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[Mechanics Change] Changes to War Mechanics to potentially solve "Dogpile" problem in game


Majima Goro
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A majority of wars till date have been dogpiles. While there are few examples of how a side with superior activity and "competence" in general have been able to "win" against dogpiles, dogpiles are generally hated by the community. The reason for the hate is that it is extremely hard to win a dogpile. While there have been a number of changes to solve this problem, none of them seem to have been effective enough. The most notable among these failed changes has been the reduction to causalities for defenders in the war compared to the aggressor. While such a system looks good on paper in a 1v1 situation, nations have 3 defensive slots and hence we really need to look at a 3v1 situation, sometimes at 9v1 situations even. The biggest reason for the failure is that to oppose an invading force, the defender needs to attack the aggressor as well in which case the causality nerf applies to the defender. Plus, having already lost units in the opening hits by the aggressor, the defender is effectively already fighting an up-hill battle.The topic of this forum post however is not to criticize past decision - it is to provide a solution and maybe influence any future ones. 

Potential Solutions:

  1. Ending all wars in beige: 
    This has been one of the most suggested changes to fight back against dogpiles. Dogpiles always rely on two things-Manpower and Beige Cycling. Ending all wars in beige makes Beige Cycling extremely difficult. Even at the current rate of 2 days of beige, at worst, the person on the losing side of a war would be able to get into a situation where he is being sat on by a single player alone and has upto 4 days of beige. Double Buys and coordination by the losing side could easily subdue this single person sitting on a zeroed person, letting them build up to at least some days of military buys and rejoining the battle against the enemy. Moreover, since both beiging and expiring the war would result in beige, players would be more inclined to beige their wars for the loot and infra damage than to just sit around and let a war expire.

    Ending all wars in beige do have some abusable points like where pirates could use this to get beiged before raiding new targets or slotfilling being hard to detect because the person is doing attacks. But such abuses would be easy to notice and punish. To make getting beiged by expired wars punitive for the defender, the target would lost 4% of their infrastructure as they would in case of being defeated. To make it punitive for the aggressor, a war beiged due to expiry will not give any beige loot to the aggressor. This would also stop abuses by pirates who might attack an inactive player, do a single attack to get their resistance below 100 and then expire the war without doing any more attacks but looting the target.

     
  2. Increasing Resistance Loss due to attacks:
    A second way to stop sitting would be to increase resistance loss due to attacks. Currently, the least number of attacks needed to beige a person 8 attacks. This implies that if you are attacked, the attacker would be able to do 8 battles against you and you will lose units 8 times. Now, if say the number of battles a person could do to you was reduced to 5. You would in theory lose 37.5% less units. The attackers would have to attack you more to zero you. This makes it more likely for the attacker to beige you and give you time to rebuild. This plus the lower causalities to defender would mean it is harder to zero a nation out without beiging them and giving them time to rebuild. 

    The proposal hence is that the resistance lost per attack be increased. A new resistance table would need to be drawn up for this. However, that is something a person good with numbers should do and not me. The theory is if more resistance is lost, sitting would be harder and beige time would help people recover. It is also possible that the players would enter beige with some military leftover.

     
  3. Decreasing defensive slots:
    This might be a controversial suggestion and might not be liked by all. However, a 2 defensive slot system could immensely help a smaller side. In a war with say an opponent 10 times larger than you own, the odds would always be 3v1 since that is the maximum number of defensive slots you have. Any person other than these 3 would just be sitting out there waiting for their turn. However, 3 people attacking 1 person might actually be overkill. A 2v1 might be more manageable. Not only this, since 2 people would kill less units, it might be more difficult to sit as well. Plus, upon getting beiged, it is possible the defender would still have a part of their military leftover.

    As to why this would be a bad thing to do, this would make the whales in the game extremely powerful, especially since it would be very hard to drag their military down and inflict much damage on them.

