Yeah it does take some courage to read all the posts...
As Berserker said, I also get the feeling that the issue here has been misunderstood by many at least at the beginning... the
point is to regularize the attack capability of players that are too
close to each other.
I will not say whether this is a good or bad idea to implement this because,
- I'm new to the game,
- I think in terms of business, and decision of what's best for the game, a few motivated alpha testers probably won't reach a conclusion that will make the rest 99% of players who will join afterwards happy,
- it's not a black or white answer, but will depend on the implementation, and we're just trying to give it a shot anyways.
So back to business, two pieces of information I find relevant :
Due to military actions in game are “time/distance dependent”. Enemy that 10 times further away from you, compared to your neighbor, are roughly to say 10 times less danger to your kingdom (If you have no protection right now). And that is the place where abusing can occur. Sure you have to take care about your cities protection and so one..
How long is this automatic truce planned to be in place?
You mentioned that it depends on the damage or the size of the attack?
How about considering that it should also depend on the town's
protection in place? If a player does not try to protect himself, he
should not earn benefit of extra protection.
Military actions are "time/distance" dependent. This is the root of the problem. A very simple metaphor that would illustrate it (from FPS games, sorry :P) : think of someone holding a rapid-fire gun. Being able to shoot powerful bullets extremely fast, without ever stopping would be unfair, so the protection is the "heating" mechanism : you fire too much, your gun runs hot, and has to cool down, period during which you cannot use the gun at all.
Same goes here : you attack too rapidly because you're too close ? Implementing a "heating" mechanism in the game, feels legit. May end up being a bad choice, but we won't know until we try.
So the faster the enemy attacks, the more it should fill the heat-meter until it has to cool down. We assume the attack rate is directly/proportionally linked to ground-distance, but this might be different with end-game eras, which may introduce airships, and really distance will mean nothing. Maybe we can think of future mechanisms to handle that (like, for a space age tribe with democracy, attacking stone age players will generate unhapnness in the city, whatever), but it doesn't hurt to consider this as well.
I believe a good thing would be to consider the time required to rebuild what has been destroyed. Plundering resources doesn't count, I think, and we are really talking about onslaught and destroying buildings.
The excessive attack gauge
I am thinking of a gauge of "total construction time lost". This gauge fills and depletes as explained in my metaphor just above. A gauge like this could be defined (using literals, and an example in parenthesis).
- The gauge is T damage big - corresponds to damage equivalent to T game time to rebuild (Ex T = 24H)
- The gauge recovers R every DT (ex : the gauge depletes R=2H every DT = 30mins)
- If damage done exceeds the gauge limit, the player enters truce that lasts
- Either the time to deplete tha gauge (So about 6 hours with above parameters)
- If the player reconnects, he can decide to reset the gauge, therefore leaving truce before its theoretical end
- If a player build defenses during that time, the gauge duration is extended (cf 2nd quote clock), why not by half the duration of construction ?
