since i don't see a post here about it, i thought i would copy what pang said. he said this is a response to one country servers:




optimal to attack once every 3 seconds?

hypothetical example:
so the warriors at SOF, 80 members, could optimally hit once every 3 seconds and send 250 hits in <10 seconds (assuming 250 hits to kill)

omega, at 20 members could retaliate, optimally hit once every 3 seconds, send 250 hits in 38 seconds.

imagine even just 1/3rd the clan hitting, not 100%, thats 27 sof hitting and killing in 28 seconds. and that would be omega's 7 members killing in 1 minute 47 seconds


why is making kill runs slower for smaller clans, even under consideration as a good idea?

That's kind of ridiculous.

since that post the number that's being toyed with is 1/second.
but you do raise a very good point here that it actually swings things much more heavily in favor of tags with more members..

50 people online = kill in 5 seconds

4 people online (which is enough to kill with @ full turns) = kill in 62.5 seconds

with 1 sec/hit, 250 HPK

that is not fair

.

.

your point is valid

poo pies llaar...splat!

I really don't like the idea of attack throttling... if at all it couldn't be more than 1 second/hit or I believe you will see some people quit.

Hmmmm it's an interesting change....

the point is to put multiple changes in together

if you just throttle attacks then it makes walling overpowered for small conflicts encouraging gangbangs coalition wars combined chats and so on

ie 20v20 in alliance

if at the same time as attack throttling you do other things such as change readiness to 2% per turn and change %civskilled/hit to be higher at the end of the run than the start of the run you can reduce first strikes being overpowered (and therefore reduce kills/country/day making wars stay even or competitive longer) without making it so small groups cannot get a kill at all

also reducing the hardcore advantage to warring making it more casual/newbie friendly


i dont get why people are saying it shouldnt apply in ffa though, in ffa you can do either 75 hits with a non demo/tyranny pretty much instantly or do 19 hits with a tyranny, then switch to next country do 19 and so on for 304 hits in a very short time frame

edit: speaking of servers which should be treated differently, team could be throttled heavier, but really kills should be impossible there to reduce the incentive to work in groups larger than 5, which is against the spirit of the server, in e2025 there used to be a limit to reducing people to about 12 civ's, before the min 5/10/25 were put in. pop would not regrow after so a country was crippled in terms of income (more so for casher) but it could grow or not as people preferred.

I dont like this idea. More likely it will take more turns, not more time. And with some ppl, its not rly needed to give them time. This change will make ppl with 24/7 online even more stronger, since you will need even more turns to kill them. Doubt it will increase kill time. With 15 ppl it takes less than 2 minutes to kill even with 3 sec pause. Much kills is more than 2min.
Need some better idea if you want to do so.

Uhh, smaller tags have a disadvantage anyway. They have less members; dumb argument. The current system gives big alliances a massive advantage because the quick volume of hits (extra members) means that there is zero chance for a defender to get online. Surely you guys are not suggesting that clans with less members should get a free pass because they're worse at attracting members than a big alliance?

This change needs to be made. Period. I don't agree with the readiness being the method in which to slow it down (simply disallow attacks made within 0.5 seconds of each other) but the change need sto be made.

would be nice to have an option to queue an attack for the time readiness loss will be as you have decided rather than have to hit as close as possible to the time as you can

if you want to maintain the option to still rush at a 30% penalty in total hit output thats ok too

Your complaints don't make any sense.

While I agree that small tags already have it difficult/impossible vs. significantly larger tags, I do believe that this change would further increase that gap, making it even harder for small clans to take a stand vs. larger bullies.

I do agree that somehow throttling the attack speed and making walling "easier" (no more <1' kill) would be a good thing, but really this still allows bigger clans to do rush kills in 30-40 seconds while taking that ability away from small clans.

ebola - big alliances have earned the right to kill fast and it's always been that way. If you don't like it, join a bigger alliance or recruit more members.

The problem is the spam hitting when the defenders military is broken down to under 50k.

I am in a big alliance, that doesn't mean I have to like it or that I have to think this change would be good for the game/alliance server.

Yes, it's always been like it that bigger alliances can kill more and faster, the question is whether we should exacerbate it further (and keep walling just as impossible for small alliances while making it easier for big ones). I for one don't think so.
I agree with you that walling should mean something, I just don't think it should only mean something to the people in big alliances.

You want to "fix" rush killing, and I agree with you. I just don't think fixing it for some people and leaving others out is the right thing to do. If that is the alternative, I prefer to leave things the way they are.

i've said it like 8 times in various places, but I want to change fighting so that killing countries isn't really how wars are fought -- make it more about killing military in the field & attacking the country's ability to produce goods. military theory dictates that you can't bomb a country to death (unless you go nuclear), so why do we allow that to happen?

