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Fixing the war system


Prefontaine
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The war system needs work. Most players know this. One of the main problems is you can get knocked out of a fight instantly with virtually no way back in. Often you're better off selling units to gain back resources or turtling to nuke/missile or spam navy while the rest of your units are killed. This isn't very fun for the winners or losers.

 

Suggested change to the war module:

  • Remove Limits on daily unit production

Pros

  • A prepared nation can get back into any fight at any time as long as they have the resources to do so.
  • Wars become more expensive in terms of steel/aluminum/(food if soldiers get a food price tag) which helps address market demand problems
  • War becomes more coordination based, rather than first strike based. You have to work with the people your fighting to time attacks to be able to inflict damage on a nation
  • Can lessen infra damage taken in short wars, making skirmishes possibly more common if the community goes that route
  • Attackers advantage is limited to getting to pick targets and having more prep time.
  • Removes the reason to "not beige" someone when winning a war. Beige is no longer needed to rebuild units.

Cons

  • Whales are a bit stronger as it's hard to keep them down
  • Wars become more expensive in terms of Steel/Aluminum which could cause mass stock-piling, which could cause larger time gaps between wars
  • Propaganda bureau will need to be changed 
  • Usefulness of Missiles and nukes will be diminished 
  • War declaration down declare range, going from 0 mil, declaring, then maxing mil

Changes that should accompany this change

  • Soldiers should cost a small amount of food to build. 10 Soldiers, 1 food. 100,000 soldiers 10,000 food. If food was 100 PPU that would increase soldiers cost by 10 per unit. 1,000,000 soldiers would cost an extra $10,000,000.
  • Propaganda Bureau needs to do something else (suggestions for another thread)
  • Missiles/Nukes should be re-worked. I've long proposed they become like spies and be a complimentary unit to war, again though suggestions for another thread
  • MAP (military action point) maximum should be increased to 16 or 20. This way several nations can coordinate more attacks at a given time to be able to inflict damage at a greater rate through coordination versus uncoordinated attacks. Adds a larger skill bonus to warfare. 
  • Beige might need to be reworked.
  • War ranges will need to be adjusted. Discussed on discord was the idea of making your war range based on your city strength. If you have 20 cities your war strength declaration range is based on how much military you -could- field, rather than how much you currently had

 

This change would allow players the ability to fight until they can afford to fight any more. The first global war where this happens will likely be a bit nuts. The market might go insanely high, the war might go a long time. The resource costs could be greater than all previous wars combined for Aluminum/Steel. However this change would fix the getting knocked out of a war part and not being able to get back in. You can now also beige the people you're fighting without fear of allowing your enemy back into the fight later. All beige would do is take whomever is in that fight out of the fight that would still be going if there are other active wars, ie a 3v1 becomes a 2v1 if one of the attackers beige. 

 

EDIT: Will be editing the OP as pros/cons/accompanying changes get brought up.


This change will greatly increase the use of steel/alum in wars and also boost gas/ammo as more units will be fighting. This greatly increases the sink for refined resources and thus the demand for them, and the raws to make them. The war module change will greatly boost the demand for resources while fixing the eternal losing a war in the first day problem. 

Edited by Prefontaine
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I can tell you right now the biggest complaint about this is that the only way to take down whales would be with your own whales or by using Soviet-Style Mass-Assault doctrine and to hell with the casualties, just hope you have more cannon fodder than the whale has bombs.

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4 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

They're touchable, you just have to work for it. 

No they aren’t, there is no way I could take down a 27 city nation if he can instantly buy full planes every time he logs in. 

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Just now, The Mad Titan said:

No they aren’t, there is no way I could take down a 27 city nation if he can instantly buy full planes every time he logs in. 

You couldn't take down a 27 city nation by yourself currently. You could with coordination. You could also this way with coordination. Stockpile turns, and grind through his navy with 3 players launching 15 naval attacks (5 each if maps are increased to 20 cap). Hit him when he's offline and you'll destroy a bunch of infra and resistance. Or you could play politics and have a few allies with whales and coordinate 1 whale into the targeting. More nations can fight more fronts at once if they can rebuild units more freely. 

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10 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

You couldn't take down a 27 city nation by yourself currently. You could with coordination. You could also this way with coordination. Stockpile turns, and grind through his navy with 3 players launching 15 naval attacks (5 each if maps are increased to 20 cap). Hit him when he's offline and you'll destroy a bunch of infra and resistance. Or you could play politics and have a few allies with whales and coordinate 1 whale into the targeting. More nations can fight more fronts at once if they can rebuild units more freely. 

