War of Conquest

okay ill get straight into it:

MANPOWER:

I feel some work is still needed in this department, after running a few tests on this subject, ive found that with a full tank of MP, (about 180-190k) you can click around 700 times before running out, and that's factoring if every attack is a win, a lot of times it takes 2-3 clicks and these failed attacks still take some MP away, now I know 700 might sound a lot, but if you get into it with another nation for orbs and res, even main hits, even a solo player will burn through MP very fast, and once its ran out you either buy more or have to endure watching someone else come in to steal all you've fought for with no means apart from defensive structures to stop them, whilst its not so much of a problem with not many people playing, when the server gets full and reaches big numbers, its gonna be a real struggle.

A possible solution may be to increase/decrease MP for solo players and team players, also increasing MP per every 10 levels about around the 70-80 mark and upwards might also help.

DEFENSIVE STRUCTURES:

So far, the Zoth temples in particular have a much too long 'cool down' period, I'm sure this is over an hour long, maybe more, but as tested earlier today, if a defending nation surrounds an orb with this defence and the attacking nation triggers it, its basically fight over, until the cool down has worn off, now this is fine if the orb was only 3x3'd and didn't cost you too much MP to attack, but if you had to wade through land and other defences like rockets and walls, costing a lot of MP, just to see your attack come to a complete halt, its going to be very disheartening.

Possible solution would just to bring all cooldown periods for defences to about 10-20 minutes, so orb/res fights can continue between nations more quickly and not be off putting to nations putting a lot of time and MP into such attacks.

Rocket/Wall combos.. these are extremely OP, the tests we ran so far have shown the results to be staggering, if you pop up some high lvl walls around a orb/res, and put rockets in those walls, good luck breaking through, its nigh on impossible, I was using a stronger nation vs a weaker one to test this and still couldn't do much about it, and our weaker nation wasn't defending back, if it was just consider whats being protected out of bounds to anyone, unless you are going to res 'rape' the nation, eat the main to leave their geo a mess, and have no MP left to come back and attack what you wanted in the first place.

Possible solution: N/A, I'm not sure what can be done to counter it.

THE MAP LEVEL LINES:

It seems abit to much that a level 100 can cover SO much of the map currently, I am able to be sat right next to fire orb and also go far west to potentially 'bully' lower leveld nations, and also visa versa, nobody wants to see tons of level 100s clogging up the that sort of area that level 60s and 70s should be playing in, I know we need a good mix of nations in that area to help level up ect but it just seems to much of a span to me.

Possible solution: leave everything as it is, but put another dotted line somewhere east, and when a nation hits level 100, and decides to cross this line to try go for the bigger orbs, a pop up could say 'if you venture over this line you will lose all land to the west and you will not be able to return, or something like that.

Ive ran out of current thoughts but I will keep adding as I remember them.

I would also like to put on record, a few solo players have been insulting us over the fact we are an organised team, and they feel we should be giving them in game handouts, now I know this is only testing, but we had to figure our own way through stuff and we will not be here to babysit everyone that complains, id like to point you all in the direction of players such as Dev and Cro, who so far are killing it as solo players! so congrats to them! also all the thoughts and ideas ive mentioned on this forum have been to help solo and smaller teams, if the game stayed exactly like it is now our team could potentially dominate a lot of stuff, I'm here for the sake of keeping the game well rounded for every player, solo or team, we don't want the game to die off or be a bore for anyone.

Cheers

I want to add to this,

Your last paragraph about complaints and verbal attacks is true.

But I want to add there is intent behind it, the person who went on a rampage in public chat about it had his own person vendetta against us. So he has a strong bias, where his comments aren't true, his true intent is.

His intent is to discredit us and anger the community to encourage some form of riot.

I urge people to ignore the crap and just play the game, no one is doing anything negative as he claims. We are all here making a positive impact and some players are progressing nicely and they deserve credit where it's due.

However, like PP said. It is NOT our responsibility to give people handouts, we can give advice and assist but... to full on help every nation level on our nations, like come on. We aren't a charity service, but we do help people sometimes.

