I've received a lot of bug reports and complaints about the way the game handles the situation where a nation has less than 5% battle odds so I'd like to open this topic to discuss alternative solutions.

The way the ground battle page works now is if an attacker has more than 95% battle odds then the defender's troops are automatically redeployed home and their defending tanks are automatically destroyed. This is fair because above 95% battle odds the attacker is not allowed to attack so therefore the defender should be penalized for having such a low defending military. The game only sends out a defeat alert message in this situation if it is the first time that the defender has been defeated on that day. Otherwise no message is sent in order to prevent spamming up the defenders inbox.

The bug reports and complaints that I've been receiving is that people don't understand why their troops have auto deployed back home and why they lost their tanks without any notification. My response thus far was to explain how the system works and tell them to make sure that they have enough military defending at all times. This is how the ground battle page has worked for over 3 years but these questions and complaints always seem to comes up during big wars like this.

So, should this be changed and if so, how?

Add a defeat alert along with it. If i understood correctly, if you're attacked while fully deploying and your troops come back home you won't receive any damage, right? Why? It doesn't make much sense - if i'm hitting the guy at 0% odds he should get a defeat alert either way.



Odd, i thought Hal said he didn't receive a DA message, and it was the first time i did that for the day. In any case if you have already received a DA that day and then this thing happened to you again while fully deploying, the game should send you a PM telling you that your opponent force your deployed forces to come back home or something.

Btw. The defeat alert and the looting system overall REALLY need to be changed.

Personally, I have always been miffed at the whole ground battle aspect of greater than 95% is an auto victory, but only for the first time on the day. If I have enough troops to roll into someone, no matter how many times they have been hit, they should still get hit. I have troops there. The fact that they don't isn't my fault.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that this is to help people who have been gang banged, but perhaps there could be a global flag on that can be flipped/set by admin. During a global war you can turn the flag off, allowing defeat alerts all day long, but during a non global war, this can't be done. If you DO do this, then I would halve the defeat alert amount. I guarantee people would be more willing to conserve aggressive slots or sue for peace if this could happen.

Well one idea would be to make DA's hurt the nation more if it's bigger in NS than you are and less if it's smaller. That would partially make sense in discouraging curbstomps and turtling as a whole imo.

Same answer like always:

Get rid of defeat alerts in normal battles alltogether and just calculate the battle with the forces on both sides. If the attacker has 99% chance, so what? He will most likely win and thats it. Same for 3% odds. Stop the arbitrary numbers.

The only exception is if the defending nation has NO troops (0 soldiers, 0 tanks) in which case it suffers an defeat alert. Imho these are needed to balance out curbstomps.

idk, I had 100% odds directly after a nuke yesterday where the defender had 0 soldiers/0 tanks and didn't get a defeat alert, so why that is happening should probably be fixed :\

yep. It happens so often I'm starting to use it in my nuclear tactic.

and before I forget it, change the Battle Odds Screen like the Spy Ops Screen - display only rough estimates, not exact values (but calculate with the exact ones, of course).

10 / 30 / 50 / 70 / 90 - greatly helps to add a bit realism and it works great for the Spy Ops as well. In RL no advisor would say "uh we have 92.32% chances to succeed!" - he would simply say "looks (very) good" "looks (very) bad" "fifty/fifty".

What? D:
How would being able to milk the target for land and tech discourage curbstomps? It would encourage them lol.




Why? The spy odds were hidden so it would be very hard to figure out if your opponent had a CIA or not. What would the point be in hiding the exact odds for the GA system. I mean besides a small dose of "realism", which doesn't really do any practical use >.>
Change the looting system. I'm not feeling the 1 mil dropped/gained in GA's AT ALL.

think again please.

if a nation turtles it has zero troops, it will suffer a defeat alert and thats it. the attacker loots nothing. discourages the attacker because it makes war less profitable for him.

and the answer to your second "why" I have already given. Its more realistic. Way too much and too exact informations are shown in CN.

Why was the decision made to make 95%+ odds a defeat? So that we understand the implications of any changes...

