Make attacking first worth it again.

TheKeeper

I think in a couple weeks, I'll make a poll to see how we can improve the race, priorizing the ones that tried Undead.

There's still time to join the undead if you want, just let me know.

Leo

TheKeeper

Nah that is too easy to play 🙂

Just joking. At first glance gnomes seemed counter to Undead. But, you say it is designed to be Demi God vs Gnomes. Meaning Undead with Swarm of the Death strat or in general?

trupheus

Leo

Swarm negates long range damage to legion but increases damage done to other units. Anything with high defense and/or short range damage is going to be strong against legion.

Weak vs dwarf. Very weak vs orc. Weak vs human. Hard counter gnomes (unless they go militia/infantry heavy and run anti cav at which point RIP the 3 mounted units all the death in melee)

TheKeeper

Leo a combo of magic Vs strat.

Jets

Leo horrible. And I had irrigation. So I destroyed buildings to get my GH and Farms up so when the military returned I could house them. After that I would make sure I had a larger reserve as, I remember dropping 50-200k food while army was out

saadht

@TheKeeper

Can we just reduce peasant food upkeep to half?

So much food crisis basically means you don’t hit.

Lord Thane

saadht if we solve every player's strategy issues by nerfing the game at every turn, then there's no point in playing the game. It's easy to adjust your strategy to make more food, just like everyone has to do.

trupheus

Somethin I been brewin on.

3-5 alliances based on player count. Max alliance size will be dependent on player count. Meaning it can go up as players join late.
Movement between alliances is possible but there’s a 1 week cooldown.
Sending aid outside alliance disabled.
Beneficial spell outside alliance disabled.
Attacking inside alliance disabled.
If you hit and break someone only your alliance can take retals.

Players can play outside of an alliance but there’s a 10% penalty on all aid received or sent. This penalty increases by 10% every time they send or receive from a player they’ve previously sent to or received from. Beneficial spells cannot be cast on them by others. They cannot cast beneficial spells on others. They cannot attack any player in protection. Because of the naturally rough lifestyle they do receive a 25% bonus attack power and defense when defending.

saadht

trupheus

I like all these points, how about an addition?:

You can declare war on another province. War lasts for 7 real life days (168 or 170 game days).

Prior to war, you have 36 hours of "protection." Nobody else can hit you, you can't hit anybody. This starts when you declare war on the other province.

Once the war starts, only the two provinces are allowed to hit each other. If you don't hit once every 35 hours or get hit, you get a massive penalty. You cannot send less than 40% of your troops against a warring kingdom.

Thoughts?

Jets

Lord Thane thank you for this. 90% of the game is a balance, 10% is risk taking 😂. I don't see a food problem. I see a farm solution

saadht

Lord Thane
@TheKeeper
I implore you to listen to my opinion with a more open mind.

In the initial game design, peasants ate 6 food. There were thousands of players back then. All of them came together and then sometime shortly afterwards, peasants were eating 0 food.

There were no "undeads" without food upkeep on combat units. Everybody on equal footing, more or less.

If the MUCH larger community felt at that time that peasants eating food is unsustainable, maybe we should re-explore that? I'm saying don't start with 0 food, maybe try 3 food for a while.

As the game currently stands, you build to 2 castles, hit somebody for your third with a good sustainable army, if enough units survive and are away, you're slightly pressed for food. Mind you, you also get a tonne of unbuilt land because 30% buildings destroyed, all your resources go to building this up. This was only 15% in the previous version. Now if your opponent pre and retals you before your army returns, you're down to 1/3rd land and not enough farms/gh to support your away army. This = time to quit and say the game is too broken to play.

I've seen two people go through it already.

Not everybody has the nerves of steel I do 😃

Thank you for listening.

Edit: Also to add that retals not giving retals means even if you rebuild back, max you'll come back to is 2 castles. Even though I used the retals not giving retals to my advantage yesterday, I implore you, let's stop encouraging strategies that will lead to FarmVille! Attacking first really isn't worth it unless it's a bottom feed where the target doesn't have any friends and cannot get you with a pre and a retal. Really, as the game stands, the best strategy is to farm until you get hit. Not a big fan tbh. We need changes to encourage hitting not discourage it.

trupheus

Jets

some people take way less risk than others and only gain from it.

trupheus

saadht

that's been suggested in other versions yet we've never done it. this would certainly be interesting until one alliance figures out let's just have 2 provs be at war with each other so other people can't attack us. the hit or get hit idea is a start, but it has to be like 80% of your army at risk. 40% isn't enough. also if you agree to terms with another province... hey everyone, only have 10GH so the army losses are crazy small.