Just my thoughts on the matter, don't let the gossip sway you.

I like everything you have said here except for the defencive fog timers. They are working well and I do not feel they need to be chhanged. I was able to defend my main and the only reason it was possible was the Hipnotic InducerIII timer. I have to use one of my advance points... lose out on a stat point... to have this tower. So you have to wait an hour if you atatck the inducer... well go attack something else and come back later... Flank better. The whole idea of the fog is to give SMALL teams a chance to compete with LARGE teams.

Everything else you have said here is almost spot on. And if you are referring to me asking you to help with feeder nations... It is a strategy.. Maybe you would maybe you wouldnt... freedom of speech is a thing and I do not see why Napoleon is so mean to me. I do not even knwo the guy and have done/said nothing to him except a joking post about stealing the spitfire name.

Well i thnk the fuzzy clouds will work worse for the smaller teams, yes you can potentially hold things for a little longer but a big team with man hours and coverage holding orbs and using those defences, aswel as being online to defend, nobody will have a chance in hell to take them, theres good arguments for and against the longer time limit but i think it still tips the scales towards bigger teams basically taking advantage of it

Thanks for the feedback, here are some thoughts:

TheRealPP wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 12, 2017 2:31 pm

So far, the Zoth temples in particular have a much too long 'cool down' period, I'm sure this is over an hour long, maybe more, but as tested earlier today, if a defending nation surrounds an orb with this defence and the attacking nation triggers it, its basically fight over, until the cool down has worn off, now this is fine if the orb was only 3x3'd and didn't cost you too much MP to attack, but if you had to wade through land and other defences like rockets and walls, costing a lot of MP, just to see your attack come to a complete halt, its going to be very disheartening.

Possible solution would just to bring all cooldown periods for defences to about 10-20 minutes, so orb/res fights can continue between nations more quickly and not be off putting to nations putting a lot of time and MP into such attacks.

This is a tricky issue; the reasoning behind the long times for some of these defenses is to put a big price on blundering blind into defenses, and to motivate people to put the effort in to flanking and disarming defenses before triggering them.

But, these very powerful long lasting defenses should be rare; it shouldn't be common to surround things with them. That being the case maybe they should have a much higher energy cost. The intention behind energy is to limit the defenses a nation can build and force them to make hard choices between say defending one or two things very well, or defending many more things more modestly.

TheRealPP wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 12, 2017 2:31 pm

Rocket/Wall combos.. these are extremely OP, the tests we ran so far have shown the results to be staggering, if you pop up some high lvl walls around a orb/res, and put rockets in those walls, good luck breaking through, its nigh on impossible, I was using a stronger nation vs a weaker one to test this and still couldn't do much about it, and our weaker nation wasn't defending back, if it was just consider whats being protected out of bounds to anyone, unless you are going to res 'rape' the nation, eat the main to leave their geo a mess, and have no MP left to come back and attack what you wanted in the first place.

Some possible solutions:
1) Further increase the cooldown timer for rocket launchers
2) Increase their energy cost so they aren't used as commonly
3) Here's a change I've been thing about that I'd like feedback on: when you capture an enemy defense, there would be a small (say 10% or 15%) chance that the defense will be destroyed completely, rather than graying out for 12 hours. This way if a counter attack weapon like rocket launchers causes a defense to be taken and retaken many times in a battle, there's a good chance that defense will end up getting destroyed completely. Then the attacker can build a wall there, to help them attack further.

Thoughts on these options?

TheRealPP wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 12, 2017 2:31 pm

THE MAP LEVEL LINES:

It seems abit to much that a level 100 can cover SO much of the map currently, I am able to be sat right next to fire orb and also go far west to potentially 'bully' lower leveld nations, and also visa versa, nobody wants to see tons of level 100s clogging up the that sort of area that level 60s and 70s should be playing in, I know we need a good mix of nations in that area to help level up ect but it just seems to much of a span to me.

