That would suffice. Spiking being anonymous is the sole problem IMO.
It's not.Been bumped to no. 1 defender of the server and week within 5 days of spiking around.
Everyone was aware of my ill-practice.
Those that don't are amateurs that are not killing enough and thus not actually hurting the farmers.It's merely an annoyance.
Personally, when I am farming (rare because I have gotten lazy about it in my old age), and I get annoyed by spikers, I just croplock the gray villages.
Heck, sometimes I resource-lock AND croplock the biggest gray villages that I can find.
Croplocking an inactive ensures that spiking will fail. If you're lucky, they try and spike with their hero, and the hero dies. Immensely satisfying.
Resource-AND-croplocking an inactive ensures that if someone conquers it, they get a sucky village. I like doing this because I hate it when people use their valuable chiefs to take a village from the inactives. I personally feel that chiefs and more importantly the expansion slots and culture points for new villages ought to be used to take villages from active enemy players.
By croplocking and resource-locking inactives I feel I am doing the server a favor (in a small way) by lowering the benefits of interacting with the NPC and by comparison, raising the benefits of interacting with active players.
After taking two steps back to think about it, I can understand how normal players don't see normal spiking as a problem and actually I agree with paulc solution on this kind of problem. I also see how this might be the only way for some to have fun and that's it's not strong as we are saying.
It's probably only us being salty about it since being top 1/2/3 raiders we have tons of troops dying daily because of spikes but this doesn't affect the majority of the people and it can be a good interaction between other players. I keep my idea that this interaction for the top players is less interesting but I can see how it can be a "good" interaction for other players.
So if it was possible to only see the name of the people spiking I think I could live with that, it would even enhance the interaction afterwards between players, and maybe it could be the very reason to trigger some other conflicts as Accord was originally saying/doing.
Lastly, I understand how you don't see the large spiking as a major problem like we do and why you think it is unfeasible, indeed it has major downsides for the deffer and his kingdom and for the whole server and it would create a really unhealthy server with lots of grudges.
Interesting topic, glad we could talk about this.
Croplocking.... like if skpikers cannot send 3k crop to the inactives and feed for 3 hours his 500 troops (+500 average inactive's pop) after arrival of his troops, more than enought time to kill hundreds of troops. Even without crop feeding spiking is effective in small villages.
It just make a little difficoult to spike but you lose 30%-100% resources raided, simply forever..... not seems to me a big deal.
you dont deal with spikers but create another bigger risk...
Croploking and resources... Really good idea! top raiders and skilled players would be incouraged, for avengeance, to zero inactive's infrastructure in all server that in the farmlists give them 0 0 0 0, and not do more work finding/distinguishing what inacives are crop-resources-zeroed, They would just zero all infrastructure of all inactives..... obviusly far from their kingdom!. I would be dedicated one on it, in that scenario, simmer and crop-resourcelocking players dont deserve to have neither a village with full building developed and no fields. and i'm sure they would not call them sucky.
So at the end you just risk to trigger a global war on those who destroy more farther inactives near enemy, involving even more kingdoms meanwhile...
Many seems be against inactives, and people that raids here.... i dont understand why.
Would you like to live in the world of wellness where there are more equal opportunity, meritocracy, and big goals to achieve.
or live immediately after a the end of a war where there are few resources, a lucky few and many criminals?
i tryed to do some speculation about a server with no inactive villages in this current system or very low raids from inactives.... and i arrived to some conclusion of global slowness of server, anarchy, less players, more sim city gameplay. no Great barracks and stables running for most of off governors.....more defensive players than offensive, internal fights in the kingdom, more weaker kingdom, more spread between gold user and not gold user, weaker player's cannibalization, last but not least your lovely interactions player vs player maybe will decrease, and even if for miracle they increase the Quality of these interaction will be for sure lower. Skilled travian players will leave Travian kingdom. (Multiaccount, sitting abuse, maybe increase?). TG says Goodbye to some money from this Kingdom versions.
Yeah... i know.... maybe is a bit catastrophic.
