Starting with Infra?

[Instr]

How would you feel if players had their starting funds reduced and instead started with a large amount of infra instead?

It would decrease the difficulty for newer players, who have no idea what improvement orders to buy; every round, even in SE, involves a huge number of players who have no idea how to build their nations in a way remotely resembling the ideal fashion.

 

A proposal would be to have all players start with 1 million and 1k infra instead of 0 infra and 5 million. It would also help alleviate trades concerns for unaligned players.

And certain complaints about players mining 3 NS nations with 2 soldiers would be partially alleviated....

Edited June 13, 2013 by Instr

[KingBilly1]

Personally I don't think that would change much.

Make it an option at the start though? Choose whether to take the infra or the larger start up funds, maybe give something like a 5% income bonus to those that choose the infra.

[Instr]

Giving a stickshift / automatic option would be good, however, but players who choose stickshift without knowing what they were doing would be more likely to quit the game.

[OverlordShinnra]

dislike this idea.

[Forward]

Interesting, but this would just delay the inevitable in the players who don't know what they're doing falling behind as they would purchase the wrong improvements, utilize the rest of their money poorly, etc. The mining would also continue as before, only slightly less efficiently perhaps. I prefer the current system.

[Instr]

I think delaying the inevitable would be good, however, because it gives new players more time to play around and organize their nation. Maybe they'll decide to actually join a decent alliance and learn how to play instead of just dropping the game a while later.

[Eric F]

I like it, but players that dont know what they are doing will still not know what they are doing in either option, sure one could get into less trouble with one over the other. 

 

I like the choice though, I would go for the money over the the infra though. 

[KingBilly1]

The mods or admin would also have to re-write the new players guide if this change happened.... And i dont see them doing that :P

[Instr]

There's two other issue with this, however.

 

#1, this encourages early raiding for cash, because the main protection for new nations right now is that they tend to have too little NS to be efficiently targeted. Raids for cash against unaligns then become more viable, but the chances of it going wrong, as well, also becomes more likely. It's a bit more fair than friends setting up nations for harvesting (which people incidentally don't seem to care about dealing with), since it provides everyone the opportunity to do so.

 

#2, zero-day rogues are currently hamstrung by the fact that you need to coordinate trades for them. (That's the main value of starting with infra; the trades are a gargantuan problem because people need optimum / near-optimum trades to get anything done and without an organization it's fairly difficult.) By removing the requirement for zero-day rogues to have trades, the amount of zero-day roguing will increase.

This may result in a far more interesting round, of course.

[Forward]

Actually, as I posted elsewhere, I think that an adequate zero-day rogue should be able to force any number of assailants to reroll. However, this would increase the potency of normally inadequate zero-day rogues and basically make any rogue force a reroll on however many other nations it can hit by DAing away valuable infrastructure immediately.