Dear Humans and Elves,
Please use this thread to discuss our new guest race as well as the rest of version 1.23.
We are looking forward to your feedback!
Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Beta Team
Please see our answer on some of the feedback/questions you've given us:
The buildings are very big (both the GR buildings and the new upgrades of existing buildings). In return we get only 2 new tech tree expansions, which is really not enough.
From a balancing perspective it should be enough. We do believe that part of the problem here is that the settlement for the sorcerers requires a rather “fixed” shape for the settlement buildings, while other settlements could be a bit more scattered/spread out through the city. Also, for previous guest races people could more easily “ignore” the expected amounts of buildings in the city, which means they take longer to go through the chapter, and that they can use more space in their city for non-settlement buildings. Due to the sorcerers’ big sized buildings, that might not be as easy anymore.
This “fixed size” in the settlement is not something that’ll return for every guest race to come. But it’s one of the challenges that the players will have to face in the Sorcerers chapter. Also, if the campus was smaller, it wouldn’t provide enough space to place the faculties around that.
It's a little cruel to add 11 expansions to the map, but tell people "you can only have 2 of them for playing, the rest start at US$80."
The max city grid was raised now, but we will not do that for every guest race anymore, so there will be new chapters in which you will not get extra city space (on the MAX grid – you still can unlock further expansions, of course). And this “lack of increase” also won’t be a problem, since people will still have enough space to place their expansions on. There is no necessity to fill the city grid completely – as the balancing keeps the number of available expansions in mind (free ones), not the maximum city grid.
Also, it is a bit unfair to claim that premium expansions “start at $80”, since that just isn’t the case. They get expensive, yes, but they do not start even near that price.
Why do a lot of the new culture buildings not even produce mana while it's such an important element in this phase of the game? This makes the Magic Maze e.g. quite useless.
If you need the buildings that produce mana, we'd like to advise you not to place the ones that don’t and focus on those that do instead. The ones that don’t produce mana are more efficient in culture/square, so if you have enough mana you can use those to boost your culture level a bit. While the building may not be perfect for everyone’s needs, we try to cater to the needs of multiple play-styles.
The balance in the culture buildings is between mana and culture. If they’re strong in mana, they are weak in culture, and vice versa. So not every building needs to produce mana for the player to have enough of those buildings. In the Woodelves chapter, (almost?) every building produces mana – for later races this will not be the case.
Please stop telling us we should deal with the space as a challenge when the guest races continuously make it impossible to simply build smaller or fewer - with the decay factor, we cannot simply save up mana over time from a smaller production base. Eventually the production rate and decay rate balance out. And we can't get the wonders that reduce decay until AFTER we have the mana required. So there is a minimum size requirement here, both for the guest race buildings themselves, and for the mana/culture production.
Minimum size requirements for settlements and such have never been denied. We even have story-type quests demanding X amount of buildings, which basically confirms that we do have a “minimal size” in that sense. Those quests typically request 2/3rds of the expected buildings, to be a bit more lenient in that. Also, space is Elvenar’s biggest challenge. What we do try, however, is to provide the player with more and more challenges the further he progresses through the game. Mana is definitely one of those new challenges that the player will have to face. And as pointed out by you: it is indeed quite a hard one. But at that stage of the game, an “easy challenge” simply wouldn’t be a challenge to begin with. Players are experienced in their gameplay at that point and they should not have too much difficulty overcoming this challenge.
The new techs are very expensive in terms of needed supplies.
Yes. Also the production of resources is faster if you are that advanced in the game and you can use various things to boost production, such as Ancient Wonders and Spells. The Power of Provision spell e.g. actually gives the player a very big boost to their supply production. Use those correctly and you can get hundreds of Ks of supplies within a day.
A better AI is great, but the squad sizes in tournaments were designed for the old AI. So fights just got harder. Also when playing against 8 enemy squads, the amount of units per enemy squad can be less than if they were with only 5 squads, but each squad is able to buff/debuff so in comparison these fights are really too hard.
We will definitely look into that, thank you for pointing this out. The tournaments were initially designed without abilities (buff/debuff) in mind, so the impact of this is something we will indeed investigate further.
AI for archers is still bad. With the new AI, our Archers STILL don't know not to rush forward, right into the attack range of all enemy squads. They even block my own squads. It's most obvious with Archers since they move first (due to high Initiative), but it's usually the same with all units: If they can attack an enemy they will even if that leaves them in a very bad position and not attacking would have been the smarter move.
