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.

Approved for Discussion

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

So if a nation with 1,000,000,000,000 infra and tech suffers a defeat alert, it only loses a max of $3 million when it's warchest is in the multi-billion money amount?

That makes absolute sense!

/sarcasm

the issue is that defeat alerts are almost always sent to the nations on the overwhelmed side of a war, crippling them further even faster. This would be a victor-favoring change.

It also would greatly hurt smaller nations with larger warchests who want to be able to last more than 2 weeks in a war before being bankrupt.

It's more than just an advantage. I was in this position during the Karma war, nuking @ 1000 infra. Even 1vs6, I was curbstomping them. Are you saying Karma should've surrendered to NPO if NPO had better warchests and was able to fight for a year? We had quite a lot of nations nuking at 1k infra. There's a difference between guerrilla warfare and being able to continue full-blown nuclear warfare for many months. As for re-thinking entering the war, anyone at the top now has an insane warchest.. so you're saying no one should attack them because it would be far too annoying? That'll be fun. The pile of money they have definitely isn't getting any smaller. I guess that's the end of big wars then?

As for halting major infrastructure jumps, I don't see why it would matter, it's not like you have a "right" to keep your growth tricks. Instead of buying 1000 infra in 1 day, it would take 4 days, so you'd only pay slightly more bills to make the jump. Big deal. I'm not sure if it was ever intended for nations to buy thousands of infra in one day anyway.

Nuke + Defeat alert is very possible to pull off, no matter how overwhelmed you are - although a lot more nations would have FSS wonders if this were implemented. The Defeat Alert would become an all important objective in wars, just as anarchy was in earlier days, rewarding alliances that were highly coordinated more than alliances that simply had a lot of members that had sat in the game for years. As such this would be a change that would favor skill over playtime, making the game more attractive to younger blood while at the same time allowing the older, larger, more monied players/alliances to retain an advantage if they were active and skilled at coordination. I think this would be extremely good for the game, even though it would make it nearly as easy to PZI someone with 5Bn warchest as someone with 200M warchest - but I don't see that as a horrible thing at all. Sitting in the game and dodging challenging/brutal wars by any means necessary should not equal "winning the game".

i don't know enough about the warfare system to comment on this exactly but i can agree that all the caps in place now are incredibly outdated now and i think instead of a cap damages should be determined more on the amount of tech/infra/soldier count of each nation instead of capped at a number that any decently sized nation barely even feels.

sounds like a much better solution. This way smaller nations arn't penalized as much for having a larger warchest. Base it off of size for damages, larger nations would take more, smaller would take less, but it would even things out better

With the current high percentages and low hard caps, small nations really don't get any love. A 100-200 million warchest is gone before you know it. Meanwhile a large nation with 5 times the warchest doesn't actually lose money much faster.

Well depending on how its done, if the formula for losses was rescaled smaller nations might not lose much more than they are now. However it shouldn't be based on warchest size, but on their infra/tech. Hell you could even base it off a percentage of their non-LC daily bills for the money lost.

but those small nations hit those hard caps as well in war. At least i did. A change based on how large the nations infra/tech are would make things better than how much cash they have on hand.

Which is why i say the formula would have to be redone in addition to an uncap/raising the cap.

i didn't see your post before i posted. but i agree with you.

Bolded parts for emphasis. I actually REALLY like this suggestion!!!! This would have a multi-layer affect of slowing rebuilds, capping insane back collect jumps, as well as increase the value of higher levels of infra over what they currently are, because of the added time needed to return to it after a war. It would also level the war playing field on the lower end of the spectrum by limiting just how much one can aid rain a small guy right after they declare on a bunch of other tiny nations.

To be honest I would even think a tighter limit, like 200 would be better.

It's definitely a suggestion worth looking into, that would make wars flow faster (and the prospect of peace mode more attractive, sadly).

The cap should be variable depending on NS/infra/money on hand/etc.. $5 million a day is nothing to people with multi-billion dollar warchests.

I support this idea, it will greatly reduce vietFAN style endless wars with nations that have a 2 billion dollar warchest and speed up the game.

the problem with people having multibillion dollar warchests is a problem in the lack of endgame, not a result of a lack of sufficient defeat alerts.

Treating the symptoms will never treat the cause.

i will never support a suggestion to hurt those that turtle until the battle system itself is fixed. People turtle because there is no way whatsoever for them to survive without doing so.

yes, when your 3v1, you should be losing over time, but you should still have a chance to defend your nation. There are numarous accounts in RL history that show a vastly outnumbered force held back the enemy from fortified positions for a very long time. In CN the defensive bonuses you get from land or infra are minuscule in comparison to the other modifiers. There really is no option to dig in, or fortify. Turtling is the best you can do.

