I did not add the data for the COM2 server that ends soon. It will instead be part of the 2019 post 
.. But here are the current standing, and Shrugg and GGG pretty much follows their predicted Victory Points (100 000 x Number of Members) perfectly.
Posts by Scorox
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We "punched upwards" too btw
I know Renuo. You won despite the server largely being allied against you too. I simply wanted to state the fact that there was not a 150 man kingdom in either of the 2 servers BM played. I not putting any judgment in this fact all. Just pointing out the different server dynamics that have been.
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I disagree, limiting the territories helped massively, so much so that a 50 player premade is now very often compared to a meta, just because they have the strength to beat them
Restricting borders to maybe 250-300 fields max (expanded over time with treasuries as it is now) would not stop any Kingdom recruiting as many players as they wished, but it would mean there was less to be gained from it (so less reason for it) managing a smaller team is lot easier & a lot more interesting overall and stops Govs just being tribute mules for their kingdoms
I agree that it did help. The situation before they decreased boarders size was crazy. I'm just not sure that it will help to the same extent if another Territory Size decrease would be implemented. If anything it will make it harder for the in-game constructed Kingdoms to compete with the pre-made out of game constructed Kingdoms.
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Disclaimer
Last few days there has been much debate on the the "Kingdom Member Limit" topic. To avoid any blame of hiding my bias on the topic I should declare that I'm in the camp that supports a Member Limitation to Kingdoms. However, to the extent that you believe me, I want to state that I have tried to stay unbiased when both gathering and presenting the data in this post. My intention of this post is not to shame anyone, nor is it an attempt to add leverage for my opinion in the debate on "Kingdom Member Limit". The intent of this Post is to describe as clearly as possible the state of the game in 2018, and to analyze the implications of the current game rules and mechanics.
Also, please leave a like on the post if you liked it. If there is interest I may find the effort to go back in time, digging up and presenting some data from 2017 and 2016.
Data
The presented graphs in this post are based on collected data from GT archives for 2018. In total there were 15 servers that ended during this year. Each server was played under the Kingdom Union system. For each server data was gathered for the top 6 kingdoms (ranked by Victory Points). Recorded Victory Points are excluding the Wonder of the World bonus.
In the Average: The Member Count - Victory Point relationship
For aspiring new players to this game you may want to know what other successful kingdoms are doing in order to reach the top 6 ranks of a given server. This information may be useful if you are interested in creating your own team, or simply if you want to avoid getting crushed in the mid game repeatedly. As a first taste of what the 2018 data tells us it's always good to look at averages. In total there were 15 Kingdoms reaching Rank 1, 15 Kingdoms reaching Rank 2, ... and so on. The following graph shows you the Average Member Count and Victory Points in each Rank-Bracket for 2018. The yellow and white down-pointing arrows with associated [- %] numbers display how much lower in % a given Rank Bracket is in average as compared to the Rank 1 bracket.
Key Observations:
1. On average, a Rank 1 kingdom had 107 members in the end game.
2. On average, a Rank 1 kingdom had 11.4 Million Victory Points in the end game (before WW Bonus was applied).
3. There is a near perfect correlation between end game Member Count and Victory Points in the averages.
4. End game Victory Points seem to fall linearly and to an almost exact proposition to falling member count.
5. One may derive a model for the Expected Kingdom end game Victory Point via the Member Count in the following way: Expected VP = Expected Member Count * 100 000. That is the same as saying that each member of a kingdom is on average worth 100 000 VP.
Applying our Model - Studding each Kingdom in 2018
Although averages may give us a model in the expectation, no model can describe a data set perfectly. Let's now apply our model to each individual observation we have of a Kingdom ending up in a top 6 Rank during 2018. In the figure below you see a scatter plot describing each Kingdoms member count (x-axis) and before WW bonus VP (y-axis). Our model for the expected VP is added as well (orange line).
