No, this should not be moved to B&S because this is very specifically about fixing this server. :)

#1: The In-Game War Declaration

What? Give tag admins an ingame 'Declare War on Tag' option so that the game acknowledges an alliance-level state of war between tags.

Why? Because it allows for tinkering with war mechanics by formalizing who is at war with who. It allows ingame war tracking. It allows admins to make first strikes less powerful, it can give retaliating alliances more power.

How? Copy the GDI system on an alliance-wide level (in a way). If Tag X is not in a recognised state of war with Tag Y then you can't do special attacks on any of its countries. You can SS and PS but no GS/BR/AB/Missiles. Give tag holders the following options: (a) 'Declare War Immediately' or (b) 'Challenge Alliance'.

Options for (a) Declare War Immediately:
- Aggressor alliance loses all stored turns
- Defending alliance gets 24 hr defensive 'bunker' bonus? Greater DR on pop kills.

Options for (b) Challenge Alliance:
- Defending alliance has 48 hours to accept
- When defending alliance accepts, the war is 'on'. No penalties for either side.
- Useful for prearranged wars.

Other settings:
- Alliances external to the conflict cannot perform any special attacks on the at-war alliances.
- FA packages can be restricted from outside the 'war zone' to an alliance currently at-war. i.e. Can only send FA via the 'Trade Pact'
- Option to 'End Conflict' only once certain parameters are met. i.e. All original countries dead, TNW of opponent is less than 10% your own, Avg Networth of opponent is less than 10% your own. If none of these parameters are met, either side may end the conflict only by 'Surrendering', thus giving the winning alliance 24 hours exclusively to pillage/farm the vanquished.

Potential Issues:
- Alliances who declare war on each other to shield themselves from external attack: Implement the $2b bug for at-war alliances? Drastically lower explore rate after 10k acres (to zero) for at-war alliances.
- Killing suiciders: Special attacks are always allowed on a country to country basis if the attack screen 'Declare War' option is used.

I see this as step 1 to fixing our current issues. War at the moment is not about winning, it's about getting the FS in before anyone else at any cost. It's killing the game.

Honestly, nice idea dagga.

Cheers, but the idea has been around a while. I've just extended it and tidied it up a bit.

More food for thought;

Average Stored Turn Levels: qz, how hard would it be to add a column in the Clan List that shows the average amount of stored turns per country per alliance? That would weaken surprise FS's as alliances would not want to tip their hand as their average goes up.

Kind of reminds me of Utopia, and I'll probably get shot for saying that I thought this kind of system was good when I played Utopia briefly.

Probably also forgot to add that maybe there should be an option to offer a cease fire without any side surrendering to the other.

The last one sounds good but, People who want intel already have the means... GET SPY's

I remember playing a game called promisance a long long time ago where you had to dec war on an alliance to hit a country more than 20x.

It was open to a lot of a abuse, but I can't remember how. I'm not saying i'm against the idea, but whatever is decided would need a hell of a lot of testing before implimented imo.

It's not Utopia at all!

And yes, mutual cease-fire option can be proposed then agreed to.

Oceana, you can't spy 25% of an alliance every day just to check if they're storing turns. That will most likely force them into saving turns and hitting you anyway.

How would it need testing Flamey?

You're not declared, you can't special attack. It really cant be any simpler. Multitudes of games that don't have issues like this alreayd use this system. It works.

On the game, you used to be limitied to hitting 3 tags, but everyone would split into mini-tags and it was a mess. What I'm saying is someone always tries to exploit things, so why not test it on a few expresses first or something.

Testing these game changes seems to be common sense for me, so that the current player base can avoid any exploits or bugs that could occur when implementing it.

If it was just placed into the alliance server without testing, we would end up being the testers.

Which isnt necessarily a bad thing, as long as the community would be willing to go through trails and errors.

Seems to me there is only one alliance really having issues with the pacting system, everyone else seems capable of playing fairly like we have been done for 10+ years.

Not against above, just saying, not everyone has a problem getting along.

Options for (a) Declare War Immediately:
- Aggressor alliance loses all stored turns
"- Defending alliance gets 24 hr defensive 'bunker' bonus? Greater DR on pop kills.

Options for (b) Challenge Alliance:
- Defending alliance has 48 hours to accept
- When defending alliance accepts, the war is 'on'. No penalties for either side.
- Useful for prearranged wars."

I like some variation of this.

1) I would personally not give the defender the responsability to "Accept war", but instead have a seperate pre-aranged war option. You can either arange the war at a certain time, or as we discussed a few sets ago, have a random timer for the start of the war (aka randomly occuring between a set time or any time during the set).

2) Totally agree with losing stored turns + greater DR on civ losses.

