Discussion [Discussion] InnoGames TV - October Episode

[Marindor]

Thank you all for the feedback, for it's really valuable and you make valid points. For the point about being able to instant scout by using premium: That is true but it won't get you much further, because scouted provinces in which negotiation costs are way too high for your current phase in the game and where fighting isn't an option either, are of little use. One of the big reasons why, as announced in InnoGames TV, the next Guest Race will appear quite soon (though the majority of our players hasn't reached the end of Orcs yet) is that we don't want you to get stuck on the end of the tech tree with little to do and finding the game boring. Basically, as you say, all there's left for you at that point is fighting (whether in provinces or tournaments), but that's about it... Of course we don't want the game to become boring so all ideas to keep the game exciting are most welcome. As I posted here, we're currently cleaning up and restructuring the ideas-section and I'd like to ask you all to, if you have a good idea on how to keep the game more exciting besides the regular fights, post it there so we can forward it.

 

[DeletedUser1757]

That is true but it won't get you much further, because scouted provinces in which negotiation costs

I don't think so. I think it was possible if you went straight to that neighbor to avoid higher costs and longer waiting time. Of course before you messed up with Orc's. Even if you still think no. I'm sure I would be able to reach him before researching breeding grounds.

One of the big reasons why, as announced in InnoGames TV, the next Guest Race will appear quite soon (though the majority of our players hasn't reached the end of Orcs yet) is that we don't want you to get stuck on the end of the tech tree with little to do and finding the game boring.

What about if you are stuck in the middle/last third of the chapter due to unreasonable InnoGames expectations in with production of guest race goods? That is not boring?
Do you even know how much Mushrooms farms & Rally points you need to complete research three without getting bottleneck?

 

[Heymrdiedier]

Excellent post Marindor. I was wondering whether the game was balanced based on "filling" the grid which as BK has pointed out can't be done without RL$. Good to know that the max expansions isn't supposed to be achieved, and is just an option for paying players to have an easier game.

I dont think this is a good idea, if you you arent supposed to get a full grid without paying, non paying players can never catch up to paying players.
Wich will make them less interested and eventueally quit.
Also if paying players dont have a risk to be catched, there is no reason for them to keep spending money, they are allready in the top and are safe there on their ivory towers.

In my opnion something like max map size should be achieveable by all, always, just some players could get there faster by buying diamonds.
And you should always give the non payers the feeling they can still get to the top (even tho in reality it isn't possible since 1 diamond building gives you a big advantage over non diamond players) and when they are almost there, they just need to buy some diamonds to get there.

 

[Marindor]

Do you even know how much Mushrooms farms & Rally points you need to complete research three without getting bottleneck?

Yes, in my own game I currently have 3 Rally Points and 12 Mushroom Farms (all on level 4 now) and that works perfectly fine. I don't have all the expansions yet myself and had to make some choices too, had to sell quite a lot of my own residences, had to make changes in cultural buildings, but it was certainly possible and progress is going steady. It might depend a bit on how quickly you'd want to rush through your tech tree, but at the moment I have about 10 more techs to go in this chapter so everything is going quite steady at the moment. Of course sometimes I get stuck for a while and then I switch to investing my KP's in Ancient Wonders until the goods are there to unlock the next tech, but that's also how it should be. Reaching each tech and having no challenge in unlocking them, woul be boring in my opinion.

 

[Deleted User - 60107]

Yes, in my own game I currently have 3 Rally Points and 12 Mushroom Farms (all on level 4 now) and that works perfectly fine.

You're joking, right? Or just made a typo and meant to say 32, not 12. There's just NO WAY 12 Mushroom Farms are enough.

On the International server I have 3 Rally Points and 29 Mushroom Farms all at level 4 (and so is my Portal) and even so I have gotten stuck multiple times while waiting for Shrooms of Wisdom and/or Loot. There's just no way 12 Farms are enough. It takes 24 hours to produce Psychoshrooms, then at least 2 hours to produce Orc Dung, then another 48 hours to produce (at most) 80 Shrooms of Wisdom. That's more than 3 DAYS for just one batch of Shrooms of Wisdom.

