City destruction changes

Nellaundra

Would unironically play Achaea Fortress.

Silas

Jarrod said:

I believe Makarios changed it to 1-4 is automatic, and 5 requires promotion.

It results in the same thing at rank 4, but requires a lot of participation.

Yeah, I still don't like the automatic progression. Maybe a Patron-only toggle to stop cities deliberately keeping their military low ranked to abuse the system, without punishing cities who don't.

Kinilan

Nellaundra said:

Would unironically play Achaea Fortress.

Achaea Fortress would have been 1000x better than Earth Eternal...

Jarrod

Silas said:

Jarrod said:

I believe Makarios changed it to 1-4 is automatic, and 5 requires promotion.

It results in the same thing at rank 4, but requires a lot of participation.

Yeah, I still don't like the automatic progression. Maybe a Patron-only toggle to stop cities deliberately keeping their military low ranked to abuse the system, without punishing cities who don't.

I'd personally prefer auto to 3, then something like capture at rank 4 you can't move down, and something else at rank 5 to make it worth promoting a handful of people to, but not something you'd want everyone to have.

Cooper

Don't look at the military ranks as anything other than how much someone has participated and how much they are worth if they die.

Daeir

That saddens me a little bit. I was hoping military rank would mean something ICly and OOCly rather than just being a measure of how juicy a target you are.

Santar

Come at me bro.

Nemutaur

Daeir said:

That saddens me a little bit. I was hoping military rank would mean something ICly and OOCly rather than just being a measure of how juicy a target you are.

Well there are abilities assigned to ranks so it has some meaning. Otherwise nope, no measure of how much you contributed or can do with the auto-promotion.

Fitz

Santar said:

Come at me bro.

Dude, we all know your couture is stale and out of season.

Florentino

I think worth should be a score expressed independently of rank, which should be a subjective measure of how valuable the army feels you are.

Dunn

Mhaldor has that one covered, maggot.

Cahin

If there was PK assist experience I would hunt to dragon as a tarot ent.

Makarios

Well, the entire reason we put armies in was to have an active measure (rank) that directly corelated to how often you were fighting in raids. It was our solution to the problem of needing to scale worth to something, but not actually having anything directly tied to pk in terms of a ranking system (or at least, not a definitive one).

Beyond that, you can really make it whatever you want it to be.

Kuy

Makarios said:

Well, the entire reason we put armies in was to have an active measure (rank) that directly corelated to how often you were fighting in raids. It was our solution to the problem of needing to scale worth to something, but not actually having anything directly tied to pk in terms of a ranking system (or at least, not a definitive one).

Beyond that, you can really make it whatever you want it to be.

Lusternia has a vote weight used for elections.  Your vote weight increases (up to 10) based on your activity within the realms.  As you become less active, your weight gradually returns to 1.  Activity is measured in terms of login time and what you do, I believe.  Would it be possible to have something like an Army Weight, which would increase the same way army rank does now?

With that, the army could serve both purposes, and it would be fairly realistic.  You can have conscripts at rank 1 who have a weight of 10 because they're fighting often as well as sergeants with rank 1 because they've been dormant.

It would also serve to make it so that people who are forced to go dormant for a while come back with lower value, which would make sense as they'd need to warm up a little before being worth a lot again.

(ETA for clarification: I use the term "rank 1" here in reference to what they are worth for tank recharging.)

Grandue

::Insert joke about spending trillions of gold and years of time on a war against a city because you heard they had lvl3 tanks and you wanted to capture their weapons of mass destruction only to find out they never had any here:: 

Silas

I really like Kuy's suggestion of making the worth of soldiers for tank charging invisible and decoupling it from army rank.

@Makarios, @Tecton, could we go with that instead?

Eld

Silas said:

I really like Kuy's suggestion of making the worth of soldiers for tank charging invisible and decoupling it from army rank.

@Makarios, @Tecton, could we go with that instead?

Separating it from army rank seems fine, but why invisible? Is there a problem with being able to identify high value people?

Synbios

Eld said:

I really like Kuy's suggestion of making the worth of soldiers for tank charging invisible and decoupling it from army rank.

@Makarios, @Tecton, could we go with that instead?

