Taeks second opinions on rwl 3.0

[taekwondokid42]

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.

[Shadow]

I'm going to preface this by re-iterating what I said earlier: you overgeneralize from a small number of events. I'll address most of your points, but I fully expect that you will change your mind on your own on a lot of them after playing a few more rounds, because the two rounds you've played to far have been exceptional (one for the lock, one for the utter lack of soloists).

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.

I don't think you really appreciate the amount of effort that the people who took you down had to go to in order to do it. Murder killing leaders is vanilla prom, from the very beginning. After you pull off a takedown like the one they did, we can talk ^_^.

2. Market good should sell in the order the arrive to the market.

We've been over why this is a bad idea. If you can tell me why I am wrong on that point, I'd be happy to argue further.

people can bid on the goods to ramp up the price (money is paid up front, and then returned if you get out-bidded).

This is like an entire re-design of the market by itself, or am I misunderstanding something? What determines when an auction ends?

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.

I don't think anyone actually does this. Merc sell is what you do when you're desperate and/or the round ends in 30 minutes.

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).

We could play with upkeep costs. Again, though, I don't think it's going to do what you think it will. There will still be a significant advantage to running without troops no matter what they cost to upkeep. Reducing the need for resources during the run just makes the market less active, from both supply side and demand side.

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.

Yea, I'm not going to address this before seeing pillage in action.

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.

Play a few more rounds and get back to me. Solo play and unclanned teams are probably more powerful than clan play, you just haven't seen them in action yet (you sort of did last round).

but team play has too many advantages right now for my liking. [...] 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.

Specifically, what advantages does team play have that you think go overboard. I am not disagreeing, I just want specifics.

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.

We can play with those numbers, sure.

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

You'd hate it when you saw maxxed out lizards on high land.

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.

food players protect themselves the same way cashers do. Even better really, since they will be heavily invested in the PM, with cash going directly to Cluny. I think they're less vulnerable than the cashers.

[Shadow]

Incidentally, there was an idea thrown around dev for a while to have a buyer's side to the order market - players could place orders for cash that other players could fill via the PM that would give them instant cash. I really likee the idea, but I can't work out an elegant way to stop it from being a bank for player's cash and/or an offensive tool to flood someone with troops while they run.

Is that sort of like you pictured with bidding?

We could play with upkeep costs. Again, though, I don't think it's going to do what you think it will. There will still be a significant advantage to running without troops no matter what they cost to upkeep. Reducing the need for resources during the run just makes the market less active, from both supply side and demand side.

I'm rethinking this a bit - encouraging large armies might make battles more interesting since people could afford to smash each other with troops during their run. If you like I could ask windy to give you access to the test server and we could play with numbers there to see how it changes things.

[taekwondokid42]

Shadow's note: I made a horrible mistake and edited your post instead of quoting it. I'll fix it in a second...

    I fully expect that you will change your mind on your own on a lot of them after playing a few more rounds,

Yeah probably. If I was surpreme dictator of rwl, I wouldn't make this many changes all at once, and most of them would be reduced in intensity. I'm a big fan of 'small steps,' which means I would definately be against making this many changes. Don't take it personally, I'm just calling out problems as I percieve them. And I'm aware of the fact that my experience adds up to a grand total of 40 days right now, which is not very much. I didn't even remember the leader equations for goodness sakes. That was a brutal mistake.

And again, please treat most of this as an attempt to increase the amount of creative juices flowing. It's my nature to critisize everything, and I love rebuilding stuff (that's why construct.php got a complete makeover, for the better, agreed?). I also love switching to fantasy mode, where I imagine the way things could be and just be an idealist for a while. It's good for your creativity. I do think that some changes would make rwl 3.0 better, but 'small steps' each round is how I would go about it.

    I don't think you really appreciate the amount of effort that the people who took you down had to go to in order to do it. Murder killing leaders is vanilla prom, from the very beginning. After you pull off a takedown like the one they did, we can talk ^_^.

Muder killing leaders is vanilla prom? That's worth pausing over but I still don't like it.

As for the second part, challenge accepted. FWIW if I had known those equations and tried to take myself down I could have done it with 1 teammate:

1. Teammate scrapes land, otherwise does a normal run.
2. I take land from teammate, hitting over 150k huts with over 400 turns remaining
3. Use the 20 million loyalty I sit on (it's part of my standard play style) to buff "+20 leaders" until my ratio is ~70 (est turns left for takedown: 250)
4. Start murdering, do it approx 50 times because I have enough turns to keep going
5. Now my opponent is vulnerable. I was unlucky because I had my shields down (dumb mistake, decent justification but the consequences are fully deserved). An opponent with shields up would not be completely vulnerable, but add a third teammate into the mix to drop 100 more murders and my opponent is indeed completely vulnerable.

        2. Market good should sell in the order the arrive to the market.

We've been over why this is a bad idea. If you can tell me why I am wrong on that point, I'd be happy to argue further.

So far the only thing I can recall is that you are worried about 1 person completely dominating the market, a point which I addressed. If you lower the minimum price, then for 1 person to completely dominate the market, they would need to set their price very low and I'm sure the lower-priced troops would sell much faster. If you can get a large volume of troops onto the market earlier in the game, you should be rewarded. If you enter the market late and don't set a price lower than your competitors, you shouldn't be allowed to sell until you've done your share of waiting.

One good advantage to your mixup version of doing things is that a single clan can't enter at equal prices and still get the aid. But the idea is to lower the minimum prices to a point where nobody is actually selling that low unless they are desparate. This means market-based aid could still happen. If nothing else, I think you should respond to this argument, because I think that the minimum price should definately be lowered.

        people can bid on the goods to ramp up the price (money is paid up front, and then returned if you get out-bidded).

