Raids should have 1/4th to 1/3rd the time length of normal battles

[Keshian]

Basically the idea is raids should be quick - you go in and get out and thats why the populace is not aroused as yous teal their shit after killing off the small army lodged there.  So the raids should be 1/3rd even 1/4th the normal battle length so it is a real risk of losing for attackers who try to steal gear with minimal fighting.

Right now its set up for abuse and glitching, but this would make it viable again as attackers actually risk losing the battle and thus significant numbers of troops/gear.  So this will force people to use smaller armies on raids, which will also allows defenders to realize whether it is a raid or a siege and plan accordingly in the five hours of reinforcement.

Right now 800 man armies are raiding just to get gear without any risk to themselves whatsoever and it is setup only for abuse rather than a real feature of the game.  Please consider this fix sooner rather than later.


Also, alternative/additional suggestion: at end of attacker reinforcement window with their decisions finalized, list whether it is battle or raid on battle page.  3 hours to reinforce based on that information.

[Harafat]

Disagree, put an army in your fief and your troubles are gone.

Dont react emotional because mercs lost with 50 agaisnt 800.

The way you put it attackers should be at disadvantage no matter what. Raiding locks you down for 24 hours, thus makes you pay upkeep and gives defence another 24 hrs to reinforce, and you can only do it if there's not much of an army there.
That's nerf enough.

[Tyr_]

We'll never forget this 50 brave men and women who decided to defend their home while being armed with one set of -4 equipment for each of them.


But yeah, current raiding is a bit stupid. Raiding a Village or a City is ok, but raiding a castle where the population actually is supposed to be a garrison of trained soldiers and therefore should be albe to defend it is kind of stupid.

[Keshian]

Disagree, put an army in your fief and your troubles are gone.

Dont react emotional because mercs lost with 50 agaisnt 800.

The way you put it attackers should be at disadvantage no matter what. Raiding locks you down for 24 hours, thus makes you pay upkeep and gives defence another 24 hrs to reinforce, and you can only do it if there's not much of an army there.
That's nerf enough.

But its being abused constantly.  Whether its a 500 man army in the fief with 2000 population, attackers just attack with 3000 troops but only raid and win the gear and then win the real fight because they avoided having the 2000 population having real gear and there is no risk whatsoever to them.  Its being abused by almost every faction that can't win stand-up fights so they resort to glitch abuse.

[Harafat]

But its being abused constantly.  Whether its a 500 man army in the fief with 2000 population, attackers just attack with 3000 troops but only raid and win the gear and then win the real fight because they avoided having the 2000 population having real gear and there is no risk whatsoever to them.  Its being abused not only by your faction, but also every other faction like yours that can't win stand-up fights so they resort to glitch abuse.

I dont agree this is bad. 2000 pop would mean a city/castle, or a heavily converted army>population to avoid upkeep. If you hold a city/castle, you should protect it with an anrmy. If they raid, they lock themselves down for 24hrs, hence, as i said be4, leaving the defenders time to reinforce. If def fails at this, then thats their problem, not the people raiding.
Raiding is introduced to give small timers a chance to rip off large clans that dont pay attention last strat. this is good. That large factions are also using this feature is being smart, not exploiting



However Kesh, i can agree that it should be a limited time, like half, but nothing that adds too much more disadvantage for attackers.

[Turboflex]

Raiding is fine, population is freebie tickets that cost nothing and should not be counted on for anything. People shouldn't be able to crutch on them.

Keep more than 1000-1200 army in a fief and raids won't succeed. If the attacker is trying to do multiple raids, keep reinforcing it, you have 29 hours to move more armies up.

The attacker has to keep attacking the same city/castle over and over, and should be incurring heavy losses each round.

If the defender is weaker than attacker, eventually he will lose anyways.

[Tyr_]

Nah, i mean just regarding the logic, nothing about free tickets:

Village Population: Farmers, peasants, etc... Nothing to stand against Soldiers
City Population: Merchants, craftsmen and maybe some guards which are in the city's Keep/garrison, so they need time to get to the walls and fighting against raiders
Castle Population: Mainly Soldiers, very compact, so they should be able to defend the walls against a raid since the way from the barracks/armory to the wall is nothing.

[Keshian]

Also that last sentence is just stupid. My faction doesnt abuse shit and you know it. And we can win from anybody, so gtfo. We're debating game mechanics, not playing a game of who can insult the other better. If you want to do that, thats fine as well, but stick to the raiding debate here

Sorry.  I was ina hurry and didnt check who was typing and from your statement I assumed it was a nordmen defending the last raid. 

I have already seen several very large factions abuse this tool when they fight defenders with better mercs in order to nullify them through an easily abusable feature.  (HRE was not one of them, sorry again)

[dodnet]

Raiding is fine, population is freebie tickets that cost nothing and should not be counted on for anything. People shouldn't be able to crutch on them.

So you shouldn't be able to raid with a 100 army neither...

[Turboflex]

Why not? Either the defender has army in his fief or he doesn't...

If the defender doesn't have army, is just using freebie population, and is also stashing real gear in there, he deserves to lose it. If he has army, 100 raiders should not be a problem.

[Keshian]

Turboflex that sounds good in general, but in actual practice how its been playing out is this:

Army A of 1000 attacks fief with 500 population 500 army - Fief has better mercs and gets a 2:1 K/d and a bunch of gear from Army A and keeps thier own gear of 500 not used yet as looting is working as intended. 500 population, 0 army as army ticks go first.

