[Essenia]

Current Situation: When a nation has no troops and is attacked, it's assessed a penalty of 20% of infra (capped at 40), 5 spies, 5% of tech (capped at 10) and 5% of money (capped at 5 million). When the penalty was first created, warchests were a fraction of they size they are today; they have increased far more than people's infrastructure and technology levels in the upper ranks for the past year and half now.

Proposed Solution: Uncap the money penalty, but reduce it to 3%. Alternately, raise the cap to 50 million or some similar amount.

Why?: To increase the importance of military strategy in the game and to make it more difficult for wars to be prolonged endlessly, as is the case now when you have nations with billion dollar+ warchests losing 5 million every day (and perhaps a few hundred thousand extra for nukes). This solution does not take away the benefit of large warchests, it simply levels the playing field and tries to make the war system more about what it should be focused on: fighting, not piling up cash.

[The Game]

Approved for Discussion

[Haflinger]

Yes, this would take some of the certainty out of the war system that currently is in place. As it is now, people run gather intel missions on their targets until they get one through, and then do the math and figure out who the winner will be based on remaining warchest.

This is bad; war should be risky.

[ChairmanHal]

Some things in war are predictable and preparation for war is one of them. Either you or you aren't. I see no benefit from increasing the amount of randomness in defeat alerts, especially where cash reserves is involved.

[Jinnai]

ChairmanHal, on Sep 22 2009, 01:19 PM, said:

Some things in war are predictable and preparation for war is one of them. Either you or you aren't. I see no benefit from increasing the amount of randomness in defeat alerts, especially where cash reserves is involved.

I agree that preparedness is one thing, however, like other things, the alert was based on a time when the game was much younger. Since the game has a lot of inflation and doesn't look to have an absolute maximum threshold for nation size a system that wills scale with the game is better.

[Essenia]

Quote

Some things in war are predictable and preparation for war is one of them. Either you or you aren't. I see no benefit from increasing the amount of randomness in defeat alerts, especially where cash reserves is involved.

How is this random? You lose a fixed % of your warchest. That percentage could be 1%, 2%, 3%, more, less, etc; but I'm not proposing a "you lose anywhere from 1-3% of your warchest idea" (though such an idea wouldn't be terrible). This does not take away the reward for having large warchests at all- it simply turns the focus of war to actual fighting as opposed to pre-war stockpiling.

[TypoNinja]

So I'm guessing you got caught with a smaller warchest than your opponent last war and are upset that while you outfight him his larger cash reserve kept him going (and beating on you).

Well... Thats the way it should work. The military with the biggest budget can hold out longer. America is not known for having the best trained infantry, the best airforce or the best navy, but they spend far more on each than anyone else and so bridge the gap with better goodies, and more of them.

The best trained military in the world still can't do much damage on a budget the size of my paycheck, and the worst trained in the world would still inflict lopsided casualties if they had huge cash reserves.

Similarly, destroying money is hard in the real world, What do you imagine your troops are doing? Breaking into banks and burning all the money? I live down the block from the largest bank in my area, if you cleaned out the vault you'd be lucky to get more than a couple of million, you know why? Its only one bank, serving civilians. All the real money is in bonds, the kind the federal reserve sells to other nations to finance its debt. In case you've forgotten paper money is a fantasy, its a collective delusion. We all agree to pretend its worth something when its really just some pretty coloured paper. Once in the past it was actually backed, but now virtually every nation runs off fiat currency.

In the case of fiat money, you really CAN NOT destroy money since more is only a high tech printing press away. letters of credit, bonds, paper money, its all there becuase the government says its supposed to be, and with the spread of electronic banking the actual wealth becomes even harder to pin down.

You want to take a 5 mil penalty and increase it by a factor of ten, thats not levelling the playing field, thats tilting the balance away from the people who have put effort into the war preparations and tilting it towards the people who have done less. A percentage based destruction also does the same thing, the same attack hurts the better prepared nation more. You want to reward the people who did less work and penalize the people who did more. Bravo.

If somebody has spent 6 months sitting on their hands doing nothing but building a warchest they have EARNED that advantage over the people who have not, devising new ways to reduce the effects of somebodies effort is not smart game design.

[Essenia]

TypoNinja, on Sep 22 2009, 08:20 PM, said:

So I'm guessing you got caught with a smaller warchest than your opponent last war and are upset that while you outfight him his larger cash reserve kept him going (and beating on you).

You are correct, even though I had well over a billion, my fierce opponent Peace Mode had a far greater cash reserve. It was an experience that changed my view of the game.



As for the rest of your attempt to be realistic, America would suffer crushing economic damage if occupied by a foreign army, the damage to the economic base from looting and disruption would not be 'capped' arbitraily.

also: more gameplay, less realism arguments?

This post has been edited by Essenia: 22 September 2009 - 02:43 PM

[jerdge]

Essenia, on Sep 19 2009, said:

Why?: To increase the importance of military strategy in the game and to make it more difficult for wars to be prolonged endlessly, as is the case now when you have nations with billion dollar+ warchests losing 5 million every day (and perhaps a few hundred thousand extra for nukes). This solution does not take away the benefit of large warchests, it simply levels the playing field and tries to make the war system more about what it should be focused on: fighting, not piling up cash.

Excuse me, but I think that you're obviously wrong.
Defeat Alerts are (almost exclusively) the penalty for the one that turtles, that is the one outnumbered and outgunned. By making Defeat Alerts more costly you would not be "leveling the playing field". Quite the opposite: you'd be making the playing field less balanced.

Moreover, your suggestion rewards those that are unprepared but gang up against those that are more prepared: it decreases the importance of "military strategy" (that is an economic issue as the game is now, and it would remain as that despite this suggestion of yours).

