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Sphere Wars mechanics discussion


Prefontaine
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With the previous war having recently wrapped up and the current one just beginning I'd like to start a general discussion thread of what needs to be tweaked besides beige mechanics, that will be its own discussion later. Posts about beige will be deleted to avoid thread derailing. This thread is more for things like "Spies still kill to many spies", or "Air should kill less ships", those sort of tweaks. All combatants please share your thoughts and I'll work with the dev team and Alex to implement some tweaks down the road.


Thanks!

List of changes to consider (Being updated as we go):

  • Spies kill too many spies
    • Perhaps need to up spies produced per day
    • Perhaps need a protected way to rebuild spies
Edited by Prefontaine
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9 minutes ago, LarsarisN said:

Missiles/Nukes need a buff like the previously discussed idea of iron dome/VDS removing a percentage of the total damage instead of removing the damage entirely but with a chance. Or just make them better cause I want to see missiles and nukes have a real reason to be bought and stockpiled.
cheers

 

Quote

 

Nukes

  • Nukes can now kill 4 improvements per nuclear missile.
    • 2 of these improvements are "general" improvements and have a chance to be any improvement.
    • 2 of these improvements are any non-power plant, non-military improvement. 
    • In the event there are no available targets, it bumps up the target list. Effectively if someone only has power plants and military structures, the nuke will destroy 4 of any improvement.

Missiles

  • Missiles can now kill 2 improvements per missile.
  • Missile Launch Pad allows a nation to build 2 missiles per day.

Iron Dome

  • Reduces the amount of improvements killed from a missile by 1. In addition to normal effeccts
  • Chance of blocking a missile reduced from 50% to 30%.

Vital Defense System

  • Chance to block a nuclear missile increased from 20% to 25%
  • Reduces the amount of improvements killed from a nuke by 1.
    • The improvement category this blocks from is the non-power plant, non-military category.

 

 

Something beyond these changes that Alex has not implemented yet? 

Edited by Prefontaine
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3 minutes ago, Vein said:

gib old war mechanics back, city score 50 or 75 at max instead of 100 pls and ty.

Been trying to get Alex to change city score for some time, no luck thus far. 

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Spies definitely still kill too many spies. That, or spy repurchase rates are just too darn low: as soon as your spies are down, you have no hope of recovering (ever). Our whole alliance, as well as many of our allied alliances had our spies sabotaged for almost two months with 0 chance to regrow: the moment someone got around 50 spies, they were destroyed. and all that by a ~10 member alliance, Oblivion. If 10 players can easily do that to around 50 players... I think it's a serious concern. Just to elaborate: it only takes two spy operations to kill over 40 spies. That means at least 20 days of recovery, in which that same one person can hit 20 other people and do the same thing.

Of course, this is often a non-issue since the spies are caught and identified. but if they get lucky on their first couple strikes using 60 spies and covert ops, hitting all players with 60 spies, then it's next to impossible to identify them (which is what happened for us, we were not able to identify them even once for the first two weeks).

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1 minute ago, Hexapolis said:

Spies definitely still kill too many spies. That, or spy repurchase rates are just too darn low: as soon as your spies are down, you have no hope of recovering (ever). Our whole alliance, as well as many of our allied alliances had our spies sabotaged for almost two months with 0 chance to regrow: the moment someone got around 50 spies, they were destroyed. and all that by a ~10 member alliance, Oblivion. If 10 players can easily do that to around 50 players... I think it's a serious concern. Just to elaborate: it only takes two spy operations to kill over 40 spies. That means at least 20 days of recovery, in which that same one person can hit 20 other people and do the same thing.

Of course, this is often a non-issue since the spies are caught and identified. but if they get lucky on their first couple strikes using 60 spies and covert ops, hitting all players with 60 spies, then it's next to impossible to identify them (which is what happened for us, we were not able to identify them even once for the first two weeks).

