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Why Orcs are needed after 10th provinces circle?

  • Thread starter DeletedUser1548
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DeletedUser1548

Guest
As advised here: https://beta.forum.elvenar.com/index.php?threads/10637-orcs-needed-to-cater-in-tournaments.5341/
I would like to ask again... ;)

Muf-Muf said:
It is intended that negotiating requires Orcs in provinces of distance 10 or further. If it happens below that, it should not be like that. Will have to check on the cater costs for tournaments.

@Muf-Muf or anyone else:
Can you explain a bit why players are being blocked with revealing a bigger piece of a map?
It is a bit confusing... First we got chests at the beginning of every chapter forcing us to clear provinces in a certain number and now we get a limit as if time and costs of scouting were not enough.

Also with chests you made pacifists / casual players / expansion buyers angry and now you annoy the other half of players. That's strange.
 

DeletedUser651

Guest
I guess they want us all to be fighters? Fighters aren't blocked from clearing those provinces, only negotiators.

Beyond this...has anyone looked at the cost of clearing those provinces with orcs? How long it will take.

I counted the orcs needed just to clear one province...1350. One armory at level 20 only produces 380 orcs in a day. Think about that. Plus, of course you need the orcs for other stuff.

Dang they are slamming the brakes on us negotiating these provinces!!!!!
 
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DeletedUser629

Guest
That's not true. Scouting takes 2 or even 3 days for a lot of players. You can easily breed enough Orcs to negotiate a province, but you will be needing more armories.
 

DeletedUser651

Guest
1. You need a lot of population for those armory upgrades. But the new houses only give you 2 more population per square once you have upgraded the houses to the maximum. The first upgrade actually decreases the amount of pop per square. It takes 295 population for one armory...590 for two. At 2 pop per square, that is 295 squares of houses that have to be upgraded to the maximum....and it takes a lot of time to do that. 12 hours and 29 minutes for the first upgrade. I don't know what the second upgrade takes....it would be simple awful if it takes orcs!

2. Many people will be hitting this wall before they even hit the orc chapter. So, they have to finish the fairy chapter, or maybe even finish the dwarf and the fairy chapter before they can hit the orc chapter to be able to breed their first orc. This orc requirement doesn't start when you hit the orc chapter, it starts when you are 10 provinces out. Right now, I am in the 12th and 13th circle. I can't remember how long ago it was when I hit 10 out.

They released all kinds of chests that forced people to clear all kinds of provinces and now people are getting penalized for clearing provinces. They wanted people to clear more provinces, but not too many? That has narrowed down choices for people. No longer can the clear less than x amount of provinces or more than x amount of provinces. Every choice outside of that range is no longer allowed.

3. You need orcs to do other things....like upgrade workshops and I don't even know what else. Now you have to choose to either clear a province OR do something else. If you choose to upgrade something, then you have to wait even longer to get the orcs to clear a province.

4. Moreover, how can you say it isn't true that they have slammed the brakes on clearing provinces? Obviously they have. Last week, under the old way, I could negotiate those provinces. Tonight I cannot. Brakes slammed. If I wasn't wearing a seat belt my head would have hit the dashboard.
 
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DeletedUser1548

Guest
@Goryn , thank you but again your answer makes me feel a bit 'shackled'...
@Bobbykitty elaborated all of this really nice I just wanted to add a little bit up.

I am a fighter but have only 2 armories as I can login quite often so no longer training queue is needed.
If I was not fighting I would be even more forced to build another Armories to be able to cater provinces (kick no.1). It is costly... So lower number of manufactories (kick no.2)? When I decided to play peacefully? It's getting more interesting with every post. :)

Still my question is unanswered: Why it was changed like that?
You know... I can manage a game being harder but I would like to know what's the origin of a change I cannot comprehend. ;)
 

CrazyWizard

Well-Known Member
1. You need a lot of population for those armory upgrades. But the new houses only give you 2 more population per square once you have upgraded the houses to the maximum. The first upgrade actually decreases the amount of pop per square. It takes 295 population for one armory...590 for two. At 2 pop per square, that is 295 squares of houses that have to be upgraded to the maximum....and it takes a lot of time to do that. 12 hours and 29 minutes for the first upgrade. I don't know what the second upgrade takes....it would be simple awful if it takes orcs!

