My view is that this not a game at all. It lacks Victory Conditions. It lacks an ending.
Instead, I see this as a Social Network with armies. The best RL analogy is prison where everyone must join a prison gang in order to survive. And many of the prison gangs employ "beat ins" whereby the initiate is first given a whupping before being allowed in the gang and "enjoying" the benefits of gang protection. And even once in a gang, members are bought and sold like a prison whores.
Illy equivalents:
Beat in...Like TMM, an alliance attacks a recruit until the recruit joins.
Prison whore trading...When an alliance is gang-banged and the suriving members are distributed among the victorious alliances as war prizes.
In Illy, War means Death. It means a player's cities will be destroyed...which means the defeated player has sacrificed a lot of time building something that is now gone. Rational players do not risk destruction of something they have worked long and hard to create. Hence, the "drift" towards peace. In this sense, Illy is like the RW - successful economies avoid total war as the cost exceeds the benefits.
There are alliances that enjoy letting evil-doers hang around so the evil-doer can rebuild and misbehave again - and then the so-called "good guys" can beat up the evil-doer again. Repeat, Rinse. This is the history of Nige/alts. This is the plan of many of the alliances currently battling Nige/alts. However, there are some truly good guys that intend to completely eliminate Nige/Alts. I have serious doubts this will actually occur. To my eye, the "good guys" that play this way are actually the truly evil ones...Evil is the absence of Good. When Good Men stand idle, evil occurs. A truly Good Man must ALWAYS WORK towards creating Good.
The absence of a substantive, game-oriented reason for conflict leads players to boredom. And in their boredom, they become suicidal and start wars for no reason except to get themselves destroyed. Tubana of Medival Knights and many of White Co leaders suffered from this disease.
I have high expectations for the upcoming Faction AI. My hope is that the factions will create a game-oriented reason for real players to engage in conflict. And thus transform Illy into a Game with a Social Network.
Fingers crossed.
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War and Peace in Illyriad
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bartimeus wrote:
