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At least that's how they'll remember him when I'm finished.

how much NW does one need to attack him?

Anybody interested in helping out, mass rats with us. Once we're in range, we're going to pillage until he's leaderless. Or, if that looks like it'll take too long, we'll just chaos him until he's ratless.

Stage 1 involves putting rats on the market until we've got enough NW to actually attack him. After that we're going to pull all the rats off the market and suicide 100% of our production.

Also, I'm spending all of my passive turns scouting to get as much land in the game as possible.

Rats    Anonymous    89,907,879    $420
Rats    Anonymous    354,725,789    $430
Rats    Anonymous    158,336,812    $430
(new!) Rats    Anonymous    16,230,953    $450
Rats    Anonymous    97,550,718    $450

All told, that's about 700m NW in rats.

Just seemed off to me, but I guess it makes sense.

House Number 1: College Dorm, moved out May 12th 2013 - time to start an internship
House Number 2: City-side house, moved out June 2nd 2013 - living there was a miserable experience, happy to leave
House Number 3: River-side house, got condemned July 9th 2013 - I loved living here, why is it condemned? Was I legally allowed to be living here? What was my landlord thinking? How did it get condemned on July 9th without the tenets hearing about it beforehand? "Surprise!"
House Number 4: ???, will move out August 16th (give or take) to go back to school.
House Number 5: Apartment for school next year, I'm already leasing it. Will move in on August 16th, give or take.

The worst part is changing your address. Bank, government, insurance, and who knows what else I missed. Don't mail me things. Seriously I'm probably not at whatever address I gave you 2 weeks ago, even if this place seemed like 'the one' it probably burned down or something.

Vacation aside,

The Syndicate    Agency    7    $203,045,577    $812,182,308

$800m does not make you a dominant clan.

So... mission accomplished?

Right now there's no reason to hold onto troops unless you are sure that nobody can break you, because if someone can break you they can just drop down to that single troop type, rid themselves of NW, and take your whole army.

Change it so that only the combat troop type does any deserting. If you attack with skiffs, only skiffs desert., etc. Std attack still gives you all troop types.

This will make it easier to maintain a defendable troop NW base.

A question popped up in the help forum so I wanted to enumerate all of the reasons that I've dropped land.

1. Drop land at the end of the run to improve your defensive ratio and protect you from leader attacks. If you ran on a 20 leader/land ratio all game and aren't holding a ton of NW, this will really help to protect your warlord.
2. Drop land at the end of the run to 'lock' your land. If you can put up a decent defense, people won't want to attack you if you only have a moderate amount of land. But if you have a ton of land and a decent defense people will suffer through needing to keep a large army while they attack you. By the time they are done, lots of your army will have died, and you will be an easier target. Last round once I started dropping to 20-30k land every run and setting up a moderate defense, I almost never got attacked. It allowed me to keep all of my leaders every run, so I never had to make more leaders.
3. If you want to increase the land spread and make it harder for your opponents to gather lots of land. You get more land per attack if the person you are attacking has lots of land. But if you and the land farm have equal amounts of land, then whoever runs after you will have to spend about twice as many turns to get to the same amount of land, and they might need to keep an army for longer so it hurts them.
4. You want your clanmate to have access to the land. Your clanmantes can't attack you but they can attack the land farm. So you give the land to the land farm and now your clanmates can use all the land you made to accelerate themselves.

You have become our peasents, because we successfully acquired control of the land in the game.

My question is, why such a strong backlash? Everybody seems upset. That wasn't the goal at all, I was hoping for some fun and a challenge. We barely pulled it off and Ruddertail was the only person who really put forth some effort.

Ruddertail was the best part of the experience. We had something of an alliance set up, then some stars aligned and sevz/snare/idunno/me decided to lock land, so I told Ruddertail and he instantly declared me an enemy, at least temporarily. Clean, simple, professional, and totally understandable.

Shadow was the worst, because he's playing passive and I really don't want to attack passive players. Except at one point he had enough rats to break idunno and we couldn't let those rats sit in the game, lest someone trade him for them. I wanted to leave him alone but 15m rats and 100k skiffs, my suspicions were strongly stirred so I organized a takedown. At that point I wasn't even 100% sure it was Shadow, I just new it was a guy claiming to be a passive player yet sitting on enough troops to break us.

