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Remove Alliance Bank Looting & Cap Alliance Bank Amounts


Alex
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2 minutes ago, Elijah Mikaelson said:

Yakuza being looted was mostly down to inactive gov who did not move the bank around or have it in an offshore, however before I stepped down we lost hardly anything, so what you are saying is, adding this it simply means alliances like Yakuza wont be loot able due to in activeness or poor management therefore an easy target.

Well if you have three members making 80m a day with 36 cities @ 1500 infra I must be doing something wrong, As at 33 cities avg 2400 infra I am only on about 40m a day and thats with 6k land.

Try re-reading that, that's saying i have 3 people who are not rebuilt and therefore not contributing. One also is raiding and has no commerce. 86m/day comes from 15 nations is what im saying :P

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Guest Elijah Mikaelson
Just now, Akuryo said:

Try re-reading that, that's saying i have 3 people who are not rebuilt and therefore not contributing. One also is raiding and has no commerce. 86m/day comes from 15 nations is what im saying :P

thank god for that, i was like wait a minute lol

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5 hours ago, Bartholomew Roberts said:

I'd really rather he publicly discuss things with all of us.

I more meant he talk with them before making the suggestion on the forums. Meaning he'll have a more applicable idea but it will still be publicly discussed.

Blame Dan Schneider~

393607803_Screenshot-20190414-060815-Discord(2).jpg.7116150a8eb6a7355bc37f3f65604764.jpg

 

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@Alex Way back int he day, you had to have 10 members to activate the banking page if I recall. Later on, it cost 2 credits to make an alliance. Maybe you just need to revert, and focus on the airpower problem...

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Are you originally from Earth, too?

Proud owner of Harry's goat. It's mine now.

I now own MinesomeMC's goat, too. It's starting to look like a herd.

Yep, it is a herd. Aldwulf has added his goat, too, and it ain't Irish.

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The solutions that Alex proposed seem good on paper, getting rid of offshore banks, but it limits the amount of money and resources of alliances, especially large alliances like NPO and BK. Many players proposed other solutions to the problem, changes to his solutions, or criticizes his solutions, but he responds to criticism by saying “these caps are subject to change” and ignores many solutions or change. Not to mention that finalized cap on alliance banks will be either too big or to small.

But I’m not here just to make a comment. I’m here to do one thing:  to propose my solution as a sort of compromise. 

 

Disclamer: I have no beef with offshore banks, and I understand that they add complexity to P&W. This is a compromise between his solution and our grievances with his solution. 

 

My proposal is to have two alliance banks, an unlootable but capped bank and a lootable uncapped bank. 

The unlootable, capped bank is similar to Alex’s solution, but with some changes. This bank will have an cap on money and each resource based on the total amount of infra of active nations in an alliance, exponentially increasing similar to how the cost of infra for a city increases-as well as a base cap based on total cities of active nations in an alliance. 

I know what you’re thinking. “But pixelhugger, if the alliance reaches the cap, when where does the extra money and resources go?” Good question, imaginary player that I conjured up in my head. I’ll answer that with...

...Uncapped, lootable banks. It’s self-explanatory, really. A bank that can hold an unlimited amount of money and resources. However, there is a caveat. In order for an alliance to have this bank, it must have ten members, with 10+ cities in 75% or more nations. Percent of money and resources that are lootable must be higher than it is now, maybe 10 times. All of these numbers can be changed, so feel free to suggest a different number if you have a problem with them. Anyways, if an alliance total infra of active drops significantly in three turns or less, the excess amount of money and resources in the capped bank will stay in the capped bank, not go into the uncapped bank.

You might’ve noticed that I didn’t explain the effects of my proposal. That’s because I’m putting them in a separate list for easier reading and to test whether or not people did read my post.

 

Effects:

  • Alliance can do a complete rebuild after wars, since the capped bank will have enough money for it
  • Alliance can have more money and resources than their capped bank can hold, since the extra money and resources can spill over to the uncapped bank 
  • Looting and piracy will be a more viable income while not threatening potential rebuilding
  • Offshore banks will be impractical, since the cost and risks of rounding up active newbies or in an alliance, a majority of them with a certain amount many cities, will discourage leaders from ever doing so
  • Offshore banks will also be obsolete for most alliances, as the capped bank will hinder enough for a full rebuild

 

Considerations: 

  • If the total amount of infra in active nation drops significantly in three or less, the excess money and resources in the capped bank will stay in said bank
  • Alliance leaders can withdraw from any of the two alliance banks, but they can only deposit to the capped bank, unless the capped bank is full. If the capped bank is full, then the deposited amounts go to the uncapped bank. 
  • The uncapped bank can be looted, not the capped bank

 

If you have any criticism of my proposal, please voice it. I’m willing to listen to valid criticism.

