My 2 cents
On alliance def fleets I am kinda on the fence. It could turn out to be an excellent change but there does seem to be a good balance of positives and negatives to it so don’t think I can fully endorse it despite my desire to see changes in pa.
Pros:
1, Compensates for attack pl – I presume this was the intention and this change is really about the discussion whether pre launch should be limited.
2, Gives Europeans more sleep – all in all makes the game one which requires less antisocial hours.
3, Makes things more interesting for alliances; there are a whole new set of questions – how many of each defence fleet are we likely to need overnight? How to construct defence fleets for people who wont be on overnight to give maximum utility to the alliance. And on the offensive side how to soak up these defence fleets; launch more early fakes/encourage your members to do more recall/relaunches to get around defence that will keep flying.
The alliances it should benefit most are alliances for the relatively inactive that have dcs. BB regularly states that bows always has a dc on so this should be an immense benefit to them. Kaiba mentioned that it benefits Ult and I guess it does, but only a little. The big difference would be it helping Ult members to get more sleep
Cons:
1, As already mentioned the possibility that someone could cause chaos in your alliance. Not a big threat really as someone malicious can already do a lot.
2, Perhaps more worrying for alliances that have close to full access for all members would be incompetent dcs – fear those who sent your fleet of and mark the defence covered as soon as attackers are in the red even if defence is much more in the red!
3, Makes pa more defensive; during gal raiding parts of the round when no one alliance is getting disproportionate incs everyone will be able to better cover incs. This may lead to more bashing. It may however spread attacks out a bit more; if alliance def is more likely to be used overnight then it becomes more worthwhile attacking through the morning and into the afternoon.
4, Makes people think they don’t need to respond at all during the night so could actually shrink the defence pool.
All however are not particularly big negatives.
From a purely personal standpoint such a change could be bad for alliances like p3n where the problem is less the response rate but the lack of dcs. I wonder if it may even force these alliances to move to a more normal structure to ensure these fleets are used.
Imo the change to SKs on the other hand is almost entirely negative. As much as I hate SKs it is getting to the point where they may as well be taken out of the game as they become increasingly unuseable. Why waste the resources to build a ship you will only use a couple of times in a round. P3n and Ult were fighting for most of the round, I am fairly sure that p3n only was at ingame war with ult once (if that, I did not notice it happening but others in p3n say it did). As a result SK usage is restricted to a couple of days in each round. I guess this may be an attempt to get the war feature used more but if this is the case then the war feature should be changed for example have it so that an alliance can set how long the war will last when they declare it, the cooldown is then proportional to the total time spent at war.
SKs should be made so that they are useful and relevant; Mz’s suggestion
http://pirate.planetarion.com/showpo...80&postcount=3 is a good one for anyone who has not read it. All in all there has not been an outcry against SKs for some time now so I am not sure why we are still attempting to nerf them yet further.