep it small, maybe you can start with 10% of the csites , 50% of the cash you had when you died, 5% of the military, 5% of the land or minimum 900 that sort of thing

make sure that building costs arent prohibitive somehow, like a discount during the free turns youd receive

(from what i hear about spies theres no benefit to being under 1k acres)

since cash is more beneficial to use while walling if you didnt get a chance to use it you could get a bigger chunk back

warlords idea of giving you a percentage of the turns you ran free as extra protection turns is interisting too

of course they need to be non attacking turns in someway to prevent too large a bonus

i was in minimonks for a while

but i think that was something about a split between 3D and charly1i

azmodil, obviously servers without 2b cash limit need a differant limit and it can be tuned

but the general concept is your land tech mil get used more in defending you than cash on hand

so if your online you spend it, if your not you get some of it back on your restart

so in ffa it could be capped at counting as 2b to start with, in express im not sure the idea is needed

percentages can be tweaked, im just of the opinion cash should be more than anything else, particularly since if you get extra land building costs go up, and extra mil expenses go up

would be nice to have a bit of an RPG country creation screen where you are given points that you can spend on various things.... that means people could change strats and so on, have as many buildings as they want

im not a huge fan of those levels, just have it where you get percentages but convert the mil and tech into cash that you can spend on the market

that sounds like the simplest option to me

if you want to force people to spend money on tech or mil thats doable by making it special cash, (call it japanese yen on tech and russian rubles on military if you want ) that disapears when you leave protection

i would also give a bonus bpt mod in protection in line with the land you give and a reduced building cost

thats to make a country as customisable as you like probably in the easiest way possible


on the subject of general size of restarts what i want is for restarts to be big enough and powerful enough to be used immediately but weak enough that killing countries is stil desirable

my preference is actually extra turns to use as you wish, depending on the point in the set, with a starting cash bonus based on cash and networth you had when you died

i dont really think land and csites need to be considered but if they are then id prefer the land to be built with half as many buildings on it as you had when you died, to simulate a war torn country, if you want to drop the acres you can, if not thats fine too

to balance it further you could make it work like defensive readiness, there could be a base built percentage of perhaps 25% with built acreage raising to 50% if you were 100% built when you died (easily changed percentages)

one advantage of that is it maintains the benefit of BR kills over GS kills since unprepared enemies are more likely to have turrets when they are first striked than jets

and missiles should be considered special attacks that can be more effective than normal attacks

so land kills with many nukes then a few SS's cost a lot more but do more damage to the restarted countries, or you can nuke some countries a bit to damage their restarts a bit but increase their tech levels while your killing them (note nukes will always remain more effective on countries you dont kill than those you do)

and chem kills would reduce buildings without a negative consequence but are considered a valuable resource in a war so should be more useful but leave the restart with the same amount of land, just more empty acres

to deal with a csite exploit of having all csites, or destroying all buildings except csites then getting bonus csites i would put a hard cap on csites of at most the amount of csites a country had when it died

an additional effect of making BR preferable to GS is that it makes it easier for any country/alliance that falls behind to focus on only 2 main military types rather than 3 if the alliance in front wants to start focusing on BR kills to reduce the bonus effect on restarts

opposing balancing factors if you will

(edited because of my stupidity)

starting turns should be enough to either almost put people out of protection and everyone gets the same amount for 24 hours with no more turns until the second day when the set reallly starts

or everyone should get enough turns immediately to get out of protection, call it either 100 or 101 as soon as the server starts

could even combine the 2 and allow public market sales on the last turns to speed up the market, either normal delay, or hitting as soon as the set really starts, or real set start plus normal delay, i dont feel its really neccessary though (possibly go into debt on turns)

the first option makes the game start faster while keeping things even between those who play at 1am server time and 11pm server time and giving people something to do when the games not really running if they want to

(edit: not too dumb :)

bonus turns for new accounts or late starting accounts, and reclaimed resources from dead countries for restarts

the bonuses for new or late starting accounts prevents them from doing attacks/special attacks for the time of an extended protection

give an option to play as a restart,that makes it simple to prevent the 2 changes compounding eachother to an excess

allow opt out where people want to attack straight out of protection but never allow that with turns to attack immediately on creation, the simple option would be to allow people to play as a restart though they would get no bonuses since their is no dead country

no forgotten, you should always only have a max of 120(120) after you come out of protection

and you should never start with so many turns that you can come out of protection and hit immediately

