NationStates

Having read through other threads and ideas I'd like to make the following proposal to address some of the issues.

Now, as an imperialist, someone who can't take place at major updates in most circumstances, and someone who participates in the R/D game mainly for political reasons, piling for me is an important thing. It is often the result of a lot of working alliance building, establishing connections between other players, organisations and regions and is an important way to get ordinary non-update players involved with the whole R/D game. However, in part due to the success of all of that it has meant that it is very hard for defenders to liberate regions that are taken by invaders, skewing the balance of the game a bit.

My idea then is to have a period of say five days (or perhaps the equivalent time it takes an embassy to be made) where the amount of influence a delegate gains is reduced to somewhere between 25%-50% (I don't know the coding for any of it so I don't know what amount exactly would be suitable) of what it would do normally from the amount of endorsements it has and so on. By reducing the influence gained this would make liberation attempts much more practical yet retains the importance to raiders of non-updaters. The fact it is for a limited time will also add to the drama of it all and still keep relations really important on all sides to success.

This also hasn't no real cons at least that I can think of. GGR transfers, or normal transfers of delegacy shouldn't be affected overly as they will have large amounts of influence to begin with. Stealth raiding will be more important again as a way to accrue influence before hand and increase the variance in the R/D game and tag raiding will be unaffected completely.

This would not help/change much at all, IMO. About the only positive I see out of this that non-updater defenders would be needed after a lib of a long occupied region because the raider influence would be too high to eject. But typically not very many nations are ejected right away, this suggestion might make the region closer to lib by one or two WAs, not enough to make it possible.

I agree with Topid. I doubt this would change much. Plus..correct me if I'm wrong, influence still works by it rising a lot slower on shorter term delegates - like say on a 1 day raider delegate compared to a 30 day raider delegate, which would be getting more influence? The 30 day delegate.

It's a good formula behind the idea but doesn't go far enough to be useful for defenders. I think Asta's proposal is a bit more workable with dissension buttons.

There was also the 'no banjection/ejection' for 24 hours by new delegates idea that came up, which still allows for tag raiding. That's a better idea than this too. (Though I'd want to be able to banject people who arrive bofore an update, and thus it doesn't cost influence...)

I agree with Topid and friends.

Cerian Quilor wrote:There was also the 'no banjection/ejection' for 24 hours by new delegates idea that came up, which still allows for tag raiding. That's a better idea than this too. (Though I'd want to be able to banject people who arrive bofore an update, and thus it doesn't cost influence...)

I don't really like that idea at all cause while it wouldn't impact tagging, it'd seriously mess up detagging. Half of what we do is kick sitting raider puppets and we'd have to wait 24 hours to do that in -each- region tagged.

Then don't bother with kicking the sitting puppets?

I think outright dismissing the idea would be a mistake. I can see a no banjection / ejection for 24 hours working for not only defenders but gives natives a chance to take some action.

New delegates almost never have the power to banject/eject anyway, not without extensive sleepering.

What that idea could do is create is interesting battles - raiders take delegacy. Natives mobilize, retake delegacy, but can't banject raiders for 24h. Raiders call in reinforcements, defenders arrive, both sides try to mobilize numbers, and like I said, maybe even a back and forth.

The downside is that Defenders do have simply more people, as was evidenced in Palistine, and it would force even more 'Raider Unity' than there already s.

Cerian Quilor wrote:What that idea could do is create is interesting battles - raiders take delegacy. Natives mobilize, retake delegacy, but can't banject raiders for 24h. Raiders call in reinforcements, defenders arrive, both sides try to mobilize numbers, and like I said, maybe even a back and forth.

The downside is that Defenders do have simply more people, as was evidenced in Palistine, and it would force even more 'Raider Unity' than there already s.

It would make diplomacy and alliances more useful for everyone though. Nationstates have more imperialist regions these days than previously. More, longer battles should help their militaries too, since it'll give their non-updaters more opportunities to participate in invasions, where their endorsement actually matter when it comes to which side win.

True, but the sheer number of defenders is a concern for Raiders/Imperialists. I mean, as long as the UDL and TITO largely refrain from working together... but if just 50 of your WAD's endorsers committed themselves, boom, there goes any raider victory.

Anything that boils down to a pure numbers game like that will skew things over too much to the defender side. Diplomacy and alliances are crucial now as it stands anyway, and having spent an awful long time over the past year building them for TNI I'm pretty sure that the capacity for many more WA numbers just isn't there. Defenders can always call on sympathetic nations that don't usually have an interest in gameplay which just isn't there for invaders.

To address points on this actual proposal, one thing that it could be combined with is a slightly higher cost of new WA nations entering the region in the first place so compound its effects. This could also be aided with a change of strategy by defenders with greater use of attrition in keeping influence levels low in advance of a major move in. This will also expand the importance for non-updaters for raiders by making them moving in more important to counteract the effects of this, and for defenders as Topid said.

