please redo spy formula. it's counterproductive to produce spies. failed spy-ops occur to frequently when having a superior spal. all my dead spies agree =(

seriously, why should a country with 3 spal defend against 3-4 spy ops versus 10+ spal.

we're looking at redoing this a little bit... we had some changed planned that got half put in, or just discussed, but never finished...

look for an announcement soon :)

I can't re-iterate this enough - spies have been weakened too much in this game. Totally kills the point of building (very expensively I might add) up a large SPAL (10+ for netters, 50+ for warriors)...

Spies need to be strengthened like 10x or something...it's too hard to get ops now (too much random factor)

Agreed

i agree totally.

spend 10 turns to get op and lose 200k spies to see that tgt has 10ish spal when spier has 40-60 spal.

yea, thanks Dave. please do change how spies work now. it's such an issue with me now that i'm no longer playing =p

the spy failling + 15 spy operations limit in tourney makes me pissed. even raising spal just makes me lose more more spies. i call shenaningans on the spy formula.

agree w/ this, but it sound slike everyone does...=)

we have been looking at how to fix spies for a while; the formula is kindof complicated atm; it was intended to behave kindof like earth, but apparently we got it off by a little... we hopefully will have a decent solution sometime in the near future

I blame Slagpit...=)

and martian! :)

haha - just whatever you do, don't marginally increase them (i.e. improving the rough equivalent of + 10%...their strength is off by way more than that...and I say this as a netter (I don't care much for war as you all know))

You must have really crappy lucky mazooka.

Martian and I did design the formula and there are parameters that we can adjust, but we're still trying to figure out the best way to alleviate the frustration and still keep the act of spying roughly balanced.

I think that next set we'll be slightly increasing the daily number of ops in tourney if that helps.

Here are some numbers I think could work very successfully. You are welcome to incorporate them or ignore them as you like.




Spy success if log(your_SPAL,1.5)+1.5*sqrt(-2*ln(rand(0,1)))*cos(2*pi*rand(0,1)) > log(opponent_SPAL*1.014^(spy_ops_against_opponent_over_24hrs),1.5)

Where log(X,y) is the log base y of X and rand(0,1) is a randomly generated number between 0 and 1 from a uniform distribution.



Spy losses = .0015*your_spies*MAX(0,log(opponent_SPAL,1.5))



Spy damages I would recommend dividing the current damages by maybe 5-7 and then multiplying by log(SPAL,1.5)



Spy upkeep = .0016 food/turn, $.8/turn

This should allow you to carry more spies, have a fair level of spies do real damage and have failure be less random and have failure result in fewer losses. I think the spy production rate from indies is fine. (and I suppose philosophically what all of these numbers are based on)

w00t for constructive ideas... i'll let slagpit digest this one

I would like to say I think it is preferable to have spy offense based on total number of spies and spy defense based on a combination of spies/acre and spies/population. That might be needlessly complicated and would require various weighting that to balance properly would more or less reduce to SPAL anyways. (at least in the limited formulations I have bothered with so far). If anyone has any thoughts on this idea I am more than happy to hear ideas on how to incorporate them differently.

the success formulas has some merit I think... we'd need to start benchmarking it and testing it to see how it works :p

but on the surface, it definitely looks like a good idea :p

The formulas would certainly require testing. One of the values I was wavering on the most was the coefficient of 1.5 in front of sqrt(-2*ln... That will clearly control how much spread there is to random success and failure. I have *no idea* what the current spy formula is for success/failure but this one will allow superior SPALs to be effective while still having chances of failure over some manner of lower SPAL ranges

Given up on ops a long time ago. Demotechers don't have room for spy ops.

I still think all forms (yes, especially the harmful ones) should be allowable out of war. They sink the user far more than you know it. You can only do 50 a day anyway. And if you're good enough you only need to make a couple even in war.

Clans would specialise more with better clan tactics/strats too. It's just a waste to see all those types of ops unuseable.

you're telling me nothing. i know i have bad luck =p

it doesn't make sense to me that having an overwhelming number of spies,spal and tech doesn't have a better chance of success. it's so hard to get and keep a massive spal, especially when you fail so many ops.

why the high variable factor anyway? it's like having 10k turrets bounce 100k jets. it doesn't make sense to me,coupled with the fact that there is a tech for spies, a gov bonus for spies and spy alliances to have more failed ops than successful ops.

if i knew math and stuff i'd suggest formula like detmer =p

yea spal drops to half quite quickly if gets alot failed ops.