Loot is even worse: First produce enough Armaments (max 160 per hour) and enough Power Shrooms (36 hours per batch), then produce some Loot - max is 192 per 8 hours, and you have techs that cost thousands. For example, "Rewards, Kisses and a Symphiony" costs 2500 Loot. That's another day and a half (at least) of producing nothing but Loot - for just one tech.

I still need to pay for Squad Size upgrade 26 (1250 Loot) and to research Squad Size Upgrade 27 (1000 Loot) and Ancient Wonders of the Orcs (2000 Shrooms of Wisdom and 3000 Loot). That's days of doing nothing but waiting to collect enough orc resources. I don't know who decided this is fun, but his idea of "fun" is clearly different from mine.

Hopefully the same person was not in charge of the Wood Elves and they will have a bit more reasonable production times and production quantities.

 

[Marindor]

I'm not joking and I didn't make a typo. As said: This is my current setup. 12 Mushroom Farms on level 4, 3 Orc Rally Points all on level 1 and the Orc Portal on level 3. And yes, I have to wait for days as well to unlock most techs and during these times, I give my KP to my Ancient Wonders. That's fine for me. I don't want to rush through the tech tree and get stuck at the end all the time. This chapter has 29 techs. If I did all of them in 2 days, I'd be without content after 2 months again. For me there's no need to rush. As said: I still need to unlock 10 techs now with this setup, the next Guest Race is about to come so that's a good pace for me. When the new chapter is there, I might want to add some more mushroom farms perhaps but as long as there's no new chapter yet, I just take my time like this.

 

[CrazyWizard]

Yes, I get the confusion. Let me try to answer it for you as good as possible

It's logical that it would take you about 20 months now for all these expansions, since you'd need the "Advanced Scouts" technologies researched to reduce these scouting times and they come with the new tech tree extensions (which aren't there yet). "Advanced Scouts" are very important technologies. They reduce the Scouting costs, which in turn reduces Scouting Times and reduces the enemy troops you have to fight. So e.g. a distance 12 province while you're in chapter 6 will be much harder than in chapter 9, because in Chapter 9 you'd have researched 3 more "Advanced Scouts" techs, which reduces everything for that distance 12 province: scouting costs, scouting times and troops you'll face. So the more you are ahead on the WM compared to your tech tree, the harder everything will be. That's all about balancing.

The unfortunate thing here with the new battle system, is that you now face some kind of "limit" that wasn't there before, just like it was with the orcs requirements for negotiations a while ago. For new players this is no problem. When they get further, fighting becomes harder and they'll find it logical that at some point they can't win fights anymore because they have to become stronger (advance more in the tech tree). For already established players, it's different for they haven't had this "limit" before. When something is there from the start, it's perceived differently. Take e.g. the goods you need for negotiations at a certain point. At the start of the game, just supplies and coins are enough but very quickly, you need goods as well. Because it has always been that way, nobody cared. It's just an extra "boundary" but it was there from the start, so that's just how the game works and it's fine. Would goods never have been required and we would suddenly introduce that after a year of playing, everyone would be offended. That's how these things work and yes, it would have been better if battles were better balanced right from the start and we're sorry that wasn't the case and that's why it now feels as a sudden limit.

That being said, let's go back to the question about what is "expected". Without wanting to go too deep into the Battle System in this thread (for we have the other thread about that): When you fight against armies that are about the same size as yours, or even a bit bigger (say 2x as big), the fights should be "winnable" by you, with a bit of luck and skill. But when the armies get 4x-5x as big as yours, it isn't realistic to still win these fights.

