Instr
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Posts posted by Instr
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Implementing it wouldn't be that hard; just put in a check "Is today the last day of the round?"
If so, then make it so that #1, the subroutines that control whether or not the nation experiences nuclear anarchy penalties are not utilized; #2, all nuclear weapons are disabled for reason of being "last day of the round".
The original idea was to enforce an overtime 1 day after the last day of the round giving everyone the chance to collect out of nuke anarchy, but this is a more elegant solution (not as though it's still intrinsically ugly).
===The tactics and strategies enabled by last-day bullshit are myriad and interesting and add much to the game, but like I said before, this is the nuclear option. If players cannot be trusted not to collude and cheat over a flag / flags, and there seems to be no action over the collusion / cheating, then take away the option to collude / cheat. Back-collects, war-dodging, all of these have been great and interesting tactics but it appears that the TE memberbase can't be trusted with it.
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For someone who was complaining about slot-filling by friends this round (and I am aware of incidents like this), you sure seem awfully opposed to the nuclear option.
This, certainly, would not resolve inadequate-type slot-filling, where an attacker attacks with insufficient force and can still do all attacks, except they don't matter, in either the nuclear or naval realm, but it would help even the field and lessen the damage.
And you must remember, I am one of the heaviest users of Methax / Immortal Turandot tactics. Most others plan to do the same thing Samwise did this round and enter "hell week" with heavy warchest and boost up at the end. This type of change hurts me more than anyone else, then it hurts the people who opt to hide out of war at the end of round (as though that worked for anyone, ever), then it hurts the least the normal conventional flag runner. -
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. -
I will note for Overlord Shinnra that Confusion is probably the most successful flag runner in TE.
His organization has won:
Duckroll, Poison Clan, NATO, TORN... what else am I missing?
My record was 2, TFD's record was 2, BN/PS got 2...As far as Confusion making shady deals goes; this is fairly par for course and slot-filling is pretty par for course. On Jraenar / Shaun Mason, for instance, I believe the Citadel attacker on Shaun was one of Confusion's old cronies and if you do note the nuke timing, Jraenar was nuked right after update.
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I also do note for you that Con takes a break every other round; perhaps he'll be back in full force next round, but otherwise there's no point in "blowing him up" next round because no one cares and no one will be impressed.
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The biggest problem is that that means that, given the motivation, an alliance can at any moment destroy any player of their choice by just plain targeting a ridiculous amount of nations on someone they dislike. They can do it even in a conventional war; got a big nation you dislike? Dump 40 ground attacks, cruise missiles, and planes on them, then dump 2x that during an update quad. Without tech bonuses, that's 3600 infra gone in 10 minutes.
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Of course, your experience is one where only people who can't win the flag care about casualties and aren't seriously trying to game the casualty system to inflict losses.
There's a ton of unfortunate ways to game the casualty system.
For example, rogue strikes to prevent a leading opponent from earning casualties; three low-infra players send the target into anarchy to prevent declares, then self-ZI to prevent victorious soldier casualties, then lock the opponent into nuclear anarchy every day. How about just plain turtling to deny the casualty winner? -
The problem with simulating late-game play in SE is that late-game play in SE tends to be very very long-term; the only reason you buy infra in SE past 15k or 20k is because you want your nation to look good, not because of any actual economic advantages, so direct growth options for players are more lacking.
TE to some extent already simulates late-tier play; a colleague last round mentioned how they had more navy floating in TE than they did in SE with a top 100 nation, and tech is already scaled in TE to compensate for the lower effective tech levels.
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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.
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The problem with this idea is that you'd end up having some kind of scoring system that could be gamed.
There's also the issue of alliance sizing; for example, if you do things off ANS, what about micro-alliances? Let's say, we have what starts as a 18-man alliance with 1 runner-like, then at the end of the round 17 of the people leave, with the runner inflating the score and ANS of the alliance.It's a great idea, but only if you can have a fair scoring system.
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Who is this Methax fellow (aside from Round 13 winner) and what the hell do we care?
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Technically two wars, then a tech raid by us, then a roguing.
OP took it easy on you guys, aiming to make you someone else's problem (insufficient nuclear pressure at the top), but eventually it turned out that it became our responsibility to take you out.
You apparently also got lucky when WD was unable to hit RE due to an attack by TPC, and you also got lucky when WD failed to nuke you on the final day. Crusader nuking you back also removed our bargaining position to hit Leafsrock / Dubiety / Hail to the King / Janro again with nukes.==
RE's yield is 4-6 flags. 3 direct flags, one via a runner hidden in Warriors, 1, I presume, via a deal, the other via what I suspect is a sleeper. It's a good yield; why can't you admit to having played the round like flag runners?
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I think one of the ways to deconcentrate play around the flag and just encourage more play for the fun of it would be to set up an awards page with various achievements, all providing one $25-equivalent donation.
You could put things like:Most casualties taken
Most navy destroyed in one war
Most aircraft destroyed in one war
Most land area
and so on.
The flag could perhaps be pinned towards the player/alliance combo holding the most achievements, instead of just pinning it to NS.
Making the game an achievement hunt for one round would at least be an interesting experiment. -
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.
