Improvement Destruction Overhaul

[Harambe the Second]

Improvement loss is both uncommon and unimpactful, especially at higher tiers. I find it a bit silly that players can lose all their infra while still keeping the vast majority of their raw resource farms intact. It gets to the point where players will intentionally keep their infra damaged after a war, so their score remains low. The improvement loss is just so minuscule that rebuilding infra is sometimes more trouble than it’s worth, or even directly harmful. I also find it strange that C40 nations will lose just as many improvements as C10 nations, even though, from a game balance perspective, they should be losing four times as many.
 

Here are some suggestions to improve the improvements:

 

1. Improvement destruction chance scales with war type: 

Aggressors in raid, ordinary, and attrition wars have a 25%, 50%, and 100% modifier to their improvement destruction rolls respectively. 
Defenders have a 50%, 50%, and 100% modifier respectively

 

2. Improvement destruction chance scales with infra damage

Cities have a 12.5% chance of losing an improvement for every 50 infrastructure damage they take. This number scales with modifiers such as war type. This change means that raid wars have a much smaller chance of destroying improvements, while attrition wars have an exponentially higher chance. This also replaces the original 15% improvement loss chance on ground and naval battles. 
 

3. Zero infra? Zero Improvements. 

If a nation is unable to lose infra due to simply not having enough of it, their chance of losing improvements is doubled.
 

4. Missiles and nukes eat Improvements for breakfast 

Missiles and nukes do not guarantee 1 or 2 destroyed improvements. They now roll to destroy Improvements for every 35 infra damage dealt.
 

5. Trifecta bonus:

Players with simultaneous ground, air, and naval superiority have a 25% higher chance to destroy the improvements of the poor saps they are warring against

6. War Policy Rebalance:

Because improvement destruction is much easier, players with the Tactician war policy will now have a 50% higher chance to destroy improvements. On the other hand, players with the Guardian war policy now have a 33% lower chance to lose improvements. The Pirate war policy loses its improvement-related downside, and instead reduces the passive income of its owner by 5%, just to spite you “pirates“ with 2000 infra. 
 

Please yell at me in the replies

 

Edited February 23, 2022 by Harambe the Second

[zigbigadorlou]

7. Beige destroys improvements

 

I like half the ideas. You should create a poll once this is discussed so we can vote on what changes we would want to see if a change to this was pushed live in 2024

[Dryad]

You make a lot of good points and I especially agree that damage to improvements should scale with city count. I think a similar argument can be made for infra damage dealt: that perhaps attacks should damage the infra of more than one city at higher city count, but I guess that's a different discussion.

Why do you think increased improvement-loss is a change the game needs? I definitely agree that the current state is silly, certainly not logical that a burnt down city would function normally. However, I actually like it the way it is. You wrote that "players will intentionally keep their infra damaged after a war, so their score remains low", but that's very much not the meta atm. Right now wars end and everyone rebuilds. I would love to see more cases of people choosing not to rebuild after wars and instead use the opportunity for instance to go raid. I also think that increased improvement-loss would make getting rolled much more devastating, which imo isn't something the game needs. So I'd argue this is an aspect of the game mechanics that, albeit silly, is actually good for the game.

Then some of your numbers are funny. A nuke does around 1800 infra damage usually which would be 51 destroyed improvements with your proposed 1 improvement destroyed for every 35 infra damage dealt. That's close to just a full removal of all improvements in the attacked city and I would say that might be a bit much given there is no defense against nukes and missiles other than praying that VDS / Iron Dome block the shots. That being said, I'm actually not opposed to making loser weapons overpowered.

[Jacob Knox]

I agree that improvement destruction could definitely use an overhaul, but I'm wary of some of these suggestions.

Hypothetical

I'm a C20, so I have a maximum capacity of 300 ships. Say I have 300 ships and I have gotten my opponent to 0. I have declared an attrition war with tactician war policy and gained superiority in all three fields. Under your proposal, I could have a modifier of around 300% if they have 1,000 infra and around 337.5% is they have 2,000 infra. That is borderline overpowered modifiers. And that's on top of the already 500-700 infra damage I would be doing (dependent on infra levels).

My Feedback/Opinion

1. I like, and agree with, the modifier based on war type. It just makes sense in my opinion.
2. If the modifier based on infra damage were to be implemented, I would suggest raising the number from 50 infra. Possibly 100 to 150 to make it a bit more balanced.
3. Perfectly fine with the consequences of zero infra listed.
4. I'm 50/50 on the missile/nuke one. Would need more information. What are the proposed odds for each roll? Any other modifiers? Do nukes have a higher chance than missiles? Etcetera.
5. I don't agree with the trifecta bonus. It's unnecessary and a bit too much, in my opinion. Kicking someone while they're down is only fun to an extent.
6. I think if you want to lower the odds of Tactician and Guardian, keep them at the same level (like they are now). Though I could see an argument for having Guardian lower so they don't completely cancel each other out, but the other proposed modifiers would make up for it anyway. There's a debate to be had here.

