Diplomacy and more

[tobermory]

Since I posted that huge spiel on the Bounties thread a few minutes ago, my mind has been churning out ideas on how to make the game more fun.

1) Diplomacy. Obviously.

What do weaker players have to offer stronger players from an alliance, if such a possibility existed? One thing stands out: their Black Market. If your Black Market costs were based on the average tech level of the alliance, it would pay to ally with weaker players (and it would pay more fairly if the Black Market costs were based on current buildings, not tech level; at present if someone of a high tech level gets a hammering in warfare, they end up worse off than if they were entirely new).

Stronger players on the other hand could provide weaker allies with military support, AID and refined materials. It would be nice if, having built up as far as I could go, I could go to a tab which allowed me to send teams with materials to construct buildings on my allies' lands. (There might need to be some extra bonus for strong players allying together otherwise the motivation for the strong player to build up the weak might be missing).

2) More types of advanced items.
Much of the fun of the game at the moment lies in the trading. Having more things to trade would help this. Basic items need to be useful for all sorts of things, because they have to be the backbone of your trading, so advanced items of more limited use would probably require fewer changes.

Some ideas:
Hydroponic Pods: increase your chances of food production (possibly even through some mechanic making it possible to grow more than one food per turn). (Glass?)
Missile Defence Systems: each can sacrifice itself to neutralise one incoming ICBM. (EUR, Steel?)
Geothermal Conduits: Very expensive and fragile (like Diamond Drills), but each provides one free energy per turn. (multiple diamonds, Alu/Steel?)

3) Raiders and pirates.
All-out warfare is rarely worthwhile. However, the ability to make bands of raiders and pirates and send them out to steal resources from neighbours or others along the coastline could potentially lead to a lot of low-level skirmishing. The cost for a group of raiders and the cost of a militia unit to defend against the raiders would have to be fairly low (if you wanted to favour raiding, you could make the raiders cheaper than the militia). The idea would be that the raiders would go out to raid a place you specified looking for the resource you've set as most valuable and carry it back, and the militia would fight them off with occasional casualties on both sides. This would give you a low-risk alternative to warfare, with a potentially useful payoff. Normal warfare capabilities would of course need to be kept up so people you'd raided don't just nuke you in revenge. You could also add senate options to encourage and discourage raider activity, upgrades in the form of items and buildings... lots of possibility of expansion there.

[jc]

I like the idea of being able to build on allies' land, as then ALU miners could stick Warehouses everywhere in exchange for allies building Cannons (but, of course, the allies don't *have* to)...

Make it cost 1 Diamond to join an alliance, and require that someone in that Alliance must have an Outpost in your land. That way, not just anyone can join an Alliance (if everyone in the alliance agrees not to build an outpost in that person's land, that person can't join the alliance!) Make people also able to found their own alliances at the cost of a few EUR/Diamonds/something, and give it a name.

Alliances would be shown in the High Scores, too, using the average member score as its basis (perhaps), and include statistics such as the number of members, the total number of ICBMs in the alliance that are useable (ie held by people with that much Coal) (perhaps allow mass ICBM combat, between Alliances, by allowing entire Alliances to go to war with each other, and use up all ICBMs (ie have all ICBMs possible to be launched to launched at random targets in the opposing Alliance, and the side that destroys more buildings overall wins some wonderful prize (a Bounty, based on how powerful that Alliance was on the Alliance High Score list)...)

Yeah, I dunno. It'd add an interesting aspect to it. Allow players to build buildings in allied lands, but that is all - not send them raw materials (that's what trading is for, after all).

Hmm...

I like the idea of more manufactured items (perhaps the Geothermal Conduits could simply each give a +10% (or +20%) chance of giving a free power each turn? That way they don't have to cost obscene amounts of materials: perhaps 2 DMND + 2 EUR , making them more expensive than AID/DDRL/ICBM, and arguably more useful...) Add a 2 ALU + 2 STEEL manufactured good to even it out (such as a "Missile Shield" that destroys itself in lieu of taking an ICBM hit, but counts as 1 building destroyed, so you'd still lose if you didn't launch in return)... Hmm... Anyway, class now. We'll see what else we can come up with.

[Jemaat]

For joining/creating an alliance, I'd suggest glass, as sand is one of the more neglected/undervalued resources in general.

Further on the prospect of alliances, given the limited player base of BM, a limit on alliance size would be desirable. For example: All of the members must be within two squares of every other member. Trying to visualise this, I think that would impose a maximum of 9 players in any single alliance.

The missile defense system idea prompted this thought: What if a group of players (an alliance, in the context of this discussion) were able to work on joint projects? What I had in mind was an anti-ballistic missile system, that would have an 80% or so chance of stopping 1 incoming ICBM to any of the covered players during each cycle. Merely an example, I'm sure there are many more balanced ways of demonstrating the idea.

[Throggg]

hmm what about economic alliances where 1 or more nations could combine their resources to form a pool and each player when logged in would see the total of the pooled resources but would still war separately, build separately, develop Tech separately and construct buildings separately using the pooled resources. Of course you wouldn't be able to attack your allies while involved in an economic alliance