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Spy rebuild, function, and Satellite project changes.


Prefontaine
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SPY TRAINING CHANGES
-Spies are either in Active Duty or Reserve status.
-Freshly trained spies are in Reserve Status by default but you can train up to 4 into active if you choose
-Reserve spies cannot be used for defense or offensive and cost 1/4 of the upkeep
-Spies in reserve cannot be killed.
-Spies cannot move from Active to Reserve, but only Reserve to Active.
-Spy training rates are tripled. (8 can go into reserve and 4 into active or 12 can go into reserve with all spy projects. 6 can be made per day with no spy projects and you can have up to 4 of them be active duty)
-Spies take 5 days (60 turns) to move from reserve to active.
-Total spy count (active + reserve) cannot exceed the maximum number of spies a player can have. 

SPY FUNCTION CHANGES
-Scaling kills for based on number of spies used ( % kills = -2200/(spies+23)+126 )

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If you look at the blue line, those are the kill rates. 20 spies deployed is about 75% of the normal kill rate. 6 spies is about 50% the normal kill rate.

SPY SAT CHANGES
-No longer provides a 50% bonus to kills
-Provides an additional spy operation per day
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Similar to beige, it's up to the attacker to give you a reprieve. While being beige cycled you cannot fully rebuild unless your attacker lets you. With spies you cannot rebuild your spies unless your attackers stop killing your spies. This way now provides a way to rebuild your spies in a manner which they cannot be killed while still utilizing some of them for guerilla tactic ops. The damage on those ops have been reduced some, but with a double buy all players can still see above 50% damage with a double buy.

The reason for the delay in moving from reserve status to active is to lengthen the window of easy spy ops for the attacker. If a player with all projects wants to get back to max spies with 12 a day into reserve, that's 5 days, with an additional 5 days that provides attackers with a 10 day window to take advantage of their spy blitz. It also stops alliances from keeping all of their spies in reserve to suddenly move out when an alliance war starts as they entire length of the first round with leave them without any spies. 

Edited by Prefontaine
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6 minutes ago, Mishato said:

What is the maximum amount of spies you can have for both active and reserve?

The total cannot exceed your maximum number of spies. I'll add that tidbit to the OP. So if you have 10 active, and no spy projects you can only have 40 in reserve.

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10 minutes ago, dtc justice said:

Pre, quit trying to reinvent the wheel. You know very little of the spy game so these changes do way more harm than good, the people who are supporting the changes don't know much about spying either 

 

Spy training rates are tripled. (8 can go into reserve and 4 into active or 12 can go into reserve with all spy projects. 6 can be made per day with no spy projects and you can have up to 4 of them be active duty)

As I bring up every time this thread is made, if you increase the spy production then there becomes 0 purpose of spying, you cannot effeftively spy military or nukes/missiles in a global war if the rates are increased, you will be stuck continuously killing spies. It takes a lot of coordination to wipe the enemy sphere, AND still still keep them low enough to spy military daily.

you're also talking about reducing the kill rates, which makes it near impossible to wipe the sphere combined with increased rates.

spy sats having 3 ops instead of the % damage boost is a fairly large nerf and makes the 500m+ projects really not worth it, there's nothing wrong with spy sats, since most people who care about spies enough, have sats, or they're too small to matter.

I get you're trying to balance things but in your changes there's like 8 game changing changes, how do you expect balance when many of those things will break a whole part of war.

This global should be a more eye opening experience for those who normally complain about roses spying. Rose lost the spy front for the first time, we were not prepared, we ignored leaks, we didn't make sheets, we didn't warn members to be active. They spy blitzed us and we weren't able to recover, we fought and it was near flipping but we failed. Do you see our spy team complaining that it's broken? No, instead rose is still doing 250 ops per day suiciding into tanks at 50% success rates. 

 

Spies are NOT broken, people just complain because they are either too lazy to put in the effort, or have no knowledge on how spies actually work.

 

Also one last point, if you allow rose to do a full reserve setup like you're saying, then rose will never lose a spy front, since we would.turn any defensive spy war into an offensive front when we please.

Rip @hidude45454 you spy scrub who doesn't know much about spies. That'll be the last time we consult you!

[11:52 PM] Prefontaine: But Keegoz is actually bad. [11:52 PM] Prefontaine: He's my favorite bad leader though.

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Interesting changes definitely. Not sure yet how I feel about the changes yet, but it could work.

15 minutes ago, dtc justice said:

As I bring up every time this thread is made, if you increase the spy production then there becomes 0 purpose of spying, you cannot effeftively spy military or nukes/missiles in a global war if the rates are increased, you will be stuck continuously killing spies. It takes a lot of coordination to wipe the enemy sphere, AND still still keep them low enough to spy military daily.

