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Discussion Spire of Eternity

DeletedUser

Guest
we discourage players from unintended and borderline exploitative play styles, such as staying on Chapter 4 and ONLY improving Ancient Wonders and Relic Boost.

And this is why Elvenar will always be inferior to Forge of Empires. You are penalizing players who want to take the game slow and strengthen their city early on to be much better prepared for later chapters. The fact that there's an 80% increase in cost from the one account to another in the same chapter is concerning...so basically you have to play Elvenar a certain way or else you will be penalized...

Now I will say this...I also play FoE and have a Colonial Age city with a very large military boost and a lv 80 Arc from Future Era. I can clear Guild Expeditions (Spire variant) easily with minimal losses. However, I recently stopped playing that city because the game got so trivial it was a joke and it no longer was fun and it defeated the city building idea. I started a new city and will play the game how it is intended because that seems more like a fun challenge. The reason I bring this up is because the nice thing about FoE is players get to decide if they want to play the game as originally intended, or use 'exploitative' tactics like getting an Arc in Iron Age and just camp and strengthen their city. This is not exploitative because if someone wants to match an early age player with future GBs, they can also achieve them by the same means and compete with that player if they choose to.

The problem here is that what you guys think is 'exploitative' is simply not the case. If I casually advanced through the game and noticed someone was getting much more progress in the spire than me because they increased their AW and relic boosts, I would stop and think: "Hey that's actually a really good idea. Maybe I should slow down a bit if I want to get better prizes in the spire." I see no reason how they are exploiting the game.

The sad thing is I want to prefer this game as I love the artwork and many of the game mechanics, but everytime I come back you guys shoot down any chance I have of staying in the long run.
 
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DeletedUser332

Guest
@Marindor I have to say that I'm also very curious to see what this 'formula' is for determining Spire costs/squad sizes. However, after reading your most recent reply I think I'm more curious why you're defending the position of keeping it hidden. What do you/Inno see that you're going to lose by revealing this information to players?

In either case, the thing about this that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is that, regardless of what effect levelling an AW has on the Spire, two facts remain here: 1) each AW has different effects, so it's essentially impossible to categorize them all as having the same effect on Spire play; and 2) in every other area of the game, an AW level offers nothing but its benefit, which is kind of the whole point of gathering runes, devoting city space, and dumping hundreds of KP to obtain/level them in the first place. If I'm levelling up a Dragon Abbey for an additional 1% attack power on my mage units, I want it to be 1%. Not 0.5%, not 0.7%, not even 0.99%. While it's only in one area of the game (for now), this new implementation of essentially applying a global nerf to every single AW in the game is very troubling to me and I think should be removed from the calculation immediately. It's certainly a creative idea, but it's also chilling to see just how much time the developers put into thinking of new ways to penalize players for playing the game in ways that, until things like this come about, are seemingly normal or intended.
 

Loki Blue

Well-Known Member
Now I will say this...I also play FoE and have a Colonial Age city with a very large military boost and a lv 80 Arc from Future Era. I can clear Guild Expeditions (Spire variant) easily with minimal losses. However, I recently stopped playing that city because the game got so trivial it was a joke and it no longer was fun and it defeated the city building idea. I started a new city and will play the game how it is intended because that seems more like a fun challenge. The reason I bring this up is because the nice thing about FoE is players get to decide if they want to play the game as originally intended, or use 'exploitative' tactics like getting an Arc in Iron Age and just camp and strengthen their city. This is not exploitative because if someone wants to match an early age player with future GBs, they can also achieve them by the same means and compete with that player if they choose to.

Ah, but now we have the Antiques Dealer, which is not available until you progress into Early Middle Ages, and there's Iron Age campers that are whining that they can't use the Antiques Dealer. And honestly, when you have Iron Age campers who've got the Terracotta Army, which is a Virtual Future GB...that's exploitative. Not that Inno is going to do anything about that, LOL.
 

