Change to Defensive War Slots

[Cino]

22 hours ago, Shiho Nishizumi said:

Anecdotal of course, but I'm reminded of when I was updeclaring on two Grumpys back in Brawly. One of them just sat there and couldn't be 0'd because he didn't burn his military on attacks. Meanwhile I ran out of plane buys on first day post blitz.

Imagine now, with the casualty/victory odds changes, alongside the one less defensive slot were this change to go through.
 

I think that it'd be more of a pain than it is worth, and two times the city count would just circle back to the current issue. It'd only be worth considering at three times the city count.

2x is pretty low for sure. I mean, id be comfortable with 2.5x but i kinda worry that at 3x you are bound to lose if you get slotted regardless of skill. Plus, with 2.5x, the issue sam raised whereby big alliances dominate the game through sheer numbers would be somewhat solved by a lower amount of slots

[Shiho Nishizumi]

7 minutes ago, Cino said:

2x is pretty low for sure. I mean, id be comfortable with 2.5x but i kinda worry that at 3x you are bound to lose if you get slotted regardless of skill. Plus, with 2.5x, the issue sam raised whereby big alliances dominate the game through sheer numbers would be somewhat solved by a lower amount of slots

Those alliances would still dominate due to said numbers; it's simply a matter that it'd likely translate into an a more protracted (read:grindier) affair where... larger alliances would be able to leverage their WC's, let alone alliance banks. Nothing to say of milcoms and coordination on protracted wars (I'd favor the mainstays here).

3x would be net neutral for same city counts, nerf downdeclares and buff updeclares. Let's take C40 as an example. At the moment, it can be triple declared, whether by 3 C30's, 3 C40's, or 3 C50's. With 3x, it's still 3 C40's, while it's 4 C30's or 2 C50's (20 cities left of capacity which are likely unusable, and I'll touch upon this next).

2.5x would be 3 C30's or two C40's or C50's. The highest you could do is a C34 and two C33's (Yes, I'm aware you could do C40 and two C30's). From there, it's a leap where you are encouraged to downdeclare in order to make use of the spare capacity (you aren't going to throw a C20 alongside the C40's because that's suicide).

This whole spare capacity/cap aspect is why I'm not a fan of the idea. It would generate odd incentives and frankly, serve to complicate planning in a fairly appreciable manner. And that's just as an as-is from being city count related. This ignores the specific multiplier (which I've already gone over).

[Cino]

On 5/22/2024 at 4:56 PM, Shiho Nishizumi said:

Those alliances would still dominate due to said numbers; it's simply a matter that it'd likely translate into an a more protracted (read:grindier) affair where... larger alliances would be able to leverage their WC's, let alone alliance banks. Nothing to say of milcoms and coordination on protracted wars (I'd favor the mainstays here).

3x would be net neutral for same city counts, nerf downdeclares and buff updeclares. Let's take C40 as an example. At the moment, it can be triple declared, whether by 3 C30's, 3 C40's, or 3 C50's. With 3x, it's still 3 C40's, while it's 4 C30's or 2 C50's (20 cities left of capacity which are likely unusable, and I'll touch upon this next).

2.5x would be 3 C30's or two C40's or C50's. The highest you could do is a C34 and two C33's (Yes, I'm aware you could do C40 and two C30's). From there, it's a leap where you are encouraged to downdeclare in order to make use of the spare capacity (you aren't going to throw a C20 alongside the C40's because that's suicide).

This whole spare capacity/cap aspect is why I'm not a fan of the idea. It would generate odd incentives and frankly, serve to complicate planning in a fairly appreciable manner. And that's just as an as-is from being city count related. This ignores the specific multiplier (which I've already gone over).

Ive been thinking: 

So your main issue with the suggestion comes from the fact that there would be spare city cap: yes, this is true. 

