Suggestion: Don't do any of this-

[LordRahl2]

https://youtu.be/F4bWk-lHzt8

 

 

 

 

 

/////

Well the renaming thing remains fine.  The rest is just terrible.

 

 

[Beatrix]

Let's pretend Sheepy will actually listen and not implement any of that. 

 

 

but from what I've heard he pretty much doesn't care what anyone thinks.

[Donald Trump]

What is he saying? He sounds like Bernie Sanders, I can't hear what the hell he's on about due to his voice. 

[Boony]

Making military caps based on population + decreasing defensive slots to 2 makes it impossible to hurt big nations without spending two weeks nuking them first.

[LordRahl2]

The gameplay problems are legion for almost . . . well for every single "tier" of players.

[Woot]

Summary of changes:

 

1. Maximum military and recruitment ability is based entirely on population. 1 city with 4000 infra has the exact same military effect as 4 cities with 1000 infra. Military contributes almost nothing to score, score is mostly infra and cities now. Score = cities*20 + infra/40

 

2. Recruitment slowly adds up turn by turn instead of resetting once per day.

 

3. Recruitment capacity stops stacking up once it reaches 2/3rds of your max mil. All units build at the same speed when you have enough improvements, 1/36th of their total cap per turn.

 

4. Tanks cost 0.1 steel and 0.1 aluminum, planes cost 5 aluminum. Most nations field smaller armies now, for example a 1500 infra city only makes 750 tanks. Most nations also need fewer improvements now, only 2 or 3 to max out their recruitment in a category. 

 

5. A reduction in war slots is mentioned it in the video - it was added to the test server, but later removed. 

 

6. Wars expire in 3 days, and a new war can be declared against the same person after 1 day.

 

7. Nations now generate short lived 'control points' proportional to score that increase alliance income and are looted on beige. These points are divided by alliance score so bigger alliances need more points for the same benefit.

 

 

I've been active on the test server for the last month, fighting a guerilla war against NPO who had total control there for a while. The test server is a strange place and it's hard to compare it to the real game, but here are my thoughts

 

1. Infra=military power now. This is obviously a huge boon to big whale nations, and gives nukes and missiles an important military effect.

Alex probably hoped this would solve complaints about score once and for all - after all, if score=infra and infra=power, then score exactly represents power and every fight is fair.

However, this is open to an obvious exploit - it's possible for a nation to delete their infra while keeping their big military. If I max my military at 10 cities x 1000 infra, and I delete my infra, it doesn't cost me much, and I can go murder some 3 city nations that I'm somehow in the range of now.

 

2. I understand the idea behind this. In the new system we won't have to set our alarm clocks for update and crash Alex's server doing a thousand purchases and attacks at the same instant. My main complaint is that the optimal war strategy now is going to be logging in every 2 hours so that I'm always topped up with as many units as possible, which is a lot worse for my health than the daily update.

 

3. This is a big change. It makes it easier for defeated nations to bounce back in the middle of a war or right after one.

 

4. Armies are incredibly cheap now, and smaller for most of us.

 

5. I'm glad the reduced war slot idea seems to have been abandoned, it killed the fun and the power of coordination in alliance wars and made numbers count for very little.

 

6. Wars are shorter now.

 

7. This is supposed to benefit alliances that fight a lot, especially small ones. I like this, I think it's a fun idea. 

 

 

My overall impression: I like control points, but the rest of these changes combine to make war pretty miserable. Armies are small and worthless and easy to replace, individual wars are short and indecisive. The only way to to beat the enemy is to grind their infra down, which is hard to do with a small army in a short war, and you can only go so far because anything below 1000 infra they can rebuild cheaply. "Winning" an alliance war means driving your opponent down to 1000 infra while you sit at 2000 infra and stare at each other across the vast gulf of score. The current system is decisive Napoleonic battle and the new system is muddy industrial trench warfare. 

Edited September 3, 2016 by Woot

[Jakeman4]

My overall impression: I like control points, but the rest of these changes combine to make war pretty miserable. Armies are small and worthless and easy to replace, individual wars are short and indecisive. The only way to to beat the enemy is to grind their infra down, which is hard to do with a small army in a short war, and you can only go so far because anything below 1000 infra they can rebuild cheaply. "Winning" an alliance war means driving your opponent down to 1000 infra while you sit at 2000 infra and stare at each other across the vast gulf of score. The current system is decisive Napoleonic battle and the new system is muddy industrial trench warfare.