So Owner of Army A quickly sends Army B of some random clan member with 150 troops to raid the fief.  Owner of fief also has a guy with 150 troops only slightly farther away, but the new mechanism only allows that guy to transfer 50 troops for the battle.  So Army A gets the advantage of 100+ troops just by that game mechanic alone.  So with 3:1 odds they barely squeak a victory with 10 minutes left by staying at ranged the whole time and steal all the gear of 2000 troops.

By that time both sides have brough up reinforcements for village and village attack, but attackers get massive gold/equipment advantage for free even though they sucked in actual battle because of abuse of bug. 

Its primarily being abused to compensate for bad fighters.  By limiting the time frame it takes this into account where you have to be good enough to kill them in the allotted time (the current setup no one will ever run out of time in a raid).  By very definition raids are supposed to be quick and sudden and catch the population unawares and get out before they mobilize.

Also, alternative/additional suggestion: At the 2 hour mark where attackers are finalized, list whether it is raid or battle on battle page so 3 hours to reinforce for defenders.  Right now its a stupid micromanagement guessing game - do I leave enough gear only for 300 troops or for 300 troops + 300 population when fighting a 500 man army, which I don't think was the intention of the raiding feature when you have gear right there to equip but you can't commit them because you can't tell what battle mode they are doing.

[BaleOhay]

Better option.. at a certain time in the match if raiders have not won pop gets mobilized and joins the fight... have a count down timer if the raiders do not win in that time the pop joins the defenders numbers.

makes.raiding viable but risky at the same time

[Turboflex]

Turboflex that sounds good in general, but in actual practice how its been playing out is this:

Army A of 1000 attacks fief with 500 population 500 army - Fief has better mercs and gets a 2:1 K/d and a bunch of gear from Army A and keeps thier own gear of 500 not used yet as looting is working as intended. 500 population, 0 army as army ticks go first.

So Owner of Army A quickly sends Army B of some random clan member with 150 troops to raid the fief.  Owner of fief also has a guy with 150 troops only slightly farther away, but the new mechanism only allows that guy to transfer 50 troops for the battle.  So Army A gets the advantage of 100+ troops just by that game mechanic alone.  So with 3:1 odds they barely squeak a victory with 10 minutes left by staying at ranged the whole time and steal all the gear of 2000 troops.

The problem with this scenario is that you left out the part where the faction of the fief owner actually has 29 hours (more if you include time where they see 1000 man army approaching) to move up real reinforcements for the 2nd battle. In 29+ hours you could easily move large 500+ armies close to 40km. That is more than a reasonable timeframe for a faction to reinforce if they are capable of it, and if they are not, then there are serious questions of how viable their ownership of that fief was in the first place.

[Keshian]

Better option.. at a certain time in the match if raiders have not won pop gets mobilized and joins the fight... have a count down timer if the raiders do not win in that time the pop joins the defenders numbers.

makes.raiding viable but risky at the same time

I really like this idea.


29 hours???  its 24 hours and with the speed of travel it really isn't that much time, certainly not enough time to get from one fief to another in most of our territory.  Also, odds are this is part of an ongoing war e.g. lljk and shogunate, so the raid feature is used to nullify better fighters by stealing gear with minimal risk.  I do think most people agree that the raid feature needs tweaking from the way it is currently setup. 

Every raid I have seen in Strategus 4.0 so far (i've been on defending side on most of them) has been an attempt to abuse the feature for advantage, not as an actual raid feature - the only exception I've seen is with Muki's 1 man army in the village.  Every other one was just trying to steal gear with an army that couldn't beat the population+troops so they try instead to steal the gear to make the defenders fight in peasant gear - usually this is after 1 or more failed attacks in an attempt to make up for their own weak mercenary skill.  And it primarily works because defenders have to fully equip troops and population without knowing it is araid or battle so attackers get free gear and almost no risk to themselves and it basically avoids real battles with equally equipped forces.  Attackers tend to already be at a numerical advantage - usually why theya re attacking and the current raid feature gives way to much of an abusable glitching advantage on top of that by those clans that abuse it, while the clans that refuse to abuse a glitch are at a disadvantage.


Or take for example a smaller, 1-village clan, they got raided.  Being a small clan that 24 hours only gives thm 100 troops to accumulate as they are a 1 village clan, once again favoring larger factions that abuse game features.

[Turboflex]

I really like this idea.


29 hours???  its 24 hours and with the speed of travel it really isn't that much time, certainly not enough time to get from one fief to another in most of our territory.  Also, odds are this is part of an ongoing war e.g. lljk and shogunate, so the raid feature is used to nullify better fighters by stealing gear with minimal risk.  I do think most people agree that the raid feature needs tweaking from the way it is currently setup. 

Yes, 29 hours to bring up reinforcements for a 2nd battle.

24 hours between start of attack and actual battle (more if you spotted them approaching), then 5 more hours to reinforce if they launch a 2nd attack instantly. Travelling at 17 metres/min over 24 hours covers 25km, add another 5 hours of quickmarch at 40 metres/min is another 12km = total 37km in 29 hours or over 1/3 of the map.

Again if you cannot reinforce during that period, it really begs the question how viable the ownship of that fief was, or if the owner was completely outclassed in size and politically.

Raiding is hardly the ultimate move, often it could result in you taking much longer/great losses to capture a fief cuz it gives people a chance to keep reinforcing a strong fief when if you sieged it you coulda taken it in one shot. You to lose a lot of extra gear if it fails, and if the defenders only keep a 1:1 gear:army ratio on the fief you would win nothing if successful, and now face the same opposition in reinforcements. Shogunate is using it against LLJK cuz they assume they are disorganized (poor gear organization, bad at reinforceing properly).