If I am reading correctly, the only increase is from 3 to 4 per day into active. That still takes a while to build up. Building up to 12 per day, you still have to wait 5 days each day you build reserved spies to transfer them to active. If a sphere tries to build up, it's still delayed by 5 days even if they are active enough to build enough reserves every day. This just makes it so the spy game is not decided from the start. At minimum it is 5 days of buildup in reserves and 5 days for each change to active.

 

1 hour ago, Prefontaine said:

-Freshly trained spies are in Reserve Status by default but you can train up to 4 into active if you choose
-Reserve spies cannot be used for defense or offensive and cost 1/4 of the upkeep
-Spies in reserve cannot be killed.
-Spies cannot move from Active to Reserve, but only Reserve to Active.
-Spy training rates are tripled. (8 can go into reserve and 4 into active or 12 can go into reserve with all spy projects. 6 can be made per day with no spy projects and you can have up to 4 of them be active duty)
-Spies take 5 days (60 turns) to move from reserve to active.

My question here is if I build all reserved spies each day, does the process to move them to active restart every day for all spies or do each wave of spy builds get their own timelines to move to active? How will we be able to keep track of when each wave comes out of reserve?

Edited by NightKnight
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7 minutes ago, dtc justice said:

Pre, quit trying to reinvent the wheel. You know very little of the spy game so these changes do way more harm than good, the people who are supporting the changes don't know much about spying either 

 

Spy training rates are tripled. (8 can go into reserve and 4 into active or 12 can go into reserve with all spy projects. 6 can be made per day with no spy projects and you can have up to 4 of them be active duty)

As I bring up every time this thread is made, if you increase the spy production then there becomes 0 purpose of spying, you cannot effeftively spy military or nukes/missiles in a global war if the rates are increased, you will be stuck continuously killing spies. It takes a lot of coordination to wipe the enemy sphere, AND still still keep them low enough to spy military daily.

you're also talking about reducing the kill rates, which makes it near impossible to wipe the sphere combined with increased rates.

spy sats having 3 ops instead of the % damage boost is a fairly large nerf and makes the 500m+ projects really not worth it, there's nothing wrong with spy sats, since most people who care about spies enough, have sats, or they're too small to matter.

I get you're trying to balance things but in your changes there's like 8 game changing changes, how do you expect balance when many of those things will break a whole part of war.

This global should be a more eye opening experience for those who normally complain about roses spying. Rose lost the spy front for the first time, we were not prepared, we ignored leaks, we didn't make sheets, we didn't warn members to be active. They spy blitzed us and we weren't able to recover, we fought and it was near flipping but we failed. Do you see our spy team complaining that it's broken? No, instead rose is still doing 250 ops per day suiciding into tanks at 50% success rates. 

 

Spies are NOT broken, people just complain because they are either too lazy to put in the effort, or have no knowledge on how spies actually work.

Hm, looks like discord coding for copy and paste. Wonder why this conversation would've happened on discord first. Hmmmm

- The window for meaningful ops is 10 days minimum, that's 30 nuke spy attempts. If that's not an effective window for you before having to having to spend 2 days spying away spies before getting another 10 days, then I whole heartedly disagree with your sentiment. 

- Kill rate reductions, outside of spy sat, are simply based off of not having as many spies. 6 spies still gives you 50% and 20 gives 75%, if you have full spies, the rates are the same.

- The 3 ops versus damage is something that was pitched to me as "largely accepted by the spy community" in the game. That includes leaders on your alliance that championed that change. I don't know if you're out of touch with them, or they didn't talk to you about it, but I was operating on the info given to me. It's effectively a wash that individual player as now instead of doing 2 ops at 150% (300%) they can now do 3 ops at 100% (300%). Yes the target takes less damage but the kills are effectively the same overall. 

I don't know if you read the summary of the reasons why this change is happening, but I will reitterate. It's to switch the choice of if the player defeated can get up from the attacker choosing the stop spy attacks, to the defender having the choice to rebuild spies. To do so they need to be able to rebuild in a manner where their spies can be rebuilt without dying.
 

2 minutes ago, NightKnight said:

My question here is if I build all reserved spies each day, does the process to move them to active restart every day for all spies or do each wave of spy builds get their own timelines to move to active? How will we be able to keep track of when each wave comes out of reserve?

This depends on what is or isn't possible with the coding of the game. Ideally I would like it this way:

You have 20 spies and want to move to active one day, and the other 10 the next, for whatever reason. On the spy page it will show three sections, reserve, active, deploying. The deploying will have a countdown of turns before that number of spies becomes active. 

That's how I'd like it to work. Again, depends on coding.

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4 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

This depends on what is or isn't possible with the coding of the game. Ideally I would like it this way:

You have 20 spies and want to move to active one day, and the other 10 the next, for whatever reason. On the spy page it will show three sections, reserve, active, deploying. The deploying will have a countdown of turns before that number of spies becomes active. 

