[[Required reading]]
Design Theory: Why is Nerfing Good?
Click the link -> http://mu.ranter.net/designtheory/balance/why.nerfing.is.good
The following post is some examples of exploits/cheese...
Some great examples, maybe some not the greatest examples.
Regardless. Add issues to this topic.
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Dear Evony team
Evony is very well thought out and designed. However there are a number of Cheese tactics currently being employed that skew what I believe were the original balanced gameplay visions. These tactics are basically three-fold:
Cheese 1) Barracks Cheese Build as many barracks as is humanly possible, and ditch buildings that are of no use or have served their limited function. Do not build anything but the bare minimum of cottages. We are talking cities with as many as 20 Barracks.
Cheese 2) Raiding Cheese Don't worry about building resource development or capacity, everything you need can be raided from NPC's very easily (see Cheese 3) or other players that don't have enourmous armies that Cheese allows. And capacity doesn't matter.
Cheese 3) Missile Troop Cheese Huge stacks of Archers and Ballista pwns j00 4ll (Barbarian Towns of nearly all levels can be easily raided for massive profit with 0 losses with nothing but a relatively modest stack of Ballista, Archers dominate Valley combats and most PvP combats)
I have some solutions to this in mind, which if you will bear with me I shall detail here. I do not believe they are all silver bullets, every system no matter how well thought out will have its exploitable flaws, but some of my ideas I believe will quite competently knock the current exploits on the head.
Anti-Cheese 1) Enforce Resource Capacity limits
and introduce Gold capacity
This is probably one of the first and most effective methods of limiting Cheese 2 and 3. Simply enforce the resource capacities detailed when hovering over the resource in the right hand details window pane. Anything brought into the city that exceeds this limit should be discarded as having 'spoiled'.
This will have the effect of utterly destroying the current tactic of massive armies fed by spoils of constantly raiding easy players and Barbarian towns. I currently have food in excess of 90 million in one city alone - and I am a moderate level player. Besides, whats the point of a capacity limit if it can be exceeded without a moments thought. This will encourage resource tile development and proper Growth. Furthermore, and I believe most significantly the benefits of any combat exploit that may ever arise against NPC's or other players will be limited through this restriction.
Additionally, a capacity should be introduced for Gold. I have 10 million that I acquired quite easily in 24 hours. More detailed reasons for this are in Anti-Cheese 2 later. Gold that exceeds capacity should be deemed to have been lost to Corruption.
The effects of this in addition to being Anti-Cheese have the effect of opening up opportunites, such as making Warehouses and Stockpiling viable and useful buildings/technologies with some modification (see Anti-Cheese 2 for further details).
Anti-Cheese 2) Make all Buildings and Technologies properly Useful
This goes some way to countering Cheese 1. Currently There are a number of buildings that are utterly superfluous to requirement either from the outset or in the long run, and inevitably get smashed down or not built at all to make way for Barracks Cheese. This is quite a fun one to detail as I have plenty of detailed ideas about this in relation to each building - however some are pretty obvious and you may wish to skip to Anti Cheese 3 if you want to be spared the details.
- a) Warehouses and Stockpiling
This is a big one. I mean really, who in their right minds builds Warehouses or researches Stockpiling? The resources you can safely stash are insignificant in quantity, and you would have to flood the town with them to even get half-way to a useful capacity even with Stockpiling 10. I have a number of suggestions to improve the usefulness of these:
- i) Obviously, increase capacity. I would suggest a scale that ends up with 4 or 5 million or so total capacity at L10. Possibly more. This would also make the research of Privateering something worth considering as an attacker.
- ii) Make Warehouse Levels and Stockpiling Levels have an effect on overall non-protected Resource Capacity. Watch people build these things so they can truly stockpile stuff overnight (assuming Resource Capacity is enforced as in Anti-Cheese 1).
- iii) Introduce a Gold capacity that is affected by Warehouses and Stockpiling (although I have other suggestions for Gold capacity this is one option). If a Gold capacity setting is right, people will be required to build Warehouses to save for expensive Technologies.
- b) Forges and Military Science
OK, so you build a Forge, Level it up to 10, research Military Science 10 and build Walls 9/10, then knock the Forge to the ground as you have had all the benefits you can get from it and plop yet another Barracks in it's place.
I genuinely doubt this was what was intended to happen with these buildings, the answer is easy:
Make the benefit of Military Science only be applied up to the level of the Forge owned in that city. E.g.: You have Military Science 9 generally, but in city X you have only a Forge level 6. That city will only receive the benefit of Military Science 6, meaning troops are trained slower here than in a city with Forge 9. Forges will be levelled up and kept everywhere should this be implemented.
This principle applies to a lot of subsequent building/tech suggestions.
- c) Workshops and Metal Casting
Same principle as Forge. Make benefits of Metal Casting available in City X up to the level of the Workshop in city X. E.g. You have Metal Casting 10 but City X only has Workshop 6, you only get Metal Casting 6 in that city so you can build Transporter and Ballista in that city but not the Battering Rams and Catapults even though you have the overall tech for them.
...continued in next post...




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