Btw by that time i'll have left TK long since. I dont care too much about future of this game. I just like guess how a game can improve, and how small factors can change the gameplay.
Current servers probably are the lasts, we are playing the best way we could, and how we wanted. No more motivation to play others, improvements happens too much slowly for me.
So please, read my words as the troll's ones. dont be scared. Travian kingdoms will become the best browser game ever, even with spiking , one day 
(Oh.. I was going to forget... in that scenario players like Accord will still be able to have fun... this aspect is important too, i suppose...)
I have been on the receiving side of this spiking myself. I used to lose close to 60 clubs a day in TEST server due to this. I have been on Top robbers for some time and Spiking really ticks me off but i would spike up farms if i was a deffer churning out phlanx sitting lazily eating crop in my village while I watch the neighbouring enemy teuton raking in 20x amount of res i make because he raids all inactives. I would want to kill them clubs xD .
But all discussions aside, i think Spiking is here to stay (Its one of the last remaining PvP tactics left in the game) So, please dont kill it. Its genuine to kill enemies in any way possible. (ITS A WAR GAME FFS!!!!) (ALL IS FAIR IN LOVE AND WAR) (cant think of other quotes but u get the flow right?)
I would like to suggest one tiny alteration.... Please make it visible who is deffing the inactive farms!!! xD ... So that The GAME just gets INTERESTING
As a player who expects more warfare in midgame, this is just PERFECT
Also , to the guys who raised the issue of deffing chiefed farm villages the minute after conquering!!
I suggest this, Next time someone does that, chief that village back and destroy all the buildings and cata it down. Make them wish they were dead
I don't see any problem with any player spiking a farm. It's understandable that it will annoy a lot of players and could cause issues for some although this in itself is not justification to remove reinforcements of inactive villages. If you want to remove reinforcements of inactives, you have to remove the ability to raid these villages also.
As much as it is an inconvenience it should always remain a part of the game as allowing such a rule change would be essentially handing everyone free resources with absolutely no risk involved. When you use your troops, no matter what you are using them for there should always be a risk.
You take a risk to gain a reward. Taking no risks and sitting back hitting your farm list raid button with no risk involved would be "game breaking". Travian is a war game as people have mentioned, you should expect to lose troops no matter how you use them, whether that attack is on an inactive or active player. To allow the ability to do raiding with absolutely no risk does not take skill.
It definitely takes more effort to be a top raider while spiking does not require the same time investment. Although both are valid strategies and neither is unfair on the other. Again, don't use your troops if you don't want to lose them, from spiking or otherwise.
The only solution to this problem is to remove inactive villages completely. There is no other solution to this problem as stopping reinforcements just allows an unchecked source of income, yes that might be great but it's highly unrealistic.
I didnt read the whole discussion. i just share my experience at last com7.
A player name Defferok was a king with no govs or alliance. In her profile there was written that he want to become a number one defender in the server.
So he started spiking. with 2/3 thousands of phalanxes. As i know some of our raider loose good number of troops, also i loose maybe 3/4k TT in whole server to only him.
He probably defend some other alliance with his troops. But spiking help him to get the top deffer of the server, at the end.
If you can see the spikers name on the deff report, then it is even. At the moment it isn't. Sure if someone takes spiking to the nth degree you can work it out, but that's not the norm. So the spiker spikes with no risk; this is what is wrong.
I don't think it's a game changer, but it is annoying and things would get more interesting if the spiker was visible. What is the downside?
It'd be most balanced if you saw the defenders names when scouting, but not when attacking? What do you guys think?
The downside here is that the whole report system would need to be overhauled, every defender will be named whether they defend an inactive or not. This is probably highly unlikely to happen also. Remember you have to take into account the design of the game when suggesting changes.
There is multiple ways to send an attack or raid, if you choose to do it through the farm list you also choose to attack blindly. If you make a choice to attack blindly then you are the one at fault here. I do it myself and get spiked as well but do not see this as justification to outright give you information where you wouldn't get it otherwise.