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43 minutes ago, MinesomeMC said:

No, add water instead

I will not stand by while the communists sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

Are you originally from Earth, too?

Proud owner of Harry's goat. It's mine now.

I now own MinesomeMC's goat, too. It's starting to look like a herd.

Yep, it is a herd. Aldwulf has added his goat, too, and it ain't Irish.

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My solution is a cap based on cities like Alex suggested but you can go over the cap, the only problem is that you lose a % of your resources/money every turn

Example with random numbers:

My alliance has 10 players with 10 cities = 100 total cities

The cap for 100 cities is 1B

If I stay under 1B it works as7 normal, if I go over 1B I lose 100k every turn

Next cap for 100 cities is 1.5B

I keep losing 100k per turn until I reach 1.5B, if I go over 1.5B I start losing 200k every turn

Next cap is 2B, over that I lose 400k, 2.5B, and I lose 800k, etc.

Now if you create one man offshore bank and the player has let's say 20 cities but he's protecting the bank of an alliance with 1000 cities he will be like 100 times over the cap and he will lose 100M per turn making offshore banks stupid

With this system you have to remove bank looting or pirates will lose what they take

 

Maybe already suggested but I stopped reading at page 4 :awesome:

And please remember this post is sponsored by Avakael

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5 hours ago, Buck Turgidson said:

@Alex Way back int he day, you had to have 10 members to activate the banking page if I recall. Later on, it cost 2 credits to make an alliance. Maybe you just need to revert, and focus on the airpower problem...

That's kind of the mindset I am thinking of. He's addressed the hiding banks in VM so that is clear and people are generally fine with that work around. Since he has pointed out that Fark nation time and time again I think he should just make it a little less convenient through score requirements and a flat rate cost to make an alliance. Then people would be more selective with making their offshore banks and the costs over time in an extended war scenario would start to add up. It would also have the added benefit of deterring a lot of the 1 man micros that pop up and litter the alliances page, but that's a fight for another day.

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On 9/21/2019 at 2:55 PM, Alex said:

That nation has 0 score. Regardless of whether or not they could transfer if they were blockaded, no one can declare war on them anyway. So they could never be blockaded in the first place.

Make it so you have to have a minimum city count before you can make an alliance? 

 

Like 10. 10 cities is easily obtained with the current setup

Edited by Jeric
Giving example
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This suggestion is inspired by the madness that is "offshore banks" and other gimmicks to avoid alliance bank looting. Alliance banks are obviously a very useful tool that we want to include in the game, but we also don't want to end raiding/looting by making their contents invulnerable. That was the inspiration behind the alliance bank looting mechanic (which doesn't often matter due to offshores, etc.)

In the status quo, we have banks like this https://politicsandwar.com/alliance/id=6045 with 0.00 score that are invulernable to raiding. I believe something needs to change so that we're not incentivizing this behavior in the game.

I agree this needs addressing. Everything gimmicky makes me cringe.

Quote

My proposal is twofold: first, we remove the alliance bank looting mechanic. Alliance banks would be invulnerable to being looted. Therefore, no one would need to make these "offshores." It would simplify alliance mechanics a great deal, and end all sorts of weird moderation issues and gimmicks that players would agree with me are unfair or against the spirit of the game.

Not a terrible idea. Saves a lot of headaches. Helps out new AAs and micros who don't have experienced staff + not enough staff to reliably manage their bank. That's good because it reduces the barriers of entry to the political aspects of the game, helping us keep more new faces over time.

Quote

Of course, we don't want to end raiding/looting. Therefore, as the second part of the suggestion, I am proposing a cap on alliance bank contents. This cap would be based on the number of cities in the alliance so as not to incentivize people to again make "offshores" to get around the bank limits. This restriction on total bank contents will require alliances to store more of their money/resources in their nations, such that they are still vulnerable to looting.