Now that i think of it. What if most whales ally with each other ? They can lower their score, declare and than instantly fully militarize. Whales can coordinate as well. 

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3 minutes ago, Limbuwan said:

Now that i think of it. What if most whales ally with each other ? They can lower their score, declare and than instantly fully militarize. Whales can coordinate as well. 

This

Everyone that isn't a casual has above 20 cities and in a squad would obliterate anyone. Literally this suggestion here is almost as if Pre wants TEst back.

Because this is how you get TEst back.

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This would make updeclaring essentially impossible, make spies utterly worthless, make standing militaries a liability, and make downdeclaring so far beyond broken it sickens me. Furthermore, removing buy limits doesn't even fix the problem it's supposed to in the first place. Sure, you can build up to your military maximum instantly... against opponents that can, and with the first strike/downdeclare advantages have built up to their potentially higher military maximums. Then what? You're gonna throw all your steel and aluminum out there for nothing? Maybe try for some attrition... which can and will be instantly replaced? Maybe try and spy off the enemy airforce to slowly whittle down their NOPE they're full on air again. Triple team their navy with prepared action points and whoops there's the fleet back to full.

Sure it sounds good when you're down and need a few extra buys to win an existing war with existing mechanics, but THINK about these things and consider what it would do for the opposing side; this would make the problem INFINITELY worse!

Edited by Sir Scarfalot
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Funny thing is defensive slots and declaratin range has to be removed as well. Whales can ally with eachother but us lower tiers can band up and beat them with numbers similar to how dead man tried killing a dragon in GoT(whales cant fly so we’re good)

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2 minutes ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

This would make updeclaring essentially impossible, make spies utterly worthless, make standing militaries a liability, and make downdeclaring so far beyond broken it sickens me. Furthermore, removing buy limits doesn't even fix the problem it's supposed to in the first place. Sure, you can build up to your military maximum instantly... against opponents that can, and with the first strike/downdeclare advantages have built up to their potentially higher military maximums. Then what? You're gonna throw all your steel and aluminum out there for nothing? Maybe try for some attrition... which can and will be instantly replaced? Maybe try and spy off the enemy airforce to slowly whittle down their NOPE they're full on air again. Triple team their navy with prepared action points and whoops there's the fleet back to full.

Sure it sounds good when you're down and need a few extra buys to win an existing war with existing mechanics, but THINK about these things and consider what it would do for the opposing side; this would make the problem INFINITELY worse!

It's where coordination comes into play. You time attacks with allies and strike at once, you get in an do some infra damage and weaken resistance. Getting a win on war and hitting all city infra becomes a viable thing to do. War declaration range would need to be tweaked, one of the ideas spitballed is changing your score to be based on what your max military is. If you're a 20 city nation, your military score would be based on how many units you can field, not how many you have to avoid the 0 mil, declare, build flaw in this mechanic. Updeclaring is far from impossible and spies are far from useless. It turns the war system to a more coordination based system rather than a strike first and hold people down system. 

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A bit unrelated, but you know how when you start a war it gives you a side-by-side comparison of your military units versus he enemy’s? Along with other stuff like score and alliance? I believe we should have access to that at any time, maybe in the dropdown box.

inb4 new spy operation “Plane Hijack”

This is the 21000th post in this subform and I'm fine with it.

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11 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

It's where coordination comes into play. You time attacks with allies and strike at once, you get in an do some infra damage and weaken resistance. Getting a win on war and hitting all city infra becomes a viable thing to do. War declaration range would need to be tweaked, one of the ideas spitballed is changing your score to be based on what your max military is. If you're a 20 city nation, your military score would be based on how many units you can field, not how many you have to avoid the 0 mil, declare, build flaw in this mechanic. Updeclaring is far from impossible and spies are far from useless. It turns the war system to a more coordination based system rather than a strike first and hold people down system. 

The war system already does reward coordination and timing due to the control mechanics and the buy limits; if you dogpile someone's air then you can potentially get air superiority and cripple their tanks, or if you dogpile someone's ground then you can get GC and cripple their air. Using spies can and does assist with that because if you open with spy operations then that adds to the opponents losses and reduces your own losses, even if only slightly it is the ONE real offensive use that spies currently have. More importantly, since the losses sustained by the enemy in these actions cannot be instantly replaced, the losses remain and add up to where eventually anyone can be whittled down by... coordination and timing. This is purely due to the buying limits being a factor.