All of this said, yours can be a good suggestion (I don't know!) But "certainly" not for the reasons you mentioned...

[ender land]

Defeat Alerts are fine.

With the destroy cash op, tech multipliers affecting defeat alert tech/land damage, and the ability to still cause 5M in damage a day through defeat alerts, cash goes fast enough as it is.

[Mirreille]

I agree with Typoninja, who basically hit all the points I would have brought up. The new destroy cash reserve spy ops have not been tested on a large scale war level, and I would want to see how those end up being used by the players before making another change in this direction.

[Jinnai]

Mirreille, on Sep 24 2009, 09:24 PM, said:

I agree with Typoninja, who basically hit all the points I would have brought up. The new destroy cash reserve spy ops have not been tested on a large scale war level, and I would want to see how those end up being used by the players before making another change in this direction.

I can understand that reasoning.

[SpacingOutMan]

jerdge, on Sep 22 2009, 05:42 PM, said:

Excuse me, but I think that you're obviously wrong.
Defeat Alerts are (almost exclusively) the penalty for the one that turtles, that is the one outnumbered and outgunned. By making Defeat Alerts more costly you would not be "leveling the playing field". Quite the opposite: you'd be making the playing field less balanced.

Moreover, your suggestion rewards those that are unprepared but gang up against those that are more prepared: it decreases the importance of "military strategy" (that is an economic issue as the game is now, and it would remain as that despite this suggestion of yours).

All of this said, yours can be a good suggestion (I don't know!) But "certainly" not for the reasons you mentioned...

Quoting this for obvious sincerity. The defender is still going to be on the short end of the stick, and very little can change that, but to make their end of the stick even shorter is rather stupid.

[Fort Pitt]

SpacingOutMan, on Sep 25 2009, 11:15 AM, said:

Quoting this for obvious sincerity. The defender is still going to be on the short end of the stick, and very little can change that, but to make their end of the stick even shorter is rather stupid.

Quoting this for emphasis.

Don't make the ones being curb-stomped pay more.

[JoshuaR]

I'm not in favor of this suggestion, again for the quoted reasons.

[Viluin]

Don't make defeat alerts worse before the Fallout Shelter System is fixed.. you wouldn't want to turn it into a suicide wonder. Please.

However, I'm a little worried about those nations at the top with 5 billion dollar warchests, possibly even more. By the time they're close to ZI they'll still have several billion dollars left, they can stay at 1000 infra nuking people for years(!), which is kinda disturbing. I think there should be a way for those extremely rich people to lose money faster, right now they are practically unbeatable. Many of them are probably getting bored too, so I'm sure all that money will be put to an extremely annoying use. My $550m warchest lasted for 2.5 months during the Karma War, go figure. I started at 9100 infra. If I had even just 1 billion dollars I'd probably have been able to fight for 6 months. Now, imagine having 3 billion dollars @ 1k infra. Or more.

Uncapped defeat alerts with a much lower percentage is something worth considering, in my opinion. Something like 1-2% might work. For most nations this would make defeat alerts weaker, for those with an unreal amount of money it would hurt more. People with a ton of money would still be at an advantage, especially because it takes coordination to deliver defeat alerts, but at least it would be possible to overcome the advantage without dying of old age. Back in the old days, when someone was ZI'd they were generally out of the war. I don't like where this is going, neverending wars are not fun for anyone, after a few months it'll just get tedious like the Karma war. Perhaps there should be an infrastructure purchase limit of 300 infra per day.. I could see that leading to interesting new war tactics (the sooner you start rebuying infra, the longer you can fight, but the more money you will lose, which is something to think about).

This post has been edited by Viluin: 05 October 2009 - 12:25 PM

[Guffey]

Defeat alerts are almost always against turtles, or those being ganged up on. Increasing their damage would just hurt the underdog more as it is. They already added in the spy op to destroy cash, which is one way to take out their war chest among others.

And the warchest also give those huge nations a chance to rebuild partially themselves once a war is over. If you tired of someone relentlessly beating on you because they are at a low infra with a massive war chest, then maybe you should think about surrendering.

This post has been edited by Guffey: 06 October 2009 - 09:04 AM

[Londo Mollari]

Interestingly enough, I just proposed a suggestion which includes uncapping defeat alerts as part of a broad strategy for reducing the benefits of conflict avoidance with the objective of breaking stagnation and deadlock in CN. As such I wholeheartedly approve of the idea of removing the cap on defeat alerts entirely.

[Viluin]

Guffey, on Oct 6 2009, 05:02 PM, said:

And the warchest also give those huge nations a chance to rebuild partially themselves once a war is over. If you tired of someone relentlessly beating on you because they are at a low infra with a massive war chest, then maybe you should think about surrendering.

You destroyed their nations.. and then you have to surrender to them because they're such a huge pain in the $@!? Come on, something is clearly flawed there. An infra purchase limit would prevent them from buying up to 1000 infra for nukes every day.

[Guffey]

but infra purchase limits would halt major infrastructure jumps, say from 2999 to 3999 in one day.

You've destroyed their nations, and now they want to get back at you, so they inflict as much damage as possible with the funds they have. Nations pushed to their limit will retaliate quite nastily and being able to relentlessly nuke is a great way to do so.

If a large nations is beat down so much that only smaller nations can fight him, he will have an advantage at that level with all the wonders and tech levels from his large level. Somehow you have to find a way to get your midrange nations strong enough to handle them, thats your issue.

If you can't stand a guerilla warfare by the end, then you need to re-think entering the war, or get them better surrender terms so that they will accept them quicker and you won't suffer as much relentless nuke damage.