Land Gained on Attacks

Nolio

The biggest and easiest way to help equalize a lot of the playing field, that would help slow down runaway kingdoms quite a bit, and make the early game much less punishing is this:

Make every attacking victory gain 10% of the land from the defender. Regardless of castles won or lost. This would also eliminate any need for Castle Chancification.

What this would do:

The bigger a kingdom, the more they lose. The smaller the kingdom, the less they lose. It's a built in catch up mechanic that encourages hitting upwards, and makes bigger kingdoms have to play better to keep their lead.

This would also make the early game on par with the late game. You would never lose half your kingdom when you have 2 castles. And you wouldn't be punished for being small.

This would prevent the kingdoms from sitting at 19 or 29 castles since it would no longer be far more beneficial to do so.

This one change would be a massive benefit to the whole game with no down sides that I can see.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Cora

Nolio temo suggested taking castles out of the game completely, but I told him that you might as well just go play Dominion then. Taking only 10% land would mean having to explore to make up the difference or make more attacks for land…am I understanding that correctly?? If so, then that wouldn’t be as devastating of a loss on a defending kingdom.

Lord Thane

Would this lessen the value of castles too much? If you always lose 10% of land, then you might as well stay at 1:45 all the time to keep your crime low.

trupheus

Lord Thane

Castle train rate is pretty darn nice. Maybe make castles give a 2% bonus to production to combat the +1% crime rate. would be a hefty bonus. It would make GB ridiculously strong though.

Cora

This would increase the amount of land taken from castles 11-19, 21-29, etc, and decrease the amount of land lost below 9 castles. Most impactful at the X9 spot. Sitting at 19 castles losing one is a little over 5% of your land. The safest spot in the game to sit and farm. It would also really impact BF'ing since typically when a BF happens the victim has less land. Right now if I were to hit the kingdom right at my 70%, it'd be a 25 land hit. They'd retal me for 44.

Really like the idea.

You would also have 0 reason to stop attacking at 19 castles.

skigglez

You’d need to find some other purpose for castles that would encourage building them

Psidon

im an explorer and turtler so i approve of this 🙂

Cora

trupheus that sounds very good, but what about the castle losses? He mentioned not needing the castle chancification. So does that mean only losing 1 castle on every attack win/loss? Even over 20 castles, etc?

Nolio

Cora It would mean losing 2 castles at 20+ and 3 at 30+ etc.

The thing I would pair with it is what @trupheus was mentioning. Make castles give a bonus to production rates. This encourages players to keep building castles. The more you have the more you earn and train.

There can even be milestones with Castles. At 5 castles you gain +10% food production, at 10 castles you gain +1-% gold production, at 15 castles you gain 10% wood and iron production, at 20 castles you gain +10% unit production rate.

Things like that would really encourage players to build castles often and faster, and it incentivizes attacking without having nearly as much of a devastating effect on the player who loses most of their land when they are small.

FriendsInSpace

Nolio I think this idea is pretty solid. As Thane said, need some incentive to building more castles if we change the victory spoils to 10% of land regardless of castle amount.

It would make the early game that much more bearable, no getting halved/thirded at the castle jump. It would make larger kingdoms hurt more relatively speaking when getting hit than smaller kingdoms, actually encouraging less bottom feeds (land wise, anyways).

I also like the incentives you said for building castles, with production bonuses at intervals. I'd almost make them slightly smaller though, and have them repeat. Every 5 castles is 2% bonus food, every 10 is +1% gold, every 15 is +5% iron/wood, like that.

If we want to encourage building them more though, I think we need to change the way they interact with crime rate. I said it in the other thread on chancification, but I'll repeat it here, more castles increasing crime rate has never sat right with me. I think it should be the opposite - Max crime rate is say [100% - (# castles you own)]. Also would have to change improved law, truph once suggested having it half the effects of crime rate and that sounds solid to me.

Enphetamy

Is modifying castle chance an indirect solution to the inability to fend off an attack? The discussion about full sends recently brought to light how on dimensional the game becomes when the mode of attack is a full send, or near full send. And the expectation to hold a retal is low (I think the 80% defender rule makes sense when you expect the attacking force to always be smaller than the defending force, as was likely the case in the past when people were splitting armies 3,4 even 5 ways). Now attacks are always coming at full force, usually from above, so you defending with 80% is completely crippling. I know, holds do happen, but not nearly as often as it should.

Disincentivizing the full send (where the worst likely scenario is a retal to grab back what they lost), will lead to more meaningful battles. More meaningful distribution and utilization of an army. There is something in this golden nugget of a mechanic, it'll take a few minds that arent mine to really flesh out the idea.

trupheus

Enphetamy where the worst likely scenario is a retal to grab back what they lost

If it's a BF, the retal probably takes more land than they lost, in most scenarios. With it being tied to castle/land ratio now, it's possible for a low ratio castle:land kingdom to still come out ahead in land after a retal if they hit someone with a higher ratio than theirs. That's possible but highly unlikely if every hit is 10% land. Most of the time the bigger kingdom has more land.

One thing that could also deter BFs is make the win condition harder based on the size of the BF.

Lord Thane

FriendsInSpace to complete this idea we could figure out another metric for raising crime, something involving castles might be good for helping to bring this idea home.