Hey bobbykitty,

I agree that the requirment for orcs is a strange and really bad idea, they one who came up with it, and especially the one who signed accepted on this agreement should be fired, The chest were a bad idea, and this one is even a 100 times worse. you want to slow down your players, but you never want them to hit a massive roadblock, because that makes those customers quit, and a quitted customer will never ever bring in revenue.
So from a buisness point of vieuw both ideas are beyond stupid the orcs being even more stupid than the chests.

That said I like to point out that your statement in the quote above is not really correct, armouries needs loads of culture and relativly very few workers.
it's they main reason they could compete for ranking points with several other buildings, since culture is at least twice as cheap as workers and therefore the points per quare for the entire chain (armoury, houses and culture building room) was quite good.

No clue how they stand with the increased size now.
 

DeletedUser338

Guest
Chests are necessary. They are REALLY REALLY necessary. Anyone who tells you otherwise has no idea of game balance.
Let me explain why; Catering tournaments gets more difficult with the amount of provinces you conquer. If you were able to get through the research without conquering many provinces, you would have ridiculously low costs, meaning you could cater every tournament unlocked with ridiculous ease. Forever.
"But Jirre," I already hear some of you say, "Why not simply increase the difficulty of tournaments when you reach a new chapter?"
Because it makes more sense to do it this (the current) way. Provinces and tournaments are very similar, so it makes sense to increase their difficulty at the same time. Also, if you were to do no provinces for a long time you'd end up with a similar (yet less eternal) problem as I wrote before. Hell, it might also be rather difficult to increase tournament difficulty through research.

And last but not least; let me address one of the most stupid arguments I hear over and over again. "I want to play as a trader/without fighting and I should be able to because it says on the wiki that you can make a choice".
This is some of the biggest nonsense I've heard so far. Everyone seems to be talking about one certain line on the Wiki ("You can either become a skilled and well-known trader, refine your producing art or lead your troops to victory in 3D-animated battles, the decision is up to you."). Except this doesn't mean scrap. You were never supposed to not build Barracks so you could just trade your way through. Just like you can't decide to not build a trader and only fight your way through research. You'd get stuck at the first chapter! There's no way to get the goods you need if you only fight. And just like that you can't always expect to trade your way through.
I mean, it doesn't even say you can decide to ONLY trade or fight. It just says you can choose between fighting and trading. Sometimes.
 

DeletedUser1548

Guest
Chests are necessary. They are REALLY REALLY necessary. Anyone who tells you otherwise has no idea of game balance.
Let me explain why; Catering tournaments gets more difficult with the amount of provinces you conquer. If you were able to get through the research without conquering many provinces, you would have ridiculously low costs, meaning you could cater every tournament unlocked with ridiculous ease. Forever.
Oh, that's nice explanation for the question I did not address (yet?) but it's nice to get a piece of knowledge. :) Thank you!
I would like to get similar answer for 10th provinces circle and I will be satisfied. ;)

Like I said... I am a fighter but I know lots of people who really hate fighting mechanism so they negotiate. They build barracks for points, etc. but they:
DO NOT fight
DO NOT understand army bonuses
DO NOT want to learn
They just simply want to build nice looking houses and stare at their piles of goods. I wouldn't say it's wrong in a city builder game...
 

DeletedUser867

Guest
I wouldn't say it's wrong in a city builder game...
Nor a Garden Club. Maybe one of the next few LARGE cultural buildings should be an Aquarium, and then everybody would be happy.
 

CrazyWizard

Well-Known Member
Chests are necessary. They are REALLY REALLY necessary. Anyone who tells you otherwise has no idea of game balance.
Let me explain why; Catering tournaments gets more difficult with the amount of provinces you conquer. If you were able to get through the research without conquering many provinces, you would have ridiculously low costs, meaning you could cater every tournament unlocked with ridiculous ease. Forever.
"But Jirre," I already hear some of you say, "Why not simply increase the difficulty of tournaments when you reach a new chapter?"
Because it makes more sense to do it this (the current) way. Provinces and tournaments are very similar, so it makes sense to increase their difficulty at the same time. Also, if you were to do no provinces for a long time you'd end up with a similar (yet less eternal) problem as I wrote before. Hell, it might also be rather difficult to increase tournament difficulty through research.