On the off chance that Shadow was indeed holding them for Ruddertail then I hope you consider my takedown a risk of doing business together like that. If there was indeed no intent on Shadow's part to ever trade the rats away then my apologies, but I think my aggression is understandable. But you aren't really passive when you are the only person all game who's had a large enough army to break the guy locking land. Or at least, if you truly are passive then that's both a coincidence and pretty impressive, and you should be able to forgive the misunderstanding.

As for reverse desertions, I think the idea is great and that it would make locking land a lot harder, except the mechanics were screwed up a bit. If you fixed them like shown below, I think they would work a lot more in your favor:

1. reverse desertions happen starting at 3x NW not 1.5X NW.
2. 1.5% is still minimum desertion, 3% is still max desertion (but happens at 3xNW and 6xNW respectively)
3. If you attack with rats, only rats desert, ditto for the rest of the unit types. You only get all troop types if you std attack.

The way it is now it's mathematically impossible to prevent someone from causing reverse desertions unless you have so many troops that they can't break you at all. Assuming you both have only rats, they only need 1/2 of your troop NW in order to break you, and that doesn't even account for the fact that you need to hold on to the other 3 troop types as well. So basically anyone you can break at all is vulnerable to your army thefting until they are literally below 20m NW. It makes it relatively easy to keep everybody well out of reach of the nerevarine.

And seriously this is crazy stressful. Why aren't we all friends?

Your opponent's Army is disgusted by their master's failure to defend! 3% join your cause!
After a failing struggle, your army is repelled by Not Land Farm (Costly Land)'s defenses. In the attempt, you lost:
15,411 Weasels
In their defense, Not Land Farm (Costly Land) lost:
2,895 Weasels

This is for everything game guide related. My first post only pertains to 3.0, but the thread is open to reg game guide discussion as well.

I asked before but nobody responded. Can we have the first section adjusted to look like this?:

Game Basics
First 199 Turns
Entering the Battlefield
Learning Leaders
Running
Adjusting Settings
Keeping out of Trouble

Except for 'extras' you can delete the other pages. I'm also asking that the guide include a 'Strategy' section, with the following topics:

Indy
Foody (Fooder? lol say it out loud)
Casher
Passive
Aggressive
Tricks
Misc (for the moment you can copy-paste what's currently in 'Extras' into here, but most of the stuff belongs in other parts of the Strategy section)

Probably most of those will be stubs for the beginning.

Okedoki, I hope you are ready for this. I hope I am ready for this. I tried to order these in order of importance. The ultimate goal is more diverse play where the different strategies all have roughly equal effectiveness. The goal is also a dyamic game, where interesting things happen every day, but 'devastating' things only happen once or twice a game (per player).

I want every single player to be actively involved in the market. Indies should be selling troops every day and buying food every day, cashers should be buying food  and troops every day, and foodys should be selling food and buying troops every day.

I want there to be roughly an even number of each type of player (+/- 60%, which is a wide range). If there is a lack of cashers, the game should balance so that the one guy who is running a casher has a noticeable advantage. Same for foodys and indies. Market dynamics should take care of this. If there is a low amount of cash in the game, everything will be cheap. If there are a low amount of troops in the game, troops will be valuable. If there is a low amount of food in the game, food will be coveted.

1. Murder shouldn't kill leaders. I thought about this a good deal, and murder's don't take much of a ratio advantage to pull off. When performing attacks, they should happen in this sort of order, from easiest to hardest: troops die, money gets stolen, food  & money get destroyed, food gets stolen, health gets eliminated, leaders die. This is because troops are hard to keep around and you end up with a fresh batch every run anyway. Money has a hiding place inside of Cluny's Hut. Food destroyed is less bad than food stolen. Low health causes lots of problems but it takes a lot of turns to lower health by a lot. When you lose leaders, it's anybodies game to do whatever they want to you.

2. Market good should sell in the order the arrive to the market. All prices are rounded to the nearest 50 (food to the nearest 2). The minimum prices are 100/200/400/600/6 AND in the 6 hour transit time, people can bid on the goods to ramp up the price (money is paid up front, and then returned if you get out-bidded). The 6 hour transit time resets if the seller manually changes the price (even if they are already at the market). This means any aid shenanegians will be vulnerable to anyone who's paying attention. Since there's no minimum price 1 player can't hog the the market unless they are selling at a low price. I have no problems with this. Market tax still exists at a flat rate of 15%.

