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