Many of the proposed changes are meant to do 2 things: 1) remove unnecessary tedium and 2) expose underlying imbalances.
This idea is a good example of that: I agree that this would facilitate planet passing between specialized roles and also cause construction bonus jumping to be even more crucial. However, I think those are really just symptoms of larger problems.
Many of IC's problems are too complex to be able to decide on a solution without exposing these larger problems, and we can't do that if they are masked behind tedium.
Altruist wrote:Planetswapping from attacker to banker will be easier and safer.
In good organized families only the "Builder" will construct buildings (as described by Darth: small, high con research). This is not optional. Good families will feel forced to use a "Builder" and bankers won't be allowed to build anything after the first or second (real) week, too expensive.
NAPs paid in planets, wars paid off in planets... all this much easier.
Mmmh, do you really want this?
Absolutely. This is analogous to the problem where playing requires a high level of activity to constantly complete very mindless tasks. The analogy is that the game has many useless things that get in the way of exposing the actual problems.
Non-aggressive takeovers should be an afterthought, not a large change. They never should have worked the way they do. However, as you said "they were never meant to be an important part of the game". It's very tempting to think that if we solve the root problem then we don't have to worry about these things, or even to think that these things are good indicators of larger problems. And that is true to some extent, however on the other hand if we remove these indicators we actually get to understand the root problems on a more pure level.
There's also the fact that we have to approach our evalutation from a web design standpoint, not just a gameplay one. The game requires so many clicks and so many steps to do things that make no sense. Ideas like this one improve that situation, which has a direct impact on server performance but more importantly user experience. This is as much a website usability issue as it is a gameplay one.
Altruist wrote:My hope always was that some active devs might come and work along the lines, what changes must we do to have more fun playing a wargame again... at the moment it sometimes looks as if it is rather: this way of playing doesn't make fun but how can it done with the least hassle? You know what I mean?
I understand why it appears that way, but that isn't quite accurate. Rather, the approach is something like "we need to make the game fun again, so we need to understand why it isn't fun anymore. in order to do that let's question anything that seems incorrect".
This will sometimes lead to obvious improvements (like ally news) and other times more subtle yet complex changes (like this idea). The point is the same though: we have to be willing to take risks and endure the pain involved if we are to fully understand our problems. It isn't a matter of "let's decide what changes can improve the game" but rather "let's really expose what needs to be improved". It's the only real way we can make meaningful progress, otherwise we're really just guessing about the effectiveness of our proposed solutions.
Altruist wrote:Before you make a multitude of changes, I really think, you/Mods/Stefan/players need to decide in which direction IC should develop. For every change there must be the question answered: Does this change support what we think important and outstanding of IC, where we want it to go to? First you need to define what is important, outstanding., what's the way to go.
Without such answeres, many changes will be contradicting.
We have done this, and we do ask this question. The "contradictions" aren't actually contradictions, but rather transitory experiences that give us the opportunity to understand the core question: "Why isn't this game as successful as it used to be?"
We can talk theory all we want but in the end we need actionable items. Changes like this, that expose the real pain and imbalance, give us exactly that.
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end of game.