I'm also thinking that market goods shouldn't sell for the full merc price. It's delayed gratification, but if you already have enough money it makes the choice really easy. I think market goods should get half of the direct-to-mercs price. This makes even wealthy players think twice about just throwing things on the market with the expectation of merc-selling.

3. Troops cost less money to keep around. Something like 30% less each. This will make indies want to hold on to more troops, make it more reasonable for cashers/foodies to buy more troops, and in general move the free-market price of the troops above the minimum because the demand will be higher but the supply won't change. Troops still eat the same amount of food because we're trying to make foody a viable strategy (not to be confused with foodie, an RL term indicating someone who really likes experimenting with food).

4. Replace 'pilliage' (lol @ me saying this before the pillage round has even started) with upgrades to 'Surprise Attack.' I'm not sure what the current stats are on 'Surprise Attack' but they should be: +25% offense points, +50% troop death on your side, their leaders get involved in the fight and die (22 DP each), no allies can help your opponent, surprise attacks ignore the fact the the opponent is maxed, and the attacker loses 2% more health as compared to 'Standard Attack.' Bascially, it's a really expensive attack that will overcome some of the things I dislike about undefended-but-maxed warlords.

5. Even inside of a clan, you can only aid someone to 3x your size. This is because I think solo play is really weak in 3.0 compared to clan play. Solo play is just too expensive, and solo indys can't keep up. Solo foodies might fare better, but team play has too many advantages right now for my liking. At one time it may have been good to help encourage team play, but at this point we all seem to be friends and enjoy teaming up at least some of the time (Even if the current state of the game is much more team-heavy than it usually is). Ultimately, I still think team play should have a lot of advantages and almost no disadvantages, but just not to the extreme that currently exists.

6. Rats die slower. A max of 7% rats can die in a single attack. That's still wayyyy more than murder, but opponents will still only lose about 80% of their rats in a volley of attacks that takes most of their land.

7. Offensive bonuses mean you gain more land per attack. Defensive bonuses mean you lose less land per attack. I just like the idea.


And something to remember: foodys need a way to protect their food, because as it happens breaking someone with leaders is pretty easy if you run right after they do. Indies hopefully have the ability to recover fast because they have high production. Cashers are hopefully able to protect themselves with Cluny's Hut. I don't know how a foody protects themselves. Perhaps food-based leader attacks are just a lot more expensive, requiring an attack ratio that is 2.5x the foody defense ratio.

My defensive leader ratio was 210. How was I broken repeatedly? Clearly I don't understand how leader missions work.

The casher bot has onlined multiple people. I'm figuring this is a bug an not a feature, as the attack patters match redfish's normal attack patterns (5 strikes, or only 1 if the first attack fails).

Not really sure what I would do to fix this. A message?

"hi. I'm a robot. I'm about to attack you. Respond "No" and I will not attack you for the next 60 minutes. Thanks."

otherwise you could keep tally of if their NW has changed but it'll change all the time if they've got too much in Cluny's hut (common thing on my account, at the very least).

I wouldn't want to look at land because people will run for potentailly many minutes after they've stopped attacking, depending on what they are doing. 20 minutes might be reasonable though.

Okay, I'm sorry for doing this to you all at once Shadow :P. I'm not trying to be mean, I promise.

The complaint: if I end with more than 80k land, then when I log on I will have 0 rats. It's pretty much guaranteed, regardless of whether I buy 10m or 25m to defend myself.

I like that rats die in high volumes but that's a little extreme. So perhaps the eqn can be tweaked a bit.

I'm not sure the best way to go about this either so maybe people have some ideas.

it's kind of a vague and mean-sounding title, but what I mean is:

If person A has 0 leaders, 0 troops, and 10x the land that I do, there should be some way for me to take land from them, even if they are currently maxed.

Make attack opportunity was one way to do this in the past. I don't have a good alternative to MAO, but something should be available. Maybe a troop based attack that doubles or triples your losses. (note: if they are undefended, tripled losses is not a big deal; that's the point)

Right now, any sort of successful indy strat either needs a ton of workers, a heavy reliance on the market, or both. Furthermore, clans/teams are able to pile roughly 95% of their collective NW into the market if they are clever about it (assume a team of 3 people all massing rats. The rats all get sent to 1 person, who can now put 10x the sustainable amount of rats on the market. Then they repeat for the next guy, then the next guy. Then they do the whole thing again with weasels and stoats and skiffs). The result is that there are hundreds of millions of troops on the market and only a few dozen million troops in the game. It's kind of silly.

