Alliance Recruiting!!

barbily

Dear players,

Soon, in the next month, Star Supremacy will launch its newest expansion update: the new War Version! It is now still under development but there are two main gameplays that we would like to share with you.

1. Domination War
After occupying certain numbers of nodes and space fortresses on a planet, an alliance will be selected as the dominator of this planet. The planet will be named after this alliance. Mysterious rewards will be sent to every member of the alliance.

2. Alliance War
In this feature, alliances are allowed to declare wars on other alliances. Members of alliances get 3 times the Honor points from any battle if the alliances they are in are in Wars. More unique and powerful items will be added in the Honor shop and only Honor points can be used to buy these items.
Military ranking will be applied to Ships’ attributes. Thus, the highest ranking, General of the Air Force, will be no longer appearing as just an eyes-catching title.

In order to get ready for this new War Version expansion, we will launch the “Alliance Recruiting” event. Hope that more and more alliances, no matter old and new, will rise up and join the Star Supremacy War!

Event Rule
During server time 20th Jan to 7th Feb 2012, any old and new alliances members and leaders will receive free bonus items as long as their alliances reach the following requirements:

Old alliances (which are created before 00:00 20th server time) If…
        Alliance level reaches 10
        Has over 40 alliance members

Alliance members will receive
        Adv Trade Token X 1
        Large Resource Card X 3

Alliance leader will receive
        Level 60 pink weapon ---- Sonic Cyber   

New alliances (which are created during server time 20th Jan to 7th Feb 2012) If…
        Has over 30 alliance members
        Every member is over level 15

Alliance members will receive
        Adv Trade Token X 1
        Large Resource Card X 3

Alliance leader will receive
        Adv Trade Token X 2
        Titanium Chest X 2
        5.000.000 Credits


Star Supremacy Team

GKZhukov

This looks good.

One question though - how will your prevent people from abusing Space Shields during an Alliance War?

DarkDriger

yeah, that's a good question, GKZhukov!
Barbily? as you may already know.... a ton of ppl found a loophole in using protection, to an unfair advantage....
Is there anyway you can fix this?

tacticus

While I'm glad you guys are continuing to add content, I am worried that you aren't finishing what you start.  For instance, will you have the colony star ship finished before worrying about this update?  With all the forts being held (there are two open at the time of this writing), the alliances are working hard on getting the blueprints.  I, myself, was the second person, after Nislar, to be able to research the colony ship itself.  But we don't know why we are worrying about it.  The bonuses from the research as nice, but having a fort to level a commander against is just as nice.

I'm worried that the colony ship will be like the rare resources, where they are needed and discussed months before they were ever implemented, with lots of other things brought in before hand.

As for this expansion, I'm not fond of it, mainly cause I'm not a PvP person.  The domination aspect is interesting, only because Leg Pirates practically own Leda already and they own more than half the total number of forts.  These special rewards might be interesting.  Are there more based on dominating total node per planet, total forts per planet, total colonies per planet?  

The alliance war part isn't that useful.  We can declare war on each other now.  We just wouldn't get the extra honor.  What will you do to encourage us to fight?  The last update set the stage for this quite nicely.  Leg Pirates are the top by leaps and bounds with JUSTICE and Federation nearby.  How are others going to deal with that?  If an alliance of 20 tries to attack Leg Pirates, then they can expect 2-3 people to obliterate every colony.  Congratulations, they got a fort for 5 minutes, and it cost them their colonies and likely hundreds if not thousands of ships.  Worth it?  I think not.  Also, the top 3 have a truce.  The only prayer others have is to form an alliance of alliances.  Either that or abandon all hope of being a dominating force and just duke it out amongst themselves.

These changes are making it increasingly harder for new players to compete.  The older players are dominating already and they get more for remaining so.  Whereas new players can't get a fort, so can't get longevity tokens or blueprints.  They are the last to the planets, taking what few low level nodes may be available.  Without forts, it is rather hard (tedious anyways) to level commanders.  The fact that there is only 1 level 9 node and all the 8's are taken, the best you can hope to grind against is a level 7, and those aren't numerous either.