Enter the Thardferr Honor Committee (yeah, THC) you asshats abuse the system, the committee can give you the flower treatment. maybe not as severe, but you get my point.

oh and last thing, we're nowhere near the player base to do this. the game is already permeated with large alliances and the alliances in place are all multi-province. so not today but maybe later.

Lord Thane

saadht I couldn't take someone seriously who would quit a game while participating in test rounds. The whole point of test rounds is to fix things, and this is a brand new game.

Anyways, it's still too soon to know if food is really a problem or not. As a Dwarf I haven't had any issues with food at all. I had a big surplus when I came out of protection, ran a deficit after my first attack which my surplus was easily able to absorb, now I'm only running at optimal level with 1:1 farms and building a huge surplus. We'll see how things go as armies get bigger and wars get more complex.

We'll have the grand market to help with resource issues soon too 🙂

Xliest

saadht re food, peasants still ate food but didn’t die when starved. It mattered when you had army. Because you would need to feed both peasants and army to ensure army didn’t starve, we have so little information about after protection as the game only ran 1 week before the resource dump. I understand and sympathize with the fact that food was different or approached different in the other game however this is a different game we are seeing that more and more. It’s community driven which og was not. Which makes it harder when others opinions are seeming to get through over yours.

saadht

Lord Thane

You haven't been in a war at the outset. Basically confirming that the best strategy is to farm.

We need more wars!

I haven't quit, so please take me seriously. I implore you to think about it deeper, would you want strategies that encourage hitting or discourage it? On your first attack, how many units survived? If less than 10% were killed perhaps, how would that change your experience?

And then along come undeads, completely unhurt by this problem. Gold is easy to come by. Even fighting orcs can't keep up with the other resources. There's something wrong. Please try to look at it from our viewpoint too.

By the way, my previous post was wrong, 40% of buildings that you absorb are destroyed. Can we at least take that back down to 15%? It's a start perhaps.

TheKeeper

saadht You just gave me a new idea, what if we do a new tech tree? we can implement your ideas and everyone should evaluate if takes that route

Lord Thane

saadht my first attack the target didn't have any troops, so zero casualties lol

We have the castle defense rule and the unit weighted damage allocation, those should help reduce casualties and distribute damage to the cheapest units. That's some help at least. We'll see how the rest of this rest round goes before making anymore battle engine changes.

The thing that is wrong is the tech times are low. I think that was a big mistake for this test round, it's ruining any sensible estimate of how a real round will go, making many opinions moot, especially around resource allocation. And it's promoting farming, hence this test round is completely ruined as far as any game balancing goes imo.

We have the poll up for currently suggested changes, and we may implement some more of those items. Other than that, I just want to test techs to verify they're all working and then wait for the real round to begin.

Jets

TheKeeper you know me, I'd love to have even more tech trees. I also don't think we shouldn't discourage farming if that is someone's way of playing. I feel like it's okay if someone wants to drive fast and take chance, but if you want to be smart and methodical....that's fine too. As both you and @Lord Thane have been speaking too, this game isn't to be catered to one person's style of gameplay, but to make a strategy game based on decisions and repecutions.

Diversity within the tech trees help allow players to follow how they want to play.

For science.

saadht

@TheKeeper

I feel like this problem will be more severe early game, especially at the castle jump stage.

Can you elaborate how you imagine the tech tree going?

Thanks.

TheKeeper

saadht I think should be: reduce food consumption for peasants (gold and time to be defined) -> reduce buildings destroyed if you win (tbd), and we should make a poll to add more tweaks

saadht

Can be a good compromise @TheKeeper but really, in this case, you must first do these techs before the game is properly playable. God forbid you get into a war before these, then all bets are off.

I mean, let's see, maybe it's a start but I can't understand why we don't just incorporate these ideas that were well tested and come to by a larger community years ago. We appreciate your thankless and tireless work, but with the undeads introduced in the game, it makes everything different.

saadht

Also retals giving retals should be immediately reinstated IMHO.

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