    This is like an entire re-design of the market by itself, or am I misunderstanding something? What determines when an auction ends?

I think you are indeed misunderstanding something. The auction ends after 6 hours beyond the most recent seller action. The act of a buyer placing a higher bid does not affect the time remaining. This is one of those things that I would definately wait to implement though until the other market changes have had some time to settle. The idea is that the price is visible to everybody while the troops are in transit, and if multiple people want to buy troops at that price, they can try to outbid eachother. But once the transit period ends, people get their troops even if there is still some bidding going on. The only purpose was to add risk for attempting market aid, since we've lowered the minimum price beyond what the average lowest price is going to be (therefore giving teammates an opportunity to identify each other by using the minimum price),

        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.

    I don't think anyone actually does this. Merc sell is what you do when you're desperate and/or the round ends in 30 minutes.

I did this all round. As a solo player, it was definately a good thing to do, because I had no way to reclaim stuff from the market without a teammate. It bascially increased the amount of troops I could sell to the mercs to 95%. I only actually sold troops off of the market every third run or so - even at minimum prices it took time to sell my stuff. Again at the very least I think minimum market prices should be reduced. Maybe 200/400/600/900 is a good compromise.

The real evidence would be if this round prices consistently are below these prices: 400/750/1400/2200. If the minimum price this round is consistently above those four numbers, I concede and say that the current minimums are low enough.

    We could play with upkeep costs. Again, though, I don't think it's going to do what you think it will. There will still be a significant advantage to running without troops no matter what they cost to upkeep. Reducing the need for resources during the run just makes the market less active, from both supply side and demand side.

What is going to happen (according to the econ half of my brain, which is usually much more correct than your average economist) is that the amount of troops indys keep on the market is going to go down. The supply of troops, essentially, is going to reduce. At the same time, the number of troops that indys end with is going to increase, partly as a result of putting less troops on the market throughout the run. Ultimately, because it costs less to run with troops, indys are going to be less proactive about the 20turns->market-20turns loop, and they will spend more turns at the very end of their run massing up a defense.

In turn, this means that cashers and foodys are going to need more troops in order to get a lot of land. This is going to make it worth their time to buy more troops. The overall effect is that the average market price for troops goes up.

I think all 3 of those things are good things:

1. indys keep more troops
2. cashers/foodys buy more troops
3. average troop price rises

I sincerely do think that as an indy you don't have a good source of income - the entire indy play right now is based around minimizing your expenses (at least my entire indy game is based around minimizing expenses). Lower costs make it easier to achieve higher NW without needing the crutch of the market/storehouse/aid to reduce expenses. I think a huge part of idunno and mine's ability to more-or-less keep up with 4 snowy firs was the fact that we made our runs with very low expenses.

        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.

    Yea, I'm not going to address this before seeing pillage in action.

I'm acutally going to apologize because I added the little pieces at the end, thinking it would be humorous but in actually I think it was rude. Hopefully you didn't see it that way but nonetheless I regret. The real intention was to add the idea that surprise attacks ignored maxed warlords. Adding leaders into the mix might be too much, and then suggesting that pillage should be removed before the round even started was where I crossed the line.

So at least address the idea of having standard attacks ignore maxed warlords.

    Specifically, what advantages does team play have that you think go overboard. I am not disagreeing, I just want specifics.

For once, this actually has a really easy answer. The huge advantage to team play is reducing your costs, which raises the upper bound on the NW you can accumulate. All of my attempts to nerf team play have actually been attempts to reduce a teams ability to reduce the costs of accumulating large amounts of NW.

I will admit though that I still haven't fully decided that team play shouldn't be much more powerful than solo play. Teams can be frustrating and uncoordinated, and it's always awesome to see a team pull things together and run away with a huge lead.

But right now I'm leaning towards the side that it's too easy to reduce your costs dramatically by using clans and other team-based mechanics. (and I will agree with one thing you said - unclanned teams can be as powerful as clanned teams. Probably a lot more powerful if they really got their coordination together)

    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.

We can play with those numbers, sure.

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

    You'd hate it when you saw maxxed out lizards on high land.

The thing about this is that lizards would also have a harder time gathering land. If you noticed though, I put this is as point #7 and it's not very high on my list of priorities. I am still really undecided about the land mechanics of the game. This round, we've seen things swing from 3 people in a row running above 180k land to situations where there were 8 people above 30k land at the same time, and nobody above 80k land. I don't really know what the most interesting thing would be, and interesting is why I'm here.

    food players protect themselves the same way cashers do. Even better really, since they will be heavily invested in the PM, with cash going directly to Cluny. I think they're less vulnerable than the cashers.

I've been under the impression that food players get their NW from actually having food, and not from trading their food for cash. We don't actually have many foodys right now, so it's hard to tell what they would do.

But I think that your recent changes have inspired at least 2 players to pursue a foody strat this round, so that should provide some interesting insights.

[taekwondokid42]

Incidentally, there was an idea thrown around dev for a while to have a buyer's side to the order market - players could place orders for cash that other players could fill via the PM that would give them instant cash. I really likee the idea, but I can't work out an elegant way to stop it from being a bank for player's cash and/or an offensive tool to flood someone with troops while they run.

Is that sort of like you pictured with bidding?

That's not at all what I had in mind but I like the idea.

