"Destroying" Cities

[endlesshills]

I was mulling this idea around for a while, and after seeing Alex's post about a somewhat similar mechanic (at least in its intention), I decided to propose the idea: When bombing/nuking/whatever-ing a city down to 0 infrastructure, that city is "destroyed", and is effectively disabled in terms of production, score, etc. (and maybe all improvements destroyed too. Idk they're not that expensive). Players who have their cities destroyed have to "rebuild" them at a cost of, like, 20% of their most recent city's cost (e.g. a nation with 8 cities has one get destroyed, it costs 20% of ~12m to rebuild, totalling ~2.4m). This accomplishes a few things:

 

1. Broadens the tactical application of attrition wars by allowing aggressors to effectively cripple a target in a protracted war (reducing the overall production limit by disabling military infrastructure)

2. Makes wars more decisive, as a thoroughly defeated target could be forced to rebuild several cities after a slew of punitive wars (but balanced as their score drops significantly, allowing them to avoid further punishment due to their base score being inflated from their number of cities)

3. Allows nations extra flexibility in deciding their nation score as they can effectively sell/lose cities if they feel they have gotten too big for their own good.

 

Numbers can be fudged but the concept is this: instead of relying on an incredibly rare event to blow up a city at random, give that power to players who are willing to invest the time, energy, and money into trying to obliterate an enemy nation, and, more importantly, give it a tactical purpose beyond griefing.

Edited December 19, 2018 by endlesshills

[Lu Xun]

Make it so that cities are rebuilt based on the cost to the next city based on "active" cities, instead of the cost to the last city. Otherwise this easily becomes too punitive.

 

We'd also have issues with people deliberately dropping score by arranging to have their cities nuked and missiled to zero infra, however.

Edited December 20, 2018 by Inst

[J Kell]

I don't like this idea

[Radoje]

The main problem with this suggestion is that if you implement this, the most effective way to fight would be to frick units all together and just focus-nuke cities until they get deleted. It would create an incentive to fight like a vagina and put practically little to no strategy into your front and just nuke people until they surrender. 

The second problem is that it would encourage people to buckle down in a siege, build as little infra/units as possible and just nuke turret to avoid cost, making wars last forever. Not even to mention that people would be even more scared of fighting in general because they have to worry about their cities getting deleted. That's so boring.

The third problem is that if you're losing a protracted war, you can't come back, because your cities and improvements are dead, hence you have to rebuild them before rebuilding your units to give you any chance to fight back. It makes wars way too black and white. The city cost could be negligible, because when you take into account the cost of nuclear power plants, hangars, docks, it would be really difficult to upfront the cost that would get you into a shape where you can fight back, especially considering that people could just blockade you and airstrike your cash, giving you literally no chance to do anything, and that's just frustrating. Not even to mention that you'd need to do it across many different cities, which would make it an insane pain in the ass.

[Sphinx]

Probably one of the worse suggestions I've ever read, no surprises this came from someone with 3 cities who from just 3 days worth of log in bonus would have enough cash to build city 4. Those 3 bullet points also tell me you have 0 understanding of what balance of power is and how this negativity effects the game, it would practically allow you to cripple foes in dogpiles and destroys any sense of rivalry and competition in the game. 
 

Whilst someone with 10 cities might be not that phased with having a city nuked out of existence since the cost to rebuild it is tiny, however in my case my last city cost me $1,419,703,750, I'd rather not lose something like that from some random nuke rouger. 

 

[WISD0MTREE]

On 12/18/2018 at 8:01 PM, endlesshills said:

-snip-

Guys, hear me out. This is a great idea.

I. We already have a shortage of large wars. People would be afraid to go to war, so would solve world peace.

II. Sheepy's unpopular change counter will increase by 1, breaking his current score.

III. This is incredibly destructive. I would've lost 17 of my 19 cities in Papers Please, giving me a reason to leave all y'all.

[NastyGamer]

On 12/23/2018 at 11:40 AM, Sphinx said:

Probably one of the worse suggestions I've ever read, no surprises this came from someone with 3 cities who from just 3 days worth of log in bonus would have enough cash to build city 4. Those 3 bullet points also tell me you have 0 understanding of what balance of power is and how this negativity effects the game, it would practically allow you to cripple foes in dogpiles and destroys any sense of rivalry and competition in the game. 

1

1

This is a very bad suggestion indeed. But that 3 city guy has more than enough loot to build his next 10 cities.