     
  4. Increasing daily buy limits:
    Another way to let dogpiled nations fight back is to increase daily buy limits for nations. Being able to buy more military daily(say 25%-33%) of your military daily would allow nations to easily fight back their aggressors, even if they have more military. Even though these attacks would probably be suicide attacks, a well-coordinated team attack could easily help beat down or even zero the aggressors in such situations.

    The downside to this is that since the aggressor too can buy more military, it might become more of a stalemate war with the winner being decided by whoever has a larger bank or more willpower to keep fighting.

    To implement this however, causalities would need to be increased to make it worthwhile to fight and double buy against the aggressors.
     
  5. Different kill rates depending on whether you are the aggressor or the defender:
    I opened with how reducing causalities to make wars even didn't exactly work out the way it was intended to. This is a patch to that change. Basically, depending on whether you are the aggressor or the defender, your causality rates would differ. If you are the aggressor, you would lose more units and kill less units in offensive wars compared to what the defender would. That is to say, if you lose 100 soldiers and 10 tanks and kill 200 soldiers and 30 tanks in an offensive ground battle as an aggressor, the defender would lose 50 soldiers and 5 tanks while killing 300 soldiers and 50 tanks in an offensive ground battle as the defender(the numbers are just examples). The difference in numbers signifies the "Home Advantage" of the defender. This could make chipping at the aggressor by defenders more worthwhile than they are now and give a better way to fight back.
     
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Fully agree in the changes here, especially with making aggression more costly per-attack.  It's often the case in games with thematically army-scale combat that the attacker should face 3:1 losses or similar for a good shot at victory.

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8 hours ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

you understand that these change would then force even more lopsided dogpiles right?

There is no way to stop people from dogpiling. There only are ways to make it easier to make a comeback for the smaller group. If you want to stop dogpiles from happening, you will need to do it politically, as in, go to a sphere or alliance or bloc and get them to treaty your own till numbers on both sides are more or less balanced.

Edited by Majima Goro
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4 hours ago, Majima Goro said:

There is no way to stop people from dogpiling. There only are ways to make it easier to make a comeback for the smaller group. If you want to stop dogpiles from happening, you will need to do it politically, as in, go to a sphere or alliance or bloc and get them to treaty your own till numbers on both sides are more or less balanced.

This statement is correct.

You shouldn't be able to win a dog pile, if you have failed at politics to the point of getting dog piled, you should lose.  If you are able to politically maneuver your opponents into a dog pile, its pretty ridiculous if the game mechanics are such that your opponents have a shot at winning a fight.

 

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29 minutes ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

This statement is correct.

You shouldn't be able to win a dog pile, if you have failed at politics to the point of getting dog piled, you should lose.  If you are able to politically maneuver your opponents into a dog pile, its pretty ridiculous if the game mechanics are such that your opponents have a shot at winning a fight.

 

I can't really say I agree with this.

From history, we can look at the Winter War with Finland giving the Soviets a bloody nose, and how even the greatly outnumbered + outsupplied Confederate rebels held out 5 years against the Union in the American Civil War.

From the game standpoint, there's not really any politics nowadays for the last few globals, which have basically amounted to "Find the Secret Treaties!" ever since Duck Hunt.  It could easily have been Rose or Blackwater getting dogpiled instead of Hollywood, because everyone's victim of just blaming secret treaties as some stupid CB.  Last war I remember with a decent CB was that one war about treasure raiding.  Not well thought out, but it at least had reason past fighting for the sake of fighting.

Edited by BrythonLexi
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What's claimed on the OWF as reasons for wars is all stagecraft for the masses.  So while people say secret treaty this, secret treaty that.  Really its revenge for this, or revenge for that, or prevent power consolidation/weaken potential opponents.  These are all fine goals for CBs and politics drive all of it.

Edited by Sweeeeet Ronny D
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Personally I think we should just change the mechanics so that Wampus can declare on any nation, that he can declare on any number of nations, and that no one can declare on him. Would be a fun meta.