"Other settings:
- Alliances external to the conflict cannot perform any special attacks on the at-war alliances.
- FA packages can be restricted from outside the 'war zone' to an alliance currently at-war. i.e. Can only send FA via the 'Trade Pact'
- Option to 'End Conflict' only once certain parameters are met. i.e. All original countries dead, TNW of opponent is less than 10% your own, Avg Networth of opponent is less than 10% your own. If none of these parameters are met, either side may end the conflict only by 'Surrendering', thus giving the winning alliance 24 hours exclusively to pillage/farm the vanquished."

1) Don't agree to restricting outside interference. That is the police's job.

2) I wouldn't restrict FA, I'd prefer it if all outside FA is made public somewhere instead.

3) Not a fan of the surrendering option.

I think we could make it into Limit Special attacks on countries to 20 attacks every 48 hours, unless clan wide war is declared (or country war is declared)

this could create a couple of strategies (like people not declaring clan wide war, but using declare war for FS instead, thus making walling much more important :)

Don't limit special attacks on untags though! It would be heaven for suiciders.

Store your turns in protection and play a day or 2 behind. Sure it tells people you're going to war, but there are some like iMag that war every set and it would still give you the surprise advantage ;)

For "potential issues"
Exploring - I'd rather explore when out of missiles to get readiness back. Spy DR would need to be fixed for a real alternative, and even then you'd need someone stupid enough to not have many spies to make SR/CD targets a viable means of readiness recovery for more than 1 or 2 people.
Suiciders - You would need to make sure vacation mode can't be entered within an amount of time after they've made any attack

What if clan A declares on clan B (who was planning to net) and then clan B immediately surrenders, thus enabling them to continue to net. I think if you did this stuff you would have to make the war last a min of 72 hours. Period. I like most everything else or at least id be willing to try it. After all, if it don't work we can always blame the mods. :)

some things id change if we went down this route, more mechanic than tuning focused i hope

if challenge is not accepted after 48 hours penalties should no longer apply, this should allow the challenged party to choose when to start things otherwise its at the aggresors choice, if they wish to wait

not sure its really a good idea though as i know what id do under such a system

if fa is restricted to trade pacts that just cuts it down or spreads it out or makes people do it for longer, anyway its a bit halfway, would be good to make FA news into the other tag automatically viewable to your opponent

i dont know if those ratios are good for tnw and anw, you would be able to auto farm a tag with 20% of your members if you got to double their anw for example

and we should be aiming to make wars less extreme (particularly less extreme immediately) which means maybe things should end before 10% anw

they arnt bad idea mainly but they arnt really addressing the main issues

which would be changing readiness to 2%, putting a daily cap on hits and so on

DH, the beauty of it is, it's just fine tuning at this point. Don't allow Surrender for 72 hours. After surrender, give the winning alliance a 24 hour window where it can hit the defeated alliance without repercussion. The winning alliance gets a recognised ingame war victory.

I like this idea Dagga, and I have been saying similar things for the Team server for a while now. It really desperately need something like this in order to survive as a server at all. Alliance is of course very similar but has more players on it.

One idea for people not to abuse the Declare war between alliances is to as you say enable the GS/BR/AB only when at war but at the same time you can perhaps Disable the PS as well as either lowering the explore rate as you suggest.

Lets hope admins pick up on this one, it would be a good next step for the game!

How would policing work? You cannot kill a violating country without have declared war on it?

Can you still declare war on individual countries?

For example, tag jumpers. Would this system prevent tag-jumping?

declaring war losing turns eh? that's not a bad idea at all...

(stored that is)

vilse what team server needs is no kills, or no pop kills

its a pretty roundabout and inelegant solution qz, you could easily just cap attacks or war attacks per 0-24 day or 24 hours such that stored turns wouldnt provide a large hit advantage

I really like Daggas idea of dropping stored turns to 0.

Or perhaps, how about decreasing the maximum number of turns on hand to half the normal, and transferring the remaining turns into stored turns on declaration of war. This could occur instead of dropping stored turns on 0 and potentially "losing" turns. Besides, if stored turns are just dropped to 0, it'll make it more likely for people to want to FS once 120 turns are stored (sooner, without warning). Whereas the latter still promotes the storing of turns, but would require a clan to be more actively participate in the war. Moreover, if the number of turns on hand during the war is reduced, it'll reduce the time people spend on their countries daily, making it more likely they'll play more often (possibly).

E.g. 120(0) becomes 60(60). 120(40) becomes 60(100). And you'd only be allowed to hold 60 turns on hand at any one time while the war declaration is in effect (granted yes you should still be allowed to get bonuses such as the 18hour bonus and bonus points in turns which could easily push the 60 turns to around 66-70 or more turns on hand).