Stop it from being a bank: include a 10% fee to make the offer, and an additional 10% fee to redact the offer. Also include a 6 hour delay just to limit aid shenanegains. One idea I just thought of is augmenting the market fee based on the the price. Low priced stuff has a low market fee (but is more vulnerable to non-teammates doing the purchasing) and high priced stuff is taxed more severely. Ultimately I think it's a bad idea in the context of an anonymous market but it was enough to be worth mentioning.

Flood someone with troops: isn't this the point though? Already you can flood someone with troops just by aiding them. Doing it this way requires going through the market and potentailly dealing with market fees. I don't think flooding people with troops in this manner is really an issue, because they still have to run with the troops and deal with 6 hour market delays when reselling.

I'm rethinking this a bit - encouraging large armies might make battles more interesting since people could afford to smash each other with troops during their run. If you like I could ask windy to give you access to the test server and we could play with numbers there to see how it changes things.

As it happens, I'm already (erm, it's been broken for 4 weeks, but the largest reason that it's not fixed yet is that I only just got internet this week after moving) running a test server of my own. But having access to the formal test server might help for a lot of reasons.

[Shadow]

And again, please treat most of this as an attempt to increase the amount of creative juices flowing. It's my nature to critisize everything, and I love rebuilding stuff (that's why construct.php got a complete makeover, for the better, agreed?).

Absolutely! I love arguing development with people (when i was designing RWL 3.0, Kilk and windy provided most of it, but nobody argues with me anymore :(). So I like arguing. I think sevs got thrown off by this, which is why he stopped posting dev stuff (sadly).

Muder killing leaders is vanilla prom? That's worth pausing over but I still don't like it.

As for the second part, challenge accepted. FWIW if I had known those equations and tried to take myself down I could have done it with 1 teammate:

1. Teammate scrapes land, otherwise does a normal run.
2. I take land from teammate, hitting over 150k huts with over 400 turns remaining
3. Use the 20 million loyalty I sit on (it's part of my standard play style) to buff "+20 leaders" until my ratio is ~70 (est turns left for takedown: 250)
4. Start murdering, do it approx 50 times because I have enough turns to keep going
5. Now my opponent is vulnerable. I was unlucky because I had my shields down (dumb mistake, decent justification but the consequences are fully deserved). An opponent with shields up would not be completely vulnerable, but add a third teammate into the mix to drop 100 more murders and my opponent is indeed completely vulnerable.

Solid plan. Give it a try :). Not killing leaders is also problematic from a takedown perspective. As you noted, a locker doesn't need to maintain a super high ratio to defend with, and attackers will take leader desertions when hitting, so if murder isn't lowering the defender's ratio, attackers can get shut down before they begin. It's happened to me on reg before even with leader killing, that desertions just outpace leader death. Very frustrating.

If pillage stays in, then maybe it wouldn't need to kill leaders. But right now it's literally the only way.

So far the only thing I can recall is that you are worried about 1 person completely dominating the market, a point which I addressed. If you lower the minimum price, then for 1 person to completely dominate the market, they would need to set their price very low and I'm sure the lower-priced troops would sell much faster. If you can get a large volume of troops onto the market earlier in the game, you should be rewarded. If you enter the market late and don't set a price lower than your competitors, you shouldn't be allowed to sell until you've done your share of waiting.

Well, there's more to dominating then getting all the cash. In your scenario, the dominating player would effectively cap the market price as low as they wanted, making their opponents have to sell even lower if they want their goods sold. Since the dominating player has more buying power than anyone else, they have just created a source of cheap troops for them to consolidate their power on.

Could you tell me what it is you don't like about buying evenly from all sellers? I can't really think of any objections to it balance-wise.

One good advantage to your mixup version of doing things is that a single clan can't enter at equal prices and still get the aid. But the idea is to lower the minimum prices to a point where nobody is actually selling that low unless they are desparate. This means market-based aid could still happen. If nothing else, I think you should respond to this argument, because I think that the minimum price should definately be lowered.

I actually have no objection to lowering the minimum. I could even do it this round. I would, however, like to increase the rounding to the nearest 25 or so if we do that, because I still want relatively few price brackets to force price competition.

I think you are indeed misunderstanding something. The auction ends after 6 hours beyond the most recent seller action. The act of a buyer placing a higher bid does not affect the time remaining. This is one of those things that I would definately wait to implement though until the other market changes have had some time to settle. The idea is that the price is visible to everybody while the troops are in transit, and if multiple people want to buy troops at that price, they can try to outbid eachother. But once the transit period ends, people get their troops even if there is still some bidding going on. The only purpose was to add risk for attempting market aid, since we've lowered the minimum price beyond what the average lowest price is going to be (therefore giving teammates an opportunity to identify each other by using the minimum price),

Aha, I understand. I like the idea in principle, but in practice I don't think there are enough players for the idea to be effective. Most goods would make it to market without ever being bid on, I suspect.

I did this all round. As a solo player, it was definately a good thing to do, because I had no way to reclaim stuff from the market without a teammate. It bascially increased the amount of troops I could sell to the mercs to 95%. I only actually sold troops off of the market every third run or so - even at minimum prices it took time to sell my stuff. Again at the very least I think minimum market prices should be reduced. Maybe 200/400/600/900 is a good compromise.

Interesting. Did other people do this (assuming anyone else reads this far?^_^). And yea, lowering min prices is perfectly doable, we just need to get the rounding right. I actually was in the process of doing it but decided that I didn't have time before the reset.

The real evidence would be if this round prices consistently are below these prices: 400/750/1400/2200. If the minimum price this round is consistently above those four numbers, I concede and say that the current minimums are low enough.