Separating it from army rank seems fine, but why invisible? Is there a problem with being able to identify high value people?

Because a wise general dresses in the same outfit as his soldiers, that his commandant colors may not be spotted immediately by a marksm...ah heck, they'll just probably see his name and quickly deduce his military value anyway!

Penwize

Thought of something interesting that's an odd side-effect of this system.  If a whole city is pre-occupied with something (say a big event where they're killing/getting killed by daemons), that used to make them super open to raiding and destruction.  Now, they're essentially immune to it for the duration of the event, since they won't go defend and thus won't enable a sanction.

I can't tell if I really like that side-effect or not.  Certainly protects events from griefing!

Tecton

We're pretty happy with the way the army system currently works. Once we get some more live use data, we may make further tweaks, but for the moment, it meets the requirements we need it to.

Fitz

Tecton said:

We're pretty happy with the way the army system currently works. Once we get some more live use data, we may make further tweaks, but for the moment, it meets the requirements we need it to.

Soo.........dog pile on Hashan for beta testing?

Silas

Tecton said:

We're pretty happy with the way the army system currently works. Once we get some more live use data, we may make further tweaks, but for the moment, it meets the requirements we need it to.

Wouldn't it be preferable for it to meet everybody's requirements? I understand that you have things you want from it as the administration, but surely it makes sense to take what the players want into account as well.

Skye

And also city flavours.


@Tecton

Jarrod

I think taking into account what some players want to influence the final product is great, but you'll never satisfy everybody.

Also, a lot of players want to abuse the crap out of things, which further limits the 'everybody's' requirements thing.

Wynedere

I hate to agree with Silas, but he's completely right on this one. Achaea is a business, not a hobby for the developers. It isn't about what the admin wants - the players' desires should be the priority in every single decision made here. 

I've seen a few of IRE games' admin refer to their own vision when it comes to features and drawbacks to these games. This isn't an approach IRE should be making simply because it is a -business- that earns a profit from players. You can't treat these games like hobby muds that are free. 

Silas

In fairness, they've made pretty great strides on that in the last few months. I'm pretty sure it was more a slip of the tongue than anything, but I just wanted to make the reminder.

And sure, there are people who'll try to abuse every system, but that's no reason to not at least try to do something for the people who won't.

Tecton

As Makarios mentioned earlier, the system works as a balancing mechanism. We're fine with people running with the ball on the RP aspects of it, and encourage it, but drastically modifying a system to no longer be that balancing point isn't something we're looking at doing before we've had a chance to see how things play out (the system is less than a week old).

I'm sure there will be many more additions to help facilitate both the "RP" and the "combat mechanics" sides of the army system, with a very large portion (if not all) of them resulting directly from player feedback. For now, we're going to keep an eye on things and see how well the mechanical side of the system performs in its current state.

Shirszae

Wynedere said:

I hate to agree with Silas, but he's completely right on this one. Achaea is a business, not a hobby for the developers. It isn't about what the admin wants - the players' desires should be the priority in every single decision made here. 

I've seen a few of IRE games' admin refer to their own vision when it comes to features and drawbacks to these games. This isn't an approach IRE should be making simply because it is a -business- that earns a profit from players. You can't treat these games like hobby muds that are free. 

Business or not, everyone has a vision for the things they create. Its one thing to say they should take into account what players want, other very different to say they should totally give in to all the players' demands just because they pay.

Penwize

If they gave into paying players demands, I'd have more eagles by now.

Wynedere

Shirszae said:

Wynedere said:

I hate to agree with Silas, but he's completely right on this one. Achaea is a business, not a hobby for the developers. It isn't about what the admin wants - the players' desires should be the priority in every single decision made here. 

I've seen a few of IRE games' admin refer to their own vision when it comes to features and drawbacks to these games. This isn't an approach IRE should be making simply because it is a -business- that earns a profit from players. You can't treat these games like hobby muds that are free. 

Business or not, everyone has a vision for the things they create. Its one thing to say they should take into account what players want, other very different to say they should totally give in to all the players' demands just because they pay.

You're adding to what I posted. I never said that they should give in to all the players' demands. That would ultimately end in less than desirable results. A level of common sense has to be applied, obviously. In saying that, though, you still cannot ignore what players want from these games.