As we think about how we can improve the war experience, I'm curious what folks like about war in this game.

What are some of the enjoyable parts of fighting? What is the outcome you want to see from a war?

Additionally, what could we improve on? What are some things that annoy you about wars?

I'm hoping to hear from folks who are both hardcore fighters and folks who traditionally prefer to netgain.

I'll make some more threads about this topic for other servers, but this server has a unique war dynamic that isn't on other servers.

Thanks!

Restart bonuses annoy me

sinistril, I agree and also think most people on AT agree but have the developers thought about sending out a questionnaire to everyone at the end of the set rather than basing changes on us loudmouths?

Um I like getting in a chat room and trying to coordinate to kill countries, and killing countries. Also spying countries and looking for weaknesses, LaF runs some tight countries......

Trying to get a higher SPAL. Trying to figure out why the other side does what they do. Trying to improve. Coming to AT and talking fluff.

Getting a kill, doesn't matter if its one of Xyles under 10 seconds that LaF love to mock or its an offline target.

And the tactics vs strategy / short term vs long term.

I like it when sof loses, this has become the highlight of my online gaming experience. It irritates me when they don't lose much harder. Also I think restart bonus is too high for the losing side. I also dont like it that a bunch of losers like sof are trying to imitate lafs refined war strategy.

You think THE restart bonus is too high for the losing side.

You forgot the definite article.

I would like to see a server with no restart bonus and the amount of turns on hand cut down.

that is just me though

I enjoy walling, I enjoy the strategic aspects of war both from a country-building perspective but also on a wider scope as target selection, attack selection and strategy selection and market prediction.

I do not enjoy having to be ready 24/7, I do not enjoy the desperate search for critical mass of turns to make a kill run, I do not enjoy the endless one-dimensional string of GSs that wars become after x days of the reset and I am particulary annoyed by the state of the balance of asymetrical warfare which I believe is the most central issue in the game since I dont know when.

Problems with asymetrical warfare described below:
Assuming countries A and B are similar in everything NW, acres, spies, military, missiles and tech. For some reason, any reason they end up fighting one another. Both countries pay similar expenses and they have similar power to damage one another with spies, missiles, special attacks and landgrabs.
If DR is low right now landgrabs are the most powerful mode of attack. Once DR has gone high they are weak and missiles, spies and special attacks all deal lots of damage. Without knowing specifics(strategies, turns on hand, missile stocks + SDIs and specific military levels) we can't say for sure which type of aggression is most effective at any given moment in this conflict - thats another way of saying there is somewhat of a balance between the damage potential of spies, missiles and special attacks.
I will also suggest that balance is good.

Assume now that country A is has twice as much as country B in everything, in absolute terms. That means twice as much NW, spies, tech and land. Well now landgrabs are roughly 1/4th as damaging for A->B, in absolute terms compared to the previous scenario, and about the same goes for special attacks because they are affected by the NW modifier. Landgrabs and special attacks the other way B->A, should they be possible due to stock or money on hand, are 2.5-3 times more powerful as the NW modifier is not as harsh the other way and because there is no limit on the damage based on your own resources.
A country twice as big with twice the resources, will be able to defend better against special attacks and landgrabs more readily so this imbalance may be warranted if looking at it in isolation. However, it becomes very problematic when comparing with the other modes of attack and how they are affected by the size difference:

Missiles are limited by your own resource slightly, but not by the nw modifyer, and in this case a chemical or nuclear missile from A->B will do 2/3 the damage that a missile from B->A will do. Country A will have spent twice the resources on SDI and warfare to achieve the same effects, yet they are 2/3 as effective, thats 33.33% value for the money. This is unbalanced.

The big problem comes with spies tho, because country A pays over two times as much expenses* for his spies and because there is no NW modifier, the limitations by your own resources only matter for a single operation(Bomb structures) at this size difference(the others are unaffected in this scenario).
The success rate on the spy ops will be unaffected by this size difference.
For most of the ops the damage will be two times as large for B->A than A->B, the only exception is bomb structures. So more than twice the investment for half the damage potential(<25% value for money); This is incredibly unbalanced.

