Proposed Beige Change

[Sweeeeet Ronny D]

So can we assume that every defeat still gives 2 days to the beige timer?  And the beige timer wont decrease if you still have active defensive wars?  so after the first round assuming a successful blitz with full coverage, your entire opposition will have atleast 6 days to rebuild?   So assuming your opponent has their shit together, you now get to wait 6 days for them to turn around and counter blitz you, and basically you go back and forth blitzing each other until one side runs out of steam?

As someone that runs an alliance military, this is exhausting.  Am I missing something here? Is that what the dev team was envisioning when they set out this proposed rule change? 

I would think that if this goes into effect, global wars going forward would just be full curbstomps. Where the goal is to come in with such overwhelming numbers that the other side would have no chance even if they got the chance to turn around and counter blitz after the end of the first round.

I gotta be missing something here right?

I'm still thinking about this, and thinking out loud, and I think you still see staggering, its just a little different, so you speed beige a large group of your opponents, and then you slow beige another group, just to break it up, but even that would be questionable because the defenders could pick up some offensive targets and lose those wars to boost up their timer, and even it out.  I get now why you want to penalize people coming out of beige early.

 

Edited March 15, 2022 by Sweeeeet Ronny D

[Panky]

just disagree with the unit debuff for coming out of beige and that the timer doesnt start running until all wars end, simply make all wars end on beige and stop overcomplicating stuff add one by one

Edited March 15, 2022 by Panky

[Vemek]

If #1 and #3 are both implemented people may as well be guaranteed a full rebuild regardless of what you do and the value of the blitz factor ends up being greatly diminished.

This would largely shift the decisive factor in wars to be the size of an alliances stockpile rather than skill, coordination or general military performance since I'd imagine evenly matched wars would devolve into both sides counter blitzing each other until somebody goes broke. (also rip the milcom people who'd have to organise this lmao). 

Wars would end up being a lot less frequent with alliances spending large amounts of time in peace focused on rebuilding their stockpiles and people would also be a lot more reluctant to fight wars on even terms knowing how damaging it can be. Putting an emphasis on stockpiles also greatly disadvantages newer alliances needing to push nation growth and simultaneously front the costs of an increased stockpile whilst lacking the extensive reserves or strong tax bases of the older and larger alliances in the game.

Edited March 15, 2022 by Vemek

[Prefontaine]

Just now, Vemek said:

If #1 and #3 are both implemented people may as well be guaranteed a full rebuild regardless of what you do and the value of the blitz factor ends up being greatly diminished. This would largely shift the decisive factor in wars to be the size of an alliances stockpile rather than skill, coordination or general military performance since I'd imagine evenly matched wars would devolve into both sides counter blitzing each other until somebody goes broke. (also rip the milcom people who'd have to organise this lmao). 

Wars would end up being a lot less frequent with alliances spending large amounts of time in peace focused on rebuilding their stockpiles and people would also be a lot more reluctant to fight wars on even terms knowing how damaging it can be. Putting an emphasis on stockpiles also greatly disadvantages newer alliances needing to push nation growth and simultaneously front the costs of an increased stockpile whilst lacking the extensive reserves of strong tax bases of the older and larger alliances in the game.

No one is forcing you to rebuild and fight back, merely giving you the option to if your side views it as a valid option.

[Prefontaine]

Allow me to be blunt. The largest complaint about wars in this game stem from the fact that wars are decided in the first day or a war and that when you're the winning side you need not win a war. This is what this change is addressing. Wars will end with a victor and the loser can have a chance to rebuild thus eliminating the wars being decided immediately. 

The complaints that wars will be less frequent - I'd rather see 50% less globals in a year if it means those wars don't have the above problems and are more fun. Leadership and active players, who are largely the people who will post in these threads, may be okay with cycling because it's easier than planning multiple blitzes but players do no like sitting there and doing nothing in a war. At least if the war is a dogpile the winning side is having a bit more fun versus sitting there idling and getting nuked/missiled.

It's just a resource race now - A dogpile will still be a dogpile. Nothing will prevent you from selling everything you have and curling up in a ball until their tired of kicking you. What it will allow is that if there's a chance for a side to turn the tide, they now have the window to. Will it cost them more resources? Of course, but this is where war resources are supposed to be used, in war. 

That this method doesn't require skill versus cycling - Please. If you can cycle even 50% of the side your fighting remotely well enough you're fine. People slipping through cracks doesn't turn the tide. If anything allowing a side the chance to muster and another side needing to defend requires more skill/planning/execution.

