Reinforcing inactives (spiking)

    Quote from Jallu

    Perhaps someone should do it and show us how easily done/broken it is. For me atleast, it's pretty hard to believe that one person could actually deal any significant damage alone.
    Devs didn't do crap about VPs until it was abused, it might be the same on this matter. Just talks never seem to appeal to the devs.


    edit: i'll probably get replied something like "i don't want to be the guy that does that" or something, but we gotta know how something works before it can be fixed, am i right? Never lost significant amounts of troops to spiking so i don't see it as a problem before i do.

    I've lost several hundred troops in one spike on several occasions. Does this count as significant in your world, or not?

    Quote from Mayo_COM

    But sure, if you want I'll try to make someone do it on your server Jallu

    Go for it, lets see how big of an impact it'll have. I'll make sure the let you know my opinion after that.


    Quote from Aeneas

    I've lost several hundred troops in one spike on several occasions. Does this count as significant in your world, or not?

    How much are you raiding with bro? You gotta react to it in time and maybe even try to counter it. If someone spikes me he better not hold the troops there longer than 30 minutes or he'll lose way more than i did. Multiple times killed even hammers that people send accidentally as reinforces. If i lose even like 10k troops to a spike (usually actually a chiefed village or something, not an inactive), i don't go to the forum telling it should be banned. Everyone wants to remove things they don't benefit from but others might. How about make inactives non-attackable? That would be fair for both sides am i right?

    Even if large scale spiking was done it would just change the farming meta from lots of small raids to fewer and larger raids to kill the spiking troops and I have never seen large scale spiking or actually had a net loss of resources while farming myself.


    I don't spike myself outside of specific situations but the example
    @PoLo
    Mentioned above is very real and situationally very useful strategy to use, for example when the case is an inactive but not yet grey village inside your borders producing lots of resources. One could very easily try to spike the attacks on such targets to secure more of the farm to himself while hurting competitors. I really fail to see how that is not a legitimate use of your troops to PvP but I guess the simmers here want to argue against such things.



    People keep mentioning lost troops as it's somehow an argument (it's not). While you lose troops someone is killing them (with the exception to inactives pulling troops from oasis which is bad).
    Farming has inherent risk of losing your troops and like I mentioned before the basic cost-benefit analysis shows that spiking isn't an actual problem. If spiking was a real problem people would stop farming because it costs more than what you gain from it but this simply isn't true and in reality spiking losses are very minor compared to farming income and everyone hence chooses to farm despite the risk of spiking.



    I would really like to see someone do this mass scale spiking just to prove some of the posters here wrong or right. If someone managed to kill tens of thousands of enemy troops without any real casualties I would say that is a brilliant move, I wouldn't even be mad if it happened to me just impressed.


    So far all the games I have seen spiking simply hasn't been an actual issue for me or anyone else I have played with be it top farmers like Jallu or the beginners I have just introduced to the world of farming and I don't think it will be in any real scenarios.

    Quote from 0omph_RU

    Abusing NPC (inactives are NPC) is not a competition in any way.

    If you are arguing that defending an inactive is abuse of the NPC, then by the same logic it would follow that attacking an inactive is abuse of the NPC.


    This is a self-contradiction. How can attacking an inactive be legitimate, while defending an inactive is not legitimate. Both are interaction with NPC. Attacking gains the attacker resources. Defending deprives the attacker of resources and may cause troop loss (strategic gain for defender). But if a defender defends an inactive, and the attacker figures it out, then the attacker can come back with an overwhelming force and easily wipe out the defender's troops while losing few of his own (a strategic gain for the attacker). Defenders cannot risk putting their whole anvil in an inactive because since it is inactive, there is a large probability that the anvil might starve. So if the attacker wises up to the game and comes back in full force to clear the defenders' troops, the advantage will always be with the attacker.


