thechessshark13 wrote:
I implicitly said I personally didn't support unhonorable methods of playing, and cleared gathering many allies as a completely honest strategy. I hate backstabbing, but I do more than just hate it and complain about it: I actually build ways to counter it. How? Hehe, get your own ideas
We all know how you prevent backstabbing, make NAPs only with people you trust. You can't always avoid it, since in wars you sometimes make NAPs with people you don't exactly know very well. It's a risk either way, the only way to be absolutely certain is to backstab them first.
[qupte]And about your example about the nuclear bomb... if it's fired, then yes you might as well be screwed, so just simply don't let them fire it. If you don't think there is a way, then perhaps that's why you might both hate it and fear it. I can go and do a really dumb suggestion and tell you to send 007 to the job, but hell, a spy could be a viable idea... Surely though, we differ on opinions, but please get my idea clear: I won't allow for it to be twisted. That's just how I think: I won't stop here and complain about something, I will both complain about it and do something to counter it.[/quote]
Right, the nuclear bomb was a bad example then. As for your way to counter it, that is amusing. You can not expect to fight 20 subs and have a strategy to win that does not involve getting a lot of subs (or good allies) yourself. If you are just one alliance, and the rest of the world consists of one mother alliance and a lot of subs, I would like to see you cook up a strategy for that. You are describing quite an ideal situation here, that there is a solution for everything in BD. Sometimes you simply can't solve it and you have to accept that they have 20 subs and you can't do much about it. Honestly, I think to an extent subs can be easily fought, especially with the new exp implemented. But I would really like to hear your strategy when they have the main alliance attacking you on the front lines and some subs just OP hopping all the way to your colonies. You will have to either split your forces leaving you vulnerable, pull back making you lose a lot of territory and thus income, or stay at the front making you vulnerable to losing your crystals and conquers, perhaps even relics. Now you might say a solution to that is relocating, but that is quite an ideal situation again, especially if they control a very large part of the world.
Quote:
Now, I personally don't think having about top 50 full of your subs is the receipt for sucess: I don't think there is this single strategy that guarantees you the win, and although I must admit this strategy is very sound and with high chances of sucess, I'm actually already thinking on my ways to counter it. There are always ways to counter a strategy, let it be build your own main alliance and ignore any and all allies, or build a whole sub empire. I personally preffer to have just what I need of both worlds... but ofc, that's my own prefferance, and no matter how I choose, I know my enemy will have ways around it. This game isn't about sitting around and complain that your enemy is finding a better strategy than yours (although you have every right to) but it's about how to topple it.
In fear that this may be perhaps quite the same as what I answered to the last quote, there are no sound strategies that you can devise that do not include getting a sub empire yourself. Unless you are assuming all these subs are completely rubbish and will simply offer themselves up to nukes, spies and the likes. Or unless you assume to have a lot of allies yourself.
I have played an era where I had to control quite a large population, once. I did it mostly by getting everyone else to attack each other. Now, this might work for a while. However as I found out personally, if you are the top dog and you do not have the subs and "brother alliances" to inspire fear, they will at one point attack. Which is exactly what happened to me. I was quite alone on that world, I had no subs, and an alliance of only 3. If I remember correctly it was the ranks 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12 alliances attacking together, and then a bunch of random alliance-less people. Vastly outnumbered, I had no choice but to defend what I could, and pull back as far as possible. I was lucky enough that they weren't that well coordinated so that I could pick them off one at a time (I must admit having 150 squads helped as well). But had they been perfectly coordinated, I had no chance. I was quite literally outnumbered 10 to 1.
So in short, my point is that if you really have a sub empire against you that have decent coordination and are not complete and utter fools, there Is. No. Counter. Except for getting subs/allies/brother alliances yourself.
Especially with the ability to kill off agents by launching a nuke at an OP, it's not hard at all for alliances to simply keep advancing a few ticks at a time.
Quote:
AI keeps calling UN names, crying out loud on how pittiful their sub-empire is, but UN isn't on the wrong: this isn't a battle of the righteous side versus the evil side, but a war between two sides that both want the win. I am seeing here at AI's right to argument against UN's idea, but I will definitely verbally stomp on any of them that I deem wrong, and I will surely explain why I do. Their guise of heroes doesn't and isn't making them justice here, but I recon that neither is UN: again, they're just two equally right sides that claim they are better than the other. There could be more sides, or the world can be one huge war between the two alone: either way, not the right or the wrong one will win: only the truly best one will.
Of course, I would never reject that they are doing it to win. I however am of the belief that it would not really BE a win. If you win with your 10 members, good, you win with your 10 members. But UN is in fact (at least from what I hear) now practically an alliance with around 200 members. There's a reason Michael reduced alliance sizes, it was to increase competition. His reasoning (or should I say his hope) was that smaller alliances would lead to the world being harder to control, more competing alliances and therefore more competition. However what we are now clearly seeing is that it has lead to sub empires and arguably LESS competition.
You can claim the strategy is not wrong, but it is all about the point of view. These veterans and oldschool players that you refer to are what makes the game run. Like it or not, many of them are the donaters that keep BD alive. And if you play a game and spend money and time on it, and become skillful at it, it hurts to see players and alliances win that simply have very little to no skill beating skilled people simply by using the law of large numbers. If that really was the intention of Battledawn, alliance sizes would be unlimited.
Sadly I can not propose a solution to the sub system, I believe what it would really take is a change in morals. The moral of some (most?) of the older players already is that Battledawn should be about working together with your team, coordinating, being active, coming up with strategies and where to attack. However it seems more and more people do not have that morale and instead win by using skill-less strategies.