Discussion Tournament Changes (post-release)

[ErestorX]

I think it is fair to have a formula that assumes players use mostly a mix of fighting and catering and build the wonders that fit their playing style.

Currently you are probably right, most players use a mix of fighting and catering. The problem is that given that formula the current strategy is suboptimal. The formula encourages players to decide to either fight or cater because as I explained in my previous post improving your ability in either fighting or catering has a strong negative impact on the other.

From what I know most players mostly fight in the tournament. And therefore I think that the current penalty of 0,003 per wonder level is to high for most non-fighting wonders; possibly even for the abyss.

Even for some fighting wonders. Even with only one queue a troop production effect was less valuable than the lower troop size from wrecking the troop producing wonder in my live city. And with three production queues barrack troops from troop producing wonders will have less value than before.

I also think that gold from neighbourly help should usually scale well with expansions. It does scale with both discovered neighbours and with main hall upgrades. The main hall should scale exponentially with research and discovered neighbours scales faster than available expansions.

Available expansions are not part of the formula as far as I know, it's placed expansions. Therefore to maximise the number of tournament provinces you can play with your gold income you have to scout like crazy without placing the available expansions. Again, you seem to look at existing cities to judge the formula and forget that the cities will change because of the formula in the future.

I have to admit I haven't repeated the excercise after the catering costs were adjusted. But before I planned a chapter eight city with 42 expansions that produced enough goods and supplies to match the gold income. Maybe a few more expansions would have been fine because I didn't take the gold income from Instants into account.

Taking that as a starting point, there was no way to improve the tournament potential of the city except for reducing the relic bonus and switching to good producing event buildings or researching to chapter 15, getting a phoenix, building a few military wonders and switching to manual fighting. The reason was that the increased gold income from main hall upgrade in chapter 9 was way too low to compensate for the increased costs because of the research and the need to place a lot of additional expansions, mainly to produce orcs for catering.

But I still do not see anything inherently wrong with having such a constant on principal.

If the effect of that formula on troop size would be displayed in every wonder together with the positive effects and everybody would get the ability to teleport wonders in case he doesn't like the balance, I wouldn't disagree. But I would still ask if it wasn't much simpler and straightforward to reduce the positive effects of the stronger wonders.

 

[Lovec Krys]

Exponential with exceptions can still be faster than exponential. Take the mana sawmill as an example. It produces 720 Mana in chapter 9. With a perfect exponential growth of 20% per chapter it should give 2580 Mana in chapter 16, but it does in fact give 3500.

There are also oposite examples. For example some set buildings like Fountain or Frost Carved Christmas Tree have 0 mana production rise between ch15 and ch16.

 

[Deleted User - 89608]

Leave the math to the experts.

I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately this applies to you as well. The term exponential has a very specific meaning and it has been way overused to describe many things in this game that are not exponential. For many of your examples of exponential increases, it's actually just the opposite. Apart from some buildings having an early rapid increase, there is a reduction in the rate of increase from one chapter to the next. That is not exponential.

If something grows 10% per level, that is linear.
If something grows 10% and the rate of growth steadily decreases with each successive step, that is logistic.
If something grows 10% and the rate of growth rapidly increases with each successive step, that is exponential.

 

[little bee]

Available expansions are not part of the formula as far as I know, it's placed expansions. Therefore to maximise the number of tournament provinces you can play with your gold income you have to scout like crazy without placing the available expansions. Again, you seem to look at existing cities to judge the formula and forget that the cities will change because of the formula in the future.

I am looking at cities that a normal player is expected to build with the new formula. Please don't forget that most players will never see this formua let alone change their city accordingly. Not researching optional squadsizes is easy. Optimizing a city for this formula is not and I doubt it will be widespread. So yes, I expect that available expansions will equal placed expansions for at least 99% of players.

There are also oposite examples. For example some set buildings like Fountain or Frost Carved Christmas Tree have 0 mana production rise between ch15 and ch16.

The Frost Carved Tree still produces 4.900 Mana at chapter 9 and 23.000 at chapter 16 which is more than the 17.558 Mana a perfect exponential growth of 20% per chapter would yield. I'm not saying I wouldn't support a realignment, but I don't think you are hoping for a nerv.

If something grows 10% per level, that is linear.
If something grows 10% and the rate of growth steadily decreases with each successive step, that is logistic.
If something grows 10% and the rate of growth rapidly increases with each successive step, that is exponential.

No, if something grows by 10% per level then it is exponential. If something grows by +100 per level then it is linear and if it grows by +100/n in the n-th step then it is logarithmic.

