W3C - War Missions and war levels (Little Upsilon)

War Missions will become the way for a war player to move to a higher war level. War levels are a measure of the player's capability to fight wars and can be obtained by showing the capability to fight and win wars against a sequence of enemies with increasing capabilities.

The war level does not depend on the size of the army, military units or the availability of nuclear weapons. Game levels will depend on the war level instead of depending on the defense and defensive indexes. The dependency on the defense and defensive indexes will be phased out.

Starting at level 0, a war player can attack a neighboring C3 country and try to conquer it. Ending the war with victory, the player will win war level 1.

More wars against C3 countries will follow, and each of them will become more complex and require better strategy and military power to win. The reason for the increasing complexity is that the C3 countries will have an increasing level of defense. They might be located further away from the country border and in higher levels, they will fight back.

As a war player, you can always fight a war against a C3 country of your capabilities. However, to move up the levels, you have to fight a war and win against a C3 country that has a war level which is higher than yours.

All wars against C3 countries will start immediately after declaration and can be fought rather quickly if you have the necessary military force.

When declaring war, the war player will be presented with several options including the choice to fight a C3 war and the required level of the C3 country. When choosing to fight a higher level C3 country, the choice will be made by the game, upgrading a suitable country to the correct level and starting the war. The country may be close by or further away, or in some cases very far away.

If the war declaration is against a country with a president, the game procedure will just make sure that a very high war level player will not declare war against a country that belongs to a much lower war level player.

This will guarantee that high level players will not bulldoze over small players at much lower levels. High level players will have to find real wars to fight against matching players.

Reaching high war levels will be rewarded with extra gold coins.

Seems very cool, pretty much exactly what my idea was. 2 questions:

1. When does this go into effect?

2. Will there also be limits when attacking a real player who is higher levels? Such as, if Joe is level 0 can he still declare war against Bob who is level 10? I hope not, otherwise players will intentionally keep their level low to avoid being declared on then be able to pop high war level players at their own will.

This is a much better change than what was announced yesterday and certainly will lead to more interest in war.

i like the theory, but wb pointed out one problem

and what happens when some one low enough in level to you starts buying and hosing your corps? you just get to watch?

and those people that will keep their levels low, and pick on the weakest member of a fed? the higher level players can't help?

and how about inactives? with out removing the level limits in regards to inactives, you are effectively stopping your self raiding inactives by leveling up.

but back to economic warfare. it would be unrealistic to put limitations on econ war, based on the nature of it. but the war player that levels to the point that he can't retaliate... might as will quit and start a new account...

...

whiteboy:

yes, we have made a 180 and adopted the idea of different levels C3 countries. It is much simpler than we have anticipated when confronted with the idea.

1. It is quite simple to implement. we are busy with the work plan and will know in more details in a week or two.

This is not going to take months. it does not require changes in the war engine itself but just the conditions around starting wars and some admin work.

There are no major user interface additions or changes.

and it is urgent. We do want to launch a new world before we do this so details will follow.

2. First, we expect people to be interested in high war levels because of advantages linked to these higher levels and awards you can win.

Second, we will allow wars between presidents when levels are equal or similar. exact definitions of similar will follow and we hope to tune them, based on players response and how they experience level differences.

Orbiter:

good issues and we will solve them.

I am not sure corporations becoming private is a reason for war. It is more a reason for celebration because private corporations are, and will become even more profitable. They pay a fortune to your country. (but this is a different issue).

Fed wars and fed support will remain in place of course but we will have to tune the rules and keep them very simple.

Economic war is indeed what we need, without firing a shot. I hope to complete the economic missions text in the coming week and publish it here.

This is incomplete on the details and you are welcome to comment.

What we hope is that this will be the base for a full restoration of a very active war game that will be non trivial (unlike keeping attacks on simple C3s) and will also leave the peaceful players out if they do not go up the war levels they are quite safe.

There might be some cases when they might invoke WP but even if it remains necessary in extreme cases, it will be a fraction of the current practice.

we should not let level 0 or 1 or even 2? war players attack countries with presidents.

Another question... or set of questions please! Sorry, but just want to make sure I understand.

Will the levels that are attained by completing war missions be on a per country basis, or per president basis. For ie... if I attain level 5 with one country in my empire, will all countries, including c3's that I later acquire be at level 5?

I all for fighting wars against higher level players, but at the same time does this confront the use of worthless c3 decs? Could I attain a high level like 10 and take c3's and use them to dec level 10 players?

I also like Orbiters question about a fed that has high and low level members. If a low level member is attacked, can the higher level ones respond offensively?

Thanks

Jason

federation competitions with rewards would be nice.

The level will be for the entire empire.

