Issues to address:
- Nations are able to use stored energy, as well as energy shared by allies, to temporarily deploy enormous arrays of defenses that are insurmountable to any attacking nation. Once the threat is gone, they salvage these extra defenses and return to their normal energy burn rate.
Because nations can typically store some 10 hours worth of energy (at their energy generation rate), a nation can create defenses that burn double their energy generation rate, and maintain them for 10 hours before running out of stored energy. And, that's not counting the energy available from allies, which can extend this much further (or indefinitely) given a few allies of high enough level.- One approach to solving this would be to decrease the amount of energy that a nation can store. It could be decreased from say 10 hours worth to just 1 or 2 hours worth. But, that would get rid of one of the main reasons for having stored energy in the first place, which is so that a nation can log off and still have their defenses be functional for 10 hours or so, after having been brutally checkered.
- Nations share their entire pool of energy with their allies. So, nations can be created and leveled up just to act as energy sources to their allies. These nations then don't have to have any presence on the map, or do anything at all, to continue providing near limitless energy (given a few of them) to their allies.
- Without the above tricks, nations don't generate enough energy to defend any more than a very few orbs or resources.
- Energy and manpower storage structures currently just increase the maximum amount of manpower and energy that a nation can store if it saves them up, and so are not very useful and are rarely built.
- It would be nice to allow nations with larger teams to have some extra manpower since they burn through it more quickly, but to do so in a way that doesn't add overwhelmingly to the advantages that are already enjoyed by larger teams.
Overburn
- When a nation has more defenses than their energy generation rate can support, it costs extra energy to maintain energy use beyond that generation rate. So, for example:
- If a nation has defenses that total 1.1x their energy generation rate, it would actually burn energy at say 1.4x their energy generation rate.
- If a nation has defenses that total 1.5x their energy generation rate, it would actually burn energy at say 3x their energy generation rate.
- If a nation has defenses that total 2x their energy generation rate, it would actually burn energy at say 10x their energy generation rate.
- This means it gets increasingly inefficient to support defenses above and beyond the nation's energy generation rate, and burns through stored energy at an increasingly fast rate.
- This would still allow nations to create more defenses than their energy generation rate can support, but only on a short term basis that could more easily be waited out by enemies.
- This would still allow logged off nations that get checkered to support defenses that use less than their full energy generation rate for many hours using stored energy.
- Energy storage structures can each hold a certain amount of energy and fill up over the course of 24 hours.
- The energy stored in these structures is available to the nation's allies, and is used by allies if/when they run out of their own energy.
- ONLY the energy stored in these structures is made available to a nation's allies. So, in order for a nation to share energy with its allies, it needs to build (and defend from being captured) energy storage structures.
- This means that nations can't just be leveled up and then used as an inexhaustible source of energy to its allies. It will need to build and defend energy storage structures to make energy available to its allies, and these structures can run out of energy if the energy is taken from them faster than they fill back up.
- A nation is limited in how many energy storage structures it can build (or how much total energy it can share with allies).
- Increase the energy generation rate available to nations through a combination of increasing the energy generation rate bonuses available with advances, and creating more energy resources.
- Manpower storage structures could work in a similar way to energy storage structures, and allow limited sharing of manpower between allies.
- The new way storage structures will work will make it much easier to limit how much energy and manpower can be shared between nations. It makes sense for alliances to enable nations to gain a limited amount of extra manpower, especially for nations with the larger teams that it will take to pull this off successfully.