by Xcom » Sat Nov 10, 2012 11:59 pm One of the most game breaking mechanics would probably be the land ownership. P-claims cluttering the world and people abusing V-claims to expand endlessly from one end of the map to the other. Others using indestructible statues as walls to create indestructible walls as hearth vaults. Its already been discussed over 100 times and this is the hundred and first post. But I hope I can shed some light in a technical and interesting way to at least keep you all reading this to the end.
As of now the authority system is clearly not working as intended. Authority pumping is all to easy for any village to keep up. A properly boosted Int Cha character can pump a measly 200k LP a day with 300 int 300 cha to keep up a village with 1000 statues. This is obviously a broken game mechanic and can be abused to the level it is right now. I suspect that village authority drain was meant to put a cap on how far a village could be expanded and favor the bigger and more established players giving them the ability to expand farther and more aggressively BUT with some drawbacks.
The authority system as is right now is linearly expanding from one statue/banner to the next and also linearly giving more authority drain. But this causes problems as you can easily see below that a village can endlessly create statues and have the ability to easily keep up with the low authority drain as we have right now.
A well boosted character with 100 Int and 100 Cha and 500% LP boost can pump roughly 200k LP a day without any problems, equivalent to 40k base LP. This boosts the authority of a village by 400k authority. If the stats of this character were boosted well above those numbers into the 200/200 it jumps the authority gain 400k more landing on 800k authority per day. Powerhouses with 300/300 int cha and full civil can boost there stats to 400/400 and pump 1.6M athority per day. You can see what this leads to. 1.6M authority drain is equivalent to 1500 statues or 30.25M authority total.
This next graf shows the amount of time it takes before the authority of a village goes from full to less then 50k authority and becomes vulnerable.
The amount of time it takes increases from 13.3 days and stabilizes at around 19 days. It clearly shows that even small time villages can pump up 1500 statues with having 1 single powerhouse. Jerebonzela and Sunlet cheese can make farmer/crafters and combat toons into massive authority pumpers with 19 day buffers. Unless you quit the game this ensures that you wont ever run out of authority unless you stay below the authority drain. 1500 statues per powerhouse.
This means that one man villages can keep up with 1500 statue villages. Large village with multiple people in it wont ever run out of authority. Basically no drawbacks in having more then enough statues. Just as a baseline comparison a large village could support up to 15 000 statues equivalent to 300M authority. The repercussion is detrimental. The world map is 25k x 25k large, this is equpivalent to 833 x 833 statues distances long. It clearly shows how broken the mechanic is when a 2 man powerhouse can upkeep a fully statued megabase vault and still have the ability to stretch out statues across the whole world.
Arguably this is equivalent to 3000 steel / WI and using backwards math this is equivalent to 3000 / .4 = 7500 cast iron > 7500 / .2 = 37 500 iron ore. A very good iron vain can give up to 1500 cast and a small one around 700. It takes about 1 - 1.5 month for a dedicated player to dig this much iron out. A team of players can dig this out in 2 weeks legitimately with no bots. It could be argued that the amount of effort it takes to put in and dig all this out should be rewarding to any base and anyone with this much effort put in should be able reap the reward. But we are not talking about a 100 man team putting in 5 months time to work this out. 10 people can do this in 1 week. Obviously it shows how broken this part of the authority / statue system is.
The following is my suggestion. Let me just add that I am not in favor of scratching everything and starting all over again having to tweak and balance the next broken mechanic. Modifying the current system makes more sense.
The first thing I would change would be the authority drain on villages. Not the authority amount but just the drain. The more statues would me more authority drain. At some point it should be made so a village would have extreme problems keeping up its authority drain while the amount of authority total would just incrementally increase making it harder and harder to keep up. This would still make larger villages able to keep up with the larger drain as more members would pump more authority more frequently giving them opportunity to expand further but with an actual drawback.
This graph shows a modified version of the authority drain system. It shows how fast the village drops below 50k authority in days from full authority. With just less then 2 day before dipping below 50k authority with 500 statues and 50M total authority.
It is simply a modification of the old formula Authority drain = (number of statues) *1050
to Authority drain = (number of statues)^2 *1050 / 50
Making each statue cost more drain exponentially.
A large village would be able to keep up with the authority drain but would easily deplete it just as quick. This would make the system more balanced as statue spamming would actually have a side effect. At 1000 statues the drain would be equal to the authority pool making it impossible to keep up and at 18 statues it would benefit of taking 25 days to deplete from full authority.
The following would be the side effects of this system and counter suggestions for how the system should be modified to solve the problems.
The biggest problem would probably be the P-claim. Easily made by 4 bones and 3 dreams. Even a noob can muster up in mere hours and established players being able to spam on alts to clutter up the whole world. Completely indestructible to common players and a nuisance for mid ranged sized villages today. I honestly don't understand how such a permanent claim system have been overlooked in its ease of getting spammed. There should be a cool down period on them just like everything else that can impact the world on such level as P-claims do. A clear large indicator should also go along with it alerting people in the area that a P-claim is going up so people can fend of new spam claims. Give P-idols a 24h cool down just like V-idols.
Right now village authority is used to remove P-claims. This is clearly a broken mechanic as it is easy for P-claim owners to just spam LP into a P-claim leaving a permanent scar on the world that is nearly impossible to remove even long after they have quit the game. Villages should simply be able to challenge the P-claim idols and after a moderate cool down be able to destroy the P-Idols. P-idols would also have to be strategically defended and not used as indestructible obstacles as of right now. Obviously larger villages would be able to remove P-claims of larger size quicker giving more authority pool faster cool down removals. Naked villages with no statues would have a significant cool down on large P-claims favoring attacking larger P-claims with bigger villages.
And for the 1000th time. P-claims should degrade over time. There are more dead P-claims in this world then players in it. Random junk claims everywhere. How hard would it be to just put a destructible timer on them. Junk P-claims randomly blocking water, clay nodes, you name it and the owners have quit months and months ago.
V-Idols should also only be plaiceable on P-claims of the same owner making it impossible to just spam V-idols. This would make it into a 3 step process in removing random P-claims around the world. Arguably it would make it a bit more difficult in removing smaller P-claims. But if it would be made harder to make new p-claims and have them degrade over time it would make smaller random P-claims less frequent and if they would exist around the world it would have to be upkeep by someone making p-claims significant enough to need the effort in removing them.
Smell of Arrogance