Discussion Tournament Changes (post-release)

[Eilin]

Enlightened Light Range and Magnificient Mage Multiplier buildings won't be very useful with this chang

Maybe they will

In the next tournament:

We will implement a way to make certain unit types appear more often in certain tournaments, to bring back some more flavor, enable Fellowships to plan better again and make sure the expiring battle buildings can be used more strategically.

This is not the final version yet. We will see on Tuesday what it will looks like

 

[KonTiki]

So, nothing new to add ... but want to get this straight. INNO says

1. Build AWs they will make you stronger
2. Upgrade your AWs they will make you stronger
3. Expand as much as possible and buy premium expansions, they make you stronger
4. Buy premium workshops and residences, they will make you stronger
   And on and on ...

AND NOW, they say we are penalizing you for doing all these things.
I'm getting mixed messages here. Does Inno's left hand know what it's right hand is doing? I'm beginning to have some doubts. Or, am I misunderstanding something.

Sign me "confused".

 

[DeepTerminal]

AND NOW, they say we are penalizing you for doing all these things.
I'm getting mixed messages here. Does Inno's left hand know what it's right hand is doing? I'm beginning to have some doubts. Or, am I misunderstanding something.

I just want to point out Inno's argument which you (and many others who talk about "getting penalized") fail to address - their argument is that whatever "penalty" you get from AW levels and expansions, they will be nowhere near the "benefit" you get by those very AW levels and expansions. So their claim is that the "benefit", in general, almost always outweigh the "penalty."

If this is true, then getting AW levels and expansions will not result in a penalty, but a reward, all things considered.

What many people fail to recognize is the distinction between a pro tanto penalty and an all-things-considered penalty. The point is not whether AW levels and expansions result in a pro tanto penalty (they do), but whether they result in an all-things-considered penalty. Inno claims they don't. Many people think they (sometimes or most of the times) do.

This is the real issue at hand. Just saying "players are getting penalized" misses the real debate.

One argument that has been raised a number of times is that not all AW levels are equal. While for some very "useful" AWs, each additional level does outweigh the increase in tourney and spire squad size, some others arguably do not. There is thus a pressure for players (who care about optimizing their city) to only build "useful" AWs and discard "not as useful" ones.

The problem with expansions is that players can choose to do many different things with their expansions. So it's meaningless to ask whether having more expansions, in itself, result in a net benefit or penalty. It entirely depends on whether those space are put to good use, bad use, or if they are used at all.

 

[Lovec Krys]

Again.
The real problem with the penalization is that those numbers multiply each other. So give it a chapter or two at it becomes a real problem for all the endgame players, not only those who have high number of expansions & wonders.
That's because the formula has an exponential growth built in it, and with linear growth of your resources, it's matematicaly impossible to keep up with an exponential growth of costs.

And why should my live city costs be 76% higher that my beta city (observed for Spire, but new tourneys has the same problem) just because I have higher wonders & expansions count despite being almost (+-10) at the same research state?
Does anyone think that I can raise my coin production&capacity from those extra AWs levels & expansions somehow?

So yes, penalty for players, who researched optional SSU has been removed, but it was replaced with much worse penalty.

 

[ErestorX]

The point is not whether AW levels and expansions result in a pro tanto penalty (they do), but whether they result in an all-things-considered penalty. Inno claims they don't. Many people think they (sometimes or most of the times) do.

So far I have argued based on my live chapter 16 city optimized for fighting. For this kind of city the biggest problem currently is scaling troop size by number of expansions, because after some point you can't build anything that gives you significantly more troops. Therefore a city half the size of mine would be significantly more efficient in the future.

But if you think about cities optimised for catering it is even worse. The sweet spot for those currently is chapter 8 (yes, you need those Orcs to get enough provinces) with only 3 wonders and not all expansions placed. With a maxed city at that point you could have beaten all but the top 3 in the last tournament and doing more research, placing additional expansions or building additional wonders would hurt you all.

