With the various threads and discussions about suiciding and griefing, and being a victim to a few suicides myself, I was thinking about the one common factor that all suicides have: the Artillery Barrage.

Repeated, unprovoked Artilley Barrages have the potential to ruin days worth of work and truns of the countries who fall victim to them.

Many people have come up with good suggestions on how to curb or eliminate this heinous act, but I feel like a lot of them are either too clunky, or shift the overall gameplay experience for specific servers.

Therefore, I propose something that could invite a bright new world of strategy while curbing suiciding across all servers: Repurpose the Artillery Barrage.

In short:

AB's Now: Destroy Buildings
AB's after: Destroy a small amount of Turrets and lower readiness by 1%

The logic: Tanks are war machines, so it makes sense that they be used for wartime purposes. You wouldn't sent a barrage of tanks to an enemy country just to blow up buildings and go away. No, you send tanks to lower defenses and soften targets.

"But what about Bombing Runs?"
Reduce the number of buildings destroyed per strike and make Construction Sites immune to them.

"What about the 'Bomb Structures' Spy Op?"
Keep it as is. Enough of them get through before your Spy DR kicks in, and Spy ops are limited per day.

"What about the buildings destroyed via land grabs?"
Keep that as is also.

This is is just a proposal, and I'm definitely welcome to feedback. :D What do you guys think?

I have been thinking about something like this as well. I agree very much with the general direction of your suggestion but perhaps theres a way it could be done so that ABs are not niche attacks still.

The ability to destroy only buildings mean its essentially useless in alliance warfare at least late in the set, while it is always super powerful for suiciders. You hit the nail absolutely on the head.

The issue I have with your suggestion is that you change the attack from one niche to another niche. Dont get me wrong. Its a super interesting niche. It would create AB+BR hybrid kills. I can see how that will make alliance warfare a lot more fun.

At the same time on solo servers there are not enough turns to break someone with BRs after you've reduced a targets turrets, so the synergy is meaningless and it will just be a means to late game suicide away a lot of NW for kinda free.
Since it targets only turrets as the only permanent resource it means it has to kill quite a high percentage of turrets to be balanced.

I suggest instead that ABs destroy all military units, pop and buildings, because its easier to balance and it will be something that can be made equally as scary to be the victim of either as a netter or as a war prepped country both early, mid and late game.
I like the readiness lowering bit. I think it would be amazing if it did something against spies, because they are too "safe" right now with only failing ops or the often kinda useless "attack intelligence centers"-op.

Maybe you are right that turrets could be killed at a higher rate than other units, since they are stationary targets that are easy to hit, plus the BR synergy is something that would improve alliance warfare so much. :)

tbh i like it too..

essentially you're making it a hybrid of CD/DEMO but with tanks. and u kill turrets instead of troops.

Yeah for alliance warfare its absolutely epic that way. Would add a whole new dimension to warfare.

Solo servers would be a different story tho. ABs are kinda essential for solo warfare so if they are changed to only kill turrets it may be problematic.

I honestly think ABs would even be less of a netter terror if they destroyed no CS or at least fewer. I'd say ideally none tho. What makes AB so tough to recover from is it can take hundreds of turns to recover the CS whereas other attacks dont take near as long to recover from or destroy build.

I think the bomb structures op should be the same as well. If you take the CS aspect out of it, it's a more normal attack, and it's not like anyone is rolling into a city with a bunch of tanks to blow up a bunch of construction workers.

If they lowered the building returns and added pop returns or made it disrupt spies in some way I'd also be for it, although having the ability to kill spies I dont like because they are not purchasable, and would no longer provide protection in war. Each green AB maybe removes an available op for the day is something I could get behind.

Main point tho. No more CS for ABs and it's not a set ruiner as much anymore if one person hits you. If a couple people do it to you, you are sufficiently flattened and won't rebuild well. Pretty much balanced with other attacks that way. You could even get rid of the CS returns on BRs and I dont think youd break anyone's heart.