    You also suggested earlier that it's impossible to tell who is defending inactives. It's difficult, but not impossible. It's like hunting for a spy in your alliance. First, you make your list of suspects. Narrow it by tribe, if possible, eliminating two thirds of the suspects. Then you start tracking each of the suspects defence points. Send attacks on the inactive that's being spiked, and look at which of the suspects' defense points go up by the amount that corresponds to the number of troops you lost. If you find a perfect match, then there's a good chance you found the culprit. Now go take vengeance on their account. :)

    Quote from Curtain

    I guess the simmers

    Please lol
    None of the ones arguing against spiking is a simmer in our current world. I guess you're failing to understand this.


    The spiking problem is "ok", the only ones that will really perceive it as a problem is big raiders since they farm the whole map and it's more likely to happen but if it happened to everyone it would be a problem.


    You say it's unfeasible to do a large spiking because the lost would be heavy for the deffender, but truth is that if you play with a team and one of your deffer loses 50k def in order to kill 200k off of 50 players it will be always worth it for the deffer, the kingdom can rebuild that deff and recover from the losses instantly, not everyone else because 1. They won't have the resources right away to do it, 2. They are going to be scared of raiding without rescouting every single farm.
    Probably this example is even in favour of the attackers wrt what it would be in reality.


    I guess some people like cheap strategies whatever happens, trying to do better is too hard.


    We don't do personal vengeance, it's a waste of time, a lot better to attack the whole server.

    Quote from Jallu

    How much are you raiding with bro? You gotta react to it in time and maybe even try to counter it. If someone spikes me he better not hold the troops there longer than 30 minutes or he'll lose way more than i did. Multiple times killed even hammers that people send accidentally as reinforces. If i lose even like 10k troops to a spike (usually actually a chiefed village or something, not an inactive), i don't go to the forum telling it should be banned. Everyone wants to remove things they don't benefit from but others might. How about make inactives non-attackable? That would be fair for both sides am i right?

    I don't have a set number of troops to raid with, but there will be some with hundreds of troops per wave. Often the spikes are considerably more than 30 minutes away, so it's a waste of time looking for revenge.


    Actually I would argue that there should be a limit on resources raided from inactives and that they should maybe disappear faster. As I keep saying, there's no great skill to farming inactives.

    People that claim that in about 30 minutes can hit spikers and sustain that is okey and normal hunt a spiker once per day i have to check dozens of players's stats. neither sherlok holmes has too much work (and i guess you are not at war with noone, or plan anything better if you have time to deal with spikers, ) and then It is so skeptical that it would be possible to do a ''great spike'', simply saying ''not feasible'' ''prove it''.... it just make me laught. a lot too. Coherence is not for this forum.


    We simply ask to balance this aspect of the game giving more weapons to raiders to discover spikers, avoid huge losses cause server are short and make wars is difficoult even without spikers and lose troops in that way is just stupid, 90% you cant identify spikers and all other reasons expressed in the thread.


    I dont care to remove this feature at all, just balance it a little cause many thinks is unbalanced and theorically IS gamebreaking if used as primary tactic from a small group of players. In very rare cases it has a strategic meaning. All the others are idiots that have fun to kill easy troops that want revenge to someone and you are too far to do anything.


    There are many ways in which is possible do it without removing the feature.

    I'm a dedicated spiker and there is nothing i love more than hurting people that blindly send thousands of attacks a day only to build hammers to take me out later.


    Last 3x.com i only defended 5 farms and managed to spike/hammer trap 40k worth of troops by day 15.I 'd become no.1 defender of the server and week ,while also being in top20 by population.All this inside the territory of the 2 biggest kingdoms of the server consisting of 140 players.


    Then they decided to ignore me,even after cataing their leader's cropper(cleared with phalanxes lol).One week later i deleted out of boredom.I of course spent no more no less than 5000 gold(cards,NPC all the time,instabuild everything,items and whatnot).I hadn't had any game breaking impact on the server but gosh that was a lot of fun.I also supported the game by buying the gold to make it possible.


    This upcoming x3.com i'm returning with a bunch of like minded defenders and gold abusers to cause even more mayhem.I'll retain my title of ''most hated player'' and have so much fun.


    Spiking and trapping your hammers on inactives makes me as happy as farming them makes you.

