Call for ideas: Defending your towns

Towers are strong enough, people just don't build them because it is drastically increasing the construction time in the town and if you build 20 towers thats 200 food, that is equal to one 10 lvl foodstpot, if it is your main town you have 1000 food left, around 200 or more will be taken by population itself, a huge % will be taken due to the penalty of having many towns. For example, army im killing worms with eats 1000 food per hour and that isnt even close to the units i have in total.

I actually calculated, the army i have in kingdom itself without  any extra eats 3,5k food per hour:D

Not in a leaderism hero. They can be knocked down pretty easy. Really though they eat to much

I destroyed a fair share of towers in past weeks and in every single town that was stripped off defence i could have been slottered but i won't tell how on forum:D So, no, towers are strong even on leaderism.

PS: If enemy will come to you with 10 heroes though, you won't stand a chance no matter what

This might not be a popular point of view, but I still would like to say it. This is a game of strategy. From the very first .. choosing leaderism or communality, we are choosing our game strategy. We choose attack or protection. We also choose how many heroes to create, how many towns to build in our domains, which buildings to upgrade first, which is more important - the defense troops or the culture. There are pros and cons to each decision, and now that the polity, building, defense, and culture decisions have been made, people are seeing drawbacks to their decisions.

So, instead of players revisiting strategy, which should be an element in playing the game, people instead are saying, "This is what I want, and if my decisions are not working, then fix it for me". I personally do not like the catacomb idea. It seems complicated and full of possible problems. If players are not happy with what occurs when they are at work or asleep, then why not simply make their domains inaccessible unless they are online? It could work in a similar fashion to our not being able to attack an allied alliance member. 

The food issue is valid. Any defense takes a lot of food. Even defense that is supportive and not active, like the population in the towers. I don't see troops sitting on the ballistae, but they still eat. The food issue could be easily resolved by making armies or supportive simply eat less. It is tough enough to defend a town without the problem of feeding large armies that are attempting to defend.

My point was that it makes no sense to fix a little unfairness if you don't fix big unfairnesses which even for defense have more impact, that's why I don't even want to think about what to do to fix this, especially since it's very likely that it would be very far from perfect and fair, if not even more unfair in the end like about things I wrote.

But I just though about something obvious that fix it all and easily since it's here already: it's a free to play game, you spent years making it and will for years to come, you need money, people should either pay cheap truces to play a game they enjoy and can't claim that it's normal for them to play it for free, or suffer.

Addressing this specific issue, some very good points have been made.  As to towers, I have some personal data regarding them that I intend to share on another thread.

Troops eat a lot. Towers eat a lot.  Maintaining a large army with sufficient towers takes a lot of food, so most people have to split their armies up when they leave the game for any length of time.  The world map does not have a lot of areas with food plots in numbers greater than 8 or 9 so most people will have 5-7 food plots per town.  I don't see that it's possible to lodge an entire army in one town with a population greater than 250 and food plots numbering less than 9.  If you are leaderism that is an issue that becomes very relevant to defense.  Defense of towns seems to be a numbers game, since having troops in town in numbers less than half that of the approaching army appears to result in total destruction of defensive structures when the approaching army has a large number of rams.

Defensive requirements differ for communality heroes, obviously.

I like the idea of reducing the food requirements for towers, for example, as that might make it more feasible to keep larger numbers of troops in one town.  That still does not solve the problem of how you protect your domain when not online or even just afk if your army still needs to be split.  Truces are not the solution as you need one for every day of the year if you are going to use them for when you are asleep. 

I don't think anyone wants a magic bullet here, but even choosing communality doesn't make you immune from multiple damaging attacks so choice of poltiics is no guarantee that you can adequately defend.   The ability to defend for a leaderism hero should be at least equal to their ability to attack but not greater and I don't see that happening with armies having to be split up or with having multiple towns in one domain.

