Hi All,

As promised over the last while, a bunch of updates! These ones are mainly attacking based, though there are netting ones in the pipeline for later.

These will go into all servers as they reset, including FFA tonight (except for the one noted that does not apply to FFA).

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#1) FAST DR TYPE II : ==> This one will NOT go into FFA <==

THIS AFFECTS ONLY SPECIAL ATTACKS (GS,BR,AB)

A new type of Fast DR is being introduced to nerf the 10 or 15 second kills going on out there, while not preventing them entirely.

The defender will now *lose less MILITARY* based on the average time between the last three attacks. If the attacks are *exactly* one second apart, the defender will lose 90% of what they lose now. If they are > 1 second apart, they will lose approximately the same as now.

However, they lose significantly fewer the faster the attacks go. At 2 attacks/second they will lose ~80%; at 3/s ~73%; at 5/s ~60%; 10/s ~35%; 50/s ~0.5%.

The formula for this new type of Fast DR is:

$dr2 = 0.9^(min(300,AVERAGE_TIME_BETWEEN_LAST_THREE_ATTACKS)^-1)

Incidentally, this means that no matter how fast the attacks go, the first 3 attacks will effectively be unreduced.

The intent is mainly to give a sporting chance to people to be able to login or react. But also to require more planning for killrun leaders.

Thanks to Xinhuan for pointing out a logical flaw in development for this one.

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#2) GS / BR Minimum Returns Ramping over Time

We are adjusting the Minimum returns of GS and BR (5 and 10 currently) to ramp to their normal values over the first turns in a reset. THIS WILL BE BASED ON THE TURN RATE FOR THE GIVEN SERVER

The formula for this is:

min(5*MULT,floor(6*MULT*TURNS_ELAPSED/TURN_RATE))

where MULT is 1 for GS 2 for BR, and TURNS_ELAPSED is the turns elapsed since the start of the server, and TURN_RATE is the turn rate in seconds

Express:
Every 40 turns for GS (20 for BR), the minimum will increase by 1, max at 200 turns;

Team:
Every 150 turns for GS (75 for BR), the minimum will increase by 1, max at 750 turns;

Alliance/FFA:
Every 200 turns for GS (100 for BR), the minimum will increase by 1, max at 1000 turns;

Tourney:
Every 250 turns for GS (125 for BR), the minimum will increase by 1, max at 1250 turns;

Primary:
Every 300 turns for GS (150 for BR), the minimum will increase by 1, max at 1500 turns;

This is intended to steer wars to be either later or OOP cripple wars, so people get a chance to play at their first country a while. It will also protect solo servers from any early quick kills.

[TO CLARIFY: The point of this is to discourage OOP wars =/ ]

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#3) Production based on Population

In an effort to make crippling and failed KR's less pointless, we have made production of indies/farms/labs/rigs based on population.

Basically production of each (&TPT) is multiplied by:

min(1,max(0.2,pop/(maxpop*0.8))

This means once you drop below 16% of population, your production will hit a floor of 20%; production does not get affected until you are below 80% of max population. Given cashers are already linearly affected from 100% -> 0%, this is not applied vs Ent/Res.


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#4) GS stealing stuff again!

Because the food destruction component of GS always seemed a bit pointless, GS will now *steal* FOOD, MONEY, TECH, and OIL, and will NO LONGER DESTROY FOOD.

However, the stealing rate is ~0.05% peak rather than ~5% peak now. This is 100x *less* than currently.

Thus, if somebody were to have 100M bushels on hand, over 500 GS attacks they would have approximately 22% of it stolen.

A NW-matched Tyr with 126 turns making 65 attacks could be expected to take 3.8% of FOOD/MONEY/TECH/OIL

This is intended to be a slight buff to GS that focuses more on the long-term aspects of war. Incidentally, it could also nerf stock-destroying suiciders.

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#5) BR CS destruction Nerf

Because of the Population based Production above, BR will receive a slight nerf: BR's will now destroy HALF the amount of CS as before. This will also mean AB's destroy twice as many CS as BR (they were equal in destruction, other than AB having a minimum of 1).

This is intended to make recovery from a BR slightly less difficult than it would be otherwise. We may revisit BR if it proves too powerful now.

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#6) Restart Balancing

Restarts will now receive slightly fewer CS and slightly more Money.

For CS: Instead of TURNS_PLAYED/10, they will receive TURNS_PLAYED*3/40
For Money: Instead of TURNS_PLAYED*3000 they will receive TURNS_PLAYED*4000

This is intended to make the build phase of restarts last a few more turns, and hopefully to encounter fewer cash problems, if unaided.

===========================




You may note some of these changes counteract each other. That is the intent; some changes may have been too powerful on their own, but together we feel these may lead to an interesting balance.


As always, please post your thoughts and concerns below! If we have made any egregious oversights, let us know! As always, these changes are part of a continuing balancing of the game, and are subject to change as deemed necessary.


