Random alliances - Can they work, and how?

[No-Dachi]

Originally Posted by Polo

I haven't read most of this thread and this is off topic, but what's wrong with the thief route? If you'd have played actively last round, you'd have seen Exitlude's thief players use them very well. Arsonists are useless, but the thief unit is awesome and one of my favourite units in the game.

Perhaps I should've made myself clearer. I know the thief is far from useless, but right now it's highly situational, and is quite underused. If the alliances was made to have an upper limit of say 50 or 70 it would be almost a must to have some thiefs in there, for quick guerilla attacks on the enemy while they are out defending your decoys.

It's got a lot of potential, and when I said "a use" I meant a more outstretched use than we see today.

[Cyrus]

50 players is far to many, noobs will never be helped, jsut look at the 50 man little round we jsut had, there's no community, no real chatting, no organised attacks, its utter chaos. 20 players is the most any allai should be as this is big enough to defend with, keeps some sort of cumminity in an alliance, not to many people that you cant organise everybody. etc etc.

[TheNamelessWonder]

Originally Posted by Cyrus

50 players is far to many, noobs will never be helped, jsut look at the 50 man little round we jsut had, there's no community, no real chatting, no organised attacks, its utter chaos. 20 players is the most any allai should be as this is big enough to defend with, keeps some sort of cumminity in an alliance, not to many people that you cant organise everybody. etc etc.

I'd have to agree there. The 50-man experiment was unorganized chaos, no sense of community, and all the other nasty things Cyrus said. I don't see how anything larger than 20 would work.

Also, to deter bashing, how about bringing back L/F!

[Alcibiades]

Originally Posted by TheNamelessWonder

Also, to deter bashing, how about bringing back L/F!

I don't recall that ever deterring bashing....

With injuries and increased contactability amongst the top 5ish allies, it has become necessary to some degree to send overwhelming force to wreck an opponent. Not to mention something of a decline of real tactics; since it's much 'easier' and lazier to bash than it is to organize a properly coordinated attack. Obviously there are exceptions to this, but blaming the lack of L/F for increased bashing seems overly simple to me. then again having universally claimable bounties on 'bashers' did have it's advantages

[No-Dachi]

Originally Posted by Cyrus

50 players is far to many, noobs will never be helped, jsut look at the 50 man little round we jsut had, there's no community, no real chatting, no organised attacks, its utter chaos. 20 players is the most any allai should be as this is big enough to defend with, keeps some sort of cumminity in an alliance, not to many people that you cant organise everybody. etc etc.

There is a huge difference between a small shitty mini round that nobody gives a **** about, and a real round. If you need 50 players to win, I can assure you that the alliances will take the time to train them. And with the addition of an ingame GCI(??) IRC client with automatic created rooms for alliances, and perhaps an extended version of politics it shouldn't be any problems at all in organizing and training another 10-15 people a round.

[Cyrus]

ofc i cant just say it wont work blah blah, id be willing to try 50 man alli round but my fears are the same, there will be no closeness between members, and it is a pain in the arse to organise 50 people rather than 20 i dotn care what you say on that point.

[No-Dachi]

I've organized defence in 60 man allies and in 5 man allies and in a 300 member big alliance in PA. PA is different due to a lot of things, but I can tell you with my hand on my heart that organizing the online members our of 60 players is stress if you have to do it alone, but so can organizing 20 players be. It's all about delegation, and learning to organize and think in a different way. To put it in a different way, organizing twice the amount of people is no where near twice the stress.

And why should there only be one organizer? Why can't alliances work with a chain of command in situations like this?

I know you don't care Cyrus, and that you only want your point out there. So please, ignore this. But for the rest of you ...

[Cyrus]

i dont care no? i do care what your suggesting if its gonna change my round considerably, by saying everyone send at X id is not organisation at its best infact its just organised chaos. trying to get specific units there from 60 people is 'i put my hand on heart' a task n half.
im taking what youve suggested on board and from my experience a disagree with what your saying. and many others are the same as me so dont just disregard my veiws because im obviously a noob

[No-Dachi]

So..

Originally Posted by Cyrus

i dotn care what you say on that point.

You said yourself you didn't care, and hence I directed my post against the other people that might care. I don't mind that you don't agree with me - actually I rejoice in good discussions and it's hard without disagreement. So don't take my arguing as offensive, as it's not meant as anything but constructive arguing.

And yes, there's a difference between posting "everyone attack id 1 this tick!!!!!!1112" and splitting units and making the best use of what you can. And with that in mind I still stand by what I said in the previous post.