Thoughts?

what happens when I just have all my countries start attacking an alliance as untaggeds?

what about cases where a single country needs killing in an enemy tag?

this is part of the reason we are yet to implement an official "clan war" system, because there are always ways to get around it or we create other tangential problems. making an official way to declare war has been discussed since the early days of this project, but there's always either ways around it or things that protect "sketchy" actions, or it just makes playing FAR too rigid (and this includes the implementation discussed above)

this should really be on B&S since any clan-focused system would be adapted for FFA as well, perhaps team but definitely Alliance and FFA, but I'm not going to move it because this general idea has already been presented there 3-4 times in different ways.

The biggest takeaway I have from running this game is that if there is a small hole to be exploited, it will be exploited to the utmost by someone when it is beneficial to do so.

In that case, seeing as it's an alliance server. Perhaps these 'war' rules could possibly not apply to untaggeds. And if this is the case, if a single country needs killing in any enemy tag, then perhaps it could be handled via a FR channel where the clan in question would be able to detag the member, making him an "untagged", allowing the other clan to kill him/her.

I guess the big thing people have agreed on is that FSes have the ability to completely incapacitate a clan, greatly reducing their chances of "winning" the war. Thus, I suggested the "reducing maximum turns on hand to 60", which would very possibly reduce the "power" of a FS as there are much fewer turns on hand, resulting in fewer deaths, thus the clan getting FSed has a chance to fight back.

Or how about if GS/BR/ABs use twice the normal turns if a "war declaration" has not been made?

I.e. instead of 1 turn for a GS as a tyr, it'd take 2 turns. Again, reducing how "powerful" a FS is.

Honestly,


Give restarts like 250 spendable turns to start with. It should change a lot of dynamics so 120(80).

I would prefer turns to be cut a little like to 100(80) but keep the turn rate the same it would change lots of stuff.

there's actually another discussion on a game dev forum about how to scale restarts as the round progresses while not making it advantageous to just restart + attack + self delete + repeat.

hmm i like that one as well as an incentive

if your not going to take away or make incredibly hard pop kills the obvious solution is to lower the tempo

to do that you change the walling formula so high pop walling is better than low pop

and either increase turns to kill, or reduce hits done per day (simple way is 2% readiness regain per turn)

that means:

there are less kills per country per day (currently its about .15, you could drop that to .075 or whatever) having the biggest effect in reducing the people who die in an FS without hitting back

small tags can still get a kill eventually if they have enough military, they wont have a turn problem or a timing problem

one waller will affect wars less particularly in small wars

when everyone doesnt need to be on hitting at exactly the same time you can slow down hitting without causing major upset since you may take 3 minutes to run all your turns but you dont need to spend 20 minutes waiting for the target anymore

wars that are less even take more time to become uneven and are more vulnerable to being effected by skill rather than raw numbers

Game needs a quick fix while having a low player base, or the game needs more players.

the restart formulas have been discussed a few times

the short version is give extra turns that cannot be used to attack with

scale it based on how many turns have gone in the set

so if you die at turn 200 you may get 100 turns, if you die at turn 1000 you may get 500 turns but you cant use any to attack, that gives you lots of turns to grow a restart back up and it doesnt matter that you died without warning

if you want to punish early wars, that a lot were discussing earlier the obvious solution is to start the bonus turns out high compared to turns passed in the set then drop it off to make killing countries more worthwhile

further explained:
if you kill a country which has taken 200 turns at turn 300 and it gets 200 free turns back you spent about 350 turns to take away about 100 turns, its fairly pointless

if you wait until 2000 turns and they only get 300 back, then its a lot better

the amount of turns given should be tuned both around being in humanitarian range and reducing the penalty of dying

doubling turn use seems like a silly way to do that, why not double readiness loss

just makes demos suck more and tryannies better

at least 2% readiness loss makes tyranny and demo a lot more similar

these biased suggestions just benefit warring alliances!!!11oneone

OP reminds me of how Nukezone works, all wars are mutual or NW restrictions apply.

"After a Clan leader has declared war, they cannot declare peace for the next 24 hours. In addition, if one clan declares war against another clan, the networth attack restrictions are still in place. However, if both sides declare war on each other, the networth attack restrictions are removed in what is called a "mutual war.""

Their warring system is alot more advanced then earths and you earn points by warring but the general idea is that wars are fought through declarations ingame.

nvm

Guys, please do not discuss restarts, turns for attacks, readiness for attacks. I made this thread specifically about the number 1 priority, and the starting point which is ingame war decs. The other stuff is all good stuff, and will follow.

Pang raised a few questions on this system. I swear I have answered them before...



You think alliances will attack as untaggeds? How? Did you read the part where I said you can't GS/BR/AB/Missile unless your tag is declared on the other tag? Untaggeds have no tag. To use special attacks they have to declare war country to country.