 

^This^

[Conspiracy Theorist]

Making military caps based on population + decreasing defensive slots to 2 makes it impossible to hurt big nations without spending two weeks nuking them first.

it isnt that that hurts smaller nations, it's the fact that larger nations can max out their militaries for large cities then delete infra without making them reduce their military size... I see this all the time on test server where this new military system is an OBVIOUS total fail... nations with max military for 10+ cities deleting infra to get within range of 6 city nations - declaring war and decimating them in 2 battles without losing hardly any of their military then using the much greater income that 10+ cities generated to just buy back their infra. It penalizes any nation that is just starting out the game and would be considered a MAJOR exploit in any other game. "stacking" military does NOTHING to help smaller nations when a small nation can go through 20-30 MILLION in cash rebuilding infra in such a battle and NEVER get past 3 turns of military rebuilding that still comes nowhere NEAR what the stored stacks the larger nation has.  Just my 2 cents worth and why I quit playing on test server since it's obviously just now a haven for exploiters (between that and sheepy not caring enough about the "test code" to fix bugs that were reported over a month ago (new nations cant have navies since that code is broken, new cities cant have missiles or nukes since that code is also broke) plus the fact that there are now basically 20 people max that play it all having at LEAST 10 mulis each and creating hundreds more just to feed their cash and resource coffers.

 

a few months back, several alliances thought that test server would be an ideal place to learn how to run a nation in peace and in war without any detriment to their rela nations on live.... sadly, that never happened because of ONE alliance on test server, NPO, not letting even small 2-3 city nations alone and the problems have only compounded and gotten worse.

 

I left test server, and if these military changes are brought to live i will be leaving live as well. It makes NO sense to support such an unbalanced game. *now waits for a warning from mods and a post ban since no one is ever allowed to speak truths about the problems of this game*

[Donald Trump]

Do people realize how much buying up infra and selling it off would cost them?

 

It'd bankrupt nations stupid enough to do it long run. 

[LordRahl2]

Summary of changes:

 

1. Maximum military and recruitment ability is based entirely on population. 1 city with 4000 infra has the exact same military effect as 4 cities with 1000 infra. Military contributes almost nothing to score, score is mostly infra and cities now. Score = cities*20 + infra/40

 

2. Recruitment slowly adds up turn by turn instead of resetting once per day.

 

3. Recruitment capacity stops stacking up once it reaches 2/3rds of your max mil. All units build at the same speed when you have enough improvements, 1/36th of their total cap per turn.

 

4. Tanks cost 0.1 steel and 0.1 aluminum, planes cost 5 aluminum. Most nations field smaller armies now, for example a 1500 infra city only makes 750 tanks. Most nations also need fewer improvements now, only 2 or 3 to max out their recruitment in a category. 

 

5. A reduction in war slots is mentioned it in the video - it was added to the test server, but later removed. 

 

6. Wars expire in 3 days, and a new war can be declared against the same person after 1 day.

 

7. Nations now generate short lived 'control points' proportional to score that increase alliance income and are looted on beige. These points are divided by alliance score so bigger alliances need more points for the same benefit.

 

 

I've been active on the test server for the last month, fighting a guerilla war against NPO who had total control there for a while. The test server is a strange place and it's hard to compare it to the real game, but here are my thoughts

 

1. Infra=military power now. This is obviously a huge boon to big whale nations, and gives nukes and missiles an important military effect.

Alex probably hoped this would solve complaints about score once and for all - after all, if score=infra and infra=power, then score exactly represents power and every fight is fair.

However, this is open to an obvious exploit - it's possible for a nation to delete their infra while keeping their big military. If I max my military at 10 cities x 1000 infra, and I delete my infra, it doesn't cost me much, and I can go murder some 3 city nations that I'm somehow in the range of now.

 

2. I understand the idea behind this. In the new system we won't have to set our alarm clocks for update and crash Alex's server doing a thousand purchases and attacks at the same instant. My main complaint is that the optimal war strategy now is going to be logging in every 2 hours so that I'm always topped up with as many units as possible, which is a lot worse for my health than the daily update.

 

3. This is a big change. It makes it easier for defeated nations to bounce back in the middle of a war or right after one.

 

4. Armies are incredibly cheap now, and smaller for most of us.

 

5. I'm glad the reduced war slot idea seems to have been abandoned, it killed the fun and the power of coordination in alliance wars and made numbers count for very little.