And last but not least; let me address one of the most stupid arguments I hear over and over again. "I want to play as a trader/without fighting and I should be able to because it says on the wiki that you can make a choice".
This is some of the biggest nonsense I've heard so far. Everyone seems to be talking about one certain line on the Wiki ("You can either become a skilled and well-known trader, refine your producing art or lead your troops to victory in 3D-animated battles, the decision is up to you."). Except this doesn't mean scrap. You were never supposed to not build Barracks so you could just trade your way through. Just like you can't decide to not build a trader and only fight your way through research. You'd get stuck at the first chapter! There's no way to get the goods you need if you only fight. And just like that you can't always expect to trade your way through.
I mean, it doesn't even say you can decide to ONLY trade or fight. It just says you can choose between fighting and trading. Sometimes.


Ok good point about the tournament, BUT. you can only play tournaments in the provincies you have scouted, right now the catering and fighting costs are good for the first 4-8 provincies and doable untill about 15 for a few levels.
they could have also balanced it in a way that you would able to somehow do way more provinces, also the amount of discovered provinces is just 1 way to calculate the increment of the catering costs, but there is never 1 road to a solution. they just decided to take the wrong road.
I am sure that if we put some heads together we could come up with a solution that doesnt need chests, nor is as simple as the chapter thing.
for example the amount of unlocked maparea, since space == production. and it's something every player stives for. it's a similar but way more natural solution than the amount of provincies especially since tournaments create relics now instead of provincies. you might need to add a small factor for calculations to the research tree. namely the several unlocks of better factories to make sure diamond players arent hindered by buying a lot of land space quickly. and this was just took me 30 seconds to come up with. so I am sure there are more solutions who are just as elegant.

So because the tournament catering costs are based on provincies they are nessesary right now, but it's still one of the most stupid things they have designed. again a running customer does never create revenue. the chests are not needed if the catering costs were designed in a different way.

Orcs are just an insane stupid copy of the chest design but then magnified on a cosmic scale.
 
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DeletedUser338

Guest
Diamond players would start building more culture+population buildings if it would work like that and putting down expansions would be discouraged. It wouldn't work as well as you make it sound. Space does not necessarily equal production.

And about orcs; personally I just consider them a 4th tier good. I'm really not sure why everyone thinks they're such a problem, we've had the same kind of thing before. If you did too many provinces you'd end up having to pay 3rd tier goods while being unable to produce them.
 

CrazyWizard

Well-Known Member
Well jirre it's the state of mind it creates.
If you went to fast, you missed something, but you could also see the end of the tunnel being quite near.
right now we are talking that quite likely you could reach the tunnel at lets say early dwarves, and the end of the tunnel is right 3 months away.

This aint the same as tomorrow or in a few days. you unlock the "normal" goods quite quickly, even if the production aint that great, it's still something within reach.

the problem with orcs is that they are way out of reach. there is simply no production, en that means the player will be stuck at the world map for weeks or months depending on the playstyle of the player.
I am very sure that at least I reached ring 10 provincies before I unlocked the dwarves.
in fact for the past 2 months or so I am cleaning up by skipped provincies, all at ring 10/11. I started skipping those like 6 months ago.
 

DeletedUser338

Guest
I reached Orcs/Goblins while being at ring 9/10. So there are some provinces I can trade and some I can't.
But the Research for Orcs is 3 steps into the Chapter. It can literally be the 3rd thing you research. Now with tournaments helping us out too, this really doesn't seem like a huge problem. If you really want, you can still fight some provinces too. There's more than one way to get the KP needed to get the Orcs, but people seem to be pissed because one of the easier ways is temporarily unavailable.
 

DeletedUser867

Guest
So there are some provinces I can trade and some I can't.
You have to depend on posted trades when you're testing, but our earlier research indicated that
  • Deletions (Goldmines), Immigrants, and your Trading Partners all exhibit flat topped hexagonal rings
  • 200 Trading Partners covers just a bit less than 14 full rings, centered on your own city
  • Scouting, Catering, Negotiation, Combat all exhibit pointy topped hexagonal rings,
    so the coverage is the same except for your most distant dozen or so potential trading partners
Consequently, you'll need a few Orcs to discover all of your Trading Partners.
but people seem to be pissed because one of the easier ways is temporarily unavailable
And they're probably realizing that using goods to buy KPs becomes more and more expensive. Using those same goods to negotiate distant provinces is no longer feasible, so we now have a much needed soft cap on goods, similar to the soft caps that we've always had for scouting and combat.
 
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DeletedUser651

Guest
Lord Jirre...your comments about this issue seem to be based only on your personal experience. You chose to do very little scouting and province clearing. Many of us have done way more than what you have done. If you have done a lot of scouting, as Crazy Wizard and I and many others have done, then players can be stopped dead from clearing provinces all the way back to the Dwarf chapter.

