RED HORSEMAN

[Nan]

I am thinking that the red horseman could be tuned down a bit. I was attacked 5 times in five minutes. We won after the first attack, but he just kepted attacking me until I had no buildings left. Now I have to rebuild from scratch. Seems like the red horseman may be too power when you do not log on right away.

- n

[iuewen]

Nah, leave it alone. Its a great equalizer. I hate seeing people sitting behind impregnable walls with no possible way to effectively breach them (even harder now with Reinforced Bunkers). Rebuilding from scratch happens, just the way the game works.

[vilhazarog]

I think there's probably some room for improvement with how the red horseman works. It's too bad that it's always come around when I haven't been able to play, but here's what I would do:

Set firepower to 1.
Flip to anarchy, scrap all trees, get around 50 coal.
Find neighbor with the least coal and who doesn't appear to be logged on.
Attack. Attack again. attack again. Keep attacking and winning until your out of ammo.
Nice way to pad your win stats and get your ratio up.

[Rasteroid]

That's very true Vil. Yeah, Reddy McReddington introduces some kind of broken looking gameplay. But perhaps it's rare enough to be justified?

Certainly is possible for people to pad their wins that way, my goodness.. The solution here is, I'm considering introducing some kind of minimum damage level for a battle to "count" in a few ways: One would be bounties, another might be counting it towards your wins/losses. That means people have to make serious assaults to get the fringe benefits.

Of course, there's always the odd occasion where a lucky low-damage volley just happens to get you that triple hull upgrade, so it's a fine line to walk. All in all, I really like the Red Horseman and wouldn't change his mechanics too much.

Hey.. What about if Red Horseman forced everyone to max firepower? Of course, you could just scrap down your cannons, but it would be a start.

Anyone have a solution?

[iuewen]

If someone wants to cripple themselves for the turns following the horseman by scrapping cannons, then great. Sounds good to me. It even fits in with the whole "Horseman of War" type thinking - everyone has to shoot all their cannons.

[spamwise]

But what about a Builder URO miner, who has all 12 cannons + the perma-cannon, has set their war settings to fire off EUR, and, therefore, choses not to have full fire power engaged, as COAL is not in ample supply (and why should they care, given that they're running on atomic fuel.) If "Big Red" comes in and says "set all cannons to kill", the not logged in URO guy would fire 13 EUR (along with 13 COAL) at anyone who attacks. Granted, this would wreak havoc on the first attacker, but very quickly they'll run out of EUR and, more likely COAL. Now he's a sitting duck and someone's going to hit that reactor.

Now, maybe we want the opportunity to "level the playing field" every so often, but I think the DDD already does that. Do we really need to encourage rampant destruction? Yes, it is BattleMines, but some miners like building infrastructure to support trades, monument construction, DDD building, etc.

[vilhazarog]

How about attackers must attack with full firepower, but defenders can defend at whatever their firepower is set to?

[Rasteroid]

You may have something there vil. I'm writing that one down.