I figured spies would be one of the more glaring issues. I've added it to the OP, we don't need more posts about spies. If you want to echo the sentiment about spies needing a reduction on their blitz capacity versus other spies, then simply upvote any of the existing posts about spies to show support.

 

Thanks.

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44 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

With the previous war having recently wrapped up and the current one just beginning I'd like to start a general discussion thread of what needs to be tweaked besides beige mechanics, that will be its own discussion later. Posts about beige will be deleted to avoid thread derailing. This thread is more for things like "Spies still kill to many spies", or "Air should kill less ships", those sort of tweaks. All combatants please share your thoughts and I'll work with the dev team and Alex to implement some tweaks down the road.


Thanks!

List of changes to consider (Being updated as we go):

  • Spies kill too many spies
    • Perhaps need to up spies produced per day
    • Perhaps need a protected way to rebuild spies

I'm not so sure its so much that spies kill too many spies; the more specific issue might be that spies take too long to rebuild (4 per day with projects is a help).

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Just now, legoboyvdlp said:

I'm not so sure its so much that spies kill too many spies; the more specific issue might be that spies take too long to rebuild (4 per day with projects is a help).

The problem is making spies quick to replenish is that so many of the spy ops become constantly spying away spies versus being useful to destroy units or something like that. You either need to be able to rebuild spies in a protected manner so that you can move them to an active status all at once and they're useful and/or we need to reduce the ability to lose so many spies at the start.

Being knocked out of your spies would be okay if there was a way to rebuild them without having them constantly spied away. Currently spies get knocked out very quickly and you can never really come back unless the enemy forgets to spy you for 2 weeks. 

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Increase Naval to Naval Casualties

 

currently even if you have 2x the ships in a naval battle the pros and cons compared to an Airstrike ships are

Pros:

-You kill more infra than an Airstrike infra.

- 2 more resistance damage (This can be a con depending on your goals).

Cons:

-Still kill less ships than an Airstrike 

-Uses 2x the amount of resources

-Lose ships from defender killing

-Doesn’t kill planes on top of ships

 

Imo ship casualties should be upped to be equal or near equal to Airstrike amount. Can’t really justify a 2x cost when NB is the worst superiority and killing infra is pointless in an actual fight.

Increasing casualties wouldn’t cause navals to even come close to replacing planes when it comes to killing ships but at least it would make the numbers reasonable whenever you are using them.

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2 minutes ago, KingGhost said:

Increase Naval to Naval Casualties

 

currently even if you have 2x the ships in a naval battle the pros and cons compared to an Airstrike ships are

Pros:

-You kill more infra than an Airstrike infra.

- 2 more resistance damage (This can be a con depending on your goals).

Cons:

-Still kill less ships than an Airstrike 

-Uses 2x the amount of resources

-Lose ships from defender killing

-Doesn’t kill planes on top of ships

 

Imo ship casualties should be upped to be equal or near equal to Airstrike amount. Can’t really justify a 2x cost when NB is the worst superiority and killing infra is pointless in an actual fight.

Increasing casualties wouldn’t cause navals to even come close to replacing planes when it comes to killing ships but at least it would make the numbers reasonable whenever you are using them.

Do planes consistently kill more ships than naval?

Quote

05/24/2021 05:06 am

The Chosen Prefontaine of Chaos ordered a naval attack upon the nation of Pleiades and eliminated 8 Resistance. The attack was a Pyrrhic victory. The Chosen Prefontaine's forces lost 78 ships, while TYRANT Tamer's defenders lost 78 ships. The attack destroyed 251.97 infrastructure in the city of Psychometrics.

05/24/2021 05:06 am

The Chosen Prefontaine of Chaos ordered a naval attack upon the nation of Pleiades and eliminated 11 Resistance. The attack was a moderate success. The Chosen Prefontaine's forces lost 57 ships, while TYRANT Tamer's defenders lost 67 ships. The attack destroyed 556.85 infrastructure in the city of Introjection.

