Caps on bank movements per day.

[Azaghul]

Preface

Alliances and nations move huge sums of resources and cash around on a whim to keep it from being looted.  It is becomes "gamey" where look to find 1-2 nations that aren't in a position to be beiged and hide billions worth of money and resources there.  They create shell alliances.  The system is ripe for abuses like the recent issue where apparently someone was trying to hide resources in a vacation mode nation.

Solution

Cap how much any particular nation can send or receive to a bank in a 24 hour period.

It can/should be reasonably high.  Not enough to get in the way of normal, legitimate distributions of aid and resources.  But enough to prevent gaming the system to prevent looting.

Something like Resources transferable per day = Infra * 2 + 10,000.  For a 15 city nation with 2k infra per city, that'd be about 70,000 per day.  To deal with food being lower value, food could have a multiplier of something like .1 or .2 for this purpose. 

Similar for cash, something like Cash transferable per day = Infra * 2000 + 10 mill.  Again for a 15 city nation with 2K infra, that's 70 mill per day.  Yes eventually you might get to the point where it takes a few days to dispense cash for higher level city loans or grants, but that's about it.

You can do this and/or limit alliance movement based on the alliance's total infra count.  For an alliance it could be something like: Resource transfer limit per day = Total alliance infrastructure Total * .5 + 100,000.  Money limit = Total alliance infrastructure * 1000 + 100 mill. 

Alternatives

Instead of capping resource levels that can be transferred, make a limit on how much cash or resources any particular alliance or bank can have on hand, scaling to infra or city count.  Obviously the formula would have to allow higher level nations to have enough on hand to buy cities.

Having some kind of improvement / shipping unit dynamic where you have to build improvements, or units, to transfer resources above a certain point.  Obviously more complex, but it could add a bunch of other dynamics to the game.

Ways to keep it fair

First off, have high limits.  And reasonable floors for what the limits are.  So that this doesn't get in the way of most legitimate uses of the bank.

You could nurf looting to some degree to account for the fact that it's harder to avoid being looted.

Limits could also be different for nations at war and nations not at war.

You'd also need to figure out a way to avoid nations using the trade system to get around it.  Maybe resources offered significantly below or above market value, or as individual trades, would also fall under the cap.

The formulas could also be based on cities if there's a concern about alliances who are in a loosing war having less infra.

Statement of impartiality

I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the specifics of who is fighting who and I honestly don't know if this would help or hurt my alliance.  I'm offering this suggestion without any kind of in game bias on this.

Edited March 21, 2018 by Azaghul

[Sketchy]

Hell no. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for people to send out or receive a great deal of bank transactions.

Also it only takes a handful of transactions to hide a bank, so this just hurts the functionality of banking for no real gain. You can't really solve the bank hiding issue mechanically without removing bank looting in favour of something like income stealing etc.

[Azaghul]

39 minutes ago, Sketchy said:

Hell no. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for people to send out or receive a great deal of bank transactions.

Also it only takes a handful of transactions to hide a bank, so this just hurts the functionality of banking for no real gain. You can't really solve the bank hiding issue mechanically without removing bank looting in favour of something like income stealing etc.

Per the "legitimate reasons", I proposed pretty high limits, which should easily cover almost all normal banking operations.  And in the rare cases where it doesn't, a transaction can happen over multiple days.

The overwhelming majority of the really big bank transfers are moving them around to keep them from being looted, where entire banks are moved.  Your objection that it only takes "a few transactions" negates your first point.

And even if it does only take a few transactions, that will still leave a lot of time (days) between transactions where the bank is vulnerable.

Edited March 21, 2018 by Azaghul

[Sketchy]

1 minute ago, Azaghul said:

Per the "legitimate reasons", I proposed pretty high limits, which should easily cover almost all normal banking operations.  And it doesn't, a transaction can happen over multiple days.

The overwhelming majority of the really big bank transfers are moving them around to keep them from being looted.  Your objection that it only takes "a few transactions" negates your first point.

And even if it does only take a few transactions, that will still leave a lot of time (days) between transactions where the bank is vulnerable.

It doesn't negate my first point, since my first point was that there is plenty of legitimate reasons to transfer money that would meet your suggested caps.

Limiting the functionality of banks to combat a flaw in their design is not a solution its a subpar bandaid fix. 

I could pick apart the individual flaws in the proposal but there is no version of it that would be good so there is no point. Bank hiding is an issue perhaps, but not one that is large enough to justify nerfing basic alliance functions like banking.

 

[Azaghul]

Just now, Sketchy said:

It doesn't negate my first point, since my first point was that there is plenty of legitimate reasons to transfer money that would meet your suggested caps.

Limiting the functionality of banks to combat a flaw in their design is not a solution its a subpar bandaid fix. 

I could pick apart the individual flaws in the proposal but there is no version of it that would be good so there is no point. Bank hiding is an issue perhaps, but not one that is large enough to justify nerfing basic alliance functions like banking.

 

What "legitimate alliance functions" require going over the limits that I propose?  How does it limit the legitimate use of banks when the rare transactions large enough to hit the cap can be done over a matter of a couple of days instead?

The ONLY time having to do a big transaction over a matter of days would have a meaninful impact is when someone wanted to do it quickly to avoid it getting looted.

Alliances frequently move entire banks to avoid looting.  There literally is no circumstance where the caps would be too high to limit loot avoidance AND be low enough to have a significant impact on normal bank uses.

[Sketchy]

1 hour ago, Azaghul said:

Alliances frequently move entire banks to avoid looting.  There literally is no circumstance where the caps would be too high to limit loot avoidance AND be low enough to have a significant impact on normal bank uses.

Which is exactly why capping transactions is the wrong solution.

 

 

[Guest Frawley]

People move their own money into Alliance Banks to protect it, to private banks, to other alliances, they store value in raws, credits etc.

Your premise rests on the false assumption that protecting your assets is not a valid game tactic. This game is already highly slanted towards looters it doesn't need any more.

[Azaghul]

On 3/21/2018 at 5:28 AM, Sketchy said:

Which is exactly why capping transactions is the wrong solution.

 

 

How?

On 3/21/2018 at 7:44 AM, Frawley said:

People move their own money into Alliance Banks to protect it, to private banks, to other alliances, they store value in raws, credits etc.

Your premise rests on the false assumption that protecting your assets is not a valid game tactic. This game is already highly slanted towards looters it doesn't need any more.

There should be mechanisms to protect your assets to some degree but being able to avoid it almost entirely by moving it all somewhere else with no limit or cost, and getting it all back with no limit or cost, is very gamey.  It is overpowered.  It shouldn't be so easy to entirely circumvent the loot system.  There should be balance where it is easy to protect modest amounts but larger amounts are harder to protect.

If your issue is that it empowers looting too much thus could be balanced by lowering the loot amounts.

Something like this could add more dynamic to the game in terms of people offering bank storage as a service.  Right now you just need 1 or 2 nations to go off your AA, regardless of your alliance size.  If you needed more than that this would open up a bunch of new tactics and bank dynamics.

Edited March 22, 2018 by Azaghul