I know it's a little more extreme right now because everything just died, but this mechanic has been hurting my brain the whole round. You can spend multiple runs massing up as many troops of one type as possible and throwing them on the market. It keeps costs low and you end up with a near-stupid volume of troops on the market. More than you can recover without losing at least 100 billion to market tax, anyway.

Combine that with the really low merc prices and you have a game economy that's just really weird and a bit opaque. You can't indy all run because you can't sell your troops to the mercs at a price that will cover your losses. You can really only hold onto about 150 turns worth of troops, and that's at a rat, who has great merc prices. An indy can only successful if they use the market, and that results in a ton of required micromanagement.

And again, there's a silly amount of troops on the market right now. imho the market cap should be significantly pulled back. .845 is a huge allowance. Bring it back to .7 and you'll still have a very active market, but a person getting to 100m rats will require much more effort. Right now a person can solo place 100m rats on the market.

And, please also raise the merc prices. You don't have to bring them to reg levels but at their current values your only option to solo indy is to rely on marketing 75% of your troops every run. Bring them up like 50% across the board. At these prices, you still won't be able to make a whole run with all your troops, but at least you'll be able to get pretty far.

The thing about selling troops to the mercs is that when you do that, they disappear. Right now the low merc prices and high market volume is encouraging people to hold onto as many troops as they can, and use workers instead of selling units.

This results in a huge confusing pileup of troops on the market. Furthermore, you can't sell them on the market for less than 3x the base merc sell price, so if you are trying to be competitive in getting money you have to accept a crazy minimum.

I'm not sure how to lay this out in a more logical way, but my strong reaction right now (as it was earlier) is that the extremeness of the market mechanics need to be pulled back. Lower the minimum price, increase the price for merc sales, and reduce the number of troops you can have on the market.

Additionally, the low merc prices have made camps generally a much worse choice. Taking the turns to build up camps can cost several billion, and its only going to pay off if you do a huge sale from off of the market.

I would appreciate if everybody came in to support me on this one. If you like things the way they are, please be vocal about why as well.

And, I'm not asking for a complete re-write or anything, just some tweaking of the constant variables. I'm not asking for major adjustments either, just moderate adjustments. Scale the market % back from .845 to .7, up the merc prices by 50%, and reduce the minimum price by 33%. That means that the minimum market price is still above what you could get on the mercs (for rats the minimum would be $220 while the merc price would be $165).

Some days are just bad days for the turbo server. Take, for example, a snapshot from yesterday. Everybody had tons of NW. On the top 10, there was probably close to 2b NW with everybody combined.

Today, not a single person is over 200.2m NW. Only 2 people are over 100m NW. The land is spread about as even as I could imagine - it's a nightmare! Everything is gone. What didn't make it to the market just disappeared altogether.

It's a bit crazy. Not to mention that guy that died. RIP guy who died.

I'm not doing this right now, but I might try it out next round. The reason that stoat gets picked:

1. +10% build, not as fast as rat, but rat has a huge leadership de-buff
2. +10% leadership, comes in handy for both defense and offense
3. +15% workers, which makes it decent at everything.

This also works with rat and magpie if you are willing to make the leadership sacrifice, and it works with Wolf if you are willing to spend more turns building and demolishing. It's called the shuffle because you move your buildings around a lot.

First we assume that you start your run at low land, 100% huts, and a high ratio. Set your tax rate to 70% because workers will be fleeing like mad anyway, so you should get as much out of them as you can.

Your first move is to espy the people with the most land. This strategy focuses on massing food and cash (unless you are a rat, but then you have probably made a lot of tweaks), so getting tons of land is not imperative. You are going to want to break the guy with the most land but if you'll need to hold 5m troops for 150 turns to add 30% land, it's probably not worth it. This run should be low expense.

If anybody has anything worth stealing, you should be at full ratio so take it. If the major land holder has tons of troops and is blocking your run, pull out the murder stick and beat them with it. Teach them a lesson. If they have their shields up and whatnot murdering probably won't get them to a point of vulnerability in a reasonable amount of turns.  So spend 100 turns or so making their life miserable (leave them at reduced health too) and then come back later.