DeletedUser

Guest
Ah, but now we have the Antiques Dealer, which is not available until you progress into Early Middle Ages, and there's Iron Age campers that are whining that they can't use the Antiques Dealer. And honestly, when you have Iron Age campers who've got the Terracotta Army, which is a Virtual Future GB...that's exploitative. Not that Inno is going to do anything about that, LOL.

It's not practical but it's not exploitative either because as I alluded to any player can gain that advantage early on in the game. Exploitative is a subjective term though so obviously not all players are going to agree with these kinds of things. Getting back on topic with the spire, wanting to gain an advantage in the spire by focusing on boosting your military and/or goods production should not be a penalty. The players that invest more time and effort trying to get the best prizes in the spire deserve more chances to get better prizes than casual spire players...simple as that.
 

Dony

King of Bugs
If I'm levelling up a Dragon Abbey for an additional 1% attack power on my mage units, I want it to be 1%. Not 0.5%, not 0.7%, not even 0.99%.
it will be 1%, increase, its almost linear for both yours and enemys army and negotiation is based on your spire squad size, but as a fighter having higher attack power means higher chance to not get hit. obivously for negotiator it doesnt work that way
 

Dony

King of Bugs
Oh and please remember this was spoken as an end gamer, I do not need my coins nor supplies for essential stuff like unlocking researches and upgrading buildings. I can just whack it all into the spire, and I still can't sustain it.
i just wonder, do you play with 0 culture bonus or with 125% culture bonus? because i dont have a problem to produce 250 mil of coins over 5 days which is enough for spire without using any coin rains. If you play without culture bonus it means you have more manufactories and produce more goods, while people with culture bonus playstyle have more coins/supplies and less goods, i see a balance in this regard
 

Heymrdiedier

Well-Known Member
@CrazyWizard as far as revealing our formulas, you know of course that we don't do this. We collect the feedback from player experiences, compare it to our data and analytics and monitor if things are going as planned. What I can say about it in general is this:

Unless a wonder is totally useless for your playstyle (e.g. Shrine of Shrewdy Shrooms if you never fight), every Ancient Wonder will give you more benefits than you would need to make up for the minimal increase in costs for building/upgrading one of these Ancient Wonders.

why would we like to see the formula is simple.
We wanna know what we should do with our thrones of the high men, watchtower ruins, blooming trader guild, even timewarp wonders.
Those are all wonders who contribute 0 to your production of goods or your troops. We wanna know if we can keep them because we like those wonders, or if we should destory them since they are only crippling our spire progress.
To a lesser extend you can also wonder about lighthouse of good neighborhood, sunset towers, Enars, bel spire/lighthouse.

So 8 of the 26 wonder have a possible big impact.

Elvenar has always been about trying to maximize you abilities and thats what many (or most) players like about this game, so i dont see why it would change for spire
 
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Heymrdiedier

Well-Known Member
i just wonder, do you play with 0 culture bonus or with 125% culture bonus? because i dont have a problem to produce 250 mil of coins over 5 days which is enough for spire without using any coin rains. If you play without culture bonus it means you have more manufactories and produce more goods, while people with culture bonus playstyle have more coins/supplies and less goods, i see a balance in this regard
i too have problems with coins on live, thats because my map is almost maxed out and i only have 16 magical houses, and thats it. I get most of my population from event buildings that don't generate coins
 

Marindor

Well-Known Member
Hi all,

Thank you once again for sharing your concerns. I do want to urge you please to keep posting in a respectful way, also towards our Game Designers. Thank you :)

I'm not going to get into the discussion about sharing exact formulas around ingame mechanics. There are several reasons why we don't do this, as explained a little bit in my previous post as well (stakeholders, not wanting to encourage excessive playing styles etc) so it's no use debating about that. Let's rather talk about the actual content and ingame experiences. :) A few posts above I also saw the well-known comparison with FOE. To be honest: There are certain situations happening in FOE (like indeed the level 100 Arcs and things like that) which we don't like to have in Elvenar. FOE and Elvenar are quite similar in a lot of areas but also very different and if that's the kind of game you like more, FOE might be a better game for you. So of course, because both games are made by our company, we look at each other, adapt things we like and rework it in a way we see it fit our game (let's say Spire is in that case a reworked version of the Guild Expeditions and the Antiques Dealer in FOE is a reworked version of our Disenchantment feature), and we also learn from each others "mistakes" and place certain situations into perspective in regards to what would happen if we would implement them like that in our own game. Both game teams have different visions for their games, so please don't expect the games to be an exact copy of each other, because they never will be :)

I'll guess you're next response will be that it's a huge succes according to your numbers, but you thats with everyting thats new, give it a few weeks and then try to say the same without lying.

