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[Cartir]

I honestly think the whole “alliances controlling continents” idea is dumb and ruins what I think made this server fun in the first place.

Letting 12 towns team up to attack and take territory completely kills balance. At that point, it’s not strategy or skill anymore, it’s just numbers. Smaller towns don’t stand a chance, new players get steamrolled, and the same mega-groups dominate everything with zero risk.

The best part of this server used to be town politics, rivalries, and actual decision-making. I’ve been playing on this server for 5 years, and in that time I’ve seen how this system plays out long-term. Alliances just turn the game into blob warfare where one side wins because they have more people, not because they played better. There’s no tension, no creativity, and no incentive to be independent when joining a massive alliance is basically required to survive.

Instead of encouraging competition, this system forces everyone into the same boring meta. If you’re not in a giant alliance, you’re irrelevant. That’s bad design and it hurts long term player enjoyment.

It makes the server less fun, less fair, and way less interesting overall.

*EDIT WITH SUGGESTIONS*

I appreciate all the feedback so far, even from people who don’t fully agree. That’s kind of the point of posting this.

To be clear, I don’t think alliances themselves are automatically bad. The issue is how unrestricted they are right now and how that removes most of the strategic decision-making. When alliances can pull towns from every continent to fight over a single capital, location stops mattering, continent identity disappears, and wars turn into pure population checks.

Based on what people here have said, I think there are a few changes that could seriously improve things without deleting alliances entirely:

1. Reduce alliance size (even temporarily).
Several people mentioned this, and I agree. Dropping the cap from 12 towns to 8, even for a single month, would be a great test. It would force alliances to make real choices about who they bring, instead of just stacking everyone possible. Smaller alliances would also mean more rivalries instead of two massive blobs.

2. Limit cross-continent participation.
If an alliance is fighting for a continent capital, the majority of that alliance should actually be from that continent. It makes no sense for half the alliance to have zero connection to the land they’re conquering. This alone would bring back geography and planning as meaningful factors.

3. Rework or remove merc towns.
I agree with the concern raised about merc towns. We already have reins, which are limited for a reason. Having unlimited merc towns on top of that just bypasses intended restrictions. If merc towns stay, they should at least be capped or tied to the continent being fought over.

4. Encourage more, smaller conflicts instead of server wide wars.
Some of the most fun fights weren’t the biggest ones, they were fights where individual towns and alliances actually mattered. Right now, everything escalates into 200+ player warp spam, which looks impressive but isn’t fun for a lot of people long term. Smaller alliances naturally lead to more frequent, meaningful fights.

I’m not claiming these ideas are perfect, and I’m not saying they should be permanent. But testing changes like these, even for one month, would give real data instead of assumptions. Right now, the meta feels stale, predictable, and heavily skewed toward whoever can stack the most towns.

I’m saying this because I want the server to stay interesting, not because I want it to burn. If people see flaws in these suggestions, I’m open to hearing them, but doing nothing clearly isn’t working either.

 

[capybara]

+1 i agree with what you wrote here fully the fights ive played in that were 20v20s or 30v30s were vastly more fun to play in than the 200v200 mega fights. Having to come up with different strategies, like sneaking, pushing at certain times, and defending at certain times and fights coming down to the wire, fighting alongside my town were some of the most fun fights ive taken part in. I think this take is a great start and would love to see what the elders will think to these ideas

 

[dmacest]

+1 Huge alliances such as HL and Southern Legacy dominate the server for months at a time (which harms the server in my opinion). Part of this being because of the 12 town alliance cap. It’s simply too big, it only allows for 1 (maybe 2?) alliances on a continent at a time. Reducing the town cap would create more competition and keep continents from being dominated or having “afk” months.

 

[Goofy]

I agree with this whole heartedly, massive fights with 200+ players look impressive but lack substance. No individual player can have real impact & they are never flawless from a performance perspective. Individual towns battling it out would be far more interesting.

 

[Cryptite]

Part of this being because of the 12 town alliance cap

No it's not. The way Loka is designed, 2 single towns without alliances could be the equivalent of 12 town alliances if the players wished to do so.

Concord has close to 900 members alone at this point.

Loka's design philosophy on Towns and Alliances is that mechanically speaking they are identical. To reiterate an example we've used since Conquest's beginning, a 100 member town is equivalent to a 100 member Alliance. Alliances of course will tend to be larger as it allows a diversity of players across towns to join together, but mechanically they are identical.