For your city space: The space that deleting the Fairy buildings yields should be enough to build the initial buildings for the Orcs chapter. During the chapter you are expected to get more expansions (via both research and world map progress, since you are expected to fight about 30-40 provinces every chapter (also see the tech tree locks, which are a good indication). Those who currently have problems fighting because they have 250+ provinces already have the expansions we expect them to have for the Orcs chapter – even more than we expect, to be honest. If you have already placed and filled those, then you might have some space issues, yes. You may have to remove some non-guest race buildings in order to build/upgrade the guest race buildings then. This shouldn't be a problem though, since the game balance was based on this. In the Orcs chapter e.g. residences become quite a bit bigger, but you also need a lot less residences to support your city, so it's no problem to delete some of them. That's a big part of the fun in a city-builder game: Each chapter/guest race brings new challenges in how to make your city as efficient as possible. It's no fun to just add expansions all the time and keep building all the buildings without having to think about rearranging, sacrificing current buildings for new ones etcetera. That the current city grid offers more than enough space to place your expansions is true, but it isn't expected to be fully used yet all the time. Now that there are so many premium expansions available from the start, premium players can obtain a bigger part of that city grid, yes, but that's not what the game is balanced on (and in my personal opinion, it's less fun as well. You can just produce more of everything but the strategic city-shaping factor goes away by having plenty of space available).

Well, it became a rather long post but I hope I have been able to clarify it a bit for you and to have answered your questions

Thanks for your reply and explanation.
There is just 1 problem I have with it, the former community manager stated that we were further ahead than that we have been supposed to be.
When I look at the not so long ago "game rules" the amount of premium expansions for you able to gain was the same as the level of your main hall, so for the orc chapter that was 21 premium expansions.
When taking in considereation the starting space, research expansions and the premium expansions, to fill a map we still required 46 more expansions aka 322 provinces cleared.
But now I am not supposed to have more than 200 expansions cleared. if we would not be supposed to have cleared this much of procinces than the map itself should not have been this large.
This change still feels like premium expansions sell well, so lets knock of some of those they get for free en force them to buy them instead.
There is also a way of less resistance, by the comming expansions of the map itself more spaces become aviable so if you continue to just server us the same amount of space by research, there instantly becomes more space to sell premium expansion more than the 2 per chapter.

The second claim that you are not supposed to beat enemy's army because it's size is 4 times larger. I have problems with that as well, troughout history we have seen massive armies been massacred by much smaller armies by tactisct but also by using more experianced and more vereran armies that so not flee as easily.
The same countsa for elvenar, if a band of fresh meat is introduced toward the battlefield to a much smaller army of much more experienced and better armoured fighters, than the fresh meat could still loose even with the massive strength in numbers.

 

[Marindor]

This change still feels like premium expansions sell well, so lets knock of some of those they get for free en force them to buy them instead.

I already addressed this in the post I made yesterday:

Now that there are so many premium expansions available from the start, premium players can obtain a bigger part of that city grid, yes, but that's not what the game is balanced on (and in my personal opinion, it's less fun as well. You can just produce more of everything but the strategic city-shaping factor goes away by having plenty of space available).

Noone is forced to buy anything (and frankly there are premium players and non-premium players. Non-premium players are not going to become premium players all of a sudden because of such a change, that's not how it works). It is true that people who spend premium, have more expansions at their disposal than people who don't. That's how it's supposed to be. It's a premium feature which is available if you're willing to spend diamonds on it. There's nothing wrong with that, all games have such features.

The second claim that you are not supposed to beat enemy's army because it's size is 4 times larger. I have problems with that as well, troughout history we have seen massive armies been massacred by much smaller armies by tactisct but also by using more experianced and more vereran armies that so not flee as easily.
The same countsa for elvenar, if a band of fresh meat is introduced toward the battlefield to a much smaller army of much more experienced and better armoured fighters, than the fresh meat could still loose even with the massive strength in numbers.

There is a certain range in this, also in the new balancing. Fights should be winnable when your enemy is up to 2x your size (with some luck and good skills). Defeating armies 4-5 times as big as yours, is not the way we want to go with this game for it disrupts the balance

 

[DeletedUser1596]

@CrazyWizard: I belive, that most of income comes from powerbuyers. Our powerbuyers have over 20 snails. That's over 60.000 diamonds.. and it's just snails. They spend on many other things. I thing powerbuyers keep this game running.