 

===

To be explicit:

GnR already proved that updeccing is extremely weak right now. Updeccing depends on dogpiles. Your proposed changes, by weakening updecs more, could finally shift the game beyond the C4 barrier where the optimal strategy is now to have a bunch of farms feeding Godzilla-type nations a la Wampus who duke it out in mass city-buying contests so they can get sufficient supremacy to downdec the rest of the game.

Edited by Cherise
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13 hours ago, Cherise said:

GnR already proved that updeccing is extremely weak right now. Updeccing depends on dogpiles. Your proposed changes, by weakening updecs more, could finally shift the game beyond the C4 barrier where the optimal strategy is now to have a bunch of farms feeding Godzilla-type nations a la Wampus who duke it out in mass city-buying contests so they can get sufficient supremacy to downdec the rest of the game.

I would disagree with this statement, what GnR proved is poorly planned and coordinated updeclaring is extremely weak against a prepared and active opponents.  Up declaring still works great when you can have 500 less planes than your opponent, launch a airstrike on them and kill 300+ planes and only lose 150 planes.

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4 hours ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

I would disagree with this statement, what GnR proved is poorly planned and coordinated updeclaring is extremely weak against a prepared and active opponents.  Up declaring still works great when you can have 500 less planes than your opponent, launch a airstrike on them and kill 300+ planes and only lose 150 planes.

Then you lose half your planes to tank shock. Check.

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1 hour ago, Cherise said:

Then you lose half your planes to tank shock. Check.

Except its still 3 on 1, so they can cut your tank power in half, which prevents you from killing planes.  So in the opening attack they wipe out around 900-1000 planes, and if you are lucky you might pull two ground ITs and kill 200-250 planes yourself before they get air control in another 2-6 turns.

If you would like we can look at my opening war when myself a 41c and fellow 40c member got hit by a 35, 38, 35 city nations.  in the opening attack they wiped out 923 of my planes.  in defense i was able to kill 148, 147, 198 planes.    I quickly double GAed the 2 35s, one i got a moderate, then IT, the other i got two ITs, and killed 245 planes.

The turn after update, the 3rd guy C38 ran another Air on me, killed another 345 planes while losing 148. I ran 2 GAs on him now (rebuy!)  I lucked out and got 2 ITs on him and was able to kill 240 planes

So over the course of before update attack and one turn after update, I have lost 1268 planes, and killed 393 planes from one dude, 198 planes from another dude, and 535 planes from the 3rd guy, which equals out to 1126 over the 3 nations.  My advantage is none of them have air on me yet, and I have ground on all of them.  So despite the fact that I have 3-6 city advantages on all of them, they are able to kill more planes than I can, even with my ability to destroy planes by ground which means its only a matter of time before they get Air on me, and my ability to continue to kill planes by GAs is removed.  I am also lucky because this is the opening attack and my spies haven't been completely killed off yet so dont have to deal with another 300-500 planes getting killed.

FYI if you want to check these wars, by this time we get to a turn after update, we have looked at all the wars that are declared on us, and decided that mine and my fellow member's wars will be the easiest of the group to turn around since these were the biggest up declares, so we had some of our guys also jump on these dudes, while they still had military, which then allowed us to blank them out,  but if we didn't get help, 2 c35s and a c38 would have been able to drag myself a c41 and my buddy a c40.  which isn't a 3 on 1 it's a 3-2 up declare, and while they wouldn't have gotten away with taking no damage, they would have eventually beat us.

Edited by Sweeeeet Ronny D
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On 8/30/2021 at 2:18 PM, Majima Goro said:

Ending all wars in beige do have some abusable points like where pirates could use this to get beiged before raiding new targets or slotfilling being hard to detect because the person is doing attacks. But such abuses would be easy to notice and punish.

 I agree with most of your suggestions but I don't think people should be punished for trying to get beiged and more importantly, timing that beige appropriately. Only strategically minded players would think of starting a war in the hopes of getting beiged to help with another war. As long as they aren't working with the person they're fighting against, it's not slot filling and shouldn't be punished or discouraged.

