Proposal 0/20% BP

[Shuri2060]

Summary: Remove 0/20% BP feature added in. (0 BP awarded for killing your own units, 20% BP awarded for killing allied/pacted units)

Reason: Having come back to this game after 1 yr out I'm appalled by this.

Afaik, this was part of this game for a long time and a fundamental part to some of its strategies.

I can't see why the devs saw this as an 'abuse' or anything like it. Players trying to get CP by crashing their own troops against each other are getting less CPs than using the resources used to make those units to hold Festivals. Even with the use of heroes to reduce these costs, the time to make 300 population worth of units will be much more than the Festival time, and in addition to that,.

A festival costs 48000 resources per CP and no unit costs less than 160 resources per population. The experienced players won't even need to resort to such tactics anyway. They usually get more BP than the amount they give away against enemies.

On the other hand, there are several reasons I believe such a feature should be removed:

1. In CQ, this punishes alliances who both backsnipe and frontsnipe CS. If the frontsnipe succeeds then they will crash into their own stuff for no/little gain. This punishes plays that take skill/experience to make - I see this as nonsensical.
2. This can be mostly circumvented if players don't band up in an alliance/make pacts. Instead, they can continue communicating using some other medium (like Skype, Discord) while gaining the full BPs they would've gotten originally. This is true up to stuff like WWs, in which case, just the WW players need to initially band up into an alliance before the rest join towards the end. As for pacts - that feature is pretty much useless thanks to this.
3. Because of (2), less experienced alliances/solo players are at a disadvantage, while more experienced players are much less affected by this.

To expand on 2, alliances and pacts should really just be handy markers/convenience features for players. The same functionality can be achieved with mods, Skype, Discord, and PMs (apart from events + WWs). It makes little sense to then punish using this convenience feature.

 

[Raydium88]

Did you factor in heightened/divine senses spells?

Regardless, I'd counter argue that the feature in place does not even do its job well. The intention is to stop troop cannibals from dominating the BP rankings, yet the feature we got can be easily circumvented within alliance teammates, by just leaving and rejoining an alliance... So if you ask me, what we got shouldn't be removed... it is not good enough.

Plus, you forget festivals take over 3 times longer to run than a VP.

1. In CQ, this punishes alliances who both backsnipe and frontsnipe CS.

If you're both frontsnipping with Birs and backsniping with LS then you're just picking the wrong combination of sniping options anyway. Not the most effective way of doing it.

You could argue how annoying it is to internalize players. Having ppl constantly asking you to leave and rejoin... Really annoying lol.

Aside from that, I don't agree with the bulk of your reasoning, and think the BP penalties for own troops should remain in place. BP cannibalism / self bashing (whatever) goes against the spirit of the game, and puts a huge "screw you" stamp on those that get their BP legitimately by fighting enemy troops.

 

[Shuri2060]

Building 300 pop of units takes longer than a festival

Its not necessarily 'wrong' to back and frontsnipe when you need to make sure the CS is sunk no matter what and the enemy has good timings. Depends on the situation, and I see no reason to have this discouragement against it.

The best players shouldn't really be caring about how others get their BP - as long as you're good enough, the most efficient way is mainly to fight the enemy to get BP. If your main source of BP is from crashing your own stuff, then you're probably a terrible and irrelevant player.

Either way, as I've said, it's practically impossible to make a change to the current system so that the feature works as intended, unless you decide to lock players into their alliance at the start of the world or something like that (also ridiculous).

Alliances/pacts are mainly convenience features - an efficient team can just forego having them by communicating elsewhere.

 

[DeletedUser54192]

Players trying to get CP by crashing their own troops against each other are getting less CPs than using the resources used to make those units to hold Festivals. Even with the use of heroes to reduce these costs, the time to make 300 population worth of units will be much more than the Festival time, and in addition to that,.

Even if you ignore BP multiplier tokens, it is possible to generate CP faster and cheaper by killing friendly/own troops for Battle Points than it is with City Festivals. Let's compare City Festivals with Colony Ships on a Speed 3 world.

