Posts by Hæim#NO

I'm assuming OP is the abbreviation of Victory Points. If that is so, then this is a very interesting idea. I do agree that this game needs new elements to spice it up, and the updated Natarian Horn that is being tested on the current test servers is a very good first step towards this.

I would love to see and play a test server with your changes implemented. It would most certainly be a different server than the one we are used to.

Another idea that is kinda similar to this that I just came up with is that you could spend your treasures to activate certain artifact powers or you could have artifact powers be active if you have more than a certain amount of treasures in a village, and the more treasures you have in the village, the stronger the artifacts power will be. Actually, I will just make a suggestion for this in another thread instead.

Anyways, really cool stuff, I like it!

- Hæim

Quote from Jackiee#EN

Yea sure... so you can have 2M troops and 0 def points and I wouldn't notice u had that many troops It's like saving up money all life and then dying before you can even spend them... you can tell people you had that many troops but nobody is going to care really Same reason there is no medal for troops cooked but for troops killed right

This reminds me of that one time Unreal built 20m def only for no kingdoms to attack them all round long because they were in a 200 player meta on a server with only 600 players total. Everyone just fought amongst themselves instead since attacking them would just be a waste of time and troops. Fun times

Also, for a second there you made me think that getting medals matter more in the grand scheme of things, but then I remembered that this is still just a game and that what matters is that you have fun playing it. Some players just enjoy improving themselves as they keep playing the same loop over and over again, and sometimes you just won't have anything to kill for a whole round while other rounds you will have to kill hundreds of thousands. As a defender you don't choose to make attackers attack your defense. You just try to figure out where they are attacking and cross your fingers that you found the right target. That's just the life of a def player.

Quote from Shape

What kind of a loser would waste time with that,kekw.

The same kind of losers that make 12 accounts and brag about being the best players the game has ever seen xD

Quote from Shape

It is posibble to make 2m-2.5m deff points, you made 1.4m.

With boosting you can get 10m def points if you want. Def points do not show that you are any more skilled at the game compared to how many troops you have trained.

Quote from PsYc0RabB.iT

I like the idea but i also get why It Is Dangerous. A possibile middle ground solution may be to allow the king to see the deletion countdown and he can assign the capital village to another player with less than 200 pops, 1 Village etc. Then, when deletion CD runs out, instead of being deleted the Village changes owner.

From my experience, 3 days after a player becomes grey, every single village they have that is inside of kingdom borders will get chiefed other than the ones with 200 pop or less. Waiting for another 2 weeks for the account to get fully removed would just leave it with 1 capital village which would also be very battered and destroyed, so it would just make the feature obsolete and not worth the time it takes to implement it in my opinion.

Quote from PsYc0RabB.iT

On this note I'd like to propose the option to transfer ownership of a game round entitely. It happens that people may have to leave a game round due to various reasons, and they Need to keep logging in even if the have a dual to avoid inactivity of the account. Instead there could be the possibility to transfer the ownership to another player (obviously someone Who Is not playing the same server).

A couple years ago I played a server where the king just disappeared 2 weeks into the server, and that very same king didn't get deleted due to inactivity because one sitter logged in every once in a while. They kept this up until the end of the server, and they still had access to the account. It could be that this was a bug at the time though. If you were to implement this feature then I think this should be in the hands of the player who owns the account only. The king should not have the power to do this for someone else, obviously. I'm not against the idea, but not everyone will freely give their account away like this, which is why I still think that my suggestion still stands for the ones that stop playing due to boredom.

-Hæim

Quote from Unknown

Thinking about the grey players, the issue with it is that while the avatar exist, the player can come back at any moment. We don't know the circumstances of each player, so taking away their hard work and giving it to others is not something we should be contemplating.

Yes, I understand you will say that players that go grey don't come back in 85% of the time (just to say a number), if that is so, there is a 15% that had a life issue and comes back to it's avatar to keep on playing.

We cannot make those decisions on who is going to come back and who is not, we must respect those avatars until they disappear.

What about the ones that had a life issue in the last week of the server? They come back 1 week later and all their hard work is deleted. Some players play an entire round planning around the last week of the server, and if they have to go away, they will come back and the server will be completely gone with their several months of work before this being a complete waste of time. Why are you trying to protect some of the players that disappear midway through te server, but offer no protection for the ones that disappear towards the end?

There will always be a new travian kingdoms server, once you have been away for a week, most of your villages will get chiefed by fellow kingdom members anyways as there is no guarantee that you will be back. That's why I said to leave it to the king. The king should know if something happened to them, and if that is the case then they can just register a new user on the server, kick the new owner of the account that they inherted and reinstate the previous owner into the account. They will have to wait another week to do that though, but it's anything but impossible.