 

6. Wars are shorter now.

 

7. This is supposed to benefit alliances that fight a lot, especially small ones. I like this, I think it's a fun idea. 

 

 

My overall impression: I like control points, but the rest of these changes combine to make war pretty miserable. Armies are small and worthless and easy to replace, individual wars are short and indecisive. The only way to to beat the enemy is to grind their infra down, which is hard to do with a small army in a short war, and you can only go so far because anything below 1000 infra they can rebuild cheaply. "Winning" an alliance war means driving your opponent down to 1000 infra while you sit at 2000 infra and stare at each other across the vast gulf of score. The current system is decisive Napoleonic battle and the new system is muddy industrial trench warfare. 

 

I am fine with "control points" being debated separatly.  They may be a very good addition or not.

 

The bottom line is that the rest of the changes (even with SIGNIFICANT changes) are still terrible.  These are not things that could be tweaked a bit so that the game would remain playable.  They are simply broken.

 

I also find it hilarious that an alliance that could not make it in the real game is actually trying to dominate the test server.  However, this sounds like it would break the test server.

Alex needs to just synch the test server with the real server very month or two.

[Foltest]

Do people realize how much buying up infra and selling it off would cost them?

 

It'd bankrupt nations stupid enough to do it long run. 

 

Regardless of whether or not it'd be long-term financially sound, I feel like it's a simple fix to prevent from happening.

 

 

Whatever mechanism currently prevents deleting military improvements, without removing the military it supports, can be shifted over to infra. Sheepy clearly already decided it would be stupid to be able to sell down into lower tiers while having a maxed military when he implemented this for improvements.

 

If I'm not mistaken, you can have improvements destroyed while maintaining your military - you just can't purposely delete them. Applied to infra: when bad fighters accidentally nuke someone down into the lower tier before destroying their military, we can honestly blame it on poor strategy rather than game mechanics.

[LordRahl2]

If I'm not mistaken, you can have improvements destroyed while maintaining your military - you just can't purposely delete them. Applied to infra: when bad fighters accidentally nuke someone down into the lower tier before destroying their military, we can honestly blame it on poor strategy rather than game mechanics.

 

Nope.  If you have max whatever and you lose that improvement you lose the compliment that are housed in that improvement.

 

So if you lose a factory to a nuke and you have max tanks then you lose 250 tanks.

[Foltest]

From a gameplay perspective, if the casualty rate isn't being tweaked at all, 3 day wars are fine.

 

I don't like reducing the number of war slots. If someone is overwhelmed in a 3:1 scenario it's because they're outnumbered and that shouldn't be artificially capped further than it already is.

 

Military based on population makes more sense, makes infra-heavy cities more viable as a strategy for upper-tier fighting, and potentially makes nukes/missiles viable as game mechanics. Potentially.

 

Thank god we're finally reducing tank cost.

 

Control points feel like they're what treasures were conceptually meant to be.

 

I like the ability to actually counter-attack during a war re: being able to buy potentially 2/3rds of your military.

 

The turn increment thing I could see going either way but I don't think it would cause a strategic need to log in every two hours.

Nope.  If you have max whatever and you lose that improvement you lose the compliment that are housed in that improvement.

 

So if you lose a factory to a nuke and you have max tanks then you lose 250 tanks.

 

Oh then my suggestion would be game-breaking and I'm less enthused about infra = military.

[Moreau]

Perks would waaay better

[Prefontaine]

Perks would waaay better

 

[Yosodog]

I think the game is already fairly balanced. Nations who focus on their military have low infra but sacrifice making more money. Nations who focus on their economy have more infra but higher score and a more costly rebuild.

These changes take away this balance in favor of a more cookie cutter build. Everyone will have the same nation and building your nation will be more formulaic. The only penalty would be having low infra and having high infra will give you a stronger military and a better economy.

Edited September 7, 2016 by Yosodog

[Foltest]

So after chatting with some test server users, apparently even though you can stack 2/3rds of a military buyback - it stacks too slowly to make a difference. If your infra is wiped out before you can buyback military then doesn't it defeat the idea of improving the ability to counter attack?

[LordRahl2]

I am going to go out on a limb and guess that most test server players, I heard NPO was a "big deal" on the test server, have no idea how to maximize the concept.