 

On 9/1/2021 at 12:45 PM, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

You shouldn't be able to win a dog pile, if you have failed at politics to the point of getting dog piled, you should lose.  If you are able to politically maneuver your opponents into a dog pile, its pretty ridiculous if the game mechanics are such that your opponents have a shot at winning a fight.

On the flip side, it's pretty ridiculous if you fail so hard at war that you have to rely on politics to keep your alliance afloat. Your statement makes it seem like as long as you're a smooth talker, war doesn't matter. The game is called politics AND war.

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3 hours ago, Avatar Patrick said:

On the flip side, it's pretty ridiculous if you fail so hard at war that you have to rely on politics to keep your alliance afloat. Your statement makes it seem like as long as you're a smooth talker, war doesn't matter. The game is called politics AND war.

Well if you are terrible at war, then yes you will need to use politics to keep your alliance afloat.  But yes, generally politics are a tool to help you win wars.  Just like being good at war is a great tool to help you with a bunch of different politics.  Look at the difference between lets say Polaris, and Guardian.  Polaris, from what i understand, useless at war, probably struggles to find allies,  Guardian however is great at war, i feel like they could go to any bloc in the game and be like can we be allies, and everyone says yes.

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This is simple and has been for almost two years.

All wars end in beige. Full stop. That's it. Increase the beige given a tad too, and then you can even increase unit casualties and rebuy a bit to increase the overall intensity (and for no other reason tbh) without worry, as even an increase from 2.1 to 2.5 days, when factoring in the time to beige to begin with, will guarantee 5+ days of buys and beige.

 

Removal of defensive war slots makes whales hilariously OP and is one of the dumbest things I've ever read. There is no way on earth this a good idea.

 

Nerfing aggressor attacks is an equally bad solution if not worse. You'd think the raider alliances would get this, but apparently not. Nerfing aggression has never once been considered an acceptable solution for obvious reasons. I'm told more than a few alliances, even bigger ones, were experiencing some supply and funding issues prior to the war, not having what they wanted or needed, making aggression significantly more costly will stagnate wars.

And also, make the dogpiles worse. With just the numbers you put up, one would want a 3:1 to win anyway, especially if the opponent has higher activity/member competency/cohesion. 

Its not impossible to best superior numbers, see GNR. Lexi really ought no better considering they've seen me already theorycraft how to use well timed war policy usage and minor tiering advantages to add devastating leverage to activity and competency advantages with the objective of winning an aggressive attack at odds of 5, 6, even 7:1 against the attacker. Hell, back as a 2ic of a major alliance I theoryfcrafted very plausible strategies to aggressively win 3 or 3.5:1 fights. 3.5:1, against me, of course, the attacker. 

 

They weren't impossible ideas then, they aren't now either. It's not a cake walk, but it shouldn't be? It's very difficult, and would require large amounts of luck, as well as precision and skill, constantly and not just at bliz either, but possible nonetheless. Half your suggestions make not only such high risk actions impossible, it makes fighting for the underdog impossible. It would make any hope of a non dogpile impossible, or any hope of a roughly even war (as GNR was and should've been were Rose expecting a sucker punch), and I'm not really sure how any conclusion but this was come to when thinking of these. 

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20 hours ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

Except its still 3 on 1, so they can cut your tank power in half, which prevents you from killing planes.  So in the opening attack they wipe out around 900-1000 planes, and if you are lucky you might pull two ground ITs and kill 200-250 planes yourself before they get air control in another 2-6 turns.

If you would like we can look at my opening war when myself a 41c and fellow 40c member got hit by a 35, 38, 35 city nations.  in the opening attack they wiped out 923 of my planes.  in defense i was able to kill 148, 147, 198 planes.    I quickly double GAed the 2 35s, one i got a moderate, then IT, the other i got two ITs, and killed 245 planes.