What you're suggesting would be to annihilate that entire advantage and make it so that coordinated offensives plus spy operations against a larger opponent would do less than nothing. Even IF your score range is modified to where you're facing off against only slightly larger opponents, your entire war is determined by the first strike, gaining control, holding onto your maximum military, blockading and letting the war expire... only with even LESS potential for the underdog to escape.

Seriously, how can you possibly not see that? Have you actually done coordinated warfare like I've described? The ONLY reason it works is BECAUSE of the buy limits, not the other way around!

Edited by Sir Scarfalot
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Guest Frawley

This is a terrible idea presented well.

Your enhanced coordination is just the potential that a couple of smaller nations might potentially destroy a small amount of infra until the whale comes back online and takes giant chunks out of every city it hits after re-maxing military.  This would actually make the current coordination required to suicide into whales and get them to a sustainable level of military entirely useless.  CN has a mechanic like this, and its also dumb, its why the only things attackers fire when vastly outgunned in CN are nukes as you can never compete conventionally so why bother.

With Nukes being almost totally useless in this game, this makes upper tiers unkillable.

Edited by Frawley
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I think it would be a bad change to implement, especially if made from the angle of a resource sink. I can understand and sympathize with wanting to fix the problem of R1 deciding the course of a war, but the economic aspect would be rendered moot simply because of the heightened cost of waging war discouraging people even more from warring than as of current. The econ problem should be tackled with a constant peacetime sink instead. Just add improvements that use up refined resources and pump out cash. You would be killing refined production (due to limited slots and/or pollution stacking up), using up current stocks, and generating cash which would all result in refined being less common and money being more abundant, thus driving prices up.

I also disagree with the change as a whole, because it would basically shift warfare to being economic warfare (even more so than it arguably is as of current), given that the only way to subjugate some definitely would be to make him run out of resources. While coordination would generate better trades, it would still be beholden to how deep each participants pockets are. Exception being in the case of gross military incompetence on the richer party's side which would be no different from as of current.

With that out of the way...

1 hour ago, Prefontaine said:

Pros

  •  A prepared nation can get back into any fight at any time as long as they have the resources to do so.
  • Wars become more expensive in terms of steel/aluminum/(food if soldiers get a food price tag) which helps address market demand problems
  • War becomes more coordination based, rather than first strike based. You have to work with the people your fighting to time attacks to be able to inflict damage on a nation
  • Can lessen infra damage taken in short wars, making skirmishes possibly more common if the community goes that route
  • Attackers advantage is limited to getting to pick targets and having more prep time.
  • Removes the reason to "not beige" someone when winning a war. Beige is no longer needed to rebuild units.



1) True.

2) Would fall flat due to aforementioned costs shying people away from warring as often.

3) Fair, though first strike is still important due to controls.

4) A pipedream due to fear of escalation.

5) Controls are also an advantage.

6) Not that black and white, given that beiging would shield him from new attacks and thus reduce the potential max damage dealt in coordinated hits due to less people being engaged.

1 hour ago, Prefontaine said:

Cons

  • Whales are a bit stronger as it's hard to keep them down
  • Wars become more expensive in terms of Steel/Aluminum which could cause mass stock-piling, which could cause larger time gaps between wars
  • Propaganda bureau will need to be changed 
  • Usefulness of Missiles and nukes will be diminished 
  • War declaration down declare range, going from 0 mil, declaring, then maxing mil

1) A lot stronger, given better rolls due to larger armies, and the capacity to fully flex their econ assets.

2) That, or aversion to them unless if absolutely necessary. People would be far more concerned about letting a sphere/s sit on the sideline and just keep generating stuff which would give them greater direct staying power in a war.

3) Yes.

4) They would likely need to be able to kill military or other strong buff to justify their usage instead of spamming navals or airstrikes, especially if the target is at war with plenty of people; obvious exception being nuking a 4k infra city.

5) Yes. I'm glad to see this being added in. It would have been a colossal oversight if it had gone unattended.

