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Discussion Version 1.23 + Sorcerers & Dragons

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.



 
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DeletedUser1754

Guest
I'm excited! It'll be a little while before I reach the Dragons and Sorcerers, but I'm looking forward to it!
I think that moving the bonuses to earlier versions of the troops will help a lot with the battles. It sounds like a great update to me! :D
 

Heymrdiedier

Well-Known Member
Very nice, i also see the enars embassy and the academy now give the correct runes on beta server! Im very happy
 

DeletedUser1075

Guest
I'm looking forward to a new guest race. I'm disappointed to see yet another row of expansions available that I can't take advantage of. I now have 23 unfilled, and I am far ahead of where I "should be" in scouting so theoretically my city should be much smaller.

At a certain point, it becomes demotivating to see all the extra space, have all these huge buildings to place, and realize that it's just not possible to do that and still have a city that functions well. This guest race requires a 7x7 campus surrounded by 4x4 and 5x5 buildings. That's a huge amount of space required, and it cannot be distributed like we have done with the guest race buildings in the past.

Inno, it is time to start thinking about other ways players can earn expansions.
 

DeletedUser1278

Guest
Why dont the magic maze produce mana??????
I dont think that its made for nothing

now 95 % of the players dont even place it because we need mana

Maybe the wonder building give enough mana
 
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Deleted User - 60107

Guest
My first thought: The new Ancient Wonders are... unimpressive, at best.

My second thought: Holy... Enar, those are some expensive techs! Half a million supplies for ONE tech?

The Campus is huge! And since it will likely get bigger with each new level, it seems like the last level will really be 10x10, or in other words 4 whole expansions!
 

daymaker

Member
Level 24 residence size?
Workshop, armory, training grounds?
Crafted Goods Manufactories?

Edit: nevermind, they had updated elvenarchitect.
 
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DeletedUser1075

Guest
Why dont the magic maze produce mana??????
I dont think that its made for nothing
Thinking about the time it would take to first think about then two weeks later start making a drawing
Then 1 month later trying to make the program
now 95 % of the players dont even place it because we need mana

Yes, culture will be a challenge as there are no new high-level culture buildings that also produce mana. I am unsure whether the magic maze will be helpful given the size and lack of mana production, and the mana producing buildings seem to all be severely deficient in culture. This is a lot of balancing considering the decay and the lack of expansions available. 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.
 

Heymrdiedier

Well-Known Member
Why dont the magic maze produce mana??????
I dont think that its made for nothing

now 95 % of the players dont even place it because we need mana

Maybe the wonder building give enough mana
Aha i noticed that too in the raw data before 1.23, i tought it was a mistake that would be corrected on 1.23 hitting the servers.

Didnt they say all future culture buildings would get mana?
 

DeletedUser1278

Guest
No at this moment timon did not lie
he told that nott all buildings will produce mana but those who do need a street.

so i think its a puzzel again
 

DeletedUser

Guest
Yes Yes Yes This is going to be a lot of fun. :D:D:D:D:D
Looks like I'm going to have to demolish quite a few buildings in my live city, but I'm not worried about that because I'm already producing way to many goods and even to many supplies at the moment. :p:p
Also a complete overhaul of cultural buildings, that will be a nice puzzle to play with.:cool::cool::cool:
I think that at the end of this chapter my city will have a completely different look. So with this chapter I can finally do what I really really like .... city building:D:D:D:D:D
Eagerly awaiting an update for Elven Architect Cityplanner now ;);)

YES! And now... The wiki! YOU CAN DO IT! ;)
Of course they can :)
 

DeletedUser1278

Guest
YES! And now... The wiki! YOU CAN DO IT! ;)

After the first repley somehow strangly removed by telling it would be 2018 and giving me points

I will not say in 2018 so ill say i hope before the vacation 2017
Because our wikimoderators are that busy because of the speed of our developers that there a little behind on our shedule
wich offcourse is very good of the developers that they can keep us busy

hope this is better or do my points go up again
 

DeletedUser118

Guest
I have a question that's bothering me for quite a few guest races already. Why do the devs add free space on one side of the city, while all new buildings get bigger to the other? Free space left, buildings get bigger to the right and the opposite. Why are you doing this? o_O
 

DeletedUser1721

Guest
Only two city expansions in the entire chapter, and the buildings are massive?

I'm beginning to wonder if Inno wants us to ignore their edicts against taking provinces beyond the goldilocks zone.
 

Marindor

Well-Known Member
I have a question that's bothering me for quite a few guest races already. Why do the devs add free space on one side of the city, while all new buildings get bigger to the other? Free space left, buildings get bigger to the right and the opposite. Why are you doing this? o_O

I'm not sure what you mean with this question, could you explain it please?
 

DeletedUser118

Guest
I'm not sure what you mean with this question, could you explain it please?

Well this guest race for example gets new space to the lower left of the city, while the buildings (like the armories (from 5x5 to 6x4 in size)) grow larger to the lower right. This already happend with other guest races before.

Edit: Picture added. Red arrow shows direction of new space, blue arrow shows direction the new buildings get bigger to.

Question remains: Why?
 

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Marindor

Well-Known Member
Ah ok... We will forward that question but I'm pretty sure that these 2 things are unrelated for each Guest Race will have different buildings sizes, new Guest Race buildings etc so you'd have to keep rearranging your city when you progress (which is part of the fun of a city builder game). :)
 

DeletedUser118

Guest
Ah ok... We will forward that question but I'm pretty sure that these 2 things are unrelated for each Guest Race will have different buildings sizes, new Guest Race buildings etc so you'd have to keep rearranging your city when you progress (which is part of the fun of a city builder game). :)

You see I don't have a problem with rearranging my city every time a new guest race appears. As you described it quite well, this here is a city building game. But strangely to me, it seems that all buildings that need to be upgraded always end up growing into the "wrong direction" so to speak. And this is definitely not the first guest race where this is happening. :)
 
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