Quote:
Originally Posted by KTrain
We've also talked about gradually degrading the number of troops in a territory if people don't visit that territory over a certain amount of time. What do other people think of this?
|
This is what I was thinking.. Basically the way it is right now if you are a new player you have little hope in growing that much, because you are dealing with other players who have essentially unlimited resources. The strong get geometrically stronger, a new player might have only dozens of a given resource while someone with hundreds or thousands of areas will be able to attack at a whim with zero downside. A good game is risk vs reward, tradeoffs, etc..
Right now the game is about what you can get, which is a function of where you go and how long you are there, not a whole lot of strategy. There should be a second factor; keeping what you've got. And that exists to some extent but there's not a lot of strategy there either as it's just a function of where you are and how many resources you have.
Some of the ideas I had about it:
1. Attrition. After 3 days reduce the # of armies a person has in a territory by 2 a day, and every 5 days add 2 more to the reduction (or some formula, depends on the data). So the longer someone is away from a territory their hold on it will decrease, and make that decrease accelerate. This fundamentally changes the game though, as the default state for most areas will be unclaimed, rather than claimed by someone with 4 armies. This though has the benefit of not having people able to amass huge amounts of resources and keep amassing easily. To maintain thousands of territories it'll be difficult.
2. Domains. To offset the attrition and try and make it less chaotic, introduce the concept of a domain. A domain is comprised of every territory that is in contact with your home territory, directly or via your other territories. Home territories are chosen.
The reason for this concept is any territory of yours that is in your domain does not suffer attrition. The idea here is this promotes a spreading out from a home base, and territories attached to the home base are safer and easier to maintain.
This also introduces strategy where instead of just attacking someone's territories that you want, you might first try to "cut them off" so that they suffer some attrition, and encourages the other player to try and defend them.
With the idea of domains you could introduce other things too, like you could make weapons less effective against domains, or you could even go so far as to make resources only gathered within a domain, or have resources be more productive if within a domain, again trying to add some strategy, making a particular territory more important for someone.
3. Resource Sinks. Barring any of the above, someone who owns hundreds or thousands of territories should have a downside to that, having more takes more effort somehow. Diminishing returns on resources maybe? Or have a maintenance cost for keeping territories outside your domain? Don't have a good idea here, but something to drain away resources to keep balance, otherwise new players with 10 resources have zero hope against players with thousands.
4. Resource Costs. You could make it so that some weapons actually cost you resource *production*, instead of just resources. So the weapon becomes much more costly and you want to make it count. This would permanently reduce your resource production, at least until you take a new territory with that same resource. The first territory that you lose with that resource would count as the "lost" resource, and for the new owner it would begin producing as usual.
5. Buildings. This could be tied in with resources sinks or costs.. you could allow the building of buildings on territories to give them certain characteristics.. armies accumulate faster but the building drains resources, or it's good against some kinds of weapons, etc..
The only other thought I had was playing the game in rounds. Do a global reset periodically, naming a winner and such. This might harm continuity too much though and make people less interested, but you also want to have newcomers be interested and feel they can play and succeed.
Anyway just some ideas, I am a big proponent of simplicity and focusing on a core and doing that really well, and all of the things I mentioned together would probably be too complex, but I hope the suggestions illustrate what I think is where the game needs some tweaking.