 

[SoggyShorts]

@CrazyWizard: I belive, that most of income comes from powerbuyers. Our powerbuyers have over 20 snails. That's over 60.000 diamonds.. and it's just snails. They spend on many other things. I thing powerbuyers keep this game running.

You're probably right, a decent chunk comes from 1 time special offer buyers, and a huge chunk from "powerbuyers" There's probably a fair number of players with monthly diamond budgets too though.

IMHO they'd do better if prices were a bit more balanced. 10 KP costs the same as an expansion? That's just silly.
If it was my company I'd try an algorithm that found the least popular purchases and dropped the diamond price on those by x%. Run that program once a week/month and try to get revenue from everything you are selling.

 

[DeletedUser651]

. It is true that people who spend premium, have more expansions at their disposal than people who don't. That's how it's supposed to be. It's a premium feature which is available if you're willing to spend diamonds on it. There's nothing wrong with that, all games have such features.

I do believe there is a great deal wrong with that. I won't bother saying it all because I think Heymrdiedier said it perfectly:

I dont think this is a good idea, if you you arent supposed to get a full grid without paying, non paying players can never catch up to paying players.
Which will make them less interested and eventually quit.
Also if paying players dont have a risk to be caught, there is no reason for them to keep spending money, they are already in the top and are safe there on their ivory towers.

In my opinion something like max map size should be achievable by all, always, just some players could get there faster by buying diamonds.
And you should always give the non payers the feeling they can still get to the top (even tho in reality it isn't possible since 1 diamond building gives you a big advantage over non diamond players) and when they are almost there, they just need to buy some diamonds to get there.

You are setting a new precedent in this game and greatly changing the balance with this new change. Only you will know if it was profitable. As a player, I can tell you it stinks. I hate this and I really dislike this game now because of it.

I have spoken to the top 10 archmages in my world and every single player in all their fellowships are farther along than they are "supposed to be". You are telling every single one of them...no matter how much money you have spent in the past on things you want, if you want to continue, you will HAVE to spend more. We won't let you progress if you don't PAY US. And since many have already purchased a lot of expansions, you are telling them they have to pay you a whole lot.

Then there are all the non paying players who are their friends. Their archmages. Their mages. You are telling all of them that they can no longer compete in Elvenar without paying. That is a whole lot of people to anger at once. Even the whales who do give you their entire pension check don't like to be told they HAVE to pay. I think they are making a very big mistake.

 

[Marindor]

Noone is telling anyone they have to pay, where did you read that and why do you think this would be the case? What we're saying, is that players are too far ahead on some aspects of the game, compared to where they are in their tech tree (and will now indeed face a kind of limit because we rebalanced the battles, which makes it harder to scout that far ahead) and we confirmed that paying players have access to some extra city expansions, compared to non-paying players (which is the same in e.g. Forge of Empires or other City Building games). Please don't twist my words into something like "you have to pay now or you can't progress" because that is simply not true. I'm trying to communicate openly with you here, but if you're twisting my words, it's a waste of time.

 

[DeletedUser651]

I am seriously not trying to twist anything. You have been very forthright and I wouldn't do that to you. I greatly respect you Marindor.

I am saying what the practical implications are. This is a city builder game. We compete (in the ranking list) with buildings we can make on a certain amount of space. We also need that space in order to build things. New races require new buildings and that takes more space for culture and workshops and houses. Therefore, all of us have come to know how important expansions are. We sit and wait, sometimes for months, just to get one expansion so we can finally have room for that one thing that will let that other thing happen and so we can move that other thing. We plan for weeks. That is all we really have in this game....waiting for an expansion so we can do something.

So when you say that we already have more expansions than we should have without buying, that means they are making it so if we want more we have to buy them. Which is also the same as saying if we want to play the game we have to pay. Because we don't have any other game.

All of us in the top 300 or more are way past the dev's expectations because we all have wayyyy more provinces cleared than they think we should have. That means, that you telling ALL of us, that the only way to have more of a game to play is to pay for expansions.