*I mentioned that a twice as large country has payed more than twice as much in expenses as the smaller country, what I didn't mention is that the bigger country will have had to devote a larger percentage of his acres to ICs(if not an indy) to reach the same SPAL at a faster growth rate, which would have damaged his production to a greater than double degree in absolute numbers than the smaller country due to specialization if they are techers or cashers. So in that case the total investment is not twice as large, it can be tree or four times as large to reach the same SPAL.

Some people seem to doubt my words when I say its impossible for netters to adequatly defend themselves and still netgain competitively. Well with current game formulas the only reason to doubt me is your own lack of game knowledge.

Leave restart bonus the same for a countries 1st kill, however that country starts fresh if killed 2 or more times in a set

I think we were discussing this in BUG/SUG in the form of "Hardcore" Server; where there are no restarts PERIOD! Mwahahaah!

The best thing about war is watching a syko and a snowflake prove they have no real life, or real friends. The fact that they think about, and post long winded post about the war is priceless.
Their fuses are sooooo short that a simple post like this one will have them spewing for days. Keeping it simple, they can't stfu. :)

The NW modifyer and the fact that it reduces damage from higher NW far more harshly than from lower NW makes wars last for much longer. I think that the restart bonus has been partially wrongly blamed also for the effects of the NW modifier on special attacks as the lower NW side will take more hits before dying and therefore lead to a stagnation of the war.

Look at the current 1a war: https://imgur.com/a/NO1sSR0
As the NW gap increases it becomes harder to keep the losing side down due to the NW modifyer, because despite having less pop they take more turns to kill.

A great suggestion! :)

I want AB's to kill citizens,

It doesn't make sense to me that I can take out 160 buildings and no one dies.. like what the heck? how was no one in any of those buildings?

restarts should only be able to attack ( and harmfull opps) tag(s) they where(are) at war with, not attack other tag(bots)

I have brought that up on B&S

Comments like these have nothing to do with the game mechanics that he is asking about it. Further comments as such and the one recently made that I deleted, will be deleted.
Thanks!

-Make the tag permanent like in team to avoid suiciders.

-Dial back restart bonus and when same country dies a second time, start fresh.

-Nukes, EM and Tanks all should kill SOME civis.

-Oil tech.

I agree to all of KoH's ideas

Have meth troops the lose no readiness

Oh and if you're a tyrant or dictator. You should be aloud to kill the humanitarians and attack small countries anyways.
Or generals for the large ones

Yes, exactly.. I was saying that the other day

"humanitarians protest and refuse to allow you to attach such a small opponent" what the heck are you talking about.. I'm a tyrant.. I'm running a tyranny government so I should be able to just kill the humanitarians and then attack whoever I want

Haha

Your opinion based on how you understand this:

Missiles are limited by your own resource slightly, but not bythe nw modifyer, and in this case a chemical or nuclear missile from A->B will do 2/3 the damage that a missile from B->A will do. Country A will have spent twice the resources on SDI and warfare to achieve the same effects, yet they are 2/3 as effective, thats 33.33% value for the money. This is unbalanced.The big problem comes with spies tho, because country A pays over two times as much expenses* for his spies and because there is no NW modifier, the limitations by your own resources only matter for a single operation(Bomb structures) at this size difference(the others are unaffected in this scenario).The success rate on the spy ops will be unaffected by this size difference.For most of the ops the damage will be two times as large for B->A than A->B, the only exception is bomb structures. So more than twice the investment for half the damage potential(<25% value for money); This is incredibly unbalanced.

And for fluff sake "Pay ATTENTION on this":

Comments like have nothing to do with the game mechanics that he is asking about it. Further comments as such and the one recently made that I deleted, will be deleted.Thanks!

#NW Modifier
#Spal

100% correct on everything, especially that part.

Never underestimate humanitarians

Ok then if you try to kill the humanitarians have there be a small chance they uprise and you turn into a democracy and are forced to stay that way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PQ6335puOc

killing

that's all so practical.

Thats a good risk. like 1% chance or something. But should not be permanent, cost of switching back is enough deterrent from abusing mechanic.

