Proposal Ghosting specific cities

Shuri2060

Strategos
Proposal

Add option to ghost specific cities under restart section in settings.

Password is required to do this.

Once ghosting process is started, it cannot be cancelled. You can still utilize your city as normal before it ghosts.

It takes 24 hrs for a city to ghost this way.

Reason

Gives players option to free up slots for cities they regret taking/founding.

At later stages in the game players often want to relocate but don't have slots. To do it they need someone else to take cities off them.

A better alternative than restarting for most - you keep your slots.

Balance

It takes 24 hrs at most to hand off cities in most worlds. Adding the delay stops this being a quicker way to hand off.

Password is there for safety reasons, just like restart.

Process cannot be cancelled so that it cannot be abused in Revolt.
 
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Hydna

Grepolis Team
What about the impact on strategy? For example in Dom to colonise rock islands or distant oceans is detrimental to the endgame so you need to consider your actions carefully. This would allow you to just colonise where you like and ghost later.

As it stands you have to choose your targets carefully in all settings. This could completely change the game.
 

1saaa

Strategos
Revolt players could abuse this quite heavily and use it as a more efficient form of revolt cancelling.

You would absolutely have to extend the time to 24 hours at the least.
 

Shuri2060

Strategos
What about the impact on strategy? For example in Dom to colonise rock islands or distant oceans is detrimental to the endgame so you need to consider your actions carefully. This would allow you to just colonise where you like and ghost later.

As it stands you have to choose your targets carefully in all settings. This could completely change the game.
Yes, true there is that to consider. Perhaps it should cost some CP to ghost, after all, and maybe a minimum build requirement (say CS in harbor from city).
 

DeletedUser22115

Guest
There would have to be a significant CP cost to get rid of a city, considering it costs 1 cp alone to remove one research, it would also probably have to scale based on your cultural level. If the cost of CP is high, it defeats the purpose of doing this, when you can handoff or trade cities.

When handoffs and trades are a thing, i don't see why this is needed to be honest. Also if the CP cost wasn't the equivalent of a slot, it would be abused in Dom, as people can fill rocks etc in beginners protection and fill rocks throughout and ghost the rock cities when time comes, this just defeats the purpose of rocks not being counted in the dom city count, as rock cities won't exist on dom worlds when the time comes as they will all be ghosts.
 

Shuri2060

Strategos
I think a cost equvalent to say half a CP is enough so it won't be completely abused. You would still have to strategize when thinking about rock cities.

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That aside, I personally think the idea of no cost can still be considered. Yes, it would change existing strategies, especially for Dom. But these aren't necessarily bad changes. Other points I'd like to bring out -

Pros:

- Allows small alliances outside the Dom circle to have more of a chance. If they are better fighters than the central alliances, they could ditch cities and invade the Dom area. Right now, the limitation of slots prevents them from doing such a thing.

- Could create new interesting strategies with regards to relocation. Currently, it is very costly for alliances to relocate (if you do this, you've probably lost already). The best they can do is expand to new locations, really. Again, slots are a big limiting factor in all this. Such a feature allows alliances to shift location easier. I personally like the sound of this - it changes the game up a bit from how it's been in the last 10 years.

- The above strategies are balanced by the time/resource waste from ghosting cities. I don't think excessive ghosting will lead to a positive outcome - there is likely some middle ground for optimal play. You lose the time spent building up the cities if you abandom them (they will probably not be enemy takes since those will be constested on the frontline).

- Going back to the first point, one of the things I don't like about Grepo is it heavily favors large groups of players, whether it be WW/Dom/Olympus. As long as the group can work together, there is no tactical disadvantage from banding together, although many would consider it 'boring', and only a limited number of players can get the awards for winning. If you have a small group of better fighters against a large alliance, they will reach a point where they are struggling for slots, making it very hard for them to win the fight overall. The introduction of ghosting might help solve this problem. I want to see a game where fighting skill has more of an influence than it does now. Atm, I would say diplomacy/leadership has a much larger impact on an alliance's chances of winning over individual skill, not that that's necessarily a bad thing. For me it feels a bit too much, however.

Cons:

- Gold abuse. You can found all over the rim oceans for gold and still play the game. Not sure what could be proposed to solve this - perhaps a mixture of things. Eg. making the world smaller, changing the way the gold market works on the rim oceans.

- Without thorough testing, it is hard to tell whether this would be an overpowered feature to add to the game, as you all say - there could be more unintended uses for this feature. We might not end up liking such a feature after all.
 
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DeletedUser57069

Guest
What about the impact on strategy? For example in Dom to colonise rock islands or distant oceans is detrimental to the endgame so you need to consider your actions carefully. This would allow you to just colonise where you like and ghost later.

As it stands you have to choose your targets carefully in all settings. This could completely change the game.
While it could change the strategy of the endgame I don't think it would be a bad thing. One huge benefit is that new players to Grepolis that likely dropped later in the server and therefore outside of any dom rings would not be written out of the endgame. The benefits of this would be increased endgame competition. Likely, you would also see an increase in player retention as they become more engaged in the endgame by experienced teams.
 
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