Crazy Wizard is right. I AM bored. This is too slow. I am still 147 kp away from being able to unlock the armories which won't do me any good because I need more population to upgrade them. It may take fewer pop to upgrade them, but it still take 295 and I don't have that. So I have to now clear the swamp trail and the upgraded residences and the orc portal....and all this while provinces just sit there unable to be cleared. Snoresville! Then, once I unlock all that, I have to spend what? a few months of upgrading all the houses to get the population to upgrade those armories. zzzzzzzz Meanwhile, all those provinces will just sit there uncleared and uncleared provinces means no expansions. zzzzzzz Then maybe, at some point in the year 2050 I will be able to move forward. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Plus, all work on the ancient wonders has stopped cold because I need the kp to do the rest of this stuff. zzzzzzz

If anyone in the dev team ever tested these brilliant ideas in real time, it would take them years to get the next updates to us. So obviously, they can't do that, but they sure should listen to us when we tell them how they have taken things too far.

I know they want beta testers, but I can't even test anything here because I can't play anything.
 
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DeletedUser338

Guest
I suppose I have cleared less provinces than average, seeing how I don't clear them of Wonders and the like.
But even then, don't tell me you can't fight a couple? Crystal provinces are still easy as hell, Silk provinces should also be quite doable and a single fight here or there in random provinces should get you quite a bit of KP already. And as I said before, provinces aren't the only way to get KP. There's still tournaments.
 

DeletedUser629

Guest
Lord Jirre...your comments about this issue seem to be based only on your personal experience. You chose to do very little scouting and province clearing. Many of us have done way more than what you have done. If you have done a lot of scouting, as Crazy Wizard and I and many others have done, then players can be stopped dead from clearing provinces all the way back to the Dwarf chapter.

Crazy Wizard is right. I AM bored. This is too slow. I am still 147 kp away from being able to unlock the armories which won't do me any good because I need more population to upgrade them. It may take fewer pop to upgrade them, but it still take 295 and I don't have that. So I have to now clear the swamp trail and the upgraded residences and the orc portal....and all this while provinces just sit there unable to be cleared. Snoresville! Then, once I unlock all that, I have to spend what? a few months of upgrading all the houses to get the population to upgrade those armories. zzzzzzzz Meanwhile, all those provinces will just sit there uncleared and uncleared provinces means no expansions. zzzzzzz Then maybe, at some point in the year 2050 I will be able to move forward. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Plus, all work on the ancient wonders has stopped cold because I need the kp to do the rest of this stuff. zzzzzzz

If anyone in the dev team ever tested these brilliant ideas in real time, it would take them years to get the next updates to us. So obviously, they can't do that, but they sure should listen to us when we tell them how they have taken things too far.

I know they want beta testers, but I can't even test anything here because I can't play anything.


As explained by Muf-Muf, the Orcs that are currently needed in tournaments are not supposed to be there, so you can still get plenty of kp from tournaments.

Regarding population. It's a strategy building game, if you don't have enough population, you need to change your city. Provinces can be cleared by fighting, it's not like we locked them entirely. With the tournaments, players are able to get a massive bonus on their boosted goods, making negotiating provinces a lot easier. This has now become a bit harder. Players can also use the magic academy to produce even more goods, and build ancient wonders to get a decent amount of supplies to breed Orcs. Things are getting more and more connected.

The blooming trader guild wonder comes in very handy now, because that portal bonus will become very important. Nobody wants to build too many of those rally points taking up 35 squares.

Yes, with a new guest race you're going to have to make choices. Use the kp for research, or use it for the ancient wonders. It's going to take a lot longer for a lot of players to finish this chapter. You can't have it all in a short amount of time unless you buy a lot of diamonds.
 

CrazyWizard

Well-Known Member
I suppose I have cleared less provinces than average, seeing how I don't clear them of Wonders and the like.
But even then, don't tell me you can't fight a couple? Crystal provinces are still easy as hell, Silk provinces should also be quite doable and a single fight here or there in random provinces should get you quite a bit of KP already. And as I said before, provinces aren't the only way to get KP. There's still tournaments.

Crystal provinces are cackewalks, but in several / a lot of provinces there are fights you simply cant win, or your losses are absolutely massive.
Think about fights with 8 groups of various enemies. you are always fighting agains all odds since the enemy always overpowers you by a lot, so you need to use weaknesses and tactics to overcome the difference.
In general this means fights like these are bought off.
at a certain points all your provinces will have some fights done but none (except those like crystal) will be finished.
So this means you will not be able to get province expansions during that entire time aka months.