 

[Lovec Krys]

@little bee If something grows by 0%, then it's no longer exponential (and it doesn't matter how fast it grew before).

 

[spennyit]

From their announcement: "... We believe these adjustments will bring positive changes to the Tournaments, ...".

So, after 80 pages of comments, we "discovered" that probably top 150-200 tournament players per server will be unhappy because their tournament results will be drastically reduced (at least by 25%, to be optimistic, maintaining their tournament investments the same as with the old tournament model) or because it will cost "too much" to weekly compete for the top places and possibly one person per server will be happy. The rest will probably split 50%-50% or will not realize the difference.

I don't think that that INNO claim is met (at least in the players' perception), but I think it was the main claim that should have been met. It seems that customers satisfaction is no more the key to success.

 

[ErestorX]

I am looking at cities that a normal player is expected to build with the new formula. Please don't forget that most players will never see this formua let alone change their city accordingly. Not researching optional squadsizes is easy. Optimizing a city for this formula is not and I doubt it will be widespread.

First of all that is the best argument against using wonderlevels in the formula. If Inno doesn't give in game information about the negative impact of wonders, many new players who start building wonders based on in game information will be really pissed of if they learn about the negative effects later. That has been the same with optional squad sizes, players felt betrayed by Inno when they learned about the negative effects.

The other point is, that most players won't ever see or use the formula but tend to copy approaches that work well from others. This will take a bit of time - but some of the people in this forum are already building cities in line with the ideas they have to exploit the formula. It might take quite a few month until those cities have enough provinces to reach remarkable tournament results. But after that other players will start to be interested. Some of them will start building optimised cities as well, the most obvious use is to help out in tournament, pushing is an other obvious reason. Later some new players will learn how to build their city for easy tournament success in their fellowship or in the forum and will build their city accordingly.

At least it worked this way for the chapter 4 tournament cities, why do you think it will be different now?

 

[spennyit]

At least it worked this way for the chapter 4 tournament cities, why do you think it will be different now?

I don't think that the majority of players has a "tournaments only approach".

 

[little bee]

First of all that is the best argument against using wonderlevels in the formula. If Inno doesn't give in game information about the negative impact of wonders, many new players who start building wonders based on in game information will be really pissed of if they learn about the negative effects later. That has been the same with optional squad sizes, players felt betrayed by Inno when they learned about the negative effects.

Yes, you are probably right. That is why I do think that the penalty needs to be drastically reduced to 0,0001 at most. But as long as the constant is calculated from the least usefull rather than the average wonder, it should be fine.

@little bee If something grows by 0%, then it's no longer exponential (and it doesn't matter how fast it grew before).

Look, if this is so important to you, why don't you make a suggestion to realign the way mana scales. I will support you. I'm just warning you that is would result in a nerv. And honestly I think it would be more important to focus on the way the orc nest is scaling. Yes, it does scale exponentially, but it uses the wrong base wich means that it fails to keep up with the tournament formula. In my opinion it would be more important to change this constant than to ensure that mana scales in a perfectly exponential curve.

So, after 80 pages of comments, we "discovered" that probably top 150-200 tournament players per server will be unhappy because their tournament results will be drastically reduced (at least by 25%, to be optimistic, maintaining their tournament investments the same as with the old tournament model) or because it will cost "too much" to weekly compete for the top places and possibly one person per server will be happy. The rest will probably split 50%-50% or will not realize the difference.

Why would the rest be split 50%-50% ? From the numbers on EN it looks like a lot more than 50% had their performance increased. It looks more like there are a few very unhappy players vs. a lot of mildly pleased players. It is important to find a balance here, but I don't think you are in the mayority.

 

[spennyit]

... From the numbers on EN it looks like a lot more than 50% had their performance increased. It looks more like there are a few very unhappy players vs. a lot of mildly pleased players. It is important to find a balance here, but I don't think you are in the mayority.

This is not the perception I have reading EN forum.

 

[little bee]

This is not the perception I have reading EN forum.

But the EN forum is not exactly a representativ selection of the EN players. I don't think they are using a live world as testing site for the forum feedback. They have beta for that. But they need a live world to see the raw data of how the changes effect all those players not on the forum. And the mayority of those are profiting from the changes.

 

[Deleted User - 81190]

And the mayority of those are profiting from the changes.

If you claim to have information that no one else has, you may want to mention your sources.

 

[Deleted User - 89508]

So, expert or not, all the math and analysis is interesting- until it's not.
Thanks all, who have put so much time into sorting things out!