See the immortalization, it shows the average price paid for all goods all round:

1,295,218,673 rats have been sold on the market for an average price of $420
233,552,943 weasels have been sold on the market for an average price of $749
575,677,937 stoats have been sold on the market for an average price of $1,769
126,801,393 skiffs have been sold on the market for an average price of $2,504
16,612,457,007 food has been sold on the market for an average price of $12

What is going to happen (according to the econ half of my brain, which is usually much more correct than your average economist) is that the amount of troops indys keep on the market is going to go down. The supply of troops, essentially, is going to reduce. At the same time, the number of troops that indys end with is going to increase, partly as a result of putting less troops on the market throughout the run. Ultimately, because it costs less to run with troops, indys are going to be less proactive about the 20turns->market-20turns loop, and they will spend more turns at the very end of their run massing up a defense.

In turn, this means that cashers and foodys are going to need more troops in order to get a lot of land. This is going to make it worth their time to buy more troops. The overall effect is that the average market price for troops goes up.

I think all 3 of those things are good things:

1. indys keep more troops
2. cashers/foodys buy more troops
3. average troop price rises

Alright, we can give it a shot. I'll have to sit down and recalculate all the per-barracks-turn costs to get the ratios right, so maybe for next round. My only worry would be that it would further empower clan play, since indiers would require so little input from the rest of the clan that everyone could produce at full capacity all the time.

One thing to keep in mind that I've found through dev here is that economic intuition tends to break down when the number of players interacting on the market is very small. All the usual effects get washed out, so predictions are often problematic.

The real intention was to add the idea that surprise attacks ignored maxed warlords. Adding leaders into the mix might be too much, and then suggesting that pillage should be removed before the round even started was where I crossed the line.

So at least address the idea of having standard attacks ignore maxed warlords.

Heh. No worries. Surprise attacks ignoring maxxing is a neat idea. Could code it up as a theme for next round and see what the reaction is. It's not like it has a use currently.

For once, this actually has a really easy answer. The huge advantage to team play is reducing your costs, which raises the upper bound on the NW you can accumulate. All of my attempts to nerf team play have actually been attempts to reduce a teams ability to reduce the costs of accumulating large amounts of NW.

Yea, it's a tricky one. I toyed with kludgy ideas like requiring paid upkeep on stuff you aided away for a while after you aided it, but nothing seemed elegant enough to be worth coding. We could implement some sort of clan upkeep where you need to pay a little for your clanmate's armies, or divide upkeep communally so that the netholder doesn't matter so much, but again, kludgy. If you have suggestions here, by all means.

The thing about this is that lizards would also have a harder time gathering land. If you noticed though, I put this is as point #7 and it's not very high on my list of priorities. I am still really undecided about the land mechanics of the game. This round, we've seen things swing from 3 people in a row running above 180k land to situations where there were 8 people above 30k land at the same time, and nobody above 80k land. I don't really know what the most interesting thing would be, and interesting is why I'm here.

Land dynamics are tricky. Too little flow, boring game. Too much flow, boring land-passing fest. The really annoying thing is that it is easier to lock at both extremes than in the middle, so it's a balancing act. I think we're doing ok as far as this one goes. Generally, I like mechanics changes to be behind the scenes, out of control of the newer players who, unlike you and I, don't really care about the details of how things happen. Which is why the market change has me so happy.

[taekwondokid42]

if murder isn't lowering the defender's ratio, attackers can get shut down before they begin. It's happened to me on reg before even with leader killing, that desertions just outpace leader death. Very frustrating.

I forgot about desertions. I'm overall against the idea of troops deserting when you are attacking a larger warlord. If a larger warlord leaves themselves improperly defended, why should you suffer? Especially since you need a lower ratio as a defender as your land grows. This is a change I'd like to add to my laundery-list. I can't really think of a good reason to keep it around. This wouldn't be the first time I've missed something obvious though.

So far the only thing I can recall is that you are worried about 1 person completely dominating the market, a point which I addressed. If you lower the minimum price, then for 1 person to completely dominate the market, they would need to set their price very low and I'm sure the lower-priced troops would sell much faster. If you can get a large volume of troops onto the market earlier in the game, you should be rewarded. If you enter the market late and don't set a price lower than your competitors, you shouldn't be allowed to sell until you've done your share of waiting.

Well, there's more to dominating then getting all the cash. In your scenario, the dominating player would effectively cap the market price as low as they wanted, making their opponents have to sell even lower if they want their goods sold. Since the dominating player has more buying power than anyone else, they have just created a source of cheap troops for them to consolidate their power on.

This would really only be an issue if there wasn't enough demand for troops in the first place. If you can produce enough troops to hold down the maket  at a low price for a full week when people are acutally buying troops in large volumes, props to you. But right now we do have a situation where there's not a lot of demand for troops and so market domination would be easier, especially because the minimum price is so high.

Market abuse is something I'm more qualified to think about when I'm well rested, but I'm sure I could come up with some good ways to abuse my proposed version of the market. Just not tonight.

Could you tell me what it is you don't like about buying evenly from all sellers? I can't really think of any objections to it balance-wise.

Yah, and let me know if they don't make a ton of sense.

