Idea for a little tweak to how scum/sorc kills work

[Kaz]

A while ago I posted an idea to try and make death a little less 'drastic'. It's still an idea I would like to test out at some point, but there is no way that it's something that can be released with the current state of code.

http://monarchygame.com/boards/viewtopi ... =19&t=1251

As an alternative, I was thinking of something simple that would do a similar thing for players who are scum or sorc killed. This is something that could be coded easily enough and released at the same time as guilds.

Basically, if you die to sorc or scum kill you could 'chose' to restart in the same kingdom, minus your cash and 25% of your land and buildings. You'd restart in npp with zero turns, and would therefore be out of action for about 4 days following a sorc or scum kill while you wait for your turns to count up again to leave npp, then count up again to do any war stuff.

This obviously won't work for kingdoms who are war killed, as the land is gone. They could either be out of luck, or perhaps be restored to 75% of how they were 48 (maybe 72) hours before death occurred. The time difference aimed to undo any war gains. Obviously if you're smashed but not killed you'd be in the one situation where you're out of luck, but I guess you could try and recruit a mate to kill you a bit like what was forced to happen in debacle.

[edit]
Tweaked Version of this idea
http://monarchygame.com/boards/viewtopi ... 534#p22534
[edit]


Opinions?

[Jokingjoe]

Some people can make themselves unbreakable in defense--which is why we have to resort to scum/sorc kills. If they come back with most of the land, it cheapens the sorc/scum kill and makes it near useless, imo.

Now, if you're interested in getting restarts back in the game faster, perhaps it'd be more fair to just start the initial land higher than 500. Perhaps restart kingdoms could start with 2500 acres and an 18 build rate (some freebie brt buildings). Let them wait their couple of days in NPP to store up turns, then come out with some land and potentially swinging.

[Kaz]

Joe, this idea was never about getting people back in the game quicker. It's about the #1 cause of agro in this kind of game. Basically you can spend months building a kingdom, and have it totally wiped out in less than an hour. Games with 'soft' deaths, don't cause that same issue. I've being trying to think of a soft death option that wont cause major issues for years.

As for cheapening the sorc/scum kill. I'd say a 25% reduction in a strong enemy, plus 4 days where they are pretty much out of action from a military point of view to be a pretty good return. Add a land or turns bounty into the mix and the tables have probably turned. We could also make it so that the hovels and guildhalls need rebuilding (as the population was killed in them) weakening the killed player further.

I can have 2500 acres and a brt of 18 in no time at all. It certainly would not be worth a month of my kingdom. I just quickly tested my default strategy to see how long it takes me to get those 2500 acres (which are only worth it if fully built). Basically its worth about 100 turns (or a day)

100 turns used
2396 acres
168 open acres
235 GH
235 Hov
1758 Qua
25 BRT

106 turns used
3000 acres
518 open acres
235 GH
235 Hov
1912 Qua
100 Tem (via tithe gift)
23 BRT

An alternative might be restoring you to the kingdom you had when you made (or received) your first offensive action. But that's basically giving you a week old kingdom, and efficient builders will have an unfair advantage.

[Kaz]

I've thought a little more about this quicker and lesser impact version of the larger soft death idea.

This new suggestion covers War kills and building annihilation.

The idea in itself is simple, it takes a killed kingdom out of the war for at least 2 days, and returns them in a lesser kingdom but without too much room to abuse the system. You could chose to fight for an extra day or two before restoring, but are up against a rolling 72 hour backup, which if missed, is missed.

1. A link to Load/Save will show up if you have not attacked for 24 hours (and are out of NPP)
2. The screen will look different to the normal Load/Save and will restore you to 75% of the kingdom you had 72 hours earlier
3. This restore will cost 24 hours of turns
4. You will have 0 cash, 0 elan and 0 turns after the restore happens.
5. After the restore happens you will be in enforced protection (cannot leave early) for 24 hours (48 if killed)
6. After the enforced protection ends, you will be unable to declare kingdom war for an additional 24 hours

If you're dead, the restore happens from stage 4 onwards.

[Jokingjoe]

Ah--I see your direction of thought now-- people rage quit most when they've lost their big investment. Making that loss much less would help retain players. Good idea.

[Darnivan]

I remember one age I think back in like 2004 or so I spent the whole age fighting fair straight up wars and after an age of back of forth fighting I was king with 10's of thousands of built acres (I think it was like 60k built or more) with a pretty good lead a week before the age was reset with my guild rank 1...only to have me and a couple others scum killed by who we never knew.

Yeah the downside of playing goblin I had like 150k elite scum but someone got through unseen and it cost me my entire kingdom and the memory did sting making it hard to come back after I stopped playing due to time constraints. This is a pretty good solution to that.

An issue I find being that it would make kingdom inflation worse and provide weird incentives (waring back and forth and reseting, essentially multiplying land). If kindoms can bounce back by the end of the age kingdoms would get massive... You might want to consider a sort of war tax after a kingdom gets so big so that not all acres lost by a player in war are taken by the other player to prevent inflation from getting too out of hand or it makes it so if someone joins partway through an age or ends up getting slowly beaten down without reseting they will be massively behind with little incentive to try to catch up.

For example like a 20% reduction after 20k acres 30% after 30k and so forth until like a 75% (at again, for example 75k acres) reduction cap. It might even be better to reduce it faster.

That way if the war is between massive kingdoms after a destroyed kingdom bounces back to 75% if they lost their land to another big kingdom only the 25% they actually lost would go to the victor.

Well, those are my thoughts

[Igneous]

I know this would have an impact on the instant gratification aspect of the game, but another approach may be to limit the ammount of turns spendable every hour to double, quadruple, or more of what is made available to the turn "bank" in any given hour. It may aleviate some of the "instadeath" factor if it takes more real time for things to happen. It would also ensure that it would take a certain number of players active and cooperating in a given time period to make a kill like this possible, which would be the justification for an instadeath.

[Aeyliea]

Or you simply make it so that the reset kingdoms' returned land is based on built land, not open land. IE, if someone gets sorc killed or scum kill sittingt on 200K acres weith 30K built, they get 75% of 30K land back. If that seems to harsh, set a second % for any open land they had AKA 75% of built and 20% of open. This would prevent land inflation very effectively.

[Kaz]

At this point I'm not overly worried about land inflation, although I also haven't found the time to code this in.

If I cant find time before the first battles begin, then it would be unfair to implement it anyway.

Long term, I want to go for a more complex idea, short term, I think we could live with a bit of land inflation. After all, without this, the kingdom restarts an adds more land into the system anyway. NPC's have the ability to add a hell of a lot more land into the system than this idea ever could.

Out of the options in this thread, I think my tweaked idea is probably the one I'd go for. My original idea, and Aeyliea's suggestion only help out players who have died, and only if they have died in specific ways. My tweaked idea can be used by everyone, as long as they don't put off the restore too long. Plus, it ought to be very simple to implement.

The ideas from Darnivan and Igneos are interesting, but firstly they would require a lot of code, and secondly they introduce limitations for kingdoms that have been playing normally. Something I'd rather not do. If I'm going to write that much code, I might as well introduce the full version (several posts down through the linked thread)