Curious: Why are battles resolved instantly?

A problem I could see with such a system, imagine Player A sends a large force as a blockade against an ooponent in a war (that being Player B), then Player B sends his troops out to destroy the blockade.  Therefore Player B has little or no troops left in his city.

So then all Player A's friends send their troops in to ransack the city.

Due to the time factor, I imagine the entire combat system would need reconfiguring, ie a battle against a city would need to involve all attacks, ie every seige blockade and reinforcement sent against it just to make city defence possible.

It is not a bad idea par-say but I would rather see the upgrades already in planning worked on than this.

Mandarins31 wrote: This non-instantaneous battle idea have been well discussed already in the topic Anjire gave a link to.  Would be quite an ineresting improvement... but as battles take time, it brings a real issue imo: it's about diplomatic relations between amies. Imagine player A defends a spot with large armies, Player B who has no Diplo relations with A can attack him. Player C is in Confed/NAP with A and B but decides to help A defend for exemple... here there's an issue because with current diplo mechanics, he can help none. If Devs are willing to make some PVP battles non-instantaneous, the diplomatic relations system should be first reworked to avoid incoherences. Like someone in a goup of confeds can't be as well in NAP/Confed with an enemy his group is at war with. Currently, to take the exemple of the current war, any Consone alliance could be confed with H? or Dlords while still confed with the rest of Consone. In the interaction exemple i gave, it's a hard case as B has no relations with A, and C is Confed with A and B. As B attacked A one solution would be to automatically change diplo status of B with C from confed to without relation or War. Same way, C could have an option to chose to defend A or to attack A, which would be seen as a betrail for B or A and change his diplo status automatically.  Though, this means 1 player would make his whole alliance change automatically diplomatic status with an other alliance, if he supports one or the other side. And here it's an exemple with 3 players from 3 different alliances... sounds like a nightmare if more alliances with various diplo relations fight on a same spot. An other idea though, would be to let alliances change their diplo status first, before being able to do anything. In my exemple, alliance of player C could first manually change its relation with B from Confed to War/no-relation in order to let player C help player A. But here the interaction exemple is just between 3 alliances... how does it work between more alliances battling on a same spot, and with various diplo intereactions? I personnally think non-instantaneous battles would need to first re-view the current diplomatic relations system (which has to be re-viewed anyway, imo), it wouldn't work with the current one.

That's a very valid point. But then again, if an alliance is NAP/confed with both of two warring parties, should they really be choosing sides before severing one of their ties? I think your suggestion--that alliances should have to manually cancel one of the NAPs or Confeds before supporting either side, is a good one.

Thanks for bringing this up though, it probably deserves it's own discussion too.

Darkwords wrote: A problem I could see with such a system, imagine Player A sends a large force as a blockade against an ooponent in a war (that being Player B), then Player B sends his troops out to destroy the blockade.  Therefore Player B has little or no troops left in his city. So then all Player A's friends send their troops in to ransack the city. Due to the time factor, I imagine the entire combat system would need reconfiguring, ie a battle against a city would need to involve all attacks, ie every seige blockade and reinforcement sent against it just to make city defence possible. It is not a bad idea par-say but I would rather see the upgrades already in planning worked on than this.

Well, for your blockade example, isn't this how it SHOULD work? It sounds like Player A is employing an effective bait strategy utilizing timed battles. Assuming the fight is fair, Player B should have friends too, who can send their armies to defend Player B's city while the home city armies attack the blockade (or reverse the roles and have Player B's friends attack the blockade).

Llyr wrote: Having battles drag on like that would make the game unplayable for anyone who has a real life to lead. It's fine for those who can sit in front of their computer playing games all day, but not so good for the rest of us.

I can't imagine battles taking any longer than the days-long sieges that already occur. The only time I could see this being an issue is during war, and I think we have all seen from recent events that war is indeed a very time-consuming process.

As an anecdotal note, I rarely spend even an hour a day total on Illyriad (and when I do it's usually because I'm chatting on GC or AC), and I don't see battles taking time to be a problem.


Edited by Hadus - 12 Jan 2013 at 16:44

Llyr wrote: Having battles drag on like that would make the game unplayable for anyone who has a real life to lead. It's fine for those who can sit in front of their computer playing games all day, but not so good for the rest of us.

Loud Whispers wrote: Hora wrote: It has been a major lack in combat, for defenders ganging up, while attackers can't... 9 squares around a city where sieges can be placed. Nine :P

I think Hora meant the defenders as the troops defending a siege, and the attackers being the force trying to break the siege.

But I'm not sure...

Rill wrote: Nine?   really? I've only ever seen eight.

You've never seen an underground siege before?