Feedback and Suggestions

[Xiang Zhuang]

I think that morale can swing too wildly and too fast in battle. The ranges of adjustment last game were big, depending on duel results, but in general you couldn't lose more than 40 in an engagement. In this game, from what I have seen, you could possibly go from 100 to 0 in one engagement, with the right spamming of skills and etc. I think that there needs to be a bit of scaling here as to keep people from loading up with morale types to try and tip the scales wildly. I mean, it has to be important, but it's just the range that it can change that's worrisome.

I suggest two things. First, consider a cap of -20 morale per round, or something to that effect, in negative boosts. A solid cap that prevents people from skirting around it and getting way too high of morale swings sounds about right. This would make it a max of -60 morale in an engagement, which is a bit closer to last game.

Another suggestion would be to diminish all of the morale boosts from multipliers of 5 to multipliers of 4. That means +/-4 for winning an engagement, +/-4, +/-8, +/-12 for ploys, and maybe even reducing the Challenge deal to -2, -4, -6. These small adjustments will really have a huge impact on the max range that things can go, and keep morale from swinging so wildly.

Again, just a couple of relatively small changes to keep battles from being completely about morale. Another way to eliminate the importance would be to eliminate morale routs... instead, just keep the normal problems that come with 0 morale (like people getting captured en masse, etc.). That still makes damaging morale important, since Effectiveness is huge, but it keeps it from being a manner of victory, which is the real thing, I think. It seems to neutralize everything else that's happening, and it almost makes you have to have a 4th and 5th officer slot for your battles to keep your morale ok (after duelist and the 2 layer commanders).

[Nanjun Tiger]

I want to comment about the PA system and how players can rise to become rulers. I believe that it is an intuitive, imaginative system and I believe that it is a great addition to the game... well, in theory at least.

I guess my main problem is this scenario: King Kong wants to win simwarlords. So King Kong grabs his buddies from another sim and brings them here. All his buddies sign up and snag PAs. They then invade cities together immediately and take them over. Some of the other buddies, work as PAs in the same province that King Kong wants to invade in the future...

Basically, King Kong gets A) an unfair advantage at the start of the game, fielding an unstoppable army from the get go, allowing them to grow and expand at an unreasonable rate and B) an unfair advantage further down the line, when they can basically field a lot of free, well armed troops in any neighboring province that they want and can use all those extra PA's as proxies.

Like I said, in theory I really like the system that is in place. Honestly, if it worked how you guys intended it to, I would try to make love to it (eww!). However, I believe the system has a severe loophole and can be abused waaay too easily. Although I'm not suggesting any way to remedy that for this version, perhaps it could be looked into for the next version?

And I share the staff's sentiments that there has to be an element where you would be compelled to bring you buddies here to play. It was a great attempt, but a few people saw the flaw in the system and took full, unfair advantage of it, to the dismay of many here. So if anyone has any comments or ideas on a system for the next version, please post them here.

Thank you for your time.

[UMCorian]

That would be an insane number of factors to calculate in. For then we would also have to add and subtract if an instance in which a Challenger doesn't have a ranged weapon, but the challenged did. The degree of ranged weapons, etc.

Furthermore under the current rules there can only be one challenge per engagement. It's fairly easy for a ruler to cover his bases by assigning one or two champions and having them ready to deal with an enemy challenge.

Challenge's success rate is lower then it had been last game and takes into account the comparison between opponents. A horse isn't really that expensive. You can get a +1 spd horse in a mere two months of employment on salary alone. I'm not sure it's really necessary to further complicate the challenge system.

You're definitely right - it would be a nightmare to program in. However, it doesn't seem like that would be too difficult to just do manually. Just remove Challenge the Battle Calculator options, or just not use it, and use a dice program. Get a base roll, then add/subtract the modifiers, in the event it does come up.

As it is, it just comes off as a bit ridiculous - like it just happened again in the Ying Fusu/Ying Huhai fight. Who, in their right mind, would accept a duel from someone on horseback and fight them on foot.... that's like bringing a knife to a gun fight.

[RuffRydeR]

And I share the staff's sentiments that there has to be an element where you would be compelled to bring you buddies here to play. It was a great attempt, but a few people saw the flaw in the system and took full, unfair advantage of it, to the dismay of many here. So if anyone has any comments or ideas on a system for the next version, please post them here.

