Smoothness Increasing Ideas

I finally decided to post a few of the ideas I had in the last weeks while playing this fantastic game, mainly details that might improve the ingame smoothness, but I like to start with something more fundamental:

There is a very low SP reward for defending, which especially puts strategies like Perfect Defence at a huge disadvantage. In many games I play while using it, I've got the most units throughout the whole game, I kill more units than everybody else, donate huge amounts of money to my faithful allies and often even control the most cities and countries of all players - well, but usually my allies still get a multiple amount of SP, not uncommonly five or six times more than I do!
I think that the amount of SP which is currently granted for defending is much too low in relation to for example occupying capitals. In the current system the most aggressive player earns the most SP, even if he loses. If your focus is just getting as much SP as possible, diplomacy is relatively irrelevant for you.
Maybe the whole SP earning system needs a fundamental reform, which might be compoundable with some of the ideas for an ingame ranking that indicates the current distribution of power - what would you think about something like that?
Furthermore I thought about the possibility how to implement some kind of SP reward for donating money without prompting massive abuse - well, I've found a solution which might diminish the above-mentioned SP-problem and improve the importance of alliances as well, another issue I reckon as a major problem in the fabulous game of afterwind:
Why not dividing half of the earned SP from all allies amongst them? I don't think that the impact on the game would be that great, but many problems would get solved and people would consider a bit longer who to ally, even the more and more frequently occuring ally-ups would get rarer!

Another issue that confused me quite a lot are the financial and recruiting values of the cities and countries in afterwind, maybe you can explain how you got them in detail? I've read you used the GNP values from Wikipedia, but I still don't know the exact method how you used them...well, I've got a few ideas about this issue, but at first I would like to understand how the currently used system works in detail!

We've reached the point with the list of minor changes I mentioned in the beginning. It would be great if it would be possible to:
- ...hear an acoustic signal when somebody joins the game room lobby after creating a game
- ...see a list of all online players and mods
- ...send money after ending your turn
- ...add a password to an ongoing game
- ...click on a name in the player list to add a /pr playername in the chat box
- ...press for example "r" to answer the last player who sent you a message
- ...highlighten the player name you've sent a message to instead of your own one
- ...ignore a "~" or "*" if you're sending a personal message
- ...keep more messages you received while and shortly before changing the room
- ...rearrange the statistics showed in the player profiles - battles won/lost are very arbitrary values, it completely depends on your playing style - units destroyed/lost would be much more meaningful
- ...have the option to extend the maximum game duration if all players agree - I've played several great games I had to abandon because of the turn limit
- ...use some new maps, especially all european ones including the north african countries
- ...split and rearrange the parts of the US so there are a few more countries
- ...grant small bonuses for controlling whole countries that are currently divided in afterwind
- ...recruit units in cities which belong to countries you don't own if the capital is neutral and not player-controlled
- ...select a single unit in stacks of more than 100 units
- ...incorporate new built units in cities to calculate the remaining movement points
- ...receive a message box a player has to click away instead of the red text message currently implemented, which isn't that easy to overlook or ignore, appearing when a mod sends him a warning and containing either a standard message like "You're warned by moderator xxx!" or a short text the mod warning him can just write himself
- ...let all users or at least mods create new chat channels - that would notably simplify arrangements between more than two players, especially if they're not in the same coalition! Furthermore I would propose a general offtopic channel


I'm running out of steam to translate and paraphrase all my ideas, I think that's enough for several discussions.

You got my vote for a revamping of defensive SP.

Being defensive shouldn't be punished, how you go about allocating SP for making your fortress is unknown, but I'd like my security in a hectic world to be rewarded.

Quote:

- ...press for example "r" to answer the last player who sent you a message

I would like to have shortcuts in general. For example a key to produce the possible amount of a certain unit in the selected city. And if that's possible, it would be great to be able to set your shortcuts yourself.

And at the SP issue: why not just grant the most SP for killing enemy units? Currently you get the most SP for capturing enemy countries, but if you change that to units killed, it should already be sufficient?

The main ways of getting SP is killing units and capturing cities/countries (apart from that, I think there are only medals). You're still destroying units in defensive, but you're doing less conquests, which reaps less SP. Not sure how this can be changed (and whether it should be changed) without provoking abuse. I'm against any additional SP for allies though, if anything, you should get more SP if you manage to win alone.

About numbers. Well, it's mostly the proportions that are based on GDP/population. The direct correlation has been tweaked, so there's no simple way to get to the game income numbers from GDP, for example. As much as we wanted to be as close to reality as possible, the gap between the earnings of poor countries and rich countries was too huge to make a good game. As for income of the cities, it's based on the proportion of city population to country population, and then a piece of country's income is determined accordingly.

The huge list of tweaks you proposed I promise to go through and take notice, but I can't promise to implement / provide feedback on all of them.

Cheers!

Geschreven door Ivan, 13.02.2011 at 02:35

The main ways of getting SP is killing units and capturing cities/countries (apart from that, I think there are only medals). You're still destroying units in defensive, but you're doing less conquests, which reaps less SP. Not sure how this can be changed (and whether it should be changed) without provoking abuse.

Why not just double SP for a defensive kill? That would make it a logical strategy, plus a home front war is always harder than fighting in a foreign nation.