For consideration. Suggestions to meet game goals.

Acknowledged game goals:

A. "Bring us back to the situation when good players used the money they earn, to build their economy, extend their empires, purchase weapons and fight wars."

B. "We should all look at how this is for beginners who are unable to offer 90T for 2000 gold coins and who see this as a hopeless place where they will never be able to compete." "new players are not served with a gold coins market where players offer huge amounts of game money to purchase numbers of gold coins these new players see as out of reach. " Create an environment where new players can complete.

C. Introduce mission game. A fun dynamic of the game to make it accessible to more players.

D. Limit ways to "gain many gold coins for little risk".

Suggestions:

1. Remove cash awards for winning wars against C3s after the first six wars that are not wars to increase war level.

How this addresses game concerns:

A. With removing the primary incentive of continuous raiding of C3s, players will focus more on building their economy, wars to extend their empire, and fighting more meaningful wars against players or to raise war level.

B. Raiding is currently an incredible revenue stream out of reach to new players. Retaining the cash in C3s for the first six wars allows them the cash to practice their first wars and aligns with the maximum wars you can wage to reach war level 3.

C. This activity will be effectively replaced by missions. Removing the cash incentive from raiding will remove this pursuit as competition to missions.

D. Obviously, continuous raiding for cash the C3s of the same level for money is exactly the activity that raises a lot of cash, for little risk.

2. Add a bonus to welfare index or birth rate (their choice) for countries out of war protection with a bonus modified by war level. Maybe other ideas for bonuses can be considered.

How this addresses game concerns:

A. With an economic bonus available for countries out of war protection (as well as the country score change), an incentive is available to have this off and pursue a defensive military as an alternative to protection. With the additional incentive of having higher war level, more players will pursue these higher levels as well to achieve higher benefits. Combined with the cash incentive of continually raiding C3s gone, more players will climb war level ranks.

B. With veteran players pursuing higher war levels, beginners will be able to leave the confines of WL1 and 2 and not find many players with massive resource to greet them at WL3 to threaten their assets.

Taking these steps, along with the monthly awards changes, will increase competition and risk for players. I believe these steps will also work to move the game away from simply a mechanism to raise gold coins. Should these steps be implemented, I believe one more change will be possible.

3. Add the ability to purchase gold coins with game money to a maximum number of gold coins equal to the largest country monthly award per real month.

A. I believe this can remain an incentive to build successful countries and enterprises and that there must be an additional outlet for accumulated cash.

B. New players will not be priced out of competing for gold coins with the cap and the hard work the put in to build their countries and enterprises will be rewarded.

Nice Ideas Aries, not all I agree with, but good ideas nontheless.

I just thought about the problem of having too many GCs in ones account it may would have suffieced if any amount of lets say more then 500 GC would automatically be diminished by 1% per RL-Day or such, would have been enough to pay for what you wanted and would be an drive to not do the Dagobert Duck with the GCs ;)

But hey, Andy said this is how it will come, so dont all we vets tell them what we like about the game we decided to stay and pay for

Crap its easy for any new player too make money buy some off aa batts and mib batts with missles and a few tank or heavy art divisons and there instantly on there way no excuse.

Steve, you made my point. Defeating no challenge C3s is not the direction the game is going. That activity should not compete with missions.

For more food for thought. A look at econ vs. raiding C3s.

Imagine a scenario where one was so powerful they shut out competition and grew their enterprise to run every country in the world! Wow, amazing right? In the days of Rockefeller and other powerful tycoons of the day, no one controlled more than 1% of the US economy let alone the world. Even Simcountry put limitations in place to make this difficult. Well, lets look anyway.

On LU their are just less than 8100 corps. A very good enterprise can get $520m profit per corp but then will pay taxes. Corporate taxes will average 30% or 156m/corp and enterprise taxes will add about $124m/corp. So it looks like this.

81000 * 520m/corp - 156m/corp - 124m/corp

$42.12T (profit) - $12.636T (corp tax) - $10.044T (enterprise tax) = $19.44T/month or $233.28T/game year.


So running a very good enterprise of 81000 corps would make $233.28T/game year. Of course, this is next to impossible. What is possible is to raid C3s of no challenge (ones not to raise war level). Checking the news, an average year will see 40+ C3s conquered of various levels. I would bet the average is level 4 or higher but will use 4.

This adds $160T+ to the world economy of cash. Not only that, raiding this many C3s is possible to do by yourself. Time consuming, but possible, and certainly no more time consuming running ASQ on 81000 corps would be.

This is the challenge I would argue that new players have. On the one hand, they want to build their empire and, on the other, they find they have no chance to compete with the income ability only available out of the protection of the first few war levels.

Removing the ability to convert this cash to gold coins does not fix this imbalance or encourage anyone to build their empires or fight meaningful wars to raise war levels.

One last thought. Months after missions is released..

Will vets teach new players how to raid C3s or how to do missions?

This will be the test to see if missions is successful.

I would suggest that in months to come, the game will be very formulaic Aries. Players will start and have most all the information on how to grow in the game, without much of a mental challenge. Strategies and tactics will virtually be a thing of the past, or at least, original ones will. This can be seen to have started to happen already as anyone who has been here before or here a longish time, can see.

Now, that isn't to say it's a bad way to go, all the games online seem to be like that. It's just personally I wish for a game like the old SC where the freedom to play in a multitude of complicated ways was available. I have even tried playing the currency market for the challenge, I was not prepared to invest my house and future though. Anyways...