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Zambaman

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  2. IRON Dispatch

    in Alliance Announcements (IC)

    Posted

    [quote name='Shan Revan' date='21 April 2010 - 04:43 PM' timestamp='1271821402' post='2268728']
    Dammit DVD, what is this blasphemy. I haven't had to do this in a long time but we're independent dammit, not neutral!
    [/quote]
    Infact in the beginning we were far from neutral from what I can recall; !@#$, we very nearly joined in on the fun in GW1 :v:

    Can't believe it's been four years and the alliance is still going. Good work guys.

  9. Do long term empires destroy the game?

    in Open World RP

    Posted

    If you want nukes to have a fearsome reputation, just uncap the GRL. I've been advocating that for months. ;)

    Ahh, but GRL affects everyone equally so it'd just slow down everybody's growth. If you instead implemented a local radiation system (affecting the nuked only) in combination with GRL then they'd be potentially devastating, at least economically. If it had a delay until the radiation was gone (perhaps giving a new bonus to the Radiation Clean-Up bonus resource by allowing it to halve the length of time) of say half a month then it'd really be quite nasty to be nuked consistently (if every nuke received subtracted 1 happiness from total happiness for a period of 15 days). Combine that with proportional damage and there's your true super-weapon that everyone fears and would escalate the danger of war.

    Of course, if that happened then the game would probably revert back to the early days when firing off a nuke could land you with ZI.

  10. Do long term empires destroy the game?

    in Open World RP

    Posted

    Yes, this is the biggest issue with creating a scarce but attractive/necessary commodity. Inevitably the most organized and most powerful groups will monopolize it. In the meantime you would have a resurgence in conflict, but all of that conflict would be funneling towards an increasingly centralized power structure, as the room for top power brokers becomes less and less. Essentially, the opposite of what CN has done (where power has become increasingly decentralized over time). The logical end game in this scenario would be to eventually have one massive alliance and many smaller ones. This sort of change would also hurt all of the very many unaligned nations, who would be the quickest to be pushed out of the buffet line. Similarily, capping the amount of nations on each color sphere (which sounds to me like one of the more promising or at least more interesting options) would hurt unaligned nations as well, and discourage new nations from joining the game because they can't join the colors they want. It's possible we would soon unaligneds being chased off of spheres, as they would be easier targets than entire alliances.

    Capping how much an individual nation can grow wouldn't really accomplish a whole lot other than making people bored, and the reality is that there are already some de facto limits, since eventually you run out of things to buy or things become prohibitively expensive. The only thing that can realistically be bought forever is tech from smaller nations. Capping how much of a given thing can exist in the world at once could have interesting results, though, again it would most quickly harm unaligned and new nations. I don't immediately see a way to introduce scarcity on a level that will generate conflict without harming unaligned/newer players disproportionately.

    But, as Cortath said, people will adapt and the equilibrium will necessarily establish itself again. This may be true even with any scarcity-introducing changes, depending on how it's done, I'm not sure, but it is certainly true of any change that still allows for unlimited growth across the board. If you want to generate more conflict, then you have to provide real incentives for people to have conflicts. Changing the way wars are fought does not give people a reason to fight wars, it just changes the strategy of fighting them.

    One possible method of implementing scarcity into the game as a resource to be fought over would be to have that resource exist somewhere (on a certain sphere perhaps) for a limited time. This could prevent one alliance from effectively gaining and then maintaining control of the scarce resource for eternity. Now the length of time that the desired object exists for could be dynamic. You could possibly have it where there is X-time units of the resource available (similar to kWhs for instance), where if a few controlled the resource it would last longer, or if more controlled it then it'd last a shorter period of time.

    e.g. 100kWh of energy available, say each person represents one kW, the if you have 100 people accessing the resource then it shall only last for one hour, however one person could access it for 100 hours.

    Now obviously time units would be different (in days say), but if there was a team/colour event where membership was exclusive (top 100 per colour or something similar, or a different mechanic perhaps), and the event was significant enough to be fought over then that'd probably get some conflict happening. If there was even some way for alliances to raid a sphere to deny access to the bonus to other alliances then that'd have an effect on conflict, surely.

    With a time limit for the bonus to be in play it'd also stop someone or some people from gaining control of the bonus for eternity.

    Secret aid would be an interesting thing to implement, though I'd imagine it'd require a large change to the current spy/espionage system if spying is to still be an in game function/action. You'd need some way for the aid to be uncovered (odds of some sort to maintain some risk) which would be hard to do as the action wouldn't be directly attacking another nation so how do you determine spy odds? Also, if secret aid were to go into effect I'd enjoy it more if it were possible to send hardware such as nukes instead of just finances or a few soldiers.

    Finally, nukes are still just large cruise missiles. If you want them to have a truly fearsome reputation (like they did way back when only the top 300 could buy them), then they need to do some sort of Percentage of Infra destruction. And if that happened you'd probably need to pare back the amount of nukes people can stockpile.

  11. 1000+ days: An analytical analysis of Cybernations in hindsight

    in Open World RP

    Posted

    IRON didn't, because according to Ender and Loegaire I conspired with admin to ruin their first attempt at it shortly after I joined the NPO. :v:

    What were much more annoying from my perspective were the puppet/multis that people had had since the beginning of the game, but were outlawed and then grandfathered in just before IRON started. The tricky way the money from those were making it around alliances (which IRON couldn't take advantage of), was very annoying.

    Also I remember when sending 10k as start-up aid was generous, and when I suggested increasing it later on some complained that it would open IRON up to nations taking the money and running. 10k.... :lol:

    Also, the complaints when IRON was first sanctioned because LUE had waited ages to get sanctioned then we and ICP (I think ?) were sanctioned not long after.

    IRON Official Announcement

    in Open World Forum

    Posted

    I have been leading IRON since before its existence was made public, over two years now. I was the secretary of State prior to Darkmistress who was my deputy and I had been training, up until sometime after the UJW. My time became scarce so I let her take the lead, being confident in her abilities.

    :ph34r:

    Congrats Shan, IRON appointees.

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