War system overhaul

[TheNamelessWonder]

War declaration range: 80-150%
Effects:

• War declaration is automatically mutual
• Declaration is immediate (so as not to allow outside alliances to get involved)
• Alliances at war are prevented from attacking anyone outside of other alliance
• Outside IDs are prevented from attacking anyone in a war
• Max land grab increased to 25%
• No insurance
• No bounty
• Alliance members may not leave or join alliance (except through deletion)
• No sleep mode
• The winner gets a benefit for the duration of the round...+5% base bounty?
• 24 hour ceasefire after war for both alliances (no attacks sent or received, time to rebuild a little after a bloody war)

I still haven't settled on a means by which to determine the winner and loser of a war. Perhaps once one alliance has dropped to half the score of the other?


Goals: To allow alliances to go 1 vs 1 without outside interference. This will of course allow 1 on 1 disputes to be settled, and allow for another fun way to play as an alliance, for the benefit of your alliance. Also it will help undermine powerblocks, because alliances opposing the powerblock can fight the alliances one at a time, rather than with powerblocked alliances moving in to help their comrades. It seems to me that, using this round as an example, this would have helped WH wtfown SG earlier in the round, which would have gone a long way towards undermining TBA.



Discuss.



Edit: New points from IRC discussion:

[*]One alliance may surrender after 24 hours or any time thereafter, with a penalty for doing so - surrendering alliance gets no ceasefire and loses 10% land to winners?

Also, potentially we open up the war system during times of resistance, so that multiple alliances can declare on rank 1 (if rank 1 has been rank 1 for a week, or something), and the upper limit for declarations is relaxed.

 

[Azzer]

Just three points that immediately springs to mind without me analysing everything else just yet, regarding point #4 "Outside IDs are prevented from attacking anyone in a war";
* Does it provide means for someone to find out who's solo'd or allied... or who's in an actual particular ally... and if so is that a bad thing or is it going to be in situations that ultimately don't matter.
* Does this provide a system where 2 allies "working" together can ensure they never get attacked by anyone else, even if it means they have to do the odd 'friendly attack' on eachother to maintain a war.
* Solos get kicked out of all the fun because everyone's always at war and they basically can't attack anyone anymore!

 

[Alcibiades]

War declaration range: 80-150%
Effects:

• War declaration is automatically mutual YES
• Declaration is immediate (so as not to allow outside alliances to get involved) YES
• Alliances at war are prevented from attacking anyone outside of other alliance YES
• Outside IDs are prevented from attacking anyone in a war YES
• Max land grab increased to 25% YES; but perhaps maybe remove the landcap? or increase to 20% grabs
• No insurance YES
• No bounty NO
• Alliance members may not leave or join alliance (except through deletion) YES
• No sleep mode YES
• The winner gets a benefit for the duration of the round...+5% base bounty? NO; especially not if the HQ overhaul leads to choosable bonuses
• 24 hour ceasefire after war for both alliances (no attacks sent or received, time to rebuild a little after a bloody war) UNDECIDED: would this affect incoming from solos/other allies; i.e. are they completely invulnerable for 24 hours?

 

[Souls]

War declaration range: 80-150%

What about declaring war for resistance purposes then?

Outside IDs are prevented from attacking anyone in a war

Say the rank 2 alli is being hit hard by rank 1, this means that rank 2 can declare war on rank 3 to stop incoming, given they're within 80%?

No insurance, No bounty

No injuries?

The winner gets a benefit for the duration of the round...+5% base bounty?

What declares a winner?

 

[TheNamelessWonder]

J* Does it provide means for someone to find out who's solo'd or allied... or who's in an actual particular ally... and if so is that a bad thing or is it going to be in situations that ultimately don't matter.

Fair question. I think it would only make sense that an alliance at war is given an accurate ID list of their opponents, since those are the only people they can attack. Perhaps someone outside of war, if they try to send an attack at a warring ID, gets a message telling them that this ID is at war so the attack cannot be launched. Or if one clicks on an ID, they get a message saying *this ID is at war*. Something like that.

J* Does this provide a system where 2 allies "working" together can ensure they never get attacked by anyone else, even if it means they have to do the odd 'friendly attack' on eachother to maintain a war.

Certainly not, I meant to put something in about enforcing that war actually involves, yknow, war. There must be some means of enforcing this. I don't have the answer off hand, but it won't be too hard to settle on something.

* Solos get kicked out of all the fun because everyone's always at war and they basically can't attack anyone anymore!

Not so! War has some clear advantages but also drawbacks (you lose most of your targets, and risk getting your ass well and truly kicked), so most alliances will not be at war at any given time.





In response to Alci's objections:

The no bounty is there because I do not want to favor attacking in war over defending. I don't want an otherwise even battle to in fact benefit the attackers just because they launched it.

I'm open to changing the reward for winning, I was just throwing something out there.

And yes, invulnerable for 24 hours, but also cannot send out attacks. I expect most wars to result in heavy losses, including for the victors. If after a war they are just thrust out into the open, them and all their shiny new acres are going to be very vulnerable. Especially given that there is no insurance in war, lots of IDs will be zeroed or very nearly zeroed after a war.