One of the alleged "problems" this Summit will seek to deal with is that of the apparent difficulty to liberate regions, and defenders have been complaining about this for the past several months. Now, lets suppose this is the case and there is no way to adapt to it under current gameplay rules and setup. And lets also suppose that its beneficial to the game to change this to make it easier to liberate regions. Then, this is the way to do it. The effect on non-raiding/defending activities should be fairly negligible too.

Defenders call the tactic of taking over a region and defending it with the banject button with a force large enough to head off all but very sizeable and perfectly timed update operations, piling. They say piling is evil. But any defender proposal to remove the ability to eject/ban for the first 12/24 hours etc, or have a delegate changing phase where there is no delegate, which makes it purely a numbers game and gives no advantage at all to being the incumbent delegate, is effectively is the end of regular or even semi-regular occurence of any kind of raiding other than tag raiding. The death knell of non-tag raiding. I don't think any raider, or anyone who engages in raiding, would deem that acceptable.

The compromise solution is obvious. This is it. Reduce the influence accumulated by Delegate's in the first few days, so that if defenders try hard enough, and raiders don't bolster the Delegacy enough, it can be taken. The question we should be discussing is what % reduction to use, and what effect different reductions will have. If we don't go down this route, then we either have to keep the status quo (which isn't that bad imo) or kill off raiding. Or find another route which totally changes the games dynamics and is much riskier and likely to have unforeseen consequences.

Cerian Quilor wrote:Then don't bother with kicking the sitting puppets?

That's absurd. First of all, raider puppets don't belong there. Second of all, not kicking them provides a much easier re-tag system - activate WA and endo. No need to worry about movement time, or fending off defenders.

Also, for some of us, banjecting raiders is like the only fun thing about detagging.

This would negatively affect those who, like me, have no interest in R/D.

Benomia wrote:This would negatively affect those who, like me, have no interest in R/D.

So new delegates no involved in R/D have a pressing need to ban/eject/banject nations within the first 24 hours? I didn't know that.

I find myself almost entirely in agreement with NES here. However, the solution isn't to reduce the amount of influence that the delegate gains, but rather to increase the influence cost of ejecting and banning newly arrived WA nations who have yet to update. At present this can be done essentially for free, and by adding even a small influence cost we would achieve two things;

1. Liberations would become more feasible; at present a failed liberation has no effect on the long term battle, as all nations can be ejected for no cost. If this was altered not only do attrtional liberations become more feasible, but a standard failed liberation has more of an impact.

2. Non-updaters become useful for both sides, rather than simply that which holds the region; with the increased cost of ejecting a non-updated WA nation, the incumbent delegate now faces a choice; do they spend influence ejecting hostile WA's who arrived pre update, draining their stocks and making them more vulnerable at update, or wait for update?

The thing is, depending on the size of the liberation, how early they move, and the skill of the delegate, even failed ones will still see some people get through, which means it will consume influence (however small) to banject them.

Cerian Quilor wrote:The thing is, depending on the size of the update, how early they move, and the skill of the delegate, even failed ones will still see some people get through, which means it will consume influence (however small) to banject them.

This is true in principle, but not in practice. Due to the differences in influence gain between the delegate and the hostile WA's, even with full cross endorsement, at present attritional liberation is not a feasible tactic. As an example, in the spring I ran an attritional liberation campaign for the UDL over five consecutive updates (six including the original raid and deffence). In the initial fight, we were able to get around eight WA's into the region and updated; of these the raider delegate ejected two, reducing our numbers to six. Over the next two updates we were able to get further people in and updated (running liberation attempts that could have feasible have placed the ex-delegate back in control). However, due to relative influence gains the raider delegate was able to eject them, and reduce our numbers. We kept trying, but with our reduced numbers the objective having shifted from trying to liberate the region to maintaining a presence in region. Even when we were able to get people in region however, their initial influence was so negligible that they could be ejected with ease, and our remaining forces removed one at a time.

Attrional liberations are not feasible at this time. Making them so would be simple however.

That's what native resistance is for.

The effectiveness of native resistance is dependant on two things;

1. Natives being sufficiently active to make use of it
2. A sufficient percentage of them doing so for it to have meaningful effect

It is also significantly harder to implement than a simple change to influence gain rates. Regardless, this isn't a case of one or the other. The possibility of native resistance doesn't make delayed influence/increased influence costs redundant, and vice versa.

No, but it makes making non-updated nations cost influence less nessesary.

No, it does not. Native resistance would provide natives with a means of fighting back. Changing the influence ratio's would make attritional liberations possible and provide incentive for defenders to launch attacks even when they lack the numbers to liberate. They both address the same general issue - that liberations are pretty much impossible - but in different manners that are complimentary. Even if one is introduced the other does not become less desirable.

Cerian Quilor wrote:

Benomia wrote:This would negatively affect those who, like me, have no interest in R/D.

So new delegates no involved in R/D have a pressing need to ban/eject/banject nations within the first 24 hours? I didn't know that.

I was talking about the "delayed influence".

It would need to be carefully balanced so attrition doesn't make holding region's incredibly difficult or make it so you need a ridiculous amount of people to move in to secure it but I think in principle this could remove one of the major problems of existing R/D without too negative repercussions for anybody.