Shared Intelligence

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    • Shared Intelligence

      As you can probably tell, I'm playing around with all the new toys from the security council that I missed out on when I had it for free.

      Let's assume that I am US, allied with Canada. There is another coalition containing Russia and China. I give shared intelligence to China, but he does not reciprocate. Who sees what?

      I know that Canada and I get nothing from the deal. I assume that China sees everything about me that I can see about Canada. Does China also see Canada? Does Russia see me and\or Canada.
    • If you give him shared intelligence, he sees everything. If he give you nothing, you still see nothing.

      Only he will see everything, his koalition will not see what he sees.

      Shared Intelligence means, you are allowed to see everything their units/provinces see. But this will not be shared with coalition partners.

      So if you have units in Canada he will see that part of Canada too.
    • Thank you very much for your explanation.

      So basically, it's a tool for experienced players who know about these things to take advantage of unsuspecting rubes who do not.

      I'm fairly new to the game, and only played a handful of matches that I was serious about. In most of those games, I found some good, cooperative allies and had a whole lot of fun working together with them. I really wish now that I had kept a better list of those guys.

      In a couple of games, however, I ran into some people who took advantage of my naivete.

      This thread has helped explain a lot of odd behavior I've seen in some of my games. Like the "helpful ally" who puts up healing stations and invites you to park your units there so his buddies can all see what units you have.

      It also explains the huge number of new players I see doing things a noob likely shouldn't have figured out yet. It's pretty easy to set up a new account to get security council access and sucker someone into letting you into their coalition so you and your buddies can get a good laugh out of abusing the system.

      I like to think that I am an honorable person and I try to play the game that way. I also like to think the best of people until they prove me wrong. That often leads to disappointment, but it is just who I am.

      I really enjoy this game, but it leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth to invest a lot of time into something only to lose by treachery.

      I'm going to have to think about whether or not I want to continue to invest my time and money in a game with a feature whose sole purpose seems to be to promote behavior that I find despicable.
    • Point 1 - playing with multiple accounts income match is prohibited and prevented by IP checks

      Point 2 - we are turning off security council for new players in the next update. This we are doing for everal reasons, amongst others: newbie abuse

      We have turned off many of the abusive mechanics and actually are getting loads of flak for this by our players - so accusing us of precisely nurturing this intent is totally absurd.

      Ask some folks here in the community and you will get this confirmed.

      /G
      "Going to war without France is like going hunting without an accordion." Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf
    • Not quite sure what you are talking about. Was my description flawed?

      It does not matter, if you have security council and give somebody shared intelligence. As long he does not give it back, you won't see a thing, but he will see everything of you.

      In this game there is no regular option for shared vision like shared map, so fooling new players is much harder anyway.


      Anyway this is a war game, so betrayal will always an option for those who only care about winning.

      Giving Shared Intelligence without getting the same back, would be very foolish in any case.

      In general don't trust anyone who is not in your koalition, over short or long you will be enemies anyway. And be wary of your koalition partners as well, if you don't know them well.

      Don't trust them blindly and watch if their troops are moving oddly.
    • Germanico , thank you for your reply.

      I should have worded that last sentence better than I did. I really do enjoy this game, and I can tell you guys take pride in listening to player suggestions to keep improving the game. For the most part, I've had a lot of fun playing. I even enjoyed the game where I first encountered the behavior I'm describing. I'm a problem solver by nature and started noticing some things I didn't understand, so that game for me was all about trying to figure out what I was up against.

      I'm now seeing the same things in another game I have going. I was a little angry when I wrote the above post, and I apologize for the tone of that last sentence.

      I'm not talking about one player with multiple accounts in the same match. I'm talking about a group that gets together with one guy playing the "noob" with his newly opened account and free security council privileges. He then finds the "sucker" that will let him in his coalition. He then sets up healing stations everywhere so his friends can see the coalitions units.

      I don't see this as the fault of the developers. It's just that there is a certain type of person who gets as much pleasure from abusing the system as I get from figuring out how they are doing it.

      Here is the last sentence from my previous post phrased with less anger and more thought:

      In a game that already allows for fluid coalition changes, what does this feature offer other than a way to make it easier to give information about one's allies away.
    • Leaving a coalition already takes 24 hours, so I would not call that fluid. If somebody suddenly leaves, you already get a warning and have 24 hours to prepare.

      Part of a grand strategy game is also: learning out of your own mistakes.