[Zevari]

I quite like the concept of many of the points you make, although it feels like they would need severe play testing to properly balance out. (I feel like this would nerf pirates though. Don't most of them run max military with more slots than infra, you would be crippled within one counter due to mass destroyed improvements)

4 hours ago, Harambe the Second said:

4. Missiles and nukes eat Improvements for breakfast 

Missiles and nukes do not guarantee 1 or 2 destroyed improvements. They now roll to destroy Improvements for every 35 infra damage dealt.

I heavily disagree with this one, Missiles are meant to strategically destroy certain areas of infrastructure. Missiles are not made to be mini nukes, they are made to neuter important structures such as HQs or factories. 

Nukes might work like this, but the thing with weapons like these is they are ironically not that destructive in regards to buildings. Sure point Zero would be heavily damaged but the main reason you can't said buildings is radiation, the biggest consequence of a nuke is the damage it does to Humans, not the buildings. 

Most of the intensive damage done in warfare is by ground assaults due to the need to rip apart enemy fortifications. (They would proactively blow up anything that provides the enemy cover or a strategic advantage.)

[Majima Goro]

I'm not sure how infrastructure correlates with buildings. While you need infrastructure to make a building, a building can function without infrastructure as well, albeit, at lower efficiencies.

Let's take an example: 

You need to build a town and each house needs a stretch of road equal to 1km to be built. If I build the road and then the houses and then destroy the road, the houses would still be present. People can still live in them. However, moving from one place to another would be difficult and reduce efficiency. In this context, the road is the infrastructure and the houses are the buildings.

From a more practical, game-oriented POV, forcing someone to keep making infrastructure to say 2500 to be able to support 50 buildings is simply over-kill, especially in wars. Not only that, wars would be over in a moment with this suggestion especially since the losing side would lose most of their improvements, even a 40 city nation would lose all their improvements, in less than a week. The only option for them would be to then either throw the towel or rebuild a lot of infrastructure to even fight another round. Not to mention, making mechanics in a way which makes it fricking easy to roll someone into the dust would promote bipolarity since each side would have to be the absolute strongest to not lose a war, especially since losing a war would be extremely costly.

On 2/24/2022 at 5:27 AM, Dryad said:

I would love to see more cases of people choosing not to rebuild after wars and instead use the opportunity for instance to go raid.

Hi

[Jacob Knox]

4 hours ago, Majima Goro said:

*snip*

While I can see, and agree with, your perspective that this is a bit extreme, even you must admit that the current rate at which improvements can be destroyed is garbage. Especially when you're dealing with a pirate who has 500-700 infra, but running a 2,000 infra build since they rarely get their improvements destroyed. It's a particular pain in the butt from a milcom perspective when the enemy is doing decent damage, but you can hardly touch them because of that "exploit" (as I'll call it).

Personally, I just think the improvements destroyed system could use a bit of rebalancing.

[Majima Goro]

7 hours ago, Jacob Knox said:

Especially when you're dealing with a pirate who has 500-700 infra, but running a 2,000 infra build since they rarely get their improvements destroyed.

When your population falls below a certain limit, you cannot use your max military anyway. That literally is equivalent to losing improvements. Fyi, at my 650 infra, I cannot get more than 330k soldiers, around 60k below my max capacity or equivalent to 20 barracks! In essence I've already lost 20 barracks once my population goes below a set threshold. The same is true for my other units as well which have been severely nuked in terms of buy terms.

[Ukunaka]

12 hours ago, Majima Goro said:

When your population falls below a certain limit, you cannot use your max military anyway. That literally is equivalent to losing improvements. Fyi, at my 650 infra, I cannot get more than 330k soldiers, around 60k below my max capacity or equivalent to 20 barracks! In essence I've already lost 20 barracks once my population goes below a set threshold. The same is true for my other units as well which have been severely nuked in terms of buy terms.

Yeah I'm with you on this one.

Though the very 1st suggestion about making attrition wars increase improvement loss I am In support of.

I'd also be ok with buffing Tactician policy.

[Majima Goro]

5 hours ago, Ukunaka said:

I'd also be ok with buffing Tactician policy.

Paired with Pirate, Tactician has insanely high improvement kill rates. If anything, the policy that actually needs rebalancing would be Blitzkreig. The 24 hour buff doesn't make any sense to go in for especially given the demerits. (I'll make a thread later on it)

[Ukunaka]

10 hours ago, Majima Goro said:

Paired with Pirate, Tactician has insanely high improvement kill rates. If anything, the policy that actually needs rebalancing would be Blitzkreig. The 24 hour buff doesn't make any sense to go in for especially given the demerits. (I'll make a thread later on it)

Yeah blitzkrieg definitely needs work, my idea for it was that it has that effect for the first 12 turns of any offensive war they declare instead of when they change to the policy.

[Mohammad]

Agree to principles.

 

Just have the phd's figure out the numbers.