The best a player not interested in manual fighting could currently do with regard to tournament success is stay in chapter 8 until his provinces are maxed and quit the game afterwards.

All the goals @Marindor communicated so far are very reasonable, the problem is that the current troop size formular fails to meet any of these goals.

 

[palmira]

I believe most players didn't yet get what these huge squad sizes, SS, in the tournament mean. Maybe some simple calculations will help.

In province 45, first round, my SS is 42664; the enemy 91728. With an army 2,2 my size, the losses however I fight will be huge, with fire phoenix fed and some temporary building(s). With none, a lost cause.

But let us see how long I will have to train troops to be able to deploy 5 such army.

Currently, with all the helping AWs at lvl26, I train roughly an army of 2500/h. I will need 5x42664=213320 meaning 85h of training just to be able to deploy such an army.

We have 69h between tournaments. If the casual players thinks province 45 is only for hardcore players, imagine province 22, not an ambitious number, where the SS is roughly half, meaning that to have troops just to deploy this fight implies 42h training, much more really since I would have 21 fights before this one. And this just to round 1.

To top this, in all fights I did for this tourney not a single one was easy in terms of combination of troops, some were outright impossible, meaning all fights were meant for us to loose a lot of troops. So there is no way, even with my 2 brown bears and the time instants I get weekly from the spire, to go further then province 20-25, 5 rounds in a weekly basis in steady state just fighting. Catering will be not sustainable not in mercs but mana, orcs and even coins as the amounts became huge very fast.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Currently, with all the helping AWs at lvl26, I train roughly an army of 2500/h. I will need 5x42664=213320 meaning 85h of training just to be able to deploy such an army.

Are you sure about that? In my Live city, I have no AW higher than level 12, and most of the military ones are under 10, and I train 8100 in a slot that takes 2.5 to 3 hours, depending on building. That is more per hour than you. Are you sure you looked at a troop with a value of 1 when you calculated that?

And how many total AW levels do you have? I only have 202, soon to be 203. And that is at the end of chapter 16.

 

[palmira]

Are you sure about that? In my Live city, I have no AW higher than level 12, and most of the military ones are under 10, and I train 8100 in a slot that takes 2.5 to 3 hours, depending on building. That is more per hour than you. Are you sure you looked at a troop with a value of 1 when you calculated that?

And how many total AW levels do you have? I only have 202, soon to be 203. And that is at the end of chapter 16.

Ops, I looked at Poison dryad, so I train twice that, 5K per hour but it doesn't invalidate what I wrote, the SSs are huge are impossible to train in between tourneys.

I have 247 AWs levels, 132 expansions and I finished chapter 16 a few weeks ago.

 

[Lovec Krys]

To top this, in all fights I did for this tourney not a single one was easy in terms of combination of troops, some were outright impossible, meaning all fights were meant for us to loose a lot of troops.

That is another thing I realy dislike about new tournaments.
And while some players managed to achieve score above 10K this week by manual fighting, I'm realy not going to spend even more time than before this change and getting less than before this change for that increased time (and resources).

 

[palmira]

That is another thing I realy dislike about new tournaments.
And while some players managed to achieve score above 10K this week by manual fighting, I'm realy not going to spend even more time than before this change and getting less than before this change for that increased time (and resources).

I won't manual fight either, it is the most stupid feature of this game, out of some twisted mind. But apparently there are some players that object to 4 clicks per province taking a few seconds and rather prefer minutes per province on manual fight because they thought that would give them an advantage over auto fighters, sigh

 

[CrazyWizard]

I believe most players didn't yet get what these huge squad sizes, SS, in the tournament mean. Maybe some simple calculations will help.

In province 45, first round, my SS is 42664; the enemy 91728. With an army 2,2 my size, the losses however I fight will be huge, with fire phoenix fed and some temporary building(s). With none, a lost cause.

But let us see how long I will have to train troops to be able to deploy 5 such army.