The AI’s first move is to check if it can attack. If it can, it does. This works like that for both the player- and the enemy units. Based on your feedback, we will look if we can adjust this behaviour, but we can already tell you that this is very hard in our current system so please don't expect short term changes here.
War Dogs still are a special case: they have such an abundance of move-points that the AI just has no strategy to fight them.
We would like to advise you the following: If you face war dogs you should pick heavy range/heave melee units. If the war dogs approach those in their first moves, then they can be easily killed by those units. And the walking range makes sure that the dogs are good enough against mages and light ranged, as they should be. If you have specific examples, please do share.
With the new AI, level 6 tournaments are nearly impossible to win.
The 6th level has always been hard (and has always been intended to be hard). In order to give any proper feedback back to you here we’ll need more details about what exactly is too hard now. Also, is it manual battle, or auto-battle that is too hard now?
We can already reveal to you that game version 1.24 will get new tournament balancing based on your feedback and you won’t necessarily need the 6th level of the tournament anymore to be able to unlock the 10th fellowship reward chest. This might help you as well. More details will come when we release version 1.24
We'd like the Wiki to be updated as soon as new content gets released on Beta.
The intention for the wiki is to have all information on the wiki in the first week after the Beta release of features. Then in the 2nd week we translate it to the other markets. We’re almost caught up with the backlog, and hope to have this system in place within several weeks.
I don't get it why not every Ancient Wonder changes its appearance... Every other building does.
At this moment it would take up too much time from our Artists to make this happen, while there are a lot of other things we're working on, which need their effort as well (events, Guest Races, UI changes etcetera). We will keep this suggestion in mind for the future, though.
I came here to play a fantasy city building game. I discovered the game, I liked its unique concept, I liked it because it was not just another battle game. The game now is all about the tournaments. Many players have left because they are unhappy with the changes.
Although it might seem as if lately we only focussed on Battle-related things, this is not really the case. A lot of the other things we're working on, are all behind the scenes so they will be noticed in the (near) future but we do understand the confusion this causes in the player's perception. Please do keep in mind that the tournaments (as well as the World Map provinces) can be played completely without fighting.
Please use this thread to discuss our new guest race as well as the rest of version 1.23.
We are looking forward to your feedback!
Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Beta Team
Please see our answer on some of the feedback/questions you've given us:
The buildings are very big (both the GR buildings and the new upgrades of existing buildings). In return we get only 2 new tech tree expansions, which is really not enough.
From a balancing perspective it should be enough. We do believe that part of the problem here is that the settlement for the sorcerers requires a rather “fixed” shape for the settlement buildings, while other settlements could be a bit more scattered/spread out through the city. Also, for previous guest races people could more easily “ignore” the expected amounts of buildings in the city, which means they take longer to go through the chapter, and that they can use more space in their city for non-settlement buildings. Due to the sorcerers’ big sized buildings, that might not be as easy anymore.
This “fixed size” in the settlement is not something that’ll return for every guest race to come. But it’s one of the challenges that the players will have to face in the Sorcerers chapter. Also, if the campus was smaller, it wouldn’t provide enough space to place the faculties around that.
It's a little cruel to add 11 expansions to the map, but tell people "you can only have 2 of them for playing, the rest start at US$80."
The max city grid was raised now, but we will not do that for every guest race anymore, so there will be new chapters in which you will not get extra city space (on the MAX grid – you still can unlock further expansions, of course). And this “lack of increase” also won’t be a problem, since people will still have enough space to place their expansions on. There is no necessity to fill the city grid completely – as the balancing keeps the number of available expansions in mind (free ones), not the maximum city grid.
Also, it is a bit unfair to claim that premium expansions “start at $80”, since that just isn’t the case. They get expensive, yes, but they do not start even near that price.
Why do a lot of the new culture buildings not even produce mana while it's such an important element in this phase of the game? This makes the Magic Maze e.g. quite useless.
If you need the buildings that produce mana, we'd like to advise you not to place the ones that don’t and focus on those that do instead. The ones that don’t produce mana are more efficient in culture/square, so if you have enough mana you can use those to boost your culture level a bit. While the building may not be perfect for everyone’s needs, we try to cater to the needs of multiple play-styles.
