Important Question

Sun Tzu

@Lord Thane @TheKeeper Please make this make sense to me.

I get attacked by someone 30% larger. Why does he need 24 hours to recover while I only need 15? Once I'm attacked, I go down to 50% of his size or lower, whereas now he uses my land and castles to grow to over 2.5x by the end of my protection. How? Why? When? Where? Sense? Please?

Lord Thane

Sun Tzu if you use 1:1 MC, then the max troops you can lose in an attack is 40-50%. You can reduce losses further with quick retreat strategy. Get a Truesight and retaliate, the odds are hugely stacked in your favor.

Sun Tzu

Lord Thane

What if I'm gnome? 1:1 MC will kill me on food when I am attacking. Doesn't work. No no no.

trupheus

Lord Thane

QR cuts damage in half, sure, but that only helps so much against a larger army (even with debuff). A change to QR that only exposed 50-60% of your army to the battle, and then you healed 20% of that... now that's the QR i'm looking for to keep my army alive.

Lord Thane

Sun Tzu buy food from market to help supplement heightened needs during attacks, or cast growing crop spell to increase production - and invest in production techs as well. It took a long time, but irrigation was one of my first ones.

Sun Tzu

Thane, doesn't this lock you into "one way of playing"? Can we do something like the following:

If you hit someone lower than your KS, you get 15 ticks max CLI, same as the defender.
If you hit someone larger than your KS, you get 24 hours max CLI.

This way some people will grow balls and stop trying to wait for the exact moment somebody comes into their 70%.

Lord Thane

Sun Tzu I don't see how it does, I just presented 1 of many strategies you could take. Run a smaller land:castle ratio and keep larger armies home to present less attractive target.

Of the 4 castles I lost so far, 2 were suicides who left nothing home, and 1 was near suicide. Very easy to retal if I wanted. Take your retal and then use your protection stone, got your castle back and you're safe for 24 hours 🙂

KingLear

Sun Tzu your suggestion will be in favor of upperfeeding. Too much favor given now for the lower ks vs higher ks. The penalty is too much already. Yet you still beg for more.

Sun Tzu

Lord Thane

So somebody hitting at 70% deserves more protection than somebody defending a 130% hit? Still doesn't make sense to me. Why does it have to be this way? Can you please explain why the attacker needs so much protection to bottomfeed?

DougEfresh

Sun Tzu attacking is scary

Lord Thane

Sun Tzu it's not that they deserve any special treatment, just that their protection is a byproduct of other more important toxicities that needed discouragement (pre-re/castle pass).

There's plenty other features in place to discourage bottom feeding, even at 70% you still get the KS penalty (cuts their attack damages -30% and gives them +30% casualties), and you're still given the castle loss chancify if under 10 castles.

The attacker is taking a risk, if they fail the attack then they can get pre-re, you can't discount that fact either.

Lord Thane

trupheus we talked about that before I think, and I really like the idea. It makes sense, just imagining how QR would work in a real battle in my head, half the garrison fleeing the field, half sticking behind to slow the enemy a bit before falling back themselves... Maybe we will tweak it.

trupheus

Lord Thane

it makes sense though, in a losing situation the general recognizes that they are severly outmatched. A sacrifical guard is left in places so the rest of the army can flee. This strategy also requires a general to be left on defense, so you're -1 attacking general and it takes whatever your military return time is for this general to return if you change strat.

Sacrificial Guard - Your general recognizes that your forces are outmatched, leave 35% of your army behind to allow the others to flee. This 35% takes double damage. This strategy requires a general. Changing this strategy puts the general in Fighting Units returning.

edit: possibly a new strategy?

Sun Tzu

Lord Thane

Reward that risk. 15 hours prot is a good reward. It's the SAME reward as the defender, especially when hitting down. Wanna grow actual balls and uphit? Here's 24 hours if you win.

Risk of defending is also there. God forbid you "successfully defend." You got no protection and your army is mostly dead. Thanks for playing champ, there's the door.

Lord Thane

Sun Tzu if you successfully defend them you're in a supreme position, you can have an ally pretal which further weakens your enemy, then you can take your retal. That attacker then is down 3 lost battles.

The more we buff defenders the less likely an attacker wants to attack. The defender has all the odds stacked in their favor in this scenario - it's not just the defender losing everything. Retals don't give retals, you can use that to your advantage.

Lord Thane

trupheus I like the idea of the new strat, but it will require more in-depth dev time than we have available, maybe something for next round. But in the short term, I think we can/should improve QR to save more troops. I'll talk to keeper to see what he thinks tomorrow.

Sun Tzu

Lord Thane

Sir, we keep getting de-tracked. Why not give them the 24h for uphits and 15 for down hits? By the time defender has used his protection, despite saving 40% of your army, the offender has more than likely out-rebuilt you.

Alternatively, in case someone larger hits you and wins, you get a +30% attack/defend on your retal.

trupheus

Lord Thane

Other than super major bug fixes no one should expect anything in this round. Like whoopsadoodle on the old shieldline strategy. And mages.

I think I found a thing with wiz resting and negative GH space but haven’t had a chance to really test it again to confirm. Maybe one day soon.

Sun Tzu

Also, once the defender is out of protection, the offender can get his "newborn friend" to attack him again and make sure he doesn't get retalled. If you insist on 24h protection for the attacker, at least match it for the defender.

Lord Thane

Sun Tzu cli has to specifically be able to match retal length in order to perform its main function of preventing pre-re. If we made cli only work on up-hits we might as well just block all down-hits because nobody will down-hit because they would all get pre-re. That idea is a game breaker in its current form as presented imo.

For the alternative, buffing retals for smaller kingdoms, they already got the buff during the down-hit. I think if we buff them even further then attackers just won't attack down at all anymore. That shrinks the potential attack pool, encourages farming, discourages attacks even more (it's already extremely risky).

Lord Thane

Sun Tzu we talked a bit about situations involving protection times recently here:
https://forum.thardferr.com/d/358-protection-times/

Those issues would need to be overcome with a solution before being able to increase protection times.

Sun Tzu

Lord Thane

So pre/re is bad but getting hit 2 times by your enemy and his "newborn" before your retal runs out is fair game?

I don't mean to argue just for the sake of argument. I just fail to understand the logic. The minute I understand the logic, I'll shut up about it.