    I've seen nagging about the spiking 'problem' in our alliance and on the forums before. Usually it isn't the top raiders who complain since they don't usually have substantive losses compared to their gains. It's just an annoyance to them but not an actual problem resource-wise. Which is also obviously true for the rest of the players on all servers, or the farming patterns you see wouldn't be the way they are. You're talking about a hypothetical situation where someone does a large spiking round after which everyone suddenly gets very scared to do any farming. The fact that you're complaining about a hypothetical should on it's own show you how small the problem currently is. But let's talk about how feasible it is to do a large spiking round and to sustain it, otherwise there's still no problem...Well, I wonder about the feasibility actually. How would you propose to do it exactly?


    You'd be in an alliance trying to win the server, right? If so, I assume you're going to spike at a moment when you're not at war with anyone and don't expect one to happen shortly. I've never been in a serious war as an alliance aiming to win the server where I could really afford to randomly miss (and with certainty lose) 50k def just for shits and giggles. The server would have to really be weak for that to be possible, even on Travian Kingdoms. So either you're: On a pretty boring server (in which case I would actually advocate spiking just to get some wars going), or a really boring alliance which only has defense, or you're a huge meta, or you're in a smaller alliance / not actually playing to win the server. I'm not sure if there's another way in which it would be possible to keep spiking and also play for the win. If you're succesful, it also means it will be hard for your own players to farm...


    Anyway, since you're talking about a 50k def usage as if it's nothing, we're talking late midgame/beginning of endgame. Let's say that 50% of the server is inactive or barely active, which isn't a stretch. With 5k people on a server, 2500 inactive, and you'd want to spike their biggest village using 50k defense: You'd have 20 units per village. That won't last an hour. So you'd need more defense or do less villages.. Let's say you do 100k and only 1000 villages, less than half of the inactive population. That's still only 100 units per village. Can you see where I'm going with this? This is absolutely impossible to sustain serverwide. So it won't be a huge problem for the server as a whole. Let me know if these numbers aren't reasonable.


    It's certainly possible to do it once, but the net losses after a day would be hopeless for the defensive side. The losses on the raiding side are far, far bigger, but shared by the entire server. So if you're trying to do a sustained server-wide spike, you would run out of defense within days while the nobody in the raiding side has really had major losses. Even if you use all defense available, you would be hard-pressed to keep it up AND sustain defense in any treasury, capital or offense villages...I don't see how it's a viable tactic unless all you want to do is annoy some people for a while. It's not a succcesful winning strategy if you're going for server win.


    Gaius' situation is a bit more practical, more efficient for the defender. But even then, 20-40 villages a day? With hundreds if not thousands of inactive villages on the map it will still be only a hindrance. If you pick a specific part of the map, around specific farmers you want to annoy, you could do it - but the attacker would soon be scouting, attacking with bigger parts of his army, or just ignoring the area in which you're spiking. Also, I absolutely don't see a problem with playing that way.


    I don't see it. :)

    LOL if is true


    Only 5 farms? i think you should raise the bar and you'll be gamebreaking with that golds and mates. Fortunately i dont play x3 speed servers.

    With all that said I'm in general perfectly okay with e.g. showing names of people who reinforce a village again to the attacker. You wouldn't be able to spike/reinforce anonymously anymore at any rate. And yes - if you play as a smaller alliance specifically to do this you could do it for a bit. It would be extremely boring gameplay for you, probably, but I'd like to see it done before I believe it would actually be such a massive problem for the server / game. Maybe Accord could lead the charge and report about it :D

    You're not hated Accord :) No really, if you think so don't! I know you take a particular liking of me :)


    I'm glad you think you're good at this game, many talk a lot and pretend to be good and then when it really matters they disappear. Very common pattern. What you do is just ruining experience for many more players, if that makes a few happy good, altho I doubt TK devs will like it aswell.
    Though you are right if spending 5000 gold and destroying a few buildings of a player capital and then delete makes you happy go ahead, TK is more than happy for your contribution, meanwhile everyone else play the game for real. And yeah spiking a few farms and killing 40k troops on a speed it's not game breaking indeed but if you had read any of the discussion you would see we are discussing a different matter.