 

Sheepy should just mirror the real game over to the test server on the 1st of the month or something otherwise people will treat it like the actual game and defeat the purpose of the thing.

[Foltest]

I am going to go out on a limb and guess that most test server players, I heard NPO was a "big deal" on the test server, have no idea how to maximize the concept.

 

Sheepy should just mirror the real game over to the test server on the 1st of the month or something otherwise people will treat it like the actual game and defeat the purpose of the thing.

 

Well if you have to sell off every single improvement except power just to competitively fight... Sounds like that would be even further detrimental to the war system rather than the stated intended purpose.

[LordRahl2]

Well, I am unsure why you quoted that particular piece of mine.  I agree with your reply though.

[Auctor]

Selling your infra off doesn't actually help in this system unless you're trying to reach someone vastly smaller. I would guess in a system without vast amounts of multi derived money floating around(test server ain't it) this would still be semiviable, but once you sell your infra off you can't replace anything without rebuying the infra. The big issue is that your replacement bank is based on your bank before your infra is gone, so you can sell off to zero infra, get your military zeroed out, and then instantly buy back up to 2/3rds of your original infra and replace your entire military.

 

A few things to note:

 

-A 2/3rds bank of your entire military doesn't actually help you if you are losing very much unless you let yourself get zeroed out and then just use your bank to replace your military at your smaller size later on. 

-Conversely, if you're winning, it's overpowered. Not only can your smaller opponent not hold as many troops, you can replace yours as you go and your bank essentially fills back up faster.

-Since it's being tested at fairly low levels, you also run into this weird issue that the city derived NS and the infra derived NS tends to favor infra heavy, cities light nations. The score formula there essentially makes 1 city = 400 infra, and 400 infra is a better value by and large.

-The vastly lower military caps tend to have two effects, 1) maintaining full military isn't financially onerous at all and 2) conventional damage is much lower. This tends to give nukes more power because people already have this incentive to maintain higher infra cities to begin with and because conventional military damage doesn't really catch up in the space of a 3 day war.

-The wars are 3 days, the beige period is five days. This creates enough time to fully rebuild your military *and* refill your replacement bank. It's overgenerous and still kind of leaves an incentive to not beige your opponents if you can stagger them. Staggering them gets chancier because if they allow themselves to be zeroed out, then replace their entire military while fighting nations a rung down on the NS ladder, they can overpower them.

-However, sell downs aren't really that expensive. I've noticed that I could probably save enough in a 90 day period(well, 15 real days on test server) that paying to grow, fight, and do at least 3 sell downs and buy ups isn't that hard. If an alliance were to adopt like a 12 city build and then do sell downs during wars, they could pretty easily zero out and hold down 2-3x their number without breaking a sweat.

-The military caps and the replacement banks effectively make conventional updeclares against even mildly active opponents suicidal. You can updeclare and eventually deplete your opponent's military banks, but that guy can shred three waves of nations in the meantime. Unless you can actually afford 9 updeclaring nations to take a single one down. Nukes don't balance this at all since they maintain their prenuke military and infra bank.

 

I don't notice this effect of having to stay up at all hours to replace military and I imagine it would completely disappear if you had the test server and the normal server on the same turn intervals. You're still either winning or losing and it's apparently really quickly. My overall assessment is that it doesn't improve on the current system enough to justify its replacement, unless the point is to scew it much more heavily in favor of older, established nations. The only really balancing thing about it is that at much smaller military caps, much lower conventional damage, much lower casualty rates, losing conventionally isn't quite as bad in the short term.

[LordRahl2]

"The military caps and the replacement banks effectively make conventional updeclares against even mildly active opponents suicidal."

 

This is one of the things that was obvious and makes the potential system game destroying.

[Fronin]

"The military caps and the replacement banks effectively make conventional updeclares against even mildly active opponents suicidal."

 

This is one of the things that was obvious and makes the potential system game destroying.

yes, you have to nuke your opponent to reduce their population first

[LordRahl2]

Oh, great!

 

That is sarcasm alex.

[Auctor]

Nukes don't really do the trick. The wars are only 3 days long so you get a maximum of 9 across three attackers, but if you're doing an updeclare he can just as easily beige all three after one nuke from each. Also, since this position up top is so secure and so profitable, that dude can easily save enough to replenish his infra. Even if the beige mechanic wasn't in place, you've essentially dropped a heavily armed nation into a lower NS range - you've accomplished a sell down for him.