Theoretically when there are a lot more players, nations will have a harder time getting too far east because that space will be taken up by more powerful nations. So I don't think we'll be seeing many level 100s anywhere near the orb of fire at that point. But depending how many nations we have at different levels, it may be necessary to adjust where the boundary lines are. Before alpha there was just about 1/3 of the map available to level 100+, now about 2/3 of the much wider map is available to them. Maybe the line for level 100 should be more like the center of the map.

I agree with there being a chance to destroy a defense once it's captured. It would almost be like a critical strike in a sense.

I also agree with the center of the map being the boundary for level 100.

The game has a critical strike stat. Would it be too powerful, when a critical strike occurs, it destroys the defense?

Sphinx wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 13, 2017 5:32 am

The game has a critical strike stat. Would it be too powerful, when a critical strike occurs, it destroys the defense?

I like this version... Or have the % chance of destruction be figured after a critical. Say a critical occurs, there is then a % chance of structure destruction.

Mike,

Yes, making the more stronger defences use more energy makes sense, meaning that the less popular defences will start to get used too, creating more of a strategy to defending your land and res/orbs.

Raising the energy costs could quite well be a quick and easy to solution to a few issues so maybe trial it next update and see how we get on?

Also, I'm not sure because I cant really remember but does flanking then wiping an enemy defence kill the 'grey defence' completely or is it still on an 11 hour (I think) timer? I think this time has to be reduced dramatically if not, otherwise when we have more people playing, orb/res fights are going to be rather insane and heres why:

Say nation 1 has the orb of fire, and then has it heavily defended, nation 2 comes along and attacks, wins and builds their own defences in the empty spots where there is no 'grey defence' and then nation 3 comes along to do the same..can you see where I'm going with this? lol

Eventually there will be no room for defences and it will come down to square vs square fighting, and that is going to be very costly for MP.

Can I also ask if you have any current plans to eventually tweak ManPower numbers/regen times or are you going to keep as is?

To address everyone else making suggestions and giving feedback too, we all need to understand what works or will work for the game RIGHT NOW, as in the alpha testing, may not work or at worse hurt the game when we have tons more people playing, not to say nobody is doing a bad job, the community has been doing great so far, but better attention to details will come into play during beta and we have everyone playing.

Cheers

I'm wary of he idea of tying defense destruction to crit chance because crit chance varies from 0% early on to 60% at high levels... a chance of complete destruction of a defense is such a game changer that I don't know that it should vary that much between nations. I think I'll try it first as a small constant % like 10% and see how it goes from there.

For energy costs, I'll raise them for cannon, artillery and rocket launchers with the next update, and see how that goes... all feedback on which defenses should have energy costs raised or lowered due to overuse/underuse is greatly appreciated!

TheRealPP wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 13, 2017 5:50 pm

Also, I'm not sure because I cant really remember but does flanking then wiping an enemy defence kill the 'grey defence' completely or is it still on an 11 hour (I think) timer? I think this time has to be reduced dramatically if not, otherwise when we have more people playing, orb/res fights are going to be rather insane and heres why:

Yes, right now it's a 12 hour timer (used to be 24). I'll lower it to 10 hours with the next update, and we'll see how much of a problem old defenses become when there's more players and more fighting. The point of the grayed out defenses is to give the nation who built them a chance to take them back after they've been captured, without requiring that they be online all the time. But yeah, we may have to make it a shorter amount of time.

TheRealPP wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 13, 2017 5:50 pm

Can I also ask if you have any current plans to eventually tweak ManPower numbers/regen times or are you going to keep as is?

The goal with manpower is to give each nation about one hour of all out fighting time per day, doing 2 simultaneous attacks. As you know this is the main way of trying to put nations with different amounts of players, and different amounts of time they can put into the game, on somewhat equal ground (of course nations with more players and more time to play will always have advantages, and they can make multiple nations.)

I wrote a script that runs lots of simulations of nations with different tech tree focuses, and found after some tweaking that it's coming pretty close to that now:
It could use some more tweaking -- the tech branch in particular could use more manpower rate bonuses. The bio branch purposely gets higher mp rate than the other branches, as that is its main focus and advantage.

But my preference is to keep it at roughly 1 hour of constant 2 attacks, so I'm not planning on huge changes to this.