i don't think it's a bad thing to be able to attack quickly, the suckiest thing ever is getting killed in war then...waiting...waiting...waiting for turns to be able to get back in it etc. as llaar said before, some people get killed and just decide to quit that set or for good if they are new. more likely to stay on if they can continue playing in some fashion and without starting completely from scratch.

this should 1) make all the work and time people put into their country mean something by getting a portion of it back (levels or percentage) 2) allow players to keep playing after being killed, even if it is just to build/regroup and not to attack until some probation period is up.

Just something off the top of my head, but while we're discussing death levels and stuff, how about adding a new building type along with everything else?

Call this new building a 'Bunker'. This type of building can store military units, cash, food, and tech points, in the case of the death of a country. Each bunker can store up to, say, 5% amount of units, 5% amount of tech, 5% amount of cash, etc. Perhaps have a hard limit on how many bunkers each country can have, maybe based off the amount of land the country has (like 1 bunker per 5k acres or something). Sort of like missiles.

Have this building type available to be built, the same as every other building, but have the cost of bunkers separate from the cost of other buildings, and maybe a turn per bunker or whatever. If you're netting, and not really expecting to die, you don't have to build any bunkers.

As to how the items actually get stored in the bunkers, I'm not sure whether to do it turn-by-turn, or just have the player put the stuff in each bunker manually. The military units that get put into the bunkers should not affect expenses, for those units aren't being maintained, they're just being put into storage for later use. It probably shouldn't take a turn to put stuff into bunkers, but it should take a turn or so to get them back out, UNLESS they're being recalled during a new country's 'scavenge' turns. Items put into bunkers cannot be used until they're recalled into service or whatever. Tech in bunkers cannot count towards tech percentages, etc...

Anyways, when a country dies, the player logs in, renames his country or whatever, starts off with the 10% of land, buildings, or whatever as outlined earlier in this thread, but nothing else, aside from whatever was put in those bunkers. ALL bunkers built should survive the death of a country. The stuff inside these bunkers will still need to be taken out of the bunkers to be used, but during a country's 'scavenge' period, shouldn't take any turns. HOWEVER, due to the lower amount of land in this new country, any extra bunkers will be destroyed, and everything they contain will be lost at the end of the 'scavenge' turns.

Anyways, all this was just thought up on a whim, and not sure how to treat bunkers as in relation to spy ops and stuff like that. But, I think it'd be a great insurance policy if a player had some control over just what items he/she started out with when rebuilding a dead country.

Well there could certainly be separate ops for bunkers. Spy on military storage/Sabotage military storage. I do think bunkers are a very workable idea. The numbers would need to be run to figure out what is appropriate but I think they could work well.

Level 1:
Requirements:
Pass 8,000 acres
Pass 1 million NW
Attain 140 CS (40 BPT)

Level 2:
Requirements:
Pass 15,000 acres
Pass 2.5 million NW
Attain 160 CS (50 BPT)

Level 3:
Requirements:
Pass 25,000 acres
Pass 8 million NW
Attain 180 CS (60 BPT)



Restarts for each level:

Level 1 Restarts at:
3,040 acres, 3,000 unbuilt (with slider bars that let you choose where to put any 3,000 buildings except CS), 40 CS
30 mill cash, 50,000 oil, 100,000 bushels
150,000 military points

Level 2 Restarts at:
5,560 acres, 5,500 unbuilt (with slider bars that let you choose where to put any 5,500 buildings except CS),60 CS
60 mill cash, 100,000 oil, 200,000 bushels
300,000 military points

Level 3 Restarts at:
8,780 acres, 5,500 unbuilt (with slider bars that let you choose where to put any 8,700 buildings except CS),80 CS
120 mill cash, 200,000 oil, 400,000 bushels
750,000 military points


military points can be assigned as follows:
tanks = 4 points
jets/turrets = 2 points
troops = 1 point

this allows the country to assign their defense. no spies would be allowed to be made in this model. if they were to be allowed, they should be a hefty 6 point value, allowing a max of 50k spies on 3,000 acres, or 100k spies on 5,560 acres, or 125,000 spies on 8,780 acres (with no military in each case) allowing spies, would be nice for someone with tons of stock, who would just buy the military they needed, but wanted some sort of SPAL

so with 150,000 points, you could have:
10,000 tanks (40k points)
50,000 turrets (100k points)
10,000 troops (10k points)

and with 300,000 points, you could have:
20,000 tanks (80k points)
100,000 turrets (200k points)
20,000 troops (20k points)

and with 750,000 points, you could have:
25,000 tanks (100k points)
300,000 turrets (600k points)
50,000 troops (50k points)



so these are 3 simple levels, once you reach them, you cannot be dropped a level on that country. so a country at level 3, if nuked to 1000 acres, it will still be able to restart at level 3's restart level. the only exception could be, that if you drop your land, and your land drops below one of the levels, then your country will level downward, that could be up for debate though since that is a stonewalling tactic.