Okay..... in principle not too unreasonable, but creates headaches ... does NOT simplify alliance mechanics... for starters, who gets to keep their money safe in the bank? What would the limits be? What happens to the resources as nations go inactive or leave the AA?

Quote

To come up with an idea for proposed caps, I pulled the alliance bank contents of all alliances with 40 or more members and compared it to the total number of cities of their members. I came up with a multiplier for each alliance (Cities * X = Bank Contents) and then using all of the calculated multipliers for each alliance, took the 75th percentile to be on the higher end. Then I did some small amounts of rounding to make for nice, pretty numbers.

These calculated figures would set an alliance bank contents cap for each resource:

  • Money: Cities * 400,000
  • Coal/Oil/Uranium: Cities * 15
  • Bauxite/Iron/Lead: Cities * 10
  • Steel/Aluminum/Gasoline/Munitions: Cities * 100
  • Food: Cities * 400

Total cities calculated would not include Vacation Mode nations, or Gray nations.

Per feedback, I agree these original proposed caps are way too low (they didn't factor in the offshore-stashed bank contents.) My intent is not to cap banks so low that they're unusable, but to find a reasonable balance between alliance bank/nation storage that doesn't eliminate the viability of raiding through removing alliance bank looting.

That these quantities were seriously considered as a reasonable discussion starting point is very troubling. The reasons have possibly been addressed elsewhere.

Not counting gray nations would be unfair to those who get beiged frequently and would result in headaches for banks who are managing their resources near the cap.

Quote

You can also see data from the last 10,000 bank loots here - on average, they're very little anyway. Removing bank looting isn't going to change much, most banks are de-facto unlootable anyway.

image.png

Yup. And in the rare cases that an alliance bank is looted for large sums, it's not the incompetent who caused the loss that gets hurt, but the regular nations who had no realistic option but to keep their stuff in savings.

Quote

Another benefit of having caps on alliance banks is that it should make war cycles more regular. Commonly, alliances wait to stockpile resources before going to war. Limits on stockpiles will essentially set a cap on how long alliances should wait before going to war.

Or you can, you know, add a mechanic that allows alliances to actually win wars. Then they wouldn't last the months they currently are. For example, significantly increase the chance of improvement destruction (after the current war ends so it doesn't skew the balance).

Quote

Also, basing resource caps on number of cities should make it more-or-less fair for all types of alliances, from high-city alliances with low members to low-city alliances with lots of members.

More-or-less.

On 9/21/2019 at 11:19 AM, Alex said:

Let me know what you think, and of course the actual caps could be tweaked. But I think the concept behind this suggestion is good, and will improve gameplay and make things a bit more sensible.

EDIT: Another note: I'm just looking for feedback here, and perhaps tweaking of numbers. I'd like to run a long-term (2 month?) tournament on the test server with alliance banks enabled, looting disabled, and the caps in place before pushing a change like this to the live server.

The tournament server isn't a good place to test this because relatively few nations play there, those that do aren't representative of the game's population, and the difference in speed may have additional impacts for testing a change such as this ... I'm not saying there is a better place, but that any data from there should be carefully evaluated before in light of these differences drawing conclusions.

As to picking cap values,

(1) These are a reasonably proxy -> https://politicsandwar.com/world-graphs/graphID=19 https://politicsandwar.com/world-graphs/graphID=23 https://politicsandwar.com/world-graphs/graphID=18 You could start off by converting those to per-city values, and then determine how much you want to keep "safe", i.e. 50% or w/e. And yeah the quantity values may need to be adjusted automatically from time to time.

(2) Alternatively, you could say "X days of Y" should be safe, for example -> 20 days of raws (lead, baux, oil, coal, iron) to run full manufactories, 10 days worth of buying military units per city (so, per city, 50 * 5 * 10 = 2500 steel for tanks + 25 * 1 * 3 * 10 = 750 steel for ships, 3 * 3 * 5 * 10 = 450 alum for planes, etc.), enough $ to rebuild 0 -> 1500 infra per city, 20 days of food sufficient to feed a 2k city, etc.

....

And none of this would prevent hiding a bank in a nation out of score range.