The balance in the culture buildings is between mana and culture. If they’re strong in mana, they are weak in culture, and vice versa. So not every building needs to produce mana for the player to have enough of those buildings. In the Woodelves chapter, (almost?) every building produces mana – for later races this will not be the case.
Please stop telling us we should deal with the space as a challenge when the guest races continuously make it impossible to simply build smaller or fewer - with the decay factor, we cannot simply save up mana over time from a smaller production base. Eventually the production rate and decay rate balance out. And we can't get the wonders that reduce decay until AFTER we have the mana required. So there is a minimum size requirement here, both for the guest race buildings themselves, and for the mana/culture production.
Minimum size requirements for settlements and such have never been denied. We even have story-type quests demanding X amount of buildings, which basically confirms that we do have a “minimal size” in that sense. Those quests typically request 2/3rds of the expected buildings, to be a bit more lenient in that. Also, space is Elvenar’s biggest challenge. What we do try, however, is to provide the player with more and more challenges the further he progresses through the game. Mana is definitely one of those new challenges that the player will have to face. And as pointed out by you: it is indeed quite a hard one. But at that stage of the game, an “easy challenge” simply wouldn’t be a challenge to begin with. Players are experienced in their gameplay at that point and they should not have too much difficulty overcoming this challenge.
The new techs are very expensive in terms of needed supplies.
Yes. Also the production of resources is faster if you are that advanced in the game and you can use various things to boost production, such as Ancient Wonders and Spells. The Power of Provision spell e.g. actually gives the player a very big boost to their supply production. Use those correctly and you can get hundreds of Ks of supplies within a day.
A better AI is great, but the squad sizes in tournaments were designed for the old AI. So fights just got harder. Also when playing against 8 enemy squads, the amount of units per enemy squad can be less than if they were with only 5 squads, but each squad is able to buff/debuff so in comparison these fights are really too hard.
We will definitely look into that, thank you for pointing this out. The tournaments were initially designed without abilities (buff/debuff) in mind, so the impact of this is something we will indeed investigate further.
AI for archers is still bad. With the new AI, our Archers STILL don't know not to rush forward, right into the attack range of all enemy squads. They even block my own squads. It's most obvious with Archers since they move first (due to high Initiative), but it's usually the same with all units: If they can attack an enemy they will even if that leaves them in a very bad position and not attacking would have been the smarter move.
The AI’s first move is to check if it can attack. If it can, it does. This works like that for both the player- and the enemy units. Based on your feedback, we will look if we can adjust this behaviour, but we can already tell you that this is very hard in our current system so please don't expect short term changes here.
War Dogs still are a special case: they have such an abundance of move-points that the AI just has no strategy to fight them.
We would like to advise you the following: If you face war dogs you should pick heavy range/heave melee units. If the war dogs approach those in their first moves, then they can be easily killed by those units. And the walking range makes sure that the dogs are good enough against mages and light ranged, as they should be. If you have specific examples, please do share.
With the new AI, level 6 tournaments are nearly impossible to win.
The 6th level has always been hard (and has always been intended to be hard). In order to give any proper feedback back to you here we’ll need more details about what exactly is too hard now. Also, is it manual battle, or auto-battle that is too hard now?
We can already reveal to you that game version 1.24 will get new tournament balancing based on your feedback and you won’t necessarily need the 6th level of the tournament anymore to be able to unlock the 10th fellowship reward chest. This might help you as well. More details will come when we release version 1.24
We'd like the Wiki to be updated as soon as new content gets released on Beta.
The intention for the wiki is to have all information on the wiki in the first week after the Beta release of features. Then in the 2nd week we translate it to the other markets. We’re almost caught up with the backlog, and hope to have this system in place within several weeks.
I don't get it why not every Ancient Wonder changes its appearance... Every other building does.
At this moment it would take up too much time from our Artists to make this happen, while there are a lot of other things we're working on, which need their effort as well (events, Guest Races, UI changes etcetera). We will keep this suggestion in mind for the future, though.
I came here to play a fantasy city building game. I discovered the game, I liked its unique concept, I liked it because it was not just another battle game. The game now is all about the tournaments. Many players have left because they are unhappy with the changes.
Although it might seem as if lately we only focussed on Battle-related things, this is not really the case. A lot of the other things we're working on, are all behind the scenes so they will be noticed in the (near) future but we do understand the confusion this causes in the player's perception. Please do keep in mind that the tournaments (as well as the World Map provinces) can be played completely without fighting.
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