Key Observations:
1. The model of predicting a Kingdoms end game VP using only the kingdoms member count seems scary accurate!
2. A few noteworthy outliers are the 2 for Kingdom BM, and the worst one for Kingdom Stars. It should be said that the 2 servers BM played in 2018 did not have any of the 150 member kingdoms we saw on the other server. In fact BM was the largest team about about 60 members in both the servers they played. As for Stars, their low outlier was on a server where EMC with about 140 members had a complete hegemony, it might have been they case that Stars (just as any other kingdoms on that server) had no chance to compete despite their 62 members.
3. It appears as if the teams that are above the 100 member threshold are the ones that a) have an open discord server and engage in active recruitment, b) are the ones that we see surviving and occurring on more than one server. Teams below the 50 member threshold appear to either be temporary in-game constructions, or have in many cases died off as pre-made teams.
Server Balance - The Kingdom Member distribution on a server basis
Having looked at the data in averages, and on a Kingdom specific basis, it may be insightful to also look how the VP - Kingdom Member Count relationship have appeared on a server to server basis. In the figure presented below you will see each of the 15 servers with an end date in 2018 along the x-axis. The y-axis displays the a Kingdoms end game VP. Each Kingdom (Rank 1 to 6) of a given server is depicted as a bubble, which width shows the Kingdoms Member count.
Key Observations:
1. We can again see the relationship between member count and VP as the bubbles generally are larger in size the further up the VP y-axis we go. The relationship is not perfect as we saw in the previous section, but we can clearly see a clear tendency that Rank 3 - 6 Kingdoms having a completely irrelevant position on most servers.
2. A common scenario on a few servers is the Rank 1 vs. Rank 2 Kingdom situation.
3. One some servers the Rank 1 kingdom is so far ahead that WW bonus will not matter.
4. There is a HUGE variance in terms of server style. In some servers you see the 150 man teams, some times in hegemony position, and some times battling another 150 man team. On other servers there are no 150 man teams, on which Rank 1 - Rank 4 appears to have roughly similar member counts, yet one team coming out on top (in 2 cases its the Kingdom BM contribution to this more rare situation). The distinct randomness by it self is a noteworthy observation though.
Ending words:
I do not want to add my own conclusion from the data presented in this post. I simply hope this can inspire some good and constructive debate below. I do however want to add a few recommendation to new players coming to the game in order to at least attempt them to not become discouraged form experiencing crushing defeats in their first and second server. My recommendations to new players goes as follows:
a) If you are a solo player coming to the game, try to seek out one of the kingdoms whom often seem to be able to mass 150 man Kingdoms. As a member of these you will be able to play a complete round without fear and stress. Often you can also get good help on how to improve your individual game play in these Kingdoms.
b) If you aspire to build a Kingdom out of curiosity or due to being unwanted by one (or all?) 150 man capable teams, then try to make sure you are able to reach that >100 member threshold as fast as possible. The data suggest this being important as many of the Kingdoms below this threshold appears only once in the data.. while the 150 man capable teams appear to survive and even grow across servers!
c) Be very very careful which server you decide to play. If you are new and not yet part of a 150 man capable team, then you had best odds on a server where one of these 150 man capable teams do not join. Jumping in blindly and joining the first best kingdom you find, then you may soon find yourself getting obliterated for staying loyal to your king by your 150 man Kingdom next door. In essence, joining a random kingdom will be a more fun and fair experience on servers where you do not see the 150 man capable teams.
That is all for this post! Hope you find some interesting and fun facts here!
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I am against restricting players, I would more lean towards restricting borders so that all kingdoms are fairer in terms of wealth and tributes regardless of how many members they have.