Complaints about INNO's formula being Flawed, or Unfair, are grounded in assumption that they intend to be Fair?

Inno can use Logarithmic elements in their formula- or Exponential ones, or Linear ones.
They can use a Random value generator, or common household VooDoo.
Any of these techniques (or combinations) could lead to something that is Fair, and Playable... if thats what they wanted.

They intend to Dilute the advantage of Time Instants, and Brown Bears. Concurrent Building Ques does both-
It wont reduce their actual value, but it puts a Chainsaw to the Advantage of Having them!

They want to make "10 chests" a Participation trophy, for early players-
They dont want players without Brown Bear, or Fire Bird to feel so bad about it-
They dont want most players staring Up at Good Players, thinking they cant Catch them, until they Achieve Something?

Sheeze.... So Many Ways to address these Interests, and others, have already been Said!!
YES, -Suggestions that dont Totally Destroy foundational values, and Goals!!

They could just REMOVE Squad Size, or Optional Increases from their Formula...
They can use the Same Formula- just starting a little easier, to get more people to 10 chests...
They could just Reduce KP prizes, for provinces after 50...
They can work in Bear/Phoenix after certain chapters, or per calendar... (which they seem to be figuring out??)...

Man.. there are so Many, EASIER, FAIRER ways to address various concerns... Yes, small tweaks... ...without Punishing Top Players for their success... without depriving Middle Players of Ambition.... and without Deceiving Early players into thinking there's a benefit in Striving for Excellence.

PS: Those who say "all battles are winnable";
I invite you to look at my attachment, and SAY what bonuses and troops will be needed to win.
Please. -This is a Real print, from My Real City. Ive Put in some of my own troops as visual aids. And after you Say How to Win, I will suggest that for Discussion Purposes, it doesnt matter if this is Map, Spire, or Tournament... "unwinnable battles" is a much more useful term than "All battles are Winnable".

 

[Heymrdiedier]

PS: Those who say "all battles are winnable";
I invite you to look at my attachment, and SAY what bonuses and troops will be needed to win.
Please. -This is a Real print, from My Real City. Ive Put in some of my own troops as visual aids. And after you Say How to Win, I will suggest that for Discussion Purposes, it doesnt matter if this is Map, Spire, or Tournament... "unwinnable battles" is a much more useful term than "All battles are Winnable". View attachment 7915

thats not a picture of tournament, since it has more then 5 enemy units. but if it was scaled to tournament, i would say you need all priests in this setup, and about 5 or 6 mage boosts. some hp boosts are probably needed as well but i cant take an estimated guess since im an elf and i dont know how cookie those priests are. The key is to kill the mages before they can even hit you, if thats possible you wouldnt even need hp boosts i guess

 

[Dony]

that is from world map where enemy has 20x more SS and he just need to wait few years to beat it, was not intended to go that far
this will never happen in current tournament

 

[little bee]

If you claim to have information that no one else has, you may want to mention your sources.

Yes of course. INNO announced that the tournament would become easier for players doing less than 2500 points and everything I read here and on the EN forum seems to confirm that. So you can just count how many players fall in that category. I think I remember someone on the EN forum posting the numbers and only around 10% of active tournament players were doing more than 2500 points. I'm not on EN and didn't confirm it myself. But it would fit with the numbers from my own world.

 

[Deleted User - 89508]

Ok... right, it is MAP...
... actually trying to Figure out this Battle...?
Yes.. 5 priests, with 5-6 bonuses... might kill those two generals.

Inconvenient Fact.... two Dryads, each Killing a one of your units on first shot.... and again on second shot...

After working that Out... Still 3 ogres, without a scratch... ?

 

[spennyit]

Yes of course. INNO announced that the tournament would become easier for players doing less than 2500 points and everything I read here and on the EN forum seems to confirm that. So you can just count how many players fall in that category. I think I remember someone on the EN forum posting the numbers and only around 10% of active tournament players were doing more than 2500 points. I'm not on EN and didn't confirm it myself. But it would fit with the numbers from my own world.

So your data have the same probability of my 50%-50%

 

[Deleted User - 89508]

that is from world map where enemy has 20x more SS and he just need to wait few years to beat it, was not intended to go that far
this will never happen in current tournament

LoL!!
Im Not assuming anything about how this was intended... but...
It just strikes me FUNNY... to think that the answer to a Game Question is "Wait a Few Years"....

 

[Deleted User - 89508]

Anyway.. my intent for posting the image...
i'd prefer people accept and use the Concept of Unwinnable Battles... and not duck behind "All Battles are Winnable"...