Suggestion: How to balance out the attacker/defender situation

[Tyr_]

Currently you can easily hide inside a castle/city with many players which produce lots of tickets for your defense while the attackers provide the equipment since you loot 50% of the used stuff everytime, maybe you get lucky and the attacker fails to lose all his tickets before the time runs out and then you have even more equipment.

I just had an idea how to balance this situation out - I haven't thought much about it yet, so it wont be perfect but i would like some input on this. So, what I suggest:

Remove automatic generation of population for fiefs.

Increase the population cap of fiefs.

City: 5000
Caste: 2500
Village: 1000

Step two:
When you attack a fief, the tickets the defenders lose should affect both, population and army, I'd suggest a 50/50 split. If you kill 1500 defenders 750 of the fiefs population and 750 of its army die.

Whats the idea behind this?

A) When the fief runs out of population tickets the attacker wins the battle, no matter how many army-tickets are inside this is kind of stupid^^

or

B) When the fief runs out of population the city cannot receive any reinforcements (gold, equipment,army) and army cannot be converted into population. This means that the army inside the fief is cut off from the rest of the world. Also the upkeep costs of an army that is stationed inside the city should increase to maybe 50% of the amount of gold that this army would take on the open field. If there is no attack on a city for 48 hours army can be converted into population again, which then allows you to put more troops&gear in and also gives you the possibilty to manage the fiefs equipment.

This would mean a city will be conquered after 10.000 tickets got killed. Well, thats not much, therefore my last idea to complete this:

Converting army to Population

Cities can only receive population boosts of 500 man
A 500 man army gives you 500 population. If you want to increase the cities population by another 500 you need to invest 1000 army. If you do it a third time it needs 1500 and so on.
This multiplicator should start to decrease by 1 per day after the city doesnt get attacked for 48 hours, so 72 hours to decrease it the first time.


This would make sieges on cites less random. If you want to defend your fief it will get more and more expensive since you have to spend an huge amount of army-tickets to keep the population over 0 if the siege lasts long enough, and if you don't fill up the population your fiefs army starves out because of the high upkeep.
Also it would force more open field battles. You need to stop the enemy on the open at least for some days so you can reinforce your city again and if it already gets besieged you will do more counterattacks out of the city.
In addition to that this would prevent fiefs being at 100% defensive power after every attack like it is now (another suggestion to prevent this was already made: walls should stay destroyed for some days after they got catapulted).

Input pls.

[Butan]

The idea on incrementing cost to army-pop conversion is good.


Splitting 50/50 casualties on population/troops in fief's defense might be a good tool to create a synergy with a game change like you suggest; but since the population auto-regenerates automatically, you will never have 0 pop for more than one hour (and even then, someone inside could just convert 1 pop to keep it "open").


I'm all for reworking raid a bit (so you dont need to have a Nerd Lord to keep the gear on him) but making them more powerful to take fiefs.

(another suggestion to prevent this was already made: walls should stay destroyed for some days after the get catapulted).

+1



I maybe have a counter-solution to make fiefs harder to defend:


- X population can only feed X troops : having more troops that the population can feed with, will result in "starvation" (the correct starvation haha)
=> you'll need to convert more army to population (or lose troops by the hour)
=> there will be less "power" to fiefs since they cant hold an infinite amount of troops (or need to be held by people inside which will cost a lot of money)
=> there will be a "hard cap" on troops stacking since you cant have infinite of population inside fiefs


It will increase the cost of troops and decrease their numbers (that needs to be converted into population and thus immobile and raid-able), it will increase the gold cost of having armies ready in a fief (if you want to have mobile reinforcements inside that cost a ton of upkeep), and make it impossible to hold any fiefs with infinite troops, thus giving penalties to those who wishes to play on the defensive.

It will also put more incentive into sending troops to attack.


Example that could not exist anymore:

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This idea combined with walls staying destroyed for X time, + "real besieging" idea (look for topics inside this section) where a besieged fief cant receive reinforcements but needs to attack the besieger = more chance for a proper balance of attack/defense, which I think EVERYONE AGREE IS COMPLETELY BIASED TOWARD DEFENSE 

[Tyr_]

but since the population auto-regenerates automatically, you will never have 0 pop for more than one hour (and even then, someone inside could just convert 1 pop to keep it "open").

sry, forgot to add this in my post - ofc i think there should be no automatic regenerated population, it would make most points in my idea irrelevant.
Thats why i suggest that you need to convert them in stacks of 500 to prevent abuses. Also, after the battle the fief has 0 population which will make any further converting impossible unless it doesnt get attacked for 2 days. When you see that you have only like 1000 population left you must start converting your army or risk that you have no chance to do so after the battle.

