[BloodyButcher]

Yes.

I guess i am kicking a dead horse yet again.

PA today is more or less about trying to do your outmost NOT getting incs while yourself are free to two fleet attack each night while your sleeping. Alliance politics now is more or less trying to have as much of the round possibole without having to wake up every other day to DC yourself(thats what we have the "non-euros" for i guess?).
Most alliances have a "pain barrier" on how many fleets they can get incomming each night without going into "red" negative growth.
On average, each planet sends out 40ish fleets a'round. 50ish fleets from alliance "A" out attacking each night/day.

This is a issue for almost every alliance out there, every other day, between 02:00-05:00 on average it pops up 100 fleets while you are sleeping, a big part of em launched 3-6 hours in advance, the only way you can protect yourself against this is if either you stay awake waiting for em to appear, or that maybe you have someone who is kind enough to dedicate their time doing this for you. Most allies/most people arnt able to do this every day, so they tend to make agreements with each other to make sure they dont have to spend time anywhere else than in bed.

This is a vicious cycle, it happends every round, you can work your ass off for 3 weeks straight waking up, handling the incs, and making sure they dont go past the "pain barrier", but with that in mind that sometime, sometime soon 2-3 other alliances(that perhaps are putting less time than you into the game) decide that its your turn to have waves and waves of incs(many preset to attack hours in advance) wich goes past your "pain barrier", and makes sure you stay in red for enough days for them to catch up with you.

People argue about that PL enables them to play, with any change to PL they would have to quit the game(and point to last time it was fiddled with). And i agree, i dont want to remove the option to prelaunch your fleets, as often i myself rather go sleep earlier, or that im unavalible at the time when i need to send the fleet. But the way PL works now, its mostly only one sided, and that side favours attacking.

Discussing this with the admins the other day, and trying to argument for why i think it should be a change to it, covered a lot of my points about the subject.

PA 2001 vs PA 2015:
1: You(atleast I) would launch earlier, and be able to DC your incs earlier. I could stay up untill 03:00 some days and still be able to cover most of what the game asked me to do.
* Ofc the technology has evolved a lot since back then, alliance tools, ingame options, and internet accesability is a lot better than back then.
But what does that matter if you have all these "tools/options" avialible if yourself are asleep?

PL attack vs PL defence:
2: Why would you only have one of the two componets of fleet movement avalible to be preset? If you could prelaunch defence as effectively and for more or less the same effort, why not have it like this?
* Yes you can PL defence, but that requires you to know when the attack fleet is gonna arrive, and without "spies/intel" from the attacker its simply just a guessing game. And staying up each tick to check for incs is putting in way more effort than the attacker is doing.

The "bandwagon" effect:
3: The bandwagon effect would change dramasticly, you would be able to DC incs when they are launched, and you will not have 50 incs showing up each tick suddently in the middle of the night wich requires to be handled within 40-50 minutes(more or less). Getting scans, putting up bcalc, looking for avaible fleet, trying to reach those avaible fleets. Its demanding.

The "pace" of the game will be slowed down:
4: If its less demanding protecting your roids, and having a "normal" life beside the game, less people/alliances are likely to get burnt out. There is very few alliances that are able to "compete" or "challenge" for #1, 4-5 rounds in a row. Wich to me says that knowledge/teamwork has very little to do with the game, its being able to dedicate majority of your(or someone elses) life to it.
* Some might say the game is "too easy", or "way too relaxed" allready, but i dont see many of them running around year after year performign at the same level. Im pretty sure that there mustve been a few thousand "accounts" being signed up the last 3 years.
And if you want a "higher" paced game, it could be done with offensive stats perhaps? or lower travel time? smaller tags?

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Now here is what i propose to change PL:

Prelaunching ships:
When you prelaunch ships, they leave your base the next tick, and can return to base according to when the fleet was prelaunched. Prelaunched 4 hours ago, 4 hours return time.

Detetecting incommings:
This stays as before, they are being able to be detected when they are ETA 9(hull3), ETA 8(hull2) and ETA 7(hull1) when the planet has TT4(hypergate). The incs will be showing on JGPs as before.

Detecting landtick:
Option 1 - Add a new scan to the tech tree(say military scans for nostalgia). This scan will show what landtick the fleet is gonna land at, and enables you to start DCing/sending def fleets straight away.

or

Option 2 - Incomming scan now show landtick instead of (PRELAUNCHED) or (ATTACKING). This requires the planet under attack to have sufficient amps/scan technology.


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Now this is just a suggestion to the discussion about the "PL" issue of PA.
People will still be able to prelaunch fleets as before, but the efficiency of prelaunching will be lowered as defence will be made easier to handle.
Many of you will prolly say that this only "favours the non-EU players", but aint PA allready "favouring" this group?