In my eyes this isnt so bad for a couple of reasons: For one, it would make milcom harder for alliances which would serve to increase the strength of better organised alliances. This would also increase the strength of smaller, alliances as they would be more organised and thus able to effectively use up defensive slots without waste. Overall, this would serve to make pnw wars less decided by numbers

And you say that these big alliances would still dominate: Yeah, just not as hard as right now

Secondly, i think (my milcom opinion is near worthless) that its not necessarily right to say its pointless to send in the c20 against the c40 (when backed up by two other c40s). Right now, alliances pretty much only care about having c40+ or whatever the number is these days. In a world where c20s could have an impact (even if minimal) perhaps alliances would care more for them and we would see more focus on them in peacetime and wartime. Sure, the c20 would get butchered, but it cost a fraction of the c40 and it wouldnt deal zero damage. 
 
3x is great in my mind also, but i also think 2.5x is worth discussing 

 

[Shiho Nishizumi]

1 hour ago, Cino said:

So your main issue with the suggestion comes from the fact that there would be spare city cap: yes, this is true. 

In my eyes this isnt so bad for a couple of reasons: For one, it would make milcom harder for alliances which would serve to increase the strength of better organised alliances. This would also increase the strength of smaller, alliances as they would be more organised and thus able to effectively use up defensive slots without waste. Overall, this would serve to make pnw wars less decided by numbers

Smaller alliances aren't more inherently organized. They're definitely easier to organize and run given the same people/staff (and will be more organized given that same staffing), but the thing is, by and large, they don't have the same people/staff. Larger alliances have an advantage on attracting, generating and retaining talent. The necessity of an apparatus to handle such mass lends itself towards that (assuming it's a well functioning one, of course). The premise isn't one that there's a very good milcom in mainstay alliance and very good milcom in smaller alliance. The premise is usually mainstay having good milcom and smaller has some pretty mediocre/bad one.

It'd make milcom harder across the board both in planning and war rooms management. And no, the smaller alliance wouldn't be able to magically use defensive slots more effectively, because the impediment is simply "No more than X numbers of cities can declare on this guy". That's a matter of "Are we tiered in such a way where we can minmax this?". Even if all of your nations are at the exact same city count (not a given or frequent for smaller alliance), you aren't going to be able to optimally hit all nations without wastage.

1 hour ago, Cino said:

And you say that these big alliances would still dominate: Yeah, just not as hard as right now

Trying to shift the logic to an attritional one doesn't favor smaller alliances.

2 hours ago, Cino said:

Secondly, i think (my milcom opinion is near worthless) that its not necessarily right to say its pointless to send in the c20 against the c40 (when backed up by two other c40s). Right now, alliances pretty much only care about having c40+ or whatever the number is these days. In a world where c20s could have an impact (even if minimal) perhaps alliances would care more for them and we would see more focus on them in peacetime and wartime. Sure, the c20 would get butchered, but it cost a fraction of the c40 and it wouldnt deal zero damage. 

Nobody (except I suppose the truly desperate) would send a C20 on a C40, especially round 1 where there are other tiers to deal with. Good milcom will try to translate their advantage (if any) in the lower tiers by scaling upwards, not by straight up suiciding someone onto someone who has twice the city count.

[Cino]

23 hours ago, Shiho Nishizumi said:

Smaller alliances aren't more inherently organized. They're definitely easier to organize and run given the same people/staff (and will be more organized given that same staffing), but the thing is, by and large, they don't have the same people/staff. Larger alliances have an advantage on attracting, generating and retaining talent. The necessity of an apparatus to handle such mass lends itself towards that (assuming it's a well functioning one, of course). The premise isn't one that there's a very good milcom in mainstay alliance and very good milcom in smaller alliance. The premise is usually mainstay having good milcom and smaller has some pretty mediocre/bad one.

It'd make milcom harder across the board both in planning and war rooms management. And no, the smaller alliance wouldn't be able to magically use defensive slots more effectively, because the impediment is simply "No more than X numbers of cities can declare on this guy". That's a matter of "Are we tiered in such a way where we can minmax this?". Even if all of your nations are at the exact same city count (not a given or frequent for smaller alliance), you aren't going to be able to optimally hit all nations without wastage.

Trying to shift the logic to an attritional one doesn't favor smaller alliances.

Nobody (except I suppose the truly desperate) would send a C20 on a C40, especially round 1 where there are other tiers to deal with. Good milcom will try to translate their advantage (if any) in the lower tiers by scaling upwards, not by straight up suiciding someone onto someone who has twice the city count.