      Also not sure, what your solution would be: coalition locking? If you enter a coalition, you can't leave it at all for the rest of the game. Would be very bad. What if all your team members turn inactive? You would be stuck with them.

      And same would go for: remove shared intelligence at all. Without shared vision team play would be a nightmare.
    • I seem to be having trouble phrasing that one sentence.

      I was not complaining about the coalition system. I like the way it works, and I like the ability to be able to change as the match develops. My problem is with shared intelligence outside of coalitions. I don't see any real use for it other than helping one player take advantage of another. I'm sure there is a reason for it that I am too dense to figure out. I just need some of you guys with more experience than me to point it out for me.


      Additionally, instead of a "wall of shame," as I saw rightfully shot down by Germanico in another thread, how about a "wall of honor."

      Players could put up names of good teammates. The list could have an option for additional players to publicly endorse the player on the list. If I noticed that someone I trusted had endorsed another player, I could feel more confident about him as an ally. You could have a rapidly growing list of players you had never encountered that you could at least trust more than picking someone at random.

      The post was edited 1 time, last by DumFud ().

    • I must agree with Germanico some players have deleted/abandoned their accounts and make a new one after joining 30 games with Security Council they leave again and they have usernames such as E.G. raddude then duderad you know it's the same person and if you confront them they deny it
      من المبالغة أن ندعو إعلان حماس والجهاد الإسلامي عن تحالف عسكري. إنها رسالة بأن شعبنا متحد في وجه العدوان الإسرائيلي - أحمد ياسين



      twitter.com/i/status/1107767831981105153
    • The abuse chance will diminish once we have eliminated the early game free Sec Council for new players.

      It's the MMO bane - give em a little finger and they devour the man, horse and tribe right with it. So we need to close any abusable feature step by step.

      //G
      "Going to war without France is like going hunting without an accordion." Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf
    • Germanico,

      Thank you again for your reply.

      I'd like to take another stab at clarifying my offensive remark at the end of post three in this thread.

      I understand that the developers of any game are doing it to earn a living. I'm a die-hard believer in free market capitalism, so I have nothing but respect for what you guys are doing.

      As a player, my only goal is to have fun. What's fun for me may not be the same as what's fun for the next guy.

      I don't expect the developers of any game I may play to make that game meet all of my own personal criteria of what is fun. It's my job as a player to find a game I enjoy. It's the developers job to make a game that a lot of people enjoy.

      This is the first MMO game I have ever played. I had no idea when I started what I was getting into. The head to head games I have played before were mostly populated with players who have a similar code of playing to mine.

      I've spent a lot of time and a little cash playing CON over the last few months. I regret none of it. The devs here are among the best I've ever seen as far as listening to player suggestions and trying to keep the game fresh with the different types of matches you offer.

      For me, however, the game is no longer fun as it exists. Without some way to have at least a little trust in my teammates, I don't see myself enjoying it. The first time I was conned, I shrugged it off. I've had a lot of teammates since then. Most were decent guys but not as cooperative as I like. Several were awesome teammates. I wish I could remember more of those guys to team up with again, but I just thought that was how everyone played and assumed I'd just keep stumbling across more like that.

      In my current game, I see the same scam being set up as before. It sucks any enjoyment I might get from the game when I have to suspect every player of treachery.

      I don't mean to disparage either the game or it's players. It's only a handful of people who have ruined the game for me. But until there is some way to tell the good from the bad, I'm going to have to stop playing seriously for a while. I'll be checking in and starting up new games just to see what's changed, but I won't be having any interactions with the other players unless I come up with a better method of finding teammates.

      To the devs, keep up the good work. You have an awesome game and a great attitude about making it even better.
    • Hm, yeah. Being both a designer and a player in the MMO space for a long time, I totally get your issue.

      It has repeatedly been identified as the main reason why players tend to either move on or find/found a Clan/Team/Alliance with other like-minded people.
      It's also a bit like chasing the holy grail. Essentially as a dev of MMOs you need to balance out your economical interest, the fact that often you are catering to a very competitive crowd (in our type of games at least) and that the internet tends to more often then not bring out the worst in some players. There are loads of altruistic people as well - more than one thinks - but the real issue is that most games (ours included) are a dog-eat-dog environment.

      We are trying to counter this already by allowing shared victories and having leave timers, but if someone really is out to make your life miserable - then it's very hard to counter this in a meaningful fashion. This is also the reason why so many cooperative online games fail badly - on paper their ideas look awesome, but once live and relying on the "good" nature of co-players all goes south really fast.

