Make alliance wars more destructive: fewer improvements, and shorter beige time

[ShiningLioness]

I think alliance wars in this game need to be more destructive than they are. I'm an ex (That terrible game that is totally irrelevant and I shouldn't be bringing it up anyways) player (come on, face it, most of us are) and war is much more destructive there, perhaps too destructive. (No-CB in 2008 meant that TOP et al had a statistical advantage on NpO and C&G for literally years.) But a balance between what we currently have and (That terrible game that is totally irrelevant and I shouldn't be bringing it up anyways) would be better. You can give someone a good kicking here and have them recover very quickly. There's no skin in the game. As we have seen in the most recent war, wars also have a tendency to really drag on. 

 

So here are two suggestions on how to do that:

 

• You should be able to buy improvements less regularly. Fewer improvements encourages people to buy more infra (and also more cities) which means that war is automatically more destructive, as infra gets more expensive past 1500 per city. It also makes nukes much more worthwhile, whereas at the moment nobody buys or uses them because the cost of buying nukes actually outweighs the damage caused unless someone has high infra. I think one of the problems with P&W is that there is very little an alliance can do to make itself tough militarily. In (That terrible game that is totally irrelevant and I shouldn't be bringing it up anyways), you can have high tech levels, military wonders as opposed to econ ones, nukes, etc. It means some alliances are much tougher than others in war, which means there's more strategy involved in building during peacetime. Here the only thing that makes an alliance tough in war is having high activity levels. My suggestion would (to some extent) resolve that problem, not just because nukes would become something alliances would need to focus on, but also because people would have to choose between military and econ improvements. This in turn would making the ingame market much more exciting during peacetime (there would be fewer resources on the market, so stuff would be more expensive, but traders would still make loads of money because the military nations would have to buy loads of stuff.)

 

• Beige time should not be stacked. Or only have one day per war. It means you can't make a full military recovery and come straight back and keep fighting the enemy. Wars will be much more decisive, and much shorter. There's much more of a clear cut victory.

Edited June 3, 2017 by ShiningLioness

[PackAnimal]

I like the idea of less improvements, if you were to make it per 100 infra per city for instance, and then slightly increase improvement yield, each slot becomes more valuable and you could fix the market too buy lowering global production slightly

 

+1

[ShiningLioness]

I like the idea of less improvements, if you were to make it per 100 infra per city for instance, and then slightly increase improvement yield, each slot becomes more valuable and you could fix the market too buy lowering global production slightly

 

+1

 

yes, exactly

[Yang]

Hmm.. both of these things are true?

 

Beige times are 2 days per beige IIRC. 

 

Most wars used to run 2-3 weeks under the old game mechanics and this recent war was by far an outlier. We had extensive global peace, meaning that everyone had excess resources. The game mechanics change let people turn around some wars. And the side were different in that one side had upper tier dominance and the other had lower tier dominance.

 

I do like that people recover quickly, because they care less about losing pixels then. Though I think what really needs to happen is a bigger resource sink. Or yeah, more limited improvements. As it was, I could keep selling stadiums and hospitals to keep the war effort running.

[ShiningLioness]

Hmm.. both of these things are true?

 

Beige times are 2 days per beige IIRC. 

 

Most wars used to run 2-3 weeks under the old game mechanics and this recent war was by far an outlier. We had extensive global peace, meaning that everyone had excess resources. The game mechanics change let people turn around some wars. And the side were different in that one side had upper tier dominance and the other had lower tier dominance.

 

I do like that people recover quickly, because they care less about losing pixels then. Though I think what really needs to happen is a bigger resource sink. Or yeah, more limited improvements. As it was, I could keep selling stadiums and hospitals to keep the war effort running.

 

I've edited re: beige times.

[Livius Clades]

hahahahahahahahahahaha....

 

NO.

[Sketchy]

War doesn't need to be more destructive. There is already almost no reason to do it besides power and bragging rights, the economic advantage just isn't there, so making it more destructive just further discourages war and makes people less likely to start them in the first place.

 

 

War needs to be more economically advantageous like it used to be when we had color stocks.

[ShiningLioness]

Another point to make explicit: forcing people to choose between econ and military improvements would mean more alliance micro-management, more skill, and ultimately more fun because more work can equate to a military and economic advantage. At the moment there just aren't many ways for alliances to distinguish themselves militarily (or even economically, really.)

[Senry]

Yeah, you're right. No way for people to militarily distinguish themselves. We all know that Syndisphere are a bunch of lucker noobs, along with any of those other ~idiots~ like Tywin or Bluebear. Absolutely a joke.

 

And you're correct economically too. Anybody could make just as much money as t$ by just having the same infra/city count and absolutely nothing else. Too bad there's no other way to make money in the game and out-grow others. Does this game even take any skill or thought lmao?

[ShiningLioness]

There are ways to express disagreement politely.

[ArcKnox]

Maybe he didn't want to be polite?

[ShiningLioness]

Maybe he should.

[Edward I]

War doesn't need to be more destructive. There is already almost no reason to do it besides power and bragging rights, the economic advantage just isn't there, so making it more destructive just further discourages war and makes people less likely to start them in the first place.

 

 

War needs to be more economically advantageous like it used to be when we had color stocks.

This.

 

The other problem with more destructive wars is that they tend to necessitate longer rebuild periods, meaning fewer wars overall. The main reason that wars happen once a year or less in (That terrible game that is totally irrelevant and I shouldn't be bringing it up anyways) now is that they're extremely destructive. People lose tech that takes months or years to re-accumulate and infrastructure that takes months or years to pay for itself.

 

 

Giving people fewer improvement slots is a good idea, but I see a few problems with it.

 

1) It's a buff to older players, who tend to have larger stockpiles of existing resources. If resources became scarcer and more expensive, older players would benefit at the expense of newer players.

2) There just aren't that many ways to customize a nation right now. My guess is that people would gradually decide to keep fewer military improvement during peace and sell more economic improvements when preparing for war, negating a lot of the intended effect of this change.

 

 

Adding more improvements and resources, especially ones that have a purely economic purpose, would probably be a better way of fixing the glut of resources we have now. If you want to get rid of some of the existing resource stockpiles, add new ways to spend them (e.g. make infrastructure cost steel or include aluminum in the upkeep cost of planes) or make it costly to keep large resource stockpiles on hand (e.g. force people to buy special improvements and projects if they want to keep more than a certain total amount of resources on hand).

[Felkey]

Maybe he should.

It's Senry, he's not meant to be polite.

[Ryleh]

It's Senry, he's not meant to be polite.

I think you are confusing him with me.

[ShiningLioness]

Well, there's way too much stuff on the market atm and it's massively depressed. The suggestions I've made in this thread would solve the problem.

[Azaghul]

I'd like to see improvement destruction greatly increased.  Make it easier to knock someone out and keep them from fighting further.by destroying their military improvements.  It would mostly destroy military capacity while having less of an impact on long term econ.

 

Wars longer than 2-3 weeks are bad for the game just because they become very boring and also tend to grind on for new players more than old players.

There are plenty of econ vs military choices in this game: militarization levels, project choices, buying cities vs infra.

One thing (That terrible game that is totally irrelevant and I shouldn't be bringing it up anyways) does very badly is make tech something that is very slow to deploy, which encourages very long wars.  Most (That terrible game that is totally irrelevant and I shouldn't be bringing it up anyways) wars last months.  They also have huge warchests that allow them to keep fighting pretty much forever in many cases.

[Qassem]

Why not make improvements also cost resources? Let them increase by the amount of infra a city has and the total city count. An easy solution that would fix all economic problems.