Before attacking anyone, do some math to see exactly how many troops you'll need. Spend a few turns beating down their health so you don't have to get too many. Be careful you don't get too excited though, you want to spend your turns on lots of land.

Right out of the gate attack consecutively down to around 50% health. Don't use standard attacks because they cost 6% health instead of 4% and it's not really worthwhile. 50% health means 1/2 production but you don't have any workers yet  so it's better to get as much land as possible. More land = more workers.

Attack to a point of 'break even,' where building full turns will put you at almost exactly 100% health (this probably means about 60% health), set your tax rate to 11% and build 100% tents. You'll build the tents first and spend the turns second, so you'll get to spend about 40 turns on a ton of tents and a low tax rate. This should help you to hit a max amount of workers in a very short amount of time.

Okay, so now you have a bunch of workers, you've moved your tax rate back to 41%, and you're actually producing for real right now. This means you gotta keep your health as high as possible, so alternate between attacking twice and building for 8 turns. If you can build 100% in less than 8 turns, then go ahead and demolish those tents, 1 turn at a time (you demo the buildings first, then spend the turns).

Depending, you'll either be building markets or foragers. If you are stoat, then markets might be favorable because of the -5% income as opposed to the -20% foraging. But I'll be building mostly foragers because I want food NW not cash.

Attack until you've gotten as much land as is reasonable. Then market your troops and merc-sell the rest, to get expenses as low as possible.

Ideally, you already have enough huts to get the full leadership buffs, but keep a close eye on your loyalty, because you want to end with a few million so that you can murder and steal at the start of your next run.

At this point you either keep on attacking (but attack opponents that don't require many units to break), or you go up to 100% health and spend the rest of the run in full production.

If you do happen to run low on loyalty, it's back to shuffling your buildings around. I haven't figured out yet if it's worth doing this last step, but I'll mention it because it might be worthwhile. At about 120 turns left, demo all of your non-huts and build 50-80% huts. Remember, demo 1 turn at a time, build all at once. When you are at full huts, no spells!

Keep enough turns around to demo the huts again, and all of your other buildings, because you want to end your run at a 175 ratio, so nobody can steal from you. Drop the land. Doesn't really matter how much land you end with, because we aren't going to bother buying troops to defend ourselves. Too expensive, we'll just accept that at the start of every run lots of leaders will be deserting. We'll get them back. [on a side note, if you get taken down too low and don't have enough leaders to benefit from the full leader buffs while you run, move this step to the first step, before the tent building. It's almost as good. Make sure you still end your run at 175 ratio].

You also want to be unclanned, so that the amount of times you can be sacked is limited to twice per hour. You'll have lots of food and cash, and smart people will sack the daylights out of you.

That's about it!

Here I've made my own fantasy and re-engineered all of the races, just to explore the types of things that might be possible. There's aren't serious suggestions they are just freely flowing thoughts.

Under this new scheme, offense and defense also affect how much land you take and how much land you lose in attacks. High offense means you take more land each attack. High defense means you lose less land each attack. Low offense means you take less land. Low defense means you lose more land. Someone with high offense attacking someone with low defense will take lots of land.

Additionally, higher offense means higher troop casualties for both sides. Higher defense means lower troop casualties for the defender only.

Another issue is that right now the extremely loose market unlocks teamplay in ways I don't want to think about. So my version of things here assumes a market where you can only store half of what you own, and furthermore any money received from the market does is not immediately available to the seller (6 hr delay). These are purely to reduce the dramatic effects that the market has on coordinated teamwork, because my races are extremes, and with good teamwork the right combination of races would completely wipe the floor.

As for the merc bonus, a (+) for mercs indicates that troops can be sold for more and bought for less. A (-) indicates that troops are more expensive to buy and sell for less. The +/- here is meant to indicate that the race interacts well with the mercs and is able to deal with them effectively.

Finally, aid is changed so that someone can only send aid 5 times consecutively, and 1 more is gained every hour. Clanned individuals can send an additional 5 aids to clanned members or allies, for a total of 10 max, but only 5 can be within the clan.

Rat: Designed for indy, designed to take lots of land, both highest offense and lowest defense in the game. Huge amounts of troop production, and low troop costs. Highly susceptible to leader attacks, and very low cash/food production from the workers. Can get by with food, pretty much needs to sell troops to get money, and life is much better when there's someone to buy food from with the money gained from making troops. The rat is a race of extremes, just like the original indy was a strat of extremes: extreme expenses, extreme troop volume, extreme cash production.

