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City unlocks and destroying your own cities


Dryad
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Hey :)

Currently, the only way to get rid of your own cities if you wish to do so is to ask Alex to delete those cities for you. I think that isn't ideal, but more importantly (imo) there is no way for whales at like 30 cities and above to get rid of their cities if they wish to do so, without forfeiting billions of dollars as they have to pay once more for all deleted cities if they ever wish to rebuild those.

https://politicsandwar.com/world-graphs/graphID=5

You can see in aboves graph/link that the bigger you become the less players at similar size you will find, I think that this is problematic because by growing you will essentially isolate yourself from the rest of the game in regard to the war system with war ranges letting you hit less and less players the bigger you become.

I think it's fairly easy to see why this can be boring and makes it unappealing to at least some players to grow. Not only this but there is also opinions on raiding being best at around 10 cities as well as opinions of raiding being best at 2 or 3 cities. There is good reasons why someone could want to decrease their size. I think it isn't great that every time you may feel like changing your playing environment by decreasing your size you have to accept potentially billions in rebuild cost.

Thus I would like to propose a change to the way cities are purchased etc.

 

The idea is the following:

Instead of building cities and paying for them at the same time as you do now, there could be a concept of "unlocking" cities. Essentially, buying cities could be split up into two seperate things: 1. unlocking the city and 2. actually building the city. Unlocking a city would in my proposal cost the same amount of money that it currently takes to buy that city, but just unlocking a city wouldn't build the city. Having a city unlocked would mean that you could build the unlocked city for free. This would then make it possible to ask Alex to delete cities without having to pay the amounts for already unlocked cities once more when you get to build them again, I do however also want to propose that destroying your own cities just becomes possible.

More on how this could work with balancing in mind:

First on building and unlocking cities: My idea would be that just like now you could build a city every 10 days if no credit is used and that to unlock city N you would need to currently have N - 1 cities. That would mean you couldn't stay at like 3 cities and unlock all cities up to 20 while raiding at city 3 but would actually have to unlock them as you grow up, the only point of this after all is that you dont have to repurchase a city once again if you choose to destroy it.

Secondly to include destroying of cities: My proposal is that destroying cities would reset the city/project-timer to 10 days but that you wouldn't need the timer to be up to destroy a city, this way you could destroy basically all cities down to 1 city if you wanted to which is then the same as rerolling except you dont need to pay again to build cities again. Note however that in this particular case there is currently no city timer before you reach city 10 and that this needs to be addressed to ensure that you cant repeatedly switch between having 10 and 1 city. You could also not use this as a tool for downdeclaring the same way a decommission of military can be used, if destroying cities causes you to have to wait 10 days again to buy a city. Of course, in order to destroy cities your military cant exceed the maximum capacity of the city count you are going down to.

To give an example on how this goes: Let's say you currently have 20 cities and decide you want to go back to raiding at 10 cities. You would destroy 10 cities and could raid at that city count. At some point you may get bored of raiding and choose you want to grow again so you would start building a city once more every 10 days (so this would take you 100 days to return to 20 cities) and once you have 20 cities you would also have to unlock cities again to grow further.

 

I believe that giving people the freedom to decrease their size with little cost won't cause a lot of balancing issues, but would make the game a lot more flexible with people not getting trapped at too high a size to war most of the game and gives a much more attractive alternative to rerolling, allowing you to change the way you experience the game instead of being bound to one playstyle and I believe this to be positive.

Edited by Dryad
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One thing that needs to be added is you can use credits to reset the city timer currently. That should no longer be allowed in this system as it means I can build 2 cities back instantly in this system after a declare. 

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Guest Elijah Mikaelson

I think this is a poor idea, people should not be able to lose cities.

In CN tech was king and when NPO forced people to hand over billions in tech thats when people just deleted.

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11 minutes ago, Elijah Mikaelson said:

I think this is a poor idea, people should not be able to lose cities.

In CN tech was king and when NPO forced people to hand over billions in tech thats when people just deleted.

Why do you see this as a negative thing though? The cities wont be destroyable by force, you would have to destroy them yourself and even then you could just rebuild them for free since this proposes an unlocking system that makes rebuilding not cost anything. I don't see any similarity to NPO forcing to hand over billions in tech in CN.

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Being able to remove the hardest asset in the game which is the core mechanic on which every other mechanic revolves is a terrible idea, and has been a terrible idea every other time it's been suggested. The can of worms in terms of gameplay and politics is best left sealed.

Edited by durmij
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Guest Frawley
1 hour ago, Elijah Mikaelson said:

In CN tech was king and when NPO forced people to hand over billions in tech thats when people just deleted.

What are you talking about, the NPO never forced anyone to hand over tech.

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27 minutes ago, Frawley said:

What are you talking about, the NPO never forced anyone to hand over tech.