Edited by Rossiya
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If the problem that is trying to be solved is preventing new alliances to be made to avoid bank offshore hiding. Make it so newly created alliances can't perform bank transactions for 10 days. It doesn't remove the problem, as in long wars like this alliances can have several players make a group of offshore alliances to shuffle things around in. However should an alliance get caught unprepared their bank has a higher chance to get hit. 

It's not a perfect fix, but it does address some of the issues without interrupting much else in the aspect of game-play. New alliances aren't typically that insane on banking right off the bat, and all they have to wait is 10 days. 

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I think the point is if he’s going to have workarounds in the game to do so those who know they exist can’t be looted, might as well make them unlootable to level the playing field with those who assume banks being looted is just part of game.

So I think either he should do so it’s possible to prevent people from making everything unlootable or he might as well remove the need for the work around people that use due to the programming not allowing people to prevent the funds sent out to prevent looting. Just requires having someone you trust to send it to.

Edit: Also considering how big the advantage is for those who use workarounds to make their bank unlootable vs those playing more normal; taking advantage of other exploits which give those who use them an advantage over those who don’t get banned. So it’s kind of weird to on the flip side requiring  exploiting the bank send feature to prevent any bank looting regardless of embargo’s to play ‘smart’

Edited by Noctis Anarch Caelum
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22 minutes ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

If we remove the ways in which alliances can survive being outnumbered, then we'll have created an environment in which alliances can't survive competition. Thus, competition would end, and therefore the game would end. With that in mind, I strongly protest any form of removal or cap or elimination of bank mechanics; this game is NOT something that should EVER be "won" on a permanent level, not by anyone. If alliances can be murdered, then they will be, and then there will be no game left; I've seen that before dozens of times.

That's how games go from a few thousand players to a hundred at the most, and ultimately to literally one.

If a blockaded nation unable to recieve funds also can't access them to send; I don't think that would eliminate any bank mechanic; just get rid of a loophole mostly. If that loophole is needed because banks being raidable for everybody would be to damaging; then he probably should just make them unlootable. Caps are dumb.

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26 minutes ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

If we remove the ways in which alliances can survive being outnumbered, then we'll have created an environment in which alliances can't survive competition. Thus, competition would end, and therefore the game would end. With that in mind, I strongly protest any form of removal or cap or elimination of bank mechanics; this game is NOT something that should EVER be "won" on a permanent level, not by anyone. If alliances can be murdered, then they will be, and then there will be no game left; I've seen that before dozens of times.

That's how games go from a few thousand players to a hundred at the most, and ultimately to literally one.

Look what you've done Alex. You've got me to upvote a Scarfalot post :P

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On 9/22/2019 at 11:13 AM, Epi said:

Everyone here has a vested interest, I saw Lucio posting earlier, lol. He's been at 100 score raiding and hiding billions for over 2 years. BK-NPO are collectively holding the entire coalitions bank rn, (political loss to give that up). T$ and TKR are renowned for building inexhaustible stockpiles, RE: Knightfall, Surfsup and the current global and they're still not tapped out.

I for one think this is a great idea, :P though the amounts need to be tweaked a bit. We don't want more than 6 months worth of cash-rss to be stored in a bank. It might be a good idea to scale this limit off of Infra not cities. That'd help balance it for the whale alliances and more effectively match their economic power.

I basically agree with this. Everyone has money, everyone wants it kept safe, so it is in the best interests of everyone if nothing in this area is changed. That doesn't mean that it is good for the game as a whole. No resource should be invulnerable.

The only issue I see with tying a limit to infra is that as an alliances infra is worn down during war, the cap will also decrease, meaning that they would not be able to keep the entirety of their prewar bank.

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Guest Elijah Mikaelson

What I find funny is most alliances would never reach the cap, but this is being shouted down by raiders and members in large alliances talk about the game being controlled by the 1%, lets face it 99% of alliances out their would not reach the caps, apart from what three alliances most do not raid just for profit but due to it being a war.

Can we not start working on things that the other 99% might want and not what the 1% want?

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36 minutes ago, Epi said:

Do you guys remember when super stockpiles that allowed alliances to fight for years were the number one threat to game health? Well, that's still possible. This is a sure fire way to eliminate that. Think before voting with your penis interest in mind, instead of game health.

Nothing about this change is actually addressing that. Just because Alex thinks it is means absolutely nothing, as what Alex thinks will happen almost always has zero bearing on reality at best.