The first numbers indeed look very promising, but as you said: there's always the first wave when something is new. So as far as participation goes, we'll have to monitor how that will be over the weeks. As far as success ratios on both Spire fights and negotations are concerned, the numbers are looking very good as well, which means that during the testing time on Beta, it seems we have been able to find a pretty good balancing altogether. I read someone calling it "minor tweaks" we have done, but decreasing Diplomacy costs with 20-50% and things like that can't be called "minor tweaks" anymore and I think the current Spire (looking at difficulty level and progression) can in no way be considered as pretty similar as our first run, which indeed, is also proven again by the numbers. However, of course (as I said in my previous post) we will continue to monitor the situation and make alterations when needed. After all, it's also in our best interest that the Spire performs as good as possible.

We wanna know what we should do with our thrones of the high men, watchtower ruins, blooming trader guild, even timewarp wonders.
Those are all wonders who contribute 0 to your production of goods or your troops. We wanna know if we can keep them because we like those wonders, or if we should destory them since they are only crippling our spire progress.

As I said before, Spire difficulty is based on a great number of factors, among which the Ancient Wonders are by far the smallest variable, so "crippling Spire progress" really is a huge exaggeration :) To give a few examples:

The golden Abbyss gives you a lot of population, which means you can save space for residences and build more manufactories, which let you produce more goods. Watchtower Ruins give you a lot of culture, which again saves you space for culture buildings and/or increases gold/supply production with culture boost, so you require less workshops for your manufactories and barracks. Tome of Secrets also gives a lot of supplies, again saves space for workshops, which can be used to build manufactories or armories instead.

So unless you're building Ancient Wonders that make no sense in regards to your play style, their benefits far outweigh the small impact they have for being one of the many parameters we use for measuring account progression. I wouldn't advise anyone to delete Ancient Wonders to make the Spire easier, for they really don't have that big an impact on the diffculty level at all and using their benefits wisely, the amount of city space they save you give you a lot bigger advantage :)
 

DeletedUser2576

Guest
So it's fair that one city has 4500 Troopsize being in construct chapter and another one has 2500 being in the same chapter.

The 2500 City has
more research-Troopsize,
higher military buildings,
more manufactiorial production.

It has everything more than the 4.500 except wonder levels.
 

Heymrdiedier

Well-Known Member
So it's fair that one city has 4500 Troopsize being in construct chapter and another one has 2500 being in the same chapter.

The 2500 City has
more research-Troopsize,
higher military buildings,
more manufactiorial production.

It has everything more than the 4.500 except wonder levels.
i keep seeing these high numbers, but id like to have some proof of those. Can you post some pictures of both accounts, doing the same encounter? Somehow i get the feeling we are comparing fight 1 on map1, with fight 9 on map2
 

Marindor

Well-Known Member
i keep seeing these high numbers, but id like to have some proof of those. Can you post some pictures of both accounts, doing the same encounter? Somehow i get the feeling we are comparing fight 1 on map1, with fight 9 on map2

This could indeed be the case, but there are also a lot of other factors that make up the entire evaluation of account progression. As I said, AW are by far the smallest of those so an 80% increase purely based on different AW levels is just plain impossible. Maybe the 2 accounts are in the same Chapter, but aside from that and the AW levels there must be a lot of other differences as well if they should result in an 80% difficulty difference. @Syonis For we cannot get into personal accounts and data on a public forum level, I'd advise you to forward these 2 account names and your findings to your Support Team via a private Support Ticket, so it can be forwarded to our Game Designers for a double check :)
 

DeletedUser2576

Guest
i keep seeing these high numbers, but id like to have some proof of those. Can you post some pictures of both accounts, doing the same encounter? Somehow i get the feeling we are comparing fight 1 on map1, with fight 9 on map2
I do not own that 2500 account, but the data was for the first encounter in the spire.
We can do screens on sunday when next spire starts.

