i agree with that point sweets

removing op penalties would be a start.

why should a small tribe not be able to op a big tribe, and who really cares if a big tribe ops a smaller tribe? smaller tribes, who cant get ML due to ML size limits, can always run CH if they feel threatened.

problem is huge tribes are oftrn able to run a much safer military citz ratio and be able to raze raid bc much more safely while small vs large cannot hope to do so

If there are no benefits to being large, what's the point to grow? Sit all at 3k and just camp out in war mode forever.

Small tribes can raze large ones. Small tribes can also build walls which protect some of their military and buildings against larger ones.

i like where this is going..

David versus Goliath?

Here's some options for people to flame ;)

1- Make the minimum starting size 250 acres. Revamp the heritage formula up to a max of 1000(!) acres when dying >5k. Make the difference between 250 and 1k meaningful (i.e. remove the FoR price alteration, increased taxes and other noob boosters at low size). Make heritage decrease over time after dying with some sort of 'decay' rate. This way, you can still all start 'together' but it would mean a setback for tribes that died longer ago because their heritage will go down to 250 acres within a timespan of, say, 5 days.

2- Give some sort of 'penalties' for larger blocks of ppl with the same age (say, lowered tax or so). A very ugly solution I must say.

3- Change the size penalties from tribe-based to alliance-based penalties. This seems to me to be a nice clean fix for many problems, amongst which is the difficulty to be a loner in infinity. AatW is a teamgame even more than classic. On the other hand this would also probably encourage the 'stay around the same size' strategy as it is pretty bad to have a very large tribe bringing all your poor 1k tribes into killing range of a 5k DEs squadron (although killing those 1k tribes has little gain too for those DEs)
Biggest drawback of this proposal is that loners are slightly favored by it because they can grow very big in a quite safe manner. Perhaps a mix of alliance and tribe sizepenalties might be even better.

Someone remind me of the use of size penalties.. I believe it was something to do with the current #1 slaughtering the upcoming #1, and the poor buggers didn't stand a chance (as in line with KP killing “all of orkfia” at some point).

The problem is mainly attacks. Big tribes even if a thieve or mage can attack smaller tribes. And having only a penalty for attacks on smaller tribes is not enough compensation.

Btw, for non stop play I would really like no natural death. Also not killing a tribe like how it is now but rather destruct a tribe to some extend. Maybe some spells and ops should remove a portion of the acres. The limit of new trainable units would be the limit of how many homes you have and how much citz you would like yourself for income. Having 200 citz wouldnt kill you anymore, just slows you down and makes you more vulnerable to money depleting attacks/ops/spells.

But don't worry orkfians. I won't push such a change through

and what's the problem with butchering a small tribe? The retaliation problem of 'big evil guys killing small noobies who grabbed their growing small one'?

How about no upper declaring limit, and remove all size penalties in war

that has a problem as war meter is set at a % of the declaring alli. bit unfair for 100k alli to lose just because they lost one 8k tribe esp since all range penalties are now removed. so u need to do something about war too

not really, if you lose an 8k tribe, you have to think of all the time that was put into killing it, as it would usually consist of almost a full alliance KT or several medium size KT's, leave the war system, it is fine, as for the old age thing, reducing acresto 1k on heritage, ok, but to further add insult to injury, for god sakes dont add a decay, you'll fuck it more (excuse my frech). as for opping of small tribes, what is an alliance without retals? if a smaller tribe ops your alliance you need the retal. I must agree on what someone else said on the world forum, this game is going in the wrong direction if these changed start being implemented, it would effect alot more then the initial problem.

1- How about... when a tribe dies, all the resources they put on the market vanishes?

So putting tons of resources on the market at an old age to be used at respawn becomes pointless...
Which in turn makes it unwise for everyone to start at the same time.

2- I saw it on another post... I think it was ScorpiAS that suggested it but... Perhaps we should have bonuses and penalties for the races represented in the alliance, and the number of each.

For example, having 1 DE in the alliance increases everyone's MP regen by 10%, having 2DEs has no effect, having 3 DEs gives -10% MP regen, 4 DEs -20%, and so on...

