Sabos out of balance

[DeletedUser1460]

Sabos are a real balance issue, when compared with trebs or zerks.
-They are at full strength in a matter of hours, it takes weeks to build nukes
-They are unaffected by faith
-While the travel time has been reduced, once the sabo lands the spies die and can be immediately rebuilt, so travel time is only one way.

That is the change I proposed should happen. Implement a sabo timer, so after a sabo from any city hits, that city has to spend a certain amount of time(3-5 days) before it can launch another sabo.

 

[DeletedUser]

Yeah, I'm fed up with this. Steady stream of sabo's at any church building I land. Only defense is to babysit 24/7 requeing spies. I dunno, I could come up with some ideas that might balance things better, but as far as I'm concerned it's a broken feature that should never have been implemented.
At the least I think defending spies should survive at a much higher rate. It's all well and good to jump on and queue 3-4 new spies, but when they die in the first couple of attacks, and you're getting hit with 50 per day...
Maybe some kind of cumulative defense bonus, so the more a village gets attacked by sabotage the higher it's intrinsic defense (with or without spies).
5th spy should take significantly longer to recruit. So people can still build 4 spies for actual spieing, and defense relatively quickly, but that 5th takes a day or more. That way sabotagers need to make a call on using only 4 for reduced success rate, or waiting longer between attempts to use 5.

A big, BIG help (and I can't believe it hasn't been done) would be to allow us to send our own spies to support. I don't get why some guy with 100 villages can make half his HoO thieves guilds and hit me with 50 sabs per day, but I can only defend with max 5 spies from the single village under attack. Its completely counter to how the rest of the game works. I should be able to counter his mass spy attacks, with mass spy support of my own, the same way I can counter troop attacks by using troops from other cities to support.

 

[DeletedUser984]

Completely agree that sabos are out of balance. Don't think a timer will be the best fix. I think it could work, but think there are better ways. I think my favorite fix was similar to what shontsoo posted above where you require a long time to rebuild the 5th spy, but then REQUIRE 5 spies in order to sab. I also do like a buildup of spy defense the more often you get hit.

 

[DeletedUser465]

Psshh you guys should've been around when sabs were only 1 spy on world 1. xD

Sabs are extremely nerfed with success rates. If you don't have homegaurd and a lvl 15 tavern, you're asking to be sabbed to begin with.

Also, it's an alternative to killing off a highly stacked church, which jsut got a little easier unless you heavily coin, by the extremely high wall building time they added.

 

[DeletedUser]

If you don't have homegaurd and a lvl 15 tavern, you're asking to be sabbed to begin with.

This would be fine, but the obvious (and in my experience, usual) target for sabotage is a new church. Noble a perfect barb, queue a church, and some walls, and within a day or so - no church, farm is now too low to support one, and HQ is too low to build an academy. People keep saying chapel, and that's a big help but there's still the academy issue. Plus, it's not uncommon to want to drop into multiple provinces (I'm sure that's not just me). Oh, and of course Tavern is dropping in levels too, so less spies when you can queue them.
I dunno, maybe the theory is you need to buy the homeguard perk every time you drop a church in a new province, but that'd be disappointing.

 

[DeletedUser465]

Academy isn't a must have...

 

[DeletedUser1460]

Academy isn't a must have when invading a prov? Really?

I guess it depends on your speed of play.

 

[DeletedUser]

The church is the key, the noble can be smoke screened so easily once you have faith bonus.

 

[DeletedUser1260]

An academy is not a must have in a church village agreed Ice. Plus if you take a player village and leave most of the wall rather then a barbarian to get into a province in the first place the only thing you queue is the church if you really must. People I will give you a hint: Chapels can't get sabo'd. There are strategies that will combat the sabo's if you choose to think about them.
Think instead of lament.
Sure, sabos, need tweaks, and if you are being hit with them are you then using them? Do you not have it in your arsenal? The speed of the spies recruitment really makes the mechanic more ideal to use by all.

I suggest that the number of sabo attacks be limited, much like we limit the number of attacks we can send from one village. We reverse it to limit the number of sabo attacks on one village.
That even though the spies are dead there is a travel time to carry their bodies back in order to recruit them again.