This issue of defending while away won't be resolved without taking care of the food needed to supply an army and a town at the same time.  Even if you have a mechanism to move troops automatically, they would have to be relocated after the battle to take into account the starvation factor.  Maybe like you have done with quest locations.  And, again, once an initial battle is done and troops are moved back to where they came from, what about the next battle?  Will the troops in the catacombs go back into the catacombs?  I'm guessing the teleportation is a matter of seconds rather than the time it takes for troops to cross the domain in real time, because in larger domains it can take a half hour to move from one end to the other with any type of heavy weaponry. So, I'm not clear on the mechanism of the catacombs, but I can see it becoming very complicated.

I raeally think it's a question of troop numbers and tower/wall strength and quantity.  I question the efficacy of walls and towers when a town has less than half the number of troops in it as are approaching to attack.  Since towers take a huge amount of time to build, promote and upgrade and add so much to all construction time, the tendency is to have more builds at lower levels than promoted towers at higher levels.  Perhaps the time for construction (promoted and built) needs to be investigated along with the strength but that is for another thread.  :-) 

By the time classical age archer towers are available, some towns will be large enough that the build times can reach 15 hours for a level 5 tower.  That discourages construction of the necessary upgraded towers, I think.

The same applies to the walls, though I think people tend to construct walls more consistently than towers.

I think its a good idea, but only if you can keep it simple, if things starts getting too complicated to understand  it will ruin your project.

Beeing attacked at night is awfull, as you cant defend properly, and i think this teleportation sistem can solve that, but i have to agree with Onjel that i don't understand some things, is the compsumition of the army substracted from the enter town income or when you teleport the income lowers in the new town? i wouldn't complain if you clarified every strange idea you can think of. Attacking is more or less accepted, but taking advantage of things like those if falling to a shame level for me

Im not a follower of the idea of lowering the army compsumition because it's a 2 blade weapon, it also gives more freedom to the attacker to gather an ever bigger army, althrough i suppose if the target town of the teleport is the one that has it's income eaten it will be needed to do

Towers are a pain: judging on what i see in my aliance mates reports towers (and walls, but not to the same level) are weak, and a town can have 5 arrow towers maxed destroyed, and i suppose there where more in the town, you can't rely on them to defend the town, but as everyone says ill leave that subject to another thread

Maybe this solves itself in the future with that feature that, if i understood good in that moment, makes troops a bit intelligent, but the building, if done properly can be a good solution, again, if you don't exceed with its complexity

I thought my final proposal was pretty simple and straightforward: you put troops in catacombs like into shelter and when the fight is going on in other town, they teleport there to fight and then back after the fight is over. I am surprised noone got the idea and instead started to discuss everything but what have been asked for.

I did reply to your proposal. I thought the catacombs would result in complications and therefore attempted to come up with an easier solution.

I am not sure how many times the issue has been brought up and how many times you have defended the "attack strength" tactics in the game. People have lost towns, we have lost so many players, but always the solution given was "build your defense". Now it appears the defense really is not strong enough.  I remember recently your increased the strength of siege weapons, but did not mention increasing the strength of defense. The solution is: make defense buildings stronger. Maybe the +/- 300% difference in polity is just too large. Why add another building? Why not improve what you already have?

I kind of like that idea Bers. I imagine it will have bugs to be sorted out but on the whole I think it is a good addition to defense. Worth giving it a shot.

I also think that  catacombs are a good idea and would have thought that the warmongers among us would be only too happy to be able to destroy their victims total army.  But medicine is always easier to give than to take.  No doubt it will have teething problems but nothing ventured nothing gained. However, it does make spying before an attack slightly pointless though, which, depending on what side of the war divide you fall on, is not necessarily a bad thing.
I do agree with Simba though - the 300% defence bonus needs to be addressed and shouldn't be tweaked in favour of one side over the other. If you have enough cats then you can do enough damage and there should be no increasing their strength/health/hitpoints unless you also increase the amount of food they require as a result.   We were promised a game with a defence bonus which would allow us to play  a relatively peaceful game where we weren't going to log in everyday to find that while we were sleeping our armies were slaughtered and towns flattened. 

I think you missunderstood me, i like the idea, and i want to see how you deveolp it, i was only asking for it to be simple

To clarify, I think catacombs could be implemented and then we can assess how complicated they are or could become.