Offense: +30% -> Take lots of land, easily break those who lock land
Defense: -30% -> Loses enormous amounts of land, very hard time defending it as well
Build: -20% -> Rat is designed to build 1 building: barracks. Camps may be useful at some point, maybe a smattering of huts and markets and foragers and tents, but really the rat is locked into a single-minded battle plan. With a -30% defense, towers are simply a waste of rat energy.
Training: +25% -> Designed to produce at high volumes
Workers: +25% -> Workers needed for training purposes
Mercs: +35% -> It's terribly extreme because right now merc prices are just plain miserable. This is to offset that as much as it is to give rats a strong incentive to use the mercs. You can only sell mercs once per run for each troop type, so the rat has to be careful about when it sells. Costs for a rat are so extreme that even having an entire other player to prop the rat up would fall short of enabling the rat to keep all of its troops. Rats would be a major drain on the economy without great merc prices to back them up. Camps will exacerbate this advantage even more, but rats take a long time to destroy and build, so camps would be a huge investment that would otherwise be spent gathering land and producing troops.
Income: -30% -> Rats should not be getting money from producing it directly. They have tons of workers, so it's not as fully extreme as a 30% disadvantage compared to neutral.
Costs: +25% -> produce a lot, but it's expensive to keep around
Foraging: -15% -> Rats have trouble feeding their armies. It's a point of difficulty, even with all of their workers
Food: +15% -> Not as extreme as costs because in-game economy means there's not really a lot of food to go around in the first place. There is however a lot of money.
Leadership: -25% -> This means poor buffs, vulnerable to attacks, and overall not much incentive to build huts. High worker rates and high training rates mean buffs are not needed for the rat to be competitive with other races. Even without buffs, the rat is the most productive race in my little ecosystem. Low leadership also means an inability to use leader spells against enemies, and a vulnerability to leader spells cast by enemies. Rats are like glass-cannons, they build fast and hit huge NWs very easily, but are very susceptible to attack. Even if they get slaughtered by a bitter attack, they'll recover fully in one or two runs.
Loyalty: -25% -> If low leadership rates weren't enough, it takes forever for a rat to get enough loyalty to cast a spell.
Scouting: -20% -> Rats are meant to attack, not be self sufficient. They have the worst scouting in the game because even in the early game they are intended to get their land from attacking.
Race Spell: Battlefield Healer -> Instead of healing troops, it heals you! When attacking for land, you lose 1% less health, meaning you can spend less turns recovering health after each attack, and spend more of your attacks at a higher health, and spend more turns attacking.

One thing about the rat is that the huge mercs bonus makes the rat a natural choice for a team that is trying to make an end game move. This is balanced by the fact that $$ is worth less NW, and during the end game everybody is going to be doing their best to trade all the in-game money for NW. The high offense means the rat is a natural choice for breaking someone, but the high costs means that the rat will also need a lot of resources to make use of the offense - and therefore may not actually be the best choice for breaking an opponent. The massive amount of troops they make is what is unbalanced for team play, and it's why I gimped the markets for this theoretical scenario. In this theoretical scenario, aid is also held in check so that while a rat will be the best producer of troops for a team, it must still deal with the costs of keeping its army around.

Painted One: Meant to be noobie friendly. Has a lot of things that it's decently good at, meant to make the game easy to play and explore around. Has gimped workers so it's not great in high level play, but really it doesn't fit any strategy particularly well. It can do any

Offense: +10% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race. Offense is slightly higher to encourage newbies to attack.
Defense: +5% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Build: +50% -> Painted one is a good race to explore around with. Try lots of different building setups. Build lots of towers. Change your mind. Switch strategies mid run. There is intentionally little penalty for doing this on this race.
Training: +5% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Workers: -15% -> Not a huge disadvantage, but enough that it offsets all the small boosts. This is really only here to discourage high level players from taking advantage of the two silly-strong buffs.
Mercs: +5% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Income: +5% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Costs: -5% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Foraging: +5% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Food: -5% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Leadership: +5% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Loyalty: +10% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Scouting: +35% -> Higher level play rarely involves scouting. Lower level play can rely on lots of scouting. Just like the massive buff to building, this is to enable quick recovery in the event that a player has no idea how to acquire their own land.
Race Spell: Frenzy -> An additional 5% to offense, 5% to defense, 10% to build times, 10% to scouting

Magpie: Designed as a money race. Not very good with troops, not very good with food, this race is meant to produce more cash by far than any other race, and have the means to protect it. In redwall, there are not many ways to protect a large amount of cash, if your leaders get compromised and you are sitting on a lot of money, you will lose most of that money. For that reason, Magpies also have a lot of leadership. This leadership can also be applied to buffs, which are only truly useful to the magpie in terms of generating money.