Another suggestion would be for stolen goods to be worth the same amount whichever Kingdom you are in and not have it based on treasures and treasuries (since this just makes larger Kingdoms richer & leaves greedy Kings wanting more)
If the rewards were the same for large and small Kingdoms then a more even fight would present itself and there would be less need for "metas" to happen
I think the development just over the last 6 months to a year are more and more indicating that a "territory" limit will not do the job. On COM6 where Phoenix and Nemesis merged (temporarily for the COM6 server) we had no problem fitting all 143 members easily .. and even with smaller boarders that would not be an issue either. The problem, in my opinion, lies in the accessibility (and even optimallity) of massing a server "raid party" of a Game Winning size before launch.
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Scorox: If limit, then 100 - from my side. Most of kingdoms can be inside it, for example on com3 - three of five biggest kingdoms with their wings are smaller then 100 players. That way would allow some new members to join too, probably.
But 60 will ruin the game too much for new players.
Maybe you are right. As some critics have said before, a hard limit may be hard to balance. Personally I'm for the most part happy that there is a debate about this issue. If I had to give a number I'm more leaning to a 60 man limit based on the Data I am about to present in a new post soon. But that is just my own guess what would turn out best.
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Member limit is a good way. In classic there was so. Embassy lvl allowed to nv more. Here we have monster kingdoms who dont allow smaller teams to play.
I agree with you TheSimon. And the bit disturbing part is that it appears as if a disproportional number of the critics of a Kingdom Member Limit are steady members of one of these "monster kingdoms". But I strongly agree with you in the conclusion that smaller teams are not viable in the game. And the strategic decision by already large premade teams to merge and completely dominate a server is a sign that also they know this fact about the game.
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....basically the argument he is making is that the reason for the development of big meta kingdoms is the snowball-effect of the treasure mechanic
for example: more members -> more treasures -> more vp -> more members again...... an other one of the mechanics that keeps meta kingdmos growing is that due to the faster treasure generation they get more treasuries -> more influence zone -> more members ... the fact that this way many of the big kingdoms can just cover complete kingdoms and recruit even more players throughout the game ...
Although I do agree with that the that the main effect pushing players into META are the VP system, I see enough other reasons to keep aiming for max member count even if the VP system is reworked or removed (which I think it needs to be BTW). Each new member brings a certain probability of one more late game hammer, or a certain uptick in WW/Treasury def. So the pull to cram in as many members as possible is there even without the VP system as it a tool for gaining the upper hand on your enemy army-wise. Concretely, even without the VP system you would aim for 150 or more members rather than 50.
Quoteone of the possible solutions could be to set a limit to the count of treasuries a kingdom can have... for example a if a kingdom could only get additional 4 treasuries (at 5k 15k 25k and 40k) -> that would lead to "smaller" kingdoms having faster access to new treasuries to be able to recruit players by covering their territory or merge with an other smaller kingdom and overall make the choice of joining a not top-tier kingdom more attractive
this would also be an obvious nerf to "bigger" kingdoms since they wouldnt be able to outgrow all kingdoms in size and cover an entire quadrant with their influnce zone at later stages... this would force leaders of large kingdoms to choose between recruiting new players in new areas and deactivate already populated treasury zones OR sticking to the area where they already have settled and established dominance but not beeing able to recruit smaller kingdoms by covering their zone
Personally I think it was a time when the territory size mattered way more than it does now. Even if you theoretically could cover another Kingdoms members with boarders and invite them today, the inability of Kings to abdicate after Union makes members of other Kingdoms unwilling. So mergers of large Kingdoms into one in-game is much less of a kingdom territory size issue today than it was in the past. The more present issue I see today is kingdom size in terms of members organised into premade teams in discord. With 200 members awaiting a launch of a server in discord, kingdom boarder size is less of an issue.
