Lord Thane

The current system to prevent bottom feeding isn't really doing anything. I just got hit for by a 20k KS kingdom, at 13.5k KS, and wiped out most of my work since protection ended. And I had 1:1 ratio GH pretty much full.... at a 65% BF.

You want to grow the game, you have to make it so that people can actually grow past 2 castles. The castle jump is damn near impossible with a huge alliance beating everyone down, so my options are to sit and wait until everyone else is over 60k and maybe be able to do something, or just do nothing for a couple weeks to get techs then get bored and quit. This was an issue with this game 25 years ago, and it still seems to be here.

Now that my bitching is done, here's a couple ideas (that are, I admit, probably terrible) that couple help out new kingdoms:

1) Make castles less important. You want to have a war game, yes, but if you lose half your kingdom every time you go to make the jump at the start, then attracting/retaining players will be difficult. Could do this by getting rid of the build limit per castle. You'd probably want to have castles give some other bonus to make them worth it though... Either way, I'm of the strong opinion that castles definitely need to be re-balanced.

2) If we don't want to change how castles work, then maybe make them easier to build (a new building pop assignment maybe, like 1500 pop to build a castle in a day, i dunno, just spitballing numbers).

3) One idea that could kick two birds with one stone is have a certain percentage chance that the castle is destroyed upon capturing it, as a casualty of war. Like 10% at equal kingdom strength or up hitting, increasing to a 50% chance (or 100) at a 50% bottom feed. Would add some uncertainty to the castle pass strat, and make it so that if you want to go for someone lower than 75% of your size you are really rolling the dice.

Anyways, /rant and F you Cyber you bottom feeding twat.

      This is not going to be popular because people love to BF, but the answer is super simple.

      The easiest solution to that is that you can't gain a castle when you hit someone below you in ks. This would damn near eliminate all bottom feeding. The person in first would not be able to make giant leaps forward because the only way they could move up in castles is by building them.

        FriendsInSpace Anyways, /rant and F you Cyber you bottom feeding twat.

        I forgot everything in the post the first time I read it because I laughed when I read this part.

        Crazier idea. What if attacking didn’t take a castle from the defender and just did a +1 for the attacker if the hit is successful and the army finds a variable amount of land?

          Something's gotta change, it's such bad game design to have half your kingdom at risk so early into the game. This is a massive issue that needs solving. You either just spin your tires for weeks while you feed the big groups or stay at 1 castle forever. Neither of these things are going to retain players. I'm already reminded of why I stopped wasting my time with this game long ago

            Thecatman

            This is exactly why I thought to 10x what a kingdom starts with. Days worth of progress can be wiped out in one attack.

              Thecatman if castles auto built, everyone would come oop already past the 3 castle jump. and it would promote more fighting because everyone would be a target.

                DougEfresh

                The thing with auto castles is there are times when you don’t want another castle. I don’t want another castle because I have no good way of defending or retaliating. The last thing I want is to be 2 castles 30 land and get knocked down to 1 castle 15 land. Most people with less than 45 land don’t because they’re just trying to get the economy to build out land. There’s also the key moments of when you go from 19 to 20, 29 to 30, snd so on.

                    Yah both those sound like good ideas, just anything to get over the hump. Me and my group are actually going backwards just getting ass fucked by 6 different provs

                      We did talk about making hits below a ks % would get a % chance to win a castle, something like hits under 80% ks would be 50/50 chance.

                      I think that addition, plus disable CLI for hits under 70% would deter a lot of BF activity.

                      I know how it feels, I lost 2 castles to BF. If CLI hadn't been turned to tech I could have retaled one of them and been safe (he suicided), but if we had the BF Castle Chance and BF CLI Disable rules in place then maybe they would have thought twice about down hitting so hard.

                      trupheus with this you would come oop with 4. so you come oop with 30 land your only a 7-8 land hit. and your economy would be even better because your not wasting 750 wood and 1250 iron on building one.

                          Thecatman

                          Those 6 provinces probably aren’t even connected. They might be but to my knowledge those dirty Smurfs are keeping to themself. It’s just that the smaller kingdoms are the feeding ground of the bigger kingdoms. Bigger kingdoms don’t want to attack each other because it’s so costly. Even if they couldn’t take castles below 80% that might just cause more farming. Unless CLI only kicks in above 80%. Hmmmm gotta figure this one out more.

                              DougEfresh maybe we should do a special deal of auto starting the first 4 castles during initial protection. Then everyone comes out loaded and they can continue building more, or turtle up - whatever they want from there.

                                  Lord Thane that works as well. i know its a small sample size since rounds havent been long enough but there isnt enough castles in the game. anything that increases that will increase fighting. and having people less of a land target will promote more risky hits, when your losing 10 land instead of 30.

                                      DougEfresh I like it, it will ease the transition period out of protection a lot, I think we'll have to do it. We can build it in as part of a new kingdom setup so it happens for everyone as they join the game.

                                      It's weird I don't remember having this problem during the test rounds, I guess everyone wasn't as worried about getting hit. I wonder if that's due to it being "just test rounds", or if cli prospects have made people more wary.

                                        ive felt like its been an issue, but as i said before, having a round last only a couple of weeks might have magnified it to me. but everyone always so scared of getting split, that they wait til someone else goes to 2 before doing it themself, and it grinds everything to a stand still

                                          DougEfresh I'm gonna put a note for this to build out. If Keeper is in agreement then I'll put it into place in a couple weeks - then all new kingdoms going forward will get it.