I think i made a mistake mixing the competence and size arguments, because you are right that smaller alliances are by no means better

I will split the arguments into two: 

Size. Alright so, my view of current pnw warfare is that due to the fact that you can put three nations of any size on a nation as long as the war ranges fit. As such, bigger alliances, who tend to have a wider range of people to choose from are able to simply downdec across the board and crush smaller alliances with ease. This should not be the case. With this suggestion, you would, at maximum, be able to use 3x (or 2.5x if the world were perfect!) the cities upon your enemies. For example, on a c40 where once you could put three c50s, you could put just 2, plus a c20 (i will adress this later). This would serve to make war more balanced (and thus more fun) while still maintaining the strength of Blitz advantage. I know you said it would make war more attritional. This is true. However by more attritional you could also say less of an absolute landslide for whoever is bigger. I think it would make war fair. Besides, what is wrong with war being slightly more expensive? Thats how things used to be

Competence: alright so putting pnw into context of other games really shows its skill cap issue. take chess, for example. you can play chess for 1000s of hours and still get wiped, in minutes, by the best chess player in the world. now take pnw: ill compare kt and i guess immortals seeing everyone is calling them trash atm. How massive is the skill cap between the two? the whole war system is slot and dogfight. Sure, there would be slot wastage, but is that actually a bad thing? the task of alliances would be to minimise slot wastage and use this system to their advantage as best they can. it would create another layer of difficulty in milcom which would put more ground between trash and coompetent alliances, thus decreasing the supremacy of numbers advantage. 

overall, i this change would serve to make the game more interesting. although i think fixing the issues with downdeclares being OP and a low skill cap should be addressed in other updates in the futire, i think this would be a great start to fixing them right now. 

[Shiho Nishizumi]

4 hours ago, Cino said:

Size. Alright so, my view of current pnw warfare is that due to the fact that you can put three nations of any size on a nation as long as the war ranges fit. As such, bigger alliances, who tend to have a wider range of people to choose from are able to simply downdec across the board and crush smaller alliances with ease. This should not be the case.

Firstly, this is a blanket statement that doesn't universally apply (let's argue a pure hypothetical and say that TI and Guardian are both by themselves, and TI hits Guardian; it's an updeclare effort). Secondly, I don't think that milcoms would overburden their larger guys disproportionately; it makes sense to give the people with unused capacity something to do (within reason). Both to leverage said capacity and to give something to do (people do like burning pixels). Thirdly, I don't see why a greater group should be unable to crush a smaller group on a pitched fight; it's what one would expect to happen.

4 hours ago, Cino said:

With this suggestion, you would, at maximum, be able to use 3x (or 2.5x if the world were perfect!) the cities upon your enemies. For example, on a c40 where once you could put three c50s, you could put just 2, plus a c20 (i will adress this later). This would serve to make war more balanced (and thus more fun) while still maintaining the strength of Blitz advantage.

The thing that people are forgetting when talking about "balancing" the wars by doing this is that reducing defensive slots by one invariably means lowering the burn rate for the aggressor as well. In other words, they're not as easily subduable as a 3 offensives (or higher) nation would be. Numbers would still give the advantage by letting people have excess capacity to overcome an attritional battle with an smaller (overstretched) enemy. Especially given that the longer it goes, the more usage one can get out of spy ops on military (this favoring larger groups even harder).

4 hours ago, Cino said:

I know you said it would make war more attritional. This is true. However by more attritional you could also say less of an absolute landslide for whoever is bigger. I think it would make war fair. Besides, what is wrong with war being slightly more expensive? Thats how things used to be

Larger alliances (everything else equal) have a bigger taxbase which to leverage for WC accumulation. Older ones also have an advantage in this department simply by having existed for longer and thus having been able to accumulate these assets. Attritional warfare is going to disproportionately affect smaller alliances due to wealth and revenue disparity. I don't think that more blows traded (especially in a context of dogfights which do minimal infra damage) would offset this.

