The day I began playing Elvenar was the exact same day I logged on Forge of Empire. The reason was that I found the battles more interesting in Elvenar. Last week tournament, I kind of played it blindfolded. I really did'nt have much time. Tonight, I tried it again, and here's my toughts.
First of all, I am really discussing here the tournament, where the battles are designed to be fair, and in increasing difficulty. Talking about the world map is beating on a dead horse, and Inno, no matter their claim they read our post, don't care at all. Actually, that's probably what they do. Read our post. And that's all they do. If they are not going to take our input, and upload that to their live servers, I wonder why they even bother to read us.
But as for the tournament... I have to be fair, and admit I find the battles more fun and engaging now. I have to be more careful about what I am doing, and I like the way new units as balanced against each others. Once I reach higher stars level and the CPU squad become to oversize mine, I expect I'll have to be even more careful. But there is two points I notice that badly need to be improve on before they go any further with this rebalancing and introducing new units and what's not. I'm probably wasting my time since they don't care about what we have to say, but I'll give it a go still.
First of all, they REALLLLLY need to have, at least palette swap for upgraded enemies. Come on Inno, do a little effort. You don't want to do a new graphic for bandit II?, at least change their colors. I had this nasty surprise in the tournament that when I reached the 2 province, they introduced bandit 2. All of a sudden, they were hitting much harder. I would have played it out differently. Now, I check before the battle what I am REALLY up against, but that is still annoying as hell, becase once the battle as started, you have to keep checking out what's what. I even encoutered both types. Say bandit and bandit II, or thieves and thieves II in the same battle, and strategically it changes a lot how you react, but you keep having to place your cursor over each units to know wich one are the upgraded version and It's annoying as hell. A simple color change, like for cerberus I and II would go a long way in improving this up.
The second change they need to bring up, before considering bringing up new units and mixing thing up even more, is the fix the way debuff are calculated. This problem always existed, but now, in this new system, it's much more problematic and need to be fixed. First of all, what is the problem? Well, if I hit an enemy with my priest, wich now act first in a round, they are going to place a -30% to the enemy damage, and they are going to defuff enemy armor by 40%. But when my heavy is going to move in for the kill, he is going to replace that 40% armor debuff by his own 10% armor debuff, litteraly upgrading the enemy by hitting him. In the previous system, it did'nt matter that much, but in this new system, it does much more. One thing I found out playing this new system with fair squad size is that it would be worth risking bringing units that are not at an advantage like the priest, to open up opportunities because of the great debuff they offer. It would open up a new world of possibilities. For instance, when enemies are mixed heavy, lights and ranged, like in the current tournament, it would definitely be worth considering bringing more lights and less heavies, taking in account that the light can now stand a better fighting chance against enemy heavies. But as of now, my paladins reducing the enemy armor by 10% is not a bonus, it's actually a penality because it cancels out much better debuff. So there is only one realy strategy here, and it's to bring the "right" troop to the battle, because debuffs can't really open up new opportunities since they keep cancelling each others.
Suggested fixes would be either to apply only the better debuff, or, personally, I would prefer different named debuffs to stack. So 2 paladins deduff don't stack, but the priest curse and the paladin armor pierce WOULD. Now THAT would make things really more interesting because that would allow for a much more varied tactics. As of now, I tend to bring more lights than heavies in the current tournament simply because the barbarians armor crushing ability is 30% and the paladins one is 10%, so in the long run, the barbarians are much less of an hinderance than the paladins.
I hope Inno actually listen to this, I think I am really making fair critisim, but the way they handled things up to now, I think they don't really care. But they cannot blame me for not telling me what's wrong, and not doing my "job" as a tester.
