I'm looking for some information on the current state of clan vs clan war and how people would like for it to work. For this discussion, please consider a 15 member alliance FSing another 15 member alliance halfway through the round. What are your answers to the following questions in your version of ideal, balanced clan vs clan warfare?

1) How many kills should they get in the FS?
2) How long should a CM rush kill take in seconds?
3) How long should a non-CM rush kill take in seconds?
4) How many turns should it take to kill a country?
5) How many additional enemy turns should be needed to counter a single turn used optimally by a stonewaller?
6) What is the biggest balance issue that should be resolved?
7) Is the only acceptable outcome a tag kill?

1) Tag kill is factory standard for war. We all want an opportunity to wall. For many it's a favorite part. And currently it takes about 14 days to settle an even sides war which is fine. I think maybe 1-2 CM kills and 1-2 GS kills is great.
2) 30
3) 1min let's call it about half speed of now would be ok
4) That's fine the way it is
5) also ok with 8 to 1 for gs and 4 to 1 for br
6) For me, CDs being overpowered makes killing well built countries too easy. Honestly even think you dont have to slow down kills at all if you fix CDs and building well in the first place will mean lemmings or heavy losses to enemy stock in order to kill. Right now you can cd someone into oblivion so it matters more if they are online than how well they built, but if the breaks are higher the kills will be slower by nature. And a 15 member tag can only squeeze 2 chem kills tops against another warclan with full SDI.

I think like. 2% CDs and demos left the way they are would result in 20 CDs and 7 demoralize ops resulting in the country having about 46% of its military strength still. That seems like plenty of value for an op but the truth is it's actually double that currently.

You do that and limit people to send like 1 chem per second I think the GS kills will be perfect speed and chems will give people a reasonable chance. Things die too quickly because everyone can just hit at break or 11-22 hits after it. The less damage we can do with ops, the harder it is to kill and the more the war fundamentally becomes about building well.

first ill post how i think it is currently:

1)
3 gs/br is what they should get currently
plus 1-2 cm kill assuming sdi
assuming 100% turnout so a fraction of that, probably 70% turnout used to be normal maybe a bit higher now

2)
with only 15 people id expect maybe 20 second cm kill, in bigger war it was lower down to about 5 seconds at minimum

3)
id say a kill is bad if its slower than a minute, and good at about 30 seconds, to go under that you need to waste resources which is a choice

4)
550 is considered normal at 235 hits, they dont tend to be more than that without walling

5)
in pure turns you max out at 18.666:1 ratio for gs, but that can go higher with DH's and lower with bio's
most wallers wind up facing BR with bio and need to sit higher on pop unless the nw difference is huge then returns drop earlier to 10, but that still makes it around about 8:1 turn efficiency

6)
choices here would be FS advantage/tempo, cd/gs superiority, inability to wall large chem rush, land drop meta, walling variability swinging wars, size of wars getting too small

Yeah even with today's narf of the FS advantage it's still such a heavy advantage. Agree with enshula on that which is why I proposed a war declaration timer for war clans that got thrown into the clan GDI for netters. That was sort of intended as a suggestion to make war better not to protect netters. It's just not much of a problem mechanically for players right now because all the war clans are in open communication about war start times 9 out of every 10 sets now. Most of us avoid that advantage because it causes the set to lose parity.

I think to reiterate a point. I think the land drop meta loses a good amount its value if you fix CDs, the speed of kills is dramatically reduced if you fix CDs, walling would matter a bit less and building well would matter a bit more if you fix CDs. In that I way, I think fixing CDs sort of addresses 4 of the 5 main problems you see to some degree.

1) this is a question of tempo, it has to be low or wars are over way too quickly and FS has too large an advantage, if formal war start times came in then it can be a bit higher since both sides will be on

2) i dont think the time is the biggest issue, but throttling attacks is possible, perhaps just 1 per second might make a difference, its probably worth trying, but the change i want to see first is capping SDI tech losses so you can get 'enough' sdi then 'extra' sdi wouldnt cause you to lose more, just 1% of enough, or i guess you can drop loss down to say .5% from 1% and see what happens, the insane cost of buying 'extra' sdi currently for low benefit leads to more land dropping which isnt great

3) id lean towards a protection if kills are done too fast, or that needs to be broken before the real kill run giving time to get online, but throttling an option, something like 5 minutes to get online could be worth testing, it would need to be expensive enough such as 25% of the hits to kill so that you wouldnt want to do it on many targets without commuting, then once that time is up maybe limit it so that no more than 10% of the hits to kill could be done in 6 seconds perhaps, the goal would be more about slowing down the end than the start

4) its counter productive to make killing take less turns because then wars become unbalanced much quicker, and FS advantage becomes much higher potentially going from around a 40% country:kill ratio if everything is perfect up to a crazy 80% if it was just made twice as easy to counter falling numbers, and if you make it take more turns then you cant run multiple kills in a day which forces either a larger war or penalises less active people, i guess one potential solution would be if all the NA joined one tag all the Euro another and the AZN a third but that doesnt seem practical

5) i dont know about ideal, its really hard to balance as things get smaller, id lean towards generally inverting walling efficiency at high and low pop which would reduce the point at which you lose critical mass of turns in a war and advantage 'offlining' compared to kill chats, if thats not doable then perhaps a buff to the way bioterrorism works particularly at very low pops could be interesting, apart from that nerf pop regain when DR is high is something id look at, ideally to halve the effectiveness of walling at low pop and see what happens

6) the size of wars getting smaller has to be the biggest problem, if you get down to 15v15 how many warchat leaders and overall leaders is each side going to have? are you going to run 1 chat a day only? at the start of a war with 120(120) things can look fine, but as you have a lot of your countries dead, and turns start running low, particularly for people that try to hit multiple times a day wont be showing up with 80 a chat, youll get more variability as the people who miss a day will come with 120, normally you need 7 people for a kill and if some are dead that drops you under 2 kills a day really early in the war, and you have constant arguments between the people who want to hit at warchat time so people can know when to show up and not hang around for ages and the people who want to hit as soon as they show up or as soon as enough turns, especially when the warchats cant start on time because of enough turns and so people would have to wait around then anyway

it seems current response to wars being over very quickly is to start very late

to stop one side just being unable to kill id like to see offlining stronger but im not sure that would be fun or good

1) How many kills should they get in the FS?
2-3?