Being able to hurt the enemy (as their is no line to hold in CN) but it makes no sense that the amounts of money are capped at spots that are so insignificant now that even mid level nations don't find them significant anymore.

Fix the battle system, so that the defender has a chance, and I'll support it. Right now I will not. Realize WHY admin has a protection mechinism in place for a defeated foe and then you'll realize why I am against this suggestion. Its not just those that turtle that would be affected by this. Its also those that are casual players and are not prepared for war. Its those small unalligned nations that make up the large majority of this game that would get utterly destroyed by not having a protection mechinism in place.

Having been on the receiving side of Curbstomps. I agree with Kung Fu Geeks.
In a one sided Curbstomp there is virtually no way to even hold your ground even with the under dog advantage. Your getting crushed and your getting crushed fast.
It isn't even fun. It has caused people to leave CN. After the NADC vs Bleu war many n00b's were so put out by the lack of defensibility they simply left CN. in some cases forever. This thread and that infra cap thread, heck any thread in this suggestion box
fails to offer any real advantage to the under dog that gives them a fighting chance in an outgunned battle.

Hi, welcome to CN, some of us have been here for over three years.

You want a fast game? Go play TE, thats what its for. CN is a long term game, slow game, the once daily turns should have tipped you off. Nothing about this game is fast, not growth, not the politics, not war.

The people on the losing end already get the short end of the stick in so many ways, out numbered, out gunned, unable to do anything but CM back for pitiful amounts.

Losing already sucks enough, why are you so interested in making it suck more? This is still a game after all, do we really want to see every war end with a major exodus of players who never even had a chance to defend themselves?

With no effective option to "fortify" your own borders and establish defensive positions wars will always be won by the side that can attack more, and in a 3 on 1 war, your infra is quickly stripped away to the point where you can't raise enough troops to win a GA. you are forced to give up the skies, and your navy, becuase the options are either spend cash like its going out of style to try and keep up with 3 people, or try and preserve yourself.

Lifting or raising the cap hurts the wrong end of the spectrum, and rewards people for doing nothing. Why hold a warchest if it can be wiped out quickly and easily? who would bother? turtling is supposed to hurt less than full on war, not more.

Good thing America has a ton of gold sitting around that don't mean jack eh? Anyway, I think Cybernations has always been about nation building, not war. War is just a means to see who built and managed a better nation, so I think TypoNinja is right in that respect. But, it wouldn't hurt to raise the cap another 4 or 5 mil to counter-act the inflation that has happened since the implementation of the rule.

You miss the point, This change would hurt the people who prepared more than the people who did not, it would also utterly unbalance wars in small-mid range. Thats bad mojo on both counts, but its also ignoring most of the game. You want a change aimed at the top 10% (or less) of the game, while ignoring what it will do to the other 90%.

Maybe you could set custom caps for different NS ranges, so that the noobs who just got a bunch of aid in and get raided don't get completely rolled over, and to combat inflation in higher NS nations who get 9000 mil a day every tax collect.

At the same time, its better now to turtle in many cases rather than fight because the DA is so low. That isn't something we should be trying to protect as its no fun for either side.

You shouldn't be penalized for a large warchest, the warchest amount should not factor into it. Furthemore an uncapping/rasing the cap should be done in such a way that low and most mid level nations will see little to no change in amount, perhaps even a drop for some of the smallest nations.

Just uncapping it with the current formula is bad I agree.

Losing isn't supposed to be a walk in the park. With the current war system, the losing end end of a war may delve down into being "unable to do anything but CM back for pitiful amounts" in the lower tiers, but in the top tiers where nations have +20K tech, a WRC, and a multi billion dollar warchest, the defenders just sit around launching nukes at anyone who attacks them, causing massive damage.
If they are only losing 5 million per day, due to defeat alerts, they could last through months of war. They lose all their infra in a week or two, and then due to tech being very hard to destroy, they are sitting in the mid or low tiers, nuking the nations of any attacker, they will likely have a much higher tech level and almost certainly a WRC, so they are doing more damage to their attackers, taking away all fun for the attackers and making it fun for the defender instead who is destroying his enemies with basically no return damage. Once the war is over, they can just rebuy all their infrastructure and they will be back at pre-war strength.

This effectively means there is no feasible way to defeat a top tier nation, as they can always buy their infra back to pre-war levels, they have become invincible, the only way to keep them down would be an endless war, which will be less fun for both sides of the coin.
If defeat alerts were uncapped, then they actually lose their money and will want to surrender instead of sitting in the mid/low tier with a massive advantage, they can pressure their alliance government into surrendering or desert their alliance.

Alliance surrenders will come quicker, as the damage is greater to larger nations, increasing the fun in a war due to their short and less drawn out nature.