I think the idea is really really good, but needs testing. Also, it's hard to tell how everything will be impacted with new ages to come. So, why do I think it would be nice to test ?

This is a take from what I experienced:

I started a bit later than others and I was a total newbie = I wasn't well developped when I was attacked and I didn't necessarily make good strategic choices, just because I was learning the game. I only have one hero, I'm connected only during the day, not the evening, I was leaderism with3 huge armies who could come and destroy my towns (like they told me: I was an easy target).

What I did: a marathon to upgrade towers and make a reasonable army to defend myself and I wanted to get retribution by attacking back (evil laugh :p).

What happened: twice I've been lucky enough to be there to defend my towns, and won. Well, still got some damages, but I managed to destroy the warmongers armies. Something I couldn't do during the night on multiple occasions. So, I joined a big alliance, hoping to mount a rebellion/resistance :D. Problem was, all of them are communalities and we weren't on the same clock or in the same region. More over, they had more towns, but were less developped army and researchwise. I realised that alone, I would never reach the goal I had in mind in time: my towns would be destroyed by the huge armies if I stayed leaderism ! And even with the Flag, I was attacked during the night between 2 flags. And during the day, I don't have time or will to check every 20 minutes to see if there's an attack coming: this game is already very much "chronophage" (time consuming).

That's why I switched to communality.... (after having launched a small attack, for the principle of it). So, now, I'm starting to have an army big enough to go to war (and a steady defense), but the cost of changing back to Leaderism is too huge and I would again lose momentum against those who are (and always will be) more developped than me ! More over, 3 against 1 mini-me with another clock, so almost all the attacks are when I'm not there. So, yes, it's frustrating, because the big attackers are almost never attacked back, which is no fun at all, don't you think ? :D

So, my conclusion: with the catacombs, it's possible I would have remained Leaderism and could have engaged in a war. At least against one, to maintain a semblance of balance in the region, because communalities can't really fight back. Knowing that at least one of my towns will be well protected while I'm away would make me at ease and I don't think people will come less, because there are/will be many other things to do besides war in this game.

I've shared my experience to explain to those who think the idea bad that it has its perks ! With that in mind, it's also possible that some other people would choose leaderism instead of communality: I'm not a warmonger (at all !), but I think it's fun to fight back, which I can't do, snirfff ! And I do believe I'm not the only one in this position, so some adjustments like catacombs and maybe some other things would be beneficial to the game. Because right now, I feel like it's a stale: many communalities are constantly under attack and never fight back, just lick their wounds. The game would be much more interesting with a good balance and I'm sure the warmongers would enjoy a real war, because it must be boring to only attack with never having to defend yourself. Well, I personally would find it boring :).

PS: also, finding ways to balance the game would maybe make it more light-hearted. Right now, I feel like there are resentments and some people are starting to hate the players instead of the characters: when things start to get personal in a game - as opposed to having fun with all the mechanics of the game - it's a sign that there's something wrong ;).

I also did not ignore what you said. The Title said call for ideas. I thought you were interested. I did not realize you only wanted comments on your idea. I am on both sides of a major war, so thought input was wanted

I agree the issue is not irrelevant. I Will probably come home to a dead army or decimated town today. Due to the fact that my opponent plays in a different time then me

I think it's worth a try and worth testing.  I've been an attacker and I've also been attacked in waves, non-stop, hour after hour until my truce flag took effect (which took me weeks to recover from).  I now understand some of the frustrations on both sides.  Will catacombs be effective on multiple, simultaneous attacks and only buy a player a couple hours?   It seems it would only be effective on the first wave or two of attacks, which can take place in a matter of a couple hours.  Would we still come home from work and/or vacation with nothing left?   We won't know unless we try :)

Also, would the Plague Rumor work on catacombs?

I might be asking for the moon here, but it would be helpful to be able to "freeze" our game--no building, no attacks, no nothing--while on an extended vacation (a couple weeks).  If catacombs is one step towards more protection while away, I'm all for it.  Definitely willing to try it out and take my hero off communality to see what happens.