koontz1973 wrote:-=- Tanarri -=- wrote:For the conscription techs, either way it's a 200% bump by the end. My concern is the advanced techs should offer a bigger net bonus than the basic techs, particularly since they cost so much more than they do.
Advanced tech always costs more to do. But the end results may not always provide more. If you look at conscription, secret and open, (why this way, would open be more fitting for the start of the war?) the first set should always provide more as it is the start. Later on, you have less resources to call on. But I agree, the neutrals can come down a tad to make them more pleasing.
For the naming of the conscription techs, I believe the idea was in the beginning you're secretly trying to conscript troops, hence getting a smaller number without raising alarms too much. Further in the war, as things progress, you start openly conscripting troops to get as many troops as you can without caring who knows.
koontz1973 wrote:isaiah40 wrote:Looking at Propaganda, I think that 20n is going to be way too many for the return of investment. You have to go through 20 neutrals for a max of 10?? If you get all 6 capitals the game is over via the losing condition. Maybe this needs to be lowered down to 5 or 10 neutrals to see a return on it.
Looking at all the neutrals versus all the bonuses, you are right. But when you consider it is +2 per capital, not till mid-late game will any player hold more than 1 capital.
The entire point behind Propaganda was for it to be a mid-late game boost once you took another capital. The name itself even hints towards it, since normally it's the enemy's population you would use propaganda on to convince them that you're the better leader.
koontz1973 wrote:Secret conscription - 30 neutrals - bonus of +1 for every 2 regions held.
Standing army - 15 neutrals - +3
National pride - 20 neutrals - +6 if holding 2 regions (Lab and capital).
Mining - 35 neutrals - +1 for every mine held.
Sabotage - 50 neutrals - no bonus
Propergander - 20 neutrals + 2 per capital.
All of these neutrals are way to high.
Secret conscription - 30
Still 30 might be too high or it will never get taken but this one we can wait for beta and see how it works.
Standing army - 15
Again good as is but consider a 10 neutral.
National pride - 20
This is low. You have only 20 neutrals, 5 more than standing army, but double the bonus. Lower the bonus to a +4 or raise the neutral to 30.
Mining - 10
Ten is a good number. Remember, you also need to attack the mines and hold them and you only get a +1 for them. So you need to hold one mine for 10 goes to get your investment back.
Sabotage - 30
10 lower than yours but even at 30, it will only get taken late in esc games or a lucky nukes games. All other games will be ignored.
Propergander - 6
You only get +2 per capital. lots of neutrals to fight through for no real bonus. How many times does a player in the feudal games attack a neutral castle for the auto deploy? Very rarely and this is going to be the same. You will get you +1 and that is that. The only time this will really come into play is larger games and then only an extra two.
For secret conscription, I agree it's a bit high if we're using +1 per 2 regions and should be dropped to 20-25. If we're using the newer +2 per 3 regions then I think the 30 should be good. In the end, I think beta will be the only thing that will provide clarity to most of these neutrals though.
Standing army I think would be too small at 10 neutral, since it's a permanent unbreakable bonus. Maybe 12 if you really wanted to encourage people to take it early game? At least then it's a 4 round payback for a permanent bonus
National Pride I think you misunderstood. The bonus is dependent on holding the entire homeland, not just the capital and the laboratory. The neutral value difference between Standing Army and National Pride takes into account that you need to defend the bonus and it can be broken. Breaking the bonus would effectively take away 12 reinforcements from an opponent (+6 regular homeland bonus and +6 national pride bonus). This makes for a reasonably high incentive to at least break a player's homeland if you're fighting them already. I think the +6 for 20 neutral is good as it is all considered. If one does end up getting changed, I think the neutral being raised is the better option, since the +6 bonus is an effective doubling of the regular homeland bonus.
Mining should be +2 per mine held. It's been +2 for a year and a half or more and only since the last update was it changed to +1 out of the blue. I'm not sure if what happened for that change, but that's why the neutral value seems so out of whack. Really at +1 per mine it doesn't make that aspect of the game anywhere near as interesting. There are so many mines around the board that holding 4-5 of them should be relatively easy, providing a +8-10 bonus. I think 35 is reasonable for a neutral given this. If it gets lowered at all, I don't think it should be any lower than 30.
Sabotage I believe I mentioned before that I'm not sure why we had it at 50. I think having it either at 30 or 40 would be reasonable to start beta off with. One thing to consider is that it's purpose is such that it becomes more useful mid game when everybody's probably dropping 20-30 troops per round. Even if it were 40 that's only one or two rounds worth of troops investment for the possibility to easily bring everybody else on the map down by +2 or +4 per mine. Say half the mines are taken on the map, even at basic mining that would give the ability to easily interfere with 40 troops per turn worth of reinforcements. Mid to late game this tech will prove to be very valuable.
