[GP] New Special Game Play Option: Economic Game

[Artimis]

Concise description:
Implement a new special game play option, that when selected would make the region count the only determining factor in obtaining more troops per turn(zone bonuses would be disabled) and would add a penalty for a troop count that exceeds the players region count by more than 25 times the region count.

• I would put forward the conservative value of 25 troops per region held. 25 seems like a good number so as to avoid strangling escalating games early on. 2 x 25 for a threshold of 50, 3 x 25 for a threshold of 75 and so on.....
• Alternatively this could be set as an XML value so that map authors can decide how many troops can be held per one region on a given map.

Specifics/Details:
For example, take Classic, if the Economic Game option were active and a player was backed into a corner on Oceania with only the 4 regions that comprise the Oceania zone bonus. 25 x 4 would give the player a threshold of 100 troops maximum across all their regions, which I might expect to be distributed as following:

• 1 on Sydney
• 1 on Port Moresby
• 1 on Perth
• 97 on Jakarta

This would be within the threshold imposed by the regions they control and would avoid army starvation. Once said player deploys on their next turn(3 troops, +3 for four regions, no zone bonus for holding Oceania under the Economic Games setting) assuming the stack on Jarkata is intact at 97, deploying on Jakarta will raise their troop count to 103 total armies across all their regions. To avoid army starvation they will need to acquire more regions to raise the threshold above 100 or fight until their total troop count drops to 100 or below again. Army starvation would be an effect that takes hold at the start of a players turn which goes on to subtract 1 troop from each region that has more than 1 troop occupying a region(NOTE: I would never intend for a player to lose a region due to the starvation of their army because that would just make a slightly disadvantaged situation exponentially worse.). If a player manages to lose enough regions that the troops they currently hold at the start of their next turn exceed the newly lowered threshold due to a reduction in their region count, then 1 troop will be subtracted per turn from each territory with more than 1 troop contained within.

Here's my mock up of what the bronze medal would look like for defeating 20 players in an Economic's game:

Click image to enlarge.

*I know the image is huge, it was just a lot easier to work on than fiddling with individual pixels in Photoshop on a really tiny image.


How this will benefit the site and/or other comments:

• It would provide another game mode option, more options means more fun.
• No need to worry about opponents that super-fluke-out and drop a zone bonus right at the start of the game, continent bonuses are moot under the Economic Game setting. Regions are what counts, and spoils if selected also.
• It would add a touch of realism in games with this option enabled, it's ok to have huge armies, but you have to feed them or they will desert!
• More medals! I like medals, they look good on my wall!

[Artimis]

I've reworded the idea and made some alterations as well, I expect the appearance of *limit* in my post above brought back memories from this thread: Max number of troops on each territory....
Which is in the rejected section(where it belongs IMHO) -you'll see my posts in there as well along with responses from a few others.
It was not my intention to bring in an idea like that as I don't think it would be popular at all.

I didn't find this post on my first and second sweep through the Suggestions forum and it's sub-forums(third time lucky!): New setting: Upkeep [Poll for minimum reinforcements]
That idea which is in the archived section is similar to what I'm suggesting. Some people reading this may decide they like OliverFA's idea better(which is fine), I think it is interesting.

What do you guys make of the Economic Game setting? Good/Bad/Indifferent?

[greenoaks]

your idea is neither good or bad.

it is - drum roll please
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worth discussing

[JamesKer1]

Ok, I would just like to clarify. Nothing wrong, I am just confused easily by the simplest things.

So if I had Australia as in the example above, but I had my troops stacked in Sydney instead of Jakarta, and someone can in and took the other three territories. Would I lose my 97 stack all the way down to 25?

What I'm getting from this is the best idea would be to keep stacks split and all under 25... Or very we'll built borders. Classically, most people will have a lot of 1's across the board and somewhat big stacks and borders in small games. So if someone breaks one border and or takes a lot of 1's, you are pretty much screwed for the rest of the game.