If you slam an active player down like that,you most likely will lose the player.

As explained by Muf-Muf, the Orcs that are currently needed in tournaments are not supposed to be there, so you can still get plenty of kp from tournaments.

Regarding population. It's a strategy building game, if you don't have enough population, you need to change your city. Provinces can be cleared by fighting, it's not like we locked them entirely. With the tournaments, players are able to get a massive bonus on their boosted goods, making negotiating provinces a lot easier. This has now become a bit harder. Players can also use the magic academy to produce even more goods, and build ancient wonders to get a decent amount of supplies to breed Orcs. Things are getting more and more connected.

The blooming trader guild wonder comes in very handy now, because that portal bonus will become very important. Nobody wants to build too many of those rally points taking up 35 squares.

Yes, with a new guest race you're going to have to make choices. Use the kp for research, or use it for the ancient wonders. It's going to take a lot longer for a lot of players to finish this chapter. You can't have it all in a short amount of time unless you buy a lot of diamonds.

Since I dont have the space for both the race buildings and culture for upgrading the regular buildings I will start by upgrading the armouries.
I will then destroy any culture building, and will count my houses required in the post research tree case and destroy all others.

This will create a massive amount of space, if multiply rally points are allowed and I have room for them then multiple of them will be build.
since the armouries drain your supply of supplies as well, even if you had the space/culture you simply cant run barracks and armouries at full speed, and still have plenty to upgrade all your houses. the fairy upgrades were already a nightmare to keep your 4 workers in action and not have your supplies dwindle to 0, orcs will be worse.

I will put all effort in getting the research tree done asap, so that I can start rebuilding my town with the orc design. the huge room left by the destruction of factories and culture will help moving around the old buildings to there new position.

wonders can come again after the orcs are completed. in the end no one is slower or faster with the AW in either case.

As for the orcs to me it doesnt really hurt me if I need to pay orcs or not for the provinces, but I would have hit this cap pre dwarves, if at that time orcs where required I would have most likely lost interest and would have quitted elvenar.

I simply do not understand the game designers point in creating doors that slam shut in front of there customers. this aint a traffic jam, but a brick wall that takes ages to bring down.
 

DeletedUser629

Guest
As for the orcs to me it doesnt really hurt me if I need to pay orcs or not for the provinces, but I would have hit this cap pre dwarves, if at that time orcs where required I would have most likely lost interest and would have quitted elvenar.

We will, of course, monitor this situation. If ring 10 proves to be too soon to have Orcs, and many players who haven't reached chapter VIII won't be able to negotiate anymore, chances are, it will be changed. Negotiating can be made harder, but should not become impossible.
 

DeletedUser

Guest
I mean, it doesn't even say you can decide to ONLY trade or fight. It just says you can choose between fighting and trading. Sometimes.

I'm guessing English is your first language, but it's always been clear that Inno doesn't employ a qualified English translator. Given the context of the sentence within the overview page, the only acceptable interpretation is that "Elvenar is a game where players don't have to be fighters in order to succeed." Ask any player who started Elvenar (from a non-fighting background): we all thought the fighting was optional / minimal.

Catering tournaments gets more difficult with the amount of provinces you conquer. If you were able to get through the research without conquering many provinces, you would have ridiculously low costs, meaning you could cater every tournament unlocked with ridiculous ease. Forever.

This is illogical. It just means that the cost increase is deferred. As you said, catering gets more difficult with each additional province...so delaying province encounters simply means that the increased expense is deferred.

Provinces can be cleared by fighting, it's not like we locked them entirely.

Of course they're entirely locked. Without orcs, no provinces.

And, with regard to the difficulty of fighting Province Encounters overall: we're forgetting about the loss of the Fairy Units. Surely, when determining the difficulty of the Ring 11 and above provinces, the developers assumed that their Fairy Units were going to be available! Surely they made these levels appropriately difficult, so as to give a challenge to our flying units. Now that we don't have those units - have we seen any appropriate reduction in the difficulty level of the Provinces? Of course not. So the assertion, "provinces can be cleared by fighting" isn't really true for most players. We don't have the units that were intended to allow us to overcome the enormous disadvantages in units / strengths.

With the tournaments, players are able to get a massive bonus on their boosted goods, making negotiating provinces a lot easier. This has now become a bit harder.

"...a bit harder". No, impossible is the correct word. No orcs.
 
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