Razing/Disbanding Question

[Pillager]

If you allow self-razing. Then a player can pillage a city after combat, then go into his city menu and raze it. So, tying the two together would save time and be less fiddly.

I believe that grabbing everything of value, before burning a city to the ground, was pretty much common practice back in the day. The two were certainly not mutually exclusive.

[bras]

Actually I agree with Pillager on this one. I for one was always puzzled why pillaging and razing are mutually exclusive. For me, these are two separate decisions illogically merged into one. Look, when you take a city, the first choice you make is whether you want to preserve the production or you want to pillage the city. Once you made this choice, the second choice you make is whether you want to keep the city standing or you want to raze it altogether. In my view, whenever a conqueror razed a city, obviously they pillaged it first (that's in real life). So indeed I'd support Pillager that if we base ourselves on "real life logic", when you raze, you should get gold.

[kenc80]

well I guess I would agree from a RL perspective...I guess Im just looking at it from a W2 angle...

I dont think there are right or wrong answers here...just tough decisions on how to setup the game.

[KGB]

What I posted earlier is that you should *not* be able to pillage AND self-raze in the same turn.

So you could pillage the city on the turn you took it. Then on your next turn you could self-raze. This follows the real life situation that I agree, is exactly what conquerors did. Waiting the extra turn can be explained that it takes a turn to pillage the value from the city and then the next one to do the razing. The raze on capture option would be razing everything including the valuables inside the city and thus give no gold.

This allows someone a turn to potentially re-capture a city they lost.

I'm not worried about someone setting game options. You can always chose not to join a game. Plus different options means different strategies you'll need to use depending on what's been selected in a game.

KGB

[bras]

What I posted earlier is that you should *not* be able to pillage AND self-raze in the same turn.

So you could pillage the city on the turn you took it. Then on your next turn you could self-raze. This follows the real life situation that I agree, is exactly what conquerors did. Waiting the extra turn can be explained that it takes a turn to pillage the value from the city and then the next one to do the razing. The raze on capture option would be razing everything including the valuables inside the city and thus give no gold.

This allows someone a turn to potentially re-capture a city they lost.

I frankly don't see the qualitative difference between pillaging and self-razing in the same turn or one turn apart. I think conceptually this build-up of rules within rules makes the game less elegant.

I think the elegant solution to this would be to have these two options, set at the game start:
1) Self-raze allowed anytime, but then just razing also yields gold
2) No self-raze and razing doesn't give gold

I'm not worried about someone setting game options. You can always chose not to join a game. Plus different options means different strategies you'll need to use depending on what's been selected in a game.

I agree with that

[KGB]

I frankly don't see the qualitative difference between pillaging and self-razing in the same turn or one turn apart. I think conceptually this build-up of rules within rules makes the game less elegant.

I think the elegant solution to this would be to have these two options, set at the game start:
1) Self-raze allowed anytime, but then just razing also yields gold
2) No self-raze and razing doesn't give gold

There is a *huge* difference in my mind.

Almost NO ONE razes a city unless they have to. The *only* reason I raze is because I take a city and don't think I can hold it. There is no other reason to raze because why would you give up production+gold income etc. So I don't think you should be rewarded with gold for razing. If anything, self raze could cost a minor amount as was suggested (50 or 100 gold).

The self raze is primarily needed for the case you capture a city on say turn 5 and then on say turn 10 or 15 you realize you are going to lose it (maybe an ally suddenly commits treachery and you have no armies to stop him, maybe a hero stack appears out of the fog of war that you missed etc). In these cases you don't expect to be rewarded with gold when you self raze. Nor should you be.

To prevent the abuse of pillage-self raze on the same turn, a 1 turn delay is needed. So you either raze and get no gold if you think you can't keep the city. Or you pillage and try to keep the city and can raze next turn if you wish. Thus your opponent has a chance to take back his city. Risk vs Reward is the heart of good strategy. Giving players the gold AND raze together gives them everything has no strategy because there is no decision to make. I don't see how it's complex or over complicating the game. The more options/decisions a player can make, the higher the level of strategy.

There have been at least 2 games where I've lost an early hero on turn 3-4 and tried to play on (I now resign because it's hopeless). I've pillaged gold immediately for a hero. But the game hasn't been kind. So I sit and wait for a hero and my opponents have pounced. Had I been able to self-raze, in both games I would have dropped from 6-7 undefendable cities down to 2-3 heavily fortified ones while I kept my gold and awaited my hero(s). But in both games by the time I got a hero it was 7-8 turns, I'd lost all but one city and because of the gold loss, I was down to barely enough to get a hero with 1 ally instead of a couple of heroes with 3-4 allies each that might have let me back in the game.

