5/17/2015 - Balancing Changes

[Alex]

Pretty straightforward, trying to make some changes to balance the game.

 

• Selling infrastructure now only gives you $150 / level, no matter what
• You can now buy 2 spies per city per day. This increases your limit from a hard cap of 2 spies to 2 spies for each city in your nation
• The Score formula has been updated to reduce the amount of points nuclear weapons add to your score. They used to be worth 50 points each, they're now only worth 15
• The formula for how much money you loot from ground battles has been changed so that more money can be looted the new formula is:

Money Looted = MIN(((Attacking Soldiers * RAND(0.5,1)) + (Attacking Tanks * RAND(7,13)) * Victory), Defender's Money * 0.75, Defender's Money - 100,000)

Edit for clarification: You can't steal negative loot if your opponent has less than $100K.

 

The change to infrastructure's selling price is to simply make things easier for everyone. A long time ago a bug was fixed that allowed you to make a marginally small amount of money by buying and selling infrastructure with infra cost reduction bonuses, but I never updated the javascript calculator that tells you how much money you make from selling it. Changing it all to $150/unit when selling is half of the base price of $300, and should have very little impact to the game overall while simplifying things for everyone (especially me).

 

Increasing the number of spies you can buy per day should help alleviate the issue where folks can't accumulate any spies from being bombarded with espionage operations daily.

 

Changing the score formula was necessary because nuclear weapons were way over counted previously. In comparison, missiles are only worth 5 points, and nuclear weapons aren't 10x better than missiles.

 

Changing the loot formula for ground battles is going to make them more appealing, and also the increase tank looting will make tanks more valuable as well. I also got rid of some unnecessary random numbers, and a varying rate depending on whether your opponent had less than 50 soldiers or not.

 

That's about it, if you have any questions ask away. Enjoy the changes!

 

UPDATE: There is now a spy range also. You can only spy on nations -25%/+75% of your score. This is the same as the current war range. This will prevent big nations with lots and lots of spies from picking on small nations without many.

[Boony]

SPIES SPIES SPIES SPIES

[Rozalia]

Well this is very much a game changer. Good move is something I'll say cautiously as this could have some negative consequences...

[Mayor]

Awesome! I like all the changes.

[Kurdanak]

With the spy change in play, something to limit spy ranges really needs implemented.

Edited May 18, 2015 by Kurdanak

[MrHat]

Meh, part of the thing with espionage/spais is that there was a lot of strategy to how many spais you should buy/upkeep per day/2 per day.  I have ~70 spais now. I spent at least 35 days getting those, and now someone with with the same amount of cities as me (7) can catch up to me in 5 days? 

 

2 per city per day is too much.

 

i can now decom down to ~30 spais during peace time just to keep rogues from spai-ing me then can build up to over 100 spais in 5 days in build up to war.

Edited May 18, 2015 by MrHiott

[Princess Bubblegum]

 

 

• The formula for how much money you loot from ground battles has been changed so that more money can be looted the new formula is:

Money Looted = MIN(((Attacking Soldiers * RAND(0.5,1)) + (Attacking Tanks * RAND(7,13)) * Victory), Defender's Money * 0.75, Defender's Money - 100,000)

 

So just doing some math... for a nation such as myself that has 11-12k soldiers and gets around 17k in cash each battle, now I would get 6-12k? That's definitely not more money being looted, unless I'm not understanding the formula correctly. 

 

Edit: if the * victory multiplies it by 3 for an immense triumph and makes it 18k-36k, then nevermind.

Edited May 18, 2015 by Princess Bubblegum

[Saopha Calas Vaduum]

You should probably put a floor on the looting, or else attackers will be losing money all the time.

[Spencatro]

Sheepy I believe I have found some very unintended behavior. Please PM me for details

[Pfeiffer]

The spy and loot changes worry me. Mostly the spy change.

[Prefontaine]

Shame the loot change didn't happen about 2 weeks ago, could've gotten some hard data to play around with. Have you tested all of this on a test server to make sure it actually works?