Offense: +0% -> A land and offense neutral race.
Defense: +5% -> Small boost to help the magpie protect its land, and not lose so much when getting attacked.
Build: +15% -> Designed to give magpies lots of mobility to switch between camps, markets, tents, and huts.
Training: -30% -> Magpies have lots of workers to get them lots of money, to compensate we have to hit them hard here. Magpies aren't supposed to be producing their own troops, their money is supposed to go towards the game economy. If they don't want to participate in the game economy, they should be able to meet their needs through the mercs.
Workers: +20% -> High workers so that there is lots of money.
Mercs: +15% -> Magpies should be able to buy and sell fair volumes of troops on the mercs, in case they have political reasons for avoiding the market. It's not a huge buff.
Income: +25% -> The big advantage for the race.
Costs: +25% -> Only meant to discourage magpies from keeping troops around
Foraging: -10% -> Not a huge disadvantage, but the focus is money
Food: +15% -> Meant to discourage Magpies from keeping troops around
Leadership: +15% -> Strong leadership to make defending the cash pile easier, as cash piles are vulnerable. Magpie is a longer-term race and dependent on defending itself. If it loses all of its money, it's not going to recover in a run or two like the rat. High leadership also means large buffs from General's Hut.
Loyalty: -15% -> Not great. The idea for the magpie would be to build up a bunch of huts at the end of the run instead of the beginning, and then hold onto the loyalty for use next run. The act of getting attacked will put the magpie at/above ratio and cut loyalty costs down to size. By building huts at the end, the magpie can use more land to gather loyalty.
Scouting: +10% -> Right out of the gate, magpies want lots of workers. The scouting bonus helps a bit, but it's nothing serious.
Race Spell: Un/Bury Wealth -> 1% of on-hand cash gets stored in a special bank with no interest. Unbury retrieves 5% of all buried wealth. Both spells cost lots of loyalty, about 10x what it would cost to use a cash buff for 1 turn.


That's all of the time that I have for now. I have some more ideas though:

1 race clearly meant to stockpile food, in a unique manner to managing cash.
1 race with a clear leadership advantage, but with high costs and few workers.
1 race clearly built around defense, with very low offense but high defense. Low costs, slow building, low training.

And then some mix-and-match races, not meant to be used for standard play but instead meant to throw some curveballs. Races with greater flexibility but lower overall effectiveness, and race spells that give them unique situations where they are highly effective.

Would anybody be against a new control panel in 'manage army' that allowed you to market troops every turn at a certain price? It would be like this:

Rats [checkbox] [price field]
Weasels [checkbox] [price field]
Stoats [checkbox] [price field]
Skiffs [checkbox] [price field]
[Update!]

If you checked the box and set a legal price, then after each turn the maximum number possible of that troop type would automatically be sent to the market.

This would save me a lot of trouble from going 10 turns -> market -> 10 turns -> market... etc.

I'm going to start this post by saying that I don't mean to offend anyone. Everybody has been trying to make 3.0 the best game possible, and there are a lot of good things that happened. But people don't care about the things that work, they care about the things that don't work, and most of my posts have been about that. So I just wanted to say that I think a lot of interesting and good things have happened, but I intend to focus on the weak stuff with the hopes of making it stronger.

Having said that, there's a lot of discussion about weaker empires vs. stronger empires, and the difficulty with which you can move up the ladder. There's been a lot of attempted fixes too, such as diminishing returns on things like the amount that you can store in the bank. But I think that these complicated approaches to the problem are the wrong way of going about it, and that it's almost always to have simpler equations and simpler game mechanics. And I'd like to say that simpler game mechanics don't mean a simple game, simpler game mechanics means it's easier to figure out how each piece works. If there are enough pieces that fit together in enough different ways, it won't matter how simple each piece is, together they will have enormous potential for complexity.

