Player have to much protection

What does everyone think about the security council having the power to remove war protection for countries older than six months? I say this because players are constantly harassing other players, and there's no real way to penalize them. Give me your thoughts!

Maybe Security Counsil should be given the power to economic sanction a country. With a penalty on income or a fine.. Besides that, secure mode can have a variety of alternatives. For example, you can attack and hurt a country in secure mode, but not take over. Many variants possible imo.

I agree I think that's a better idea. I fine aspect. Especially if the GMs are against war level protection removal.

Not sure if giving the Security Council any real power would be beneficial to anyone, there are a lot of clicks in this game. War protection is needed at times. What should not be allowed is permanent war protection in any world. After three real months you should pay for it with gold coins. Keep Fearless Blue how it is, but lower the cost by half or more on all other worlds. This may help people think before they speak (write or post) on the form. I love the rivalries and back and forth we see on the form, but there comes a point were you need to put up or shut up. My advise is do not hold on to tight, enjoy the game if you loose a war stand up brush yourself off and get back into the game. My gut call most players do not want to see anyone taken out of the game completely. Just my two cents, probably not even worth that.
Rob

Rob, as one of the more veteran and long term players I think that your input is needed.

Unsurprisingly, I also agree. I think war protection is needed, but after Empires advance to a certain point I think war should be viable. I floated the idea months ago, admittedly when I did not know much about the war engine, of making it to where you lose the ability for (non paid) protection for all of your slaves after your first one. So if you wanted to expand, you would have to defend you interests. A three planet system would be nice, consolidating the smaller player base would mean more interaction and you could have a peace, war and somewhere in-between planet.

Regardless of how, I think the player base at large wants a revamp of the war system to make it more accessible.

Of course, loud players that are untouchable because of protection are annoying. But really I think the downside is the nearly non-existent war game. People SHOULD be interested in it. Most of the products and a large part of the game is dedicated to war, yet majority of the base will never reach this point. Heck, a lot of players cannot even beat the AI to GET to WL3 on the planets that require it.

In the year I have been here, I have participated in one active war (both participants actively shooting at each other) and witnessed three. Off the top of my head, I think we have had 6, MAYBE 7 live PvP wars this year. A lot of these wars were started by players who participated in others, as well.

I think given the player base of the game, this number is not nearly high enough.

Andy, our benevolent deity that refills our natural resources and allows us to purge, hear our prayers. I know that this is a fundamental change and is not easy, but we have been asking for it.

Nice idea, but we won't take out players right to play basically peaceful, because of one or two players.. I know well developed nations who are basically economic players some have been here for ages, we can look out of the box and look for other Alternatives.. This thread for me can be modified.. for example the SC on WG is mainly occupied by a particular sect of people giving this people the right to do such maybe in the long run have drastic consequences.. We should Allow players choose their game play.. the game has Already put in rewards for going up in war levels.. if a player decides not to move up, then why force him, or open him to attack. The war level Protection was sometime removed earlier this year allowing more experienced war players have ability to attack any player above war LV 3, (No doubt this is good), but on this current matter I think this shouldn't be implemented. Alot of changes has already been added to the War engine.. what about the economic aspect of the game..

My two cents tho..

The council should not have the power to actually hurt any player.

There are players here that have absolutely no interest in going to war. They stay below wl3 by choice not for fear or inability. In my opinion going over wl3 on WG serves no purpose and would be a waste of time and resources.

I feel it's the one size fits all setup of the game that's the problem.
Awhile ago we discussed having fewer worlds and for different styles of gameplay. I doubt that will ever happen.

Until the war engine is overhauled, this thread is irrelevant.

If you choose the peaceful option This Should be enough to keep your country from going to war or starting A War with anyone. If you decide not to play a peaceful game you should be given A month to rebuild your defenses. If your country is set up for defensive score then Permanent war protection should not be allowed. The cost could be minimal but there should be a cost..
Rob

"Let the sim streets flow with the blood of the heretics and nonbelievers.
Smite the asshat and hear the lamentations of his simwomen for it is good."

