Some potential fixes

1. Prevent cubixes from giving a quick exit from the cosmic planes much as they don't work inside rooms or underground. That makes lightning raids much less likely and reduces the stress of people running up and down all the time. They can cubix in, but once there the options for leaving are much more limited.

2. Make it so you can only tess from nil to astral or earth and from celestia to astral or water for the same reasons as 1.

3. Once the first angel or demon is killed have the others panic and group in one room for mutual protection for a day along with what ever other guards are around.

4. Improve the combat ability of all cosmic plane mobs such that they all have room-wide afflicting and damage abilities with each attack to increase the risk factor for groups.

5. Include some quests that temporily increase the defensive or offensive capabilities of celestial beings on that plane. For example, find the horn of a griffon and grind it up in an ogres forge and sprinkle the remains on your devils and hey presto for a month they can't be harmed by sharp weapons (or magic, or blunt weapons etc etc).

6. Have a roaming celestial guardian on each plane that can be empowered with quests to give it more abilities, stronger health etc. Make it aggro, track and hunt down enemies once they arrive.

Idea number 6 is nice. More Ix bashing fodder, woo.

Make angels and demons aggro by the way, I don't get why they aren't.

This should have been done a long time ago.
Making them stronger doesn't work.
As soon as a way is found to kill them it will be repeated whenever possible.

Add to that the factor that loosing them wipes out a skillset for the Celestines/Nihilists and it just adds up to player frustration.

The conflict needs to be made more self-correcting. At the moment, whenever one side gains the upperhand more and more advantage is given to that winning side - making it harder and harder for the losing side to recover... which is why it takes a long long time, and massive drifts in players from one org to another to re-right the balance.

I like the idea of somehow empowering the defenders as thier city / commune is crippled, making it progressively easier to defend. This would keep it worthwhile trying to defend, and might eventually strike a balance where lower might players might even fight on even terms against those more skilled.

How one might actually implement this I will leave to those more familiar and skilled with the IRE codebase.

1. No they pay too much for the cubix, cant make it not work. Just shouldnt be easy to kill the imps etc and that may handle the idiots that you speak of who just pop in kill one and pop out.

2. Tess no, that means no nexus's on astral or nil?? That shouldnt happen, or if you are saying you cant use the cubix to leave that is 2000 crd someone wasted. same answer as 1

3. They could do something like be more aggro... but if you had 20 angels in one room you will never be able to kill them, that and everyone will just go meld the room and defend it.

4. That would make them too powerful, imps and angels that is.

5 + 6 I like those

For me Nil and Celestia are ok. And sea battles were ok, only if they could appear not os often. 5 times in one week was too mch. 1 or 2 per week would be ok.

And only change i would make to Nil and Celestia is to make cubixing a bit harder? Maybe add a few second delay?
And i would like to see Supernals and Demon Lords with a lot of health but not with so fucking strong attacks.
So killing Demon Lord or Supernal woudldnt eb few seconds attack with a lot of peoples but you could use less people but you would need fight with for 10-15 minutes. That would give time defenders to prepera and counterattack.

Just make the only cubix exit on cosmic into a neutral third area, with archways into the Pool and the Megalith, and change them all to the same continent. Add an aetherways dock to the neutral area.

Then it matches the difficulty of raiding Ethereal.

NO!

I dont like how Ethereal is now.

It doesn't take much to use a ship to raid, and then at least they have some potential for battle!

I actually like the way Ethereal is set up. It's not insanely easy for individuals to pop in and raid whenever they like, and continue to do so incessantly. It takes a bit of preparation and strategy.

I know I was going to take a break but I'll show up for the meeting.

I know my idea was unpopular in a vote but it was to set the conflict up as a rotating, semi-random, "attack times", leaving the Supernals/Infernals invincible other times. This would allow attacks, but prevent the attacks from occuring too often. Maybe the more attacks that occur, the longer it takes for another attack opportunity to occur. It would also nerf the "metagame" status of always attacking when you know the other player base can't fight back.

Another idea--what if you needed a ritual to attack the lords from the opposing city or commune? Say, the Supernals/Infernals are vulnerable only if the opposing city (or a raiding commune) spent power each time, and repeating attacks take far more power to accomplish. Let's say, a raid ritual will cost a city 5000 power, then if done a second time in a week 25,000 power, then a third time in a week 125,000 power, and so on. So, you can raid, but your own nexus will get weaker if you do it too much.

Honestly, Shorlen and Blastion, the conflict quests were a good idea but got too abusable by the playerbase. Those that like to do them do them "too much". Also, sometimes people use the RP as an excuse to justify "complete hatred" for the other side, instead of either exploring shades of gray or thinking about the game aspects of Lusternia. One side can't permanently "win", so people need to keep that in mind.