As for "How things used to be"; respectfully, I'm not sure if you're old enough to where you can remember the days of sub 1000 munitions, 2500sh steel and 1700 bauxite (of course, in context of the game at the time). Also, no. Tanks used to be more expensive back in the day (twice as much steel, as a matter of fact), but planes used to be 3 aluminum and got increased to 5, while ships also got increased from 25 to 30 steel. There was give and take.

One could argue that there being guerrilla warfare back then (which has since died) did present an extra expenditure that no longer exists, but there are three problems with that; one, it was sadly never that widespread. Secondly, you can build more missiles (and nukes) now, which is an offsetting factor (especially since turreting is far more common than guerrilla used to be). Thirdly, that'd be an argument for bringing guerrilla back since it was pretty fun, more than to justify grindier wars now.

Of course, this ignores stuff like ground zero meta (no steel spent on tanks), and furthermore, pre-resistance wars where if you lost, you simply lost because there was zero comeback, but even that is before my own time (technically I joined pre-resistance changes, but my first real war was with the resistance change already being in place).

4 hours ago, Cino said:

Competence: alright so putting pnw into context of other games really shows its skill cap issue. take chess, for example. you can play chess for 1000s of hours and still get wiped, in minutes, by the best chess player in the world. now take pnw: ill compare kt and i guess immortals seeing everyone is calling them trash atm. How massive is the skill cap between the two? the whole war system is slot and dogfight.

I'd make a joke about Leo the Lame's BK where BK forgot to actually do dogfights during AC, but that's a bit besides the point. You're right though, PnW's skill ceiling is low where the mechanics are concerned.

4 hours ago, Cino said:

Sure, there would be slot wastage, but is that actually a bad thing?

The argument is one of implementing something. For it to be worthwhile to implement it needs to be superior. The question should be "Is the system good enough to excuse, among other things, slot wastage?".

I've gone over the downsides (might as well be "one of the reasons why it's bad" since I'm not particularly a fan of the idea), but yes, it is objectively a bad thing.

4 hours ago, Cino said:

the task of alliances would be to minimise slot wastage and use this system to their advantage as best they can.

...which smaller alliances would have a more difficult time at, given what you inferred earlier:

4 hours ago, Cino said:

As such, bigger alliances, who tend to have a wider range of people to choose from

I'll argue a hypothetical and pick Singularity since their compacted tiering at C40 lends itself well to this. Let's say that they have to fight Guardian. Anything from 40-45 is basically wasted slots they can do nothing about. Their C50+ has enough spare capacity where you could throw a C30 at it (very bold and not great). 54 and up is where there'd be enough slots to throw another C40 at, and due to Singu's tiering, their next smaller nation is 35 (realistically 34's and 33's).

Of course, in reality it'd be more complex given sphere wars and such, but it does serve to illustrate the point of how you're just screwed having to accept the unused capacity is going to waste if your tiering isn't matching.

4 hours ago, Cino said:

it would create another layer of difficulty in milcom which would put more ground between trash and coompetent alliances, thus decreasing the supremacy of numbers advantage. 

This implies that the smaller alliance has the more competent milcom. Again, not a given, and given the most probable case, it's the other way around. More rooms to oversee would definitely disproportionately affect the smaller alliances that have only one person (maybe a couple) running things as opposed to larger alliances with a proper apparatus that can more readily digest this workload (one single person can only track so many things at once).

 

Edited May 25, 2024 by Shiho Nishizumi

[Anarchist Empire]

So mostly it would do so people not declaring any wars have 1 less defensive slot, but if someone max declares they 2 extra slots (Without Pirate Project). So end up fighting 10 wars instead of 8, with 5 of those picked by the other side. Not sure how this is suppose to make soloing easier, if raiding solo opens you to a lot more defensive wars.

Seems counter productive for stated goal.

[Eli Gemstone]

End NAPS; promote more war.

[Herbert West]

Terrible, terrible idea. Do something else.

[Gwazi]

Looking at this I see a couple of issues.

Original Proposal - This would end raiding. Raiders will declare multiple wars and will vulnerable to significant counters.

