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.