The turn after update, the 3rd guy C38 ran another Air on me, killed another 345 planes while losing 148. I ran 2 GAs on him now (rebuy!)  I lucked out and got 2 ITs on him and was able to kill 240 planes

So over the course of before update attack and one turn after update, I have lost 1268 planes, and killed 393 planes from one dude, 198 planes from another dude, and 535 planes from the 3rd guy, which equals out to 1126 over the 3 nations.  My advantage is none of them have air on me yet, and I have ground on all of them.  So despite the fact that I have 3-6 city advantages on all of them, they are able to kill more planes than I can, even with my ability to destroy planes by ground which means its only a matter of time before they get Air on me, and my ability to continue to kill planes by GAs is removed.  I am also lucky because this is the opening attack and my spies haven't been completely killed off yet so dont have to deal with another 300-500 planes getting killed.

FYI if you want to check these wars, by this time we get to a turn after update, we have looked at all the wars that are declared on us, and decided that mine and my fellow member's wars will be the easiest of the group to turn around since these were the biggest up declares, so we had some of our guys also jump on these dudes, while they still had military, which then allowed us to blank them out,  but if we didn't get help, 2 c35s and a c38 would have been able to drag myself a c41 and my buddy a c40.  which isn't a 3 on 1 it's a 3-2 up declare, and while they wouldn't have gotten away with taking no damage, they would have eventually beat us.

I've done both updecs and downdecs. Last war, my updecs worked. Downdecs, your coalition wasn't working near its theoretical potential; I am better at downdeccing than you are and I suspect that might have been a factor limiting your war; i.e, a fear that your coalition would have figured out how to downdec efficiently as opposed to merely being effective against a relatively disorganized force.

 

One important thing to consider with updecs / downdecs is that they're not actually measured in cities, no matter how dumb and innumerate people might be. They're measured in percentages. The hit by 35s amounted to roughly a 17% updeclare, which would be the same as a 6 city nation attacking a 7 city nation. Last war, the realistic requirement for updecs from safe ranges was 50%, not even 33%.

 

Moreover, I think in my after-action report on the last war, one of the key recommendations was to attempt to avoid updec wars whenever possible. It's not simply that it's much harder these days than to simply score compress with no tanks and planestrat, but because high-city nations are more resource effective in terms of damage dealt for damage taken. Updeccing has always, even before the post-Roqpocalypse changes, been extremely costly and is a recipe for war stats suicide.

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On 9/3/2021 at 10:47 PM, Cherise said:

Updeccing has always, even before the post-Roqpocalypse changes, been extremely costly and is a recipe for war stats suicide.

Updeccing literally *is* supposed to be costly. 

Also percentages aren't a good stat at all times. Pure numbers might serve as better stats at times as well. Especially since the number of kills in PnW is not related to ratios(percentages) but is related to numbers. If you have a c10 hitting a c100, they would kill same number of planes that they would have against a c50. The causalities too are dependent on how many planes the opponent has. 

FunFact: The highest city updecc where you would kill equal or more planes than you lose is 1.35x your city. This means a c30 can hit a c40 and take out planes equal to or more than he'd lose. 3 c30s working together can hence take down a c40 such that the c40 loses 3x the planes the c30s individually do.

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5 hours ago, Majima Goro said:

Updeccing literally *is* supposed to be costly. 

Also percentages aren't a good stat at all times. Pure numbers might serve as better stats at times as well. Especially since the number of kills in PnW is not related to ratios(percentages) but is related to numbers. If you have a c10 hitting a c100, they would kill same number of planes that they would have against a c50. The causalities too are dependent on how many planes the opponent has. 

FunFact: The highest city updecc where you would kill equal or more planes than you lose is 1.35x your city. This means a c30 can hit a c40 and take out planes equal to or more than he'd lose. 3 c30s working together can hence take down a c40 such that the c40 loses 3x the planes the c30s individually do.

It's that casualties are based on how many planes the opponent has that creates the percentages.