Quotealso an interesting take on this issue could be making it easier to beat bigger kingdoms:
what i mean by that is that a kingdom could recieve a small debuff on their defensive forces when defending against members of a kingdom that has a lower population by a certain percentage... that way there would be an obvious disadvantage in just mindlessly recruiting a large amount of players... this would also counteract to a big kingdom beeing able to recruit more defense just because of their large playerbase
these are just suggestions that came to my mind so there could be some flaws in them that i didnt think ofMaybe, but reverse engener that formula and you would have a number of troops build compared to population and you would know which members would be a cost and whom are contributors. At least with a hard player limit the lowest performers do not cost you more than the alternativ cost of someone better taking this players membership. But with a soft limit like this there will be a computable performance threshold you need to meet to not be considered a direct loss.
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More people in leadership positions isn't a pro at all. This means, that most kingdoms will be lead by garbage and are just a snack for kingdoms with a good leadership.
But one must ask the question. Why do you think most people are not suitable for leadership positions? Is it because of they are beyond all help and can not develop some of the skills needed for it? Or is it because they are never given the option to be in this position? Personally I think that more people than are currently entrusted by the larger more well known organisations are capable of at least learning, if not already capable of handling these tasks.
QuoteTo sum it up (for the other readers, I'm sure you know the post very well, but just chose to ignore it):
A) Hard limits force you to make bad decisions like "do I keep an active, chatty noob or do I kick him for someone who does nothing, but build def"
B)This won't work after all, there will just be a wing. In T:L it is like this, main ally only gets the win, wings get nothing. There still are metas. T:L is the living proof, that what you propose won't work as intended at all.
C) New players are more or less fucked. You euphemize this by saying "it'll take them some time to get recruited by a top kingdom", but they just won't get recruited at all, get bashed, and get farmed. Either this, or they land in the 17th wing of some random meta.
A) Even under the current system "noob" get kicked and farmed. This is nothing that is completely elusive to a system with a Max Member Limit. If a player ever get kicked from a kingdom in-game and feel unfairly treated.. then truly this player would fare much better finding a better home where new players are welcome and guided properly. In other games it is a common thing with "guilds" that are focused at welcoming new players to teach and train them. In Travian Kingdom these players are instead left to guessing in-game which kingdoms may be suit him and his level of experience and commitment.
B) There may be METAs and Wings in game. But there can never be an agreement of that 100 players in a group will always work for the win of the other 50 (main members) in a 150 man group. And are you proposing that Travian Legends are working worse than Travian Kingdoms?
C) Here we fundamentally disagree. If "Permanent Kingdom Organisations" are supported, I can promise you that new players have more Organisations to choose from than they possibly even have time to evaluate before they have decided to stay in a particular team.
Quote from Be2-e4It's not even remotely less biased, premade kingdoms rarely do exceed 60 members and if they do, they will be much much much more likely to be willing to create a wing for the sake of playing together, thus boosting premades even more. It also won't be more competetive at all. Either there will be lots of wings, or, the good kingdoms are now only X accounts, a number which will exceed the number of decent+ accounts anyway, getting rid of the semiactive garbage, which isn't a big deal to fight off.
I agree that the Pro/Con list in the original post do not deliver the arguments, just desired effects. The arguments to why Wing-METAs would have a harder time under this system I wrote in the longer text which StarX quoted. Essentially the argument is that players they do feel that they are put on the bench and being done away with will eventually look for a team where they are fully appreciated.
Quote from Be2-e4I dislike kingdoms based on pure mass aswell, which you will know if you read the other thread, but this solution is just not working and this thread and poll is biased as hell ... and there are much better ideas and solutions than hard limits, for the most trivial instance, the one Curtain posted in the post I linked.
You cannot say for sure that its not working. And if there are better suggestions to save this game we should lift these suggestions up for concrete debate too. Curtain would you have time to formalize it into a new post?
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There are so many pressing issues in this game that need to be addressed....I just dont think the member limitation is one of them....not to say that it wouldnt be appreciated in the game, but just so many more things that SHOULD be addressed first, like the fact that you cant dissolve a kingdoms union.....thats fine, but the fact that you can delete.....with an active treasury....and TREASURES!!......thats is just a terrible design!
