Leo
Excuse me sir. I have. I've had tons of idea's floating around, a few of which specifically on this topic. Scroll up? Doesn't matter if they are NAP'd or allied, a pass is a pass. It's a test round and people are having trouble not resorting to n+1 warfare already lol.
There are just no good idea's to these social problems, castle passing and massive alliances. Until we render it inefficient to pass, there will always be passing. That's why I believe a modified CTA rule will work best(so far). But how do we help the middleman? By allowing them to keep their army out safe without being destroyed. An idea i've had on a separate thread was by selecting a substrat of 3(?) options. Aggressive, normal, Guerilla. Everything would be as normal except with aggressive your sent troops(remember 70% sent only, you need to leave some behind for full prot) fight to the death(I think this is where we are now), normal--idk maybe something like 50% losses? and Guerrilla where all troops losses are only 15% of normal, unlikely to ever win and does not generate a retal. This would allow mid players to keep their armies out and even potentially chip away at larger players. I haven't though about this too much but my mind keeps roaming to it. I prefer to empower the user with choice. I'm sure there's a balance/idea in there somewhere.
Alliances are their own beast of a problem, much more difficult to tackle than castle passing, if possible at all. "If two province alliance takes the lead then a 5 province alliance could take'm down". How can you say that sentence and in your last breath you were talking about inter-prov stuff to eliminate alliances? Were we hoping they'd just be good-faith participants? 5 prov alliance, fucking barf bro lol. Even 2 prov alliance makes me want to barf tbh but I acknowledge this isn't living in reality. BUT whomever makes the 2 prov alliance starts the n+1 warfare, and the 5 provs will come quick. This is what we get when dealing with humans, we band together lol. I just don't see a good solution to this other than some kind of rigid war system that I don't particularly enjoy.
From another thread: Only other idea i've had to get people to flee their safety in numbers is to offer small incentive. I suggest creating incentive for winners. ie; top prov gets a 1-2-% production bonus next round. But will that only matter for the last week of the round? Probably. Just thought now... what about monthly(yearly in game) ranking snap shots for production(or other) bonuses? Top prov gets 2%, second place gets 1%, just for the month and then new production champs are crowned. Some goal worth fighting over.
