Team size

[Loki]

Hello,

I would like to address team sizes and here is why.

Currently only one team has made it over level 100.. if you see multiple nations at this time they are all the same team. This is the work of dominantly 6 players with a few more helping and planning in the end to be a team of 12. Manpower is not limiting enough. I cannot fight this team no matter how hard I try or what I do.. there is too many of them and with their 24/7 coverage nothing can be gained by anyone else. A similar situation to and a big reason why KillEmAll disbanded. I felt like we were monopolizing the map having all of the over 100 land to ourselves. and that was only with 4 people... when this team has all 12 members they claim are coming... who are also some of the most successful sovereigns from the original game.. I feel a team of this size is going to detour players from the game. Myself included. they are targeting me specifically which is fine by the nature of the game but at some point begins to feel like cyber bullying because they are personally targeting me both on the map and verbally. One of them has even been making "spoof" names that are vulgar in nature and of which names i will not repeat here. Something needs to be done to prevent even just 4 players from dominating the map... its been done twice and is very hard to undo. Also with 4 people on capable of 6 attacks a piece... thats 24 attacks potentially every 2 seconds.... if they have splash thney can then hit something like 150 squares every 2 seconds... thats riddiculous and how they lvled so fast im suree.. just splashed back and forth at each other by working together. Maybe we do need the convergence after all.... or perhaps veer away from thhe idea of being in a nation with an other player and work more on the ally feature and that be how teams can interract.

Thoughts everyone???

[Mike]

So as I understand it the biggest problem right now that's allowing a nation with a large team to be unstoppable and to gain XP very quickly is that splash damage is overpowered. Correct?

Manpower should be enough to keep a nation with a large team from having too great an advantage, but right now splash damage is a loophole in the manpower system. A splash attack only costs as much mp as the initial attack, but the nation gains all the land and XP from all squares defeated by a splash attack.

It seems to me the best way to fix this would be to have splash damage use up an amount of manpower proportional to the amount of damage that it does, to all the squares affected by the splash. This way splash damage would still be useful and potentially devastating, but it would have a large cost in manpower and so would only be deployed occasionally. Of course if this were the case there would need to be a way to choose whether an attack would use splash damage, since a nation would no longer want to use it for all of their attacks.

Anyone else have thoughts on this?

[Loki]

worth a try in my opinion.

[Sphinx]

I think when the max simultaneous attack is 3 for example, then all members in a nation should not be able to do that. Even worse then they have 6.

I would not like to see manpower nerfed, that would make everyone lose game time.

I like solo nations, but also i don't want to ruin the game for those who like to play together. More members in a nation should give some diminishing returns on power. Basically one player nations should be able to compete with nations with many members.

Maybe balance around alliances somehow. Instead of pumping nations full of players, have alliances instead, that are capped by tech. Small nation alliances should replace big nations.

I have no comments about splash, since i havent gotten that yet.

[Duke]

We don't have 6-12 on at a time. We just have virtual 24 hour coverage with 1-2 online most of the time.

You can't fault us for being organized.

[Zero]

War of Conquest from the onset has been a team game. You can feel outnumbered at times. The problem is you probably don't have a team. If you are feeling suffocated and strangled because the opposite team is good to their task, then you need to recruit/ form a better team. The simple and plain strategy in this game is management of manpower and co-ordination of the members.

[Zero]

So as I understand it the biggest problem right now that's allowing a nation with a large team to be unstoppable and to gain XP very quickly is that splash damage is overpowered. Correct?

Manpower should be enough to keep a nation with a large team from having too great an advantage, but right now splash damage is a loophole in the manpower system. A splash attack only costs as much mp as the initial attack, but the nation gains all the land and XP from all squares defeated by a splash attack.

It seems to me the best way to fix this would be to have splash damage use up an amount of manpower proportional to the amount of damage that it does, to all the squares affected by the splash. This way splash damage would still be useful and potentially devastating, but it would have a large cost in manpower and so would only be deployed occasionally. Of course if this were the case there would need to be a way to choose whether an attack would use splash damage, since a nation would no longer want to use it for all of their attacks.