Currently, with all the helping AWs at lvl26, I train roughly an army of 2500/h. I will need 5x42664=213320 meaning 85h of training just to be able to deploy such an army.

We have 69h between tournaments. If the casual players thinks province 45 is only for hardcore players, imagine province 22, not an ambitious number, where the SS is roughly half, meaning that to have troops just to deploy this fight implies 42h training, much more really since I would have 21 fights before this one. And this just to round 1.

To top this, in all fights I did for this tourney not a single one was easy in terms of combination of troops, some were outright impossible, meaning all fights were meant for us to loose a lot of troops. So there is no way, even with my 2 brown bears and the time instants I get weekly from the spire, to go further then province 20-25, 5 rounds in a weekly basis in steady state just fighting. Catering will be not sustainable not in mercs but mana, orcs and even coins as the amounts became huge very fast.

I did some paper math as well and came to the conclusion that for a player like me if I placed +500% LM combat damage (should be enough to whack anything on your path do 20 provinces on autocombat using rangers(fastest attack unit we have) would result in 16 days of training to recover from it (without brown bears)

Thats just plain scary

I do understand it works well for players in optimised chapters who do 14 provinces/cities blindfolded with easy but as an high level endgamer?
Those are impossible stats, and I do not like to be forced to play manually.

My city finished the last chapter, I train with a level 35 flying academy, I have 30 premium and 111 regular expansions and currently 764 wonderlevels.

 

[DeletedUser1657]

In province 45, first round, my SS is 42664; the enemy 91728. With an army 2,2 my size, the losses however I fight will be huge, with fire phoenix fed and some temporary building(s). With none, a lost cause.

Sadly the game is designed for you to lose that fight, boosters are the only chance you have to not lose. It is inno's words that fights of 2:1 are designed to be impossible to pass. So between their difficulty ratio and the troop training time issue you point out, it is clearly meant to stop players.

Hopefully that was not intended but we will see, it seems at odds with adding bonus chests. Adding 9 bonus chests where 25 people need to get 6,640 pts each requires a huge amount of work and effort. That would be 25 people getting 25 provinces to round 6, because a fellowship is never that perfectly balanced you would need some more and some less to be able to achieve this. One would think some people would have to be going into the 40+ province mark, so your example is perfect.

It would seem from a mathmetical (and your example) perspective that the difficulty and the bonus rewards are not aligned to be achievable. I can see they don't want a fellowship getting all bonus chests every week but how many fellowships are expected to ever get them? One would think they need to lower the requirements for bonus chests or adjust the squad size and difficulty scale so players can achieve more provinces regularly.

 

[Dl. Goe]

Hi everyone,

I don’t have an account here, on beta, so I already owe you an apology for posting here and not to the pre-release topic, but I feel the previous is almost abandoned.

Regarding the changes discussed here, although I don’t have first-hand experience, one thing stroked me: number and amount of changes proposed here would have a massive impact upon game-play; this, by itself, doesn’t matter which ones or in what direction, I expect would annoy each and every veteran, because contradicts the nature of this game, at least as I understand it and I hope I’m not representing a very small minority.

Here probably a bit of clarification should be made:

• I understand this game as a (very) long-term strategy game; to be abundantly clear, as something opposite to shooters (react on spot) and to randomness (doesn’t matter what you choose, in the end everything will level up)
• I understand this game as a very soft, but still competitive game (in the end, it is tribal wars redesigned and with better looking buildings, isn’t it?! Lol, don’t shoot); so that, in my view, people do compete one to another, but only through “positive” interactions (I can’t heart anyone, most I can do is ignore him) and mostly through their long term decisions and eagerness/stubbornness/patience to put them at work.

Examples, if needed:

-I placed and upgraded ToS for it’s kp/day mostly; now I hear I should lose more kp than it brings during tournaments and some troops…

-I decided it suits me better to have larger quantities of troops, than quality of armies (again wonders, but now the decision might be very well reversed…)

-I decided to skip SSU so that I could do better in tournaments, but worse on map encounters, so that I pushed on production buildings, for catering on map; with this changes they might turn out to be dead weight.