There's a lot of minor things, but by far the biggest issue is between spy op strength/how spal works and restart bonuses/how quickly you die.

Spy ops either need reduced effectiveness or change how success is calculated. CD is way too strong. Implement some form of land/nw scaling modifier to returns of spy ops.

It should still cause the govt switch cost or I would abuse it for netting purposes when I want the demo switch.

What are some of the enjoyable parts of fighting?
Warchats, killing stuff, the strategy part of what are most suitable targets. That killing in different part of the reset have a very different choice for strategy for the set.

What is the outcome you want to see from a war?
One side win and another side loses.

Additionally, what could we improve on?
Techer bots carry too much cash so wars are endless. You can basically save 120 turns and farm some bots then break most of the countries in the game. Think spy ops are a bit OP, CD+Demo and 60% of troops power is gone.

What are some things that annoy you about wars?
That being online 24/7 is needed to play properly. Techer bots.

What I dont like:
1. The need to be by my phone or computer 24/7 in an attempt to wall a 10second (or less) death.
+ I have a wife, kids and a job. It is too demanding to expect for someone who likes to compete. So I feel obligated to be super available at all times and eventually tire out and want to just quit playing.

2. That a kill run consists of one thing: setup for GS or BR and hold enter.
+ Its too simple and not enough excitement.

3. The restart bonus.
+ You kill someone and they restart with too many resources and it really drags the war on longer than need be. It also makes it more difficult to declare a real winner in any meaningful way until weeks and weeks of constant war has gone by and you've had to chance to kill the same people multiple times.

I would like to see kills be a tad harder, walling a tad more possible and the penalty for dying more severe. I'm not necessary saying get rid of it outright but it needs modifications.

4. Bots that hold onto too much cash is a problem.
+ When restarting and grabbing bots for 200+ million cash per grab is a thing its really takes away from the game, the market and the normal flow of things. It's a cheesy way to almost instantly become a breaker after you restart. The bots need to be spending their cash not hording it, they could buy bushels and oil or something.

5. Related to #1, kills are too fast.
+ If a country dies in 10 seconds or less this game is broke. It takes days, weeks, month to build a country and can be killed way too quickly. No country should be able to be killed in less than 1-2 minute(s) IMO. If they can be slowed down to that pace it would take a lot of pressure off people to be super ready all the time and its still a pretty fast kill.

•More population in countries have millions in Pop keep the civ per attack loss the same makin it a longer process to kill need more turns available for the attackers slowing the killing process down and more prolonged giving the defender more time to wall and making the attacking strategy more thought out process needs to be slowed it will rewrite the strategy how to kill.


•Ab’s should kill pop in rl they do.

•If you haven’t got more than 10 players in your clan you shouldn’t be aloud to make a clan, forcing more mergers larger alliances, unlikely allies becoming friends healing old rifts possibly making new game dynamics and allies or foes.

• bots are going good great idea there for farming etc I love that idea.

•Make an alliance BANK and make a cost for the alliance to rebuild and remake a restart country no bonus everything apart from pop should be brought using the alliance bank account,no money aside in the alliance bank no restart country new dimensions to the game slow the restart rate down forcing countries to stockpile money in war.


• Make a world map 🌏 the alliance represents the territory they have in the world so we have a visual of power in the server and make a tournament out of it like every 2nd set or something can make rules for it like 10 day wars whoever wins kills/hits/defends comes up with the best strategy in 10 days takes that territory of that map, it would be fair a smaller clan can take on a bigger one and wall and kill for 10 days and so on if its a netting clan they can win by majority walling for 10 days and keep their territory if they can wall for 10 days just a thought, then you can maybe introduce navy units if there is a clear space of water needed to invade a certain area of the map making the dynamics a bit more challenging to take a territory.

Last one everyone should be a loud to have a wall babysitter page like lafs or access to the scripts so we can see if they are cheating or not or we can create our own.