That this will only cause dog piles - If mechanics that allow the blitzed side a chance to come back in a fair fight stop nations from going to war that's on the player base. Don't expect me to create mechanics that grow you a spine. Players only engage in wars that they have no chance of losing, then that is solely on the players.

[LukeTP]

I can see what you're trying to do with these proposals and i'm not entirely opposed to them but do think they could be balanced a bit better.

First up, dogpiles suck for everyone, it doesn't matter whether you get to hit the attack button every day or not, they're boring, they're unproductive and they just cause the losing side to sit there doing nothing for anything from a week to a month or 6 months or however long before the winning side decides it can't be bothered any more. Anything that has the sole outcome of increasing the likelihood of a dogpile happening should be tossed in a bin, that bin should be burnt, then nuked, and then whatever is left should be launched into some distant star.

Regarding the points in the original post:

1. I like the idea that all wars end in beige. It stops the perpetual beige cycling that exists at the moment.

2. I like inactive wars automatically expiring. If you aren't fighting, it isn't a war.

3. If beige timers do not start until the last war expires, then I think we should reduce the length of beige. If a nation has 5 offensive and 3 defensive wars, loses all of them, but the fighting is done around the time of the first beige, the nation would get basically 212 turns of nothing (over 17 days). My thinking is either beige starts immediately and stays at 2 days per war, OR reduce to maybe 1 day, but start when the last war ends.

4. Makes it impossible to fight back against a dogpile (leaving beige early is almost the only tool you have to try and surprise the enemy and get back at them).

5. This just makes dogpiles easier. if you have 5 offensive wars that you finish on the same day, that's a 225% rebuild straight away.

[Dryad]

I honestly really like this.

Quote

4. If a nation leaves beige early, their units are 10% less effective in offensive wars for 12 turns.

This one I would like to be changed to something like this:

"If a nation leaves beige early while having more than 12 turns of beige, their units are 10% less effective in offensive wars for 12 turns."

I think that would make guerilla warfare more fun, while not providing much of a timeframe for a whole coalition to organize a blitz without most people getting the debuff.

[Majima Goro]

  

2 hours ago, Prefontaine said:

1. All wars end in beige. If the war would expire, the nation with the most resistance win. If the resistance is tied, the win goes to the defending nation.
2. If no attacks happen by either party in 20 turns, the war ends.
3. Beige timers do not begin reducing until all defensive wars have ended.
4. If a nation leaves beige early, their units are 10% less effective in offensive wars for 12 turns.
5. If a nation wins a war, that nation can produce an additional 25% units for the remainder of that day. This number stacks but is always calculated off of the base 100% unit production levels.

I might be wrong here but I feel the extreme emphasis on "All wars end in beige" is sabotaging this proposed mechanics change. While beige cycling definitely is the biggest problem in globals, it is a valid strategy and requires coordination to pull off. I definitely do not want to remove the entire concept of beige cycling here. However, the means to achieve it should be made very difficult. 

Currently, if your opening blitz went well, you'd be able to attack zeroed or lightly militarized opponents in round 2, get Air Superiority(12 resistance, 4 MAPs), get a Naval Blockade(14 resistance, 4 MAPs) and Ground Control(10 resistance, 3 MAPs) and sit on the opponent with 70-80% military on your nation. All in all, it took you 36 resistance and 11 MAPs(5 turns) to completely annihilate and block off any sort of recovery of an opponent. Since there are usually 3 people hitting a single target, you could even have the other two people not do the naval blockade and keep the enemy at 14 resistances higher. Since the enemy is zeroed, you don't need to do any more attacks. Any military they buy can be grounded down with one or two ground attacks and/or airstrikes. And then one of you can beige and the rest expire their wars. You have achieved beige cycling in just 5 turns of into a war! The entire problem lies in how fast it is possible to block off recovery for a zeroed nation.

While the proposed changes do infact help a nation to rebuild completely, complete rebuilds aren't really the golden solution to this problem. As SRD and Vemek have pointed out, the biggest problems that would arise out of this would be power accumulation and warchest accumulation. On the political side, spheres would try to fill their ranks with as many people as possible, leading to a bipolar world, a concept I'm very much against and which I believe a lot of people are against as well. If you have huge numbers, no matter how much you rebuild, you'll be able to keep curbstomping the enemy every time. Take for example the KT-Swamp war. Even if KT was able to completely rebuild, at best, they'd be able to do tons of damage before being suppressed by numbers. This would go on an on till one side ran out of resources, Swamp in this case being the bigger one, being able to outproduce KT. While this is an extreme example, even a 1.75:1 situation would result in similar results. Not only this, newer alliances who don't have much capital would not be able to keep up with older alliances with huge resources in their banks. 