1. With a FIFO approach, you have to plan your prices ahead of time. You can't just set your price to the current minimum and expect to sell troops. You either have to undercut your opponent or wait your turn. No free lunch. Under your method, a player can put a huge volume of troops on the market early on an not sell them even by the end of the round because other players keep adding units at the same price.
2. A team could dominate a certain price range by distributing the sales evenly between multiple players and just producing at the same rate that they sell. If it's one solo player vs. one team, the team is going to get a much higher portion of the sales.
3. anonymity doesn't defeat our ability to associate different troops with ourselves. If I know that my team has 10m stoats on the market at 1500, and I see 15m stoats on the market at 1500, I have some information that I can work with. If I see that nobody has troop prices at 1499, I can direct my team to place their troops at 1499 each and then I know who my teammates are.
4. I forgot because I'm tired. But I promise there was a fourth reason at it was pretty decent. lol

But mostly, I like the idea of planning ahead. If you were able to create and price troops 1 week ago correctly prediciting what they would be worth now, you should get rewarded as being the person who gets to be the first to sell at that price. And someone could always sell for lower. If you tried to hold down a monopoly, buying all cheaper things and blocking all equally priced things, you'd run out of money. It would only be sustainiable in a situation where people aren't buying many troops in the first place, and in that case having a monopoly isn't that special because the market isn't that big.

Let me think about this more though.

Aha, I understand. I like the idea in principle, but in practice I don't think there are enough players for the idea to be effective. Most goods would make it to market without ever being bid on, I suspect.

They indeed would. But there would be a 6 hour window, which is better than a 0 hour window. I also thought about making the transit time 24 hours instead of 6 hours. Any active player would have a chance to bid on it.

But perhaps 24 hours is too long and would discourage use of the pm.

The real evidence would be if this round prices consistently are below these prices: 400/750/1400/2200. If the minimum price this round is consistently above those four numbers, I concede and say that the current minimums are low enough.

See the immortalization, it shows the average price paid for all goods all round:

1,295,218,673 rats have been sold on the market for an average price of $420
233,552,943 weasels have been sold on the market for an average price of $749
575,677,937 stoats have been sold on the market for an average price of $1,769
126,801,393 skiffs have been sold on the market for an average price of $2,504
16,612,457,007 food has been sold on the market for an average price of $12

Because of the large amount of market aid and clan-helpiness, I'm going to call these prices unreliable. And because of Bluefish, I'm also going to call the food prices unreliable. I think for troops, the average price would be lower if teams weren't "abusing" the market, and for food, the price would almost certainly be higher if Bluefish hadn't kept up a constant stream of $10 food. (I had meant to say something mid-round, but never got around to it). The new market should give better insights.

My only worry would be that it would further empower clan play, since indiers would require so little input from the rest of the clan that everyone could produce at full capacity all the time.

This is a valid concern. Clans already have big advantages because their costs are so low. But I think that since it's affectivng everybody equally, it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

One thing to keep in mind that I've found through dev here is that economic intuition tends to break down when the number of players interacting on the market is very small. All the usual effects get washed out, so predictions are often problematic.

This is true too. Less people means strong personalities stand out better. And when you have 1/3 of the experienced players in a single clan, things can really fall apart.

For once, this actually has a really easy answer. The huge advantage to team play is reducing your costs, which raises the upper bound on the NW you can accumulate. All of my attempts to nerf team play have actually been attempts to reduce a teams ability to reduce the costs of accumulating large amounts of NW.

Yea, it's a tricky one. I toyed with kludgy ideas like requiring paid upkeep on stuff you aided away for a while after you aided it, but nothing seemed elegant enough to be worth coding. We could implement some sort of clan upkeep where you need to pay a little for your clanmate's armies, or divide upkeep communally so that the netholder doesn't matter so much, but again, kludgy. If you have suggestions here, by all means.

Well lets just do some brainstorming.

I like the storehouse because it can reduce costs and give advantages without actually reducing costs. It just makes playing smoother, but the resources still came from somewhere in the first place.

I like troop sharing for the same reason. The resources aren't popping out of nowhere and costs aren't reduced but playing is made smoother.

1. reduce number of aid credits to 18. Un-allies cost 3, allies cost 2, clanmantes cost 1.
2. reduce max upwards aid to warlords of 3x size. This limits the # of troops you can get rid of.
3. can't buy from clanmates over the market. doesn't stop unclanned teams, but still helps
4. aid costs 4 turns and troops are sent after the 4 turns are spent. When your troops cost 1b per turn, this is a big deal.
5. reduce send-able troop volume to 15% per aid instead of 20% or whatever it currently is.

The costs add up.


Also, just to address your like for catering to newer players, promi is not a game friendly to new people, and I don't think it needs to be. You can't be good at the game unless you understand most of the equations. I think 3.0 should only be newbie friendly enough that they don't fall flat on their faces. But really this is just an afterthought, we aren't exacly a community sees new players very often.

[Ruddertail]

Honestly, Taek, it was relatively easy to take you out once we actually got the equations and stopped relying on bad guesses, but that's just because you messed up with setting up your leader defense. If anything, lack of suicides should have made that takedown impossible. All you needed to do is run to 150k, use the leader capacity thing/academy to get to 100 leaders/hut, then have somebody hit you to 20k ish land. You'd have a ratio close to 700. There's no way to beat that with the land available. In fact, I'm not sure it's possible to beat it period, by sheer leader mass. . . the more leaders we have, the more land we have, and on.  Takedowns don't need to be made harder overall. We just got lucky that you guys didn't set up well.

[taekwondokid42]

Honestly, Taek, it was relatively easy to take you out once we actually got the equations and stopped relying on bad guesses, but that's just because you messed up with setting up your leader defense. If anything, lack of suicides should have made that takedown impossible. All you needed to do is run to 150k, use the leader capacity thing/academy to get to 100 leaders/hut, then have somebody hit you to 20k ish land. You'd have a ratio close to 700. There's no way to beat that with the land available. In fact, I'm not sure it's possible to beat it period, by sheer leader mass. . . the more leaders we have, the more land we have, and on.  Takedowns don't need to be made harder overall. We just got lucky that you guys didn't set up well.

like I said, had I known the equations there's no way I would have felt comfortable at a 175 raio on 33k land.