The Ruminations of the Pinktator.

1:1-2

Purge the Heretics.

No smell was ever so sweet as the pyres burned during the crusade.

Even bigger issues than war protection is the extremely unbalanced nature of things like overpowered federated air defense, limits on moving corporations out of countries for economic war fare,etc... War protection is the most obvious protection but also the easiest to defend.

If by heretics you mean those of us that don't worship the pinktator then clearly the purge never happened.

As a believer in the trinity, I forgive you Johanas Bllderberg, Peace Be With You.

o.o

I do not follow the logic here. or some of it.

We do have a boycott function allowing players to boycott a player.
we do have a war world where everyone is moved to wl3 after 60 days and participates in wars.

we are open to suggestions on diversity and between worlds.
we will not be able to pull the carpet from underneath players who signed up for certain conditions but some changes were always part of the game.

btw:

We created a natural resources only country (KB) with 120+ natural resources corporations and none other.

it is extremely profitable.

We are also creating a country with a huge population. The country Andy on KB.
It has currently a population of 500 million, trying to get much higher.
This is very difficult and very expensive.
we do not advise anyone to try this.
You have to pay a lot for the population and it keeps declining.
It needs a lot of babysitting or it will fall apart.

we did discover some strange movement of workers between worker groups and other movements that were clearly amplified because of the huge numbers.
This too makes it extremely difficult.
I am looking for a bug in there.
The problem is probably small with smaller numbers but it should be fixed.

I fully agree with keeping the war protection below WL3, and letting players stay there indefinitely, you should always be allowed to play peaceful only. Pretty sure the hostility to war protection is all about one loudmouth on the forums.

The war game is heavily slanted towards defense, if you have Federation Air Defense and some small Nuclear defense garrisons you are pretty much unbeatable even if inactive, this repeatedly comes up on my federations discord. The range of the defense interceptors and helicopters is also ridiculous and allows hugely spread out feds / empires to receive the benefits over an excessive part of the world. Defensive weapons have no good reason to have longer range than most offensive.

The economic game sure has boycotts which do about nothing with such low server populations, there is always C3 nations buying, but hostile taking over a countries corps has limited value as there is a limit on how many can be moved in a time span. I tried the hostile takeover and move out game, it limits to 20 corps moved then does not execute the rest and eventually they were canceled. This made it cause almost no damage as they could easily rebuild before more could move.

Until air defense gets fixed, players can ignore virtually all aggression. Full stop. The war game - the only part of the game where you really do interact with other players, is broken currently.

If we ignore that, we can also say that boycotts are basically useless. Nuke bans are basically useless. Security council measures besides providing aid to new players is pretty dang useless. Players targeted by sanctions can simply sell nukes or supplies to themselves from another country or from their enterprise to completely bypass any sanctions. Additionally, federations are not useful since there is almost no war, so there are almost never situations where you could rally enough players to get the minimum 10 votes for anything anyways. There's probably only one federation in the entire game that can use the security council for sanctions.

Regarding war levels, their existence *creates* doubt and fear in player minds. It tells players they could or should be scared, which usually is enough to deter players from ever moving up much in level and facing the "scary unknown" of war level 3.

Players are taught by the game to be afraid and they almost never recover from that. You're right that a "war world" exists, but NO NEW PLAYER SHOULD EVER SIGN UP IMMEDIATELY FOR OPEN PVP IN ANY GAME. No one competes against top players out of the gate in sports games, in shooter games, or in other strategy games. This isn't a good solution.

Furthermore, almost no one sticks around long enough to "graduate," or progress to the war world. You need to practice and accumulate assets before you're ready to fight other players, but players simply just don't do that. It took me a year to venture onto FB back before there were war levels at all, and at times, I have been one of the most aggressive and warlike players around. An average or "normal" player will never ever consider it, even though they might end up liking it, and it's partially because of how war levels are presented and how they play out.