I believe the only solution here is to remove inactive villages outright but then you have to look elsewhere for your resources prompting people to attack players that are active and creating a farm out of them. Yes they will disappear if they go inactive but you'll be in the same position if they don't disappear when someone begins to spike them.
My suggestion is that no village is marked as inactive on the map, the villages that are inactive get deleted automatically after 7 days of inactivity.
You will not find out who is defending someone if you scout or attack an active player and thus is true for inactive villages as well. On a deeper level the whole combat system is effected by the changes that are being suggested. It would also be a logistical nightmare to have to overhaul the combat system to appease people that don't like being spiked on there farms. You could of scouted, but you don't once the farming of that target begins.
You are getting angry because you are being led into a false sense of security over attacking an inactive player and thus demanding changes where they are not needed.
Jallu's suggestion is a possibility but it's not entirely realistic in my opinion as scouting someone should only show details that you could obtain from a realistic scout. I.e. the scout can see the wall, the scout can see the troops, the scout knows where the troops are at that time but the scout didn't see where those troops came from.
The easyiest solution to balance it a little is remove the Morale Bonus for inactives, if make visible spikers is not technically possible.
That defensive bonus (that is very relevant cause inactives are always low pop due the chiefings, above all in late game it reach easily 30-50%) is thought to make more difficoult destroy weaker player WHEN the player IS ACTIVE, it's just stupid that this defensive bonus is exploited only to the benefit of a second part against a third.
Someone disagrees?
From reading all of the above and thinking about the problem for a while i think some of the main issues are:
From the point of view against farming
It is currently to easy to farm
The introduction of farm lists and the ease of identifying potential farms have made it a LOT easier to farm compared to earlier versions of travian.
Especially if you consider that a lot of players simply add all inactive villages to farm list through map and then unit scout it to see if its farmable. Even to me that seems a bit to cheap considering the amount of effort you put in and the potential gain.
From the point of view against spiking:
Plunderers are more or less powerless to retaliate against spikers
This goes hand in hand with how easy it is to identify inactive (farmable) villages. In essence what makes it so easy to make farm list now also makes it easy to spike. Moreover stacking defence bonuses and no ability to identify the attacker makes this tactic extremly effective and very frustrating for people who plunder a lot.
Would people be more okay with farming if it was more time consuming and more difficult? In this case i think the solution below would be a good change from both point of views. The goal of the change im sugesting here is to keep all the tactical options for both sides but rebalance the amount of work and resources that can be gained.
1. Remove the visual indicator of inactive players, essentially don't make inactive players turn grey after a week.
This increases the skill cap and effort required from plunderers to create the farm lists. You would still be able to farm if you can put down the time and effort to scout and find all the potential inactive players. It will also make the tactic of blind unit scouting a LOT less viable therefore increasing the skill cap for plundering.
At the same time it allows small scale spiking for people who wants a nearby farm for themselve while making it more difficult to do large scale spiking due to the difficulty of finding the farms in the first place. Without the grey villages to guide you i dont think large scale spiking is likely to happen as it would require a tremendous amount of work. And if it did it would be fine due to the amount of work you would have to put in to make it happen
Moreover this change has no technical limitation and has no unintended impact on the game.
Many of the other sugestions suffer from either being technically very difficult to implement and/or with the risk if interupting game balance.
2. Rebalance how much resources can be gained from inactive can be adjusted by how long a village can stay inactive before dissapearing
This essentially changes how many inactive villages will be available for plunder at any given time during a server and vastly changes the total amount of resources that can be plundered. Here i think we can all agree that we need to strike a balance where plundering is still profitable while not being game breaking. IMO if it requires a lot of effort im fine with top notch farmers being able to farm maybe 1-2 million resources per day and this can be adjusted by reducing the time it takes before the inactive village dissapear (Lower timer ->less farms = less resources). Currently i think you can plunder around 3-5 million per day during the most profitable time so likely the time for deleting inactives should be somewhere around 2 weeks which is significantly shorter than it is currently.