Gentle Persons

I tend to concur with the Noble Dac Syzygy. I would add however particularly when we are now including in "Our Nuclear Strategy', a caution and suggestion. I would like to know exactly how many of your soldiers and tanks would be keen on trying to pillage an irradiated city? I believe that number would be zero. So may I suggest in addition to calculation of each fight, if a nation has been nuked in the last two days that no ground attack should gain anything. Sure you could still destroy from a distance but since the gains are from pillaging if a nation is glowing your troops might be somewhat hesitant to attack the glowing areas to steal. You want to make curb stomps and fool tech raids less likely then make people earn their loot without the use of nukes. Otherwise the troop and tank losses for the attacker should go up substantially when attacking a nuked nation.

Respectfully
Squire Hime Themis

The bolded is the reason why the > 95% rule was added. It's not really arbitrary considering that if an attacker has > 95% odds it's the same if you didn't have any troops anyways and it provides some limit and balance to the curbstomp and loot that takes place in ground battles to nations that can no longer defend themselves. For this reason I don't think that it's a good idea to get rid of the > 95% rule entirely. I'm simply looking to tweak it in a way that it's better understood by the player base.

Perhaps the system should be left as is and simply explained better in the information index?

Actually this is quite incorrect. Can't find any video of it atm, but there are declassified films of a nuclear bomb test, followed by American troops movements into ground zero. The maneuver resulted in no (immediate) deaths.

Also, I really would have preferred this information to be displayed in Cybernations Index and not sprung on me twice during a high-cost war. I also tend to agree with everyone here, if the battle odds are 97% then they should have a 97% chance on winning the GB and stealing tech/land/money.

If you suddenly decide to turtle you have to wait 2 days before you can decom all your soldiers. With your idea implemented, you'd be milked for land and tech like hell during those 2 days with planned attacks, especially if you're fighting many opponents. At least with the 95% rule you'd have a chance of reducing this damage.

I really have no idea when defeat alerts are triggered. I've fought in a really huge amount of wars, and STILL cannot give a "this is when defeat alerts happen" statement :\

you can just deploy them all to have 0 defenders if you want that.

I explained how defeat alerts work in my OP of this thread. Maybe if this was made more clear in the information index that would help?

That makes is seem like you can only get defeat alerts if you return soldiers to home, and not if you had no soldiers total to start with.

After reading your OP I'm still a bit confused because you make it seem like you can ONLY get defeat alerts when you have soldiers deployed to be "defeated." Are you able to receive defeat alerts while maintaining soldiers deployed?

My understanding is that if you have over 95% odds and are legal to perform a ground attack, your opponents soldiers are returned home, and if that does not increase their odds to at least 5% then you receive a defeat alert (no more than 1 per day).

Initially i thought the same but i think the OP says if you get them while they're fully deployed with 0 defending you make the deployed soldiers come home AND send them a DA. Did my current lack of sleep make me misunderstand this admin? :v

I know this isn't the exact thing that you were asking for, señor admin, but in the battle tactics, I often feel upset that if I have 150K troops and 16K tanks, going in against 30K troops and no tanks, for some reason I can RARELY defeat ALL of their soldiers. As a matter of fact, I normally am only able to kill around 10K, IF NOT LESS. This is one of the most maddening things in this game. I understand that you want to make wars last a little longer and lengthen out soldier and tank casualties, but give me a break. This flies in the face of any reason I can see. I would like to have the battle results calculation based upon the largest number of troops available and not the smallest. I would like for the end result on a success to be something like "up to x troops can be killed" and if the defender has x troops or less, then they are all gone. Maybe this can happen and I've just been really unlucky in ground assaults, but I have a feeling that often I just get a percentage instead of shear numbers of my enemy.

To the OP, I think that so long as there are any soldiers in a home country, that a defeat alert is impossible. So long as there are troops, they should get whacked, regardless of the battle odds. Either buy more troops or dismiss them all (or lose them in ground attacks).

Also, to Hime Themis, the amount of radiation following a nuclear blast depends upon whether it was a ground burst or air burst. Fallout and persistent radiation occurs when there is an irradiation of the debris. This occurs most often in a ground burst (which is less effective use of the blast btw). When the mushroom cloud goes up, it sucks up the lose debris and irradiates them in the process. When they fall back to earth, they then give off radiation. Air bursts do more damage, as the bulk of the blast doesn't go directly into the ground. Also neutron bombs offer much less radiation, as they are against organic material and generally leave inorganic matter as it is, outside of the pressure waves and blast radius.