Response to Souls:

It's too exploitable to remove the upper cap, so it's something we have to live with. Can't have rank 24 declaring on rank 1, thus depriving rank 1 of all other attacking targets...

Yes, an alliance could declare war to escape some other troubles. A tactical decison that comes with advantages and drawbacks

Yeah no injuries.

And as I said, still sorting out what makes a winner

 

[Souls]

It's too exploitable to remove the upper cap, so it's something we have to live with. Can't have rank 24 declaring on rank 1, thus depriving rank 1 of all other attacking targets...

Outliers like such are irrelevant. If you want a hard cap, set it to something definitive instead of a varying integer. A 150% cap pretty much leaves it so that only rank 2, and maybe 3 if it's a good round, can declare war on an alliance that's run away with the round, and pretty much kills all chance of a resistance. It's hard enough to take down the top alliance as is, why add difficulty to it?

 

[Forwyn]

War declaration range: 80-150%

Max 200-250%, imo

Most of this looks good, with obvious tweaking for balance reasons.

Also, if it were to be implemented, I would like to see 2 war slots, 1 offensive, 1 defensive(i.e. if rank 1 declares on rank 2, rank 1 can be declared upon by rank 3->, but cannot declare on another until rank 2 war is over; and vice versa).

 

[TheNamelessWonder]

New points from IRC discussion (also added to OP):

[*]One alliance may surrender after 24 hours or any time thereafter, with a penalty for doing so - surrendering alliance gets no ceasefire and loses 10% land to winners?

Also, potentially we open up the war system during times of resistance, so that multiple alliances can declare on rank 1 (if rank 1 has been rank 1 for a week, or something), and the upper limit for declarations is relaxed.

 

[Weeble]

If the only way to break the war is to either surrender or..win/lose, surely people could use that to their advantage?

If a bottom end alliance declares war on a top end alliance (within range) with immediate impact, won't that piss a load of people off if they were planning to attack someone else? Their 'surrender' so they can get on with their proper war will just bum them over...

 

[DarkSider]

That's actually a very close suggestion to my first alliance war suggestion and i'm still very much into it. It's close to war system in utopia - a much more successful and filled with action game and maybe we can steal the good bits from good games
I also strongly believe alliances at war should have little to no outside interference so they can fight it out instead keep troops home in fear of all the vultures out there to retal and interfere in their war.
The way Bushtarion works we can't just allow outside attacks but limit their gains since often the initial help doesn't come to get acres just to push the balance of the war or the hits are sent when one of the alliance has the troops out so there will be some free gains.

I'd suggest:

- keep the suggested 80-150% range but allow multiple alliance wars. Like rank 2 + rank 3 total 100 billion score so they can declare combined war on rank 1 who is at least 80 billion. Maybe also allow joining a war at a later time ? Say 2 sides are fighting and one has 300 billion other takes the lead and goes to 450 billion which means one or more alliances can join the loosing side for a maximum total of 262.5 billion.
- for outside interference either make all +10 member alliances public and disable attacking alliances in war or when attacking a player involved in a war you get a warning for it and every tick you fight on an id a percentage of your fleet deserts. That way you can change the balance of a war but they can just fake defend last tick and the helpers loose maybe 5% each tick of their mob sent and totals to a signifiant loss for interfering in a unhonorable way.
- I agree with no member switching in a war, not even kicking but allow to totally put a member in the dark if you know he is spying on your alliance. (Cut total access to politics, incoming and members online page, disable defences to and from that id inside the alliance). The other alliance is in war with all your members and might not be right to allow the leader to kick all his members to avoid this fight.
- also disable sleep mode
- The war in this case shouldn't be instant mutual. Have one alliance declare their hostility and to get into war you need 1 of 2 things :
- the other alliance to attack back and do a bit of signifiant damage (not 69 rpg ) and only count the attacks sent after hostility is on to avoid declaring right before other alliance looses a big grab or defends and gets a instant war. This is solution if your leader or other members with permission aren't online to declare hostile back and start the war.
- declare hostile back and go into instant war.
If you wish to not enter war because you don't like your odds (members inactive, in vacantion, in sleep mode etc) you can declare peace against hostile declaration which will give you some defensive bonuses to help you cope with defending but will have a downside too.
A war must remain active and it's easy to messure the amount of action and damage happening in a war. If there is less damage than required in the past x hours the war is automatically canceled and the 2 allies can't declare war for a good while. Maybe even decrease land income for a bit after beeing involved in a fake war.
- a war is ended either by surrendering, withdraw, auto win or mutual agreement.
Have a war metter to messure the damage between sides and after say 3 days since war started if one alliance is above 60% damage dealt/received they auto win the war. You can surrender after just 1 day, you can withdraw after 3+ days if you are above 55% and you just want out of it or after 3+ days both leaders want to end it they agree on it. All different endings give different consequences.

And to Azzer's point i don't think solo's should be allowed in alliance wars, they can hit when alliances are out of it

I might think of a few more points later

 

[Garrett]

if the HQ isn't redesigned then some of this should be used, but not much.

if the hq is redesigned then this needs a whole new spin. thumbs down for now.