Combat Orders - Good or bad?
HeapSeppo
Recently we had an update called "Combat Orders". Basically how this works is that people can donate money to their military units, this money will be able to be spent on a battle of the commanders choice.
The commander has 5 options
Certain military units only or everyone: One of the options is that the commander can chose certain military units to be able to use the Combat Order. This means that only the listed military units will be able to participate. The commander can also chose to let anyone participate if they need a lot of damage. This option can also be used to specify certain citizenship's.
Which campaign and specific divisions: The commander gets to choose which side in any campaign that they want to put the Combat Order at. They can also chose which divisions are able to use this if certain divisions got bigger need for it.
The cost, how much do they want to pay for 1 million damage: The second option is the price. This will be put in as cost per million damage, though you do not need to hit a full million to get the money, you will get it in smaller chunks.
Let's say that the price is 100 cc per million damage and you do 50000 damage with 1 hit, that means that every hit would give you 5 cc.
Chose when people can participate: The commander can chose at what % of domination you can participate and actually get money from the combat order. This mean that if they put it to 52% and the wall is currently at 53% you will get no money from hitting.
Last one is budget: Every Combat Order you set up a budget, a limit for how much you are ready to distribute. This means that once you run over this limit the Combat Order is removed.
If you set the limit to 10000 cc and price per million damage to 100 cc you are able to buy 100 million damage before it ends.
Effects of this system - Is it good or bad?
Merc military units will be severely crippled by this, their main income was to sell damage to be able to keep up their communes to make the soldiers tanks. As the middle man is now removed and there is no need to rent mercs in the old sense they will have to find a new way of supporting their soldiers.
One way would be to let their players merc freely to make their own money and then sell them tanks for factory prices. This would mean that it would be harder to control where the damage goes, but also that weaker players will be left behind. Being a weaker player they will use tanks for a higher value than they gain unless the price of the Combat Order is really high. Earlier this was sorted because the military unit got the money and not the players, meaning that the military unit could supply tanks based on how many hits, rather than how much damage was done.
Let us do some math
I am counting with a price of 9.3 cc each Q7 tank and a Q5 food price of 0.19 each food.
Let us say that a person got 25000 damage, this mean that he would need to use 40 hits to reach 1 million damage. 40 hits is 4 Q7 tanks and 40 Q5 food which today would equal roughly 44.8 cc.
If the person does double the damage, 50000 he would half the cost needed to make 1 million damage, resulting in a price of 22.4 cc.
Not many players hit this hard, most having a hit below 20k and most likely around 12.5k damage which would leave them with a 89.6 cc cost.
What are the results of this?
As you see, this clearly benefits the stronger players, leaving weaker players making a lot less money than they would have earlier. Some might not even be able to maintain to hit all their food fights everyday if they are in a merc military unit, due to the fact that communes will be nearly impossible to run unless someone comes up with a solution to this issue. The gaps will increase even more, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
This update might have looked good on a first glance, hell I thought so. But it really breaks down merc military units too much, meaning that either you have to gold to keep up communes, sell tanks to the players in the military unit, which will mean that weaker players get left behind a bit, or you go to fight for the government. It is really sad that it comes down to these options, but as far as I see, there are no other solutions. Another option is to go into heavy WRM production with rubber plantations, which will cost a lot of man power.
Comments
Let's see if we can find a solution to this issue together!
Adopt a tank
Well, the tank needs to buy gold to keep the tanks coming, or he won't be of any use when it comes to keeping communes up. We got several of tanks already.
RAWR!
Good Article by the way
Quite interesting! There must be some Div division or rank maybe?
Voted and Sed
Second picture, "Choose Division"
RAWR!
Great and clear read!
RAWR!
RAWR!
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, sounds like laizzez faire capitalism!!!
So bad for player with low strength! 😨
One tip if setting a combat order... put it for
Which isn't really a massive problem, until combat orders become more common, but a generous combat order could be taken advantage of.
no need to put Combat Order when the battle start... Usually, the "smart" fighting starts at T60, if you ask me...
v+s
very good article 🙂
Great summary! Voted and shouted o7
I don't agree, because setting combat orders for everyone will be too expensive with small effect, because there will be much damage payed, in former battles was not payed. It's also a tool for wasting treasuries easily.
I believe that in most cases combat orders will be set to MUs. Then government for example have to consult the MU-HQ and have to negotiate a price.
It's a complex tool and I can't foresee the groupdynamics, but I'm expecting more fun. 🙂
v
in this game you make nearly no money - so the question is: who would pay for open to all MU combat orders all the time. even just for a specific MU combat order you need some people to pay for that stuff...
So, money is paid based on 1 million damage? I guess not for me any time soon...
No, it's payed out in smaller chunks, so you do not need to do 1 million damage to get money. But the price you see is the price they pay each million damage.
If you were already planning on hitting for that country anyways, or its your DO - thats money made - the weaker players need to pick and choose - but come out ok in the end.
Combat orders are often used to fake fighters with low domination values, suddenly paused orders and orders with low budget. As fighter you start fighting but don't get the expected reward, because you didn't see that the CO becomes inactive.
There is a option needed that stops fighting and use of resources if CO is inactive.
(I have already written a ticket to the admins.)
Every one who agrees also should write a ticket to make fire under the asses of the admins. 😃
hm, i guess your right, maybe instead of a stop the player from fighting. do not allow people to canacel the combat orders, that to me sounds better, the person who sets it up should take the time to understand what they are doing. if they make a mistake and want to cancel too bad, however to make fighting more complicated, if it became common to try to scam people like you are suggesting then i would probably hot use the combat order system anymore. espically if they implimented what you suggested. ok i want ot dump 300 hits, combat order seleceted, fight fight fight, combat order canacled, why cannot i fiught any more, ok click the notification that i am not loonger getting paid, find new combat order then fight more then its canaceld have to click the notification, find new one,
to mee this seems like a lot of hastle!
people will learn to watch them carefully if they really care,
and i do not like restrictions, they make things more complicated, lets let combat orders happen until they reach an equilibrium point,
like posted i nthe article, they are paying 30 dolalrs to do 1 million dmaage and to do 1 million damage it costs me 200 dollars, so combat orders is nice but nothing to really change my behavior yet, and soo i will be in division 4, and so they combat orders will be break even for div 4 but i will still not be break even until i get the average str of div 4,
It shouldn't be a restriction but a option that you can set as a fighter.
Making 1cc per million damage is infinitely more than making 0cc per million damage.
Sure, it benefits the stronger players more, but it does benefit everyone, at least a little bit.
Except the weaker players that joins merc MUs that used to live on deals.
It offers some incentive to not waste damage in pursuit of TP medals, so I have to say that it is a good thing on the whole.