Ease of locking land is closely related to the land flow in the game. If every person usually acquires 90% of the land in the game every run, then the chances of someone being able to hang onto 95% when they finally make their big move is much smaller; everybody [should] have lots of resources to take them down early, even if they have to make a gimped run to do it. Additionally, the person who usually clings tightest to their land is also the person who usually has the easiest time locking land; people learn that attacking them is usually a larger effort and prefer to wait for someone else to do it for them. Why waste 100 turns and half your marketed troops when someone can do it for you?

So in general you want a situation where land is moving freely. One thing that's different about 3.0 is the lack of an 'increase attack opportunity' button. Because of this, someone who has just run (and is unclanned) can only lose about 50-60% of their land, something that really decreases land flow. It also makes unclanned emps substantially harder to break, because even if you get through once they'll STILL have just as much land as you, and they'll be maxed. Getting enough resources to do a take down attack on an emp usually (and should) takes multiple runs, and so the likelihood of doing 2 in a row successfully is very small.

The other thing is that an emp used to have to defend against attacks from 3 major fronts and 2 minor fronts: rats, stoats, and leaders for the major fronts and skiffs and weasels for the minor fronts. In 3.0 an emp hardly has to worry about leaders: sevs was on 30% leaders and DogCat was on 150+% leaders, yet DogCat still couldn't pull off an espy. Furthermore, an emp cannot lose land to leader attacks, though health sabotages and murders are still useful. But now with towers, the emps position becomes even easier to hold! The 4 troop gaps begin to merge into a single more easily defended fortress. Instead of needing 2x the rats of your opponents you can just keep more skiffs or weasels around and reduce that number to needing about the same number of rats as your opponents. This reduces the stress you'll need to bear to deal with the food costs of having a large rat army.

Another thing that makes locking land easy is aid: you can aid all of your troops to an ally, make your run on a massive amount of land with little costs, and then have all of your troops aided back to you.

So I have a bunch of mostly simple ways to make locking land more difficult, and make land flow throughout the game better overall.

1. Reduce the number of defence points a stoat has. Right now a stoat is 7 offence 5 defence. Reduce it to 4 defence and suddenly it's 25% easier to break with stoats. This means that the emp will need more stoats.

2. Increase the number of attack points a stoat has. 8 offence vs. 5 offence will still make a large difference, forcing the emp to get more stoats to withhold attacks against opponents.

3. Make towers more expensive to own. IE reduce the number of workers that move onto land with towers.

4. Make towers less effective at having troops defend each other. Instead of maxing out at 50% boost to each troop type, have it max out at 25% and grow slower. This forces someone trying to emp to have more rats and stoats, but it especially forces them to have more rats. Rats eat a lot of food, and if the emp needs to hold twice as many food-eating-monsters as you do,  the emp is going to have a harder time keeping his spot at the top.

5. Make rats eat even more food. Make them painfully expensive to hold onto. This will work best if used in tandem with forcing emps to keep more rats around.

6. Weaken aid. I don't know if this is how it currently happens, but make it so that the turns are taken before the aid is sent. Force whoever is aiding their troops away to deal with their expenses for 2 turns before being able to lighten the burden.

7. Lower the amount of aid that can be sent per package. Instead of 50% cash and 20% everything else, set the limits at 25% cash and 15% everything else. This will keep emps from unloading their goods as fast, keep them from unloading as many goods, and force them to deal with the expenses of the goods for longer. Unclanned warlords will still be able to aid away more than 60% of their goods in 12 turns.

8. Bring back 'increase attack opportunity,' to allow everybody to run more often on greater volumes of land.

9. Up the attack limit maximums. Bring it to 25 instead of 21. Or maybe even 27.

10. Increase the amount of land that gets lost in an attack. I think it's currently around 3% (which means over 21 attacks you would take on average 48% of their land), so raise it to 4.5% (which means that you would take on average 62% of their land)

But to me the biggest ones are the ones that make the land more fluid as a whole. Land will be harder to lock down if it in general moves around with greater ease. That means changing stoats so they have less defence points and are harder to defend with, and changing attacks so that an assailant can take 60-70% of someones land instead of 50-60%. Either do this by raising the attack cap to 25, or by bringing back 'increase attack opportunity', or by increasing the amount of land you take each attack.