What if we tied crime to LAND. I thought of a couple ways it could be done, one is by rungs of land like 100 land = 10%, 200 land is 20%, 354 land is 35%. The other way I was thinking of doing something tied to castle to land ratio, but I didn't work that one out far enough to figure how it would work exactly, lol

Either one of those, or maybe another option not yet invented, would work for the next part - which is make castles reduce crime. I didn't work out what would make sense, 1 castle = 1%, or whatever - we can figure that part out later.

It seems to make sense to me, as an empire grows (land) crime rises. Plunking down castles act like ye olde popo, reducing crime. That will fix the "now everyone is running 1:45 to min-max", don't want runaway crime deteriorating the economy.

Maybe a system that combines both the land rings and also castle:land ratio would work best, because of the top of my head I like the idea of lowering crime based on there being fewer lands for each castle to manage.

Maybe something like the castle:land sets the multiplier of crime VS the land rung you're on. So for example, if your castle:land ratio was 1:10, then we could set the rungs of crime down to a base level, maybe 0.5%, then at 1:20 it goes up to 1%, then at 1:45 the multiplier is capped at 2.25%. so if you got 10 castles and 100 land your crime would be 5%. If you got 2 castles and 100 land, your crime would be 22.5%. if you got 5 castles and 100 land, your crime would be 10%... Using this model vs the current model my 61 lands and 7 castles would be 3% crime on the new model and 7% on current model. If I had only had 2 castles then my crime on this model would be 9% (1:30 castle land ratio = 1.5% and my lands at 62 = 6%, 1.5x6 = 9% crime).

That's gonna make everyone want to keep a low castle:land ratio, so we'll have castles coming out the wazoo.

How would the new crime model affect someone like Cyber with 28 castles and +1100 lands. That 1:40 castle ratio would give a 2 multiplier, then the land run would give 110 points of crime, with the multiplier he'd have 220% crime currently. If he dropped his castle ratio down to 1:20 it would cut that in half to 110%.if he had the crime tech capping it to 25, we could leave the castle multiplier in effect, so if he had 1:20 ratio then he'd stick to 25, if he stuck to his 1:40 then his crime would be 50.

Idk if the base rate needs to be at .5 specifically. Would everyone then min-max to have 1:10 ratio to keep low crime? If Cyber did with this new model, then his crime would be 55 without tech, and 12.5 with tech... Maybe the tech needs tweaked to fit this model fairly, we don't want to get an unfair advantage to big kingdoms. If the tech didn't cap and only reduced by -50% as trupheus suggested then it might make more sense. In that case, Cyber would have 22.5 crime with the tech and 1:10 castle ratio. With a 1:20 ratio he would have 55 crime. At his current 1:40 he would have 110 crime with the tech applied. As you can see, this idea doesn't just encourage castles, it really demands it - maybe too much lol

Enjoy the late night ramble 🙏

FriendsInSpace

Thinking about it more too, if this were put in you could almost reduce protection times too. It really sucks trying to rebuild when you lose a large amount of your kingdom, as your production just got wrecked, but if you didn't lose that much per hit bouncing back could be a lost easier.

skigglez

Lord Thane I don’t think the current version of GB fits with your proposed model, as the large kingdom just gets 0 crime rate. You’d have to either change it to a % reduction of crime rate or increase the resource generation, or else the runaway kingdom runs away even harder

FriendsInSpace

Lord Thane

You thinking having land be what sets the minimum crime rate, and using castle/land ratio as a modifier on top of that? It could work nicely, though I think we would want to have it more weighed towards castle/land ratio, or have max crime rate capped at like 40% or something so as to prevent a death spiral.

Lord Thane Idk if the base rate needs to be at .5 specifically. Would everyone then min-max to have 1:10 ratio to keep low crime?

The thing is, you get limited by the amount of castles you can build in a specific time frame, so you would then have a choice to either run a smaller more efficient kingdom CR wise, or try to just overpower CR with raw numbers...to a point.

Lord Thane Maybe the tech needs tweaked to fit this model fairly, we don't want to get an unfair advantage to big kingdoms. If the tech didn't cap and only reduced by -50% as trupheus suggested then it might make more sense.

Could even break apart the tech to have different levels, say improved law 1 reduces effects of crime rate by 10%, 2 by 20%...etc. Obviously would need to split apart the TP cost to them as well.

I think this all adds a nice element of strategic building/exploring to the mix, and I think coupled with nolios idea of 10% land loss/hit could really make castle passing less appealing to larger players, as that could start ruining castle/land ratios.

These comments brought to you by me before my first coffee, so nothing has really been thought through.

Sinnywinks

Have Tim send me that link please.

Lord Thane

skigglez we can remove the crime effects from GB entirely. Just leave it as a production bonus spell.

skigglez

Lord Thane would 10% be enough in that case, or bump it up to 25%? Gotta be significant if it’s a blessing from the gods

FriendsInSpace

skigglez

I would say if you are removing CR benefits from GB, then 25% buff to production from 10% would be a fair compromise?

Enphetamy

FriendsInSpace
That'd be quite a buff to GB. As I think would be appropriate. TP needed to get to it (and the wizards required to utilize it), and the things you arent getting, would feel more balanced at 25%.

FriendsInSpace

Enphetamy Well right now GB is a very powerful spell, with the caveat being you are already a large kingdom. The 10% buff and CR negation doesn't help smaller kingdoms nearly as much as it helps the large kingdoms, as the main thing is getting rid of the effects of CR.