Ideally, I'd like to have a system (for clan servers at least) where if your get hit you'll be at a disadvantage for sure, but you're not completely out of the game and your country can recover. I think it would have to include changes for how military bases work as well to give them more purpose as a "rebuilt" building -- maybe tying it into Indies somehow. Changing pop killing to be based on population density is one change which I know others have mentioned before (Detmer), but I think we need to consider the larger system and make a lot more changes to make this work well.

That's a big changeset potentially, but the thing I have always hated most about fighting in this game is how you spend 3-6 weeks building a country and it dies in less than 3 minutes. if you're driving, you can't even pull over to wall effectively. today's modern games typically make it harder to go from an active, powerful account/country/island/whatever to being dead. we definitely need to move there if we want to be at that level.

population density is pretty much only something I have suggested for missiles. ;)

My revised population kill formula that I shared to the admins is the most important change I have proposed and the one that will alter warfare to be inline with what "we" want. It will be a single change that literally forces people to revise their warfare systems.

Perhaps, instead of throttling attacks, it is simpler to make death less of a penalty of losing "a few weeks of work in 1 minute".

What if a dead country can choose to restart as the dead country, but "revived" with 1/4 of its land/buildings/cash/military/everything with a 200 turn forced protection period? This means, killing a country would only just put it out of the picture for roughly 3 days, but can still return with a semi-decent country.

This will force war efforts to focus more on crippling countries instead, and if you were to kill a country to put it out of action, you have to make sure it comes back really small or maimed. That is, you might want to focus on nuking/grabbing/destroying away half a country's land/buildings first before actually killing it.

This will also mean killing a country with a large cash/tech reserve is less effective as it can still return with 1/4 of that cash/tech reserve. However, this could promote the use of other currently "useless" spy ops such as bomb banks, steal tech, etc, if they can be re-balanced properly for it. Make all harmful spy ops publicly available on the news just like normal attacks, so that it cannot be abused for netting resets, and that it can be properly accounted for in war stats.

With these type of changes, I think throttling wouldn't be needed. Fix the underlying problem, not the symptoms.

i presume detmer you mean something that changes turns gained walling from

8 attacks and 18.666 turns wasted for every 1 turn walling at 5 civ/gs and something like .7 attacks per turn walling at near max pop

if you put it over 1 at near max pop and decreased it to under 1 at low pop that encourages people to wall gradually and makes it so with enough persistence about 2-3 people could eventually get a kill

(reducing the risk of a group dropping below critical mass, which i was always interested to see if it would happen in the TIE/NM war, in other words a walling change can help smaller groups)

ive seen people talking about low-high-low percentage kills rather than flat or low-high though

no enshula, as in it is literally impossible to population kill a country unless you mostly destroy it. If the admins adopt the formula, which I really think they should, then I don't know if they want the formula released. I suppose I could post it on gimpco to vet it, but that would still spread the formula pretty quickly.

I had originally thought it would be nice to change it to be more advantageous to wall early, which is something that qz was working on, but still, doesn't change the fact that you want to pop kill. The only other really viable change imo was to make it take maybe four times as many turns to kill, so you could cripple a lot of countries in the amount of turns you could kill. I still think the other solution is better though.

i'm not a huge fan of just restoring a certain % of a country -- i'm all for making restarts start with more as the round progresses, but taking a portion of your old country just seems a bit hackey. That seems more like a patch than an overarching change and wouldn't be as elegant as a more balanced attacking system.

I don't find pounding the "attack again" button or mashing F5 to be a great attacking model either :p
it would be cool to add more finesse during a kill run, rather than just as the run starts.

increasing restarts bonus on hand turns but making it so you are in protection until those turns are used and only can come oop with normal turns

normal (stored) [quickstart]

and quickstart always get used first and protection turns equals 100 or quickstart, which ever is higher

quickstart would be 0 to start, go up to as high as people want to encourage less penalties for late starters and then would drop off to make it so restarts were not as large as originals

so at the end of a set when theres been about 4500 turns, maybe someone could get 500 quickstart turns if we wanted to help a lot, or only 100 if we just wanted to make protection not boring

thats the alternative to getting stuff you had before you died imo

Yep, but the second intention there is also to promote the use of the "useless spy ops". Make them really powerful, but make the news for them publicly viewable as well.

By taking a % of your dead country, it also alleviates some of the "being blindsided" issues of a stocking alliance - it can still win the war by unloading stockpile, although, at a much reduced rate (75% gone) and delayed rate (200 turns delayed in my example).

making countries impossible to be killed should be tested on solo and team

those are the obvious places for it, after that we can worry about it on alliance and ffa

solo no one should be encouraging killing because its a lot more likely to be players organised outside the game

and team it would be one way to reduce the need/desire to have >5 people in a group

Basically, you want to shift the focus of warring to "maiming", you do that by making killing less attractive. You don't do this by making restarts more attractive, its counter-intuitive.