If the goal is to encourage new smaller players sticking around and forming new smaller alliances then we need to disincentivice large alliances and blocs. They should still have their place as vibrant communities within the game, but giving smaller alliances some benefit could make them more viable than they are now.

Counter Proposal.

-1 defensive slots for alliance-less players.
+1 defensive slots if your alliance is over X members (80 for example)
+1 defensive slots if your alliance has over X ODP or higher treaties (5 for example)

Would mean larger alliances would have 4 defensives, smaller alliances would have the standard 3. And splitting your alliance into "training" alliances too much to get around the 80 member limit keeps you at 4 anyways. Also large alliances in a dominating bloc gets 5 defensives.

Larger alliances still have the players where 5 defensives can still be worked with. It'll also give some alliances more options tactically in where they assign their offensive slots.

New players are somewhat protected with only having to field 2 defensives.

I do forsee an issue with paperless alliances, that happen outside of the game and keeping alliances around the defined boundaries in regards to treaties and members.

Edited May 29, 2024 by Gwazi

[Odium]

I know I am late to the party but hey I figured I would say my peace (piece? I have never seen that saying spelled out before). I logged into my account here for the first time in 3 years to comment on this idea. I understand the point I really do. But there some some fundamental problems here, many of which have been addressed.

I would consider myself an anti-raider. I find them annoying and would like if they would stop thank you very much. I think a lot of people here would get on the "please don't raid me and my friends" train (though a lot of us will then turn around and raid you and your friends, including myself lol). But at the same time this change would both make raiding harder for smaller nations and those in micros AND more annoying for people in large alliances. It is seriously one of the few ways I could think of addressing this problem that would make everyone more angry over it.

To begin with smaller nation will end up choosing between raiding 9 people and getting curb stomped by their friends, or raiding 1 person at a time and slowing the game to a crawl. That seems like the most obvious problem with this. It does literally nothing to resolve the stated problem (ie. "We have a shortage of pancakes so I sent Bob to go mine rocks, I see no reason these things won't resolve each other").

Secondly as a member of a large alliance oh my god, the day I am told I need to find 9 nations to counter every raider that hits us is the day I resign from MA and likely the game as a whole. This incentives us to make even larger alliances to promote having enough people in range of EVERY POSSIBLE SCORE to have 9 good counters. That means we need 9 active, relatively milled and responsive people in a range of between 100%-133% of every single score in the game at every time of the day no less. That math is a pain but I can tell you it is a heck of a lot of people.

Bottom line is I have to agree with Sketchy, this game has to decide if it is a group or individual sport. I think it is a group sport. But if we were playing football and at half time the ref blows the whistle and says from now one we are doing a 1 v 1 game with only the kickers I would expect everyone to be really annoyed. Even if it does make the single kicker who hasn't had any field time feel more included.

I sincerely ask that this change is promptly tossed directly in the bin to never see the light of day again.

[Zim]

Sorry, a bit digging up death treads. I am not too active these days. 

Frankly, I don't really dislike the suggested changes. There is definitely, something to work with here for raiders. I can see this being a decent buff to high-tier raiding, which is something I have desired for years.

One need to be bit pickier with what targets one selects to raid, but only having to deal with possible 2 counters suddenly make a lot more nations far more beigable than they were before. I can see a comeback for many of the old school raiding tactic, instead of the current meta of cheapest build possible.   

Wars can get a bit more expensive, and frequency of raids will slow down, but nations that doesn’t expect to be raided now can be.
Nuke runs only become more powerful, while hiring mercenaries to fight in wars, suddenly became far more desirable.
As an example hiring Arrgh to ram into an alliance to bait counters, so an alliance open more defensive slots, to then be blitzed.
It going to led to more strategies having to be developed, make the war system more complicated, which it does desperately need. So the option for victory become more then who got the most players, or who is willing to fight for the longest. 

Radical changes to the game mechanics I think is needed to bring life back into this game at any rate.

But Alex, also a voice of warning, players doesn’t always know what best for the game, I have seen a lot of indie games fail after trying to do to much of what the players wanted to have implement. And frankly i see a lot of the game current issue being caused by overreliance on the advice of a few old players. 
The best tactic is just to do test runs of different suggestions. And see how they function.