1 hour ago, Prefontaine said:

No one is forcing you to rebuild and fight back, merely giving you the option to if your side views it as a valid option.

No, this is not the solution to the last point I made! This should never ever be a solution except in the most extreme of cases. 

Anyway, here is my counter proposal for the mechanics change:

#1) All* wars end in beige. Upon expiration of defensive wars, if defender has less resistance, he is beiged. Offensive wars do not result in beige for aggressor upon expiration if aggressor has less resistance. If both have same resistance, neither loses the war and none is beiged. 
#2) If a particular attack does not happen in 12 turns, any superiority gained from the specific attack earlier expires. 
#3) Beige Time from expired wars is reduced to 18 turns rather than 24. 3 defensive wars expiring would hence give at most 54(4.5 days) turns of beige rather than 72(6 days). No change will be made to beige time from losing wars conventionally. 
#4) Beige timers run the way they do. However, beige should not stack past 8 days in any circumstance. 8 days should be enough to rebuild and would not reward declaring offensive wars for the sole purpose of stacking beige past a point.

In addition to these, expired war beige doesn't let you loot the opponent or destroy their infrastructure.

The proposed changes here are meant to keep cycling a thing while at the same time making it much much harder to cycle. Incentives must be given to beige wars conventionally. Here, the no additional damage vs less beige time question makes for an interesting choice whether to beige or to expire a war. Moreover, sitting is disincentivized by expiring superiorities periodically. Unless you keep doing attacks, the enemy might be able to turn the tides of war when your superiority on him expires. While I might have people yelling at me for the suggestion that offensive wars don't result in beige from expire defeat for aggressor, I would like to clarify that I myself don't think it would be a good change but I've added it so it can be debated on.

[Corvidae]

I think we could tweak a few things using the suggestions from the comments here, but I overall actually like this proposal. I know it'll jinx it but hopefully this is leading towards a new beige mechanic that works better than the current system.

 

I'd echo the sentiment that removing the debuff for leaving beige early would be a good idea after reading some feedback.

[Dryad]

4 hours ago, Prefontaine said:

5. If a nation wins a war, that nation can produce an additional 25% units for the remainder of that day. This number stacks but is always calculated off of the base 100% unit production levels.

I just had a thought on this. Given two strong spheres A and B as well as an extremely weak sphere C, how would A approach an attack on B?

With this proposed mechanic there is a really funny idea of A first hitting and completely stomping C to farm wins and then using the unit production buff to blitz B 2 days after the blitz on C.

Edited March 15, 2022 by Dryad

[Prefontaine]

12 minutes ago, Dryad said:

I just had a thought on this. Given two strong spheres A and B as well as an extremely weak sphere C, how would A approach an attack on B?

With this proposed mechanic there is a really funny idea of A first hitting and completely stomping C to farm wins and then using the unit production buff to blitz B 2 days after the blitz on C.

Well, then Sphere B gets a 2 day notice of what's coming and can plan accordingly, or they can quickly team up with C to fight A because of that notice as well. 

 

Sounds.... Dynamic.

Edited March 15, 2022 by Prefontaine

[Prefontaine]

30 minutes ago, Majima Goro said:

Snip

You quoted the answer, no one is forcing the alliances to rebuild and fight back. They don't have to throw all of their resources into a war, they can sit and bide their time for the next war just like in the current system. Only with this change, they will now have the option to fight back if they choose and deem it worth the cost to rebuild the alliance army. 

[Majima Goro]

2 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

You quoted the answer, no one is forcing the alliances to rebuild and fight back. They don't have to throw all of their resources into a war, they can sit and bide their time for the next war just like in the current system. Only with this change, they will now have the option to fight back if they choose and deem it worth the cost to rebuild the alliance army. 

7 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

Sounds.... not Dynamic

 

[KindaEpicMoah]

Controversial opinion, but I actually like some of the proposed changes, or at least the direction the proposed changes seem to be going in. I think the general problem with beige is that 1) beige is purely beneficial for whoever receives it which means 2) there is a large incentive to cycle beige which leads to beige not being used for its intended purposes. Of course when you factor in infrastructure damage/loot, this can change, but in an actual war, military control always comes first. 