SacredLegend That is indeed not good. But the foundation problem there is also that the wrong people are in control to the faith of so many other players. Travian Kingdoms do, via the "random in-game" kingdom philosophy facilitates this. This is just another reason why we need "Permanent Kingdom Organisations", where players can seek out a variety of options in terms of teams to join before they enter a server. Such an ongoing kingdom development in-between and across server have a good potential of establishing more organisations among wish less such bad surprises happens. A competitive environment among organisations also outside of servers, I believe, will organically push teams into "shaping up".
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I dont think Travian would institute such a restriction....and if they did it would take years for them to do so. There are "simple" issues in this game that could and should be fixed, but Travian hasnt done so.....doing something like this would be a huge over haul to the game, as i believe there would have to be other changes made to kingdoms before you could institute this 60 member limitation.
Overall, I think this is a dying game...the devs seem to be putting in less and less time into this game.....and just apply bandaid fixes to issues as they come up.
Basically....dont expect Travian to do anything about this anytime soon.
I think the Kingdom Unions update, and the Menhir update were pretty significant in their technical differences to the past system. So one could argue that the Devs are still putting in effort. I agree that the game is on a downwards slope in terms of active players however, and this we much do everything we as players can to prevent. We must ask of the Devs to have one question in mind when designing coming updates of the Union and Menhir scale, namely "Why are players leaving the game, and why are they not recommending the game to others to a larger extent?". I personally feel like the Menhir update was very much a response to the answer such question may produce. So I'm not completely sure all is lost just yet.
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One further consideration could be that this does not necessarily need to be something that excludes servers with 150 member in 2 dominant kingdoms each. There could be Limited Kingdom Servers and Unlimited Kingdom Servers, just as there are x1 and x3 speed servers. Personally I do however see more and more players preferring the Limited Servers for both fairness and challenge reasons. And with that thought in mind, if I had a new friend whom would be interested in Travian Kingdom, I would for sure recommend him to join a Limited Kingdom Server .. I reckon he would be better welcome by the community there. Just having the "new player"-friendliness objection in mind.
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StarX I think it would be worth to map the details and supportive features such restriction would optimally demand. If the details are not mapped out fully and described in detail everyone will judge such proposal in the light of their own individual assumptions of how such restriction will be implemented and what affects it will have.
Background:
In essence this proposal is a change in game philosophy. The current system evolves around a kingdoms who's "life" span over one server only. Membership in a kingdom is temporary, and there is no restriction in regards to how many such temporary members a kingdom can have. By the increasing ease of organisation and communication using 3rd party software, such as discord, the playing field is getting increasingly unfair as the power difference between pre-made kingdoms and in-game-constructed kingdoms widens. Especially new-comers to the game are more likely to suffer at the hands of more experienced players whom joins a server in a pre-made kingdom. This proposal intends to level the playing feel by adding pre-made kingdoms (with restrictions) as an core mechanics of the game, thereby facilitating for new-comers and experienced players alike to find an group of players to bond with, learn from, fight for survival together with.
Proposed Details:
A) Official Support for "Permanent Kingdom Organisations" on the official Travian Kingdoms web-site. Such a support if implemented correctly could serve as way for new and inexperienced players to find a "home" in this game, where they can get help and guidance from more experienced players. Such official support for "Permanent Kingdom Organisations" may involve:
- Kingdom Information Page describing the Kingdoms Culture and Status in terms of recruitment.
- Display of Kingdom Achievements
- List of Kingdom Members
- Statistics over Kingdoms Past Results
- A Kingdom lobby chat for members.
- Kingdom customization (Kingdom Banner/Flag/etc.)
B) A "Kingdom Member Limit" of 50-60 Members, and a restriction of only being allowed to assume membership in one Kingdom at the time. These restrictions are aimed to stimulate the create of a larger number of "Permanent Kingdom Organisations", with a more distinct and varying culture and goals.