That way we make plundering still viable but require a lot more time and skill to do while balancing the amount of resources that can be gained compared to those who dont plunder. Moreover we dont have to remove any of the tactics non plunderers use to fight against large plunderers while making abbusive large scale spiking much more difficult.
Good suggestion.
However, let me also say that I disagree with:
Quote from Skyler#EN(4)The downside here is that the whole report system would need to be overhauled, every defender will be named whether they defend an inactive or not.
I don't see this as a downside at all. I think the pendulum is too heavy in favour of defence at the moment; this would help swing the pendulum back.
In the old days of travian it was possible to turn active players into farms (at least for a while) through croplocking.
In kingdoms, in comparison to the old travian versions, it is so difficult to attack, disable, and cripple an active player's village to make it into a farm that most people don't even try to farm active players.
I think that it would actually be a good thing to bring back hard croplocks. Make it so the hero cannot produce crop. Make croplands, warehouses, granaries, etc., cost crop again to train. Make troops cost some crop to train so that croplocked villages are tough to defend and regain control of.
Then make the inactives get deleted faster.
That oughta make for some more interesting gameplay.
Display More1. Remove the visual indicator of inactive players, essentially don't make inactive players turn grey after a week.
This increases the skill cap and effort required from plunderers to create the farm lists. You would still be able to farm if you can put down the time and effort to scout and find all the potential inactive players. It will also make the tactic of blind unit scouting a LOT less viable therefore increasing the skill cap for plundering.
At the same time it allows small scale spiking for people who wants a nearby farm for themselve while making it more difficult to do large scale spiking due to the difficulty of finding the farms in the first place. Without the grey villages to guide you i dont think large scale spiking is likely to happen as it would require a tremendous amount of work. And if it did it would be fine due to the amount of work you would have to put in to make it happen
I think this is the more viable solution to this problem and also the easiest to be implemented in the short term. It solves the complaint without having to fundamentally alter current game mechanics.
I don't see either side on this discussion being able to disagree with this point. I am open to hearing peoples opinion on a change like this? With so many options being discussed and thrown around we need to come up with at least an agreeable solution that would work for the players of the game that the developers may implement.
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It will make farming a more time intensive task than it currently is with identifying where the farms are but drastically lowers the chance that a large majority of farms could be spiked. I am not entirely against farming taking more time with an update such as this and it will potentially make farming more lucrative.
It will make farming a more time intensive task than it currently is with identifying where the farms are but drastically lowers the chance that a large majority of farms could be spiked. I am not entirely against farming taking more time with an update such as this and it will potentially make farming more lucrative.
Not really. I'm not using the map at all when adding new farms atleast, probably neither does most of the top robbers. Inactive finders don't care if a village is grey or not, they just see if that guy has gained population in x days.
Not really. I'm not using the map at all when adding new farms atleast, probably neither does most of the top robbers. Inactive finders don't care if a village is grey or not, they just see if that guy has gained population in x days.
This is also how I go about adding my farms also but people have been focusing on grey inactive villages and thus it seems like a possible solution.
This is also how I go about adding my farms also but people have been focusing on grey inactive villages and thus it seems like a possible solution.
Fair enough, not most non-hardcore players use finders, but i still don't think the change would affect much..
Fair enough, not most non-hardcore players use finders, but i still don't think the change would affect much..
It certainly wouldn't affect the top farmers.
I like the idea of inactives being in play for less time though. It makes farming a little more work, which is good.
On the subject of seeing defenders, I rather suspect that the issue there is not balance, but what a report on attacking a WW would look like. On that basis it looks like I'd prefer to go back to not being able to spike greys - this forces spikers to do the same work as farmers in working out who likely farms are.
On the subject of seeing defenders, I rather suspect that the issue there is not balance, but what a report on attacking a WW would look like. On that basis it looks like I'd prefer to go back to not being able to spike greys - this forces spikers to do the same work as farmers in working out who likely farms are.
That's what i had in mind when i proposed that defenders names would be only shown when scouted.