Thats not a problem with defeat alerts, thats two separate problems, 1 being the relative difficulty of destroying tech. (if tech went away faster they wouldn;t hang around one range for so long). 2 being the pathetically low infra/tech required to gain a nuke. If you needed 3k infra instead of 1k infra to buy nukes and more tech as well, the costs of nations playing nuke tag would go up quite a bit.

You've identified the problem but have fixated on the symptoms instead of the causes.



It is indeed very hard to permanently knock a prepared nation out of the fight, SetiCrunchers from NPO was a great example, he was out there nukes flying pretty much the entire war. But you know what? He worked for the ability to do that. The keyword here is prepared. A nation with no warchest won't last a week in a nuclear war, but those who put in the time to work one up deserve the advantage that their work EARNED them. If the argument that warchests last too long even in full on nuclear war, the answer is the change the minimum infra/tech required for nuke purchasing, that would force a nation to choose between preserving its funds for rebuilding, or spending the now significant amounts to maintain nuclear capability.



This is likely true but it overlooks all the other possible effects such a change would have.



Debatable but not really relevant to the game mechanic changes anyway.

I want to elaborate on this. The new defeat alert cap formula should be:

Max money lost = NSx500

Take me for example. I've got around 7k NS. And my net profit everyday from taxes is 200k. My max loss would be 3.5 mil, around 2 and a half weeks of preparation. Or profit from 2 or 3 3/50/50 tech deals. It might seem an unresonable amount for nations like mine, but the reality is, smaller nations don't have big enough warchests to mass soldiers anyway, so defeat alerts don't happen too often for us. The fomula should work really well in nations that buy tech instead of sell it and who have enough to back collect instead of collecting and paying on a daily basis.

Correct me if I'm wrong in some way.

Edit: Spelling and Grammar.

I don't think you have thought this through realistically.
Tech - The only real way to destroy tech is with nukes, making tech more easily destroyed would affect the attacking nations and the defending nations in equal amounts regardless of how any attackers you had on you, one nuke per day all around. Meaning it will have nil effect in making wars shorter, just equally more damaging (and less fun) for both sides.
Infra limits for nukes - 3K infra only costs about 40 million, raising the infra limit for nukes will just mean the defender has to sit on his infra screen buying lots of 10 infra for an hour before he can start nuking again, this would be terrible for the defender as its boring as hell, and even if they didn't have to go through that process it doesn't shorten wars or have any real affect for anyone with a large warchest.

With your two solutions here, any large nation will still blow the hell out of mid/low tier nations, and at the end of the war rebuy to their pre-war level, granted the tech damage increase would make them a lot weaker, but its affecting the attackers in an equal amount. Making defeat alerts more damaging to a warchest is a much better solution then those you provided here.



Above I went over the reasons why a tech/infra limit on nuke purchases wouldn't help the situation.
I understand that a nation with a large warchest obviously spent a fair amount of time saving it, but their attackers would have equally large warchests, almost every top tier nation has a giant warchest. If you have 3 nations with 2 billion dollar warchests, attacking one nation with a 2 billion dollar warchest, and your all losing 5 million per day, that war can basically last forever.
War is around to weaken your opponent so they are not a political threat to you any longer, if you want to take down the top tier nations of your opponent, the only realistic way to defeat the defending top tier nations, would be to keep them in nuclear anarchy and spy on his warchest every week, watching it slowly go down 5 million per day, until finally they have nothing left and cant make a comeback. This will take a very long time and its not fun, increasing the damage gives the same result in less time.

You talk as if that $5M from a defeat alert is the only loss they are taking in a day of war. I don't know what you have been looking at, but the nations that fought in the Karma war for an extended time are not back to where they were pre-war for the most part. Certainly the people on the losing side are not. Getting back to 5 or even 6k infrastructure might be possible with a huge warchest, but getting back to those pre-war levels? Not going to happen. Even if they could do it once, the cost would wipe out a huge amount of their reserves; if they got into another war too soon after that they would be crushed.

Also I don't buy the vague allusions to all the nations in the upper ranks hoarding billions upon billions. There probably are some, but no way are there thousands of them. I don't think this is so widespread an issue that you need to alter the whole combat system to "fix" it. Those people with such large reserves spent months and even years to build them. If you make the change you propose then all that effort becomes nothing but a waste, and you are in fact punishing nations for trying to protect themselves.

You are also ignoring the fact that you can CM, bomb, and strip away their cash reserves with spy ops now; that's going to amount to a lot more the $5 M a day. If anything, those things are going to make it much harder on mid and small sized nations, but larger nations are still going to lose more. I've seen people say they lost several hundred million in only a week of war, and you are saying that isn't enough?! You seem to want to strip an enemy nation down to where they have nothing left but their improvements and not a dime to their name. If you want to be so vindictive, force them to decomm wonders or improvements if you can, that will be more effective.