This wouldn’t work right? … Right?

trupheus

I’m gonna start by just laying the pieces to this puzzle out there and putting them together.

CLI grants protection up to 24 hours on every castle taken.
Attacks grant retals.
Offensive spells grant retals.
Retals do not grant retals.
Weak offensive spells (not EQ or Fireball) do not break prot.

Kingdom A attacks kingdom B this gives a re.
Kingdom A has 24 hours of CLI.
Kingdom B Has 15 hours.
Kingdom B at their leisure, mostly likely somewhere between 12 and 15 hours of protection they take their re. This ends their party.

But wait? Does it? Could there be a way to party forever? Can they have private soup kitchen for 2 in the Prius indefinitely!? Kingdom B casts famine on Kingdom A. This does not break protection, but does give a re. And is easily countered.

Now Kingdom B has 24 hours CLI.
Kingdom A has 15 hours prot and a retal.

Rinse and repeat.

What stops this? A maniac 8.5:1 caster EQ’ing them? Caster loses in the long run. People refusing to sell wood, iron, and food? They’re professional independent farmers who don’t need no help.

How do they grow faster than 1 castle every 30 hours? Simple, buy them. Have the other kingdom get enough schools and wiz to cast Famine on you. Heck pay for them to do it. Take the retal and buy the castle.

Make it so offensive spells don’t get through protection? GG casters. We wanted you to be good… One EQ or Fireball isn’t going to be enough to wreck a kingdom. Just an inconvenience.

Please tell me I’m missing something. Or tell me how you prevent this. Before someone says well that would be boring. Yes, and boring wins. Because the winner of the round ends up being the best farmer most of the time.

Lord Thane

Well, for one thing we turned off retals for Famine, only EQ/FB/WT get retal now. That change was done a few hours ago, along with a few other magic tweaks like scaling the damages from offensive spells on kingdoms <70% ks.

Also, not really sure how your flow of logic works, when we get to this point: Now Kingdom B has 24 hours CLI. Where did that CLI come from? The famine spell? Famine never and still doesn't give CLI. You mean Kingdom B took their retal against Kingdom A to get their castle back and got CLI from it? So then what's the point of casting Famine, just to give Kingdom A a free pass to try continuing the fight? To what end? It's moot since Famine doesn't give retals as of a few hours ago, but I'm still curious what the goal would be since it seems illogical, the caster would basically just be giving the attacker a free retal for no apparent reason.

trupheus

Gotcha. So a famine wouldn’t work. If FB and EQ are the only options to grant a retal, fireball because I like it spicy. And it doesn’t cost my partner to rebuild.

Just have to cast it before making the attack to give the retal and break prot there then take the re to be back in CLI. So OOP for a whole second if you use 2 tabs and set it up.

The point of the offensive spell is to give a retal so the person with 15 hours prot can get through the CLI protection.

This strategy minimizes your time exposed to attacks. Free to frolic. Never have to worry about being attacked.

Lord Thane

Okay, rereading a few more times, I guess your point is that if 2 players work diligently and coordinate all day every day, they could hit each other back and forth and do magic and whatnot to keep each other in perpetual protection. And they'll grow by buying castles, or something.

I guess I addressed this back in the day when we were discussing CLI and the subject of retals-give-retals was being discussed in relation to CLI. Someone proposed that with R-G-R + CLI 2 people could "abuse" it by purposefully staying in perpetual war with each other. My response to that was that if 2 people wanted to dedicate everyday of their life and game life to perpetually pushing each other into protection conducting a carefully organized dance - then sure, what's wrong with that? They aren't hurting anybody else, and it's an impressive amount of coordination to do that everyday for 3 months. I'm also not quite sure how well they'd grow in that situation, considering the loss of buildings and peasants during each hit - and they'd each be getting hit every day (or more) to sustain the dance.

So if people could still do that, just replacing RGR with a fireball or EQ, sure, why not? It would take a insane amount of dedication, and I really don't think they'd end up growing as fast as anyone else considering they'd be at perpetual war - other kingdoms get some breaks between battles, but these hypothetical protection dancers would be st war constantly - constantly losing buildings and their little bits of troops and peasants and having to keep strict schedules... It'd be pretty impressive, especially if they somehow managed to grow into the top30 somehow.

I don't see it as a problem though. What's the problem with it?

trupheus

So it would work and there’s nothing wrong with it? This wouldn’t get anyone banned. They’re just removing themself from the attack pool by manipulating CLI. Shrake at 1:1 mills and mines would make over 2k wood and 1500 iron per tick. 48000 wood and 35000 iron per day hours? The average wood cost per building is 86 and iron is 46, depending on the exact makeup of buildings. If 50% of buildings were destroyed in a 2 castle 80 land(more than these guys would lose right now), that’s building 400 buildings to build every 24 hours when you make your attack. Unless buildings are supposed to be destroyed for the defender as well as the attack in every hit. But from my experience when my land was full built out after a failed defense I’d be at 0 or -1 buildings to build. 400 * 86 is 34000 and 400 * 46 is 18400. I think he can manage when he doesn’t have to retrain military losses.