Also your idea with the starving troops is good, but i would rather increase the upkeep than having them rly starving, so like 5k pop feed 15k army, everything above needs open-field upkeep (or a percentage of it, like 50%), so for Narra it would be the open field upkeep for 16.000 soldier. The limit should be somewhere around this so you can have around 15k troops, since you need to get huge amounts of tickets to start a proper siege on another city, you have to convert them into population if you get attacked and ofc if you want to attack someone you dont want your fief to be without an army.

[Zaharist]

Tell me please why do you, mercs, always need to change game balance?
Nothing personal, Tyr, just wondering.
I agree that battle system (sieges, raids, loot) need some changes, but I don't agree with your suggestions.

Currently you can easily hide inside a castle/city

1. Remember Imperiale Almerra siege? or DRZ Slezkh siege vs Apostates?

2.  Castles and towns are core of faction defence.
Castle should not have population at all. it is absolutely 100% defensive fief.

3. If we look at slezkh castle stats (unfortunately I didn't find anything about Uxhall), we'll see that most longstanding and most difficult castle was taken with 1.86 K:D ratio. And it's really dust in the wind, not casualties.

(click to show/hide)

There had but been one break out of the castle into Apostates lands.
760 DRZ, 783 Apostates Bazhek was taken
http://c-rpg.net/index.php?page=battledetail&id=1901
perhaps someone can give me the second Battle over Bazhek, i wasn't able to take part there.

----------------------

the initial attack on Slezkh Castle,
DRZ 319, CFA 1083, Peasent Battle
http://c-rpg.net/index.php?page=battledetail&id=1610

the reinforcements got intercepted
DRZ 1149,  CFA 1741
http://c-rpg.net/index.php?page=battledetail&id=1613

1st counter attack on Slezkh Castle
Due to the ladders on the main keep, some called them sky ladders.
We weren't able to protect the the weapons racks which constantly got shot down
failing in building forward spawn behind keep, at those locations we choose
Wolves 1505, DRZ, 695
http://c-rpg.net/index.php?page=battledetail&id=1681

2nd counter attack on Slezkh Castle
different locations for weapons racks, still they got constantly shot down, pretty much the complete right side of the castle
nothing can't be build close up because of the physics ignoring ladders on the main keep.
SoA 1622, DRZ 422
http://c-rpg.net/index.php?page=battledetail&id=1725

3rd counter attack on Slezkh Castle
building Siege Towers, but not working very well
catapults get shot down by ranged
Wolves 2100, DRZ 948
http://c-rpg.net/index.php?page=battledetail&id=1834

4th counter attack on Slezkh Castle
building Siege Towers, after this battle i pretty much consider them useless as castle with any kind of hill on which the castle stand
catapults get destroyed by ranged and outbreaking cav
front left sections of the walls seems invulnarable from  what we learned so far
Wolves 1595, DRZ 831
http://c-rpg.net/index.php?page=battledetail&id=1955

5th counter attack on Slezkh Castle
found a week spot in the walls close to the tower to the gate
Wolves 1481, DRZ 965
http://c-rpg.net/index.php?page=battledetail&id=1984

6th counter attack on Slezkh Castle
Wolves 1406, DRZ 1134
found a second weekspot on the far right tower
http://c-rpg.net/index.php?page=battledetail&id=1995

7th counter attack on Slezkh Castle.
found a last week spot at the tower right of the gate
Wolves 814,  DRZ 684
http://c-rpg.net/index.php?page=battledetail&id=2024

Castle retaken

----------------------

overall numbers

Apostates 783
CFA 13347
DRZ 7907

4. Let's see what next week brings, and then make conclusions if it's really "easy to hide inside" without losing most of your fiefs, economy etc.
Frankly speaking (I can be totally wrong, cause I'm not really involved in strat since dec 2011) I am not sure if you (mercs) can speak about game balance. I don't remember any significant apostates sieges, wars, battles etc (judging by DRZ and ru community forum, less by this forum).
How can you prove your words? Experience? Examples? Figures? Or your personal feeling based on experience from battles your were hired in?