Anyone else have thoughts on this?

I was able to rake up 5.3 million points in one day, alone without using splash and buying manpower. So, I don't think its a problem of gaining xp or levels pretty fast. If I have good levelers, I can get my nation rb in 2 or 3 days if i have that much time to play.

[Mike]

I was able to rake up 5.3 million points in one day, alone without using splash and buying manpower. So, I don't think its a problem of gaining xp or levels pretty fast. If I have good levelers, I can get my nation rb in 2 or 3 days if i have that much time to play.

How did you do it, if not with splash or buying manpower? Most of the XP comes from attacking, correct? I've run simulations that show how many attacks nations at each level should be able to do per day, and so how much XP they should be able to earn, and how quickly they should be able to level. According to the simulations, it should take 1-2 months to get to level 100 by attacking, not 2-3 days. So obviously there's something the simulations aren't taking into account.

One possibility -- the simulations assume the nation is attacking another nation of similar power. If a player is creating nations with very low geo to level on, then each attack on those 'feeder' nations will use very little manpower. That will allow many more attacks per day, and faster leveling.

On the one hand I don't think this should be eliminated altogether, because it's a clever strategy, sort of an alternative to farming. But it shouldn't allow leveling to rb in a couple of days. So one possible approach to reducing how effective it is without eliminating it would be to have each attack take up no less than a minimum amount of manpower. So if your manpower per attack is say 40, then even if you attack a nations with very low geo, you would still lose a minimum of say 10 mp per attack. (so a minimum of 25% of your mp per attack). What do people think of this approach?

[Napoleon]

War of Conquest is a team game, MP limits the teams expansion. Nothing more needs to be done on that front.

As for splash damage, it is meant to be a very useful tool, in fact i am quite content with where it is and what it can do. MP used for splash if anything shouldn't use that much. What splash does is helps speeds up the game. If i buy splash damage and i run out of manpower before my temps run out that's just silly.

Making it help burn through manpower faster destroys the practicality of it. If you set the burn too high then i might as well eat the squares one at a time, since under most circumstances it never takes the square on the first attack depending on nation strength.

You want there to be a way to speed it up, splash is a way to do that. If the games too slow, it will turn off some new players. Having some "life hacks" to the game to excellerate people to competable levels is a good thing, how effective they are is up to you.

I think it's the XP from the splash damage that is the problem, maybe keep it the same but water down the xp given from indirectly attacked squares that get taken.

It has a very useful tool in the sense of clearing out a low level and filler nations quick and for doing quick damage at a cheap cost. Those benefits imo shouldn't be removed, but if you want to slow down the gaining of levels, attack the XP not the Splash damage itself.


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Also, raising the burning of manpower while attacking low geo nations could be worth a shot. 20 or 25 % seems alright.

[Mike]

The excessively fast XP that can be gained with splash is a big problem with it, and just decreasing the XP from squares defeated by splash would fix that, but that's not the only problem with it. Also:

1) Because splash attacks don't take manpower they make a nation using splash able to defeat many more squares per day than a nation not using splash.

2) Because splash is just available via purchasable techs, it tilts the game very far toward "pay to win".

So with the next update splash will take some manpower, but not as much as a normal attack. Say you have 25% splash damage, then each square attacked by splash will take at most 25% of the manpower of a normal attack. Splash will still go through a lot more mp than it does now, though, so it will be more useful for doing devastating damage in special situations, then for using constantly.

Also, at the same time, splash will be a bit more powerful than it is now, because (due to a bug) if a square was being attacked by say 3 splashes at the same time, then that square's hit point restore rate was restoring hp at 3 times the speed it should. Now hit points will be restored at the correct rate no matter how many simultaneous attacks are hitting the square.

So we'll see how the new approach to splash works, and adjust further as needed.