05/24/2021 05:07 am

The Chosen Prefontaine of Chaos ordered a naval attack upon the nation of Pleiades and eliminated 11 Resistance. The attack was a moderate success. The Chosen Prefontaine's forces lost 40 ships, while TYRANT Tamer's defenders lost 69 ships. The attack destroyed 651.81 infrastructure in the city of Perception.

The first one particularly. Two of those is basically the daily rebuild count of ships. While I understand the thinking behind you lose ships when planes don't, but you've had to clear the skies to get to that point. If the plane bombing rate is on par with these kill rates, I think the idea may be to nerf the plane kill rates of ships slightly and maybe buff the naval kills slightly as well. Something like 5%-10% for each. 

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1 hour ago, Prefontaine said:

With the previous war having recently wrapped up and the current one just beginning I'd like to start a general discussion thread of what needs to be tweaked besides beige mechanics, that will be its own discussion later. Posts about beige will be deleted to avoid thread derailing. This thread is more for things like "Spies still kill to many spies", or "Air should kill less ships", those sort of tweaks. All combatants please share your thoughts and I'll work with the dev team and Alex to implement some tweaks down the road.


Thanks!

List of changes to consider (Being updated as we go):

  • Spies kill too many spies
    • Perhaps need to up spies produced per day
    • Perhaps need a protected way to rebuild spies

I dont think necessarily that a lot of balance changes have to happen with already existing mainstream units (Tanks / Planes) so people can figure out for a few months whats actually better etc.
But I do think Vali proposed an interesting idea a while ago. ( in this thread  War suggestions - Game Suggestions - Politics & War Forum (politicsandwar.com))
Someone else also proposed something like this although I don't recall where exactly. Their exact proposition was the ability for ships to have a "Coastal raid" type of attack. With a raid you would do less damage but could focus on one specific resource to steal.

 
I think ships having a wider variety of uses and not just "good for naval blockading and removing infra over 2500" would be an interesting change to the meta, and bring yet another unit to the forefront. I am a bigger far of the coastal raid idea than the attack all units idea, it could have strategic uses to deplete munitions or gassoline for example.

But that is just my 5 cents.

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1 minute ago, BelgiumFury said:

I dont think nesecairly that a lot of balance changes have to happen with already existing mainstream units (Tanks / Planes) so people can figure out for a few months whats actually better etc.
But I do think Vali proposed an interesting idea a while ago. ( in this thread  War suggestions - Game Suggestions - Politics & War Forum (politicsandwar.com))
Someone else also proposed something like this although I don't recall where exactly. Their proposition was the ability for ships to have a "Coastal raid" type of attack. With a raid you would do less damage but could focus on one specific resource to steal.

 
I think ships having a wider variety of uses and not just "good for naval blockading and removing infra over 2500" would be an interesting change to the meta, and bring yet another unit to the forefront. I am a bigger far of the coastal raid idea than the attack all units idea, it could have strategic uses to deplete munitions or gassoline for example.

But that is just my 5 cents.

 

Quote

 

Ships

  • New Attack Type: Bombardment
    • When a nation is blockaded naval units can bombard a city instead of performing a naval battle.
    • This attack destroys 33% less infrastructure
    • This attack destroys 2 non-power plant, non-military improvements in that city.
      • If there are only power plant and military improvements, this attack kills no improvements.
    • This attack costs 50% less gas to perform.
    • This attack costs 50% more munitions to perform
    • If a bombardment attack happens while the defending nation has defending ships, the casualties caused by those defending ships is increased 25%.
      • Example: If you attack with 200 ships and they have 50 ships defending and those 50 ships were going to kill 20 attacking ships, in a bombardment attack they instead would kill 25 ships.
    • You must use at least 75% of your max navy when performing this attack
      • max navy is determined by the number ships you could have if all of your cities had max dry docks, not how many dry docks you current have
    • If you have 20 or less improvements in a city this attack will only kill 1 improvement.
    • If you have 5 cities or less, this attack only kills 1 improvement.