1 hour ago, Prefontaine said:

Changes that should accompany this change

  •  Soldiers should cost a small amount of food to build. 10 Soldiers, 1 food. 100,000 soldiers 10,000 food. If food was 100 PPU that would increase soldiers cost by 10 per unit. 1,000,000 soldiers would cost an extra $10,000,000.
  • Propaganda Bureau needs to do something else (suggestions for another thread)
  • Missiles/Nukes should be re-worked. I've long proposed they become like spies and be a complimentary unit to war, again though suggestions for another thread
  • MAP (military action point) maximum should be increased to 16 or 20. This way several nations can coordinate more attacks at a given time to be able to inflict damage at a greater rate through coordination versus uncoordinated attacks. Adds a larger skill bonus to warfare. 
  • Beige might need to be reworked.
  • War ranges will need to be adjusted. Discussed on discord was the idea of making your war range based on your city strength. If you have 20 cities your war strength declaration range is based on how much military you -could- field, rather than how much you currently had 

1) That would likely rip one of their few benefits, that being them being decent ratio netters due to how cheap they are. They aren't a particularly strong unit, and being able to max right away would be a nerf as is, given their quicker mobbing rate as of current.

2) Yes.

3) They would need a new niche, given their current one would be largely gone under that framework. Either killing units directly, or impairing their production would make the most sense to me. It would be a very delicate thing to balance, as if handled without care they could inexpensively cripple conventional military entirely, but that could possibly be mended with hardcaps or diminishing returns over repeated use.

4) That would be a good change under that rework.

5) It would probably still be fine by then.

6) Not a bad idea, though that would make NS ranges basically useless.

 
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2 hours ago, Frawley said:

This is a terrible idea presented well.

Your enhanced coordination is just the potential that a couple of smaller nations might potentially destroy a small amount of infra until the whale comes back online and takes giant chunks out of every city it hits after re-maxing military.  This would actually make the current coordination required to suicide into whales and get them to a sustainable level of military entirely useless.  CN has a mechanic like this, and its also dumb, its why the only things attackers fire when vastly outgunned in CN are nukes as you can never compete conventionally so why bother.

With Nukes being almost totally useless in this game, this makes upper tiers unkillable.

There are definitely flaws to the idea, yes. However there is also some merit. Upper tiers can kill other upper tiers, I get that a lot of the recent history of the game involve tiering of alliances. But with diversity of tiers makes up declare coordination work when you have some larger nations helping out. If you look at it as a simply 20 nations in the 20 city count fighting several nations in the 30 city count, then yes, it's a problem. And if those nations in the 20s don't have any allies with high tier members, it can lead to problems. I also know the fears of a DBDC sort of group popping up, to which that is on the community to avoid letting happen. Some of the things fall on the players to prevent, some on game devs. 

 

There are fixes that combined with this change do make it work, but those ideas aren't that popular as well. Restrict the war declare range to city counts, that way someone with say 4-5 more cities than you is unable to down declare on you. I understand this change does give rise to the host of problems involved with defending against up declares and thus never being able to hit someone who could declare on you. 

 

This sort of a change, were it to happen, would need several other changes to go along with it to make it feasible. This idea came out of a brainstorming session to increase resource use of steel/alum in the war module, it also hit upon allowing for nations to fight back and not having lost a war the moment its started without you even being around which is a common complaint about the war system. The point of this thread is to find if there are enough things that can be realistically done to make this fix work. Lets be clear, there is no perfect fix, or perfect war system. Someone's always going to have an advantage and someone else is going to have a disadvantage. What we can try to do is minimize those while making it more fun. 

 

Something does need to change. Winning isn't fun. Losing is often more fun if you are one of the people who can make it work by being a thorn in alliances sides, but in general losing also isn't fun. There needs to be an element of fun in the war system -- part of what inspired this is for those who remember Lunar Wars. Out of the war systems I have been apart of, that was the most fun and it had to do with the ability to max your units without limit. This games base might not lend itself too well to that sort of system, however combined with a few other changes it might.

Edited by Prefontaine

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I agree that the current war system is lacking, and what you are proposing is kinda similar to the CN war system which is 10 times more fun than the PnW war system.  

As the guy that runs the whale alliance, if this went thru, what I would probably end up doing is jacking up the warchest requirement, to probably atleast 3x-5x of what we have now, and once we are sitting on 500k of each resources or so, activity becomes king.  It's fun because you then time out when to attack with 2-3 other people run all your attacks in like 30 seconds, on the defensive side you wait to catch them attacking you so you can rebuy during their attacks and completely stuff them.

The problem with what you are proposing is that war now comes down to warchests and who is willing to outspend each other to win. 

You need to set some sort of limit even if you cut down the time to militarize by half so it takes 3 days to max planes vs 6 days.  Or you do a CN thing where you can deploy a certain amount of troops every day for offense, and keep a certain amount for defense, and have unlimited troop purchases that go towards defense.  Deploying leaves your nation open to attack and as you lose troops during your attacks, your ability to attack drops each time, that way you aren't just attacking full strength every single time, until you cant afford it anymore.