Propaganda at 6 is way to low. I agree it may be able to use being brought down to 15 or so to make it a bit more attractive as a potential secondary boost for early'ish game, but it's really going to be more useful later in the game. Considering it's more meant as a mid-late game tech, one possible solution to making it a more viable tech would be to raise the bonus per capital, perhaps as high as +4 per capital. If we set it at +3 per capital, then I think it could stay at 20, and it would effectively be doubling the troops you get from owning a capital. If we had it at +4 per capital, then I think raising it to 25 would be good. Heck, we could even do a +5 per capital for 30 troops, making it an even more attractive mid to late game tech. The intention behind the tech really was to offer a player who's already taken out another player a way of getting extra troops. I've always thought the +2 per capital bonus for a mid to late game tech was pretty small.
koontz1973 wrote:isaiah40 wrote:Advanced Researches
Doomsday Device --> 100
Open Conscription --> 75
Deep Mining --> 55
Mobilized Amy --> 50
Top Secret Facility --> 45
Doubling the bonuses does not mean doubling the neutrals.
Doomsday Device --> 100
Open Conscription --> 50 (80 in total)
Deep Mining --> 20 (30 in total)
Mobilized Amy --> 25 (40 in total)
Top Secret Facility --> 45
(TSF, can any be attacked? So if my homeland is SW, can I attack SE TSF?) If I can doomsday becomes redundant as no one will go for it.)
All neutrals for the bonuses you get seem high. If I can knock a person out of the game by taking their capital away from them, why would I grab even the most basic research?
Doomsday Device
really needs to be more than 100. 100 is crazy low for a +75 bonus. 200 for a bonus that size really is pretty decent as it is already.
Open Conscription, if we're using +1 for 2 regions for Secret Conscription, should be higher than 50. It is a late game tech and the bonus one will get from owning it along with 1/4 of the board (not unreasonable for late game, I'd think) will be quite large. I think 75 is possibly okay, but 50 just seems really small. If we're going with +2 troops per 3 regions for Secret Conscription, then I think 50 is reasonable, since the net gain is less.
Deep Mining, again the original Mining bonus should be +2, for Deep Mining giving a +4 total bonus per mine. I think 20 is waaaay too low for a neutral in this case. Bringing it down a bit from 70 where it's at now may be in order, though I think considering it's a mid-late game tech, a player would likely own 6-8 mines minimum if they're researching this. That's total bonus of 24-32 troops for a total of 105 neutrals, which really isn't too bad.
Mobilized Army for 25 is again way too low. That's a permanent +12 bonus. Granted 60 may be a bit high, so perhaps lower it to 50 like Isaiah was suggesting, but 25 is just way way too low.
Top Secret Facility should be lower than 45, unless we decide to make owning it a requirement for getting advanced techs as I threw out there as a potential suggestion in a previous post. Presuming we don't decide to go that round, TSF should be no higher than 30, presuming we're keeping Standing Army at 15 neutral and Mobilized Army at 60 neutral. If they're getting changed to say 12 neutral and 50 neutral (a 4 round payback), then TSF should possibly be changed to 25 neutral as well.
And no Koontz, TSFs can only be attacked by the matching player. All techs can only be attacked by the matching player ever. There are a couple techs that can bombard out to opposing players territories (Sabotage and Doomsday) but nothing can attack another player's tech.
Regarding your question about why you would research the most basic tech when you can knock a player out by taking out their capital: Because by the time you're able to reach that other player, they've probably already researched a couple basic techs for long enough that they can match your troop count by the time you reach them and then are dropping more than you per turn when they counter attack. In a 2 player game, I could see a player winning by taking out the other player's capital before they could properly build up their research, which would be great to have as a strategy for the map. But really, any 3+ player game I think it would be suicide not to research at least a bit (conscription techs if nothing else) since even if you could reach someone and kill them before they got their investment back, the other players who are researching will have grown to powerful for you to fight.
To date at least, the map has been designed with no cards or flat rate being the ideal card settings. An escalating game with a higher number of players will likely blow all the balancing and make a lot of things not worth taking. But if you consider any other standard map, you run into the same sort of situation where taking bonuses doesn't make any sense. I realize the neutrals seem high at first, but one thing to consider is during a no cards or flat rate game, people will easily be dropping 25-30 troops per turn by round 10-15 and will only go up drastically from there. If you bring the neutral counts down too much, then people will be able to research a new tech every turn, which I don't think should happen. It should take at least 2-3 rounds to research a new tech and at least 3 rounds to see benefit from it. This way everybody won't own the same techs, which adds to the gameplay, and there is a certain level of risk to putting the investment into the research since you leave yourself weaker for a few rounds, which will give opponents a chance to eliminate you before you start becoming all the more stronger than they are.
Go with what you think and we can all debate that.
