Feedback and Suggestions

[ann]

Well we don't allow people to reroll and return with PA. But we could do a rule like one you suggest - four or five turn break before return to the same region. People could still look forward to playing with their friends but the delay would make them consider rerolls pretty carefully.

[RuffRydeR]

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.

I dunno what you mean.

I just figured:

Mercenaries are a bloody expensive proposition. More expensive than using your own troops, and these are soldiers who fight for money, purely money, and not loyalty. That increases the expenditures even more.

To be honest, you could have just one singular rule that makes people think twice about PAs:

Have a monthly upkeep cost for troops. If you can't pay it, morale drops, and a percentage desert. That means if you have PA 4, you'd want to take a village first thing. =P

Hell, oh, do the same for followers. Even the maid gets living costs paid for by their master.

And I'm not so sure how dropping the PA limit to a lower number than 10000, AND limiting the officers they can deploy is so bad...

FINALLY, these two:

-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.

Well? What is so bad about that?

[antlan87]

I don't know if this was suggested before, but maybe we should implement some sort of activity check so people can't have their friends join the game, join their kingdom, and then go inactive for the rest of the game while they get used in KTs. Since even an inactive PC is better then 80% of NPCs, that seems to be sticking the deck to me. Perhaps they need to have at least 1 PT every few months or something?

[ann]

If you make it illegal to hire a mercenary force unless it outnumbers your own force and then also make it illegal for the force you send with a PA to be larger than half that of the PA when the total size of the combined PA force you've allowed isn't even big enough to take a city with a generic force. That makes Mercenary bands pretty useless and makes it nearly impossible to use force to take a city.

I just can't tell from the various rules you propose what it is you think PAs should be for. We actually INTENDED for them to be used to take cities (your size restrictions would make that difficult if not outright impossible) and to be able to make an appreciable difference in battles - something you seem to be trying to avoid.

Mercenaries should be able to assist in invasions as well as enter into agreements to help defend. You've completely done away with defense agreements. Though you allow a loophole we've already done away with in letting people keep troops and join rulers - the defense only rule isn't meaningful in that it would allow people to invade with higher forces than they ordinarily would as they'd be able to rely on inactive PA troops to defend - in other words you let the force size be effectively increased without requiring any recruitment.

Here is our usual approach to things like this - we first decide what we want something to be used for, and then be sure that it's balanced with other alternative ways of doing the same thing, then look for ways of abusing those rules. It does seem, from your proposals, that you're looking for ways to prevent what you don't want to happen without looking at how they ought to be used.

What's your issue with followers?

[Taishi Ci]

I only have a couple suggestions for balancing PAs, which I think a lot of people would agree with.

1) No starting PA BPs
2) To compensate, generic city garrison sizes are smaller.

Have mercs. Have independant forces. I have no issues with those, they seem to work rather well. Just don't allow people to flood areas with PA signups.

[Xushou]

Y'know, unless I'm reading the sign-up thread wrong, even people who choose 4 BPs in PA won't start with 10,000 soldiers until, like, turn 42 or something. Honestly, with a half-decent administrator, you can trump any BP PA for troops in one KT, even on balanced production. Unless someone with a dozen or so friends very patiently waits until turn 42 to flood a single province with a bunch of 4BP-PA sign-ups, I don't see how it's terribly unbalancing, personally. I believe someone joining at the conclusion of this turn would still only start with 3000 soldiers. Sure, they start fully equipped and with decent morale, but without a kingdom backing them, indies are gonna have a hard enough time keeping up without hamstringing them with new limits and/or removing PA BP from sign-up.

I would call this my two cents, but I didn't really read much further back than this page, so...

[Nanjun Tiger]

Y'know, unless I'm reading the sign-up thread wrong, even people who choose 4 BPs in PA won't start with 10,000 soldiers until, like, turn 42 or something. Honestly, with a half-decent administrator, you can trump any BP PA for troops in one KT, even on balanced production. Unless someone with a dozen or so friends very patiently waits until turn 42 to flood a single province with a bunch of 4BP-PA sign-ups, I don't see how it's terribly unbalancing, personally. I believe someone joining at the conclusion of this turn would still only start with 3000 soldiers. Sure, they start fully equipped and with decent morale, but without a kingdom backing them, indies are gonna have a hard enough time keeping up without hamstringing them with new limits and/or removing PA BP from sign-up.

It's only been a couple turns and PA's are fielding over 5,000 troops. The problem isn't with a single player, on his own, its if several people sign up with PA's and band together, they can easily field those 10,000 right from the get-go. Plus the issue with rulers using PA in conjunction with their kingdom armies...

I would call this my two cents, but I didn't really read much further back than this page, so...

This explains it better.

[Xushou]

Well, on that note, the problem seems to be less with PAs than with people's friends signing up to join them. Honestly, I've got one PC in my 'kingdom'. PAs or not, that's a huge disadvantage when compared to, say, Phailak (whose kingdom is overflowing with officers). Now, I dunno how many of these folks joined Phailak for reasons other than pure IC happenstance (ie, liking his recruitment letters best or somesuch), but it's safe to assume that some of them did, I suppose. Even if you completely remove the soldiers from the equation, he and I are not on equal footing cause he can use those extra PCs to raise an army far faster than me.

If you remove PAs from sign-up, all that will happen is the independent folks will suffer for it. The kingdoms exploiting BPs in PA will simply exploit some other feature of having more officers (Items BPs to make unstoppable duelists, Followers BPs to start with two exceptional NPCs, and so on). And those same kingdoms will have extra money for not having to pay for their new officers soldiers.

So, yeah, the problem to me just seems to be that some people have more friends willing to play the game with them. (Which brings me to the folks who re-rolled after their PAs served their purpose...but that's another story altogether.)

[Choso]

Yeah rerolling after your PA served their purpse in order to get a charcter with super equipment, skills, or followers is wrong. And can and should be stopped by a 3-5 turn delay.

[RuffRydeR]

Hmm...yeah, I guess I nerfed em too much. =P

I only have a couple suggestions for balancing PAs, which I think a lot of people would agree with.

1) No starting PA BPs
2) To compensate, generic city garrison sizes are smaller.

Have mercs. Have independant forces. I have no issues with those, they seem to work rather well. Just don't allow people to flood areas with PA signups.

The stuff in bold should ALSO lead to:

NO starting PI, villages or towns. =P Well...maybe villages, but definitely no PI or PB as starting bonuses. You can stack villages onto the Wealth chart. =P

And to be honest, in a race, with the current system and having BOTH no starting PA or PI/PB...I think PI/PB would still get there first. It takes a while to draft, and a while to train, eh?

Also, an option for taking villages or towns via PI would be nice. =P

And as for rerolls...

Well, why can't rerolls PAST the first turn a Player joined the game have one less BP to use. Third reroll only gets 2 BP, and the fourth, 1 BP. Anything afterwards gets zero. That doesn't sound so bad...=S

Also, what's wrong with the idea of still paying for the troops even if you're establishing the kingdom after battle? How does that not make sense? Did you actually share of any of the real spoils with these victorious troops? =S

And what's wrong with having to pay for the armaments as well as the troops?