That's how I'd like it to work. Again, depends on coding.

See I would prefer this to having to keep track on our own. Just in our list of spies something like a list of changes into active with remaining turns would be ideal. But coding of the game comment fair! 😂

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If there are reserves and increased rebuy then spy kills need to be buffed, otherwise it'll take too long to kill enemy spies. The debuff changes make more sense in some "optimal war" scenario where every member gets off successful spy ops against the best target and the enemy doesn't fight back; which is rarely the case.

And idrc since I don't have spy sat, but an enemy has 3 spy slots, so an extra attack has less utility than the extra kills. Spy attacks also cost $, so you are also getting less net damage (this is more relevant at lower city counts).

Edit: A compromise might be to keep the spy sat kill buff, but only have it for normal military units.

Edited by Borg
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1 minute ago, dtc justice said:

Hidude gave change ideas because pre was insisting on sat change ideas

Insisting? Are you getting logs of the design channel? Regardless that's a bold, and incorrect claim. I posted the idea of removing it, someone suggested removing it and adding the op. We then went on a long talk about other areas of the change and then I said this:

Prefontaine — 07/20/2022
One last thing before I go.
Changing the 1.5x spy rate for spy sat to 1 additional op is something liked, yes?

Someone confirmed and then I said.

Prefontaine — 07/20/2022
That got lost in the shuffle but I didn't want to omit it.
Works for me.

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9 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

- [...] It's effectively a wash that individual player as now instead of doing 2 ops at 150% (300%) they can now do 3 ops at 100% (300%). Yes the target takes less damage but the kills are effectively the same overall.

True and untrue.

 

A single player can get spy-slotted for 450% damage currently. Now they'll get spy slotted for 300% damage.

Unless you mean to say that damage is effectively unchanged, only scaled with spy counts, which is not how your original thread makes it appear.

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Just now, Exalts said:

True and untrue.

 

A single player can get spy-slotted for 450% damage currently. Now they'll get spy slotted for 300% damage.

Unless you mean to say that damage is effectively unchanged, only scaled with spy counts, which is not how your original thread makes it appear.

That's why I said the damage the individual player can do doesn't change. They could have done 2 ops for 300% damage, but now it'd take 3 which they can do. The damage done to the player is reduced, yes. 

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9 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

That's why I said the damage the individual player can do doesn't change. They could have done 2 ops for 300% damage, but now it'd take 3 which they can do. The damage done to the player is reduced, yes. 

But is this truly a necessary change?

3 spy ops from 2 people with spy sat with average RNG on a target with max units will destroy approximately a single rebuy of that unit type. That's not enough to influence the direction of an alliance war on its own, requires 2 spy satellites, plus the coordination needed to make it happen, plus variables like success rates.

 

While I'm here:

Quote

-Spy training rates are tripled. (8 can go into reserve and 4 into active or 12 can go into reserve with all spy projects. 6 can be made per day with no spy projects and you can have up to 4 of them be active duty)

Is this truly necessary? I think people on the non-Rose coalition have become acutely acquainted with the reality that, whether you win or lose the spy war, an alliance willing to dedicate time to coordinating spy ops as an alliance can still inflict damage while being spy-wiped. (For some metrics, I've been spy wiped all war and destroyed over 65k tanks this global war through spy ops alone as a c31)

This is just giving more meat to already competent spy alliances, who already have an edge by virtue of understanding the mechanic more, or dedicating more manpower to it.

Edited by Exalts
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12 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

Insisting? Are you getting logs of the design channel? Regardless that's a bold, and incorrect claim. I posted the idea of removing it, someone suggested removing it and adding the op. We then went on a long talk about other areas of the change and then I said this:

Prefontaine — 07/20/2022
One last thing before I go.
Changing the 1.5x spy rate for spy sat to 1 additional op is something liked, yes?

Someone confirmed and then I said.

Prefontaine — 07/20/2022
That got lost in the shuffle but I didn't want to omit it.
Works for me.

Yes I see some logs of the spy talk stuff, these changes are top dramatic and game breaking, if you want to make spies useless and have sheepy refund billions in sats, then by all means 

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1 minute ago, Exalts said:

Is this truly necessary? I think people on the non-Rose coalition have become acutely acquainted with the reality that, whether you win or lose the spy war, an alliance willing to dedicate time to coordinating spy ops as an alliance can still inflict damage while being spy-wiped.

This is just giving more meat to already competent spy alliances, who already have an edge by virtue of understanding the mechanic more, or dedicating more manpower to it.

If you're saying this allows coordination and heightened knowledge and execution to gain an edge, I'd say that's a good thing in this case. The focus on these changes is to allow a defeated party to have the ability to get back up again. You have to look at things outside of your own interests, or your own alliances interests in some cases to achieve these goals.

