Defeat Alerts - Incentivizing Aggression

[hapapants]

One of the reasons "flag-running" is viewed as so boring is because turtling is by far the best option to succeed.  This is because as long as one maintains a sufficiently high warchest, it is impossible to do any meaningful damage to a runner.  A runner can literally sit back, eat nukes/DAs/etc, and still manage to boost up to the top 10 on the last day without a sweat.

 

To fix this, I propose changing Defeat Alert money damages from 5% money (capped at $600k) to 5% money uncapped.

 

There are couple of things I want to note about this change:

1. This provides a way to severely damage passive players if they do not defend themselves.  A player with a $100 million WC eating 5 million dollar DA's is very significant.
2. This provides a huge incentive for players to attack passive players.  If someone wants to do a lot of damage, it is now possible to put a severe dent in a player's flag-running aspirations with a coordinated strike.
3. This change would open other viable running strategies.  A moderately warchested player that defends himself well could beat a turtling runner in the NS race by doing significant damage to him with DA's.
4. This change only really affects runners, and not the majority of players.  5% DA's are not nearly as much damage towards a moderately warchested player, and does not affect their ability to rebuild to a relevant level

 

This is a simple change (that has been suggested several times in SE) that I feel would greatly improve the quality of play in TE.

[Lord Hershey]

That sounds very fair to me.

[Forward]

This would serve as an automatic gather intel operation as well, unfortunately, unless there was an overly random range.

 

Perhaps we could just raise the cap (and possibly percentage as well) to a more damaging level to remedy this. On a separate note, many flagrunners do not turtle, and ones like Tenochtitlan and Gingerbread did not place so well last round doing so either. (Well, I guess it depends on your perspective, but from here on out non-top 3 counts as "not so well" again.)

Edited June 16, 2013 by Forward

[hapapants]

This would serve as an automatic gather intel operation as well, unfortunately, unless there was an overly random range.

 

That's not a big deal though, is it?  Intel operations would still have their own use, since you can use them without declaring war and organizing a coordinated attack.

 

...

Perhaps we could just raise the cap (and possibly percentage as well) to a more damaging level to remedy this. On a separate note, many flagrunners do not turtle, and ones like Tenochtitlan and Gingerbread did not place so well last round doing so either. (Well, I guess it depends on your perspective, but from here on out non-top 3 counts as "not so well" again.)

 

Every runner that placed last round turtled in some capacity.  It's a dominant strategy - it's almost impossible to place anywhere near the top without avoiding war.  Setting a flat percentage doesn't completely solve the problem, but it goes a long way to closing the gap.

 

As for raising the damage level overall, that's exactly what the flat percentage does.  Except it has the added advantage of doing proportionally more damage to those who turtle.  

[Therm]

No, it doesn't. If you wanted to hurt those who turtle, make the damage increase per consecutive DA.