Discussion Release Notes version 1.25 + Tournaments rebalancing

[Heymrdiedier]

Tournament squad size NL1, 3 stars province
Province 1: 36
Province 2: 48
Province 3: 48
Province 4: 72
Province 5: 108
Province 6: 108
Province 7: 168
Province 8: 168
Province 9: 168

Tournament squad size Beta, 3 stars province
Province 1: 75 - increase 2.0833x
Province 2: 150 - increase 3.1250x
Province 3: 225 - increase 4.6875x
Province 4: 299 - increase 4.1527x
Province 5: 374 - increase 3.4629x
Province 6: 449 - increase 4.1574x
Province 7: 523 - increase 3.1131x
Province 8: 598 - increase 3.5595x
Province 9: 673 - increase 4.0060x

Both Beta & NL1 accounts are in Chapter X (S&D), all technology research up to chapter X, nothing skip.

So squad size is around twice the number of troops in the first province only but goes up very fast, more then 4.6x (!) in province 3.

Im afraid thats only the tip of the iceberg. theres 4 squad upgrades to go in the new tech tree, meaning we likely end up with a troops size of 95 in province 1 and end at 855 in province 9. this means x3 for province 1 and x5 for province 9

I see the intention of this change tho, the tournament became easier and easier if you were at endgame with each chapter that is added. And i assume they wanted to change that.
But this just feels wrong. i dont know a good solution for this problem tho

 

[Heymrdiedier]

Sadly this is a typical inno change, and they did not lie, we all just read different thing then what they were saying because thats what we assumed they said.

• We will lower the number of encounters in a Tournament from 8 to 4. We therefore increased the size of the fights (bigger squad sizes for both your own and enemy units) and the cater costs. We believe this is will be a big time saver for those who want to fight their way through the Tournaments. In total, the amounts of units or goods you need will be similar to what you need now per province.

they said they will increase the squad size, they never said they will double it to compensate for halving the ammount of fights.
they also said they think the amount of units or goods will be similar to what you need now per province. read carefully province fights, so a lvl 15 tournament fight should take about the same amount of units as a ring 15 province fight on the world map.
Who still fights those ring 15 fights and doesn't buy them off tho?

 

[Mikekun]

hello

I'm demand remove change abuot automatic fight becuse I'm can't win normal fight from computer. I'm don't understend why somethink update what before working good. After change automatic fight are useless.

greetings Mikekun

 

[DeletedUser1877]

I just did 5 provinces, all using auto fight. That's 20 battles, with no defeats. Perhaps you chose the wrong troops to send in?

 

[DeletedUser1025]

OK, in the previous system, I could fight 8 provinces, 3-4 rounds, struggling a bit in the fourth. Never got over round four. That, combined with efforts of others, could bring some awards.
According to what I read, I should be able to fight somewhere into round six after this change...
However, after the "rebalancing" (sounds always ominous when mentioned here) I lost ALL my troops in the first two rounds fighting 8 "halved" provinces. That is it for me, in this tournament. Rewards received for myself (relics, points and shards/runes) hardly a third of waht I used to get. Almost zero per FS. Hardly worth the troops losses (and the cost of troops in resources).

Where is the improvement when I can only win much less fights? For me, there is no chance of getting over round two. I will be interested to see who gets to round six, without paying in goods. I do not quite get it - are we SUPPOSED to buy the provinces with goods (or money) instead of fighting them?? Are we NOT supposed to fight auto?
Anyway, it used to be fun for five days or so, now I am finished on day two. I will train some troops for the next tournament and see. In my view, so far, it is a big step back. Tournaments were introduced to fill in the time of waiting (the waiting time is measured now in hours...WHY? to conceal that it is, actually DAYS or to teach us to divide by 24??)
So we are back to the old complaint - what are we supposed to do in the game when every upgrade/scout takes so long? Getting rid of your whole army in the tournament, on the other hand, takes about half an hour now. To train them for it...days. Where is the balance?

 

[DeletedUser1657]

I see the intention of this change tho, the tournament became easier and easier if you were at endgame with each chapter that is added. And i assume they wanted to change that.
But this just feels wrong. i dont know a good solution for this problem tho

Thanks I can see a bit more of what they are doing, don't like it, but makes some sense now. The sad thing is come endgame your have years 7+(and that was calculated per lvl 20 wonders and such updates) worth of KP needed for wonders. So the dramatic reduction of KP and increased cost feels like a double hit. 1 or the other I think would have being ok.

they also said they think the amount of units or goods will be similar to what you need now per province. read carefully province fights, so a lvl 15 tournament fight should take about the same amount of units as a ring 15 province fight on the world map.
Who still fights those ring 15 fights and doesn't buy them off tho?