Quote from Unknown

Regarding the menhir, we are right now running some test on how to improve that feature, and some other, in the test game round:

Testing game version 0.101 – vacation mode + menhir

I'm already playing that server. I like the new changes. It should get rid of some of the abuse, but there is still things that can be abused like menhiring a multi account or a friend over that then donates all of the resources they get from the resource crates you get after menhiring. This means that you can get several hundred thousand resources extra added to your account for free on the first day of the server, and this lead will increase their growth exponentially. My idea completely removes their ability to do this, and it also feels more realistic since you have to move to the new village with your hero instead of just being teleported there with your entire village on your back like this is some kind of sci-fi game where you can warp your space fleet to anywhere you desire. I'm sorry if that sounded rude, but this has been an issue for a very long time now, and we are honestly getting very tired of having to deal with it. The current test server should remove most ways that it used to happen, but I can guarantee that the ones behind it will find a way around it once again like they always do.

I wouldn't suggest something unless I knew that it attacked the core of an issue with this game, and the updates in the current test server is just a bandaid patch in my eyes. Players will still be able to just lower their village below 200 population and then proceed to do the same thing they have always been doing. Yes it will require a lot more help from their team, but coordination was never an issue for the players abusing this anyways, so I'm sure they will find a way around it.

-Hæim

I suggested adding a 1.000.000 or higher troops trained quest in the past as a solution to this

There is 2 parts to this idea. The first is a different take on how to handle grey players and the second is a different take on the menhir system

1: Succeeding a grey player

After a player has been inactive for 7 days, they will turn grey. If that player was in your kingdom before they went grey, then you, as a king, would be able to have another player take over all of their villages. The player that moves in will have to have less than 200 population and only 1 village in order to be able to succeed the inactive player. They may not leave the kingdom and the king may choose to boot them out of the account at any point for the first 7 days of them being on the account. If they get booted out then they will get removed from the server and will have to make a new account on it. 7 days after the player got booted out they will turn grey again and can be succeeded by a new player.

Why?

The reason is simple. New players who start way after a server has started will have a chance to start at a later stage while already in a kingdom that is interested in having them there. This is a much better new player experience compared to being menhired over and having to build up their empire from scratch, and it will also feel much better for the kingdom as they won't be 1 player down because someone stopped playing. This is also a good opportunity for players who weren't able to join the server in the first few weeks to join without being weeks behind their peers.

2: Menhiring the way it makes sense

In the residence you may choose to turn your non-capital non-cropper village (not city) into a menhir village. The king may then select the village and menhir a player to it as they please. The village will have all the upgrades in it that it has at the time the menhiring player relocates to it. The player that menhirs recieves no compensation for menhiring. The time it takes to menhir is equivalent to the time it takes your hero to run to the new village. They will get the troops that have been built in the village that they menhired to, but the troops in their original village will get deleted. If necessary, the troops in the village that the menhiring player gets transferred to will also get deleted. Hero will get transferred to the new village safely. Tribe unique buildings will get demolished upon transfer.

The player that built the village will recieve culture points equal to that villages daily production times 40 for 1x servers, 13,3 for 3x servers and 8 for 5x servers, as well as freeing up the village slot they used to settle it, so they may settle another village should they wish to do so.

Why?

Menhiring will be a lot more restrictive in the early parts of the game, and there is no way that I can think of that you can abuse this system. You are not generating anything out of thin air. The village is already there, the only thing that has changed is the player that is running it. This also just feels a lot more natural than the way the current menhir system works. Picking up your village and moving it 80 tiles away and putting it back down in an instant seems a bit illogical to me, especially when you can take your entire army with you as well. I'm not saying the current menhir system is bad, it works fairly well in my opinion, but it just doesn't make all that much logical sense. There is nothing else magical about this game other than the menhir stones and maybe the shroud around the World Wonder, so having a more logical way to move players feels more correct for me.

- Hæim

Quote from Elijah_FR

some players use hideouts to hide their troops they wouldn't approve :p

It was never an intended feature, and it's one that makes playing as an off player very trivial because the only way you will ever reliably kill an off player while they are away is because they are either too lazy to hide their troops in the hideout or because you killed their entire village. There are still ways of hiding your army if you are going away for a longer period of time, but the robber hideout is the most reliable way of doing so, but it was never intended to be used this way to begin with, or so I would believe.

Quote from Elijah_FR

if it scales with off and you are a def player this means the troops in hideouts would be low and thus too easy to clear.

Then why does this entire thread exist to begin with then if they didn't want to have an easier time clearing robber hideouts? That's the whole point of this discussion

Why would it be too easy? It would just be as hard for a def player to clear it as it is for an off player to clear it without the def player having to pivot into building a mini hammer just for clearing hideouts every day?