To your first point destroying an entire rebuy of tanks or planes is very powerful in an individual war. If you can do it on an alliance-wide level is absolutely could turn the tide of a war in the opening round. 

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1 minute ago, Prefontaine said:

If you're saying this allows coordination and heightened knowledge and execution to gain an edge, I'd say that's a good thing in this case. The focus on these changes is to allow a defeated party to have the ability to get back up again. You have to look at things outside of your own interests, or your own alliances interests in some cases to achieve these goals.

To your first point destroying an entire rebuy of tanks or planes is very powerful in an individual war. If you can do it on an alliance-wide level is absolutely could turn the tide of a war in the opening round. 

I'm saying precisely the inverse. It allows for alliances LIKE ROSE to spy blitz you every 5 days, even if it has lost the spy war.

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1 minute ago, Exalts said:

I'm saying precisely the inverse. It allows for alliances LIKE ROSE to spy blitz you every 5 days, even if it has lost the spy war.

ngl, sounds kinda fun.

[11:52 PM] Prefontaine: But Keegoz is actually bad. [11:52 PM] Prefontaine: He's my favorite bad leader though.

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1 minute ago, Exalts said:

I'm saying precisely the inverse. It allows for alliances LIKE ROSE to spy blitz you every 5 days, even if it has lost the spy war.

If you saying an alliance has a chance to fight back several days after being blitzed, again, I think that's a good thing. 

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7 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

destroying an entire rebuy of tanks or planes is very powerful in an individual war. If you can do it on an alliance-wide level is absolutely could turn the tide of a war in the opening round. 

You usually can't kill normal units in your spy blitz, you need to kill spies first. Also, a spy op kills 1-5% (and a 50% bonus with spy sat), so on average with current spy sat mechanics, assuming enemy spies have been wiped, and you 3-slot all enemies, that's 13.5% of a single unit killed (assuming they have that unit maxed, you get diminishing returns at lower unit counts). If you are hitting both tanks and planes, then that's 6.75% of each unit on average. A rebuy is typically 22%

Edited by Borg
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Just now, Prefontaine said:

If you saying an alliance has a chance to fight back several days after being blitzed, again, I think that's a good thing. 

Would this still be a very good thing if you could do the same with tanks and aircraft too?

I can't imagine the winning side in a war being very enthusiastic about their opponent printing a full army weekly without any recourse

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1 minute ago, Exalts said:

Would this still be a very good thing if you could do the same with tanks and aircraft too?

I can't imagine the winning side in a war being very enthusiastic about their opponent printing a full army weekly without any recourse

Yes, this is the reason for the beige changes. One of the biggest let downs when you're winning a war is when the enemy sells off everything and your left there punching a dead bag. You should want enemies to rebuild so you can keep fighting, it's more fun to fight someone who can fight back. This way a war, and a spy war, isn't over and done in the opening moments. Something that can go on for weeks and months isn't done in the moment. Will the other side rebuild? Not necessarily. Can they with these changes? Yes. That being the important thing.   

So yes, these are good things. Thanks for highlighting them.

4 minutes ago, Borg said:

You usually can't kill normal units in your spy blitz, you need to kill spies first. Also, a spy op kills 1-5%, so on average with current spy sat mechanics, assuming enemy spies have been wiped, and you 3-slot all enemies, that's 13.5% of a single unit killed (assuming they have that unit maxed, you get diminishing returns at lower unit counts). If you are hitting both tanks and planes, then that's 6.75% of each unit on average. A rebuy is typically 22%

With spy sat you can kill off more than enough spies in the opening day to spend the next day change on units if need be. 

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Just now, Prefontaine said:

Yes, this is the reason for the beige changes. One of the biggest let downs when you're winning a war is when the enemy sells off everything and your left there punching a dead bag. You should want enemies to rebuild so you can keep fighting, it's more fun to fight someone who can fight back. This way a war, and a spy war, isn't over and done in the opening moments. Something that can go on for weeks and months isn't done in the moment. Will the other side rebuild? Not necessarily. Can they with these changes? Yes. That being the important thing.   

So yes, these are good things. Thanks for highlighting them.

If that is the design philosophy that you and your team are pursuing, so be it.

I feel this is going to lead to rather toxic changes to the war meta where alliance wars might become endurance races to the first person to finally get tired of back and forths, or might discourage future wars that aren't guaranteed stomps because of the possible risk of taking massive losses through the opponent's spite.

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7 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

With spy sat you can kill off more than enough spies in the opening day to spend the next day change on units if need be. 

With current mechanics, a week after the blitz, both hollywood and celestial had around 30 spies average. So yes, in your "optimal war" scenario you would be correct. 

img.png

Spies aren't especially relevant currently, partly because coordinating them effectively is difficult. If you are spending most of your ops killing enemy spies, it's going to cost $$ and not really achieve much. 

Edited by Borg
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