Beige should be both a punishment and a relief for those who receive it. I agree with Babai (Majima Goro) that beige cycling should not be completely done away with, but at the same time it should be made harder to do and less appealing of a strategy. Frankly, beige cycling is boring as shit for both the person cycling and the person being cycled. Nations should be given actual time to rebuild in beige, but cycling can be employed to slow down their rebuild periods (rather than completely remove any chance of rebuilding, like how it is now). Additionally, counterblitzes are much harder to organize than blitzes, since beige time/rebuild amounts can greatly vary depending on how many enemies a player fought and how much military they lost doing so, and I think that the 10% military effectiveness debuff incurred does address concerns of an overwhelming counterblitz from a larger sphere onto the smaller attacking sphere. 

Additionally, beige should reward the winners. At this point in time, beige provides no benefit related to war. Infrastructure damage and loot are good for you, yes, but they only slow down enemy growth, rather than having any influence on the outcome of the war. The bonuses outlined in #4 and #5 would not only reduce the incentive of cycling by giving people who beige an edge in war, but it'd also give players fighting multiple nations at once an advantage over players fighting just one nation, and perhaps most importantly, it'd give ships an actual use in war. At the moment, ships have a very minimal impact on war, and it is generally accepted that having no ships is better (for war) than having max ships since ships add unnecessary score (although if you want to avoid losing infrastructure to ships, then people will run ships, but this is not an impact on war, it is an impact on growth). Blockade cycles aren't much of an issue since (smart) people will carry the right amount of warchest on them to fight a couple of rounds (without getting looted for insane amounts), and if people run out they can resort to credits/looting inactive enemies/randoms. But with this change, players would have to choose between running no ships and risking getting beige rushed which buffs their opponents and debuffs them if they choose to leave beige, or having max ships while running the risk of being downdeclared on. 

However there are a couple of criticisms I agree with. The first and foremost criticism being that a lot of these changes promote the need to stockpile warchest, since the side with the most resources will win, which leads to wars happening less often. I think that wars in general should be cheaper (units should require less to build and less to operate, in order to encourage fighting back more), but additionally, I think that the bonus in #5 should be changed to a unit effectiveness bonus similar to #4, rather than being a unit production bonus. When an attacker wins a war, their attacks in all other wars, including defensives, will destroy more units. I also think that the bonus should depreciate with each war won (i.e. a 25% bonus for winning 1 war, a 12.5% bonus for winning a 2nd war, etc.), so the bonus becomes a marginal advantage, rather than a total advantage. Lastly, there needs to be some sort of indicator if a player has either of these debuffs/buffs. I'd imagine it could go with the other effects like air control under each person's nation on the war page. 

I'm sure there's other stuff I wanted to say, but I'll leave it at that for now. 

Oh and while we're on the topic of war changes, can we get some sort of timeframe on the nuke/missile/ID/VDS reworks discussed in this post? It kind of feels like they got dropped off of the face of the earth. 

 

[Ayayay]

Holy shit I'm agreeing with SRD, wtf is going on

[Who Me]

7 hours ago, Prefontaine said:

If a nation wins a war, that nation can produce an additional 25% units for the remainder of that day. This number stacks but is always calculated off of the base 100% unit production levels.

Does this mean that if a nation wins 4 wars in a day they can then rebuild 100% of the military units in one go and not have to wait the extra days to rebuild?

2 hours ago, Prefontaine said:

You quoted the answer, no one is forcing the alliances to rebuild and fight back. They don't have to throw all of their resources into a war, they can sit and bide their time for the next war just like in the current system. Only with this change, they will now have the option to fight back if they choose and deem it worth the cost to rebuild the alliance army. 

Or one side could all hit VM for a few weeks thus losing very little and killing activity in the game.

 

Are the loot rules for beige still going to be applied the same? If 2 nations fight a war to a draw why should 1 of those nations be punished by losing loot and infra from a beige

 

 

[Zei-Sakura Alsainn]

Drop 3, 4 and 5. 

I have stated this many, many times, but there was already a solution to this problem TWO YEARS AGO with broad community support and tested on the test server.

Stop trying to reinvent the damned wheel.

 

All wars and in beige and inactive wars cancel automatically deletes beige cycling as a problem. It'll still be theorhetically possible in select circumstances but that's about it. 

 

Congratulations, I just made your wars more fluid and dynamic, while not eliminating the need for skill or coordination or for proper warchest planning. You'll need both because high intensity combat will last longer and the battlefield will shift far more often. 