Edited December 26, 2018 by NastyGamer

[Dusty]

That would.kill any chance of rebuilding and all pirating let us fight beyond the grave

[endlesshills]

On 12/20/2018 at 3:55 AM, Inst said:

Make it so that cities are rebuilt based on the cost to the next city based on "active" cities, instead of the cost to the last city. Otherwise this easily becomes too punitive.

 

We'd also have issues with people deliberately dropping score by arranging to have their cities nuked and missiled to zero infra, however.

I think we're both intending the same thing, just describing them different ways. Rebuilding successively nuked cities would be cheaper as, yes, it would be based on how many "active" cities you had.

 

The idea of self-nuking to drop score is entirely intended as an in-game way to get rid of cities instead of needing to restart because of building too many cities.

On 12/22/2018 at 12:31 AM, Balish said:

I don't like this idea

fair

On 12/22/2018 at 4:37 PM, Radoje said:

The main problem with this suggestion is that if you implement this, the most effective way to fight would be to frick units all together and just focus-nuke cities until they get deleted. It would create an incentive to fight like a vagina and put practically little to no strategy into your front and just nuke people until they surrender. 

The second problem is that it would encourage people to buckle down in a siege, build as little infra/units as possible and just nuke turret to avoid cost, making wars last forever. Not even to mention that people would be even more scared of fighting in general because they have to worry about their cities getting deleted. That's so boring.

The third problem is that if you're losing a protracted war, you can't come back, because your cities and improvements are dead, hence you have to rebuild them before rebuilding your units to give you any chance to fight back. It makes wars way too black and white. The city cost could be negligible, because when you take into account the cost of nuclear power plants, hangars, docks, it would be really difficult to upfront the cost that would get you into a shape where you can fight back, especially considering that people could just blockade you and airstrike your cash, giving you literally no chance to do anything, and that's just frustrating. Not even to mention that you'd need to do it across many different cities, which would make it an insane pain in the ass.

1. It would definitely not be the most effective way to fight a war, as foregoing units altogether would get your nation rolled before you could drop more than two nukes. Heck you'd still have up to 12 hours of leeway if you were quicker on the draw than your opponent and could add in some extra damage through airstrikes to add some extra punishment before finishing them off. Upping the destructive capability of a nuke adds more end-game strategy to protracted attrition-style wars (where you're already fighting "like a vagina" to cause as much damage as possible) by allowing combatants to effectively and (relatively) quickly lower the enemy's ability to build their military back up after losing.

2. I'm not sure what you mean by nuke turreting, but it should have the opposite effect of wars lasting forever. Wars would be decided much more quickly assuming one side invested heavily enough into mass-producing nukes beforehand and were able to defend themselves. From my perspective, the amount of prep you would need to make your nation capable of getting off all 4 nukes in a war would already assure your victory from the start. This would just make that victory more definitive.

3. That is the intended mechanic, yes. It's counterbalanced by your score quickly dropping out of the range of your previous opponents due to said city wiping along with your units being wiped out. Peace agreements would be reached much more quickly when a losing side risks their members having a nuke train ran on them all the way down to 0 (even though it would be progressively easier to recover from). While it would definitely be frustrating to be on the losing side of that scenario, it wouldn't last too long, as the ~110m investment to get nukes plus the ~5m per nuke would be prohibitive. The cost would ideally keep it excluded from a conventional war and only as a last resort to either definitively end a war or to be super !@#$ to someone/some group in particular at great cost to yourself. 

On 12/23/2018 at 1:10 AM, Sphinx said:

Probably one of the worse suggestions I've ever read, no surprises this came from someone with 3 cities who from just 3 days worth of log in bonus would have enough cash to build city 4. Those 3 bullet points also tell me you have 0 understanding of what balance of power is and how this negativity effects the game, it would practically allow you to cripple foes in dogpiles and destroys any sense of rivalry and competition in the game. 
 

Whilst someone with 10 cities might be not that phased with having a city nuked out of existence since the cost to rebuild it is tiny, however in my case my last city cost me $1,419,703,750, I'd rather not lose something like that from some random nuke rouger. 

 

It's funny because your last city was also your 33rd. A mechanic like this also serves to soft-cap the number of cities a nation can maintain. As it stands, completely crippling and destructive dogpiles are already possible with as little as two nations deciding they want to just chain blockades on you indefinitely. At least with this system you'd drop out of their score range quickly. It makes things more cut-throat but it hardly destroys competition.

56 minutes ago, Bluedart said:

That would.kill any chance of rebuilding and all pirating let us fight beyond the grave

Hardly. By the time a city could be raided to 0 infrastructure it'd be out of almost everyone's raiding range already, and would have long since been completely unprofitable to raid.

Edited December 27, 2018 by endlesshills