More nukes, more fun

[Raphael]

The game is really struggling with how to handle whales, and basically has for as long as whales have existed. So the question is how to make the game fun for these long-playing players while also keeping things balanced? My idea would be to introduce specific mechanics that are designed to eat up additional resources as the player grows. My first pitched idea for this:

 

Every 10 cities you can buy an additional nuclear weapon. C20 = 2 nukes, c30 = 3 nukes etc. The idea here being that it's fun to be a nuclear menace, but the more nukes flying through the upper tier means more radiation to eat up food AND more destroyed infrastructure in the tier that we're trying to impose a bit of fairness on. Plus I think generally that allowing players to fling more nukes is a good thing because it's the "loser's fight back" mechanic.

 

I know pixel huggers will balk at this initially, but my experience as a whale - confirmed by many others - is that once you break through to the higher city counts, your relative costs actually decrease in spite of the exponential curves Alex has put in place on things like infra and city cost. It's easier for whales to fight forever, rebuild faster, and grow quicker than it is for the  midtier or low tier playerbase. We need to start introducing fun ways to increase the cost of being at higher city counts or risk PnW falling into a Politics and Whales game... which it arguably already is.

 

[Shutter]

Radiation is yummy.

[Danzek]

Its fine if a city 5 has all their cities nuked in a war, they don't matter. But if I've worked to build myself to city 45, I think I deserve a reprieve from losing all my infra to some pesky pirates, or an alliance i'm rolling. 

What's the point of dogpiling when people can just fling nukes at you. There's no strategy to loser weapons. And the billions of land ive bought will have terrible ROI if people can spam nuke radiation. 

[KindaEpicMoah]

9 minutes ago, Borg said:

 There's no strategy to loser weapons. 

Is that you Tyrion?

[Raphael]

19 hours ago, Borg said:

Its fine if a city 5 has all their cities nuked in a war, they don't matter. But if I've worked to build myself to city 45, I think I deserve a reprieve from losing all my infra to some pesky pirates, or an alliance i'm rolling. 

What's the point of dogpiling when people can just fling nukes at you. There's no strategy to loser weapons. And the billions of land ive bought will have terrible ROI if people can spam nuke radiation. 

The satire was so good that I think Prefontaine will take this post seriously