What is everyone's experience with systems that penalize players for attacking outside of a certain range? Ie, if a player attacks some with half their population, or less than 60% of their karma, or some other system of comparison of ratios, then the attacker suffers a long term penalty if the ratio is outside of a given range.
I'm considering adding such a system to my game and wanted some feedback before I dove too deep into the engineering of it. Specifically, in a land grab game, I want to limit the population growth through a system of Prestige. Specifically, a player will receive a large population growth nerf if their population hits a certain size, and their Prestige is too low. A player will naturally gain prestige as they grow their kingdom, but will suffer a permanent penalty if they attack someone with a significantly smaller kingdom. They will also receive a buff for defeating someone larger than them, and a small buff for simply attacking someone larger than them with less Prestige. I'm even toying with the idea of letting people who want to be evil and do nothing but attack down have a means for doing this. Perhaps removing the nerf, but making them the targets of high Prestige kingdoms, and suffer larger losses if defeated.
Anyways, I'm not asking for a critique of my system, I'm simply asking for your experience with such a system. Does it work? Does it discourage bullying of new players? Does it produce the effect you were hoping for? Does it increase competition amongst top tier players? Or is it a failed system?