Sure, for now, all that will happen is that all of us will not longer be able to fight. That means all the players more advanced than the devs think we should be will lose that ability. Those that stay will simply negotiate their way to more expansions. But the devs will see that quickly and since they don't want us having so many expansions, they will put a block on negotiating too as they did with the other players and the orc limitations.

Keep in mind though, that this game is pretty boring the way the devs think we should play it. If we hadn't discovered questing, most of us wouldn't have stayed a month. And the devs were very much against that. They play in god mode so they don't realize how incredibly SLOW this game is. We do. We finally find ways to make it slightly playable and they keep blocking us.

You say "some city expansions" as if it isn't a major thing. City expansions are the entire game. If you block those, you are blocking the game. There isn't anything left to do here.

You bring up ancient wonders as an alternative. That's all that is left? Ugh! They are awful and slow and boring. All the top players played for a year without those things. We all had 200 provinces cleared before they released them, so most of us can't get the runes needed to build the decent ones. We have 100 crystal lighthouse runes and 2 broken shards for a wonder we actually want. Maybe the system will work for the new players, but the old timers really got the shaft on that whole thing. And what good are many of the wonders now? Why bother upgrading the mm or the db or any of the fighting wonders? I mean, really, since we are too far ahead anyway on fighting, then all those are mostly useless....except for possibly some tournament fights?

I simply took what you said and extrapolated out what the practical implications are. I am sorry you think I twisted things. I really wasn't trying to. I was just responding to the effects of this.

 

[DeletedUser1757]

I'm not joking and I didn't make a typo. As said: This is my current setup. 12 Mushroom Farms on level 4, 3 Orc Rally Points all on level 1 and the Orc Portal on level 3. And yes, I have to wait for days as well to unlock most techs and during these times, I give my KP to my Ancient Wonders. That's fine for me. I don't want to rush through the tech tree and get stuck at the end all the time. This chapter has 29 techs. If I did all of them in 2 days, I'd be without content after 2 months again. For me there's no need to rush. As said: I still need to unlock 10 techs now with this setup, the next Guest Race is about to come so that's a good pace for me. When the new chapter is there, I might want to add some more mushroom farms perhaps but as long as there's no new chapter yet, I just take my time like this.

What is KP rate per day that are put into research tree?

Clearly too low too meet demands of environment. Thats why there are 3 days waiting times for scouting & millions to scout one province because KP rate is too slow. Because scouting before able to research new advancing scouts and You need more then 24 KP rate per day (23-24+8+tournaments+NH) in research tree if you want scouting costs to be normal to 1 province per day and unlocking techs without any bottlenecks. Which should be normal rate.

Once you start putting KPs into AWs you are done with environment rewards or cost rise with every KP.
Not enough resources to keep the demand and sooner you run out of space because you can't get province expansions which are crucial to stay nominal play rate.

I don't think is possible to do Orcs in normal time.

If you want to proceed at normal rate in orc's you need:
Portal Level 4.
18-21 Rally points Level 1.
60+ Mushrooms farms Level 1.
3000+ orc's from breeding grounds daily
and lots of supplies & T3 goods.

Because upgrading to higher level you need to produce even more time & resources.
These are just quick estimates and on missing data (wiki doesn't provide full data).

Until today is still not worth upgrading manufactures past level 10-11. Unless you pay for it and keep paying. Then that can be done in multiple ways.

This is what I call unreasonable implantations. I wouldn't mind if you do it once in a while. But running this production rate for months. Doesn't sound like fun.

@CrazyWizard: I belive, that most of income comes from powerbuyers. Our powerbuyers have over 20 snails. That's over 60.000 diamonds.. and it's just snails. They spend on many other things. I thing powerbuyers keep this game running.

Exactly the same I was telling support team. They only notice the big spenders and creating the game to their weakness.