you will restart based on the level your previous country achieved. a level 3 that restarts will still not be at level 1 either, since the NW and CS levels will not have been met, so if they are killed again before hitting level 1, then they will restart at 4717 NW with 120(120) (see other thread discussion on turns you start with)

you will receive 10% of your bushels/cash/oil in addition to the bushels/cash/oil levels listed above

i don't think levels higher than what i stated should exist, as this is to just give you a somewhat basic restart, but add on to it, the stock you had on hand before you died in terms of cash/bushels/oil

no tech would be given. it would be assumed you can re-buy the tech you need with the cash give, production, and the extra cash/bushels you were given from your old country

i decided on adding in the CS requirements, as it would also encourage new players to build CS to reach new levels, which they notoriously are known for running rainbows at 10 BPT in my experience... at least they'll be better off with rainbows at 50 BPT ;)

Yeah, it is amazing how many turns newbs spend building. I think that is some of the fun cutting your teeth that way... but there needs to be some hint that more CS is better ;)

azmodil, obviously servers without 2b cash limit need a differant limit and it can be tuned

but the general concept is your land tech mil get used more in defending you than cash on hand

so if your online you spend it, if your not you get some of it back on your restart

so in ffa it could be capped at counting as 2b to start with, in express im not sure the idea is needed

percentages can be tweaked, im just of the opinion cash should be more than anything else, particularly since if you get extra land building costs go up, and extra mil expenses go up

would be nice to have a bit of an RPG country creation screen where you are given points that you can spend on various things.... that means people could change strats and so on, have as many buildings as they want

im not a huge fan of those levels, just have it where you get percentages but convert the mil and tech into cash that you can spend on the market

that sounds like the simplest option to me

if you want to force people to spend money on tech or mil thats doable by making it special cash, (call it japanese yen on tech and russian rubles on military if you want ) that disapears when you leave protection

i would also give a bonus bpt mod in protection in line with the land you give and a reduced building cost

thats to make a country as customisable as you like probably in the easiest way possible


on the subject of general size of restarts what i want is for restarts to be big enough and powerful enough to be used immediately but weak enough that killing countries is stil desirable

my preference is actually extra turns to use as you wish, depending on the point in the set, with a starting cash bonus based on cash and networth you had when you died

i dont really think land and csites need to be considered but if they are then id prefer the land to be built with half as many buildings on it as you had when you died, to simulate a war torn country, if you want to drop the acres you can, if not thats fine too

to balance it further you could make it work like defensive readiness, there could be a base built percentage of perhaps 25% with built acreage raising to 50% if you were 100% built when you died (easily changed percentages)

one advantage of that is it maintains the benefit of BR kills over GS kills since unprepared enemies are more likely to have turrets when they are first striked than jets

and missiles should be considered special attacks that can be more effective than normal attacks

so land kills with many nukes then a few SS's cost a lot more but do more damage to the restarted countries, or you can nuke some countries a bit to damage their restarts a bit but increase their tech levels while your killing them (note nukes will always remain more effective on countries you dont kill than those you do)

and chem kills would reduce buildings without a negative consequence but are considered a valuable resource in a war so should be more useful but leave the restart with the same amount of land, just more empty acres

to deal with a csite exploit of having all csites, or destroying all buildings except csites then getting bonus csites i would put a hard cap on csites of at most the amount of csites a country had when it died

an additional effect of making BR preferable to GS is that it makes it easier for any country/alliance that falls behind to focus on only 2 main military types rather than 3 if the alliance in front wants to start focusing on BR kills to reduce the bonus effect on restarts

opposing balancing factors if you will

BR is already preferable to GS in that it destroys buildings and has a higher minimum civilian kill limit. Additionally for GS the offense and defense cost the same but for BR the offense is cheaper (as governed by PM prices) than the defense. The reason you perceive it to be less preferable is because people tend to carry many more turrets than troops.

yes what i mean is that the damage done in a first strike will be reduced since more of the kills will be GS's that wont be damaging the restarts as much as BR's would

therefore an unprepared target that gets blindsided gets a bigger benefit from restart boosts than a war prepped alliance that people expect to stonewall and has more troops therefore more of the kills run on them are BR's

What really needs to be finetuned is the maths. When it comes down to this happening, it must be mathematical, or its too hard to code.

I like where your going enshula, please post up your %/Numbers for your ideas and reitterate.

Love your new Level idea Llaar.

Its based on what you have achieved
It isnt over powered
Has set amounts that you get so even if u wasted everything stonewalling u still get a bit, but also the 10% of bushels/cash that you had before for those that use their resources more wisely.