Eh, it did in 2008 but a much smaller amount. It's not on the scale EM is suggesting of a billion and setting anyone back permanently. He's just doing his usual anti-NPO thing and it's a fabrication. The highest reps were on NPO and it was 350k tec which did set it back for a long time.

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Guest Elijah Mikaelson
2 hours ago, Dryad said:

Why do you see this as a negative thing though? The cities wont be destroyable by force, you would have to destroy them yourself and even then you could just rebuild them for free since this proposes an unlocking system that makes rebuilding not cost anything. I don't see any similarity to NPO forcing to hand over billions in tech in CN.

sorry misread it, I thought it was a way for people to destroy cities via war.

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Basically this would mess up the score system too much to be worth a "buff" to raiding. I support piracy but I can't support this. Some examples off the top of my head how this would be abused:

- Entire alliances drop into a single tier during wars.

- The resources generated by these extra cities don't go away. So you could have a very low score nation preying on newbies with effectively infinite resources.

- Banks suddenly get dropped on nations who de-activated their cities.

- Instances such as this global war where you have many nations versus fewer nations but the less-numerous losing side is technically safe in the lowest tier - Coalition B would be able to slowly keep dropping score until they have everyone permanently pinned.

 

If anything, I'd like to see more incentives to grow to larger sizes rather than more incentives to stay or become smaller.

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21 minutes ago, Bartholomew Roberts said:

Basically this would mess up the score system too much to be worth a "buff" to raiding. I support piracy but I can't support this.

This isn't supposed to be a raiding buff, raiding was just one example why someone could want to get rid of their cities. The real issue is that whales are trapped essentially forever with little to do war-wise, if you are wampus then you have an amazing 5 people in your war-range. He can already get rid of his cities if he wishes to, just ask alex to delete some cities and done, the only issue that my proposal addresses is that he would have to pay 20b again to get back up. But the entire "being able to delete your cities"-thing isn't necessary, we can keep it at asking Alex to delete cities if you prefer that, the main idea is the unlocking system of not having to pay again.

Some people have played this game for 5 years now. Sax-player for example is now at 26 cities and he has been at that size for 700 days unable to do anything about it. It's a common opinion that you cant raid at that size, what would your proposal be for someone like him to ever get into raiding again if he wanted to? We are obviously not getting rid of war range. Based on those opinions I guess he just can't ever raid effectively again unless he deletes his nation.

 

21 minutes ago, Bartholomew Roberts said:

- Entire alliances drop into a single tier during wars.

This becomes a viable strategy I think. I'm not sure how problematic this is. TCW whales were pretty valuable to coalition B in this war, i'm not sure they would drop down to city 20 tiering to fit in. Generally destroying your cities isn't exactly a buff, it decreases your military output. If you can somehow utilize making yourself weaker to your advantage then I think that's actually pretty cool.

 

22 minutes ago, Bartholomew Roberts said:

- The resources generated by these extra cities don't go away. So you could have a very low score nation preying on newbies with effectively infinite resources.

Idk man, you can already reroll if you want to and have someone send you your stuff, like whats the difference even. The fact that nobody wants to drop cities because they are expensive as hell to rebuild? I guess you can always hire someone to crush some newbie with your resources too if you are really into that stuff. Overall I don't see the big problem. It's also true that your resources aren't 100% safe if you take them with you so maybe that's a blessing for some new players even who manage to steal your stuff.

 

23 minutes ago, Bartholomew Roberts said:

- Banks suddenly get dropped on nations who de-activated their cities.

I do believe it will be more common that alliance will use offshores at low city count. But then again it's already possible to have an officer at low score being your offshore. Enemies of that offshore can also follow them down though if they really want to attack, in fact this possibility may make it less secure overall. And most of all, offshores are already basically not lootable anyway so is there even a need for this?

 

23 minutes ago, Bartholomew Roberts said:

- Instances such as this global war where you have many nations versus fewer nations but the less-numerous losing side is technically safe in the lowest tier - Coalition B would be able to slowly keep dropping score until they have everyone permanently pinned.

That's a thing I guess. I would also argue your side has already lost if your opponent rather has their nations at low city count to fight there because they aren't needed higher. So perhaps this just helps deciding the victor more quickly. But a fair point.

 

23 minutes ago, Bartholomew Roberts said:

If anything, I'd like to see more incentives to grow to larger sizes rather than more incentives to stay or become smaller.

Yeah, sure, I'm all for this too. I do still think that some people would want a change in landscape every once in a while. I don't think i wanna be stuck at 30+ cities for the next few years non-stop.

 

I wanna reiterate once more that the main proposal is the unlocking system and that the city destruction is a bonus to get rid of the need to ask Alex.

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I've always said a City cap is the best way to go. Personally I would take into account all Nations with say 15 or more Cities, work out an average. Let's say the average is 22cities. We then allow +10 of the average to be the max amount of effective cities. This means players can still buy cities but they will be useless until the average city count rises at which point the city becomes unlocked and effective. The numbers above etc can all change, this is just an example. 

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