 

For instance, a C10 hitting a C100, first, a team of 3 C10s will not be able to damage the C100 beyond the rebuy capability of the C100, and hence no actual damage will be dealt beyond war stats. Second, the C10s will see degradation of their combat capability as a function of the relative ratio between C100 and C10; vs a C20, on the other hand, the C10 will lose its planes much slower than suiciding into the C100s (and that's not even a tactical suicide, that's just pure suicide).

 

As for percentages in general; it's more a way of thinking. You're trying to fathom a gameplay features difference, as opposed to qualitative difference, between C6s engaging C7s and C35s engaging C40s. On the qualitative level, it's definitely there, the C35s (usually) will be more experienced and know what they're doing, whereas the C7s will need to be babysat. There is also a subtle, but not really substantial difference, between C6s vs C7s and C35s vs C40s. The C40s in the latter case, especially at the start of the war, will have massive amounts of infra, meaning that partisan resistance as part of ground attacks is higher, but the partisan resistance aspect of ground attacks is really minimal and can be easily bypassed.

 

Or, in other words, beyond the qualitative and mild gameplay factors, there's no real difference between a C6 hitting a C7 and a C35 hitting a C40. That's why I'm saying ratios and percentages.

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These mechanical changes aren't solely beneficial to a losing nation. These all seem designed to make it a lot more difficult (or rather, impossible) to take someone's military down and keep it down, which'll make it much harder to defeat nations with more cities/military. 

It also reduces the games already simple strategy, since this would remove any kind of beige cycling. If that's the case, imo there should be other mechanisms so at least people with more coordination can be rewarded for their efforts. 

What i'd like to see:

  1. If you are kept blockaded and run out of resources, you should still have options for fighting, albeit in a diminished capacity
  2. It should be easier to break or bypass blockades
  3. The kinds of attacks a losing nation does should be buffed (without severely changing the dynamics for everything else)

Ideas:
 - Allow buying and using soldiers without power, but they are weaker or the cap is much lower
 - Increase soldier tank kills, but also casualties to other soldiers
 - Some mechanism for receiving funds when blockaded (with some costs and limits associate with doing so)
 - Reduce navy rebuy to 3 days (maybe increase naval MAP usage and navy losses to air as a debuff for this?)
 - Have utter failures destroy some amount of infrastructure (though much less than a successful attack)

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or we could all start being transparent with treaties and stop caring so much about the aesthetics of having seperate spheres on the treaty web. i swear nobody would care about intersphere treaties if it weren't for the visual treaty web. Instead of just getting past a simple stupid aesthetic we keep having unknown alliances.

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On 9/9/2021 at 3:14 PM, Cherise said:

It's that casualties are based on how many planes the opponent has that creates the percentages.

 

For instance, a C10 hitting a C100, first, a team of 3 C10s will not be able to damage the C100 beyond the rebuy capability of the C100, and hence no actual damage will be dealt beyond war stats. Second, the C10s will see degradation of their combat capability as a function of the relative ratio between C100 and C10; vs a C20, on the other hand, the C10 will lose its planes much slower than suiciding into the C100s (and that's not even a tactical suicide, that's just pure suicide).

 

As for percentages in general; it's more a way of thinking. You're trying to fathom a gameplay features difference, as opposed to qualitative difference, between C6s engaging C7s and C35s engaging C40s. On the qualitative level, it's definitely there, the C35s (usually) will be more experienced and know what they're doing, whereas the C7s will need to be babysat. There is also a subtle, but not really substantial difference, between C6s vs C7s and C35s vs C40s. The C40s in the latter case, especially at the start of the war, will have massive amounts of infra, meaning that partisan resistance as part of ground attacks is higher, but the partisan resistance aspect of ground attacks is really minimal and can be easily bypassed.

 

Or, in other words, beyond the qualitative and mild gameplay factors, there's no real difference between a C6 hitting a C7 and a C35 hitting a C40. That's why I'm saying ratios and percentages.

