The terrible dangers of too much war and too much peace
Entry posted by lamuella
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There are four related problems that will plague any alliance that is seriously trying to make a name for themselves in a game such as this. They in fact cause a fifth problem, namely that the problems are semi-contradictory, and the optimal solution for one is actually a very bad solution for another. The problems are as follows:
- If players get bored, they will likely leave the game
- If players get beaten up too badly, they will likely leave the game
- If an alliance never makes war, when it finally gets into a war its soldiers will be green and inexperienced
- If an alliance constantly makes war, its soldiers will be too beaten up to perform well
There is no single perfect solution to any of these problems, because they each depend on the makeup and personalities of your alliance members. If all alliances were alike, this would be a dreadfully boring game. However, a few true statements can be made, and I will take a little while looking at each of these problems.
If players get bored, they will likely leave the game
Without meaning any offense at all to the admins and moderators who do a stellar job of keeping this game and this community active, CyberNations on its own is not a terribly interesting game. By on its own, I mean that if this were a standalone single player game, it would provide a lot less excitement than (to pick an example) Age Of Empires. Obviously, it's not competing against Age Of Empires, and one of the things that makes it eminently competitive as a game is its strong community, and the interactions with other nations. Even adding in the peacetime activities of making trades, tech dealing, and the like, Cyber Nations still only has five or ten minutes of active stuff to do a day. "pixel farming", as it is sometimes called, is something that some players find tedious.
War, on the other hand, is bloody exciting. Compare the experience of 11:45 CST in an alliance's private IRC channel during peacetime, and the same bat-time and bat-channel during a war. One is sleepy, not much going on, people blathering about random nonsense. The other is packed, active and tense. People are preparing for attacks, planning defenses, coordinating, getting it done. They are in other words playing the game and having fun with it. I've seen people on IRC during this latest war who I haven't seen since... well... the last war. Business, to coin a phrase, has picked up.
Now, war isn't the only interesting thing an alliance can do, but as an instant pick-me-up, few things are better. If an alliance goes too long without a compelling reason to log on and do stuff, members will lose interest. There's a certain critical mass at which an alliance community starts to become self-sustaining, but even for alliances where they are self-sustaining, something in the way of bread and circuses from the leadership helps keep interest up.
If players get beaten up too badly, they will likely leave the game
a possible solution to the first problem is for the alliance to be trigger happy, to look for wars, or start them, in order to keep the members happy. Bread and circuses, like I said. The problem with that is that it will lead to your members getting stomped on for attacking the wrong person. Eternal war is more interesting than eternal peace, but it's also more painful, and more liable to leave your membership saying "Screw you guys, I'm going home". This is of course unless you're FAN. Words can never express how astounding FAN's achievement of keeping a war going for two years was. Few alliances could hope to compare.
FAN members to the contrary, most alliances don't enjoy being dogpiled. Alliances that are on the thin end of a beating will lose people either to inactivity or to surrender. Being on the winning or losing side of a proper war is fun. Being on the losing side of a mugging is No Fun At All. Thus, while you want to keep your alliance enthused and active, you don't want them to leave to save their skins.
If an alliance never makes war, when it finally gets into a war its soldiers will be green and inexperienced
The ability of your nations to make war is a national security issue. It's sometimes thought that simple nation strength, or average nation strength is an adequate rough indicator of an alliance's ability to fight. However, time and again we see that nation strength, in the words of Aaliah, "Ain't nothin' but a number". To pick an example from the annals of Cybernations history, let's take a look at a front in Great War III: Legion versus FAN and TOP. On paper, Legion were larger than FAN and TOP combined. They were also the side declaring, giving them a theoretical advantage of surprise. Legion should have therefore won. However, because TOP and FAN were better prepared, more active, had more recent war experience, and could coordinate better, they performed one of the most legendary defensive actions in the game's history, and severely dented Legion's fighting ability. Note that Legion also declared on the Grand Global Alliance at the same time. I'm not in any way discounting GGA's fighting ability, merely recounting the legend. The point of the story is that ability as a fighting force has never rested on numbers. Rather, experience and skill can turn the tide of a seemingly unwinnable battle. Coordination, speed, timing, vigilance and an understanding of the game's war mechanics can render advantage in terms of military might to be meaningless in some circumstances.
