Seeing as these are all the rage, I thought I'd get with the times. Apologies for post length, but I think reasons are just as important as specific suggestions. If you want to get straight to the point skip down to the large gap below.
What we seem to want is something that will stop constant activity being required to be able to play this game at anything above alliance rank 20 level.
However, we don't want to over power pros while doing this, while at the same time it should still be the case that by putting in more time and effort you will do better than someone who doesn't.
Ideas being thrown around have included tick length change, which has been thoroughly covered, and improvements to sleep mode, which seems a little forced and clumsy to me, and also reduces the already small pool of targets we have.
But why do we want these changes? It's so that people can continue to have fun, and troops to have fun with, without being active. And primarily why do we want this? To stop player numbers decreasing, and to attract new players.
Fun in this game, community aspects aside, comes almost exclusively from battle reports and trying to bring them about. Going back and forth with offensive and defensive mobs, forcing recalls and never fighting, while it does have it's merits, isn't enough by itself, and we only do this in the hope that we'll get a nice BR out of all this work, and if this never happens we end up getting bored (eg. resistances).
The way the game is currently set up there aren't enough incentives on either attacking or defending sides to 'stay for the fun of it'. We are all too afraid of losing large chunks of our troops for very little gain. Even equal battles are to be avoided, except in certain war situations, because in the grand scheme knocking out one of the hundreds of players in the game, doesn't really benefit you in and of itself. We weigh up the damage we will take against possible land/bounty gains, and unless we're going to destroy an enemy it often isn't worthwhile.
So to sum up my thoughts, what I feel the game needs is more battles, which are ultimately what we derive fun from, and to bring this about we need less severe consequences for these battles in order to encourage them. This will result in activity being less vital, while time and effort will still be rewarded. It so happens that we already have mechanisms in place to reduce consequences and encourage battles. Bounty and insurance.
So my actual suggestion would be to increase bounty and insurance. Now this would rely quite heavily on a successful fairness calculator, which I don't know where Azzer is with, but which is certainly achievable. I would suggest upping base bounty for attackers to 75%, with a base insurance of 25 %, and doing the opposite for defenders, so 75% insurance with 25% bounty gain possible while defending. It would also be an idea to increase the insurance on a defender by 5% for every 12 hours they are offline, to a max of 95% if you've been offline for 48 hours.
What effect would this have on the game? People would be willing to actually stay for battles more often. In an even damage battle with people of equal size/FC, both sides stand to actually lose nothing overall. This will stop the game being so much about preserving what you have, and make it more about what you can gain. It will also swing the game away from being land dominated; bounty hunting could be just as effective an income. Alliance wars with 0% insurance would also become much more serious, while possible bounty gains would greatly increase the drive to take the war to the enemy, rather than sitting about waiting for them to make a move.
It would change the activity problem from being "if i'm not active I'll be repeatedly wiped" to being "if i'm not active I'll fall behind in the bounty race", so there are still rewards for activity, but the consequences for inactivity aren't as severe.
It would also benefit solo play. AR could be reduced so that it is easier to hit a solo player, reducing AR abuse situations, while at the same time solos would be more able to stay in the game with their increased insurance.
Also, looking ahead, if this were to work then a change to 5 minute ticks might not be so unthinkable. Most people would agree that 5 minute ticks made the game alot more fun as far as attacking went; you could search for a target and see it from eta 5 through to attacking for 1 in under 45 minutes. In this respect activity is also reduced. The problem people had with 5 minute ticks was the strain it put on defending. Insurance in the 75-95% region would drastically reduce this strain.
Possible problems of it being impossible to really hurt an alliance are dealt with by the alliance war function. A decent fairness calculator should stop abuse of the high base bounty by attacking much smaller players or single unit LET rushes.
All in all I see a long list of positives with a pretty short list of negatives. I realise that such a drastic change is highly unlikely to be implemented, but by keeping up the bombardment of drastic suggestions, we might at least get something through the "I fear change" barrier! If you've read all of this, thanks for your patience. I'm sure I've missed some negatives, so fire away
What we seem to want is something that will stop constant activity being required to be able to play this game at anything above alliance rank 20 level.