From what I understand, there is a drastic weakness in the system as you have described.

Let us presume that I can deploy over 95% on a target.

His deployed tanks are destroyed and his deployed troops return home, fine.

Then I nuke that same target.

He now has zero troops, and automatic turtle.

Seems like it does away with calculating proper deployment... when I deploy expecting to be nuked I try to send enough so that after I am nuked I have adequate support at home.

With the system as is, if I expect to be nuked I have absolutely NO incentive to do anything except deploy 100% soldiers and tanks.

Is it really going to spam the defenders inbox though?

I mean this would lead to at a maximum two messages per day, one defeat alert and one 'your troops have been returned home' message... as you can't re-deploy again...

I think the best and simplest way is to just add that msg to the game so users know why their deployed troops were returned home.

Simplest in the immediate short term would be to spell it out in the information index and do a game update log notification so everyone has to read the definition to clear the game update else its their own fault.



If you did this, then when would Anarchy be triggered? without defeat alerts wouldn't this this would mean a re-code of how it is triggered, which is an undesirable situation.



I do like this idea.

The defeat alert message is generated whenever someone loads the battle screen and gets > 95% odds. Rather than allow someone to sit on that screen and F5 F5 F5 that's why only one defeat alert message is generated per day.

Forgive me if this is going to sound inplausible, because obviously my understanding of the system and code is sketchy... but...

Right now I assume you have some flag you set once a defeat alert has been sent...




Could this be plausible:


The deployment_return_msg could read something like:

"While your forces were deployed, your opponent attempted to attack you with greater than 95% battle odds. This has resulted in the destruction of your tanks and your deployed troops have been returned home. If your opponent maintains greater than 95% battle odds and attempts to attack you further today you will not be able to retain any tanks that you may purchase."

why not have a second inbox, for system messages???

how hard would that be, and I believe it was discussed some time back as well...

not that I care to look for the thread but I know it was discussed..

I am going to assume here that simple coding of the inbox would in the db 1 = inbox 2=outbox why not make 3=system messages inbox?

do that and the entire inbox problem would be solved. and then change system messages inbox messages to last for 3 days instead of 7 days.

test it out in TE and see how it would work.

Well thats a separate issue.

Even if you did separate the inboxes, in the system inbox, there would currently be no notification telling you your deployed soldiers just got sent home because you didn't leave yourself enoguh soldiers to protect your nation at home etc...

Admin saying that it would spam the inbox, can be avoided by setting a flag once its sent once as per my post above, thus it doesn't get spammed out everytime someone F5's the odds screen.

I'm pretty certain this is a bug to be honest. It's just happened to me, I did a deployment and literally 2 seconds afterwards (I always have deploy military, and war and battles screens open together) I had nothing deployed at all. It's not what you mention in the OP as I still have all of my tanks.

I've not received any defeat alerts today, the day is only 21 minutes old, and all of my statistics (infra, cash, land, tech) are unchanged from when I was logged in before I got kicked out just prior to update.

So yeah, there's definitely something wrong somewhere, and I'm losing out on 8 ground attacks on severely weakened opponents because of it

I had a similar thing to poyplemonkeys happen to me a couple days ago: did an overdeploy, received no defeat alerts, deployed no soldiers while wasting the deployment for the day.

Also, I can't see how this is even remotely fair. Someone can do their 2 ground attacks on you, and then still ruin your deployment by loading up a battle screen when they're not even allowed to attack you again. They shouldn't be able to force your troops home unless they have remaining ground attacks on your nation.

I still maintain there is a bug in here somewhere though.

Protip

Don't attack around update.

Update is the most successful attack time for me due to my larger opponents being hit by everyone else so forgive me if I don't heed the protip.

I believe that the issue causing the repeat bug reports is being overlooked. If one has deployed troops, and their opponent opens the battle odds screen and has >95% odds, then one's troops will be automatically un-deployed with no defeat alert being issued, regardless of whether or not one has or hasn't received a defeat alert that day.