Only adjustment i would consider making, is to lower the corresponding acres of each level by a bit. Eg the level 3 from 25k acres to 20k acres. Cause lots of techers etc would be a lot lower on acres, (but leave all the other requirements the same). And of course then lower the level 3 restart from 8760 to 20k*1/3+CS= 6740. Do the same for each level.

i assumed that the devs would pick the idea they liked most or were easiest to code then tweak numbers for the level of effect they desired, hopefully starting at the low end and working up if needed

llaar is spot on.

The formula;

Acres.

VarX = Acres / 4
VarY = CS * 2
VarZ = NW / 3
VarW = VarX * VarY / VarZ

AcresOnRestart = VarW * 1000 (rounded down)

CS Obtained.

VarX = CS total
VarY = AcresOnRestart
VarZ = NW / 3
VarW = VarX * VarY / VarZ

CSOnRestart = VarW * 200 (rounded down)


Thats a start on the maths I guess. It works. Try it.

* = times
/ = divide

Just so im not misunderstood

I see no problem with that at all. If a clan wants to BR to reduce the effectiveness of a recovered country that is their prerogative... nothing is forcing them to select GS because it is the lower break.

Also, for your formulas... even if they happen to work out they make no sense... I see no reason why you should be dividing by networth.

i believe with those fomulas you should be doing it more like

newacres = modifier * oldacres * (1+oldcsites/4600) * (1+oldnetworth/40,000,000)

otherwise your acres would be less the higher your networth was

anyway i dont really see the need for complex formulas like that, if whoever killed you destroyed your acres then why should you get them back after they spent all that effort destroying them :)

same for buildings and military

what you should get back is a proportion of your wasted resources and a complimentary minimum bonus to make it a bit more fun

worrying about gaming levels in particular probably isnt a good thing to introduce

nukevil if you want to open the lid on the can of new buildings be sure to let everyone play ;p

making it active rather than passive and having a penalty is interisting but keep in mind one of the least fun things is getting blind sided and losing everything which that would increase the likelihood of

I agree... if they went to the effort to destroy it you shouldn't get it back.

hmmm i definitely like the way this thread is going

if a country were to get back a good portion of it's land, that might encourage land kills? so that it has no land to get back, and is properly "dead" ? we could add 100A in that case i guess?

Yeah, adding 100 acres would clearly be necessary. I'd maybe even say MAX(100,NW/2000)... that depends though... then it might be hard for them to build up... onthe other hand no acres but big expenses could be a problem too... I guess if you're land killed you probably have almost no military left anyways...

worst case you can sell mil on private so its not completely bad, or drop acres until you can afford to build

it should be easy enough to convert part of what you had into cash instead though so you can build and run turns without hassle

and yes a minimum acres is needed for land kills

it used to be fairly common to nuke targets down to about 50 acres then finish off the kill with a few SS's so its possible to still have high mil

or it could be PS'd out and potentially 35% on the market for a commie

which makes me think id prefer to see mono as a restart government rather than keeping the old gov, not that i think anyone would disagree

yeah, definitely mono for the restart... let them choose anew. They are scavenging a previous country in my eyes that has no necessary bearing to the previous regime ;)

And good point, they can always sell goods if they want.

Maybe give them enough cash for free such that if they have positive cash flow they get one bonus turn cash or if they have negative cash flow they have just enough cash to spend one turn selling on the market.

whee. there's a lot of merit in this, tho i can't possibly read the whole thread. deserves a TTT tho =)

I'm definitely interested in this.

Idea will need some refinement though.

i think this is a great example of new ideas being implemented into the game,

as like you say it is realistic for someone else to try to take over the country,
the issue we have is when you land kill someone or pop kill someone, who or 3what is left to restart the country,

you would almost need to redo the kill message to humanitarians mock your need to continue killing innocent lifes or something similar. so there would be something left.

with this is mind it makes sense a new leader would take over and that a new name and number would be sensibile.

i like the percentage caps but think you need to look smaller, thinking like 3-4% max as anything more your still a threat especially if you were a large country.

id also recommend something like a 3 day cap just so tht people cant hit too quick as it makes restarting much more powerful

I dont think it should be % based at all, give the country a set amount of cash, land, cs to begin with and thats about all you need

i dont see any reason at all to give more credit to netters that dies in a war then anyone else and time cap just use the same as before or give them some turns and raise the protection time

im all for faster restarting but lets try to keep it on a serious level which imo most of the suggestions posted here isnt

Ivan
Survival of the Fittest

part of the reason for making things varied is it means those that used less resources preventing dying get more back, weakening blind side first strikes being so powerful

which is one of the biggest problems making some wars boring at the moment

A country that 'dies' still has a portion of the resources there... like if you killed off all the people in America, there would still be some farms, some infrastructure, some salvageable military, some hydrocarbon wells, etc...