Also >.< shields. I did so well all round. Then I realized it was still the 27th and I didn't have enough shields to make it to the end of the round. That's an awful feeling.

[taekwondokid42]

Here we go. Another slew of things:

1. Don't have income be related to health. This is purely because it makes my runs take 40 minutes when they could be taking 15. Attack->attack->build->heal->repeat. Lots and lots of pages, when I used to be able to just attack over and over and over and skip a lot of the inbetween steps, doing everything in larger chunks and speeding up my run.

I don't know what the specific logic was for making health affect production, but I can't really think of too many benefits. The only reason I don't like it though is because it forces me to micromange my runs at a rate that really slows me down, especially since I have an unstable connection and occasionally page loads will take 10-30 seconds.

2. Halve the amount of money that players can store in cluny's hut, but then make your market ratio able to push that number up to 5x the base value. This gives cashers a large place to hold money even at low NW, and makes other players have to deal with more vulnerability on their cash (which encourages them to keep their resources in goods form - either selling on the market or buying from the market).

3. Give martens a slightly better worker bonus than -20%. It's really a crippling value. Maybe -15%, but probably -10%.

What are all of the race spells and equations? 'Cause I really have no idea.

[Shadow]

I forgot about desertions. I'm overall against the idea of troops deserting when you are attacking a larger warlord. If a larger warlord leaves themselves improperly defended, why should you suffer? Especially since you need a lower ratio as a defender as your land grows. This is a change I'd like to add to my laundery-list. I can't really think of a good reason to keep it around. This wouldn't be the first time I've missed something obvious though.

This round's theme is sort of a test of what happens without desertions. I am not attached to them.

This would really only be an issue if there wasn't enough demand for troops in the first place. If you can produce enough troops to hold down the maket  at a low price for a full week when people are acutally buying troops in large volumes, props to you. But right now we do have a situation where there's not a lot of demand for troops and so market domination would be easier, especially because the minimum price is so high.

Not really. We have a situation where people priced things high because they were market storing.

1. With a FIFO approach, you have to plan your prices ahead of time. You can't just set your price to the current minimum and expect to sell troops. You either have to undercut your opponent or wait your turn. No free lunch. Under your method, a player can put a huge volume of troops on the market early on an not sell them even by the end of the round because other players keep adding units at the same price.

The problems I'm telling you with FIFO market aren't theory-crafting - I have played proms that had them: RWL and FAF, as well as vanilla prom, all have had anonymous, cheapest only FIFO markets. The issues I am telling you about are literally what happens. One person gets a lead, dominates the market, and uses that to keep the lead. At FaF it was even worse because you could sell stuff on vacation, so people would stock the market, go on vacation, and log back in to trillion of dollars because nobody had any choice but to buy from them.

I don't really see "but they could undercut them because no min" as a good way around it either. If a dominating player can reduce profits for literally everyone to the level of merc sell just by being good at the start, you've ruined the market. And of course, market storing comes back full force.
[/quote]

2. A team could dominate a certain price range by distributing the sales evenly between multiple players and just producing at the same rate that they sell. If it's one solo player vs. one team, the team is going to get a much higher portion of the sales.

This is a valid concern, and if it is a problem we can deal with that. However, because clan costs are so low, a clan could also easily profitably dominate a FIFO market by pricing huge amounts of troops under market price as well, so clam market domination is not limited to the current scenario, it's just different. At least in this one, the other guys get something, whereas with FIFO they would get squat. Moreover, this way people will be able to see it happening, and respond by pricing their goods to siphon off even more of the clan profits.

3. anonymity doesn't defeat our ability to associate different troops with ourselves. If I know that my team has 10m stoats on the market at 1500, and I see 15m stoats on the market at 1500, I have some information that I can work with. If I see that nobody has troop prices at 1499, I can direct my team to place their troops at 1499 each and then I know who my teammates are.

Again, this is also true of FIFO. And even then, you can determine who is selling what by watching net change when you buy a few troops. There is no true anonymity as things stand now.

But mostly, I like the idea of planning ahead. If you were able to create and price troops 1 week ago correctly prediciting what they would be worth now, you should get rewarded as being the person who gets to be the first to sell at that price. And someone could always sell for lower. If you tried to hold down a monopoly, buying all cheaper things and blocking all equally priced things, you'd run out of money. It would only be sustainiable in a situation where people aren't buying many troops in the first place, and in that case having a monopoly isn't that special because the market isn't that big.

This just isn't true, speaking from experience here. Monopolies are sulf-sustaining in prom. And because of free price edits, planning ahead isn't as much of a thing here as at other proms anyway.

Because of the large amount of market aid and clan-helpiness, I'm going to call these prices unreliable. And because of Bluefish, I'm also going to call the food prices unreliable. I think for troops, the average price would be lower if teams weren't "abusing" the market, and for food, the price would almost certainly be higher if Bluefish hadn't kept up a constant stream of $10 food. (I had meant to say something mid-round, but never got around to it). The new market should give better insights.

Sure, they're ballparks at best. But you would expect "clan-helpliness" to lower prices, not raise them, since you were all clamoring to unstore things all round.

1. reduce number of aid credits to 18. Un-allies cost 3, allies cost 2, clanmantes cost 1.

Sure, why not

2. reduce max upwards aid to warlords of 3x size. This limits the # of troops you can get rid of.