But i can give you the sizes for level 2 first encounter of 2 of my cities both at the end of research, where you can see a +26% difference.
The city with the lower size i even played like 6 month more so it should be harder there.

upload_2019-8-28_10-22-8.png


upload_2019-8-28_10-22-42.png


@Marindor
Will send you both accounts via PN.
 

DeletedUser2630

Guest
I enjoy the tower. But I won't actively play her for these rewards. But I can find a strategy to find the right cost-benefit ratio. However, the potential of the tower is quite killed.

There are possibilities for me
- increasing rewards, removing coins and hammers
or
- reducing difficulty to tournament level 15-30 province

But what bothers me is the time-wise "between steps" are too long in my opinion. It would be appropriate to remove them so that players can play gradually on manual combat.
 

Heymrdiedier

Well-Known Member
But what bothers me is the time-wise "between steps" are too long in my opinion. It would be appropriate to remove them so that players can play gradually on manual combat.

ooh yeah i forgot to mention that in my feedback(s), i also dont like the gatings, well you can skip them with the time boosts you have won before reaching the gate, but then you basically didnt win anything yet. I prefer the way inno did it. You got max 10 attempts, 1 attempt regenerates every hour, and you can win extra attemps from t he encounters, or pay diamonds for more attempts
 

palmira

Well-Known Member
the worst thing about the spire is the diplomacy feature that is simply wrong: is not a logic game as with 3 attempts is is impossible to win without spending a huge load of diamonds (unless you are extremely lucky) on the spots that we would need diplomacy. Where it is a logic game you don't need it as the fights are very easy. I didn't pay attention to the details, it seemed that the difficulty was approximately the same, in my live city vs beta city but i will have a look and post screenshots. Both are constructs cities the main difference, besides expansions, number of provinces, factories and premium buildings, are AWs levels so we can figure it out :)
 

DeletedUser332

Guest
I do not own that 2500 account, but the data was for the first encounter in the spire.
We can do screens on sunday when next spire starts.

But i can give you the sizes for level 2 first encounter of 2 of my cities both at the end of research, where you can see a +26% difference.
The city with the lower size i even played like 6 month more so it should be harder there.

View attachment 6241

View attachment 6242

@Marindor
Will send you both accounts via PN.

Although it wasn't directed at me, those screenshots are very revealing to me. Namely because I'm also at the end of research, but my squad size for the same encounter is lower than both of them at 10,150. Not much lower than the 2nd one, mind you, but lower all the same. This is with a total of 226 AW levels, which I've come to find is generally pretty far above the average. However, I'm pretty well BELOW the average in terms of provinces acquired - my ranking points from the world map are still below 40k, whereas most of my peers are several thousand above that which translates into...what, about 40 provinces or more?

Since we're not going to get an official answer, it looks like we'll have to discover how this thing works on our own. Do provinces acquired have an impact on the difficulty? How about squad size researches? Maybe just researching anything causes an increase? Relic boosts apparently cause an increase as well, how much of an effect does that have? Additionally, what is the 'baseline' for the Spire? That is to say, even though it's unrealistic, what would the numbers look like for a player with as many 0's or neutral values placed into this formula as possible for a given point in the game? Asking this question, I consider that there probably isn't anything 'reversible' in the formula, at least not easily so, so the contributors are probably research, relics, provinces, and AWs, possibly permanent (MH, barracks) building upgrades as well.
 

palmira

Well-Known Member
As soon as the door opens I will do the first encounter on the 2nd level on both my cities to see how it compares i have roughly 100 provinces more live and 70 AW levels (and around 1,6 points...)
 
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