So with this system it would be wise for the alliance to choose one of each race instead of just 2 or 3 races.

no no no, because then you would have a heritage tribe start with only being able to make, say 200DPA, and with all these overpumped attackers, that in itself is scuicide

You know, these are not changes but rather ideas that attempt to solve a certain core issue brought up by Sweets: how to make alliances consisting of blocks be less effective. This was brought up by her because it has unwanted effects on the competition of AatW and might be the core of some problems with AatW gameplay.
It might be quite fun to shoot at any changes from the sideline, but without any argumentation from your side why you think it is a bad idea, your voice will not win many hearts to agree with you.

@ sanzi: 1 seems to be quite commonly accepted as a needed change in dev to make AatW more friendly for new players. Currently the market system is simply unfairly biased towards old established alliances without any reason. 2 seems to misunderstand Sweets problem: it's not the block of same races that create power but rather the block of same size tribes. Although it can be an interesting idea, this thread was supposed to be about something else :)

Yeah I know I just thought it would be a good place to mention it lol

well if i understand it, you like that you can start when you want.. but that isnt really the fact since you need to grow together to real max your dmg done.. so if you start later it will be hard to keep up or the rest has to wait.. Also i hate the fact that when you reach a nice size with everyone near each other acreage wise and finally able to do real dmg and then half of you get killed that you only have a half of ally left to play..

not a bad thing persé, cause you do need to intel. but seeing as not every alliance does that properly or are caught by surprise due to activity, but your age is pretty much limited to growing to 10k and wait for heritage to try again, but by then the rest is around 4k and so on.. and so they plan a manual reset and the saga starts over again..

but it's probably my frustration of late :D.. and some minor changes in races and some other stuff could stop that. dunno. but still, been quite some times i wished i was a thief so the intel was done properly, but i'm also the first to admit that i forgot to do my intel once or twice :P.

ahh i feel better now, just do some changes and i'll be happy again.. :P

The original author is Sweets.

This thread is nullified!

I recognize that quite a bit. That's why I like my #3 solution the most: it would enable small tribes to participate more, thus making size different less problematic than currently.
I'll elaborate a bit on it to make my idea more clear: I want normal military attacks to have size penalties much like currently. But I want destructive military attacks (BC + Raze) and t/m operation to have no personal size penalties at all, instead replacing those with alliance size penalties. This has a lot of effects of which some definitely will be seen as negative by some people.
It means that, if your alliance happens to be in the same size category as the alliance you want to target (say, 80-150%), you will have no penalty whatsoever on ANY tribe in that alliance. This means that your 15k Britt could go arson the hell out of that poor 1k OOPer.
This means, effectively, that larger and settled alliances will have to be more careful also at smaller sizes when growing up. Large tribes do offer not only protection, they will also bring your tiny tribe into range of biggies that could be mean to you without any form of penalties. It also means that your tiny tribe can participate in a kill on a biggie tribe unpenalized (although your firepower prolly wont be very big at 1k acres).

It would probably still be the most effective to all be around the same size. But at least having a 'split' alliance as lepel describes above isn't as disastrous as it currently is in crippling an alliance in warring and having fun. Also it would make fameraping for new/lonely players less of a problem as they won't be in anyones range and thus will be not great targets for any tribe in a full alliance.

this is why it is so difficult to keep up with suggestions/ideas

i give up

Sometimes I think we focus too much on the minutiae instead of working towards creating a consensus about the Big Picture.

Different visions of where we are going is the problem. Once we set a common destination it should be easier to read the map and make the adjustments to get us there.

Otherwise there's just a lot of noise that tends to skew the discussion, waste time, and dishearten those truly interested (& capable) in making thoughtful, positive suggestions.

You mean: once we set a common vision.

That's the problem. And of course a lot of people who don't elaborate enough on their ideas or elaborate too much (call it noise).

Joe's idea of size-based penalties for t/m ops is pretty sound, because although a 10k tribe may be able to deal out a lot of damage, he endangers the entire alliance. Or he turns the whole alliance so big they can't kill anything anymore. Either way, setting the penalty in an alliance context rather than an individual context seems to me to make much more sense. As a matter of fact, it's the determinant of war - logically, you should be able to deal damage to guys you can declare on. This is a way to make that happen (and I don't see any drawbacks yet).

Now go ahead, voice drawbacks or other solutions for this or one of the many other problems

Well, it needs to be combined really with a redo of the famegain on ops. Many mage ops have fixed gains which would mean 10k mages can famerape 1k tribes. Instead, the famegains should always be based on damage (much like arson) but that is also not too easy to create. And it could lead to 'famefarming' if really worthwhile (although you would need to create famefarms in alliances in range, which is alot harder than creating farms currently)