And therein is part of the problem. The only way to pick up the skills that make you a better fighter is to fight, or to be around veterans. A big nation that last had a war back when level 2 fighters and bombers were the height of technological sophistication is going to have a lot to learn in a modern war. A smaller nation that has fought in a nuclear conflict within the last month will have a statistical disadvantage over a large nation, but will make up for it in knowledge of how to fight. If, however, the best way to pick up this knowledge is to be in a lot of wars, then your nation will be pretty war-torn, and that leads us to the next problem:
If an alliance constantly makes war, its soldiers will be too beaten up to perform well
The ability to fight well is a great thing, and a very useful skill set to maintain. However, the best skill set in the world won't help you if you're anarchied, half the size you were two months ago, and under surrender terms that have you shipping tech out to bigger nations once every ten days.
Even in less severe circumstances than those outlined above, fighting a lot gets you beaten up a lot. It gets your infra blown out from under you, it wipes out your tech, it plays merry hell with your finances and your ability to collect. Fighting ability counts for a lot, but it still has to build on something, and trying to defend yourself with a broken nation is like trying to build a bridge with rotten wood. Peace is as necessary as war, if only in that it prepares you for the next war. Alliances that undergo multi-month wars, like Fark and FAN, usually come out on the other side statistically weakened by the experience, even if it hardens the players and hones their abilities.
Therefore, on all four problems, we need a balance: Enough war that your players are enthused and well trained. Enough peace that they aren't discouraged or too badly beaten to do much.
Different alliances find different solutions to this problem, but one that is both relatively popular and highly controversial is this:
Tech raiding.
And as I say this, I can feel a chill descend across the room. Tech raiding in CN is one of those issues that will divide any group you talk to. To say opinion on it is polarized is like saying that mount kilamanjaro is quite a steep hill. It doesn't do the concept justice. I'm not going to talk about the morality or otherwise of tech raiding here. If anything, this article should be amoral (which is a different thing from being immoral) towards the hot potato of the cyberverse. Instead I'm going to be talking about the benefits to the alliance of tech raiding, plus the costs.
To reiterate, this is not a moral defense of tech raiding. Tech raiding is and always has been the deliberate use of the resources of another player for your own advancement. It is war for gain, be that gain of enjoyment, experience, or technology. However, the cyberverse is a competitive place, and such war does happen. If you are willing to accept this, and neither throw up your hands in disgust not loudly maintain the justice of tech raiding, then allowing such raiding can be of benefit to your alliance.
Tech raiding lets your alliance's smaller members learn the war system at small size and low risk. It lets them learn what to do when attacking and when attacked. It lets them know how to coordinate attacks, both for maximum destruction and for material gain. It helps them learn to coordinate and builds camaraderie amongst members of a team. In short, it keeps your players interested and trained without most of the international problems caused by major wars.
Note there that I said most of those problems. There are of course those in the cyberverse, and I'm sure some of them are reading this article, who deeply dislike tech raiding, and are and have been willing to cause diplomatic incidents over what they view as the excesses of tech raiding. If the balance in what is allowable to the tech raiding alliance is set as too permissive, the alliance as a whole may find themselves in the midst of a war. If the forces against them are large enough, then the training they were seeking by allowing tech raiding will not be enough to prevent their bloodying.
Ultimately, the choice is that of the alliance leader and the alliance member. allowing tech raiding, or joining an alliance that allows tech raiding, is a decision, and like all large decisions in the game it has consequences. The decision is whether the risk of what this might bring is worse than the risk of stagnation if your members are denied such excitement, and I can't make that decision for anyone else but myself.
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