-Hæim

Alright, another couple of ideas:

1: What if when you reinforce the robber hideout, the robbers automatically attacks the troops you are reinforcing with with their full strength? This could either be instant or on a 1 hour delay allowing you to stack it up before they attack (though I think instant might be more fair.) You don't get the benefit of hiding behind a wall this way, but it could be a way to speed up the killing of robber hideouts where attackers won't benefit from it very easily. They would have to make def villages and use those to tank the hideout, but at that point they could also just build a second robber hideout hammer to clear it instead. Also, attackers would still have an advantage because they can siege it.

2: Make it so that robber hideouts scale more linearly with attacking strength and not have them be based mostly on resource production in the early game. The current robber hideout is very unforgiving for defensive players because they HAVE to build an economy to be able to build up their force since most of the time they can't rely on raiding because there is very few good defensive raiding units, and because of this, robber hideouts are a lot stronger for defensive players than what they can kill if they were to just attack it with their defensive army. Their losses will be several times larger than what a single village hammer offensive player will lose because their troops are spread out through several villages and because of this initial resource production scaling. Just either reduce the scaling or make it scale entirely off of the attacking strength of your troops to fix this issue.

-Hæim

I think that even with the wall bonus this would be a fine idea. A proposed change I would make to this idea would be that you could provoke them by attacking them with 1 unit, then they will immediately retaliate. When robbers attack though, they only attack with half their units, and they can attack up to 2 times, so you still have to kill 1/4 of the original hideout the same way, but it is a lot more managable this way compared to how it is right now. A good temporary fix for this, until they change hideouts that I personally use is to train haeduans in my capital just for killing these hideouts since it pretty much pays for itself and you will have some extra haeduans to use as def in a pinch. Hero levels is also a +. And the treasures help out a bit as well.

Quote from Camelot

this would bring the game more out of balance between offer and defender, like it still is
the offer can decide to attack for the CP, the defender has to share the CP with other defender and mostly leaders decide, who has to defend which villa
finally the defender cant choose to make CP in this kind, the offer can

It is very true that def players have a disadvantage compared to off players that they have to use their troops reactively, but def players can stack as many players as they want in just 1 village to overpower off players, and def troops are way cheaper compared to off troops once you get into the part of the game where off players have to run greats. If you are in a position where you have to spend all your resources on building def troops, then you will most likely be able to use them several times every day anyways, so you should get a bit of a trickle of culture points to let you get new villages a bit quicker instead of just having to wait for that super slow passive culture point gain or having to spend resources on celebrations.

Quote from VIOLENCE 59

That's exactly my point. Since you're playing attrition you'll never have a decent amount of troops since you are constantly hitting and rebuilding, therefore a simmer that has been fattening up will most likely be able to kill way more troops than the attrition player before he runs out of army, and he already has the eco to stack up the army again and probably can maintain parties going 24/7. I don't see an attrition player winning this fight on CP.

What does it mean to be playing attrition? Do you just suicide your troops on the enemy every single day? Do you try to cause as much damage on the enemy with as few losses as possible? I'm guessing that it means that you spend all your resources on troops and improving your troops, but if you are on the front line you will most likely be able to farm quite a bit extra which would give you extra production compared to a simming player, but you can't spend that production on parties like they can in the beginning. If you try to play safe and build up your army while only picking off easy targets, then you will be able to eventually have enough resources to spare to build a few settlers every once in a while to settle new villages, or even chief one of the villages you have been attacking and farming. Eventually, you can start putting resources into running celebrations as well, and you will be able to catch up to the players who have been simming in cp. because you have higher income with farming and higher cp income because you are killing enemies, while you also have an army and they do not.

Also, you can build troops then spend them and start simming after. That is also a valid strategy right? Aiming for powerspikes then recovering. If you spend all your resources on building troops to fight then lose them all in an attack on an enemy treasury then you would get some cp back for every troop you killed and would be able to settle a couple of villages to help you catch up to your simming peers. This would also help you with spending some of the extra resource production you gained after freeing up a large amount of maintenance.

Do you think that you should get punished for playing attrition? I think that if more players played this way, it would be way more fun to play. Early fights can be just as important as fights in tha later parts of the server, but the players who sacrefice their lategame to secure an objective early are usually rewarded with no recognition on the hall of fame, so most players instead choose to aim for strategies that give the largest amount of impact and points in the lategame even though they could have and should have spent their troops way earlier. This idea is mostly just to encourage players to fight more and earlier.

Quote from Mycro#EN

Multi abusers will love this idea.

Besides the idea one need alot of villages in order to create a usefull account (off or deffwise) isn't necessarily true. Many different ways to play this game and be usefull. Its all a matter of playstyle, goal and how one works towards it.

Those who don't last early game mostly won't have any effect later game either.

I'm sure multi abusers are having a good time already with all the crazy things they can exploit. Adding 1 more thing to the table that is also super easy to track shouldn't be an issue imo.