Regards,

- qzjul & the EE Dev Team!

confluffed. We are mindful that some of these might have to be incrementally adjusted some more in following resets.

LMAO @ Alliance Server.

congrats, ruin warring even more. tag kills will be virtually impossible

the fact that you made OOP wars even more powerful proves you have no intention of actually making war better.

What? Did you *READ* change #2?

This is intended to steer wars to be either later or OOP cripple wars.

you said intended to be steered towards OOP cripple wars. why would you encourage ANYTHING to be OOP?

he means away from.
Besides, read the changes: I don't see how any of those would encourage OOP wars unless we are missing something?
How does this make tag kills harder? Be specific.

Hm i guess that was vague.

What i meant was:

Either you war later OR you are forced to cripple rather than kill, because killing will be really hard OOP

And yes, the Off Allies removal for Solo Servers is planned, I was just trying to get these in before FFA reset

ok thats more clear, your original statement didnt make that very clear.

as far as tag kills harder, imagine trying to kill a good waller when you cant rush them because their breaks dont drop fast enough to get finishers in before they get on.

Yes, but this way their production will be down. So you can just keep crippling them and eventually they will succumb, unless they are perpetually supported by FA.

I have to say I *think* I like the GS change. It will at least make an unsuccessful KR do something to indies, farmers, and techers besides give them DR.

If it's quantitative, use 'Fewer'.
If it's qualitative, use 'less'.

I get fed up of correct Xin on this -.-

Is that better PaleMoon?

@palemoon: except when comparing numbers directly then it's less than
5 is less than 6 NOT 5 is fewer than 6 otherwise yes.. english gramar is fail:P

if oop wars don't work, then change the game again :D


but hey, bushel thieves are back!

I actually found it easier to wall, when you could purchase military and it lowers their returns.

Also a few ideas!

Don't forget to fix Spies:
The fact that a country with a SPAL 5< can go into Spy DR in about 30 - 40 turns is ridiculous. If you insist on keeping Spy DR, at least make it on a curve. If this change seems ridiculous to everyone else, let's at least reduce the cost to keep spies. Also, bring back stealing food instead of burning it.

Adjustment to missiles:
Chems - leave alone
Nukes - adjust slightly so it's possible to kill with them, similar to a Chem, but takes more to get the job done.
Cruise - let's finally make this a missile actually worth using. Let it continue to take away military, but for each successful hit, it destroys 2-3% SDI

i can't speak for palemoon from his side, qz, but i also noticed it (again i read while you edited/posted), and yes it's far better now :P

Heh fair enough, I should consider grammar when I'm typing these up, but I'm usually thinking about math...

well i have trouble counting past thirteen, so you do the math and we'll let pm correct any english ;)

I *just* nerfed spy DR!



Maybe; martian & I have been examining spyops, but there's a lot of them and it's a bit of work.



My main idea (actually AusPiggy's idea I think) was to make it so you could choose which units a missile was targetting, and increase the unit damage a bit; so you could select troops, and get say 3% (i don't remember what it does now, but probably ~5x the percentage it does now, but for a *single* unit type) of their troops, as a precursor to a GS run; or whatever; maybe even spies? o.O

Bio missiles! EM missiles!

Ah, that's a good idea too. Something to make it more worth it would be nice. I ran some numbers on SDI.

Let's say the defender has 90% SDI
After 40 successful cruise missiles, at a 2% loss per success the defenders SDI would drop to 40.11%
After 40 successful cruise missiles, at a 3% loss per success the defenders SDI would drop to 26.61%

a nice change would be to add an attack that kills spies, that isnt a spy op. like for example make it so you can BR intel centers to kill spies instead of civs.

Yea I don't like the attacking changes.

I don't think they will have the desired impact mainly because now the tactics that will have to be employed to compensate will get even nastier.

i like most of these changes :)

How about nerfing bomb structures some. It's way over powered.

BRING BACK THE BUSHEL PIRATES


ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR MATEY

this is just starting to get stupid now.

I dont see anything glaringly wrong in these but I only glanced... perhaps the amount of hits to reduce to minimum is a bit unbalanced atm since 1-2 people could probably manage to bring losses to minimum on their own


What I would also like to see is an adjustment to spy attacks though.. some are too weak and some like Bomb Buildings simply rape you. The amount of CS that appear to be destroyed by that seems kind of crazy at times. I am judging based on judgement only and not hard numbers but many of the spy ops seem useless and some seem the exact opposite.

Oh and is rule 1 in place of what was in for this last set or on top of that?

Yea we're going to be adjusting spyops; KF and I are discussing them.

All changes are in addition to previous changes, unless otherwise noted.

cruise and nukes are still pretty worthless.

You could make nukes destroy a minimum of 100 acres and have the this minimum damage (100 acres) ramp up like the minimum gs/br you implemented.

Successful cruise missiles destroying some SDI sounds plausible.