That explains the confusion. So it definitely is not 1/2 the encounters and same losses as before. It is 1/2 the encounters and same losses as a province which is a very different thing and a large increase in cost. Tournaments were a perfect training ground for learning province encounters and I feel with the increased losses they have lost this appeal for people trying to learn combat with wiping out their army and spending weeks rebuilding it.

Edit: note this says goods as well so explains the increased costs too.

After change automatic fight are useless.

Auto fights haven't changed this update to my knowledge. I use auto fight a lot for time saving and have always found it works for the purpose I use it, even immediately after the combat update right through to now. It loses a few more troops than I would on manual, a cost worth paying for the time I save.

 

[lika1961]

One thing is for sure - if this is how the tournament is going to be from now on I am not interested. Spells as a reward is very uninspiring. I can produce as many of them as I want in the Magic Academy that I am forced to have. I have hundreds of worthless relics to use for that after all. For me KP is the main reason for doing tournament and getting 3 after spending thousands of goods negotiating is not worthwhile.

 

[Sir Squirrel]

Have to agree, I just tried round 3, fourth tourney out and got defeated on 3 out of the 4 encounters, if this goes live like this, you heard it here first. The live forums will be a mess again with everyone freaking out that you broke another part of the game that wasn't broken. We are tame here, the live forums are crazy when things get messed up. I am surprised you have any mod's still there after the battle and wholesaler changes. Every time I see the pop up about volunteering to be a mod (or support) there, I laugh out loud and say to myself "yeah right". You couldn't even pay me enough to deal with that. Time to change my signature back to the balance one.

 

[DeletedUser1721]

@Sir Squirrel I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks that. Maybe if I was paid very, very well... snarky sympathizing with people tends to get them to focus their anger on the people who are actually ignoring feedback, rather than me (yay for having practice working at a grocery store with a payment system that is very much broken, and which is broken further every time they try to fix it), so that they address their criticism where it needs to be addressed to fix the problem (rather than just saying "the cashiers were making paying for groceries take longer"), but not as an unpaid, volunteer thing.

I find balancing my city's goods requirements without building a Magic Academy to be far more entertaining than actually having the Magic Academy. Spells are useless as prizes for me, except when there's an event with a "obtain x power of provision" requirement. And even then, I find those quests annoying because I remember a mod acknowledging at one point that the reason the devs aren't doing anything more with the Magic Academy is because people hate it so much. If people hate the Magic Academy enough that the devs have stopped rolling out new things for it, why don't people hate the Magic Academy enough that the devs don't introduce event quests requiring spells? But the tournament provides a relatively easy to obtain source of spells for quests like that.

I don't consider myself particularly tame. I'm still very upset that the devs don't seem to be acknowledging the fact that when peoples' complaints were "the tournaments are too hard" they responded by making the tournaments HARDER. To me, "this will be explained on the InnoTV episode" (Which I don't watch, because listening to things like this is difficult for me to process, because hearing aids, and there are no transcriptions) means "we aren't going to change this back because we want you to have the trouble you are having". Perhaps not everyone feels that way, but that is what that sentence reads as to me.

 

[DeletedUser1596]

Hi guys, I'll just share my point of view:
I fight in tournaments a lot. Usually I get all 6 stars in 11-14 provinces, which is a lot of dead units. Still, the number of units in barracks is slowly rising. My greatest enemy isn't the lack of units but the time spent fighting. Which is .. stupid. This new patch seems to change a lot. I will spend less time fighting and with more losses per province I will actually start losing units - which makes sense!

And there's one thing I don't understand.:
A player fighting 4 provinces will have app. 3,7x less casualties then a player fighting 8 provincies. (see army sizes). It is quite possible to fight 10-12 provinces every week without losing too many units in a long run. Then why so many people fighting only a few provinces (thus having many times less dead units) see bigger squad size as a problem?

 

[CrazyWizard]

Hi guys, I'll just share my point of view:
I fight in tournaments a lot. Usually I get all 6 stars in 11-14 provinces, which is a lot of dead units. Still, the number of units in barracks is slowly rising. My greatest enemy isn't the lack of units but the time spent fighting. Which is .. stupid. This new patch seems to change a lot. I will spend less time fighting and with more losses per province I will actually start losing units - which makes sense!

And there's one thing I don't understand.:
A player fighting 4 provinces will have app. 3,7x less casualties then a player fighting 8 provincies. (see army sizes). It is quite possible to fight 10-12 provinces every week without losing too many units in a long run. Then why so many people fighting only a few provinces (thus having many times less dead units) see bigger squad size as a problem?

for 1, many arent able to have there barracks run 24/7, just calculated it cost me 428200 hammers a day just to keep it running.
not to mention many dont have room for a lot of armouries to keep it running overnight and during work hours. they start the tournament with a lot less troups.