I like the idea, but if the above is correct (please correct me if I'm wrong), then this will definitely cut down on long games, an decreases what spoils affect in the game...

[MoB Deadly]

tl;dr

I think we that medal should stay that size though!

[Artimis]

Ok, I would just like to clarify. Nothing wrong, I am just confused easily by the simplest things.

So if I had Australia as in the example above, but I had my troops stacked in Sydney instead of Jakarta, and someone can in and took the other three territories. Would I lose my 97 stack all the way down to 25?

What I'm getting from this is the best idea would be to keep stacks split and all under 25... Or very we'll built borders. Classically, most people will have a lot of 1's across the board and somewhat big stacks and borders in small games. So if someone breaks one border and or takes a lot of 1's, you are pretty much screwed for the rest of the game.

I like the idea, but if the above is correct (please correct me if I'm wrong), then this will definitely cut down on long games, an decreases what spoils affect in the game...

Errr, NO! That would be hideous.

If you have three regions with 97 troops on one region and 1 troop on each of the other two regions then the threshold for you would be 75(that's 3 x 25), seeing as you're already down to 1 troop in two regions you'd only get -1 troop applied to your stack of 97, knocking it down to 96. If you'd had 6 in two regions and 87 in one region, then -1 would have been applied to all three regions because they all contain more than 1 troop.

I hope that clears up any confusion. It's why I swapped out the word limit for threshold, because limit implied that you'd lose a chunk of your army where as the effect I'm describing is more like a slow bleed than the loss of a limb.

[JamesKer1]

That sounds much more reasonable. However, -1 would be a pretty small impact unless someone spread out troops too much.

Might be interesting with nuclear, actually it sounds like it would be great, but I'm not too sure with other game types.

[Artimis]

That sounds much more reasonable. However, -1 would be a pretty small impact unless someone spread out troops too much.

I was thinking about ramping it up a bit with the following forula:

Code: Select all

Subtraction Factor = (Total Troop Count -1) / (Region Count * 25)

If you have 97, 1, 1, 1 on your four regions, the -1 ensures that you don't get army starvation unless your troops exceed the Region Count. Otherwise 100 troops divided by 100 = 1, you get the -1 penalty even though you're just and just within the threshold outlined within the suggestion.

What this formula does is increase the army starvation effect to -2 if you reach 201 troops with only four regions controlled at the start of your next turn. (201 -1) / (4 * 25) = 2, the result of 2 is then subtracted from every region that has more than 1 troop within, in the case of a region with only 2 troops within, the effect is limited to removing the extra 1 troop(again, I don't intend for players to lose regions through army starvation.)

Of course if you were to lose two regions whilst sporting a stack of 205 and a lone 1 on your two remaining regions, you could expect to lose 4 troops from your big stack on your next turn. (206 -1) / (2 * 25) = 4.1 So take the whole number 4 and ignore the .1, subtract that from the big stack to drop it down to 201, the other region is already on the bare minimum to maintain occupancy and so is unaffected.

[JamesKer1]

The more I look at this suggestion, the more I'm starting to like it. The formula makes it a whole lot easier to understand the impact of.

However, I'm afraid this might be too complicated- one thing we need to keep in mind is that to make a new setting more popular, it needs to be able to put in short, sweet, and simple terms to make it easy for the general public to understand. For example, we can go into elaborate explanations of polymorphic, but the simple one would be a player controls a whole team of either two, three, or four players, and plays against an opponent like a team game. What would be the simplest explanation of this possible that you would like to be advertised if implemented or asked somewhere for public opinion? Many great complex settings have been suggested, but some of the problems have been lack of understanding or getting too caught up in the details.

[Artimis]

Yeah, that's why I opted for the standard -1, if I had rolled out too much detail to start off with then viewers would simply tune out and move on. The formula is more for the benefit of the coders, they might decide that a basic -1 for all conditions is too weak for a new setting designed to add an economic dimension to the game.

Would be nice to hear from a coders on how much of a challenge it would be to add a new setting.