You're probably right, a decent chunk comes from 1 time special offer buyers, and a huge chunk from "powerbuyers" There's probably a fair number of players with monthly diamond budgets too though.
Thats what I was explaining to all support guys.
IMHO they'd do better if prices were a bit more balanced. 10 KP costs the same as an expansion? That's just silly.
If it was my company I'd try an algorithm that found the least popular purchases and dropped the diamond price on those by x%. Run that program once a week/month and try to get revenue from everything you are selling.

They are trying this with selling rune shards.

 

[DeletedUser1548]

@Marindor , I believe we all see you do your best and try hard but we connected the dots and interpreted it as a jump on our wallets.
Orcs, impossible battles, less research expansions -> all comes to the change you made first: more premium expansions available for everyone.
Saying about a balance and making us guilty of it all (you got too far!!!) doesn't help.

 

[Marindor]

@Bobbykitty : Thank you for the explanation, that helps You're mentioning a few points in your post, I hope to be able to clarify these:

The way the game is balanced, you should get about 3-4 expansions from the tech tree per chapter and about 3-4 expansions from the World Map per chapter. For the top players, the expansions they already have from the World Map, is a bit more than that. Just to be clear: Noone is "blaming" anyone for that, for all you did was play the game and try to get as far ahead as possible. There's nothing wrong with that. The only thing is: We see now how this goes in practice and if we don't do something about that, it will bring even bigger balance issues in the future. If anyone is to blame for this situation, it's us. We should have seen that coming from the start and the battle balance should have been better all along. The truth is, this wasn't the case so we had to make some adjustments now. This limits the top players now and we're sincerely sorry for that but we do feel that it's necessary to restore the balance and keep the game fun and challening in the long run, which is our aim. In terms of extra World Map expansions, you're totally right because you will be limited here now until you are a bit further in your tech tree again (and the number of scouted provinces matches this progression). Of course every new chapter will still keep bringing you the tech tree city expansions, so you will get a few extra expansions but less than you're used to now.

The game is also balanced based on this lower number of expansions. Yes, you are right when you say that these 33 premium expansions have been introduced a while ago and that premium players can get a bigger city but the game is not based on premium expansions (and as I said before, though it's my personal opinion: Having too much city space available makes the game less challenging. Of course it makes you able to build more buildings, produce more and get more ranking points, but in terms of game challenge, for me it takes away the aspect of having to arrange your city strategically, which is a big part of the fun of a city builder).

For the comments about the game getting boring, especially for end-tech players: I'd really like to ask you to provide us with good ideas on this in our ideas section. I hear what you say and for end-tech players there isn't much else to do than battling and storing produced resources. If you have any cool ideas on how to keep the game challenging, please share them with us in that forum so we can forward them because we do want to keep the game interesting.

About the "GOD" mode subject: There is a difference between the servers we use internally for development and testing purposes, and the servers on which we play our regular games. In InnoGames TV episodes you see screenshots from our test servers with boosted accounts, but these are not the accounts or servers we play our own regular games on. As I said a few posts back: I myself haven't got all expansions on my regular game either so I know which challenges we face as a player and the same goes for our development team.

Hopefully this post helped a bit. I understand it's it still not nice to be "limited" on World Map progression/expansions for now (even though it is temporarily) but I hope I've been able to explain that it's needed for now to get the right balance back to avoid bigger issues in the future and to be able to keep the game challenging in the long run. I also hope I've been able to take away the feeling that you would be "blamed" to playing the game and progressing as far on the World Map as possible, for it's certainly not about blaming, but about us having to bring back the balance in the game and fixing a situation which we didn't see coming from the start.

 

[DeletedUser1596]

Fair enough.

 

[DeletedUser]

Noone is telling anyone they have to pay, where did you read that and why do you think this would be the case? What we're saying, is that players are too far ahead on some aspects of the game, compared to where they are in their tech tree (and will now indeed face a kind of limit because we rebalanced the battles, which makes it harder to scout that far ahead) and we confirmed that paying players have access to some extra city expansions, compared to non-paying players (which is the same in e.g. Forge of Empires or other City Building games). Please don't twist my words into something like "you have to pay now or you can't progress" because that is simply not true. I'm trying to communicate openly with you here, but if you're twisting my words, it's a waste of time.