If you have war level 10, and you want to take a C3 country, this will be a level 10 C3 (or level 11 to move to a next level), and the war will be fierce.

I don't think you will do this to then declare on a war level 10 player, or you might, but that too will be a challenge and a real war.

Fed wars is indeed an issue and we will return to this later.

In the mean time, if you fully get it so far, make some suggestions on the fed wars.

My mind boggles at who is going to do the fighting for a war level 10 C3...
Are we to believe that code can be written to match human skill and tactics. The best I can see is that all C3s of a certain level will fight more or less identically and so will become easy to master fairly quickly.
I hope you prove me wrong Tom, if so, your company has a very promising future in many fields of prediction and response, and the military will surely knocking on your door.

Crafty,

Our wars are not as complex as real ones.

we think that we can bring a lot of variations in the war response and military power of C3s.

It is in fact easily possible to make them invincible.

The real challenge will be to make them increasingly powerful, not to overdo it and make sure there is so much variation that no two wars will be the same.

can we choose to fight a c3 of unusual level? for instance, if i'm level 8 and want to fight a level 5 c3, can i have the option?

additionally, if we are taking on heavier losses, shouldn't their be higher rewards? i mean, for example with that... the remaining units in a c3... will they disappear?

i think it would be a good idea to allot you to choose any level of c3, that you have already defeated, and have stuff left over to loot. the reason for it, is at level ten, (for instance,) a warlord can get beat down to nothing, and would be forced to pick on lower level warlords for recovery. if higher level c3s, (with out the gold coin reward,) provide better loot, it could help take pressure off younger warlords with less knowledge and resources.

and as far as economic war, i'm all for it. but as it stands now, you have people that just sit in wp, and harass other players endlessly. once you give them some sort of level protection, they will use that, and fight economically.

and yes, normally a corp going public from private would be a celebration, unless they ruin the corp, and instead of making your 3.3B monthly profit of it, you now make 0.3B... with the proposed changes, you know that their will be players that take every advantage of warlords that have leveled up. and if the answer to that is, "deal with it," then in the current environment, their are allot of "warlords," that would do better to not level up, past the minimum they need to dec a player.

again, i'm for economic war, but i'm against being restricted in how i retaliate...

a further thought on feds

of course fedmates should be able to assist each other, and counter dec

but... what about if player A decs on player B, THEN player C joins player B's fed... are we going to allow for fed adjustment after the fact... just curious.

and in the case that C counters A for his dec on B, can D counter B and/or C if he is feded with A?

these are just questions, don't really care on the first one, just want to know. second one, counter decs should be allowed both ways

The idea is to give you GCs awards if you go up the levels.

C3 wars will be at the same level you have or up.
instead of looting them, gold coins will help with the cost but your economy has to work too.
Once you win the war, there will be some stuff you can take out but this will hardly be the reason for the war.

I think that we need to solve the problem of badly performing private corporations.

punish the president if there are no workers because of bad education system and allow the president to retake the corporation if the owner reduces production or does not purchase raw materials.

but this is a separate issue and a diversion from the war issue.

"punish the president if there are no workers because of bad education system" -Tom

lol, i'm going to laugh at that one for a long time....

i love it!! "punish the president" thats going into my favorite quotes, thanks Tom!!!

Additional war idea to solve the man power problem:

Professional soldiers and officers.

we think of the idea to allow players to purchase boosters that will deliver 10.000 soldiers or 2000 officers.

these soldiers and officers will remain in the army, will not be part of the regular population but they will reduce the need for workers and managers to be recruited into the army and they will reduce the risk of automatic deactivation which was one of the problems discussed on the war subject and we have promised to try to resolve.

The president has the responsibility to make sure all corporations can hire to capacity. Education is essential to achieve this.

The owner of the private corporation, has the responsibility to keep the corporation supplied and at full production.

you can repurchase the corporation at a low price if the private owner does not do his part.

What if the president is not doing his part? stop paying him... no taxes, and not other contributions to the country?

I am happy it is funny ha ha.

Just remove the "takeover" button. Complicating things when there is a simple solution annoys me. Besides, you will have to do something like that sooner or later, so how about you spare everyone some time and resources and give it a go? It is beyond sensible, it is wise.

There are some good points in here from Serpent and Orbiter, we should definitely make sure that fed members can still counter declare to protect their new fedmates, if not then that will be a big blow to the federation system. I would suggest to keep it simple, if someone declares war on a member of a federation, then anyone in the federation at that time can counter regardless of level. *However*, they can only counter against the specific country(ies) that declared war, this will ensure players don't use this rule to turn around and wipe out weaker players.