C) Only 1 kingdom can "WIN" a Server. Winning a server will be something very rare and truly astounding, since only 50-60 members can win. Also a loss will be something less dramatic as compared to now.. were approximately half the server wins, and half looses. Such a change also holds the potential of reducing the problems of huge Wing-METAs as players will not accept playing in "helper wings" and helping their main Kingdom Win server after server. By time, more and more players will seek out a home where they can act more independently, and maybe even get a win of there own.
In closing ...
Following through on such a fundamental shift in philosophy the hope is that it will encourage team building and bonding players tighter together. Every kingdom will need to make the best use of the members they have. Train, motivate and encourage. More and a larger variation of organisation cultures will appear. With that comes an increasing chance of that every player will have a good chance of finding a team he or she feels at home at in. More players will be engaged in and develop expertise in leadership tasks. A more vibrant diplomatic and political landscape on each server.
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The Optimal would be if they could just add support for different levels of Zoom in the Web-browser version (I mean the current one you use on PC, not the old one for mobile that got discontinued). Then they could just scrap that app thing completely.
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Noone can't limit kingdoms' member.It is about players' mental.Firstly,players' mentals must change.We can see Meta X kingdoms like :
X-1 (60 members)
X-2 (60 members)
X-3 (60 members)
X-4 (60 members)
X-5 (60 members)
... (Total +300 members)
Welcome to the Thread LovëGood .
This part regarding wings have been discussed a lot in this Thread. The reason why a Kingdom Member Limitation would have potential to improve the situation we see today (kingdoms of 5 wings - 300 players) is the following:
- Only one Kingdom can win the server. So if such kingdom of 5 wings with 60 members in each should be possible, then 4 wings need to act as helper kingdoms to the 5th. And only the 5th will get the win. In the current system the wings can be set up with the promise of all members of the wings later be invited to the winning main kingdom. That promise would no longer be possible with a Kingdom Member Limit. Hence, wings will need play a full server purely as helpers for the 60 members of the main kingdom to win. Sure, this may happen the first few servers while old groups are still intact in the massive states they are now. But over time I certainly believe that some players will not accept just playing as helpers for the core group of the 60 players in the Main Kingdom. As we all know, differences in temperament and opinions are a factor that drives players into wishing there was something that more represented their own ways, and eventually the 4x60 players of the helper kingdoms will find a place where they feel more at home and can approach the server more freely and independently, without being bounded to help the old core of 60 players win server after server.
... who knows if this will work or not. But I'm a strong believer in peoples wish to create something in their own image or to find a home of players with similar mindsets. With the right support from the Travian Dev team with more and more features facilitating Kingdoms of limited Size (such as the Between-Server-Kingdoms idea), I see this game coming to a rebirth.
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To step the discussion forward a bit, let's move on and accept that a few of us have different expectations regarding the effects a limited Kingdom size would have. Some are firm believers that it would exclude players, and be unfriendly to new player. Some (including myself) thinks that it rather would have an even more welcoming and inclusive effect as compared to the current system. To move on from this discussion I would propose to us that are proponents of a Limited Kingdom size to engage in ideas and suggestions for features that would facilitate and support a Travian Kingdom with the limited member size as a philosophy. Let us have our focus on features that are improving community and support for new players.
Official Kingdom Organisations Support
It is already the case that the larger and more established organisations are organizing themselves in between servers using Discord and other means of communication and to have a home for their members. However, with an official support for Organisations via the Kingdoms.com website there could be several interesting community enhancing features, such as:
- Kingdom Information Page describing the Kingdoms Culture and Status in terms of recruitment.
- Display of Kingdom Achievements
- List of Kingdom Members (one may only be a Member of one Organisation at the time)
- Statistics over Kingdoms Past Results
- A Kingdom lobby chat for members.
Such an Official Kingdom page could greatly increase the community feeling among its member. It could also act as a way for new players to browse around to find a group they could feel at home in, both by the Info Page but also by its Current Members. This is all very similar to a typical "Guild page" of other MMOs.