Here lies the problem, in FoE, premium expansions are limited to 2 each era, just like it used to work here, that we could only get 2 per MH level. Also, in FoE, you can buy expansions with the currency "medals", which allow players to have something to look forward to, even it they know it will take them months or even years to earn enough medals to get all available expansions. This option allows the players not to feel blocked, as they can keep working towards something.
Opening all the premium expansions here just created a huge imbalance between the players that can pay, and the ones that can't. And saying that the reason why you are blocking the more advanced players from progressing on the world map is to balance the game, only makes me laugh, in the view of this.
There is no possible balance when some players get 33 more expansions, and the others are told " so sorry, but we never intend for you to be able to have the whole city grid available to play, no matter how long you play".
Now, i don't mind that premium players have some advantages, that is more than fair. But it should be possible for everyone else to get very close to the same space, even if 2 years later than the premium players. With the way the game is going, that will never be possible, and that is just very discouraging. Why play if you know you will never reach the ultimate goal in any city buildings game? (have all the grid available)

Also, although I really appreciate the change in stance from "its your fault as you scouted too much", to "its our fault, as we didn't balance the game properly", it seems to me, you are failing to take into account the changes in the game, and this issue we are facing now, will only get worse down the line.
When most of the top players started to play the game, there were no wonders. As such, all Kps were spent on tech, and we flew through it. so we kept up with the scouted distance as best as we could, taking into account we had to wait months for new chapters to be released.
Now, most players starting the game don't fly through tech, they have loads of shiny wonders to spend their kps in, which means they progress a lot slower in the tech tree. But they keep scouting, whenever they have a free scout. And why shouldn't they? there is nothing in the game that tells you to scout only once a week! On the contrary, every event has quests to scout a province, which reinforces the notion that you should keep your scout as busy as possible. This then leads to situations like they are happening already, in which players are hitting the negotiation brickwall, because they need orcs to negotiate when they are still way back in dwarves chapter, and they cannot win any fight.

This will only get worse, as you have so many wonders to level, that if you dedicate yourself to that, you could be scouting for months without reaching the end of the tech tree, bringing you further and further away from the balance that you claim to want to implement.

In the meanwhile, players like me, that are already done with the orcs chapter, are bored out of their mind, because I cannot fight on the map anymore, and the tournaments have been made so much harder that soon i won't even bother with that anymore. For the second week in a row, I did the first 3 or 4 provinces up to level 3, and then stopped, because at level 4 i couldn't win anymore. I might have been able to do level 4 if i fought manually, but like many others, i only use auto fight in the tournaments, because I play in 3 worlds, and i simply don't have the time or the patience to spend countless hours fighting manually in the tournaments, for what are, at best, paltry rewards.
That is another huge issue for me, you not only killed the fights in the map, but you made it very hard to have any fun in the tournaments as well. So now, i have nothing to do besides collect, set buildings to produce, rinse and repeat.
Oh, and you killed the Magic academy as well, because no fighting, no relics, no relics, you can't keep the MA working. Yes, that same MA that was so important for the game that we were forced to build it! Now it sits idle because we cannot get enough relics to keep it working.

So yeah, i agree the game desperately needs to be better balanced, the pity is, it seems like Inno is intent on making the balance issues worse, and not better,

 

[Marindor]

@madzix Thank you for your eleborate post. The feedback about these 33 premium expansions has been forwarded and I get the contradiction in this, compared to the rebalancing reasons.

For your remark about the tournaments: Could you explain why the tournaments are so hard for you now? These enemy troops are based on your own army strength and should be perfectly doable (of course, with each level their strength increases a bit), but with the right skills and tactics you should be able to fight them and win. Why is that so hard for you now?

 

[Deleted User - 60107]

Let's change topic for a second: Any news about updates to the Magicless Academy? I keep hoping the next episode of InnoTV will finally bring some news about it and keep getting disappointed. It seems to have been forgotten by the devs...