I really expect some serious communication from Innogames about this so called "Battle Redesign" (which should be called broken redesign now), they even asked us in that announcement thread: We will be more than happy to answer your questions you have so far. I expected much more from this update.
Limiting factor for gaining new expansion should be scouting time and not abnormal difficulty, there should not be so big jumps in enemy squad sizes per ring (unless that change is done only to new scouted provinces after this update and not old), fight should be fun to do, we should have some losses and everything would be OK. But it isnt.
You promoted in last InnoTV episode and in that redesign thread that it should be obvious choice when picking our army against NPC (especially for newcomers or not-fighters till now), that every unit will have advantage against 2. OK lets take a look.
I am elf so I will write here for their units. Just for the record im now in middle of the dwarven chapter here on beta. I have 30+ provinces waiting to try out this battle redesign.
Sword acrobat was supposed to do good against light archers and sorceresses/enchantress so i found out province with only this 2 types of units and only 5 squads total so it should be fair, something that every casual in the world will pick up when this patch goes live.
Its close to zero to beat this setup just because: they play with me like cat with mouse, kite me around obstacles, placing debuff on me with increase damage taken so i loose an advantage and easily beat me.
Archers II were supposed to do good against sorceress/enchantress and treants, found this type of province and tried. Enemy squad size where about 20%-30% more then mine, 1 enchantress squad killed half of my archer squad with placing debuff to take even more dmg from next source, while it took me with my 4 squads to kill this 1 enchantress squad, against treant its a bit better then before.
Golems II were supposed to be good against light melee and light ranged, i tried province with 5 archers and 1 treant, while it was good against archers, that 1 treant killed almost half of my army (yes i know treant is good against heavy ranged) and that didnt felt good. Golems against light melee were partially good, but i personally dont think its good choice anyway, they are doing too low damage.
Treant II were supposed be good against light melee and heavy ranged. Against light melee its useless unit now, will talk about it below. Against heavy ranged as expected its hard (its possible) just because there are plenty of opponent squads, and they block my way to them which means their bonus was useless all the fight till i killed all others. (was fighting against cerberuses and steinlings II).
Sorceress II were supposed to be good against heavy melee and heavy ranged and they are. I personally thought that 1 of the reason for this rebalance was to nerf sorceress, but they are still best unit.
Of course i dont have lvl 3 units with special abilities (archers III has any?) on beta which can change some strategies, but not much.
Lets talk about broken mechanics.
I liked the idea that melees can retaliation 2 times per turn, but only enemies and not us?
I dont know which broken mind in inno made retaliation 50% of normal damage but he must have been smoking some brutal weeds.
This excludes using melees against melees in most cases, imagine scenario 5 melees on our side, 8 melees on enemy side, with 50% retaliation is actually to fight against 10.5 squads and they can retaliate 2 times now. This should have not been changed with this new system because yuor "wise minds" at inno didnt balance melee units around that, im 100% confident.
Light ranged are supposed to fight against mages but they didnt got defense against them? So mages use debuff on them and they take increased damage, while they were supposed to be good against them?
Heavy melee are supposed to fight against light melee and didnt got bonus damage against them? Yes they got 30% damage reduction but taking 50% more damage from retaliation, so in fact they are not good against melee at all. I would like explanation from inno about this.
Heavy ranged are supposed to fight against light melees and didnt got bonus defense against them? What about cerberuses or war dog which hit them before they can do that bonus damage?
Cerberus II and War dog II has same damage values?
Upgrades of our units have so little increases? Really? That must be joke.
Almost all provinces have same kind of setup (3 types of units)? What makes provinces different from each other now? Nothing.
"Bug" from previous battle system where damage per unit is exponencially higher the less units are in squad also has no place in this redesign since we have plenty guaranted losses now. Its retarded that 1 unit doing 100 times more damage then intended and its even more the bigger squad on the start of the battle is, i even saw 200-1000 times more damage.
I dont know if inno ever realized but almost nobody (if any) fight in provinces against same squad size, its still higher and then even higher, who in the world cares it is balanced for same squads size when they never stay against each other? (apart from tournament)
This broken redesign can be done in 1 day max, its so broken.
Where in this system are we supposed to have fun you were promoting we should have? Can somebody explain? Yes you will laugh at us trying to fight thats for sure.
This was more or less feedback for around of dwarven chapter.
How to fix it?
Plenty of ways.
Provinces should have much smoother increase of difficulty per ring, it doesnt make sense to have this big difference, we will have losses anyway, dont need to wipe out us and not give us solution to overcome it. It takes 1 month to take expansion anyway, there is zero reasons why to make it even worse for everybody. If this was done to remove our supplies more rapidly then it failed horribly.
Defenses of our units are completly broken if you are not rebalance numbers in squads of enemy.
Every our supposed unit to be good against something should be actually good and not even worse (treant), and even every unit should have apropriate attacks/defenses against unit they are supposed to be good? How in the earth you want to sell this to casual if its completly broken?
Tone down retaliation damage
Remove increased damage per damaged unit
Remove bugs you transfered from old system (like really? still showing wrong debuffs on units, increasing my suqad over the top when taking zero damage etc).
And even numbers are horrible (some units should be doing more damage, and some units should have less damage = i am talking mainly about units which are supposed to be good against something, not all of them are)
I am not saying fights are impossible, its a challenge, but i dont see how this redesign can address casuals or new players at all.
Only logical explanation of this broken system is that you will release new more powerfull units in future, but what till then?
Personally i play this game for fighting, if this wont be fun even for fighters, nobody will have fun ever, which is exactly what you didnt wanted and yet you managed to do it. Deja vu?