The other big reason I didn't mention above with self razing is the ability to deny a vector spot to your enemy. The overpowering effect of vectoring makes it doubly important not to allow your opponent a city where they can start freely sending in men. Timed vectoring ala DLR would help but it would still be important to deny that vector spot.

KGB

[bras]

The self raze is primarily needed for the case you capture a city on say turn 5 and then on say turn 10 or 15 you realize you are going to lose it (maybe an ally suddenly commits treachery and you have no armies to stop him, maybe a hero stack appears out of the fog of war that you missed etc). In these cases you don't expect to be rewarded with gold when you self raze. Nor should you be.

I think nobody ever said you should be rewarded with gold when you SELF-raze.
I think the decision to pillage should be decoupled from the decision to self-raze.
Raze = pillage + self-raze, thus you get the gold from pillaging, not from self-razing.
It is also more in line with real life.

To prevent the abuse of pillage-self raze on the same turn, a 1 turn delay is needed. So you either raze and get no gold if you think you can't keep the city. Or you pillage and try to keep the city and can raze next turn if you wish. Thus your opponent has a chance to take back his city. Risk vs Reward is the heart of good strategy. Giving players the gold AND raze together gives them everything has no strategy because there is no decision to make. I don't see how it's complex or over complicating the game. The more options/decisions a player can make, the higher the level of strategy.

I still think that having a self-raze option, even with a one turn delay, basically renders the raze option quite useless. When I raze, only in a very small proportion of cases do I think that my opponent would take the city on the next turn. Usually the horizon for this decision is longer. Anyway, the only "strategic" choice involved is whether you can hold the city 1 turn (then use pillage and self-raze) and or you cannot (then you just raze). This is rather a tactical, not a strategic choice, and a pretty petty one at that. On the other hand decoupling the two decisions altogether - the decision to pillage and the decision to raze - which would result in the option to self-raze anytime and in razing being basically the combination of pillaging and self-razing (and thus yielding gold) - removes this imposed artificial choice and allows for a true strategic thinking.

I also think my other point still stands. I think it's important to keep certain conceptual simplicity to the game. Not only is it a question of beauty of simple solutions (which I admit is my personal motivation). It is also the question that when you introduce lots of illogical and unobvious rules, the game starts to favour insiders with a long experience instead of smart newcomers.

Btw, I like you saying that Risk vs Reward is the heart of good strategy. That's why I don't like self-raze in the first place, as discussed earlier. Self-raze can be too easily abused to at the last moment deny your opponent a city that he's spent a lot of effort attacking. It's just not fair, because it allows you to just negate all his risks in one stroke.

There have been at least 2 games where I've lost an early hero on turn 3-4 and tried to play on (I now resign because it's hopeless). I've pillaged gold immediately for a hero. But the game hasn't been kind. So I sit and wait for a hero and my opponents have pounced. Had I been able to self-raze, in both games I would have dropped from 6-7 undefendable cities down to 2-3 heavily fortified ones while I kept my gold and awaited my hero(s). But in both games by the time I got a hero it was 7-8 turns, I'd lost all but one city and because of the gold loss, I was down to barely enough to get a hero with 1 ally instead of a couple of heroes with 3-4 allies each that might have let me back in the game.

I can feel your pain. But I don't think self-raze is the most effective solution to that and certainly it's not one that will be used by most players. Frankly, other things kept equal, most players will continue to resign in this sort of situation even with self-raze. That being said, I think maybe some other remedy should be created for these admittedly rather desperate situations. I think these remedies have actually been discussed elsewhere on the forum - like imposing a new hero if a hero has been lost in the first 5 turns or something along these lines. In this case the solution would really be proportionate to the problem.

The other big reason I didn't mention above with self razing is the ability to deny a vector spot to your enemy. The overpowering effect of vectoring makes it doubly important not to allow your opponent a city where they can start freely sending in men. Timed vectoring ala DLR would help but it would still be important to deny that vector spot.