As a result, what happens most often is a new player chooses a non-war world, gets scared of going up in war levels, can't find anyone to help them learn the game and quits. We have the short-term single player mode going on right now more often than I've ever seen it before.

Lastly, there are players whose primary motivation appears to be simply to irritate others. There is NO POSSIBLE WAY to interact with them if they choose to stay (or get stuck) at low war levels, so they can exist in perpetuity as an annoyance to most of the community. There are no repercussions. They're toxic, unhelpful, and selfish, and players who wish to teach them a lesson or "compete" against them have no options for doing so.

There's just so little benefit or call to player interaction these days that the social side of the game is basically gone.

If you go to game level on your home screen you will see (Judge My Empire) You are given two options 1) Peaceful 2) include defense. On all worlds except Fearless blue you should be required to play by either of those. If you choose peaceful you have war protection. If you choose defense you should need to purchase war protection.(when you desire it) It seems to me that players who chose the defense option but are never required to defend there countries receive a higher score than they deserve. That's all
Rob

Andy,

there are different ways how to balance. one way could be strong federation defence and removal of "always in peace" mode. being in federation protects people from being killed while they can still engage in small scale wars for the purpose of damaging the enemy.

i would suggest also to change federation defence logic and only allow 1 air wing to participate from each player in the defence instead of 3 wings regardless of number of players. that will trigger much bigger collaboration inside federation.

I like the input all good ideas. I would like to see the game move more towards strategy. First thing I would do is get rid of the def radar planes. Instead develop radar stations, preset by the game same as military bases. However each base would be responsible for a region. six per country. War protection would not protect them ever. They would need to be defended by garrisons and def units. This would allow players to coordinate together a strategic path into a country that would not be able to send up the interceptors in a timely response (allow lets say 10% to respond if destroyed) a base destroyed would require 25% restoration, before regaining any functionality. (25% at 75%)(50% at 50%)so on. One game month for complete restoration if construction material is available. I seem to remember in the past if the last airports was destroyed to 98% the air force was unable to take off at all. This should be re implemented. Def helis and attack helis would still function. Just some thoughts. I understand the difficulty in refactoring a program. I get it.
Rob

Andy, I would be interested to know what you are looking discover by having a country with high population. I originally left the game when the 80m population cap was introduced, watching my countries lose 100m people over a few rl months was not fun. But this does raise a question I have regarding game level 15 and 16 for peaceful players due to the average population requirements, unless willing to spend real money and constantly babysit many countries.

Are you planning to reconsider the population caps in the future? Perhaps even just for Leader countries to make balancing a good economy whilst meeting the average population requirements attainable?

Related to Robs point I feel part of strategy would be making locations matter, only coastal countries can operate navies and the such. I really like Robs point about making military bases / airfields stop functioning at levels of damage, then have special units that exist to repair them which do not require a base and repair over time based on unit size and material availability.

Thanks for the good suggestions.
we will seriously consider them and try to improve.
not everything is doable. or quickly doable.

on the population:

we know there are some difficulties when the population is large.
we have amplified these difficulties with a country that has a population of 500 millions.

It became very difficult and far too expensive. Much harder than in smaller countries and it exposed several processes that are playing at these levels.

we are implementing some tweaking to make it easier.
it will also make it easier for countries with 100 millions.

we are also looking at a reduction of the population loss in countries with a large population.

we think that growing the population at that level should be difficult, even expensive but as it is now, it is far too expensive and population is lost very quickly.

we are looking into it and will be back with solutions.

We do want to allow for larger population.
not make it trivial and just let it grow.

we used to have a processing issue in the past, when processing the next month data took many hours.

The last generation servers is much more powerful and the problem is long gone.

Thanks Andy, I am excited to see how these changes evolve over time. I understand that large population countries cause a challenge for a whole host of reasons. For those of us that opt to play the peaceful game a key motivator is either making in-game money and/or the achievement of reaching the higher levels. At the moment, anything above GL14 would realistically not be sustainable. Whilst one could achieve it the cost of buying population at the required rate prevents it from being feasible.