As for your event, why should the leader get special treatment?  For instance, Leg Pirates and Federation both lost their original leaders not too long ago.  So the current leader is a de-facto leader.  And the last update made the leader a figure head as the other roles can run the alliance with or without the leader.  True, some leaders are quite good at leading and getting the alliance moving.  But should some leaders get special gifts cause they can spam global recruiting newbies?  Though I do like the slap in the face by giving two titan chests that they can't open.  Nice touch there.

tacticus

Reply 2# GKZhukov


    On a similar vein, a dominating alliance like Leg Pirates have protection on planets where they hold forts for an extended period of time.  This means the only way to attack them is to take their forts first.  Since this is common knowledge, all they have to do is keep massive fleets in the forts.  The only hope is then to slowly whittle at their fleets.  But being in the position of power in the first place, they can easily replenish and can kill far more than are killed.  If they manage to take the fort, then they have to go about attacking the players, resulting in more loses.  And since the attackers aren't protected, or likely to be, the defense can obliterate their colonies while they attempt to take the forts.

I personally have 21 shields at the moment.  Of my 7 colonies, 3 are currently protected, 3 more will be protected within 24 hours, and the last one needs 4 days to be protected.  I have enough shields to easily last that long.  Then I just to hold the forts with my buddies and I have nothing to fear from being attacked.

Something needs done.  I imagine you'll make it so that declared wars can't be protected against, i.e. if Federation declares war on Leg Pirates, Leg Pirates lose all protection if a Federation member attacks, but still protected from JUSTICE and others.

GKZhukov

I think you over-estimate how easy it is to keep so many forts against a dedicated enemy. Fleets in Forts don't have the protection of Lance Towers etc. that Fleets in Bases have (plus multiple large fleets become a serious fuel drain). If I was at war with someone I'd rather just smash up their Fort Fleets first atm to hurt them, then go after Solar Lance Base protected colonies that I won't get much from anyway later. Fleets in Forts when offline are particularly vulnerable now that Combat is more balanced and manual decisions are thus more important.

That said I think losing protection against Alliances you are in a state of War with is a good idea (certainly if you're the ones who declare the War). It'll be annoying sometimes when someone is genuinely on Holiday etc., but that'll just have to be a price we pay for a more balanced environment.

As for the other points. I think the incentive is that there'll be more goodies in the Honor Store making it worth warring for the Honor alone (though we'll have to see how this pans out depending on how high the gains are and what the goodies are).

I don't see a problem with Bigger Alliances battling each other and the smaller Aliances doing the same. Eventually some of the small Alliances will get bigger and vice versa. I'm not sure any game out there tries to make it easy for smaller players to beat bigger players right from the get go. Of course this depends to some extent on the Honor mechanism, but I'd hope an Alliance like Legs would get significantly more gains from attacking an Alliance like Justice or Warmongers than from bashing a noob Alliance, thus discouraging the big Alliances from warring the small ones. Will have to see though.

Regarding new players in general, I think Forts will free up once people start collecting enough Blue Prints or if people just decide to start hitting them. The Techs in there are actually pretty important for balancing HIgh Lvl combat as they help boost the armor to limit one-rounding etc. I agree new players struggle with the lack of higher Lvl nodes and Spec Resource nodes. That's a trickier one to fix though, as simply creating more nodes just pushes us further down the PvE route, and this is ultimately meant to be a PvP game with PvE aspects.

I do agree that current balance/bugs need priority over future updates - however it does sound like the next update ties in nicely to the other stuff. It pushes the PvP boat and also means the Forts will get fought over (unlike now where as you say they are more or less truce-locked). Hopefully a few balance issues will get ironed out *before* the Alliance War though, or it's going to be rather lopsided.

GKZhukov

Also don't forget, Tactitus if a High Level alliance War kicks off, odds are a lot of nodes suddenly become free.

Smaller players ought to be able to pick up some of these, at least from the alliance getting caned, if not necessarily from the stronger one. Sure it's risky etc. but that's war.

What remains to be seen is if the benefits of War under the new system are significant enough to outweigh the downsides. I'm hoping the answer is yes. Atm I think the main reason the bigger guys have a lockdown on stuff is we're far better off not fighting each other. If this changes it creates breathing space for smaller guys too, whilst the bigger ones are smashing each other up.

GKZhukov

Erm Tir, why are only six of your players able to benefit at once?

barbily

Rewards are sent. If there is any problems, please post here. thanks