AD2460 Cycle IX : The Art Of War — Part 2

The next cycle of AD2460 will begin this Saturday. As you may already know, there are several changes and improvements. Not everyone prefers to read the long “change-log”, so I thought it might be a good idea make some articles to try to break it down a little, into more manageable pieces. You can find the previous article here.

While alliances were not specifically targeted for improvements, some modifications, fixes and additions “forced” their way in anyway.

We have had numerous requests for increasing the resource-storage for alliance banks, and this time we have done so, by 25%. Banks can now store 500 million of each resource type. At the same time, the maximum personal resource storage has been doubled from 50 to 100 million.
Also by request from our players, bank grace has been modified by a random addition of 0.01–9.99 % extra time, to make it less predictable when a bank can be attacked again.
Some alliances have also been faced with the problem of receiving undesirable ships in their bank fleet. To alleviate this concern, alliance leaders will now be able to LOCK the bank-fleet for further ship-transfers.

The last point affecting alliances has to do with commanders, their personalities combined with the different techs, and the commander ability in combat. The alliance-bank and all stations now have commanders that can be modified at will. The alliance leader, and station governors, can freely alter both the stats and personality of such commanders under their control. This may sound like a surprising addition, but due to a certain combat-related change, this is now rather important. As different players use different techs, they have need for different commanders to suit their specific fleets. The combat-related change I refer to, is the triggering of the commander ability.

The turn in which this ability triggers is no longer affected by random chance. It is now tied directly to the commanders Commanding attribute.
A commanding value of 0–19 will trigger the ability in turn 7.
A commanding value of 20–39 will trigger the ability in turn 6.
A commanding value of 40–59 will trigger the ability in turn 5.
A commanding value of 60–79 will trigger the ability in turn 4.
A commanding value of 80+ will trigger the ability in turn 3.

We have made this change to reduce the “randomness” of combat outcome, and to try to make combats easier to comprehend. For a long time, many players have been under the impression that “an early trigger of the ability = win”. The reality is far more complex. We will not go into the advanced explanations here, but it is covered in great depth in the updated game manual under Combat -> Commanders. We recommend that experienced players read it all, as there is much to learn on the topic as a whole.

This should cover the changes for the next cycle which relate to alliances. We will continue this series tomorrow, with a look at the new TechTree, where a LOT has changed….