Making it easy to bankrupt entire alliances will leave a pile of bodies scattered, that would correlate quite simply with the winner and losers in conflict.

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22 hours ago, AwesomeNova said:

My proposal is to have two alliance banks, an unlootable but capped bank and a lootable uncapped bank. 

 

If you do this, what is to stop alliances from filling the unlootable bank, and then creating an offshore to stash the rest of the lootable bank safely?

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3 hours ago, Epi said:

Do you guys remember when super stockpiles that allowed alliances to fight for years were the number one threat to game health? Well, that's still possible. This is a sure fire way to eliminate that. Think before voting with your penis interest in mind, instead of game health.

Not really. All this does is prevent people from hiding stockpiles in alliance banks. It doesn't prevent people from hiding them or accumulating them. Instead the meta would likely change to hiding stockpiles in nations in extreme score ranges (either incentivizing the creation of multis in the extreme low tiers or further magnifying the influence and power of whales) or hiding stockpiles in beiged nations.

The only sensible way to implement stockpile caps is universally - on nations as well as alliance banks - and even then it might not be a good idea.

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On 9/23/2019 at 1:55 PM, Edward I said:

Not really. All this does is prevent people from hiding stockpiles in alliance banks. It doesn't prevent people from hiding them or accumulating them. Instead the meta would likely change to hiding stockpiles in nations in extreme score ranges (either incentivizing the creation of multis in the extreme low tiers or further magnifying the influence and power of whales) or hiding stockpiles in beiged nations.

The only sensible way to implement stockpile caps is universally - on nations as well as alliance banks - and even then it might not be a good idea.

I agree that people will get around it with individual nations.  There should also be a cap on individual stockpiles.

On 9/23/2019 at 3:33 AM, Sir Scarfalot said:

If we remove the ways in which alliances can survive being outnumbered, then we'll have created an environment in which alliances can't survive competition. Thus, competition would end, and therefore the game would end. With that in mind, I strongly protest any form of removal or cap or elimination of bank mechanics; this game is NOT something that should EVER be "won" on a permanent level, not by anyone. If alliances can be murdered, then they will be, and then there will be no game left; I've seen that before dozens of times.

That's how games go from a few thousand players to a hundred at the most, and ultimately to literally one.

1) Even if an alliance's stockpile gets zeroed, they still have all their cities.  And they often can get loans after a war.  Even starting with nothing, infra is relatively cheap.

2) If the caps are set at a decent level, they could balance things out in favor of losers by limiting how much of a stockpile the winner of the war has after the war, and thus the disparity between the alliances. 

Right now many alliances have banks that have several months of stockpiled resources.  If we have caps, alliances at peace will hit the stockpile and then have to invest elsewhere.  Starting a war, buying more cities, and in their newer players.

A rough illustration:

Currently: Alliance A is twice the size of Alliance B and defeats Alliance B in a war.  Both alliances go into the war with 6 months worth of stockpiled cash/resources.  They fight for 3 months.  Alliance A uses 1 months worth of stockpile to fight and 1 months worth to rebuild.  Alliance B uses 3 months worth of stockpile to fight and 2 months worth to rebuild.   Alliance A ends with 4 months worth of stockpiling left, Alliance B with 1 month.  Alliance A now has a 3 month stockpile advantage.  Alliance A takes 2 months to rebuild their stockpile and Alliance B takes 5 months.

With Caps: Alliance A is twice the size of Alliance B and defeats Alliance B in a war.  Both alliances go into the war capped at 2 months worth of stockpiled cash/resources.  They fight for 1.5 months.  Alliance A uses .5 months of stockpile to fight and .5 months of stockpile to rebuild.  Alliance B uses 1.5 months worth to fight and .5 to rebuild (1 month less than they need).  Alliance A has 1 months stockpile left and Alliance B has 0.  Because they couldn't do a full rebuild, Alliance B takes an extra month to rebuild without stockpiling again.  Alliance A has a 2 month stockpile advantage on Alliance B.  Alliance A takes 1 month to rebuild their stockpile and Alliance B takes 3 months.

This is of course an oversimplification in a lot of ways.  But the point is, if warchests are capped, it limits how much of a warchest advantage one alliance can accumulate over another by setting a maximum for the winner.  It sets a maximum amount of time that an alliance effectively needs to be "war-ready" again.


 

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