isaiah40 wrote:-=- Tanarri -=- wrote:I've been trying to find time to comment on the above properly, but have too many games running and life got a bit busier too.
I agree with the TSF being an advanced tech requirement, the +1 per 2 homeland territories, and the +1 per 3 land territories in general. Something will have to get figured out with the conscription techs now that the normal +1 per 3 is being added.
We won't have the normal +1 per 3 regions right now.
I've also wondered about reducing the amount on standing army a little to make it more appealing as an option to take first before the homeland.
Like maybe a n10?
I've also wondered about reducing Secret Conscription neutral to make conquest more appealing earlier on.
Reduce to what value??
I'd like to see something done to make enemy homelands more appealing to take to encourage more combat between players on the map.
Well we could make all the neutral regions n2.
Sabotage really needs to be gimped or removed. I personally think gimped would work better. Oliver suggested in one of our games to make it a killer neutral and more of an operation rather than tech. Maybe a killer 20 or 25 would be suitable?
Killer 25 would be good, with the ability to bombard the TSF? I think it fits with the theme and the idea of sabotage.
The last thing I wanted to mention is conditional autodeploys are possible through the new transformations code. I think figuring out something to use this new code with would be neat. Possibly remove or change Propaganda to use the code since I don't think it's very useful the way it is now.
Actually conditional autodeploys are still not possible through the new transforms as of yet, unless something has changed very recently.
+1 for 3 normal territories -- I strongly believe a standard territory bonus would help the conquer side of the game, which is sorely lacking at the moment, but if we'd like to see how other changes affect it first, then I'm happy enough to see where things go.
Standing Army -- I think neutral 10 would work well enough. Really, the 15 it is now still makes it worthwhile to go for, just it only makes sense to go for the homeland and then National Pride first and then worry about other techs like Standing Army. I think if it were neutral 10 it may encourage players to take it before completing their homeland bonus. At 10 it would line up with National Pride's bonus ratio as well.
Secret Conscription -- I think it'd be worth reducing it to a neutral 15, maybe even neutral 10, if the standard +1 for every 3 bonus isn't being included. I think it's important to make it easy to gain the ability to get troops from conquering land territories.
Open Conscription -- While I'm at it, I think it'd be useful to reduce Open Conscription a bit, either to 60 or 70, to make it a bit easier to take. If you're going to go the conquer route for your troops and use this tech to do so, then you still have to spend 3-4 guys per territory to take the territory on top of the research cost. I think making this change would help encourage the conquer side of the board as well.
Enemy Homelands -- I think reducing the neutrals to 2 on the entire map would be the wrong way to go. I haven't played many non trench games on the map, but I think with how quickly the bonuses increase, you need to have the neutrals at 3-4 in order to help slow down fast elimination of players. I was thinking more along the lines of significantly changing Propaganda. As it is now it barely makes sense to research it when you've taken a second capital. I think changing Propaganda to read either +1 per enemy homeland territory or +1 per homeland territory would help make taking out an enemy player and/or fighting over neutral homelands much more worthwhile. The neutral value would need to be changed to something like 25-30 if enemy only or 50-60 if your homeland is included. Thematically including your own homeland in the bonus could make sense since there's countless examples of governments using propaganda on their own populaces to change the way they think. Including your own homeland with a return of 6-8 turns would also make it a viable secondary option for increasing your bonus before you go off to invade other homelands.
Sabotage -- I agree 25 neutral would work well. This way it's high enough to discourage constant homeland mine bombarding to break homeland/National Pride bonus, but makes it still useful to break those bonuses in multiplayer or to break mining bonuses in 2 player if your opponent has a large mining bonus. If this gets implemented the way it's suggested, then I'd suggest increasing National Pride to 25 neutral, as I think 20 is too low for the bonus if it's going to be more permanent due to the changes in Sabotage. I think the idea of being able to bombard TSF with Sabotage is worth trying out. We could also take it one step further and allow it to bombard all the "Special Research" section (including other Sabotages for counter-Sabotage moves in freestyle games)... this could make sense since the Special Research section really aren't researches so much as various efforts to obtain bonuses, which is something I'll bring up at the end of this message.
Conditional Autodeploys -- According to bigWham they are possible using the transformation code... or at least he marked Conditional Autodeploys as implemented and stated they were possible in the thread. I think the only research which could be considered for replacement at this point is Propaganda, but my primary suggestion for it would be to change it to the above. If others don't feel the same, then we could look into changing it to something that uses Conditional Autodeploys, if they're able to be done as bigWham suggests.
"Special Researches" -- I think it'd be useful to find some other name for this section. The way I see it, the Basic and Advanced researches are all knowledge which has been gained through research, whereas the "Special Research" section I see more like putting out resources in order to gain a benefit. National Pride would be like running a specific type of propaganda type campaign to instill a sense of national pride into the populace. TSF is putting resources into building an advanced research facility. Propaganda is putting resources into convincing populations that you're the best leader to follow. Sabotage is putting resources into sabotaging your opponents. Making the name change would also help the change to Sabotage make more sense.
Doomsday Device -- I think it'd be worthwhile to change the neutral of this to at least 250, perhaps even 300, even with it being behind the TSF. At the moment, it's a race to see who can research it first while everybody stays huddled in their homelands or nearby. 50 troops a turn is fairly easy to get to and especially in trench games, you can often get it with only 20-25 troops per turn with nobody being able to do anything about it besides Sabotage to slow you down a bit, which often isn't enough.
It'd be great to get others comments on these thoughts as well and I look forward to the second test beta version of the map becoming available. It's been a lot of fun testing out the first version and I think a few flaws in the balance have certainly come up.