War

 

What I found in GW which I think could be relevant or applicable to Illyriad in the light of this thread are the following:

 

1 I agree with the position that games like Illyriad as well as GW are made for war/conflict/hostility.  WE play it because we love the conflict in it. Without it, this game will fade away because peace-loving players would rather flock to Farmville.

 

2. If you love to play Illyriad, destruction of your cities will not make you quit. If it were to happen to me, I would gladly settle where the game relocates me and start all over again. I would hope to be in the farther reaches of the map so that I could be the veteran in that area and dominate the newbies nearby.  In GW, cities could not be destroyed so you have to be content with living with your next-door enemy for the rest of the game and if you are the one being battered, you simply build an outpost far far away and store your resources and hide your army there from from the next door all-powerful enemy. But this is one thing about Illyriad because here I could make such pesky neighbors disappear for good from my backyard.

 

3. GW uses a reputation/penalty system which penalizes unprovoked attacks or pearl harbor type attacks. There you have to declare another player as "Hostile" first before you can attack him without penalty. The "Hostility" timer counts down for 8 hours. If you say attack without declaring hostility first, you incur a reputation penalty of say 10 points. If you attack another with an nuke ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile)  you incur say 100 points. Each penalty brings down your reputation points which you earn positively by other means or it automatically counts up every time you reaches a particular level of population or level of development.  When you become negative reputation, you get slapped with a "Rogue Player" brand seen on the player rosters. A Rogue Player is not only a psychological or social punishment, it carries with it other penalties like a decrease in your attacking power or gets you booted out of your current alliance or you cant join an alliance and the like.  I think that such a Penalty System could also be done in Illyriad to discourage adventurism and aggression.

 

4. In GW, there is a maximum limit of 10 alliances which one can join in the lifetime of the server. Re-joining alliances count as one. After you left your 10th alliance, you could no longer be admitted to any alliance so you are left alone and vulnerable. This I think is another tool to discourage opportunism by jumping from one alliance to the other, thus people make careful decisions about alliances and long-term bonds/loyalties are created. The alliances are actually the lifeblood of games like these. Thus strengthening the alliance system would also contribute to the retention of the core playing base. It will always be a reality that players will come and go, not all would play the game for keeps. But what is important for the game developers is to maintain or at least consistently increase the core base. Thus the need for a strong alliance system.

 

5.  I loved playing GW but I quit it (in late 2009) after having tasted victory in Server 6. Because the next servers were just utter duplications. So I really appreciate the current design of Illyriad as it is more open-ended and not directed towards a race to win the server and I do hope the game developers keep it that way. Although this game is built for war as i said earlier, the fantasy setting and the role-playing aspect is so much more engrossing than the war factor alone. So i guess if you play this game for war alone, you will not last long since either you will get decimated by more powerful enemies or you will not have really played the role.

 

 

I do not intend this to be an exhaustive comparison between Illyriad and Global Wars so I would like to limit my discussion to the above. I hope that I made some sense and gave some useful insights for the developers to consider.

 

Warm regards to all and see you all in-game,

 

 

Azreil