No need to continue, examples should be in hundreds, without any exaggeration.

So, if you somehow agree with me so far, does it mean the game once started cannot suffer changes? Well, it’s both yes and no, from my point of view; if “no changes” (or at least not important ones) it’s possible, that should be the preferred way; but we are not in an ideal world, so when such changes “must” take place, a few rules should be followed:

• Accept that every change you make will affect player’s strategies and in different ways/amount; as a consequence, each time you have to do this, please, start your announcement with “we are sorry” and not with a big smile and “wonderful news”; it doesn’t make sense.
• Try to make those changes as small as possible, incremental if really needed.
• Try to think/foresee those changes well in advance (if possible more than the average players’ long term decisions…in my case that’s over a year, upon my word, so good luck); and obviously, communicate, even the row idea, as soon as possible.
• Always accept that adding something new is better than changing something already in place (basically you offer 2 choices: remain with what you have in place and that will stay as it is, or go for the new one, a new start for everyone).

And last, but not the least, talk with the people from programming department (who are clever boys, but probably don’t know a thing about this game) and ask them to picture that, every time they are asked to change something, they find themselves in a pool full of shit; so one principle comes handy: don’t make big waves! And because they are clever guys, they will realise immediately they should use addition (in their smart functions) as often as possible, multiplication less so, and exponentials only for tsunamis (to be clear, for something new, everything is equally good).


Sorry if made it too long, these are my two cents thoughts…

Best regards,

Mihai, live-ro

 

[Pauly7]

Good post @Dl. Goe.

• Accept that every change you make will affect player’s strategies and in different ways/amount; as a consequence, each time you have to do this, please, start your announcement with “we are sorry” and not with a big smile and “wonderful news”; it doesn’t make sense.
• Try to make those changes as small as possible, incremental if really needed.
• Try to think/foresee those changes well in advance (if possible more than the average players’ long term decisions…in my case that’s over a year, upon my word, so good luck); and obviously, communicate, even the row idea, as soon as possible.
• Always accept that adding something new is better than changing something already in place (basically you offer 2 choices: remain with what you have in place and that will stay as it is, or go for the new one, a new start for everyone).

This all seems like a very reasonable set of expectations to me. The first point in particular is the thing that puts all the players in an angry/defensive frame of mind from the get-go, because despite calling them out on it every single time, Inno still tries to present each "nerf" as if it is somehow a benefit to everyone. It doesn't work and makes people feel like it's an insult to their intelligence.

 

[Verde]

Inno still tries to present each "nerf" as if it is somehow a benefit to everyone. It doesn't work and makes people feel like it's an insult to their intelligence.

Even when a change (not this one!!) isn't actually abyssmal, it's just the principle of the thing.

 

[Marindor]

Hi guys,

To avoid getting off track in a thread that is already big enough, please stick to the core of this thread here, which is the tournament changes. If you want to debate about how to promote changes, please feel free to create another thread for that but let's stay on topic here, please. Thank you.

 

[SirSmithy]

As a reminder :

• Elementary era
• a level 14 monastery
• needles of the storm level 7
• a level 4 dwarf rampart
• 61 province extensions
• 6 premium extensions
• 43 search extensions
• all squads minus 4.

I did not feed my phoenix or add buildings favoring the troops. I only used the barracks units.

5th day:
I managed to make 14 provinces out of 14 in auto combat.


Review:
Fairly balanced tournament. Even without military advantage and with only troops from the barracks, we can make 14 provinces in automatic combat.
I like the fact that it is not the same troops that are requested.

Next week, I'll do the negotiations and keep you posted

try to compare the 60+ provinces KP loss to that 14 “balance” provinces... that’s pretty lame, IMO

 

[Verde]

Hi guys,

To avoid getting off track in a thread that is already big enough, please stick to the core of this thread here, which is the tournament changes. If you want to debate about how to promote changes, please feel free to create another thread for that but let's stay on topic here, please. Thank you.