There is no reason not to reward people who had big countries. Blind first strikes are way over powered as enshula said.

blind first strikes arent really overpowered at all especially not with most of the server at 33 members or lower

theres no reason at all to reward people who had big countries and if they did have a big country i dont really see how or why they would be killed in a blind first strike

50 chems on 0 SDI that had 500 million bushels stocked?

when people spend a month/month and a half building a massively cool country, and then login one day to have to make a 4717 NW country, they can become quite dispirited

i have never played in a 100% war clan, and the sentiment of all those clan's members for years, is that they hate starting over with nothing and a LOT of them tend not to play anymore that reset, and after enough wars, they just stop playing.

yes, 100% war clans and dedicated players will continue restarting... but with other games out there, where what you build cant ever even die (farmville/evony) this game needs to recognize what you once had, and not make you start off from scratch. that will help this game grow.

its not necessarily wars that cause players to leave, its the redundancy of restarting over and over with absolutely nothing, and then building 80 CS with your first 100 turns and being useless for a few days til you build up or get FA

if this got netters to enjoy more war, this would make for more fun wars, which would make warriors happier too

as you just said, with 33 members or lower... to still have activity, people need to be back in the action faster. otherwise enough people die that you cant even have proper warchats anymore since we all live across the globe and coordinating with even just 20 living OOP countries makes things more difficult. this idea combined with higher starting turns, will make everything faster and more enjoyable IMO for everyone

eventually the change would always favour the losing alliance

meaning less turns spent building up

id also like to see 99 turns being given to a restart instead of 50

more turns starting whenever IMO. heres a thread on that topic:

http://forums.earthempires.com/...?threadid=2303&page=1

llaar understands....

favouring the losing alliance is not necessarily a bad thing; in earth atm, once you're tagkilled and the original clan has some of their members left, you're pretty much SOL

(keke like that earth-related pun :)

would counter the huge advantaged a well planned fs has also, lol

the only reason an FS has an advantage is because alliance leaders neglects their work same with the country llaar possed
i dont see why anyone would have 500 million bushels stocked without buying 1 point of sdi i know i never played a country like that and had top 10 finishes anyway the few times ive actually netted

Llaars entire level reason is based on countries having high networth but if they do have high networth and sdi they wont be targetted in an FS thus the point is moot,fluff and unvalid

And as usual if you sit on 50k acers with 200k turrets you will get topfeed its the same reasoning with that case as its with this case

each 1m turrets costs roughly 200k per turn, that adds up when stocking

and could reduce net by about 5m nw finishing for every 1m nw you carry in defence while stocking

theres always going to be people who run balanced, and those who run to extremes for netting or warring

Indeed but really if a country runs on no defense and has 2 bil bushels i dont see why its restart should get 200m bushels to start with thats just ridicilous like most of the posts on here

And its up to the player itself and the alliance as whole to be ready for an eventual war/suicide its not my fault if i run an FS on alliance that they are completely blind sided and have no defense/spies/sdi at all its up to the player/alliance leaders itself and ultimately their own stupidity

I really dont see why we should reward stupidity and if im not mistaken upkeep costs were lowered compared to E2025 so i dont think complaining about that is valid either

If you wanna run your country/alliance to the extreme then go a head but dont complain when another alliance/player comes knocking on the door

fluff!

the upkeep costs are lowered thing doesnt mean anything

it just means the average amount of mil everyone has goes up

some will always have below that and some above it

once i had a country about 60k acres casher that had much more than the mil of the alliance we were at war with, because i was so big having a lot more mil would have meant i couldnt participate in the war

then another tag joined in the war who were bigger and killed me before i knew, theres always going to be situations where you can get blindsided

but the real point of the change in my opinion is to stop wars getting so uneven that one side just stops trying or it turns into a bit of a cold war where nothing happens

If you wanna stop wars getting so uneven then perhaps you should go into politics instead of gameplay?

the reasons wars are so uneven isnt because of the game mechanics and has nothing to do with restarts, the only thing that makes wars unbalanced is

1 bad prep
2 numbers

and I dont see how small alliances benefits more then big alliances from the changes proposed in here,in fact I see it the other way around I also find it sort of amusing that the people supporting this idea are the people who currently are in large alliances and in a war with an opponent much smaller then themselves or loves to call allies in even when its not needed.

I'd love to discuss this on irc with you btw :)

Ivan
Survival of the Fittest

How is this not implemented yet? WTF? Awesome idea.

because it's complicated? :)

what is this blasphemy

if a country is killed, its killed off, no civilians = no economy = death.

no land = death.

Killing off countries completely is what some people live for in this game, aka snipers. and restarting is all part of strat in wars as well.

so when a man dies it gets reduced to a baby? =P this whole thing is retarded and would ruin war!