You don't need a lot of villages to make a useful account indeed. One of the most useful accounts is the king accounts made on day 1 used to menhir players closer to the WWs, and you don't even need to settle a second village to change the course of the server with such an account. Being the first kingdom to get to 10 out of 12 croppers near a ww will secure that ww for you and severely set back any other kingdoms aiming for that ww, pretty much ending their server on day 1 if the server is competetive enough.

Every player on the server has some kind of impact whether they like to or not. They take up a tile on the map at the very least, and that is enough to change things. It could very well be that the winner of the server was determined by a random player who joined the server on day 1 and left within 10 minutes due to the butterfly effect.

Quote from VIOLENCE 59

what if the players that were left alone and go the simming/partying route start attacking when they have the eco to back up the losses ?

Isn't that gonna make it even more difficult for those frontliners to compete with ?

If you did that then you would be attacking enemies who are already being attacked by someone else who has probably also been farming those same enemies for quite some time. It's not like you can't also do celebrations at the same time as doing this. It could be that if you wait too long with using your troops then the players who have been fighting will have already caught up to you in economy, and will have already surpassed you, so you would be the one catching up at that point. It kinda balances out. That's how it should be ideally though. I want to endorse more fighting, not more simming. The value of culture points fall off quite hard in the later parts of the game, so when the troops killed measure up in the millions, it will already be so late in the server that 5 extra villages will not gain you that much of a benefit.

As it stands there is no actual tangible benefit for killing other players troops other than for hero xp unless you are trying to farm someone or if you are trying to destroy an objective or defend an objective. I just imagine culture points would be the best way to give something in return for spending large parts of your economy on military and to reward aggression.

You should always build up your economy to some extent. You don't want to be building only military with the just the 1 level 1 cropland you are forced to build in the tutorial. But when the most effective way to play the game is to not interact with other players for the first 30 days of the server then I feel like that's not how it's supposed to be. It should be an option, but it shouldn't be the best way to play the game.

As it stands, the only way to build your culture effectively is by building up a lot of villages and holding a lot of celebrations.

My suggestion is simple.

For every unit killed in offense and in defense, grant the player who is responsible for that kill 1 culture point.

So if you attack someone and kill 2000 def troops and you lose 1500 off troops, then you gain 2000 culture points, and whoever lost their def troops will gain 1500 culture points.

A couple of exceptions would be that you can't gain culture points from killing troops from the same kingdom and you can't get any (or reduced) culture points for killing robber hideouts or robber camps.

Why do I think this is a good idea?

Sometimes players end up in the middle of an earlygame war, and because of this they end up being heavily impeded in their cultural growth since they are forced to spend all their resources on building troops.

These circumstances makes it so that these players who fought for weeks on end will end up a lot weaker than players who were left alone and were free to develop their villages as they saw fit, even though the players that were on the front line have made a much bigger impact on the server as a whole. I feel like this is the opposite way of how it should be. The player who fought from day 1 is the one who has gained all the fame and notoriety, so their culture should be way more known, widespread, and thus more developed. There is a reason why none of the largest cultures in history is one that just wanted peace with everyone, but instead it was the ones who were waging war.

Quote from Unknown

First I will say that one of the reasons we don't published the punishment guidelines is to ensure players don't "calculate" what is worth doing or not.

So if you published them, would there be a way to calculate some form of cheating that would be worth doing?

Shouldn't all cheating not be worth doing, or am I missing a point here?

Also, players are going to figure this out even if you post them or not. There are already players who are testing the limits of what they can get away with and what they can't.

1. Track the multies for at the very least a couple of days, preferrably a week to gather evidence to figure out the perpetrators behind them. Who do they trade, who do they send their def to, who do they get raided by (is it just 1 person or is it several people?) and is that player raiding them getting raided by someone else? Where do the value of the account end up? That's the guy you need to ban. The multies are replaceable, the main account is not. It might seem like this is more work than just banning them on the spot, but trust me when I say that these are the same people doing it over and over again because it works, and it works really really well.

2. Ban the avatar, not the account on just 1 gameworld. Ban them on every gameworld and force them to either stop playing or make a new character with 0 prestige. This way we will know which players are the scum and which players actually deserve the prestige they possess.

It would make it easier to make hammers that specialize in damaging world wonder villages. You would lose out on a bit of killing power and gain more destructive power. The benefit would be that you can maybe get that 1 extra level shaved off of the WW that could change the tide of battle in the endgame, but it could also be the reason why you weren't able to pull through a treasury attack earlier on because you wore that instead of a cavalry helmet for instance. Also, it would make ww hammers a bit cheaper to feed. As for benefits, you would have more options on where you want to take your account. More options means more strategies which means more replayability.

- Hæim

I feel like truces don't really make all that much sense anymore now that we have got vacation mode in the game. It only affects the players that currently can't take use of vacation mode, like kings and dukes.