 

As opposed to this incredibly over baked "Dev Team" variant that has BRILLIANTLY figured out how reinvent PONG of all things in a text based game where hundreds of people are both the ball and the paddles. Dunno bout you, but I don't find pong very fun.

Edited March 15, 2022 by Zei-Sakura Alsainn

[Benfro]

5 hours ago, Prefontaine said:

The complaints that wars will be less frequent - I'd rather see 50% less globals in a year if it means those wars don't have the above problems and are more fun. Leadership and active players, who are largely the people who will post in these threads, may be okay with cycling because it's easier than planning multiple blitzes but players do no like sitting there and doing nothing in a war.

You know what else most players don't like? Long peace periods. It is why we have pushed to get away from long NAPs as a community. Shorter, more frequent wars are fun! Cutting the wars in half will also lose a lot of our newest, interested, and engaged members who join during peace time. I firmly disagree with this argument

--

Overall, I love the idea of all wars ending in beige. Previously, there was plan of a beige time cap, which I think would solve much of the issue here. I agree with many of the above posters that we need to find a way to encourage people not to sit on beige, whether that is a bonus for leaving early or extra rebuild capacity or whatever else. Allowing (or forcing) players to sit on beige endlessly (see: over a week in some cases) will not make the game more engaging or interesting.

Implement a cap, allow more units to be built during beige time, or something/anything that will keep more players engaged in more wars is a benefit to the entire community.

Edited March 15, 2022 by Benfro

[Ukunaka]

So you turn the tied in a war or block them from defeating you at the last moment but they still beige you because they had more resistance when the war ends?

If someone cant complete a war they shouldnt get the rewards of it. 

Im not completely opposed to them being beiged, but no loot should be given on expired wars.

 

There also should be no penalty for breaking beige, I dont even understand the reason for this.

I also dont understand why there is a buff for winning a war.

[Wendell Williams]

.

Edited March 17, 2022 by Deulos

[Joe Schmo]

This has a few problems IMO

The "All wars end in beige" and "Wars end after 20 turns" thing only encourages beiging before the war expires and spacing out your attacks, the former of which kind of exists already in the form of nuke beiges, and the latter just being good common sense when sitting.

I don't like how winning wars gives more recruitable units, since that only makes it much much harder to fight back against a losing war, and gives the winner more "momentum" than you. Keep in mind, you're going to have a sizeable portion of your fighting force out of the fight or with 10% weaker units.

The beige timer only going down when there's no defensives is a pretty good solution to the problem though.

 

Edited March 16, 2022 by Joe Schmo

[Avakael]

16 hours ago, Prefontaine said:

Wars that can last over a month being decided in the first day where the winning side doesn't win the physical wars and has to sit there doing nothing is not a good system, nor is it fun. 

Your sentiment is correct, but the way you intend to fix it won't actually make anything better. The winner will still be decided within the first round, because there'll be nowhere near as many nations rebuilding their way to try again from beige than there were nations available in the first place. You're just making the process more tedious and expensive for everyone involved. Otherwise you wouldn't be including points 4 or 5 to compensate, because both of them go against your stated intention in this quote- why would you, for example, make your military units 10% less effective when you come out of beige early, when a counteroffensive with everyone choosing to exit beige early at a specific time is the only tactic anyone would have available to try and re-take control of the war?

In reality, the issues with the PnW war system run vastly deeper, and won't be fixed by tweaking individual components like the beige system. It should be rebuilt from scratch- not just MAP and beige, but wars themselves, military units, etc. PnW made things interesting over CN by splitting infrastructure, land and improvements out from a single national pool into individual cities- why not think about how to do the same for our armies?

[Maks Maximmillian]

Imo points 1 and 5 are ok but 2,3,4 are worse than it already is.

[Prefontaine]

With feedback we have scratched off points 4 and 5 in the OP. 1-3 will remain and be implemented into the test server for a future tournament when Alex is able. 

[Viselli]

1-4 are the problem 5 should be the only one implemented as it gives incentive for winning wars and makes attackers consider before letting a war run down. In terms of the others 

1. This takes away beige cycling which is the only chance a smaller alliance has of beating an alliance of larger numbers or city size. If after every round things reset in terms of military size the people with the largest military win. 

2. This enables people who want to extend their beige time to hit inactives or those that can't fight back knowing the war would end soon and as point 1 states, defenders win in a tie. 

3. Just like in number 1 this prevents beige cycling, which is a bad thing. 

4. This is aimed directly at the portion of the player base that raids. This is bad and should not be implemented. 

5. This one I'm fine with as it gives incentive to win.