      This being said, I believe we've gathered quite a nice bunch of people here in the forum and in the community at large. Possibly instead of moving on you simply need to move "in" - into a closed team or Alliance with other folks you can trust 100%. Just saying.
      "Going to war without France is like going hunting without an accordion." Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf
    • In reading back through this thread, I realize that it has gone way off track of the original question I asked. In most game forums I've read through the years, it would have been locked or redirected long ago. Certainly, no other games developer would have spent this much effort on one players grievances.

      This is an interesting conversation, however, so I will continue it here unless directed elsewhere.

      Although this is my first MMO, I know enough about how some people behave when hidden behind a mask of anonymity that I didn't expect perfection. It's kind of like online dating. You can never know if that beautiful blonde you're falling in love with isn't really some 350 pound dude with a hairy back.

      The fact that we're still having this conversation, and other things I've noticed on the forum, have given me hope that this game is at least trying to head in the right direction. The Post from Opulon that I just noticed on the dashboard also explained a lot.


      Regarding the alliance suggestion, I'm glad you brought that up. From what I had heard about alliances in other types of MMOs, it was more about getting a group of skilled players together so they could go around crushing lesser skilled or smaller groups. That holds no interest for me so I never even thought about it here. After a brief look in the alliance section of the forum, I see that I was mistaken. I'm a little burned out on the game right now, but I will be looking more deeply into that aspect.
    • There surely might be alliances, who prefer to crush 'weak' alliances, but alliances from the alliance tournament surely strive for the opposite.

      In every MMO there are different kinds of alliances, not every alliance is full of grievers, pretty everywhere you find those, who want to compete with equals or enjoy their time roleplaying two mention two other typical types.
    • This post is in no way meant to criticize CON or it's player community. I only wish to explain how I came to the game, define what I'm looking for, and determine if there is any future for me in CON.

      My gaming background is mostly PC strategy games. Those games range from fairly casual to one serious grognard type. In almost all those games, something was missing. For the most part, that something was serious competition against live opponents.

      Generally, when I see a game that looks interesting, I'll lurk on the forum for a while to get a feeling for the game and it's community. I came to CON the other way around. I clicked on an online ad (which I almost never do) and was fairly quickly and easily dumped into the middle of a game about which I new almost nothing.

      It turned out to be an interesting match. One of my neighbors attacked another immediately. I gave them a little time to wear each other down, then invaded the stronger looking one in force. I knocked him out easily and the other neighbor invited me to join his coalition with one other partner. Suddenly other players started dropping out and it was apparent to me that we had won. I had no desire to spend the next week rolling over AIs, so I suggested to my allies that I leave the coalition and take them both on. Their reaction was akin to what I would expect if I had casually offered to shoot their favorite pet. I got bored and dropped out for about a month.

      When I came back to the game, the match was still there on my games list. I opened it up and saw that all the players were inactive and the AI had populated my country with a boatload of shiny new toys. I immediately started rampaging all over Europe, including my former allies, who I assumed had also given up. A few days later, one of those former allies had left a message asking what the hell I was doing. He explained the gold reward system and pointed out that I had just cost him a lot of gold. I did some research, made some calculations, and discovered that I had actually earned about two cents per hour for my time.

      Next, I decided to jump into the big map. That's where I started noticing all the strange behavior that lead to me starting this thread.

      Taking Germanico's suggestion to check out the Alliance section, I headed to that part of the forum. Because I was offered a chance to form my own alliance the first day, I had decided that it was likely not something I'd be interested in and had ignored that aspect. The forum there is pretty much dead. In order to even get in the discussion, I apparently have to sign up for discord. That's a bridge too far for me. I cringe every time I open some new internet account somewhere, and I refuse to do it again without good reason.

      In reading what is available there, I can tell that there are a handful of players trying to accomplish a lot of what I want in a game. I fear they are facing an uphill battle, but I applaud them. From what I can tell, a serious alliance membership requires more of a time commitment than I am willing to take on right now. I don't like making commitments I can't keep.

      I don't know if CON will be able to bridge the gap between other strategy games and MMOs to fill the niche I seek. I think it's possible and have some small suggestions, but I don't know if the market is there to justify it. I know there are others out there like me. I've seen remnants of them on this forum and others.

      Sorry for the long post, and thank you for reading it.
    • Don't worry. For all i can see, it's constructive, and (most of all), structured. I may accept insults somewhere in the text with well-constructed feedback :D
      Running an online alliance is pretty much like running a small company, except you need to find other way than money to keep your employees productive. May they play or work, they are humans.