[BlackWolf]

Before I rerally go to things I will respond to Cyrus message.
If you Cyrus think that 50 is too much for your alliance who is forcing you to use all 50 spots possible?
You could as well make smaller alliance of lets say 20 members or 25 members of good players you know and organize between them. Making organizing easier and faster, thus having less targets to cover and being tighter group you could compete against larger alliances.

This game is also about NAPs and coalitions as much as it is about 1vs1 fights (if not even more, when you have seen fair 1vs1 last time?), so in terms of alliance size it is pretty irrelevant of what size your alliance is as long as you play with best skill and activity. In the end its about politics and making right allys against others more than how many members you got. Yet it could be huge difference at the down end to have 7 people online instead of 3.

In the end it doesnt really matter if theres 40 vs 20 situation (2vs1) or 60 vs 20 (3vs1), or if theres colition of 100 vs 50. More people is involved to attacking side less easy it is to organize working attacks. With more people to alliance and less alliances dividing people to targets actually makes attacking harder, not easier.

The funny thing I see in posts like Dachis is the way people are responding to those. For some unknown reason people seems to think that game would be somehow different if alliance size changes. It is still same game. Alliance size doesnt affect to game play even nearly as much as people think it does. The change must be really radical to actually do something.

For example going to 10 members would half the current membercount and as such lead to radical increase in demand of contactability and activity. In other hand changing to 40 thus doubling it would in same way about half the demands of activity and contactability, yet pose a threat of "all best to one alliance" situation. Yet I bet those same people would be in winning alliances and outcome and actual round would be pretty much the same

Decision between one and another is not that hard really if you start to think game over all and not just your own self.

[Cyrus]

i assure you the game changes considerably between having a 2 member alli and having a 50 men alli, you say if i find it harder to orgnise things with 50 folk i should just recruit what i can organise? thats obsurd.
no player in a 50 man alli feels part of that alli. you cant have a close nit community in a 50 man alli thus people dont try as hard.

and bw did you not just agree with me? having massive allis making organising harder...

[Hobbezak]

Originally Posted by Cyrus

i assure you the game changes considerably between having a 2 member alli and having a 50 men alli, you say if i find it harder to orgnise things with 50 folk i should just recruit what i can organise? thats obsurd.
no player in a 50 man alli feels part of that alli. you cant have a close nit community in a 50 man alli thus people dont try as hard.

and bw did you not just agree with me? having massive allis making organising harder...

Bring back a-naps (possibly only for alliances outside top 5 to stop powerblocking?)
Less active alliances would have more possible defenders, but one would need to be online to contact the a-nap.
You'd still feel part of your 15/20 man alliance.
Secondly you don't have to recruit total strangers into your team to get to know new people. It's through a-naps that I got to know some great people back in the old days.

Conclusion: BRING BACK A-NAPS ASAP! \o/

[atsanjose]

hobbe, quit demanding things...
since you stopped playing and ****

[BlackWolf]

Originally Posted by Cyrus

i assure you the game changes considerably between having a 2 member alli and having a 50 men alli, you say if i find it harder to orgnise things with 50 folk i should just recruit what i can organise? thats obsurd.
no player in a 50 man alli feels part of that alli. you cant have a close nit community in a 50 man alli thus people dont try as hard.

and bw did you not just agree with me? having massive allis making organising harder...

No I do not agree with you. If you feel like in 50 man alliances, being part of alliance cant exist how do you feel that 20 man alliance with 2h online members can feel together? See thats where you fail to understand anything you have been told to by Dachi or me. You are either too stubborn, stupid or dont even want to think outside of your box of what the game is for others.

If you cant organize 50 man alliances so be it. No one is forcing you to be part of such alliance. Yet I bet that gives people playing 2 hours a day much more feeling of being in alliance than when they are in ally of 20 players. There is major difference of having 3 people online from 1 alliance compared to have 7 people online. I am 110% sure that anyone who is in such alliance and plays with such low activity would agree to that they would rather have 6 people to talk to than 2.

[Cyrus]

50 man allis are not the way forward. thats abit of a daft way to look at it, oh look every alli doesnt have at least 5 people online, so taking that into consideration what we will do is increase the alliance number so we can reach at least 5 people online at any 1 time. dont be so narrow minded BW. i agree it should be higher than 10, i thought 20 was perfect. we always had afew folks to talk to but the closeness was there.

on another note, having bigger allis narrow the competition coz all these good players will flood inton the same alli and new players will have no chance.

and please dont say i cant see this arguement from both sides, as i jsut said i do think the allis should be bigger but not too big. but i guess you'll miss this point and pick out any flaws in my post to make up your silly arguement.