Apologies, that was indeed off-topic

Speaking of the length of this thread, should there perhaps be a new thread for Tournament changes V2, depending on when the next group of significant changes is introduced?

 

[Marindor]

Apologies, that was indeed off-topic

Speaking of the length of this thread, should there perhaps be a new thread for Tournament changes V2, depending on when the next group of significant changes is introduced?

That might not be a bad idea indeed. The point is that these changes will probably not all be implemented at once, but rather more gradually throughout the upcoming weeks. We'll think about it, thanks for bringing up the suggestion.

 

[edeba]

When you look at the outcome of what they've done, the maximum difference from the squad size upgrade issue was something like 56%, and I would argue overall it was far less because I think most players figured it out chapters ago so over time, overall the problem was declining.

What they've done here is make the differences in squad size differences to be exponentially increasing. I haven't done the calculations, but people have reported 400% differences because you invested in your city versus a city without any enhancements.

I did my second highest score on beta this week and the level of resources I drained is shocking. I've got months of not playing to my potential and building resources. I drained 40% of my orcs, 3 weeks of goods production and a few weeks of troop production. For my highest score my burn rate was higher than my production rate, but nothing like this in comparison. With the 3 extra 10kp from the extra chests my kp take was probably about the same as my highest score. I think I burned through at least double the resources.

The real problem with the penalization is that those numbers multiply each other. So give it a chapter or two at it becomes a real problem for all the endgame players, not only those who have high number of expansions & wonders.
That's because the formula has an exponential growth built in it, and with linear growth of your resources, it's matematicaly impossible to keep up with an exponential growth of costs.

And why should my live city costs be 76% higher that my beta city (observed for Spire, but new tourneys has the same problem) just because I have higher wonders & expansions count despite being almost (+-10) at the same research state?
Does anyone think that I can raise my coin production&capacity from those extra AWs levels & expansions somehow?

So yes, penalty for players, who researched optional SSU has been removed, but it was replaced with much worse penalty.

I disagree that all the goals are very reasonable. There was specific intend specified against a playing style where you just stop for a while and build up resources so you'd be stronger, but, now your are indeed much weaker for the effort.

All the goals @Marindor communicated so far are very reasonable, the problem is that the current troop size formular fails to meet any of these goals.

At times I could count up to 10 seconds for a stupid encounter to accept. Sorry, but it was an insane monotonous amount of time, not a few seconds, and no longer fun. I think the argument went that it was so time consuming, the idea of doing manual battles was precluded, and the competition wasn't about who could go the furthest, but who could withstand the most drudgery. I will probably do some manual battles now, but requesting a reduction in monotony does not equate to the motivation being looking for an advantage from manual battles.

there are some players that object to 4 clicks per province taking a few seconds and rather prefer minutes per province on manual fight because they thought that would give them an advantage over auto fighters, sigh

Insane... No one asked for this. There's a quote from this presentation, https://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_lipstadt_behind_the_lies_of_holocaust_denial#t-918514, that I've really taken to:

"There are facts, there are opinions, and there are lies."

For sure the promotional video about the new tournament is full of lies.

I did some paper math as well and came to the conclusion that for a player like me if I placed +500% LM combat damage (should be enough to whack anything on your path do 20 provinces on autocombat using rangers(fastest attack unit we have) would result in 16 days of training to recover from it (without brown bears)

Those are impossible stats, and I do not like to be forced to play manually.

Agreed... If going though this wasn't so consistent, it gets to the point that credibility gets lost on the first two... "There are facts, there are opinions, and there are lies."

Good post @Dl. Goe.
The first point in particular is the thing that puts all the players in an angry/defensive frame of mind from the get-go, because despite calling them out on it every single time, Inno still tries to present each "nerf" as if it is somehow a benefit to everyone. It doesn't work and makes people feel like it's an insult to their intelligence.