I have no idea what your point is. I'm talking in a numbers perspective that the number of kills for any city remains a constant, be it in defensive or offensive wars. I'm not saying I'm going to use c10s cs c100s. I'm saying that the entire bs about squaring and applying percentages to make it seem like a c40 v c35 matchup is a extremely one-sided battle is unnecessary and in fact, extremely false. A c35 hitting a c40 is a close matchup. Infra here is an unnecessary thing to bring up since the c35 could have more infra or even infra with the c40. As for experience, that is also a non-factor. In most wars, the first hits are coordinated by milcom. Be it a c35 or a c7, they are expected to listen to milcom when they hit. Also, 3 c35s hitting a c40 with airstrikes is going to kill a shit ton of planes on the c40. Unless they were online to strike back first, the c40 would be extremely dead. 

 

Your entire point tbh should be that the game is too incompetent these days and Alex should make it easier for incompetentence to win if they have more numbers.

4 hours ago, Arln said:

or we could all start being transparent with treaties and stop caring so much about the aesthetics of having seperate spheres on the treaty web. i swear nobody would care about intersphere treaties if it weren't for the visual treaty web. Instead of just getting past a simple stupid aesthetic we keep having unknown alliances.

Again, this topic is meant to discuss how to make it such that losing nations can fight back better or get better time to get ready. If you want to discuss about secret treaties, then you should make a new topic. Secret treaties aren't gameplay mechanics, they are a failure of FA

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7 hours ago, Borg said:

What i'd like to see:

  1. If you are kept blockaded and run out of resources, you should still have options for fighting, albeit in a diminished capacity
  2. It should be easier to break or bypass blockades
  3. The kinds of attacks a losing nation does should be buffed (without severely changing the dynamics for everything else)

This already does happen. You can keep buying soldiers and suiciding them without munitions to kill tanks.

Blockades are a problem yes although maybe having blockades being auto-broken every say 6-12 turns isn't an option, atleast not one I believe will be a popular one.

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2 hours ago, Majima Goro said:

I have no idea what your point is. I'm talking in a numbers perspective that the number of kills for any city remains a constant, be it in defensive or offensive wars. I'm not saying I'm going to use c10s cs c100s. I'm saying that the entire bs about squaring and applying percentages to make it seem like a c40 v c35 matchup is a extremely one-sided battle is unnecessary and in fact, extremely false. A c35 hitting a c40 is a close matchup. Infra here is an unnecessary thing to bring up since the c35 could have more infra or even infra with the c40. As for experience, that is also a non-factor. In most wars, the first hits are coordinated by milcom. Be it a c35 or a c7, they are expected to listen to milcom when they hit. Also, 3 c35s hitting a c40 with airstrikes is going to kill a shit ton of planes on the c40. Unless they were online to strike back first, the c40 would be extremely dead. 

 

Your entire point tbh should be that the game is too incompetent these days and Alex should make it easier for incompetentence to win if they have more numbers.

Again, this topic is meant to discuss how to make it such that losing nations can fight back better or get better time to get ready. If you want to discuss about secret treaties, then you should make a new topic. Secret treaties aren't gameplay mechanics, they are a failure of FA

C40 vs C35 is not a one-sided battle. It's an extremely workable updeclare, comparable to C6 vs C7. I would actually consider it a sidedec, not an actual updeclare. For your range, it would be as if you had declared on a C28.

 

The point is that while the number of kills for a single city remains constant, the agglomeration of cities controls damage stability.

 

Let's say, for instance, 100 ships fight 50 ships. Ship fights, like ground fights, are symmetrical in the amount of damage dealt, but unlike ground fights, ship fights ignore population-based resistance, so it's an easier example. Ships deal between 8-12% of their count in damage, so let's say the 100 ships kill 10 ships, while the 50 ships kill 5 ships. So far, so good, right? But now it's 95 ships vs 40 ships, or 95% of previous damage output vs 80% of previous damage output. In a return fight, the formerly 100 ships have a strong chance to kill another 10 ships (50/50), while the 40 ships can expect to kill 4 ships instead of 5, a 20% reduction.