However, we don't want to over power pros while doing this, while at the same time it should still be the case that by putting in more time and effort you will do better than someone who doesn't.
Ideas being thrown around have included tick length change, which has been thoroughly covered, and improvements to sleep mode, which seems a little forced and clumsy to me, and also reduces the already small pool of targets we have.
But why do we want these changes? It's so that people can continue to have fun, and troops to have fun with, without being active. And primarily why do we want this? To stop player numbers decreasing, and to attract new players.
Fun in this game, community aspects aside, comes almost exclusively from battle reports and trying to bring them about. Going back and forth with offensive and defensive mobs, forcing recalls and never fighting, while it does have it's merits, isn't enough by itself, and we only do this in the hope that we'll get a nice BR out of all this work, and if this never happens we end up getting bored (eg. resistances).
The way the game is currently set up there aren't enough incentives on either attacking or defending sides to 'stay for the fun of it'. We are all too afraid of losing large chunks of our troops for very little gain. Even equal battles are to be avoided, except in certain war situations, because in the grand scheme knocking out one of the hundreds of players in the game, doesn't really benefit you in and of itself. We weigh up the damage we will take against possible land/bounty gains, and unless we're going to destroy an enemy it often isn't worthwhile.
So to sum up my thoughts, what I feel the game needs is more battles, which are ultimately what we derive fun from, and to bring this about we need less severe consequences for these battles in order to encourage them. This will result in activity being less vital, while time and effort will still be rewarded. It so happens that we already have mechanisms in place to reduce consequences and encourage battles. Bounty and insurance.
So my actual suggestion would be to increase bounty and insurance. Now this would rely quite heavily on a successful fairness calculator, which I don't know where Azzer is with, but which is certainly achievable. I would suggest upping base bounty for attackers to 75%, with a base insurance of 25 %, and doing the opposite for defenders, so 75% insurance with 25% bounty gain possible while defending. It would also be an idea to increase the insurance on a defender by 5% for every 12 hours they are offline, to a max of 95% if you've been offline for 48 hours.
What effect would this have on the game? People would be willing to actually stay for battles more often. In an even damage battle with people of equal size/FC, both sides stand to actually lose nothing overall. This will stop the game being so much about preserving what you have, and make it more about what you can gain. It will also swing the game away from being land dominated; bounty hunting could be just as effective an income. Alliance wars with 0% insurance would also become much more serious, while possible bounty gains would greatly increase the drive to take the war to the enemy, rather than sitting about waiting for them to make a move.
It would change the activity problem from being "if i'm not active I'll be repeatedly wiped" to being "if i'm not active I'll fall behind in the bounty race", so there are still rewards for activity, but the consequences for inactivity aren't as severe.
It would also benefit solo play. AR could be reduced so that it is easier to hit a solo player, reducing AR abuse situations, while at the same time solos would be more able to stay in the game with their increased insurance.
Also, looking ahead, if this were to work then a change to 5 minute ticks might not be so unthinkable. Most people would agree that 5 minute ticks made the game alot more fun as far as attacking went; you could search for a target and see it from eta 5 through to attacking for 1 in under 45 minutes. In this respect activity is also reduced. The problem people had with 5 minute ticks was the strain it put on defending. Insurance in the 75-95% region would drastically reduce this strain.
Possible problems of it being impossible to really hurt an alliance are dealt with by the alliance war function. A decent fairness calculator should stop abuse of the high base bounty by attacking much smaller players or single unit LET rushes.
All in all I see a long list of positives with a pretty short list of negatives. I realise that such a drastic change is highly unlikely to be implemented, but by keeping up the bombardment of drastic suggestions, we might at least get something through the "I fear change" barrier! If you've read all of this, thanks for your patience. I'm sure I've missed some negatives, so fire away