This in itself will makes throttling attacks for a kill run a non-issue.

http://forums.earthempires.com/...-restarted-a-dead-country

I see llaar suggested this before! And qz thinks the idea is worth exploring there.

The advantage is already in big clans favor. This will at least give small clans a shot at stonewalling in an FS. Look at it both ways. No clan is going to have 40 people hitting all the time.

Also, killing in 4 seconds is just stupid as it stands now.

Locket, the argument is that while it gives a small clan a shot at stonewalling, it ALSO gives the small clan no chance to rush kill the larger clan because they have that much fewer members to attack with.

So why not include the number of countries in a tag in the hit-readiness-loss equation? The fewer countries in a tag, the more readiness is lost by a relatively larger alliance upon each spam hit?

That is not as eloquent and handicaps an individual. It further implies that if you are in a large clan you should have to work together, not just that you can work together.

and doesnt factor in joint warchats which with walling as it is now can increase effectiveness a lot already

or more of a problem it would make having 10 small tags give you an advantage in warring, and untagged would naturally have the highest effectiveness

Still a better system then having stonewalling mean nothing during the most important times of a war.

I had an idea that I told Pang one time, regarding stonewalling changes. I'll post it on BS to see how people like it.

That's the point, though. As it stands now, countries in a netting alliance NEED to work together in order to achieve whatever their goals are for that particular reset. Otherwise, you do not achieve those goals.

So why not make warring where countries in an alliance NEED to work together to achieve the same results? As it stands now, it's very possible to solo-kill a landthin untagged country, or a country in a one-man tag, with relative ease. And suiciding has been more or less nerfed, so the larger alliances can get away with farming lone countries with near-impunity. Also, a smaller alliance can be wiped out in a couple days by a larger, well-equipped alliance. The spam-throttle being equal to all alliances, regardless of size of membership, will only delay the smaller alliance's death, while still not giving the smaller alliance a chance in warfare, because it will be subject to the same throtting.

You are trying to prescribe what an alliance is. I do not like that at all. If a change like that were implemented, PDM would start splitting tags so as not to be handicapped.

speaking of nerfing suiciding, countries which self delete should be grabbable

not allowing it is just promoting griefing ;p


it used to take about 3:1 advantage in countries to take basically no damage in a war, its a lot less than that now, changes including throttling plus making stonewalling ineffective or killing largely undesirable would go some way to making wars less likely to end up lopsided than they are currently

Tags which would not have signed any pacts with any alliances. Remember what happened to SoF when it tried to sidestep a uNAP by putting most of their countries in a different tag?

why couldnt pdm negotiate pacts for multiple tags?

the only problem is if for example evo and pdm had a multi set pact already signed and you both refused to agree on whether you could have multiple tags or not

and even if you couldnt agree the only fair way to decide which tag was the main tag if it wasnt obvious would be to go with the first created tag

then pdm could shove all their landtraders and some retaliators in the tag you didnt recognise leave allx's and bottomfeeders in the other one and it would just hurt the tag trying to recognise one and not the other


but any change which promotes silliness like this (including cant hit people in your own tag) isnt a good idea without a very good reason

Yea I like the restart with a %age or somehow more of your stuff if you died; "Some of your people were hiding in bunkers, and have merged to rebuild your country!" or something

Like the idea, but need a way to communicate to the player when they can attack to get what results.

it displays how long you need to wait for + if you are using the javascript attacking, it counts down for you and the message disappears when the countdown reaches 0.

the user experience is there -- it's just about tweaking the math at this point.

I'm making a new thread about this in the meantime -- read that :p

k, good to hear :O

I think this is a critical issue to look at.


I remember when I first played the game, on my slow Dial Up Connection, it took 3 seconds to make a hit LOL. This made EPIC stonewalling possible:) 1k hits 1500 hits etc.


So let's remember the game original evolved with 3 second hits....its faster internet connections that changed things......

Now I'm not a formula guy...
But I remember a TIE guy online stonewalling, he had 50K turrets and 200 pop

One of our first time war guys logged in, and had 126 turns, and a great internet connection,
He got off 20 hits in 3 seconds. Got the kill.

Honestly, as much as they helped as a small alliance, I'd rather that couldn't happen:)


Turns are an issue too:)
let's go back back something like 80(40) with maybe a turn bank that builds up we can access 2-3 times a reset....only.....but that matriculates in and fills the 80/40

This will also make it require more countries involved in a kill, and thus encourage other kinds of hitting.

Biggest problem with your argument Servant. Yes attacking speed have increased. But so has the ability to wall. With alert bots and smart phones.

So perhaps the problem is the availability of news and market feeds?

I can't believe some of the stupid suggestions in this thread.

1. Slow down maximum attack speed to 2/sec.
2. Give restarts more bonuses - starting turns at 120 (120), keep 20-30% of all your tech/stock and keep your ingame bonuses)

It is really that simple.