Just to clarify something, if I reach level 10, can I then *only* declare war on Level 10 or 11 c3's and not Level 1-9? I'm sure that would bother some people but I actually really like that idea, c3's will no longer be worthless and that new $12 nominal value for them could become fairly realistic (depending on your level and just how strong the c3's are). It will diminish the problem of c3 warfare because if Player A is level 10 and Player B wants to attack player A via c3 warfare, they have to spend a bunch of time, weapons and ammo taking the level 10 c3's and if they were to instead just say, well then I'll stay at Level 1 and have cheap c3's, then they couldn't attack Player A because he or she is Level 10.

That is a great way to address two big problems, the fact that c3's have *very* little value (current stated value is $12, but in reality it's $-.50 probably, assuming you know how to take it efficiently and strip it out), PLUS strongly diminish the issue of constant c3 warfare. The only problem is that the worker problems will have to be addressed, if you make it cost a bunch of money/time to take a c3 while the issues we continue to have with workers (HLW is the biggest) then there will be a lot of unhappy people.

Overall though Tom, this is a great idea. Like all ideas there are always a few issues here and there, but this is something that WILL seriously create a robust war game while at the same time allowing those who choose not to fight to be left alone.

Great job.

EDIT: Also, as far as the soldier/officer booster, I like the concept but I think it's going to have to be ALOT more than that for 1 GC. We're talking about military's that are at least 1 million (if even slightly decent) and 10 million for the biggest, 2k/10k is not enough of an effect on those kind of numbers. That is only enough to run 10 NDB's or 1k MIB's, it's not that those are bad numbers, it's just they aren't worth a full GC.

as far as the booster, i agree with wb, really, that is a pretty small number for the cost

plus, could you make it more of a market? i'd like to be able to sell just mlm, i can generate allot of them, and sell them to players that need them. so a market for selling specific worker types, not just mlm, or llw, but also hlw, and hlm, and what not?

but back to using boosters for extra officers and soldiers, how long would they last? would they age like normal pop, and retire? do they enlist or are commissioned for 5 game years? (about 3 rl weeks on wg) still you consider 50 gc for 100k mlm? you'd be better off buying 10m pop that way you could at least sell some back, if you win. so as a booster, to make it worth the value, you really need to increase it to 5 times the suggested value, at least. so minimum of 10k mlm for one gc? still pretty short, but better, 5 gc (equal to 1m pop,) would give you 50k mlm, still doesn't really sound equal, but maybe thats the point? not a cheap solution to poor war prep, but a rather expensive one?

I also think that this system will solve the main problems we have with the war game.
some remain and will have t be solved before we call it a good solution.

the feds must remain in function and they must be able to participate. This however will be part of presidents wars that will be enhanced to allow for everyone to start at the same time.

If you are at war level 10, you can attack C3s of level 10 or 11.
if you want to go up a level, it will be a c3 of level 11. The game will choose one for you because it might be further away from your country.

if you are attacking a C3 country at your level, it will be 10 in this case and it might be your own choice of a country but it will be instantly upgraded to become a level 10 C3.

I hope I am clear enough.

I do not see the connection to the HLW problem but part of what we are changing in the growing corporations is the relation between the workers groups to solve it. I expect to see improvements starting to kick in within several weeks.

We did not decide on any price for soldiers and officers boosters.

It is not meant to have the whole army built in this way. Having a 100.000 such soldiers will already reduce the deactivation problem. we do not want to entirely eliminate the influence of war on the economy.

we happened to discuss such a market today.

direct trading is being expanded and we will start by adding cargo shuttles to direct trading with more products to follow. (mainly ones that are not traded on space stations).

having a market seems a good idea and in that case, we do not need to decide on the price.

The problem is that we do not think countries should sell their population unless the population is at very high level.

already now, selling your population has adverse effects on the country.

more to come on this one.

I suggest we get happy with this plan people of SC.

It seems to me a really good development and like others say, confusing the issue with lots of little possible problems we might forsee can only stall the process and mess it up. It will settle out. As any player of experience will verify, this is a long term game, not one of instant gratification.
Here's to seeing what war level the game will decide I am, 2? maybe 3? anyone know a bookmaker?

Tom, if your intention is to have fewer private CEO corporations, are you going to drop the CEO corp numbers required for indexes?

If not, it will make higher levels even more difficult to reach.

Hugs and respect

Jo

So for a level 10 president to take a level 10 c3 obviously they will have to use alot more assets to do so. If a level 2 president takes a level 2 c3 they would use less assets. Will those c3's that each player took have roughly the same amount of assets and population? Even tho the level 10 president spent more time and assets?

Thanks

Jason

im thinking the higher the lvl, the more your tactics and weaponry will come into play.

A lvl 2 will take only a small amount of knowhow and weapons, whereas a lvl 10 will take much more

Its been stated c3 wont be about assets in them although there will be some to remove