Originally
posted by
table4two:
Cyref or myself might've been the last people to win 1a with a casher. 2019 seems about right as its been a looong time since a casher has last felt competitive.
Its a weird one- You'd think I would be a proponent of the recent change set, as yes it gets stale seeing the one strat dominate. But even more that, the traditional oil destock was such a quality of life addition, I find myself still preferring to have kept this element even if it means the status quo doesn't change.
All that is to say I don't think the benefit of removing the traditional oil destock out weighs the quality of life addition it provided to the wider meta of the game.
Also, it is a shame to see the 'best 3' metric rendered obsolete now. It was the best metric to compare the best netters in the game.
I wonder if there are more surgical ways to rebalance some of the strategies? For example, reducing the food/oil production of the Fascist or increasing the PCI of a Republic?
In any case, it has been fun to see how people are playing this set and seeing how the market plays out. Change is inevitable and you can't make everyone happy. I applaud you Slagpit for trying to shake things up in the first place.
Thank you for the thoughtful comment.
As I understand it, players on the alliance server are able to send research pacts to bots and get free tech all set. This strikes me as a completely ridiculous mechanic that should be removed. If it is removed then final NWs will drop somewhat which could impact leaderboards. Should it not be removed then?
Generally speaking we're going to prioritize other factors above leaderboard parity. It's really difficult to have meaningful leaderboards over a 15 year period in the first place and any change isn't fair to a certain degree. For example, suppose the same player managed to win the first ten rounds of alliance. He would have a Best 3 of around 300 M. In the current era a player could play a single country to 901 M NW and not even finish in the top ten. He would then have a higher best 3 than the other player. That's hardly fair, right? At some point I plan to offer a seasonal view of the leaderboards that would be retroactively applied. We'd have metrics that would apply on a yearly basis to Alliance in addition to the overall metrics.
We want players to have multiple feasible options for destocking. That's always been a core design principle. Having a single destocking method be dominant as well as risk-free is the exact opposite of that. Can you explain what the missing quality of life feature here is? You can still do private destocks and you can still burn oil for units. It's just less efficient than before.