Get your kill team to Declare War country to country. If there are multiple targets (rare), kill the first one, Declare Peace, rinse and repeat. I ask you this question: What if you need to kill a GDI country? It's exactly the same, your kill team has to Declare War individually.



I see no reasons above to not implement this system? Untaggeds can't do special attacks unless they declare war and special attacks are always available on individual countries provided the country-country Declare War option is used.



I don't know why but I get the strong feeling you are trying to water down this suggestion or muddy the waters so it never gets implemented. Unsure of your motivation for this. Hundreds of players on this server have had a fluff experience for 6 months straight, not due to poor play, but poor game mechanics. This needs to be recognised, here.

Hhmmmm I still think attacking from turn 101 would be fine. As long as you are given 100(400) for instance when you gain 500 turns as restart. You can only pump out so many attacks a day.

PS. I'm glad people see the benefits to formalizing war decs, as it does make for MUCH simpler ways to reduce the effectiveness of a first strike.

There is no simpler way to balance out first strikes than for the game to recognise what a first strike is. Once recognised, remove all stored turns. Easy.

Ahh.. Restarts are an important fix as well, but that will be Fixing Alliance #2..

/me slap Makinso!!

This has to be one of the top agreed upon game changes imo, along with the delayed times on attacks. The only problem with that idea was very poor implementation (and thats a pretty huge problem). That can screw this idea up if the same occurs here.

Besides game mechanics... which really is the entire basis of the game, is the lack of players.

We would not have ANY of these issues if we had a better population. We would not be so confined and be in such major conflicts with the same people over and over again if there were more people to play with.

/endrant

good idea dagga.

i feel like a lot of what's happening right now is because the game is too focused on net changes and not war changes.

let's hope the admins take some of these very good suggestions to heart

I agree.

btw to those who don't get it, it's not a stupid idea, it just means you only have to store turns for 40h and not 80h to ensure you don't lose some of your precious turns.

Great idea overall, I like these ideas.

one abuse i see with this:


- Killing suiciders: Special attacks are always allowed on a country to country basis if the attack screen 'Declare War' option is used.


is that an alliance can effectively declare war on another by doing the declare option on who they are FSing one by one

we can make it so that when say, 2 countries in a certain tag got killed using the declare war option - it auto-declares immediate war and all stored turns will be lost.

I like a lot of ideas as well -- they align well with what we've discussed publicly and privately and are clearly evolving through the discussion each time dagga posts some semblance of them. But at the same time, I'm aware that this sort of suggestion really makes wars more rigidly defined and limits the actions of certain classes of players on the server (untaggeds vs tags).

I've personally lobbied for improved abilities of the clan and limiting what untaggeds can do for years (back on E2025 and early in EE) and the response I got was that folks generally liked how untaggeds have the ability to do whatever they want. Folks also felt the same way about clans -- no one should be above anyone else in terms of what they can make the clan do. I've tried to keep that in mind when thinking about changes as I feel that's the will of the people? Am I wrong about that now? Those are my core concerns as an admin...

As for muddling up the water... lol :p. I just like having the changes and suggestions discussed (and saved) in the proper places so that they don't get lost in the sea of garbage on this forum. That's for a few reasons! A lot of the really vocal people (i.e., alliance leaders + very dedicated players + political pundits, myself included in that group) tend to like certain ideas more than other groups because it gives people like *US* more control over things. There's also less of a political bend to any discussion on B&S. Even though it's not necessarily intended to be there, this forum has a weird way of bringing it out. Also, to be perfectly honest, when I see a new thread started by you on AT during a tumultuous time politically, I usually don't pay it much attention :p I didn't notice this until I saw qz as the last poster and was like "oh wtf is qz doing on there... oh, it's a change suggestion topic...". If it was on B&S, I would have probably noticed it sooner.

Anyway, on topic and posting this for the purpose of discussion if nothing else... we actually had some discussion about this topic that General Earl started around the holidays about improving the clan experience. I think we've said several times that the goal is to eventually get a better clan system implemented and the discussion hinges around what that clan system can do. I'd rather go all in and basically make it a federal level of government and your countries are basically states within that nation. I think that makes more sense conceptually for the nature of the server. It could include a simple "minister" system of some kind. There could be different bonuses for different types of federal governments. Maybe you can send FA (maybe just money+cash) to your federal government to redistribute to restarts or smaller countries. Maybe you can "PS" a portion of your defense to clanmates' countries to stop help defend (but if the country dies, your units are gone!). Maybe national gov bonuses could align with state-level government to provide synergies? It opens up a new level of gameplay for the more hardcore players and gives us a new tool for the experienced players to help the new ones out.

I always said that if we're going to make war changes, they're going to need to be big changes. That kind of tectonic shift in how the clan element of this server is played/managed is something that's far overdue and I think dovetails nicely with official war decs and it almost becomes like an expansion pack.