Thank you for your time.

Possible PA nerfing Rules:

-Maximum combined size in any attack of 5000/7500 instead of the 10000, without a city under your belt. Unless you have a rank.

-PAs cannot reinforce if the possessions of the PC leading them are not directly under attack.

-Rulers have the option of not paying for PAs of people, and people keeping them while working for a kingdom, but these troops CANNOT attack. They can only defend. (Basically, the opposite of the above. PAs can only attack if not part of a kingdom.)

-PAs CANNOT combine with kingdom troops unless:

Their commanding officers are part of the kingdom (If this happens in an attack, the kingdom must IMMEDIATELY pay for all the troops and they are lost by the PC as if they had joined.)

OR

The kingdom troops sent are less than half the PA troops. Basically, less than 5000, or whatever number.

-Pay both the cost of buying a PA into a kingdom and the cost of the armaments.

-PAs still have to be paid for to join even if the kingdom is formed through battle and people try to join right away.

-No more than five officers can be deployed by a PA army, instead of the 10 that a kingdom can deploy.

-PAs of anybody without a village or larger, lose 10 Morale every PT.

Just some ideas... A few might be a bit mean, or too messy=3

But the ones in bold are probably what kills the effectiveness of the PAs as anything but a bandit crew or a mercenary garrison force. Mercenary attack forces are possible too, but the biggest they'll ever get is around 8000 or something. =P

Now, if anyone wants a crack at nerfing followers, go right ahead...=S

[KvChaos]

They need to spend 4 pts to get a really good starting PA.
Hence, the solution is to make this 4 pts more important.. make them think about it before wasting 4 pts in PA.

Then again, removing PA from sign-up is better.

[ann]

It seems to me that RuffRydeR's suggestions make PAs impossible to play as mercenary forces - that really defeats the whole point. Frankly I can't see any IC logic to any of them - and that's kind of important to us.

I'd be more inclined to get rid of the PA background sign-up myself and have people recruit the forces in turns. This would mean adjusting some of the others as well - we'd want the city one got eventually by force to be fairly comparable to the one you got in a turn seizure at about the same turn.

[UMCorian]

PAs are fine the way they are... the only thing you might need to balance is blatent abuse of the system. Say, for example, 3-4 players making PA characters, joining the Sim, taking whatever they can almost immediately... then, once their PA is bought and they have no more purpose, they retire and reroll characters who utilize another part of the Background Point system (usually items or skills), essentially 'double dipping'. I believe a few folks were guilty of that here, but I won't mention names or point fingers.

What I would recommend is a simple fix:

If you retire your character, you get 0 background points on the remake. In another words, if you retire voluntarily, or suicide, you need Admin approval to get background points. It's usually pretty obvious to tell which characters die legit and which suicide.

[ann]

You know, we actually WANT people to have characters they like to play. Often - especially at the start of the game people roll and then realize they just don't like what they got. We've let them reroll without much penalty - none if they've done nothing with the character. Your method would make that impossible and punish people whom we don't want to punish - or would require us to make subjective judgments about the intent of individual players.

[UMCorian]

You know, we actually WANT people to have characters they like to play. Often - especially at the start of the game people roll and then realize they just don't like what they got. We've let them reroll without much penalty - none if they've done nothing with the character. Your method would make that impossible and punish people whom we don't want to punish - or would require us to make subjective judgments about the intent of individual players.

Sometimes, it's very blatant. Again, no names - let's just say look at Yan. 3-4 people, almost like geese changing direction in a V, suddenly retire their characters, after using their personal armies to take a massive amount of land early, and take a more advantageous Background Point distribution for their current situation - same characters, really, just ones that no longer need a PA.

I don't believe that's the sort of game play you should be encouraging - but that's your call. I'm just here to kill shit.

[chandler_19]

I think that UMCorian has a point. I guess the best solution would be that these players don't have the right to return in the same region for 4 or 5 turns.

The background points for PA are really strong now if they are used by a group of friends who will follow each other. This is the only background increasing in strentgh turn after turn after turn. It is probably the major problem.