This is why we disagree with 90% of suggestions about arbitrarily increasing or decreasing caps of things - because historically they change nothing and the illusion of "increased competition and smaller fights" has never crystallized into reality in 10 years of Conquest. The only thing truly affected by smaller alliance sizes tends to be just the actual number of Towns that exist across Loka. The driving factor of reducing alliance size for us would only potentially be that there are too many small, inactive towns across the server which is precisely what happens when you do things like add arbitrary caps to merc towns. People just go right back to proxy towns and we repeat the circle.

Peacetime, whether globally or on specific continents is not some bug that needs fixed. It's natural. And what never changes is that players will always congregate into 2 sides where the Big Wars will happen. Players want to be in the big, consequential fights, and for recruits/logons nothing will stop them from doing this (because they don't care what town they're in, or where they live, they just come for the fight).

 

[the_farter123]

No it's not. The way Loka is designed, 2 single towns without alliances could be the equivalent of 12 town alliances if the players wished to do so.

Concord has close to 900 members alone at this point.

Loka's design philosophy on Towns and Alliances is that mechanically speaking they are identical. To reiterate an example we've used since Conquest's beginning, a 100 member town is equivalent to a 100 member Alliance. Alliances of course will tend to be larger as it allows a diversity of players across towns to join together, but mechanically they are identical.

This is why we disagree with 90% of suggestions about arbitrarily increasing or decreasing caps of things - because historically they change nothing and the illusion of "increased competition and smaller fights" has never crystallized into reality in 10 years of Conquest. The only thing truly affected by smaller alliance sizes tends to be just the actual number of Towns that exist across Loka. The driving factor of reducing alliance size for us would only potentially be that there are too many small, inactive towns across the server which is precisely what happens when you do things like add arbitrary caps to merc towns. People just go right back to proxy towns and we repeat the circle.

Peacetime, whether globally or on specific continents is not some bug that needs fixed. It's natural. And what never changes is that players will always congregate into 2 sides where the Big Wars will happen. Players want to be in the big, consequential fights, and for recruits/logons nothing will stop them from doing this (because they don't care what town they're in, or where they live, they just come for the fight).

FAX

 

[Cartir]

No it's not. The way Loka is designed, 2 single towns without alliances could be the equivalent of 12 town alliances if the players wished to do so.

Concord has close to 900 members alone at this point.

Loka's design philosophy on Towns and Alliances is that mechanically speaking they are identical. To reiterate an example we've used since Conquest's beginning, a 100 member town is equivalent to a 100 member Alliance. Alliances of course will tend to be larger as it allows a diversity of players across towns to join together, but mechanically they are identical.

This is why we disagree with 90% of suggestions about arbitrarily increasing or decreasing caps of things - because historically they change nothing and the illusion of "increased competition and smaller fights" has never crystallized into reality in 10 years of Conquest. The only thing truly affected by smaller alliance sizes tends to be just the actual number of Towns that exist across Loka. The driving factor of reducing alliance size for us would only potentially be that there are too many small, inactive towns across the server which is precisely what happens when you do things like add arbitrary caps to merc towns. People just go right back to proxy towns and we repeat the circle.

Peacetime, whether globally or on specific continents is not some bug that needs fixed. It's natural. And what never changes is that players will always congregate into 2 sides where the Big Wars will happen. Players want to be in the big, consequential fights, and for recruits/logons nothing will stop them from doing this (because they don't care what town they're in, or where they live, they just come for the fight).

I understand the point about towns and alliances being mechanically identical and that shrinking caps historically haven’t changed behavior. That’s exactly why I don’t think structural limits are the solution. If players will always consolidate into two major sides for the biggest fights, then changing caps isnt the solution, it’s incentives. Right now, the only fights that truly matter are the largest ones, so naturally, everyone piles into them. Instead of trying to prevent consolidation, why not make smaller, decentralized objectives meaningfully contribute to conquest victory, and add diminishing returns on oversized participation? That wouldn’t stop 200v200 wars, but it would make splitting forces strategically optimal instead of stacking everyone in one place. If spreading out becomes more efficient and incentivising than dogpiling, behavior changes without needing arbitrary limits.

 

[Cryptite]

smaller, decentralized objectives meaningfully contribute to conquest victory,

Agreed. It's not the point or really our desire to kneecap large fights since that's part of Loka's literal appeal. That said, Conquest wasn't designed for 400 players fights so we need to find ways to distribute players around the (giant) battlefields better.