[Mzyxptlk]

Well, the "problem" with war in PA is that it's multilateral. In games like Starcraft, you usually only have 1 opponent. If you kill that opponent's entire army while losing only half yourself, you're winning. In PA, you have a whole bunch of opponents. If you lose half your fleet finishing off one of them, there's almost always some other opponent who's lost nothing. In a war between alliances A and B, it's alliance C (And D, E, F...) on the sidelines that gains most from it. Never alliances A or B, no matter how badly one is beating the other.

In addition, you don't gain anything from war until you've exhausted your target's defense. If your target can cover 100 incoming fleets, then if you send exactly 100 fleets, you land nothing. It's the fleets after the 100th (all of them!) that land.

And finally, the better your land rate, the lower the chances of crashing. You can't crash your attack when there's no defense to crash into, after all.

(Possibly interesting sidenote: the math is kind of funky. The number of crashes depends on your crash rate and the number of fleets your target can cover, not on the number of fleets you send: Number of crashes = Crash rate * Number of fleets covered by defense)

This is why alliances generally attempt to fight asymmetric wars. Spending a week fighting it out 1 : 1 sounds noble and honourable, but that kind of slugfest is not what wins rounds. Your landing rate suffers, and both sides will slowly erode each other's value away through crashing, fleet catches and reduced roid gain rates.

All of these things combine to discourage alliances from from fighting wars, especially long protracted ones. It has nothing to do with cowardice, it's simply the best strategy for winning a round. Ensure that each of your opponents is killed as quickly as possible, while losing as little as possible yourself. Send 200 fleets in 1 night, land 75%, inflict 25% roid loss. Overkill, that's the name of the game.



If you want to counter this somehow, then you need to do something about the "Two dogs strive for a bone and the third runs off with it" effect. One way might be to give 100% salvage to both sides. That way, crashing is something that ruins the next couple of days (no ships = you get roided), rather than the reset of the round. To ensure crashing is still at least somewhat punished, you could slow down production times by a factor 2-3, and/or reduce the rate at which additional factories speed up an order. This would ensure that a crash still hurts, because you can't gain roids without ships, and you'll be an easy target for retalliation during this time. Something would have to be done about the bashing formula too, I guess. Use peak value + score from the last X days, rather than from now? Something like that.