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In SE as well as TE navies are primarily cash sinks and NS inflators. We saw this to a great extent last war in SE, where naval warfare was actually critical because eQ killzones were below Competence killzones and eQ wanted to drag down Competence nations. Naval warfare, to my great surprise, became critical.
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The problem with any treaty map is that the distances involved imply that a lot of alliances are closer than they actually are, and vice versa.
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Two other common cheating patterns are:
-Arranged non-nuclear slotfill; where the attackers and defender conspire to give the defender enough time to get out of nuclear anarchy
-Botched nuke timings; where the timing of the nuke can determine whether or not the player can survive the round due to the huge NS damage dealt to planes.
Easy, if ugly ways, to get rid of these two problems are:-Remove the ability to nuke on the last day.
It over-politicizes the game if the winner is the one where the nuke timing is favorable or unfavorable; for example, Lazaraus45 lost the flag in round 14 because OP got upset at him for some reason or another and nuked him at 11:59:59. It's also pretty cheap when players coordinate so that they get hit early in the day so they don't have to worry about getting nuked at all.-Remove nuclear anarchy on the last day of the round.
Now, I've won rounds by getting people past the radar and getting them a last day collect, but TBH the sheer potential for abuse is too great. My memory is foggy, but I do believe the attackers of the winner on Round 7 informed me a couple of years later that they HAD in fact performed a nuclear slot-fill by refusing to nuke the winner, purportedly because there was someone in front of him that was slot-filling. In Round 17, something similar happened, where the attackers conspired to make sure the Round 17 winner could get a final collect out of nuclear anarchy. Here, my memory is a little fuzzy, but I seem to recall they were so brazen they actually went non-nuclear for not only 1 day but two in order to enhance the final back collect's quality.
By removing nuclear anarchy on the last day of the round, it will remove the thrill of being able to sneak nuclear back collects, but it definitely puts everyone on an even playing field. It also weakens the advantages of people who manage to dodge wars at the end of the round; since no matter what happens everyone will get a last day back-collect. -
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.... -
I'm just asking people here how you feel about the 10 flag payout. It's changed the dynamics of the round significantly; did it make this round more or less exciting?
How about the integrity of the game? Do you feel that this round is more or less marred by irregularities than previous rounds? -
Alliance mega-mergers. The main issue with flags has always been politics;
the game seems to be converging towards a point where a bunch of people make shady backroom deals about who is entitled to a flag and who is not entitled to a flag.
If you do it on a score basis, what's to stop people from just calling in SA Goons and flooding the game in the last 2 weeks with a GOON swarm to fuck with the alliance system? -
That's how navies are supposed to work. They're enormous cash-sinks designed to provide additional NS.
If you want to wipe out an opponent's navy, either stop that opponent from accumulating a large navy by hitting him early, or use a rogue to conduct skirmishing actions and blow his navy up early, then deploy 3 attackers with vast naval superiority to wreck the opponent. -
There's other reasons for Admin to shut down TE, of course.
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First, let me remind everyone that I am distinctly of the opinion that this is not the last round. I don't think it's appropriate to list my reasons for suspecting this, but I feel that it is very likely that there will be a round after this and considering this it would be useful to make observations regarding the round format and the nature of the round.
The first observation I'll make is that flag running is what ruins TE. I told Clash this in Round 13, when Clash let Methax go, letting him pull off a victorious back collect, but flag running is fundamentally destructive to TE.
The reasons are as follows: first, flag runners are here for an objective, not for the fun of the game, and a dedicated flag running organization is much less likely to be persistent. For instance, did the Kronos people stay after they bagged their flag? How about the Gre people? MK-Umb only flag ran when they could win, then joined other alliances when the objective was gone.
And for the alliance itself, and the tactics flag running organizations require (roguery, war dodging, political isolationism, curbstomps), these are not sustainable to the members. People need to be dragooned in to work, and many of them leave, instead of persisting for round after round, simply because flag running and flag running tactics are not fun; it's work.
Second, this round has been a bit cruel in nature. There have been many irregular wars and attempts at abnormal gameplay modes, yet virtually no alliances have stepped up to intervene. Consider the stomp on OP at the start of the round, the preemptive and repeated attacks on Citadel, certain alliances' constant choice of easy wars, and the fact that no one has opted to intervene over any of these. Since the difficulty of flag running has been significantly reduced, more alliances are now oriented towards flag running, and the costs of a "friendly intervention" as opposed to just sitting around and hoping someone else will deal with the problem mean that weird wars and odd wars will not see their white knights.
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And as to a point for this post, let me say that there is no point and that's it for now. Just a few observations, which can be disputed, to be followed with others with no conclusion. -
Gutsy attack this time; it's a 33% updeclare by infra, but on the other hand, you have nothing to lose.
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Sabotage IRS Proficiency (New tax rate randomly produced, 1-5% lower than old tax rate, low limit of 23%) = $10,000 + (20 x enemy nation strength x enemy number of days inactive) [Defender required to collect taxes to change]I'm guessing it's this issue. LOL
From the Artist Formerly Known as Doom House
in Alliance Announcements (IC)
Posted
10/10 I laughed.