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Guest Elijah Mikaelson

http://politicsandwar.com/index.php?id=129

Something like this would be a better fit long term, sure the perks can change but this is a far better idea, the problem with the war system right now is planes, they are overpowered and land accounts for nothing, IF a nation has 5000 lands and have a defense project the attacking nation should lose more troops, planes and so on than if they attacked a nation with 2000 land.

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10 hours ago, Prefontaine said:

The war system needs work. Most players know this. One of the main problems is you can get knocked out of a fight instantly with virtually no way back in. Often you're better off selling units to gain back resources or turtling to nuke/missile or spam navy while the rest of your units are killed. This isn't very fun for the winners or losers.

 

Suggested change to the war module:

  • Remove Limits on daily unit production

Pros

  • A prepared nation can get back into any fight at any time as long as they have the resources to do so.
  • Wars become more expensive in terms of steel/aluminum/(food if soldiers get a food price tag) which helps address market demand problems
  • War becomes more coordination based, rather than first strike based. You have to work with the people your fighting to time attacks to be able to inflict damage on a nation
  • Can lessen infra damage taken in short wars, making skirmishes possibly more common if the community goes that route
  • Attackers advantage is limited to getting to pick targets and having more prep time.
  • Removes the reason to "not beige" someone when winning a war. Beige is no longer needed to rebuild units.

Cons

  • Whales are a bit stronger as it's hard to keep them down
  • Wars become more expensive in terms of Steel/Aluminum which could cause mass stock-piling, which could cause larger time gaps between wars
  • Propaganda bureau will need to be changed 
  • Usefulness of Missiles and nukes will be diminished 
  • War declaration down declare range, going from 0 mil, declaring, then maxing mil

Changes that should accompany this change

  • Soldiers should cost a small amount of food to build. 10 Soldiers, 1 food. 100,000 soldiers 10,000 food. If food was 100 PPU that would increase soldiers cost by 10 per unit. 1,000,000 soldiers would cost an extra $10,000,000.
  • Propaganda Bureau needs to do something else (suggestions for another thread)
  • Missiles/Nukes should be re-worked. I've long proposed they become like spies and be a complimentary unit to war, again though suggestions for another thread
  • MAP (military action point) maximum should be increased to 16 or 20. This way several nations can coordinate more attacks at a given time to be able to inflict damage at a greater rate through coordination versus uncoordinated attacks. Adds a larger skill bonus to warfare. 
  • Beige might need to be reworked.
  • War ranges will need to be adjusted. Discussed on discord was the idea of making your war range based on your city strength. If you have 20 cities your war strength declaration range is based on how much military you -could- field, rather than how much you currently had

 

This change would allow players the ability to fight until they can afford to fight any more. The first global war where this happens will likely be a bit nuts. The market might go insanely high, the war might go a long time. The resource costs could be greater than all previous wars combined for Aluminum/Steel. However this change would fix the getting knocked out of a war part and not being able to get back in. You can now also beige the people you're fighting without fear of allowing your enemy back into the fight later. All beige would do is take whomever is in that fight out of the fight that would still be going if there are other active wars, ie a 3v1 becomes a 2v1 if one of the attackers beige. 

 

EDIT: Will be editing the OP as pros/cons/accompanying changes get brought up.


This change will greatly increase the use of steel/alum in wars and also boost gas/ammo as more units will be fighting. This greatly increases the sink for refined resources and thus the demand for them, and the raws to make them. The war module change will greatly boost the demand for resources while fixing the eternal losing a war in the first day problem. 

I like the intent of this suggestion because the war system is indeed broken and we will never reach a full consensus on how to fix it because the advantaged won't willingly support losing their edge. With that in mind, I think if we tempered this a little it would work far better.

For example, what if every war resulted in beige for the loser (the person with less resistance)? That way there is no way to scam the system and perma-war someone. 

Alternatively, buff the Propaganda Bureau. Make it so it halves the time to max military rather than 10%.

Or just flat buff recruitment rates across the board and leave the PB as-is. The problem with unlimited recruitment rates is that it would turn PnW into another game that has failed partly due to the broken war system. Frawley detailed it out a little better but you get the idea.

 

I really, really love increasing MAP's. I think that would go a long way for people who get hit then log on when they wake up to a zero'd out military. They at least have options.

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