Game Change Ideas

[Arthus]

Because they already have an axtra unit to attack with. Indies and farmer and cashers only really have troops and a few magers to put a shield up. Magers have a 5th unit which they can use to get land PLUS can use the money they loot to buy lots of troops to break people. They can steal gold and food suffering no losses at all to themselves other than using up some runes.

You do not want to destroy your ratio? Then buy up and break with troops. Whenever I mage I only use mage attacks as a last resort to get land. I don't see why I strat that already has an advantage getting land due to having another troop to attack land with should get yet another bonus.

We are trying to make this game not one of those "mage or get raped game".

And it's not always more costly. If I'm attacking with troops someone who is trying to landlock and have to break through 60mil infantry to do it, I'm going to be suffering heavy losses that are extremely costly. One, the money spent on troops to break him and 2, the increases upkeep to support the attack.

Mages have an easy enough time already without making it even easier for them.

Also, I was reading a post by Firefrenzy and found this humourous, the first line anyways:

For instance, currently, smithies appear to generate military via some fanciful extra-dimensional rift in space -- at least, this is the lone postulate I've formed.
Perhaps produce military from population? I believe that this would be a good (and indeed logical) step towards a game of nation-building, rather than nation-warring, as well as a leap towards realism.

[Shadow I]

I do like the idea of armies and mages from population - if we base our production on population, then cities add a nice benefit there from producing peasants, and it would serve to balance both mage and troop attacks since everyone will need to have worker buildings in order to get ahead.

A lot of proms laready have this.

[Freenhult]

Also, I don't think its right that you have $30 mil net one day, and then $256 mil the next. There is something fishy going on with how mages work right now. Unless someone wants to explain how this is happening.

[Shadow I]

I stocked up on reserves before I was broken, and then I took them off after I got back on track....

[Freenhult]

180mil worth of reserves? That's not 25%.

[Shadow I]

No, I had about 80 mil worth of reserves, I had a full bank, and I made a further 50b during my run with all the scrolls I saved up while gathering back my land. You will notice that for two runs i didn't lock land - I dropped down to build up supplies so that I could reccover properly.

Now stop suggesting that I am cheating, I won't be explaining myself again.

[Shadow I]

Something else to fix:

bazaar fill rate is scewed up badly. Boats apparently have no limit, or else the limit isn't affected by the scaling factor, and the other troops all fill erratically depending on which ones were bought and how many you bought.

[maddog]

There is something else that could be looked at that may balance the game a bit more
and that is when u attack using mages your health decreases by 2 but if you attack using troops you lose at lot more health per attack as much as a decrease of 6. this allows a mage to attack more times b4 hes too weak then a farmer cashier or indier.
Wether or not balancing this out would make a slight difference. ( not knowing how the coding works this may not work or make any difference)

just an idea or passing thought

[Freenhult]

Mage attacks should cost 6 health. Everything else was meant to cause only a little.

[The Beatles]

Update: mage attacks have been scaled down another half, that is they're now at eight of their original value.

[Shadow I]

Are you sure they were scaled down in the first place? I'm pretty sure they weren't. Is it possible that the problem is in a different part of the code to the one you just changed? I'll tell you for sure my next run, but yeah.

[Shadow I]

I echo Arty's notice - this slow land flow thing is lame and causes all kinds of balance problems. Right now I can safely drop out of first with 0 army and still be confident that I will hold the majority of the game's land when i get back.

All the ideas except the slow land flow are good - the landflow issues are going to do more harm than good without making scout produce land like nobody's business, and all that will do is lessen player relations until we are all just self-sufficient land farms competing to get the most land.

[Arthus]

See, Shadow did exactly what I said magers could do in this situation. Damn I'm good. Posted it in the confusion topic. Fixing mage attacks should be of the HIGHEST priority.

I still see this.

Jun 29 '09, 16:19 amazing (#3)
Clan: None Vale (#7)
Clan: Yeah... (dfbgf) Mission: Covert Operation
903 acres 1

Ge only had 15.5k land. Me hitting amazing with 40k land, 3 attacks got 900 land.

Sorry, but if this is how it is going to be, I won't be coming back on WoA and most likely not on BFR. You might as well make it a magers game.

A mager is only really restricted on how much they make by how many runes they have. So anyone with half a brain would spend the first week or so simply mage attacking land (so they WILL have more land than everyone else) and gathering runes, then just spend one or 2 full runs looting up an insane amount and lock the lands. They could even spend only like 2-3 days gathering runes then just rape the other none mager players. Considering they can only take back a fraction of the land the mager takes, the mager keeps getting higher and higher lands.

[Freenhult]

Arthus, Calm down. If there is something wrong I need to know, and I'll get it fixed.

[Freenhult]

I echo Arty's notice - this slow land flow thing is lame and causes all kinds of balance problems. Right now I can safely drop out of first with 0 army and still be confident that I will hold the majority of the game's land when i get back.

All the ideas except the slow land flow are good - the landflow issues are going to do more harm than good without making scout produce land like nobody's business, and all that will do is lessen player relations until we are all just self-sufficient land farms competing to get the most land.

Also, we did the changes mid-set when there was already a bottleneck effect going on with land. Beginning of set, this shouldn't happen. Therefore you won't have this problem.