make treasure bonus inversely proportional to membership

[Kid Winchell]

Even though you're probably not going to be changing treasures again, I think it's still worth considering.

 

This game, as has been well established, inherently pushes players towards gathering in fewer larger alliances. This, in turn, leads to stagnation. Treasures attempted to address stagnation by incentivizing war, but the bonuses provided resulted in a system where larger alliances could simply purchase treasures from smaller ones and both would come out ahead.

 

The issue with the treasure system was larger alliances could use their greater resources to gain a larger advantage. The pending fix addresses that issue by making treasures universally less potent, which 1) defeats their original intended purpose while ignoring the real issue underlying the mechanic and 2) punishes smaller alliances for the actions of the larger ones.

 

Making treasure bonuses inversely proportional to membership means that all alliances benefit equally from treasures. (Take, for example, an alliance of 10 people that make $1000 per day. One treasure in this hypothetical system would net each nation 0.2% (2% / 10), or $2. The alliance as a whole would gain an additional $20. An alliance of 100 people that make $1000 per day would get a bonus of 0.02% (2% / 100), or an extra $0.20 per nation, which adds up to $20 for the alliance.) Accumulating treasures would still be profitable for alliances, but the profit difference for a large alliance versus a small alliance would not be large enough that they could simply be purchased. They would have to be acquired through force, as was originally intended. Additionally, purely self-interested nations have further incentives to form smaller alliances in pursuit of a larger share of the treasure bonus.

 

Even if you don't implement this for treasures, you should keep the design principle in the back of your mind. Optimal game strategy for players is to always congregate in fewer larger alliances, so game mechanics should incentivize more smaller ones. And one effective way to do that is to provide bonuses to alliances that are inversely proportional to the membership of the alliance.

[Aerys Targaryen]

Treating treasures as a limited resource which should be shared between nations in an alliance is a very good idea. As far as I can think of, it'll still lead to treasure transfer, from alliances with low <cities/nation> to alliances with high <cities/nation>.

 

If treasure bonus is made inversely proportional to number of cities, then it might stop alliances buying treasures from one another and everything you said, would happen (in my opinion).

Edited November 17, 2016 by Aerys Targaryen

[Woot]

It would become profitable to send the treasure up to the biggest whale you have, and have him go make an alliance with just him in it, getting the maximum bonus from it. 

 

If this method was combined with treasures generating simple cash instead of applying a percentage bonus, it would have no downsides.

[Bhuto]

Well personally I feel there is no need of treasure at all like if you want to get some extra money you may do things with alliance color

Like take an example of color Red 

Now let there are 3 alliances with Red color then top ranked will get 15% then second one 12.5% the third one 10.416 % and so on 

It will be a better thing  to stop the sell of treasure and stagnation of the game