To enhance the feeling of kingdom community even stronger it would be interesting if there were some Customization options on the Official Kingdom Page. Like for example the option to make your own costum Kingdom Flag. Maybe even one would be able to select this Kingdom Flag to be displayed in game rather than your real life nationality as is the case now. Some examples I made for demonstrator purpose:
Flag1.png Flag3.png Flag2.png Flag4.png
With this additions to a philosophy of a Kingdom Member Limit (of say 50 members), I feel that the overall effect would highly improve community, and also help new players much better than now. Some ways I see things improving would be:
A) It will encourage team building and bonding players tighter together. Every kingdom will need to make the best use of the members they have. Train, motivate and encourage.
B) More and a larger variation of organisation cultures will appear. With that comes an increasing chance of that every player will have a good chance of finding a team he or she feels at home at in.
C) More players will be engaged in and develop expertise in leadership tasks.
D) A more vibrant diplomatic and political landscape on each server.
E) Winning a server will be something rather rare and truly astounding, since only 50 members can win. Also a loss will be something less dramatic as compared to now.. were approximately half the server wins, and half looses.
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Why you saying that when there are rumours that your and Scorox's team will join the biggest META - Stars to make it even bigger lol? That's what I call BS
That are false rumors. Codex, which is the a small team of friends I belong to, was offered to join several teams for the upcoming servers. If someone have said that we have accepted any of these offers they are lying.
Honestly, I just want more and smaller organisations to be viable and be able to thrive. This was the motivation to enter debate on this thread.
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Quote from Curtain
Quoting the number of "hammers" in this case is bit disingenuous since as far as I saw they had like 1 actual hammer in there (170k from ja sam ja if I'm not wrong was the biggest). As in this case their biggest hammer was about half the actual power of what a hammer could theoretically be based on the law of hammers and rest weren't even worth mentioning and they didn't even have a rammer which is basically trivial to have.
I certainly did not mean to be disingenuous. I just compared to what I have seen in practice on the last 2-3 servers I have played. On both COM7 ending in Nov(?) and COM6 ending in Dec, there was not even 1 hammer above 200k. But really, I think we went far too much in the Details here. The point I made was just that "DEF is bounded by member size (which is unbounded), while OFF army size is bounded by a theoretical max". It may not be that critical yet possibly (even if we reached that Game Over state now 2 servers in a row). But the incentive in the game design to push the Member Count up for the sake of DEF is there too (its not only for the Treasury and VP generation). For each extra 500k def you can rally, more and more hammers on the enemy team are unable to touch the WWs. I don't mean to say it is drastically unbalanced at this current day. But I just wanted to point to the incentive structure the game has.
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a) point is pretty interesting and at least I didn't think of it that way. It does certainly seem like it would apply pressure for the "on the fence" guys to not join a bigger team if their position would be in a wing and instead seek a competitor. That being said the effect might not be as big as you think since lot of folks are fine in playing not to win and sticking around in 3rd party kingdoms and pseudo wings till the end.
I honestly think that it will not have a huge impact the first time around. It is likely that for some time there will be groups of "loyalists" that forms "supporter kingdoms" and so on. However, by time I envision that the increasing amount of smaller organizations will pull hard in those not welcome into the "Main Kingdom" of a certain organization, leading to that it will over time be a gravitational pull away from pure "supporter" kingdoms to new and smaller organizations that seek to build a main kingdom of their own. I think that over time there are a great deal of players that will not accept to play as supporters for the main kingdom server after server. And the pull by smaller and hungry teams will contribute heavily towards the creation of more viable organizations.
b) is only really half right regarding the offense/defense balance. Big kingdoms in of itself don't really tip the balance more towards defense for instance 1x200k vs 1M isn't that much worse than 2x200k vs 2M (a quick sim on the matter gives me 99->63 vs 99->88->73). The prime cause of the balance shift is that the "extra" players are usually not capable of building the required WW hammers in proportion to their numbers be it because they are recruited from defeated kingdoms or because they are usually weaker than the "core" players. This means that the first lets say 50 players unlock you 4x200k hammers and 2M defense but the next 50 players only get you 1x200k hammer and 1.5M defense as the players tend to be both smaller and less offense oriented.