Yea, sure.

3. can't buy from clanmates over the market. doesn't stop unclanned teams, but still helps

No, I don't like this one. Clans will just reduce their market presence.

4. aid costs 4 turns and troops are sent after the 4 turns are spent. When your troops cost 1b per turn, this is a big deal.

We could play with the order of things, sure.

5. reduce send-able troop volume to 15% per aid instead of 20% or whatever it currently is.

We can play with that too

Also, just to address your like for catering to newer players, promi is not a game friendly to new people, and I don't think it needs to be. You can't be good at the game unless you understand most of the equations. I think 3.0 should only be newbie friendly enough that they don't fall flat on their faces. But really this is just an afterthought, we aren't exacly a community sees new players very often.

I cannot disagree more. And we have players here who have a hard time with 3.0 despite my best efforts (hopefully your guide helps with that). We do see a fairly steady stream of new players, they just don't have much of a presence on forums or in the game so you don't notice. If I can keep even one extra one by making things friendlier, I will.
[/quote]

[Shadow]

Let's argue these points to a standstill before you add any more, this thread is already huge enough. I'll address these, but then let's finish taking your arguments to a conclusion before more:

Here we go. Another slew of things:

1. Don't have income be related to health. This is purely because it makes my runs take 40 minutes when they could be taking 15. Attack->attack->build->heal->repeat. Lots and lots of pages, when I used to be able to just attack over and over and over and skip a lot of the inbetween steps, doing everything in larger chunks and speeding up my run.

I don't know what the specific logic was for making health affect production, but I can't really think of too many benefits. The only reason I don't like it though is because it forces me to micromange my runs at a rate that really slows me down, especially since I have an unstable connection and occasionally page loads will take 10-30 seconds.

The reason it is related is to stop cashers and farmers being able to attack continuously for an entire run and still make money. If we removed this, we would have to drastically reduce their output to keep them on par with indying (they're already better than indying).

2. Halve the amount of money that players can store in cluny's hut, but then make your market ratio able to push that number up to 5x the base value. This gives cashers a large place to hold money even at low NW, and makes other players have to deal with more vulnerability on their cash (which encourages them to keep their resources in goods form - either selling on the market or buying from the market).

Markets already make a difference, but not to that extent. I don't really like safe resources: that was one of the reasons 3.0 exists, because market storing food on reg is awful. If you can't defend it, you don't deserve to have it.

Additionally, one of the goals of 3.0 was to make it about the short game. If cash is vulnerable, it motivates people to spend it NOW to get a defense, instead of waiting to get it stolen. Hording resources makes for a boring game, IMO. Vulnerability reduces hording.

3. Give martens a slightly better worker bonus than -20%. It's really a crippling value. Maybe -15%, but probably -10%.

What are all of the race spells and equations? 'Cause I really have no idea.

Considering solo martens have won or placed well in most of 3.0 round, I'm inclined to disagree. You can find the spells in magicfun.php, and most of the equations in the takeTurns and takeBuffTurns functions in funcs.php.

[Ruddertail]

Honestly, Taek, it was relatively easy to take you out once we actually got the equations and stopped relying on bad guesses, but that's just because you messed up with setting up your leader defense. If anything, lack of suicides should have made that takedown impossible. All you needed to do is run to 150k, use the leader capacity thing/academy to get to 100 leaders/hut, then have somebody hit you to 20k ish land. You'd have a ratio close to 700. There's no way to beat that with the land available. In fact, I'm not sure it's possible to beat it period, by sheer leader mass. . . the more leaders we have, the more land we have, and on.  Takedowns don't need to be made harder overall. We just got lucky that you guys didn't set up well.

like I said, had I known the equations there's no way I would have felt comfortable at a 175 raio on 33k land.

Also >.< shields. I did so well all round. Then I realized it was still the 27th and I didn't have enough shields to make it to the end of the round. That's an awful feeling.

Fair enough, and I'm not trying to gloat. Point is, leader takedowns don't need nerfing, i.e., exempting leaders from murders, etc. This round, it should have been impossible. With the addition of a way of killing leaders, it will still be pretty difficult.


As far as cutting back on aid credits, I'm skeptical. Mass aid dumping is one of the few ways for indies to keep costs low. Maybe if the market gets up and running, they'll be able to take it, but I'm not sure. Passing between allied clans is hard enough as is.

[taekwondokid42]

Okay, I re-read this whole thread an tried to cosolidate things into a readable list for easier debate.

1, Murder shouldn't kill leaders -> put on hold until Taek proves that this is a bad thing. If Taek fails to prove that this is a bad thing, then it remains on hold.
2. FIFO Market -> put on hold because for a FIFO market to work without monopolies you need the troop economy functional. Right now the troop economy is essentially broken.
3. Surpirse Attack ignores maxxed opponents.
4. Change # of aids from 24/12/6 to 18/9/6
5. Put a % limit on the number of units that can die when you get attacked. Make sure this limit adjusts upwards as you lose health. The limit should be higher than murder, like 8% or something for someone with full health.
6. Have markets increase the amount of money you can put in Cluny's hut by more than 2x (to 5x or 10x), but lower how much everybody else can store by 50%.

2a. Even though FIFO market is on hold, the idea of lowering minimum prices has been maintained. Both Shadow and Taek also seem to agree that prices should be rounded to the nearest X dollars, and that you shouldn't be able to get priority by selling skiffs for $1 cheaper than the other guys. Taek is thinking $50, Shadow said $25. Taek is also proposing the idea that the increments be splayed, perhaps $25/$50/$100/$150, but if it's done this way each of the four prices have result in relatively easy head math. Increments of $17/$34/$68/$102 is just a bigger headache.