(edit: dumb dumb section here, i apologise please ignore, would allow infinite suiciding)
the only exception is early set when it should be made so that someone who create at the start and do nothing, and someone who create 3 days late are equal

detmer everyone would have the same choice, and theres no other solution to not penalising peple who start late

right now you can:
0 hours 50(0) +50
18 hours 120(8) +78
36 hours 120(84) +78
48 hours 123(120) +39

so thats 48 hours after turns start you can play and buy tech
changing it to 72 or 96 hours necessarily allows people to buy tech on the market 1 or 2 days later

the only way to stop that is to ban people selling on private for 1 to 2 days longr, or ban the late starters buying on private for 1 to 2 days longer

since the specific concern is tech you could ban purchasing tech for 1 to 2 days after the set though if people had more than 243 total turns unplayed if you needed to

i personally dont think its a huge concern though, and i already start late after tech has hit the market

actually it might be if you join within 25 hours you get the up to 50 but lose out on up to 8.33 bonus turns? but you can sign up at either -24 or -48?
or do bonus turns only come after the first logout or after first 24 hours or something

i was being stupid about wanting people to start late

sorry all for the ranting and particularly to detmer who pointed it out to me and i didnt even realise what i was advocating

anyone who wants to play every day should be able to creat a country within a few days, then if they have created it they should be able to play turns within 80 hours since thats how often we have to play at minimum anyway

*head in hand picture*

yes what i mean is that the damage done in a first strike will be reduced since more of the kills will be GS's that wont be damaging the restarts as much as BR's would

therefore an unprepared target that gets blindsided gets a bigger benefit from restart boosts than a war prepped alliance that people expect to stonewall and has more troops therefore more of the kills run on them are BR's

just wondering if it needs to be at the same rate as other servers, since if someone sleeps for say 8 hours in express thants 120 turns which i believe is longer than the time it takes to max and start decreasing

and obviously 24 hours or 360 turns definately is

perhaps private markets could also be bigger in express?

it would be nice to have an option where you could set a display name to all your old countries in the scores list if you wanted to

in express for example where people change names frequently would be interisting to see who does well

could set it server by server, perhaps differant monikers for each server to appease the shady types but im not much for that

yes would be nice to see incoming and coming home for your own goods only

devestation seriously contact us if you want us to talk about a new player

dont just whine about it

im not leadership but perhaps theres an arrangement we can come to that would result in the player not quitting

im just wondering if the alliances warring might find it fun to merge the wars and make them more even

right now focus and pan seeem to have more countries and net than imp and sof

while aodt seems to have more countries and net than nbk

so you have a situation where

AoDT 264 $910mnw 2,274k acres
SoF 75 $154mnw 526k acres
IMP 67 $173mnw 333k acres
Total 506 $1238mnw 3133k acres

vs

NBK 252 $57mnw 411k acres
FoCuS 187 $1315mnw 2878k acres
PANLV 163 $307mnw 1013k acres
Total 602 $1679mnw 4302k acres

But from what i understand both SoF and IMP have a lot more countries untagged or dead than the other side. NBK may have more dead or untagged than AoDT but not by as large a margin i believe.

Could result in 2 unfun wars becoming fun.

Anyway keep an eye on both wars and if you guys want to arrange a fun war down the track think up some combinations you could use.

ergh no html on this forum i guess.....

(edit: sorry removed the stupid stuff)



I dont think anyone proposed anything like 1000 extra turns over a reset. Unless your talking about a problem with the game having a differant amount of turns for everyone?

But in the past we have had long sets and short sets varying by perhaps a couple of weeks, sometimes the game was 3 months, sometimes 2 months, turns used to be every 40 minutes and so on.

So i assume you think somehow someone would get extra turns by starting late compared to someone who started on time?

The only way i can see that making sense is if your talking about someone that gets kill a lot and restarts quickly and we give the current 50 or more free turns to each new country.

Apart from that the rest of your post is okish except people cant have bonus turns after coming out of protection since they could come oop, attack, delete and repeat. Too big an exploit.

Even stored turns are a big risk since you could have double turns the next day to hit with. Then delete restart make a new country and have double turns again the next day.

Cycle would actually be up to 40 hours if you had 120 stored turns which is a lot of time of double attacking.

Thats why we need the complicated stuff if were going to either make new players or restarts a bit better mid set.