The VP point is very much right and incredibly snowbally mechanic.
I think that if you look at it from the point of view of the absolute top of the organizations you are correct. When you study the effects of 200k hammers you get these results. However, on COM6 we had about 1.5 Million DEF in one Wonder, and 3 million in the other Wonder. The trail of about +25 enemy sieges by Stars and the rest of the Server of the did not hurt either of these WWs even 1 level. The same was the case on COM7 where ANTIMETAs trail of +15 sieges did not take down even 1 WW level. I'm not saying that the Kingdom size put DEF in favor of OFF really, but what I find to be the case is that with kingdoms of 300 players owning 4.5 million DEF, then you need that enemy organization to hold 4-6 players capable of producing +200k hammers, and these players do not grow on trees. So in many cases and on many Servers the current Huge kingdoms can and have in the past been able to put the Enemies in a checkmate state by the amount of DEF they are able to rally. So the problem of OFF size being bounded by game "laws of physics" and DEF being bounded by kingdoms size is a real thing.
Quote from CurtainRegarding the point c2 (or d I suppose) is that while it's true that ideally that's exactly what would happen the reality is that in a game like this if a new player get smashed once or twice they won't come back and even more determined players won't play if their expectation is to "well just first play a round in a pseudo wing ally kingdom and then another round in a proper wing and then you have a chance of joining one of the "main" kingdoms to have a shot at really mattering". When round represents 6 months of commitment you gotta be really careful with how you make the new player experience and to ensure as many as possible have an enjoyable round. Then again the danger of such progression from ally to wing to main over several servers can be mitigated by changing the alliance size. 20 players would certainly mean there would be several rounds minimum to even enter while a 100 player limit wouldn't really limit the size much at all.
At least personally one of the bigger selling points of kingdoms was that as a noob I could just start and instantly belong to a team where I spawn and then have a real shot at mattering without having to know the right people or belong to a specific group beforehand. Menhir does kinda solve the "you spawned in the wrong neighborhood kid" problem though which is nice.
Under the current system its not only the "new" players that gravitate towards the massive organisations in order to avoid being smashed to pieces. In fact, almost everyone are.. and many are done so out of pure necessity. For example, as the rumor has it, on the COM that is being launched in Feb, Knight + Titan + GGG and many more are merging into a huge team. What drives such merge, and what does the faith hold for anyone in their approximate region? In fact, I judge these kind of developments as the prime killer of this game. The number of players that these mega kingdoms will discourage from continue the game is a hidden statistic. I'm not saying that a max kingdom size would eliminate new players from getting smashed, but I do not see it getting worse, and I do see certain other aspects of the game approving based on it.
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Let's keep this Thread on the topic fellas
In reality we certainly would have nothing to loose and a lot to win working hard towards a state where we can formalize a petition for a Event Server with limited Kingdom size. No one knows for sure how it will turn out. But most long term players for Travian Kingdoms knows that the player base have been shrinking, and the community feels smaller and smaller for every year that passes. Since we really care for this game our efforts are well invested in trying to direct the attention on what type of Event Servers that are launched by the Travian Dev Team. Certainly we have picked up on a few things while playing this game over the years that may hold more or less potential for increasing the popularity of our beloved game. In my mind I see no other rule set for an Event Server that hold higher probability of really revitalizing this game.Most respectfully, the topics of "Multi account cheaters", and "Pay to Enter Servers" are topics I think we ought to keep to threads separated from this one. Just for the sake of maximizing our odds of the Dev Team hearing our wishes for "Max Kingdom Size Servers".