    Quote from Ammanurt

    Usually it isn't the top raiders who complain since they don't usually have substantive losses compared to their gains.

    Either they weren't top raiders or they didn't have large offs x) Once you have a large off you see the difference when you get spiked or not. What you raid helps you feeding troops and training troops. If what you lose is equivalent to what you can make due to negative your off won't grow.


    We're not trying to win, we just want to have fun and attack every alliance and destroy everyone. If someone does it he must be able to afford doing it and even then 50k def is built in 2 days with 5/6 good deffers. All your supposition are wrong, we are quite small, have been attacking all server, deffed all server. Obviously it would be hard for our own raiders to farm afterwards, which is why it's completely stupid to even have the remote possibility to do such thing, it would ruin any kind of raiding during the whole server.


    Also your example is completely unrealistic on the current state of TK, there are 1k players at most late game of which 200 grey villages. Of these 200 grey villages let's say 50 are really small and aren't worth spiking because the production is so small the raiding troops will be very small. You take only the biggest 100 villages, you check for size of account, you take the ones with best morale bonus you send enough troops to make it worth 3/4 times their value. ggwp


    The def losses would be from one guy yes, but the kingdom can cover those losses a lot faster than what everysingle offer that lost troops would on his own.

    So you're saying the entire server (even with 1k players you'd still have at least 50 people who raid heavily with big hammers, and more who raid less heavily) is getting so massive a (shared!!) resource income flow from 100 useful villages that they couldn't live without it? It would be gamebreaking? Even then, it works only during endgame and then the latest stages of endgame apparently. What is this, an april 1st fools joke...

    100 villages with all maxed producing let's say 5k resources/hour, means they overall produce 12 million resources a day
    84 million resources a week and we are talking about 100 average villages, there are then cities and smaller villages so we will reach a lot more.
    And it's only an example, but it's huge numbers of resources shared makes people(governor) having good sized off or shitty offs, unless they are king or duke and get free tributes all game long.


    This can applied to any stage of the game depending on how a raider builds an account and depending on how many troops he can sustain on his own. Though it's hard as a governor to have accounts producing more than 110/120k crop per hour when late game starts.

    Ah, but your tactic can't be applied to any other stage of the game. All it takes is for the server to be bigger, or for you to try it slightly before endgame and there is no problem. See my previous big post.


    Also in this example: That's only 240k resources per player, or 48 hourly productions (and that's with single village producing 5k per hour as in the example) - the same as having 2 additional villages. Might sound like a lot, but since the resource flow will only shrink and not expand at this stage of the server your point that the hammer won't be able to keep growing is invalid. If that pittance is all you're getting, it already isn't growing that much beyond what it would otherwise have grown without farming during that stage of the game.

    It can be applied to any stage, you just need to a be a bit inventive about it. Also the resources aren't split equally and those resources aren't resources that you get after waiting to invest time and resources in order to have the payback from it. It's not even comparable. How much you raid increases at the end when villages are bigger and you have more troops to raid the opposite is false, how can I say it? I've been top raider on two servers in a row x) Also you're not keeping into account feeding your troops x)
    But I mean it's pointless to keep arguing about it, I know the danger of it because I have seen the effects of this matter on a limited amount of villages, and I realize what it would mean to do it on a global scale keeping into account every detail that would derive from it.
    Also the example shown above + a few villages and you can keep troops queued 24/7 on B S and workshop level 20. If you don't see how huge this is idk x) And that's only the resources needed to keep the troops queued then you need to have the crop to feed them, if you cut the raid income it means that you need to spend all other resources either in feeding or in producing troops. At some point you will grow a lot less than what you would grow with raiding. And this would make deffers even more stronger, I'll let you figure out why on your own.
    So why shouldn't they sim more and make more villages? Well we could, but it's bad business for an off player to have lots of pop.

    I don't need to do it to have fun thankfully. We're just pointing out a problem and a suggestion. Waiting to see how developers feels about it. And just saying but, even if most of you think it's not feasible//not a problem, it doesn't make our opinion less valid.