Thoughts on: Perception & More || Giving Newbies a chance while punishing bots

Day 4,716, 00:36 • Published in USA USA • by Marcelaxy

Hi,

the air fight module and everything surrounding it is in a weirdly unfinished and unpolished state.

Higher-Q weapons are anounced, although I doubt this will change all that much. Even Q6 Air weapons simply won't be cost-effective, Q7 is hard to say, it depends on how the Raw Material cost scales.

So, there's one untouched area since launch and that is (you might have guessed it from the title) Perception.

Everyone has 0 Perception as of right now, which puts everyone on a level playing field. Sadly though, this also gives bot armies huge leverage in the air. The most prominent offenders might be Egypt and Indonesia. Two countries that, despite a large population, show hardly any activity from their citizens.
If I was Plato, I'd have deleted those countries out of spite years ago but I digress.

In order to have a rewarding perceiption system, we can't do a copycat move with the "strength" system where we have a lifetime accumulation of clicking "train" once a day.

No, what we need is a dynamic Perception System that rewards activity and success. Also Legend-Ranks for air fighters that aren't as powerful as on the ground in order to make bot-armies less versatile/powerful while not locking air fighters in their or and of other countries.


Perception


In order to achieve that, I think Perception must consist of multiple elements. As of right now, I can think of four.

● Activity in the last 30 Days

Let's say it's Day 5177 of the new world. Your accumulated hits (not kills) in the air from day 5147-5176 are counted for this part of your Perception. In theory, without level-ups, EBs or using hits for work and on the ground, you can do 66240 hits in 30 days at a recovery rate of 92 hits per hour.
So 50k hits makes sense as a cap, contributing let's say 500 Perception to your overall. So for 100 hits in the last 30 days you get 1 Perception until you reach 500.


● SHs in the last 30 Days

Let's say it's Day 5177 of the new world. Your accumulated SHs from day 5147-5176 are counted for this part of your Perception. I think requiring 50 SHs to reach the cap is reasonably low while giving botters a hard time with this one, assuming no changes to air battles and therefore commonness of SHs are made.
This part gives you a total of 500 Perception again, resulting in 10 perception per SH until you hit the Cap of 500


● Perception Training

Kinda like the ground training we have right now, just not with lifetime accumulation.

It should be divided into four different facilities without quality upgrades. The first one is free, the other 3 you have to buy for 20,50,100 Gold. (just to make botter's lifes a little bit harder)

Each one should equally contribute to your overall perception while having increasing cost per train.

The free one costs 100cc per train, the next one 200, the third 500 and the fourth 1000cc per train.

Each Perception facility contributes up to 150 Perception based on the number of trains during the recent 30 days. So 5 Perception per train, capped at 150 in 4 facilities adding up to 600 perception.


● Lifetime SHs

This one is, once again, designed to punish botters while not being a lifetime disadvantage to new players. It's also a long-time goal that someone can reach to keep motivation up. The cap should be at 1000 SHs (again, assuming no changes to air rounds are made and the commonness stays the same) and reward up to 400 Perception. So 0.4 Perception per lifetime SH until you hit the cap of 400.

Summary:

There are 4 brackets your overall perception consists of.

Activity: 500 Perception
Recent SHs: 500 Perception
Training: 600 Perception
Lifetime SHs: 400 Perception
Total: 2000 Perception

The lifetime SHs are weaker in order to make this hard-to-achieve lifetime goal not too peowerful. The training rewards 600 to keep the maths for it clean and simple while staying on a 30-day basis.

Stingers should receive a buff to make up for the increased damage. E.g:

Aim-93 Stinger: 10.000 damage, 3 hits.


Perception Pack

This one is a spontaneous idea and probably unpopular but I think a monetization of perception is pretty much inevitable.

An air-oriented monthly pack could be added that adds another up to 500 perception to your overall, increasing the total to 2500 perception while also offering some other perks and things.

E.g. Air bombs (that I will discuss later) and a 600 energy building that is atm. only available to ground-fighter-oriented packs (MP, IK) or just a 1000 energy building to be able to stack the MP'S and the Air Pack's buildings. This also improves non-script users' playing experiences since you don't need to manually get rid of FFs that often and lose energy less often, e.g. during sleep.

Since then a lot of power is behind a paywall, it makes botter's lifes harder as well (unless they want to spend hundreds of Euros per month to cheat in a game...).


Air Legends

To keep it fresh I would give this one a new name, for example "Ace Pilot Level I to X" or "Flying Ace Level I to X".

Those air Legends shouldn't be as powerful as on the ground in order to not totally dominate the module. 2% bonus for fighting to your country per Level and only 10 Levels. So a total of +20% instead of +200% on the ground.

It's a neat bonus to give real players an extra edge over bots, who will most likely never reach those ranks, while not totally dominating the module.

Air Bombs

In order to shake things up (and to be able to counter Legends on their turf)
there shopuld be air bombs like we have on the ground.

I would call them "EMP Missile" doing about a tenth to an eighth of a usual SH's damage requirement. Percentually, they'd be as powerful as Cruise Missiles in D1-3 but there's more Gold and domination points at stake in the air, making them far more valuable.


So, that's how I would rework the Air Module to make it less stale and keep botters at bay. Do you have additional ideas or disagree on certain points? That's what the comment section is for.