On minimum market prices: I think that min. prices should be set and increments should be used, either increments of $25, or $50, or perhaps a gradient like $25/$50/$100/$150. There aren't many gradients that lend themselves to easy head-math, but $25/50/100/150 is not too bad. The only tricky one is 150, but if you're actually pricing your goods competitvely you'll have some nearby values as a guide. We could also add some javascript increment/decrement arrows.

On limiting the upwards aid to 3x: After more thought I realized that 5x is a pretty high ceiling all by itself. The real problem (at least for indys) is that solo indy is not a viable strat. You have to either solo hybrid indy, or team indy. So I'd hold off on adjusting this until we've got the indy race fixed up better.

On health-affects-income: see troop economy

---

Troop Economy:

So the big problem with indys is that troops are too expensive to hold onto. Everybody runs a hybrid indy strat because solo indys can't make as many troops as hybrid indys. I'm not against hybrid strategies, but the pure strategies also need to be functional in a solo environment. Even in a clanned enviornment, hybrid indy seems to be superior. This is because workers are so productive. Having 30% more workers means having billions more dollars and hundreds of millions of more food per run. When indys disregard their income, they become completely unviable and underpowered.

But the original point of the indy was to have troops be the source of income. The idea was to produce bucket-loads of troops and have the troops be your sustenence. Right now though, it's just too advantageous to have a bunch of workers and keep a high income to give serious thought to the idea of a 80%+ barracks strategy. That income makes a huge difference.

I believe that the original idea behind 3.0 is to make workers necessary. Necessary to the farmers and cashers for income, and necessary to the indys for troops. This is a dynamic I'm trying to keep.

One idea I had was to make the amount of income per worker drop to about 1/3 of what it currently is, and then to use markets and foragers to 'power up' your income. So if you have 10% markets you get a 40% boost to your cash income. 20% markets means a 80% boost. Same with foragers. Make it so markets and foragers don't actually give you any income at all on their own but instead require a large worker base to power them. So if you are a casher, you need lots of markets, lots of tents, and you don't have much room to get barracks while still keeping a piece of your land available for leaders.

Under this scheme, you'd need 50% markets to have the same income given the same amount of workers. But at 50% markets you'd have less workers (unless cashers currently go very high volume markets - I don't know how cashing works). Same with farmers.

Indys then could focus on barracks, but we need some way to account for the fact that the indy strat is very expensive. This is how the economic flow for indys would work in an ideal situation:

|high volumes of troops| -> |high volume of cash/food| -> |troops disappear in high volumes|.

In the old turbo, troops were sold to mercs to generate lots of cash, which was used to get the food you needed. Troops diappeared because they went to the mercs.

In 3.0, the goal is to get the troops sold to other players, but from there they still need to disappear from the game in some way. Brainstorming:

1. get rid of camps and make that a function of markets. Cashers profit by selling the troops they buy. (messy and adds a lot of power to cashers)
2. make troops die faster in battle
3. make troop-murders easier

Old indy worked so well because holding onto troops was costly, but getting rid of troops gave you lots of money, so an equilibrium was formed. We'd want to establish some system where there's a single variable (2 at most) that control the equilibrium of how many troops it's beneficial to hold onto. Right now that equilibrium is about 100 turns worth of troops.

troops->market->?->disappear for profit that's roughly equal to the expense of holding onto troops for 300-500 turns. or worth the expense of buying the troops in the first place.


I think that lowering the cost of holding onto troops is a good start, but that also makes emping easier (except that everybody will have more troops so it's really not so bad). I think it might also be good to have a few races that can sell to mercs for a high value, I htink adding a niche race might work -> a race that's decent as a casher or farmer but can sell to the mercs for very high prices and therefore typically buys large volumes of troops every run. I'm thinking maybe have the magpie do this. (probably not a race that has strong leadership).

Just starting to think about this, but I think that the indy part of 3.0 is currently broken in a way that can't be patched by tweaking a few constants. The problem is that for 3.0 we want large volumes of troops to be running through the market, which wans't the idea in the old style of indy. But I also don't think that we need to completely change how everything works. Just a few basic mechanics  to pull everything together.

[Shadow]

1. Good luck
2. FIFO is bad, and the current market addresses everything that is bad about it. You'll need to demonstrate why current market is bad, too.
3. I'll do that as a theme for starters.
4. 18/9/6 is what it was when we first put it in, there was almost unanimous complaint until we increases it. So probably not.
5. There is a % limit, it's just higher than you would like. However, because you get rats 6x faster than skiffs, it makes sense to me that they should die 6x faster. Currently, they die less than 6x faster.
6. Again, being able to store impervious resources is a bad thing. Being able to store cash reduces incentive to use cash and makes the market less active. Bad thing.

2a. Rounding to any number is equally easy once I write a function to do it ^_^. However, the range of competitive prices for all troop types is pretty small, so rounding the same way for all 4 types is probably the way to go.

One idea I had was to make the amount of income per worker drop to about 1/3 of what it currently is, and then to use markets and foragers to 'power up' your income.

markets an forages do power up income.

1. get rid of camps and make that a function of markets. Cashers profit by selling the troops they buy. (messy and adds a lot of power to cashers)
2. make troops die faster in battle
3. make troop-murders easier

I could see making camps and barracks the same thing, so that high barracks numbers reduced troop upkeep while leaving it relatively higher for other strategies, which aren't going to be using troops during their run anyway.