I forgot

•Make military units more expensive and realistic keeps the numbers of military down eg 1 soldier in rl makes 40 a 50 k a year that should reflect the up keep and it should minus one of your pop same with jets and tanks 1mil each dor example to buy and make with an up keep of under 100 k a year maintenance it will make military numbers of a country more realistic instead of having millions of jets and tanks and soldiers bring some real life costs in.

bonus

i have said this before events once a set where bots buy more or a set where bots create tags and war other clans just something to spice the game up some.

Also, I didn't post this before since I figured everyone would be against it but when I see the seriousness of others here.

And I am serious about this.

Get rid of eestats etc all, don't allow people to have the game code and don't allow real time news to be outside of the game......

Yea i agree .


I like it , it would tip the scales in any war 😲

Neil & Task1,

Maybe instead of getting rid of it all together a 'Fog of War' concept could be worked into the game somehow. Maybe a certain # of his or something do not show up right away or something. Maybe it only does this on GS, BR, AB etc... But that still doesn't solve the 'countries die too fast' problem...

Eestats makes it easier for me as a game mod to watch for certain people that are banned from the game lol

I guess its possible to turn all kill runs to offline kills by randomizing groups of country numbers every tick of a turn that can attack one another. If you split the game into 10 groups there would only ever be 2-4 people on one side of a war that can hit a designated target. I think this is a really bad solution tho.

Other ways to slow down kills:
Make pure GS or pure BR kills require far more hits to complete and make hybrid kills much better.*
Make walling less powerful, harder to pull off effectively and easier to counter.**
Make it impossible to just hold enter/space on a kill run by redesigning the attack again prompt. Should alone increase the duration of killruns by 10-25 seconds.

*Hybrid kills will take longer to pull off as players would have to switch attack modes halfway. Maybe a GS kill of 350 hits won't take much longer than a GS kill of 250 hits given you can break the target and you have the turns to go all the way, but if the Hybrid kill of GS then BR takes 200 hits you will have a great incentive for those types of kills.
**If encountering an enemy waller is less of a disaster for the tag thats killing him there will be less reason to go fast on the kill runs which will allow more relaxed warchats with shorter set-up times.

Could also have a readiness penalty for hitting too fast. If you 'Attack again' within X time (can be defined to anything you want) then you get additional readiness loss otherwise you get the normal readiness loss. That would also give way to a strategy letting alliances decide if someone is worth burning up more readiness on to be faster or go slower. Would add another layer to the game play.

I would rather have an increase in losses if doing many attacks in the same second or something like that. If every hit in the same second added 10% losses and then reset next second then a 19 hit spam in one second by a tyranny would cost about two times the units without affecting oil or readiness(unless your total units dropped down too far). It's a cost you'd be willing to take in some situations, but again an incentive to slow down and think instead of just clicking a button really fast.

Slowing kills a bit, not a lot, but enough to give someone a fighting chance to defend.. enough time to at least let them get the attack alert.
add an alert feature that originates in site and base a specific time from that itself.

Yes there are many ways to slow down kills. What the devs will have to figure out is what is the sweet spot, time wise, is it 1min, 2min, 3min and so on.

For me I'd say a 1-2min, standard, kill range would be a sweet spot. Hopefully whatever method of slowing down kills that would be implemented would also have a secondary method(s) to do a fast kill at an opportunity cost.

Something that gives players/ alliances options and different decisions to make throughout any one kill run or any one war.

thanks for all the feedback so far!

maybe also ask what you dislike about war?

war is boring for the most part.the majority of the players just login and go to war chat where you are told what to do with your turns and logout untill you get more turns that someone else is going to tell you how to use.during which time you are being told how to build your country their way.

Just make it impossible to die without first logging in. As soon as your click the warning that you're gonna fluffin die then it opens to floodgates and gives you a chance to wall. Say 5000 population and you can no longer be attacked until you login.

Or make it so you can't be attacked with special attacks while not logged in. You log in to run turns? You're free to be attacked in the next 3 hours. Otherwise, you can't be hit. Thus people won't have to worry about walling at work or beside the wife/gf/Soviet (to be inclusive to galleri) late at night in bed

run one set without bots and increase the explore rate by ONLY 5%