This is still a game. I remember being excited about the aethership game this weekend, and poor Reiha was almost pulled away to defend Earth when some Celestians decided to take advantage of the playerbase by raiding the earth lords when most of us were getting ready in the ships. That was definately poor sportsmanship, and I was happy Estarra said "stop that".

Honestly, if conflict quests were made to work such that they could only be done a certain number of times per whatever amount of time was reasonable and their effects were not continuous there wouldn't be nearly the problem with them as has been previously.

You do realize that without conflict quests, the only way to cause actual hurt to another side is to grief them so much that people quit the game, right? Without ANY sort of war system, that's all we really can do, and that's why the Seren-Celest war was what it was, and drove tons of people from the game.

Well, technically, the conflict quests can also be considered "griefing", if you use that definition, because it can hurt. Either way you slice it, constant attacks can hurt. If what you say is true, then it's the conflict that hurts the game, unless it's changed.



Then how do the other IRE games handle conflict? I don't think any of the other have war systems, or tried them and they failed.

QFT


If there would be one change to nil/celest (and coincidentally affecting the avatars as well) it would be to make their room attacks:

1.not be weakened by the presence of an allied nations members.

and

2.not hit said allied nations members.

So Magnagorans could stand in the room with say, Luciphage, and his room attacks would remain as potent, and not kill them off in the process.

I like that idea it would give people a reason to get into the room and fight.

Imperian currently has one in the works that's almost finished, if it isn't already...

... Kidding, right?

Not really, I'm just trying to think of a solution.

That particular figure is calculated exponentially, but it could just be a straight multipler, 5000, 10000, 15,000...or a doubling, 5000, 10,000, 20,000, 40,000, 80,000, 160,000 etc...

The point would be to factor in the economic cost of a prolonged war. War is usually a negative-sum game, with losses on both side--only one side loses more. Prolonged wars in the real world are not possible without straining the economies and manpower of all nations involved, even if it's on "foreign soil".

The goal would be to provide a benefit to less frequent raiding...it will always cost you more power to escalate a war. Lets say it naturally goes down 1 level each (in-game) year that passes. So, using the doubling method, if you raid 3 times that year, your cost for each raid is now up to 20,000 each time you raid. If you then wait a year before your next raid, the cost is now 10,000 the next raid. Then you decide to escalate it again...3 more raids that same year--costing 20,000, 40,000, and finally 80,000. You then wait a year to raid and the cost is 40,000.

The goal would be to get a natural barrier to prolonged "hot" conflicts. You can raid all you want, but eventually the power cost will make it unpalatable. You wanna take down the avatars or half-formed of a nation? Go ahead, but it will be very costly. And this is the best simulation of real-life conflict--a prologned war would be costly in terms of economics and manpower, but people can't perma-die in this game and you can translated the economics cost into the current commodities system.

It's an interesting viewpoint, and one I've thought about myself without coming up with a solution, so I applaud you for that.

However I think it would be vastly unpopular with raiders. The celest/seren war with this system would have seen celest at about -500,000 power and seren sitting on around -24,000.

Edit:In the least the power needs to be scaled back some.

It would be like a discretionary power, celest drains 500 power from the pool, directs it at mag, and the demonlords go from invincible to merely insanely powerful for an hour, they want to keep it up the second hour? Then they need to drain another 500 power from the pool. The syntax could be as simple as Weaken Magnagora, Weaken Celest, Weaken Serenwilde, Weaken Glomdoring.

This however does nothing to address PvP, so it's a bit one-sided. I also think other descretionary powers and shrine powers are already doing a good job to discourage long raids.

I guess it depends on what the raiders motivation.

If it's combat, we can start having more arena games. If it's a hard fight against mobiles, we can create some other powerful creatures--half-formed of the soulless, for instance, on Astral or an Aetherbubble.

If it's to hurt the other team, that's valid, but there will be a cost to constant raiding...it still allows raiding, but rather it prevents a person from raiding constantly. It also keeps the RP intact. Say Celest and Serenwilde kept hitting the avatars and supernals under this system--eventually they'd both be forced to swallow some pride and stop, or else nobody would have any power.

Edit: Well, I don't play as much as some people do, so I have no idea how often the avatars/half-formed are raided, or how many successful raids happen each week. I'm just throwing out ideas. The problem for both hawks and doves is that both hawks and doves have various levels of tolerance--some play 8 hours a day, others might play 8 hours a week. That's the hardest thing about balancing these efforts.

I think the key goal is to prevent the majority of players from leaving, especially potential new players. If people leave the game, Lusternia is a negative-sum game, and that's not good.