How do the players feel about the current state of war? Do people who regularly participate in war like the present power of:
1. Missiles
2. Spy ops

I feel like these two things take some of the art of war out of the battle and turn war into a two-dimensional battle. Get spies, get missiles the rest almost doesn't matter. You can enter a war with 20m troops or 10m troops- either way, you are equally just as killable. Should this be the case? I'm not sure. This problem is compounded when you have a late set war.

I think we need to take a look at some of the mechanisms of war we currently have. Does anyone share any of these opinions?

Lower strength , limit their attacks, increase sdi or spy tech values and increase loss of readiness % of attacker .

I have Spoken at great length about both these things. Because from a balance perspective they are messed up, so becomes the state of war. I think what is needed is that the goal needs to be specified and then tweaks to spy ops missiles and ops are done to achieve this.

I have heard Pang and QZ over the years stating they want to slow war down and make it more about moves and countermoves rather than just about being there a few seconds early to survive, or be a few seconds late and die. I agree with this, and I have made plenty of suggestions that would each take the game in this direction.

When it comes to spy ops I have posted ideas to make the damage lower while vastly strengthening the intel gathering aspects of spies, thereby making them, as I think is prefereable; not great on their own but a vital cog in any effective war effort. Currently spy ops are all about the universally accepted as overpowered CDs. They are so strong that they are powerful both on their own or in connection with a GS run.
Spies are the most problematic aspect of warfare on Solo servers as well because of the way spy damage is calculated vs the way special attacks damage is. I have made lengthy posts with calculations explaining this in the past, it's had no effect.

one easy change might be to make it so killing just doesnt happen on servers where its not really supposed to

basically solo servers and maybe team

for tagged servers my preferred initial thoughts would be limiting SDI max point loss based on if you had 'enough' such as 89% or 80% or whatever, can easily start out really high and see how it goes

and with CD>GS id go with just reducing the damage slightly, say by 10 or 20% and seeing how it goes, it would probably lead to even more focus on spies and more ops in the short term, but perhaps at around 33% it might become balanced

keep in mind the main opposition to when pang/qz wanted to eliminate killing entirely a while back was because of suiciders

so if a few more good changes reduce the risk of an unkillable suicider/griefer then it might actually be a good change to have no killing at all any longer

1.BUFF SDI
2.NERF CD

then observe for a while before starting to talk about radical large scale changes

its so easy that even fluffty devs who dont give a fluff about the community can/should be able implement

Well we talked about just this a year back or so, and there was strong pushback from a vocal minority who thought it was changes that only LaF wanted, even tho some SOLers, several Elders and people from some other alliances supported those changes to CDs. No idea if anyone changed their minds since then.


SDI is harder I believe. I think its a mix of Chem rushes being overpowered and the other missiles are too weak. And indeed chems are not all that powerful most of the time once everyone has spent their stocks and you just have 20-100 in every warchat. If you buff SDI and do nothing else it risks making nukes and EMs useless. But I completely agree something needs to be done in this area too, I just have not seen a reasonable quick fix here as I have when it comes to CDs.

I'd love to sell or FA missiles.

In current state 1 CD is better than 1 EM , which is stupid as hell

CDs were specifically why I said, "You can enter a war with 20m troops or 10m troops- either way, you are equally just as killable."

It should be a shocking realization that the game is broken.

With numbers as low as they are, First Strikes have become over powered. Missiles and spy-ops are a big part of that. Everybody bemoans arranged wars, but honestly thats the only way to keep one side from obliterating the other with a blindside FS. In the old game when a big war had maybe 200+ players per side running 3-4 kill runs per day, you had a legitimate chance to overcome a FS with activity and good leadership. Now when a war is 20 v 20 and all 20 show up with missiles and turns for a a blindside FS - the war is over in an hour.

Wouldnt taking away cds effectively lower the dimension?

High production countries = breakers
Spy countries = bane of land fat breakers

Nerfing cd completely would result in those who can grab and stock better becoming unbreakable am I right?

I thought the spy system was going to get an overhaul though?

If we want to talk about broken we might need to look at oil destocks.

This thread is about the state of war. Everyone agrees oil destocks are broken.

No one is suggesting a removal of CDs afaik. But weaker CDs in which they are useful but not so far beyond everything else as now.

the numbers being smaller means one side can lose critical mass a lot earlier in the war

but the first strikes power in itself has been boosted way too many times

heres a bunch i can think of

1) tyranny became much more viable, i think attack gain went from 10 to 20 and upkeep cost came in and the pop reduction got reduced, other factors were average grabs got a lot smaller which meant theo techer died and tyranny techer became the default, and more late arranged wars gives you time to stock then switch gov if you want

2) turns per day went from 42 up to about 83

3) readiness went from 2 to 3

4) potential land now means no real missile cap

5) sets went from about 2400 turns to 5k turns, meaning way more missile potential

6) stored turns went from 75(47) all the way up to 120(120), which in the first 40 hours gives you about 500 turns per country which is 214 readiness hits + ops + missiles per country, basically meaning each live country who hits at full activity has done more than 1 kill by the time stored turns are all used at which point you shift from effectively 300 turns/day to 83 turns/day

old 75(47) you ran out of stored turns 31 hours in and only did 75+47+54.25 = 176.25 * 2 / 7 = 50.35 attacks in that time

thats around about a 400% increase in first strike power, and we wonder why wars are over so quickly

its probably around 500% with the increase in missiles as quite often people dont use full readiness to dump the missiles quicker

Yeah I think the full readiness dumping of chems is a particularily bad sign that something is very wrong, balance wise. People dont even care about losing all those attacks just because chem rushes are so powerful.

I would change it to all troops, all turrets, all tanks plus all civilians destroyed.

It would take more time, make it more fair and more fun!

I have been saying for a while if you make the type of attack have a DR effect the amount of population killed it would take one type longer. If you force hybrid kills and give everything a type of population kill it would force people to have different types of units and tend to balance it out. ABs should kill pop at a lesser amount then BR or GS, but if you have done 50 GS attacks and then you do a BR the BR should kill more pop then the GS.

If you only did GSes it would take longer to kill and would solve some of the to many turns in a FS situation. War leaders would have to decide if it was more important to kill in less turns or to save jets when the target is lets say a 5k break.

These could have huge impacts in war.

But will also become a organisational nightmare with the current player base.

some sort of alliance wide GS dr might be less objectionable than during an individual kill run

but would also be more complicated to code probably

@ makinso.

How so?

I think the exact opposite makinso. If hybrid kills are far more efficient due to attack specific DR then maiming will be far better and far more important than now. Maiming is something that can be done outside of chat times. War atm discourages people who are not in one of the goldilock time zones, it pushes those players away from the war aspect of the game precisiely because 100% of all effective war effort has to be conducted within the few seconds/minutes a kill run takes place in.

Ideally it wont be just maiming, instead it will be a mix of maiming and kill runs. The way you get there is just a matter of twaking the numbers.

I think it would add a new level to the game. It's been the same for years. You want to attract old players you need to do something to really change it. Besides ABs, Nukes, and EMs should kill someone. It can be at a lesser rate, but it still should do something.