Resource cost for 1 CP:
- City Festival: 48,000.
- Colony Ship: 47,647 (including Mathematics, as anyone sensible will be using it).

Time for 1 CP:
- City Festival: 408 minutes (including Strong Wine).
- Colony Ship: 333.2 minutes (including Shipwright, using Level 30 Harbour).

If you cut the Harbour to Level 10 (lower than you'd see in any normal naval city), you'd still only have a time count of 416.1 minutes. If you think that those 8.1 minutes make all the difference, then remember that these calculations didn't include the use of a Call of the Ocean spell. The resource cost calculation doesn't take account of the Battle Experience research, which would tip that figure further in favour of Colony Ships. Therefore it can be seen that building and killing Colony Ships is both faster and cheaper for Culture Point generation than running City Festivals. Factor in the presence of 2xBP and 4xBP tokens and Nereids rituals, and this tips the resource costs further in favour of troop-killing.

Its not wrong to backsnipe and frontshipe when you need to make sure the CS is sunk no matter what and the enemy has good timings.

To echo Ray, most decent alliances will try to avoid backsniping and frontsniping with the same type of units. If the targeted city has no walls, then frontsnipe with biremes and backsnipe with fliers. If the targeted city has high walls, then frontsnipe with DLU and backsnipe with LS. Even when there was no BP penalty, alliances tended to avoid using the same type of units for frontsnipe and backsnipe.

Furthermore, this mechanism doesn't prevent killing friendly troops for BP. It makes it more of a hassle (leaving and rejoining alliances to get 100% BP), especially for internals, but it doesn't actually prevent it from happening in the vast majority of cases. What it does prevent is killing your own troops for BP.

 

[Shuri2060]

mb I forgot about CS.

Then a suitable fix could just be to lower the cost/duration of Festivals or have some additional benefit for running festivals.

Either way, as far as i can see, my main point stands - the alliance/pact function is a convenience function and isn't a necessary part of the game for players who can communicate elsewhere until you reach WW (or events). This doesn't affect those players, while this affects newer players who wouldn't even be crashing their own stuff for much BP anyway.

 

[DeletedUser54192]

mb I forgot about CS.

Most heavy self/friendly troop-killing revolved around the use of BP-multiplier tokens, especially 4xBP tokens. I haven't run the maths, but I'm fairly confident that most units become more cost-efficient CP generators than City Festivals at that point. CSs just happen to be (I think) the most efficient unit in terms of BP/population.

Then a suitable fix could just be to lower the cost/duration of Festivals or have some additional benefit for running festivals.

Festivals are already a fairly efficient way of generating CP, so long as you are optimised for it. It's just that self/friendly troop-killing was more efficient. While the penalties haven't prevented friendly troop-killing as a source of BP, they've made it less convenient. Given that this is meant to be a war game, I'd be hesitant about increasing the viability of non-combative CP generation.

Either way, as far as i can see, my main point stands - the alliance/pact function is a convenience function and isn't a necessary part of the game for players who can communicate elsewhere until you reach WW (or events). This doesn't affect those players, while this affects newer players who wouldn't even be crashing their own stuff for much BP anyway.

That was just one of your three main points. It's just that the other two main points were invalid.

The alliance/pact function is actually still a necessary part of the game. In the endgame, it would be practically impossible to achieve anything without the alliance function: you have to be in the alliance to help with the Domination percentages, and if you're not in the alliance you can't send resources directly to the World Wonders, or use favour to accelerate them. However it is still highly useful before the endgame: the in-alliance activity status, conquest/pact timelines, and reservations are just a few examples. (I believe you can share reservations between non-pacted alliances, but it takes more set-up.)

The main negative impact I actually saw from this change was in terms of handling internals, as you either have to leave and rejoin alliances to clear them at a reasonable BP ratio, or kick them and alert every nearby alliance that the cities are vulnerable. However it does make it easier to see which players are BP-hunting internals without permission!