If you are the defending party, I can see the motivation to stop the vectoring. But I don't understand the motivation to make the vectoring less effective when we talk about overall game design. I think that the creative vectoring is too rarely used in the game and at the same time it contributes to some of the more creative strategies. For example I've only seen once in my 20 games or so when a city deep within the enemy lines was taken and used successfully to vector men in and expand. And yet I see this as a beautiful and creative strategy, which admittedly is hard to do. But why would you want to block it altogether as the game designer?

[KGB]

Bras,

I think nobody ever said you should be rewarded with gold when you SELF-raze.
I think the decision to pillage should be decoupled from the decision to self-raze.
Raze = pillage + self-raze, thus you get the gold from pillaging, not from self-razing.
It is also more in line with real life.

Except I consider that it takes times to plunder your booty from the city before burning it to the ground vs just putting the torch to everything immediately without regard for booty. So if you want to pillage that gold, it takes time to do so.

I still think that having a self-raze option, even with a one turn delay, basically renders the raze option quite useless. When I raze, only in a very small proportion of cases do I think that my opponent would take the city on the next turn. Usually the horizon for this decision is longer.

I don't follow your logic here. You already raze cities now without getting the gold. So clearly you aren't worried about whether or not you are getting gold from this action since you are razing for a long term horizon. All that getting gold will do is make it *more* likely that you will raze as opposed to simply pillage, defend and buy new production.

When I raze, it's 90% of the time related to whether I can hold the city for a turn or two until I can re-enforce it. The other 10% is long term horizon. From playing 1000+ DLR games online the overwhelming philosophy is "It's better to let God have a city than my opponent". That's because each one he takes from you strengthens him AND weakens you. But ones you raze only weaken him (if it's his city you captured) OR you (if it's self-raze) but never strengthen him and weaken you.

Anyway, the only "strategic" choice involved is whether you can hold the city 1 turn (then use pillage and self-raze) and or you cannot (then you just raze). This is rather a tactical, not a strategic choice, and a pretty petty one at that. On the other hand decoupling the two decisions altogether - the decision to pillage and the decision to raze - which would result in the option to self-raze anytime and in razing being basically the combination of pillaging and self-razing (and thus yielding gold) - removes this imposed artificial choice and allows for a true strategic thinking.

I doubt that. What getting gold + razing would do is simply mean that players are FAR more likely to raze cities. There is no risk in doing so since you get gold and deny the opponent a city. The only reason you'd keep a city is if there was NO chance of it ever being recaptured (within 4-5 turns). In fact if this were the case I'd be razing the map like crazy. It would give me piles of gold for new heroes. At the same time I'd fill my cities with 32 men with the gold to pay the upkeep. My heroes would aggressively defend my cities while I raided and razed more and more opponent cities. I strongly suspect this is how all games would progress.

I also think my other point still stands. I think it's important to keep certain conceptual simplicity to the game. Not only is it a question of beauty of simple solutions (which I admit is my personal motivation). It is also the question that when you introduce lots of illogical and unobvious rules, the game starts to favour insiders with a long experience instead of smart newcomers.

Agreed 100%. But this game is not going to be that kind of game. W2 was that kind of game. But this game is moving closer to DLR with every update. Basically the equivalent of moving from Risk to Axis and Allies and headed toward ever more complex games such as the old hex based cardboard counter War games like PanzerBlitz/SquadLeader. By the time Beta4 or Beta5 arrives with spells, quests and lots of other features you won't be able to be a smart newcomer and compete with a veteran. You'll have to put in your learning time with the rules. I see no way around this. So a simple 1 turn rule for razing is barely going to be noticed and is easy enough to learn compared to say the complex interactions of combat and the unit powers.

Btw, I like you saying that Risk vs Reward is the heart of good strategy. That's why I don't like self-raze in the first place, as discussed earlier. Self-raze can be too easily abused to at the last moment deny your opponent a city that he's spent a lot of effort attacking. It's just not fair, because it allows you to just negate all his risks in one stroke.

It's true, you can do this. But he is weakened by what he did. So you are gaining. As I said, this was a staple of online play. You couldn't compete if you didn't do it. Your job when being attacked by a superior opponent is to fall back and steadily defend less cities with more men. Make each one harder and more costly to capture in terms of time/men/resources so that he picks another opponent/target (assuming a MP game). Basically what Russia did against Napoleon/Hitler. It's the *only* successful defensive strategy I've ever seen online. Games where self-razing wasn't possible ended far sooner than ones where it was possible because players simply gave up after having oodles of gold/cities taken from them. Self razing keeps players in games longer. I guess the question is whether or not you consider this a good thing. If you like marathon games, self-raze is an option you want. If you don't, it's an option you don't want to use.