Can you not somehow bring med tech back into the game? It's pointless right now and probably even more so with these changes. Perhaps include your med tech % in the formula somehow so that only those with decent med tech % actually benefit from the proposed changes.

OH, and how about making it work for the attacker too since mil losses are so fluff nowdays.

LOL... I knew I didn't like being a WCL. Thanks!!!

Love #3.

1. GS
Losing 22% tech after 500 GS is awfully painful and makes walling much more difficult. Imagine you had 10m tech points and lose 2.2m of them after each failed run on your country. That is in fact more expensive than having ~28m of your troops killed.

Then you lose cash/oil/food on top of that too AND have your production dropped to 20% for a long time, basically means death when you can't even afford to take turns.

Percentage loss should be adjusted based on resource type (similiar to losses in a SS/PS), instead of applying the same percentage to everything. (err, or just leave tech out of it)

2. BR
Halving CS damage from BR may sound like a lot, but say 400 BRs are done and then walled at the end, losing say 2% CS per hit vs 1% gives the following:
99%^200 = 1.8%
98%^200 = 0.03%
Either way the result would be close to no CS left.

3. Missile (not in the changes, responding to some of the suggestions above)
Failed missiles already kill 1% of SDI, if successful EM is going to kill even more SDI, the damage from failed missiles should be removed.

4. Military Loss
Currently the military losses of high NW hitting low NW is amplified like crazy. Wouldn't it be way too expensive to break somebody when combined with the reduced defender loss from Fast DR Type II? IMO, it would also be much fairer if low NW hitting high NW suffer the same military loss penalty.

mostly sounds reasonable but GS STEALING sounds scary and makes suiciding more powerful

Vic -- nah, not so much. More types of things get taken, but the quantities are tiny.

GSs, back in the day, used to take a lot of food. I used to play on the old school Standardized servers (1c-1l), run indies, and GS everyone for food. :D

min(5*MULT,floor(6*MULT*TURNS_ELAPSED/TURN_RATE))

Can you clarify this and tell me what I'm doing wrong. Assuming turns every 5 minutes (ffa/alliance), hitting GS, and hitting at 200 turns elapsed.

min(5*1, floor(6*1*200/300)) == 4

Am I using the formula wrong?


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Edit: Thanks qz.

That is the part that is wrong =/ Turns every 20 mins

Actually it still fits - you can't *count* '5',it's not a quantity, but a number with the quality of '5'. Just as the number 6 is a number with the quality of '6'.

If you can count it, it's quantitative, and you use 'fewer'.
If you can't count it, it's qualitative, and you use 'less'.

"I could find my keys if there was less mess on my desk." (you can't count 'mess').
vs
"I could find my keys if there were fewer pokémon on my desk." (You can, obviously, count 'pokémon'... once you've caught them).

Also,12345555 vs 12345678 - there are fewer 5s in the second number, but the first number is "less than" the second (until it's used as "I have 12345555 pokémon, when it becomes 'fewer' than the number (12345678) of pokémon you have...)


Aaaaaaaaaaand, I like the changes, thanks qz :)

Clarification: Regarding change #3. I had told qzjul that I didn't want population% to be multiplied into production directly, because this means both GSes and BRs are buffed together, and this means a BRed country has a double whammy - production loss from both population loss and building loss.

I suggested that GSes and EMs reduce a new variable called Productivity instead (this recovers to 100% slowly), and Productivity is multiplied into the production formulas instead of the announced min(1,max(0.2,pop/(maxpop*0.8))

BRs really don't need to be buffed further, which is probably what led to the CS nerf, which is really only useful if you are able to log on and wall in the first 100 hits of a KR.




10m tech points? I ran a 30k techer and no where at any point in time I ever had more than 4m tech points. You would have to be a 60k or larger techer to get that much tech points.

That being said, I think the rate of tech stealing needs to be lowered percentage-wise compared to the rate for stealing food/oil/money.

However, this DOES represent a significant buff to the GS attack type, and encoursging GS usage over the almost exclusive use of BR now is a good step.




I think the intent here is to be able to rebuild your country if you were able to wall quickly in the first half of the run. If you were to wall at the tail end of the kill run when the BRs are already at or very near min pop killed, it wouldn't matter either way.

Xinhuan, you need more tech points :)

Xin: not just BR's but CM's too, right? CM's are buffed as they destroy buildings AND population (and thus productivity)... by contrast, wouldn't this be a type of "nerf" to NM's? NM's would reduce total land and thus reduce maxpop, increasing productivity (like dropping land might)?

As long as I can mindlessly toss missles at random people. I am good

Yep, I view CMs as essentially a "very powerful BR". NM isn't really nerfed, because if you look at the formula, the population factor is clamped between 20% and 80% (that is, at 80% or more of maxpop, your country functions at 100%).

agree NM to be able to kill and always been a fan of cruise missiles to skip sdi to hit the miltary then they become useful!!