 

 

Something not yet added, but does give some increase ability to ships. Regarding the ability to kill planes or tanks after a blockade that would need some talk beyond me just going "I like it". I'm posting that thread into the Dev channel for discussion.

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1 minute ago, Prefontaine said:

 

 

Something not yet added, but does give some increase ability to ships. Regarding the ability to kill planes or tanks after a blockade that would need some talk beyond me just going "I like it". I'm posting that thread into the Dev channel for discussion.

Interesting. 
I think ships being able to kill other units would be pretty bad for balancing reasons right now. (Either they are still useless or they are the new meta), it was more another example of someone proposing to give ships more use.

I do think the idea of Naval Raids is a more interesting one than just "kill more types of units" (in addition to bombardement) because it would allow some deeper strategies in some scenarios..

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I'd be most interested in more unit variety.

As it stands if you have more than your opponent you're just going to win, this is especially true in a dogpile. Specializing your units in a way that can maximize them for their combat type, or let's them hit other areas better could make wars more interesting. Especially if we can't see, without some sort of new spy shenanigans, how much a unit variant makes up that unit. (Don't know how many of the enemy soldiers are AT Crews for example)

For instance Soldiers could be split into regular soldiers, AT Crews (cost more, do more damage to tanks, not as good against regular soldiers), and SAM units (cost more, help destroy enemy planes when they do an aerial attack against you, also not as good against regular soldiers).

Planes could be split into fighters and bombers. Fighters would be better against other planes, bombers better when hitting infra/ships/whatever.

Nukes could have the regular nukes and "dirty" nukes (less infra damage, maybe even less improvements destroyed, but the radiation effects last longer)

This could even pair with the proposed commodities to, perhaps, make some of the otherwise less useful ones needed for something.

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1 hour ago, Prefontaine said:

Do planes consistently kill more ships than naval?

The first one particularly. Two of those is basically the daily rebuild count of ships. While I understand the thinking behind you lose ships when planes don't, but you've had to clear the skies to get to that point. If the plane bombing rate is on par with these kill rates, I think the idea may be to nerf the plane kill rates of ships slightly and maybe buff the naval kills slightly as well. Something like 5%-10% for each. 

Look at that! it's already working.  once again you are welcome game. 

Side note you may want to look at your kill rates, so even plane attacks kill what? 10-15 percent of planes an attack? fairly even ground attacks kill about 15% of troops and 8-5% of tanks?  Does that need to be tweeked?  I dont know if it does, but its much harder to wipe out tanks than planes, granted you can launch 4 grounds for every 3 air.  I haven't launched any navals yet, so I dont know what the approximate kill rate is there but looking at your stats it seems to be around 10-15 percent as well.

 

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18 minutes ago, Bolby Ballinger said:

I'd be most interested in more unit variety.

As it stands if you have more than your opponent you're just going to win, this is especially true in a dogpile. Specializing your units in a way that can maximize them for their combat type, or let's them hit other areas better could make wars more interesting. Especially if we can't see, without some sort of new spy shenanigans, how much a unit variant makes up that unit. (Don't know how many of the enemy soldiers are AT Crews for example)

For instance Soldiers could be split into regular soldiers, AT Crews (cost more, do more damage to tanks, not as good against regular soldiers), and SAM units (cost more, help destroy enemy planes when they do an aerial attack against you, also not as good against regular soldiers).

Planes could be split into fighters and bombers. Fighters would be better against other planes, bombers better when hitting infra/ships/whatever.

Nukes could have the regular nukes and "dirty" nukes (less infra damage, maybe even less improvements destroyed, but the radiation effects last longer)

This could even pair with the proposed commodities to, perhaps, make some of the otherwise less useful ones needed for something.

Probably the only thing here I agree with

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Why should wars be made more difficult? 

 

It is good to have global wars, they make the game dynamic. What we should do would be to change the mechanic of blockading so as to not make the gameplay of the victim boring af and make military destroy less stuff in general. That would make wars longer and more affordable. Making the game, overall, more entertaining. 

 

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