 

EDIT:

 

This change now makes spying away missiles/nukes/ships nearly impossible, thus making spies nearly useless. With the way the math works on attacks (something I've been trying to get you to change forever) the less spies they have, the much less you kill. Because obviously if they have less units my units should defaultly perform worse. So if they can buy 10-20+ spies a day it makes turtling in a cost range to spy missiles !@#$ing obscenely easy. Your change to spies has effectively ruined spies usefulness outside of gathering intel because of the damage caps (and especially damage reduction nonsense if they have less units). Congrats on fixing the ability to quickly buy back spies, and effectively ruin their ability to actually be useful in the process.

Edited May 18, 2015 by Judge Dredd

[Geronimo]

Nice. I like the spy change.

[Eviljak]

The spy change is lame and broken atm as im showing -2 on my spy purchase gor today. It also screws the guy that has fewer city's but more infra. For example: ive opted to up my infra in my current 6 cities rather than adding more cities for the time. So now i can buy less spies than a nation with less infra but more cities.

 

Really stickn it to me

[Dr Rush]

Sheepy I have concerns on how you addressed the spy issue. This gives a massive advantage to older players in terms of spies. They already allowed big nations to stomp little ones this will just make it worse.

 

A better way would be 

(highest spies - your spies) / 2 + 2 = spies you can recruit

This probably needs tweeking but the general idea is that the more spies you have in comparison to the top player. The slower you can recruit more.  This addresses both people being bombed into oblivion & new players needing to catch up.

[Alex]

So just doing some math... for a nation such as myself that has 11-12k soldiers and gets around 17k in cash each battle, now I would get 6-12k? That's definitely not more money being looted, unless I'm not understanding the formula correctly. 

 

Edit: if the * victory multiplies it by 3 for an immense triumph and makes it 18k-36k, then nevermind.

 

Your edit is correct.

 

You should probably put a floor on the looting, or else attackers will be losing money all the time.

 

You can't loot money that your target doesn't have. A floor doesn't make a lot of sense.

 

Sheepy I believe I have found some very unintended behavior. Please PM me for details

 

Send me a PM, or make a tech support thread.

[Spencatro]

Ok, PM'ed

[Atzuya]

mfw this thread

 

2 spies per city is tad too high I'd say... I can buy like 20 spies a day now (at the cost of half of my daily revenue wut) Perhaps one per city?

[James Gordon]

I honestly don't really like this hole more than 2 spies a day thing. It's simply opening the door for people with many cities to create a spy army and not have an honest war, but instead keep spying and destroying without an honest war.

[Arthur James]

 I see the danger of the availability of hiring more spies.

[Hooves]

This spy change really does worry me...

[Alataq]

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=5909

 

rip score

 

Also: With this update, spying is going to become so expensive as everybody gets so many more spies. .-.

Edited May 18, 2015 by Alataq

[Eviljak]

A nation with 12 cities but 500 infra each...could litterally buy twice as many spies a day than me with much less infrastructure.

[Spencatro]

You can't loot money that your target doesn't have. A floor doesn't make a lot of sense.

 

According to the formula... no, but you can loot "negative" money. If a nation has no money, the formula becomes MIN(don't care, don't care, 0-100,000) = -100,000

 

(Examples in my PM)

 

If this is intended behavior, I am not a fan at all and would only be able to accept it after much much whining ;P

[Alex]

According to the formula... no, but you can loot "negative" money. If a nation has no money, the formula becomes MIN(don't care, don't care, 0-100,000) = -100,000

 

(Examples in my PM)

 

If this is intended behavior, I am not a fan at all and would only be able to accept it after much much whining ;P

 

I left that part out of the formula, and edited the OP for clarification. You can't loot negative money.

[Alex]

I understand there is some concern in the change to how many spies can be purchased, but I don't think it's as big of an issue as everyone is making it out to be.

 

First of all, it doesn't really change that much. It's the same across the board, so big nations can use more spies in their operations against each other, which is fine if that's what they choose to do.

 

Spy damage is still limited. Spies are not the end-all-be-all, so even if your opponent has more spies now, the amount of damage he can do is still very much capped.

 

Nations can only do one espionage operation per day. There's a huge opportunity cost issue there, as there always has been. If you sabotage one nation, you can't sabotage anyone else for the whole day.

 

This doesn't really affect the odds on spy operations. It just scales up about the same with more spies on both sies.