 

Let us say, assume 12 MAP go in. 100 ships kill 10 ships on the first stab, 9 ships on the second stab, and 9 ships on the third stab. That's 28 ships killed. The 50 ships on the other hand, kill 5 ships on the first stab, 4 ships on the second stab, and 3 ships on the third stab. That's a total of 12 ships killed, vs 28 ships killed, or about 85% of what having 50% the number of ships should actually imply (12 vs 14). At the end of the exchange, the 100 ships guy has 88 ships left. The 50 ships guy has 22 ships left, or that the 50 ships guy has lost more than 50% of his ships, whereas the 100 ships guy has 88% of his ships. If we continue infinitely, ignoring rebuys, the 50 ships guy, in another 2 engagements, will have about 5 ships left, while the 100 ships guy will have 85% ships left. Another attack by the 100 ships guy finishes off the 50 ships guy, or in other words, the 50 ships only manage to kill 15 ships, while the 100 ships have killed 50 ships. That's very disproportionate to what a 2:1 ratio looks like on paper.

 

This is why Lancaster's Square Law applies to PnW (even if we go to a salvo damage model, as a TKR player who really should have known better tried to obsfucate with). The 100 ships are not twice as powerful as the 50 ships, but four times more powerful than the 50 ships due to their greater damage stability.

 

===

 

As far as the game being too incompetent these days, I actually agree. The near-abolition of plane strat has dumbed down the fight. I still recall when, during Nova Riata vs Pantheon, I deployed a bunch of Pantheon members using Soldiers-Planes vs max-milled Nova Riata. We eventually overextended, after which Classic BK saved our asses once NR had been exposed with the infinite resources exploit, but NR's fighters were getting decimated, deplaned, and rendered non-operational despite fighting a nominally weaker force that had half their members.


This actually formed a sort of trinity, because tanks were useful for certain applications, planes were useful for certain applications, and ships were useful for yet another set of applications.

 

Tanks were used primarily as raiding tools and also to bulk score, in order to present a unified line and to prevent easy updeclares. The relative disutility of tanks in a conventional fight, likewise, provided an interesting meta in which tanks countered soldiers, planes countered tanks, and soldiers countered planes. Plane stratters were vulnerable to people conducting raiding ops against them (as they still are, except plane strat does very little these days), and presented exactly what you were asking for, a way to counter dogpiles.

Now, if people went to max tanks to counter raiding ops against planestratters, as people are doing now, they bulked up score massively and made themselves vulnerable to downdeclares or planestrats. These days, everyone maxes tanks, but there's really no penalty because plane strat doesn't work anymore.

 

===

 

But, honestly, I think you're just enjoying the extent to which downdeclaring is broken right now, and you want to have the game changed so that whoever the upper tier controls the game. Or, in other words, we should just make it so that Wampus owns the game, or alternately everyone builds a Wampus and goes to straight PnW feudalism (tons of farms and a fighting caste).

 

Numerical advantage is a fundamental aspect of the game; hell, you arguably won Roqpocalypse because of your numerical advantage (Alex listened to the masses). You are asking Alex right now to privilege the few (with way too many cities) over the many, and depending on how well the few donate / pay up, it might end up being the case.

 

Since NPO has departed, I don't have any particular affixation against a game made up of Wampuses and farms. In fact, I'd think it'd be exciting to an extent because of the sheer douchebaggery we could expect (Schrute, Greene, etc) from these people who have been built up with the cash of the masses and the ideological bullshit we could expect from people who can abuse their "lessers" with pure downdeclares. I'm retired, the game, imo, is built around douchebaggery, and it wouldn't bother me.

Edited by Cherise
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6 hours ago, Majima Goro said:

 

Again, this topic is meant to discuss how to make it such that losing nations can fight back better or get better time to get ready. If you want to discuss about secret treaties, then you should make a new topic. Secret treaties aren't gameplay mechanics, they are a failure of FA

Bro I was drunk when I wrote that post so idk 

Edited by Arln

               

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