Secondary, you wont be able to keep doing. if your troup sizes increase to 4-5 times their current size your quickly out of troops as well. even when you keep it running 24/7

3rd there are plenty of people who do 10+ provinces.

 

[DeletedUser1513]

One question I'd like to get more information on: Some of you mention fights becoming harder - Could you explain why exactly?

One factor that made the fighting harder is the lie that the squadsizes were only doubled, (didn't I predict that this would be the case)
but another thing that is even more annoying me is that in one of the previous updates, they decided to make the treant the most passive unit in autobattling, so we are now forced to use manual battling every time we face defenders that have a weakness when getting hit by heavy melee , but where a single mage or archer gets added. I even lost in the first round using autobattle in one of the first provinces with an overpowered 3 star army selected on the weakness of the 1 star enemies! This never happened before 2 weeks agoo.

So WTF you are now saying that this update was to reduce the fighting time for tournaments.
Before i could do the first rounds of fights in autobattle in 20 minutes for more than 10 provinces, now doing the same provinces takes more than 2 hours (at the easy levels).
So do you really expect from your players to get up in the middle of the night to play (since those changes) for more than 2 hours, because you still maintain that stupid 16 hour counter, that require working people to leave their healthy 8 hours sleep time?
You say this changes were based on feedback from players. Probably someone has once posted it in the forum... no doubt... But what about feedback that many players are complaining about like the 16 hour timer? But in fact for me you don't have to change it anymore if you keep the desastrous awards...

Luckily you made the rewards also more or less useful, so it doesn't make sense to fight too many provinces and that many levels anymore...
This is the only reason I see that the time waste gets handled by this change. I see less opportunities to fight autobattle than a couple of weeks agoo.
So fighting IS getting harder, don't deny that!

The reward that is IMO the most useless will soon be the broken shards...
I have only 1 wonder where I need shards. So in a few weeks I have all the shards for all wonders. So the next broken shards I get I will not be able to use, because or I don't want to build those wonders because they are not valuable, or I have to wait until they are leveled high enough that I can again add runes to it (and fill the missing runes with broken shards again), but because the number of KPs you can earn nowadays has been ruined, it will take much longer before you reach that point.
Luckily I didn't have the enars embassy built because the new era takes soooooo much space. This wonder now becomes really useless, why would you take that big space to get 1 broken shard every week, while you can get too many of them from the tournaments!

 

[ALdbeign]

Losses from fights appear greater thus more difficult for the same reward - This one is tough as it can vary week to week depending on the province and with new enemy units in provinces it will alter difficulty potentially for affected provinces, that impact is currently unknown.

All good points Mykan, just going to comment on this one though. Marble is typically one of the easier province types to fight in, how dramatic this is going to be will probably take a couple weeks.

 

[Sir Squirrel]

Hi guys, I'll just share my point of view:
I fight in tournaments a lot. Usually I get all 6 stars in 11-14 provinces, which is a lot of dead units. Still, the number of units in barracks is slowly rising. My greatest enemy isn't the lack of units but the time spent fighting. Which is .. stupid. This new patch seems to change a lot. I will spend less time fighting and with more losses per province I will actually start losing units - which makes sense!

And there's one thing I don't understand.:
A player fighting 4 provinces will have app. 3,7x less casualties then a player fighting 8 provincies. (see army sizes). It is quite possible to fight 10-12 provinces every week without losing too many units in a long run. Then why so many people fighting only a few provinces (thus having many times less dead units) see bigger squad size as a problem?

Although I am glad the tourneys are working fine for you, this is probably more because you are at the highest levels of the game and are in the top 10 - 15% or higher of the best fighters on here as well. Try starting a new city, get to about chapter three, then try the tourneys, and then come and tell us what you think. Seriously if you seen how long it takes to build troops at the beginning of the game, losing tons of them is not a good thing, try it!
Also see if you can beat the ring 3 battles when you are in chapter 2 and need 4 or 5 of them to get the chest unlocked. I would be interested to see if it is just average players that are finding it impossible.

 

[DeletedUser1548]

No KP's and army sizes copied from regular province fights. 3rd star and I am losing on auto (in 2nd province!). Okay... No more playing here for me.

Tournaments was to give us relics and now they give spells instead of relics. Another change I don't get. Should we or shouldn't we have 5x5 MA to produce spells? @Marindor could you explain more about why prizes were changed like that? I seriously don't get it.
Recently we were told it's temporary that you put so much effort into battling. Can you say when this 'temporary' will end? It's been months, game is getting less and less fun and every change makes me feel it's DvP (devs vs players). I'm very patient person and it's the first time I wrote something like that so it means I'm really tired of all of this. I want to play Elvenar but I feel you really don't want me to.