It's very clear from looking at the hero skills and future things coming in the game that it will be *very* possible to do what was done in DLR. That is have 4-5 heavily defended cities with heroes and a few killer hero stacks roaming around and compete with someone who has 30-40 cities (assuming the winning condition is 100% cities vs 75%), oodles of men and only average/weak heroes. Again I guess the question is whether or not you consider that a good thing.

I can feel your pain. But I don't think self-raze is the most effective solution to that and certainly it's not one that will be used by most players.

Maybe not but it's nice to have the option. There are remedies coming in the upcoming version to help with this. I was mostly using it to illustrate an example of when I'd use it. I also use it frequently to put myself in a better defensive position by razing cities that can be attacked easily or when a former ally decides to commit treachery at an inopportune moment etc.

If you are the defending party, I can see the motivation to stop the vectoring. But I don't understand the motivation to make the vectoring less effective when we talk about overall game design. I think that the creative vectoring is too rarely used in the game and at the same time it contributes to some of the more creative strategies. For example I've only seen once in my 20 games or so when a city deep within the enemy lines was taken and used successfully to vector men in and expand. And yet I see this as a beautiful and creative strategy, which admittedly is hard to do. But why would you want to block it altogether as the game designer?

I don't want to block vectoring all together. It's a tremendous time saver for the drudgery of moving units way in the back cities. Without it the game is almost unplayable on large maps due to the time required to move so many far away men to the front lines.

I merely suggested it's one of *the* most powerful features in the game that's vastly underrated on how powerful it is. A very large percentage of the 1000+ online games I've played were decided by who got a post city deep in the enemy territory first and started the mass vectoring. You literally razed as much as possible to prevent this because once those men come in they can't be stopped where as men walking toward you can be attacked. DLR had timed vectoring (2-5 turns depending on distance of vector) to compensate for the powerfulness of vectoring.

I am not surprised you have not seen deep cities in enemy lands used as vector points. There is little reason to do so at the moment. You can win 95% of your games long before that becomes important enough to attempt. I have needed to do it only twice in 60+ games. Also with no fog of war it's very difficult to sneak stuff past and do lots of other neat tricks. I suspect that in Beta3 you'll start to see vectoring and taking back cities and sneak attack forces come into play a lot more.

KGB

P.S. Incidentally, I also think we need a 'no raze' option too for games when no one can ever raze. DLR had all 3 options and while no-raze and raze-on-capture were not popular choices compared to raze-anytime (self raze capability) they were used on occasion.

[piranha]

This razing discussion is quite interesting and it shows how different view that people have.

I'm gonna jump right into the fire

My take is from a gameplay perspective,if its 100% realistic or not is not that important. After all upgrading walls or buying new production should also take time in that case, + many other things that aren't 100% realistic.
Some logic is required so people can grasp the game as fast as possible. It's true that with all functionality planed you will have to learn everything from experience but thats okay as long as thing make sense when you try it.
Things like being able to do something some turns and not on others will confuse new players.
There are many things since beta1 that we reworked based on new players who never played warlords who tested and we could see that they didn't figure important things out fast enough.

An example are the flags used to display number of troops. Turns out that noone of the people we have tested with figured that out until we explained it so flags will be replaced in beta3.

We had the self raze discussion too while building and our opinion is that you can raze for free when you capture or pay gold to raze at a later point because from a gameplay standpoint it makes sense that it costs money.
Right now you can't raze at a later point but I think it will be included along with rebuilding cities, probably beta4.

[KGB]

Piranha,

An example are the flags used to display number of troops. Turns out that noone of the people we have tested with figured that out until we explained it so flags will be replaced in beta3.

I wish this was a game option like movement paths showing numbers. So old time warlords could continue to use the flags we know and love and newbies used the new system.

Incidentally what are you going to replace it with? A number next to the army to indicate how many are in the stack?

We had the self raze discussion too while building and our opinion is that you can raze for free when you capture or pay gold to raze at a later point because from a gameplay standpoint it makes sense that it costs money.

Makes perfect sense to me. Assuming the free raze doesn't grant any gold. You can always *fix* the pillage-raze same turn issue by making the cost to raze in that case be exactly equal to the gold just pillaged

KGB