This is correct.


This is not fully correct. If it were, I would have received a defeat alert on the 26th at about 3:30pm. I did not. You can see the confusion and the appearance of a bug. A player deploys troops and then voila, seconds later they are home.

One way to remedy this would kill two birds with one stone. Players should have to launch ground attacks to trigger defeat alerts. This would inform one-upped players why their troops u-turned, and would also keep players from being able to win a ground attack, get a defeat alert, then get a second ground victory when their target repurchases troops.

defeat alerts should only be given if someone actually launches a ground attack.

When I made this report it was impossible for me to have had odds lower than 5% with any of my opponents.



I had attempted a 40K deployed and my largest opponent had about 53K troops.

My stats are on the left:

Attacking Technology: 5,366.85 -- Defending Technology: 2,990.95
Attacking Infrastructure: 4,748.44 -- Defending Infrastructure: 8,167.29
Attacking Land Area: 3,888.496 -- Defending Land Area: 1,157.138
Attempted deployment approx. 40K -- Defending had approx 53 K troops



There is no way this produced a 95% chance for the enemy (to cause instant troop movement back home to me) whether the opponent was clicking F5 furiously on the ground battle declaration screen or not.

Edit: rechecked ender's thread, issue clarified.

I think a 2nd msg as I described above would go a long way to determining if there is a bug here or if all these cases would be notified of a 'sent home' message...

From what I understand, if you nuke first you don't get the defeat alert.

^^^
PLEASE put that in the explanation. That's a big reason why no one understands defeat alerts. Do you have to not nuke for 2 days to get defeat alerts? What are the specifics?

Unless I'm mistaken you can initiate a defeat alert and then still get both attacks even if it caused damage (or 1 if you attacked once already). Perhaps initiating a defeat alert should eat up an attack if it causes damage.

This is the problem in my opinion. The Defeat Alert should only be generated if you actually launch the attack.

The GA should be allowed to be carried out at any %, 0<x<100 and only when the defender has 0 troops will a defeat alert be generated. Defeat alerts should take up one GA slot, and should actually have to be initiated, no just the odds screen loaded. You can suffer as many defeat alerts as are launched per day, and each should do twice the damage of a ground attack. To counter the nuked, then 6 defeat alert trick which would come from this, you can only launch GA's if the target has not been nuked that day, else your troops refuse to enter a high radiation zone.

After years of patches and modifications any kind of change like that is going to mean a complete overhaul, which is obviously not going to happen during a war.

There is a solid foundation for the ground battle system, but my impression is over time its become like a multiple story house, but over the years the extra stories have been whacked on the top and its just gotten bigger and bigger... Each story that has been placed on the house (eg, bringing up battle screen sends defeat alert without actually enacting the ground battle) was done so for a good reason at the time, even if some cannot recall what the good reason was.

But, you can't fix something on the 1st floor without a major overhaul.

Not everybody who is nuked has zero troops at home.

I try to deploy 50/50 sometimes to make sure troops are at home following a nuke....

I meant zero defending troops.

A problem I see with this is that a player could calculate their battle odds anyways since they know how much tech, land, infra, defending troops, and defending tanks an opponent has.

Do you know how damn hard that calculation is to reverse engineer? Very, and the formula is guarded well.

Not very hard, well at least to get a really reasonably accurate number :\

Only read the opening post.

The only problem with the current setup is that one nation can deploy and their opponent may see this and attack them right away, so that person can no longer attack for that whole day.

However it's always been like this so I don't really see a need for it to change.

The current setup works well except that a defeat alert is not strong enough to encourage people in a reasonably fair war to stand and fight. I think it's important that you can't just loot someone for land and tech every day if they are already beaten, but too many nations which are definitely not completely beaten sit on zero ground forces because it is a tactical benefit, and I think that's not right.

Make it so that every nation at war can issue a defeat alert, but make it slightly less strong.

I think you should always be able to perform 2 ground attacks, regardless of the battle odds.

If you have 0% attacking odds, you automatically lose if you try to attack.

If your opponent has 0% defending odds, you automatically win the attack.