 

[DeletedUser1877]

Much of the discussion here I don't understand, but that is because I haven't seen all that much yet.

So, for those who are making comparisons, I am right in the center of chapter 3. In this particular tournament, there are seven provinces for me to do. This is the first tournament where I can actually fight all 7, 4 stars so far. Not sure I'll reach 6 stars on all 7, but this change has improved my personal performance in tournaments. Oh, and for clarification, I'm just shy of researching the magic troops.

 

[Marindor]

@Marindor could you explain more about why prizes were changed like that?

Yes, this was based on player feedback. Players (not only here, but on Live markets as well) thought that the rewards were too boring, so we added new rewards to bring more variation. This of course also meant we had to remove some of the previous rewards, to keep it in balance. We are forwarding your feedback though about this

Recently we were told it's temporary that you put so much effort into battling. Can you say when this 'temporary' will end?

As explained in yesterday's Livestream, our main focus has been moved away from the battles for a few months already but of course you will still see some new units being added to the game and will see the regular battle-related changes/additions for it is a part of our game. The major overhaul has been left behind us though and we're working very much on other game features. Most of that is behind the scenes for now, but will show up soon

 

[Dony]

i have no problem if first 8-10 provinces have variable rewards
i have problem that province 10+ have rewards which people who doing them have no use of and i am confident that overall worldwide amount of people doing 10+ provinces on level 6 are minimal compared to the rest (what i want to say here is that you also need to listen feedback from this small group of players, while majority has no clue about this, since they never reached this far)

 

[DeletedUser1513]

Yes, this was based on player feedback. Players (not only here, but on Live markets as well) thought that the rewards were too boring, so we added new rewards to bring more variation. This of course also meant we had to remove some of the previous rewards, to keep it in balance. We are forwarding your feedback though about this

So now I understand why the lest time more and more rune shards got removed from the tournaments in the lower levels!
So it was anticipation so some people would start complaining so they had a reason to force this change they were working on.
Also people were asking to get easier rune broken shards and made very decent proposals for it. But instead of offering the proposals, probably only the message has been given to the devs that people want to get broken shards. ANd peopel were indeed complaining about the huge supply cost in the next era, so devs decided to help them with extra spells???
The way I see it is that THESE CHANGES are not requested, nor supported by the community and are only based on inaccurate filtering of the players requirements in the forum to the needs that devs have to care about.

As explained in yesterday's Livestream, our main focus has been moved away from the battles for a few months already but of course you will still see some new units being added to the game and will see the regular battle-related changes/additions for it is a part of our game.

So what do you mean with regular battle changes?

• Do you mean that on a regular basis you will transform the stronger units in the weakest unit (like you did for treant) to adapt the battle behavior thinking it will create excitement to the players.
• Or do you mean that you will on a regular basis increase the qsuadsizes?
• Or to make AI for units players cannot use more intelligent while making the AI for the units players can use even more stupid?

These are all actions spoiling the game in the last few weeks, so according to your description it is just part of the regular changes, or did I misunderstood your explanation?

The major overhaul has been left behind us though and we're working very much on other game features. Most of that is behind the scenes for now, but will show up soon

Normally we would have to be excited about this kind of announcements, unfortunately players like are fearing it will ruin the game even more.

 

[Deleted User - 60107]

Yes, this was based on player feedback. Players (not only here, but on Live markets as well) thought that the rewards were too boring, so we added new rewards to bring more variation. This of course also meant we had to remove some of the previous rewards, to keep it in balance. We are forwarding your feedback though about this

Your devs went too far with the removal of the rewards. I need the Relics (at the KPs, but mostly the Relics) because I am nowhere near the max boost, but I am getting too few Relics now, taking a very long time to increase my boost. The costs I have to pay do not care about that, though.

Also, here's a battle that's unwinnable for the AI:

This is the SECOND tournament province, round 4 (I already completed the previous three). The AI lost - likely thanks to the obstacles blocking the path of my archers. Without those obstacles I could hit 5 enemy units: 3 Mages, 1 Orc and the Thieves. But the obstacles make it unwinnable for the AI. And that's an early province.

You guys REALLY need to do sometihng about the battlefields - far too often terrain leaves one side at a HUGE disadvantage, like in this case.

EDIT: And here's another that proved impossible for the AI:

This one is the very next province (the third one), the very first battle of the fourth round.

I am done trying to fight in the current tournament. I am almost out of Archers because of all the losses.


Another one impossible for the AI, just as a test (from tournament province 6):

Dryads are suposed to be good against both Mages and Heavy Melee, and the enemies are either mages or Heavy Melee. But the Swamp Monsters are 3 stars, while the Mage and Knights are 2 stars, while my poor Dryads are 1 star and will stay that way until the Woodelves, many months from now.