2) How long should a CM rush kill take in seconds?
Should a CM rush kill on its own with only 15? I rather chems be a better compliment to BR and GS runs and CM rushes be possible but much less efficient than now.

3) How long should a non-CM rush kill take in seconds?
2-5 times as long as now.

4) How many turns should it take to kill a country?
About as now. I'd like hybrid kills(GS+CM, GS+BR, BR+CM, GS+SR, BR+SR and perhaps other combinations) to be significantly lower and GS kills to be significantly higher.

5) How many additional enemy turns should be needed to counter a single turn used optimally by a stonewaller?
One-five maybe? the 18.67 current turns on a GS run or the 9.33 turns on a BR run is just plain unbalanced especially in todays game with so few players.
If you dont have the resources to buy enough units to create Def Helds you shouldn't get to live.

Megabuff bioterrors against wallers and make this their only effect?
Reduce min pop growth after protection?

As a two-three time 2k hit waller I can say that I believe strongly that turn walling needs to be nerfed to crap.

6) What is the biggest balance issue that should be resolved?
*CDs, land dropping, CMs are too strong in war.
*Nukes, ABs are too weak in war and too strong against netting countries.
*Maiming war countries isnt possible now since land dropping is so potent anyway and wars are so late(because of how exhausting it is to fight long drawn out wars). It should be, so that war players who cant get to warchats can participate actively in the war by hitting offline targets.

7) Is the only acceptable outcome a tag kill?
No. Tag kill is a remnant of the past that makes no sense from a game balance perspective or a strategic perspective. Why should I have to kill your inactives to win? Why not kill your actives again?

Make all missiles useful
Nm em
Make spy ops better and more important for a balanced country

1) How many kills should they get in the FS?
I'm not sure how to answer this as it depends on many factors. I would say, though, in general, an FS should not determine the rest of the war.

2) How long should a CM rush kill take in seconds?
I think missiles need to be nerfed a lot. Even a player with 90% SDI will die to like 80 missiles (I just picked that number off the top of my head, the actual number is close to that). There is no incentive to build the best country for war because you will be a CM target and die no matter what. Now I will be the first to say before someone else does that I did successfully wall a CM rush; however, it took me out, and the rest of the war was just about staying alive and living off stocks - not very fun. Even countries marked as missile dumps just slowly get widdled down by NMs etc. Either missiles need to nerf, or SDI needs a boost; missiles are not balanced in war.

No country should die faster than 120 seconds to give people time to wall.

3) How long should a non-CM rush kill take in seconds?
No country should die faster than 120 seconds to give people time to wall.

4) How many turns should it take to kill a country?
No country should die faster than 120 seconds to give people time to wall.

5) How many additional enemy turns should be needed to counter a single turn used optimally by a stonewaller?
No input here.

6) What is the biggest balance issue that should be resolved?
Missiles, Spy ops - most specifically CD

7) Is the only acceptable outcome a tag kill?
No, the highest total NW is an acceptable win.

7) Is the only acceptable outcome a tag kill?

currently a lot of people see it that way, and it encourages weird play

some people do things like keep low defence and dont break enemies to limit the exposure of their stockpile just so they have enough cash to wall forever combined with high turn ratio multipliers when walling, cost to rebreak, DH's and sometimes at the extreme level even juggling humanitarians/gdi which significantly increases the commitment needed to start a kill run

combined with later starts to wars annd things getting uneven very quickly you can either have people trying to run out the clock, or you can have people dragging out a war when otherwise people would agree its over

at least those people chasing dumb stats will sometimes attack because they want to stonewall and pad their stats they need to annnoy the other side, some just talk trash on the forums though

but theres also wasting turns on inactive countries

my thoughts to change it would be both hard and soft ways of declaring a winner, the curent proposal is 5k average land to force peace, which if it comes in might fix land drop meta as well

but apart from that start making reports for formal wars, and give points for things like doing attacks and spyops, most pop killed or military destroyed on offence

but dont lean in as heavily to stats that will make people turtle up and avoid tagkills

could even subtract points for things like wasted readiness, or just give war participation forum or profile medals or badges

after the war have reports on how much each tag had going in, how much they destroyed vs used up on offennce, whether they closed the gap of an unfavourable position

maybe even simulate the war on an ai war server then note how well you did compared to thhat

Some of these things I do not feel should be regulated by code fixes

CD is OP, but if you reduce its pure effectiveness and dependence, then it will just create some other optimal path for killing that isn't as sustainable for large end of set warring while restarting or running turns post stock depletion.

It's a fine line, frankly the biggest wars are 15v15 now, kind of sad when a small war even 2 years ago we 30-40 on each side.

It's getting hard enough to even get a kill with 700 turns in a chat FFS.

I don't think you should try to regulate the war outcome or timings. I think you should focus on improving the existing game mechanics/features (offer rewards for all of the attacks, gain something from every attack including missiles...) and implement new ones at the same time that help wallers and attackers in different ways so we can find our own ways to overcome the existing limits. I would way rather see new stuff then regulated versions of existing things.

I would like to see a new bonus category that aids in readiness reduction so you can conduct more GS BR etc without the need to regain.

Making hitting from mobile easier