5. Do you want to have 1day town sieges again?
It's ok that castle holds for several days, and that attacker losses more troops and time besieging it.
Castle defenders should have even more bonuses, it's far too easy now to take castle (especially if you are superhero enough to attack early in the morning)

[Tyr_]

Most of the sieges against slezkh castle just were complete fails where the attacking army still had huge amounts of troops left while they ran out of time, which is one of the reasons why so tickets were needed to conquer it. Slezkh Castle is not the "most difficult castle", for defenders its above average. If you want to see stong castles have a look at Alburq or Jelbegi castle, this are hard nuts to crack.

Thats the reason for my suggestion. Defending one of the very strong castle I - at the worst case - lose about 1000 tickets per day/assault. 1 player grind 24 tickets, 42 players grind 1008. Having 42 players in a decent defensive position makes it impossible to take the castle (considering that attackers always provide gear thanks to the current looting system).

If you would have read my post you would see that there are no "1 day town sieges". Attackers still need at least 9-10 waves for a medium fortified city (5k pop, 5k army) and any heavy defended fief can reinforce its population by converting army into it.
What this idea changes is that it would be impossible to hold a fief for an endless time. Sieges get more like real sieges where you starve the enemy out. The longer you attack the more tickets the defenders need to invest to get population and once the population is at 0 the attackers can slow down to make 1 assault every 2 days since the city cant get anymore reinforcements and will fall sooner or later.

As you said yourself you are not involved in strat which gives you not much of an idea how the current situation is (dont take it personal), but for my experience we had more than 10.000 tickets in ismirala castle watching the nords garrison in tehlrog - which was also around 10.000 for months. There was another 10.000 tickets waiting in Dhirim area which could have made use of, but there was simply no point to attack the castle because it could receive endless reinforcements which would have taken all our resources then.

The same situation was shown at Uxhal. The city just got reinforced more and more often while a faction with as many players as the greys simply had more ppl inside the fief grinding tickets than the coalition could kill in the battles. After each battle the city was at 100% since there is no real option to besiege a fief.

You should be more encouraged to fight your enemy on the open field before he reaches your fiefs, and castles/cities still will be very important to slow the enemy down which allows you to regroup, but it is simply stupid to make them that strong. Most cities and castle usually were starved out or some traitor opened the gates from inside (which is bannable in strat afaik^^).

So reading your 4th point i just guess that you decided to attack us? Should i just put all my armies into alburq castle? We can defend it until the next christmas assault without running low on gold there, maybe you will change your opinion then.

I dont care if this gets implemented into strat since we (mercs) are barely active there, I rather spend my time studying than looking on the strat map. It just would be nice to improve the game and i just had time to write a longer post. If this idea makes it better its an advantage for everyone.

[Zaharist]

Ok, i didn't get your idea right first time, but still

1). There is no faction atm that can make 42 ppl grinding tickets daily.
2). Put all your tickets into one fief, and you'll stay there for ages. Game would be over for you.
3). You say Slezkh sieges were complete fail, but ration was 1.8. If they didn't fail that much what ratio could be? 1:1? It's nonsense if we talk about castle siege. Even if it is easiest wooden castle.
4). I'm not aware of what Vovka is going to do now, I don't even know, why I am standing where I am atm, I am just doing what I am told. 4th point was about current templar attacks by greys and drz

Can't say that I agree with your solution, but I agree with your point that without proper sieges we have pretty lame "siege system" with only one option - endless charge waves.

[Tyr_]

but I agree with your point that without proper sieges we have pretty lame "siege system" with only one option - endless charge waves.

This is exactly my point. I just had this idea which, imo, would be nice to have. Other very good suggestions were already made, like walls that stay destroyed for several days - for this wooden citys/castles must be fixed - or one that was made by tomas (not sure) that you can lay a week-long siege on cities if you have double the amount of tickets ;)

Current siege system is stupid. For attackers there is no real gain in attacking because they lose so much and for defenders there is no point in counterattacking because the 100% win in a caslte gives them lots of gear.

[Osiris]

Should just implement an actual siege rather then the assaults we have now, give fiefs a weeks supply of water/food and after that people start dying rapidly. This means the defenders can sally out or reinforce etc. That or make catapult damage take 48 hours to rebuild so we don't have to break the walls every time, perhaps filling the gaps made with a wooden palisade that takes far less to destroy