[Mzyxptlk]

Thanks for another one of these posts, they're very interesting reads. You're confirming several things I've suspected for a while now.

Originally Posted by Kal

Then we got attacked - 3-4 waves. None of us got any defence form our alliances and very little from each other. This is where the semi-actives loose - they don't get defence. If it wasn't for my experience in the game (running fleet etc.) then I now would have no ships and would have given up playing the game.

This I think is a huge problem, multi wave attacks have a real possibility of making new players quit the game just as they were starting to get interested and do well.

Given the importance of XP, loosing roids isn't that big an issue right now - but loosing ships is. We need a way to protect thoose ships so that new players don't loose them and quit. (not wanting to suggest, but perhaps allowing ships in base fleet to be immune from combat or something).

I totally agree here. The reason many people lose their ships is because keeping your ships alive at base requires a conscious effort. When I send defence somewhere, I do so in the knowledge they might suffer losses. If I do not want this, I can refrain from sending, and they won't fight. Ditto for attacking. But when I'm defending my own planet, I need to make an effort to prevent my ships from dying.

In my opinion, fighting should be a conscious decision, not something that happens automatically. It is reasonable to assume that not sending ships out keeps them safe. Even the name of the home fleet, "base", suggests that the ships are inactive.

I have recently suggested in several places that ships at the home planet should no longer automatically participate in battles. This prevents planets from losing ships due to inactivity and hopefully make sure that people don't leave because they keep getting killed. As you said, losing roids isn't such a big deal; losing ships is.

Originally Posted by Kal

The other issue here is that its distinctly depressing to see a galaxy status with 3+ waves of incs and no defence. I remember in the olden days an alliance would attack multiple galaxies with a single wave rather than multi-waving a target. In my mind multi-waving is hugely bad for morale. It has just occured to me that the prevalence of multiwaving occured after we moved from 3 tick attacks to single tick attacks - perhaps a return to multi-tick attacks would remove the need for multi-waves?

The reason alliances send between 4 and 8 waves per planet is because it works. Many planets in top20 galaxies have no trouble gettting several waves worth of defence, but once the defence runs out, all fleets get trough. Let me give you an example to illustrate my point.

Let's say I am an average player in xVx. If I get 3 waves of incoming, my alliance will be able to 2 of those, no problem. The attackers will cap 1 wave. On the other hand, if I get 6 waves of incoming, my alliance will still only be able to cover 2 waves, allowing 4 waves of capping. In this particular case, a 100% increase in waves yields a 273% increase in roid cap.

Multi tick attacks will not prevent waving, because the basic premise stays the same: more waves equals better cap.

Multi tick defence might help a bit, because the same defence fleet can be used to defend two attacking fleets. You'd be forced to send same-class attacks several ticks apart. On the other hand, it'd be easy to send a cr/bs fleet for tick X and a fi/co fleet for tick X+1. The defence for the cr/bs fleet has already launched by the time the fi/co show up, and the defence sent could easily die. I am certain there are several unexpected side effects to this as well.

Another way to reduce the number of waves per planet would be by making attacking easier. When people no longer have to worry about defence so much, it will pay off to launch on more targets, simply because the last wave on a target doesn't cap as much as the first wave on another target could. On the other hand, the loss per attack would stay roughly the same, plus the bonds that hold alliances together (defending, not attacking) would be weakened, which might be a very bad thing for the community. Here too, lots of side effects.

Originally Posted by Kal

Now enough about the depression that is defence - what about attacks? On many of my attacks I've been annoyed to find other alliances hitting the same targets, while probably less annoying for the new player, its very annoying for me. To solve this I would very much like to see more advanced war/combat features where unless attacking fleets are on the same "side" they will attack each other.

The issue here is that there are simply fewer targets now than there were 15 rounds ago. Generally speaking, non-alliance players are less active on the attacking front: they're basically there for target practice only. Back in round 16, we had 1851 non-alliance players. In round 29, we had 533. More targets equals a higher chance of piggying. (You're always piggied by someone else, you never piggy someone else. This is one of the basic laws of PA.)