FriendsInSpace

trupheus

But seriously, takes 30 hours to build a castle, so sooner or later you'd have a gap in the protection where the plan fails.

trupheus

FriendsInSpace

How? Castles aren’t destroyed merely transferred.

Starting at 10 for each players. 11/9 moves to 10/10 when the second kingdom takes their retal. 30 hours in they have 22 castles between them. Another 30 hours goes and they’re at 24.

FriendsInSpace

trupheus Ah gotcha. I mean, if one wanted to do this then sure i see how it could work, but it kind of seems like more of a science experiment than participating in the game tbh.

Jets

FriendsInSpace I don't know if you have noticed. Seems like half the game doesn't want to participate in the game...they want to "beat" everyone by finding ways around the classic, hit and be hit. Mostly by massive alliances to remove simple risk...others. Ways around the standard game play to maximize returns.

I feel that in an attempt to make it an attack friendly game, we have made it more farmferr than ever.

If retals do not give retals...and CLI provides 24 hours of protection....and the province circle jerks... Really it is becoming an elaborate game of hot potato.

FriendsInSpace

Jets It's been like this, and variations of it, as long as I can remember. The biggest alliance usually takes the top, whether they end up playing farmferr or whatever, just by shear numbers.

If that's the way they wanna play, and the above posts are the way truph wants to play, then to each their own i suppose. I just like trolling people and trying to throw wrenches into plans when I can.

Jets

FriendsInSpace I'm just bitter because I just tried to attack 9 people. All of which are in protection. Made me sad.

Guess I'll build more farms.

trupheus

FriendsInSpace trying to throw wrenches into plans when I can.

when it was a simple mousetrap, things like this weren't possible. now it's a complicated mousetrap and there's more possibilities. i preferred the simple mousetrap. hit, get hit, or pass for prot. even just the ability to full send and not have to worry about how much protection you're getting is interesting.

it's not necessarily the way i want to play. but i see it as an avenue. i normally get too bored and make a hit i shouldn't that exposes me to unnecessary risk.

FriendsInSpace

Jets The joys of a smaller player base. Hopefully the game grows some more and we have more targets kicking around.

Lord Thane

trupheus is it worth giving up the thrills and anxiety of playing the game though? What if you do this plan and can't event get to top60? Or if some alliance notices you two, and breaks the chain via fireballs or something, then feasts on the broken + defenseless kingdoms? Seems like a lot of hopium to do something that's boring as hell. I've basically been just farming the whole round and it really is meh - I get some excitement when someone's attack fails, or when they succeed at a heavy price, but that's not near as fun as being part of the full experience.

xiAo-Shin Star

Lord Thane
I'm not sure why are you pointing at getting on the Top 10 or whatsoever. This game should be all about War. Hit and get hit that is what it should be. Who cares if you are on top or not, at some point we all enjoyed the fun.

Soon, the game will be boring. You only get to attack once and full of bottom feeders and then hide with CLI.

Lord Thane

xiAo-Shin Star I mention it because it seems to be the only goal of the plotters and schemers. Otherwise, they might just play the game and try to have fun lol

Xliest

Lord Thane alliances aren’t the problem in every version of the game there has been some amount of coordination and backstabbing and treachery are certain to follow. I personally don’t think that truephus’s scenario is that far fetched, and in the future I could see CLi being abused this way. And despite your attitude of it’s not going to hurt anyone else. It absolutely will hurt others in the way that people not using the strategy will not feel like the game is worth playing because they won’t be able to compete on the same level and to just be competing for 3rd place is not all that fun for many people. Also your claim that these people will have to dedicate their lives to stay in protecting is quite bogus. We have people Trying every waking tick to hit out and the ones that are in protection are able to stay in protection simply by attacking 1x every 24 hours… all that would be necessary would be for one kingdom to log on every 15 hours to attack and the other kingdom to login every 15 hours to retal… you had the same argument over the early game shenanigans this round… that kingdoms were throwing there round away to giv up a castle on tick 2 of protection, when in reality that’s the easiest castle to recover from… you don’t have any army, you don’t need really many buildings… just need to explore some amount and build a castle on the 91st tick after that you could easily start making buildings and army it would be like you never missed a beat…with in the first 3 days oop.

Lord Thane

Xliest my guess is if it became a problem then players would demand a change and we'd come up with some creative solution - just like all problems we've collectively faced.

As for the rest, those players did give up their rounds, as was evidenced by them walking away from the game for 2 days after the stunt was completed - except for Saadht who was the only one found to be continuing on to try rebuild/recover.