Defences at low levels

[Zenkai]

Hi Mike,

Great work with the game so far, thanks for all the time you've put in, it looks and plays great

I have a suggestion for a balance in the game, involving defences at lower levels.

I have spent some time playing in the 40-80 level bracket for the past few weeks and there is a problem with how some of the defences work, mostly ones that are, at that level, guaranteed to retake the square the hit is coming from. Nanobot, Autonomous and Djinn are the most commonly used ones and the problem is that all someone needs to do to hold orbs in this level bracket, is to be the first person to settle land around an orb, and build a bunch of these defences. What this means is the most anyone can do, regardless of how much res the have, or how little res the defender has, is walk to the orb and then stop. You could have stats of 100/100/100 and the defender could have their base stats, holding 0 res, but because the hit damage from these defences is a set amount, and is enough to always take the attacking square, it is basically impossible to clear the land from around an orb if they have a decent amount of these defences on it (Please correct me if im wrong and completely missing a trick here). So all the defending player has to do, is log in every now and then and take back the orb, with no risk of being wiped from it.

Obviously this isn't what we want as it makes resources completely obsolete and doesn't reward collecting them, but instead just rewards whoever settles the orb first. What I think needs to happen here is that the hit damage for these defences needs to be scaled with level as to make sure people can fairly clear someone from an orb if they res up and succeed in taking the orb. Perhaps this could be done by the defences dealing a % of the average hit points per square for that level, or much longer cool-downs on the defences at lower levels.

Im sure some other people have also noticed this, and as we want to give new players the most positive experience possible, tweaking these lower level problems should be something of a priority.

Hope this is all clear Mike, if not just ask.

Regards

Zenk

[Mike]

Thanks for bringing this up Zenk. Here are some possible solutions:

1) Good idea about increasing the cooldown times for the lower level versions of these defenses. Unless anyone sees a problem with this, I'll do that.

2) I'm thinking about having geo efficiency of less than 100% immediately cause some defenses to become inert. So, checker a nation down to 50% geo and half of their defenses would become inert. This would provide another option for softening an array of defenses like that.

[Phathod]

I've only just hit 45 recently, but i was noticing a similar issue as Zenkai mentioned. When I settle an open orb, I add my most powerful defenses near it, then fill a bunch of the nearby space with walls. Adding enough walls to pad the space around the orb forces anyone wanting to take it to build their defense around all of the walls, making it costly to maintain and less effective.

Even if someone can retake the orb, so long as i log in every now and then I can easily break through and start reclaiming territories, which reactivates my defenses making it easier to recover. It seems like only a high level nation or group of players could thwart this without a massive time investment.

Are there any trick for prying people off of orbs when doing this?

[Mike]

The only trick I know of is that, every time you take a square with a defense on it, there's a 10% chance that the defense will be destroyed permanently in less than a minute (instead of the usual several hours). So you can capture a defense, and if its timer shows its going to be destroyed permanently very fast, hold it until it's destroyed. Otherwise attack somewhere nearby to trigger enemy defenses so that square gets re-taken by the enemy, and then capture it again. Repeat until the defense is permanently destroyed.

That's tedious and can take a long time though. However if all defenses were destroyed permanently seconds after they're captured, then defenses would lose their ability to protect assets long-term.

One possible option would be to increase the chance that a defense is quickly destroyed permanently after being captured, from 10% to say 20% or 30%.

Any thoughts on that, or any other suggestions for a solution?