As to the design goal of speeding up the start of the game that has to either be capped at 100 turns or whatever protection is. Or you can give extra bonus turns only before anyone is able to attack or use the market. But there is really no need.

i wont go into the theory but if we are going to have a lot of new players starting the game instead of writing up wikis, having helper alliance or staff and possibly ingame help all telling people to increase the tax rate at the beginning of the set surely its possible to put it at 33% or some other amount to begin with

ive seen many players even ones who have played along time running at rates like 20% and 30%, its not a huge differance if your not a casher but during startups income goes from something like 2200 to 4700 from memory by changing tax

and that can make building up your initial acres much easier, the one disadvantage is some people who didnt change it might have wound up with more csites

i assume that theres a way to change it and keep PCI and pop the same unless we wanted that to change startups

i assumed that the devs would pick the idea they liked most or were easiest to code then tweak numbers for the level of effect they desired, hopefully starting at the low end and working up if needed

well i thought panlv was going to lose by a large amount, they were behind on networth and countries

but now imp and sof are behind a lot, but they might be running a lot of hidden restarts

and nbk are way behind on net but seem to think they can come back, particularly in kills but knocking out all of the enemies breakers is hard with restarts

i think i did it once in laf and once in valhalla, but in laf i think we still had some originals, and valhalla oil was insanely high which is very beneficial for restarts

anyway aodt or focus FSing eachother almost achieves this, and they seem to have a dispute over FA

id guess its not mass FA though or there would be a lot more talk about it

(edit: i was being stupid)

im really not following

the way it works currently is

78*60=4680
24hourloginturns*days=turns
if you want you can do 18 hour logins and get
80*60=4800

bonus turns would be given
a) to make it so everyone starts the game out of protection or close to out of protection, at max these would be the time of protection +1, so to get 200 even protection would need to last for 200 turns if for some reason people wanted to do that
b) to make it so restarts or new players starting late wouldnt be so far behind, but if these turns are taken then countries must stay in protection for the duration

under either method turns would be given once not 20 times, not 50 times, not adding up to 1000

i get the impression you may be seeing 120 turns on hand as a cap when it doesnt have to be, but giving them as stored turns allows us to set new players with a normal amount of turns to play each day rather than distorting their impression of gameplay

i have no idea why you would ever get an extra 1000 turns

thinking just about the last part of your post though that i think i understand:

(sorry this part was stupid about delaying play)

i just realised one major problem i forgot, any country made after the game started would have to have at most turns equal to protection

the time you can sign up but not play needs to stay in, since otherwise turns given would need to be at most equal to protection

or protection lengths would need to vary depending on when you signed up

sorry i did realise all that stuff before and just went ranting, really do feel silly

also finally realise what detmer meant about rewarding delaying play for no reason, sorry detmer and particularly azmodil who i caused to write a lot of stuff on a topic i should never have been ranting about

bonus turns should only ever be a max of protection, which can be higher if longer opt out in some way protections are added but must still never allow free attack turns

0% is interisting the only downside is if that causes PCI kills?

i seem to remember if you leave tax at 0% for ages eventually your PCI drops to 0 and you die

perhaps 1% could achieve the same thing without risk of newbies dying :)

i believe with those fomulas you should be doing it more like

newacres = modifier * oldacres * (1+oldcsites/4600) * (1+oldnetworth/40,000,000)

otherwise your acres would be less the higher your networth was

anyway i dont really see the need for complex formulas like that, if whoever killed you destroyed your acres then why should you get them back after they spent all that effort destroying them :)

same for buildings and military

what you should get back is a proportion of your wasted resources and a complimentary minimum bonus to make it a bit more fun

worrying about gaming levels in particular probably isnt a good thing to introduce

nukevil if you want to open the lid on the can of new buildings be sure to let everyone play ;p

making it active rather than passive and having a penalty is interisting but keep in mind one of the least fun things is getting blind sided and losing everything which that would increase the likelihood of

worst case you can sell mil on private so its not completely bad, or drop acres until you can afford to build

it should be easy enough to convert part of what you had into cash instead though so you can build and run turns without hassle

and yes a minimum acres is needed for land kills

it used to be fairly common to nuke targets down to about 50 acres then finish off the kill with a few SS's so its possible to still have high mil

or it could be PS'd out and potentially 35% on the market for a commie

which makes me think id prefer to see mono as a restart government rather than keeping the old gov, not that i think anyone would disagree

well if thats the case then i can sleep a lot more when i play express

ive actually been alarm clocking a bit to buy military on private, which makes me sad if it was wasted

would still need to buy enough to get it heading in the right direction before logging out i guess though

this should mean logging in after 60 hours should give you 90k tanks on private market and so on

which will be obvious to check next set

they never cancelled but dead countries were automatically removed at a certain point, first 24 hours then two weeks i believe, unless the country number was reused, no one ive talked to is really sure when dead countries are removed currently

edit:
yes i think your right that once they were dead you could always cancel them, but they were never auto cancelled