New Alliance & Embassy Mechanics

Introduction

The Embassy and Alliance mechanics always felt a bit like cheating to me. Especially with the Embassy building having a given "capacity", which means only 3/6/9/12/... and up to 60 members could be in the alliance, depending on the level of your Embassy.

Now, this is all cool and dandy but once you had an Embassy on level 20 and you reached 60 alliance members, you were free to demolish the building completely and nothing ever happened. You wouldn't be able to switch alliances but that was about it. The capacity property for Embassy no longer applied. If it did, you would not be able to demolish it even a single level down to 19 - because with full 60 members, the Embassy wouldn't be able to hold them at level 19 anymore.

So I decided to pepper the game a little, making Embassy a somewhat more visible chess-piece on the board.

New Mechanics

In order to make things interesting, I've developed a whole new set of rules for demolition and battle-destruction of the Embassy. It's a little bit complicated but actually mirrors the "capacity" property of the alliance perfectly.

The main change is that people can't really demolish their Embassies without a side-effect of being punished once it goes too low. For an alliance member, this would mean their Embassy must never go below level 1. If it does, they are warned and subsequently removed from their alliance.

Similarly, for alliance founders, this actually presents even more of a challenge, since they are the ones who need to keep their alliance running smoothly. For them, demolition of an Embassy will not be allowed below a level that can still hold the current number of alliance members.

Now, in the peculiar situation when other players/alliances actually attack the founder's village where their Embassy stands, and subsequently target that Embassy with their catapults and rams - that situation can bring a whole lot of trouble. If there are no other Embassies in other founder's villages on a sufficient level to hold all the alliance members, the alliance could be dispersed. The only exception would be if any other member of the alliance had a sufficiently developed Embassy - in which case that member will be auto-elected to a leadership position and will save the alliance. If no such player is found, the alliance will be completely dispersed.

Detailed information

For a more graphical and in-depth information about how this new system works, you can visit this Google Presentation.