I am misunderstanding something. In the current tournament, there is already a continuous increase in difficulty with each province opened: my round 1 in province 6 is significantly harder than my round 1 in province 1. The implication of the description is that is currently not the case. It is not just squad sizes getting bigger for both me and those shady characters, the enemy squads will often have higher rankings (number of stars) in the later provinces too. My ratio of losses are higher in the higher provinces. This is not just a squad size thing.
It looks like the description is saying that round 2 in province 1 will be incrementally harder than round 1 in province 6. Is that what you are trying to say?
The difficulty is a measure of enemy troop size as compared to yours. In the 4-click tournament all of level 1 is 85% difficulty, level 2 100%, and each level up by 15%. There is also a squad size increase with each province, which is basically the province you are on times the troop size for province 1. So, difficulty doesn't increases, but relative losses do. If you lose 5% of 100 troops at province 1, you would expect to lose 5% of 2000 troops at province 20. They did round losses down for the 4 click tournament so certainly the first couple provinces would seem easier.
Now how the difficulty increases a more complicated, but there are 21 encounters that are less difficult than anything that was in the 4-click tournament ( the first 6 provinces level 1, the first 5 provinces level 2, the first 4 provinces level 3, the first 3 provinces level 4, the first two provinces level 5 and the first province in level 6).
For level 1 from province 7 on, every encounter is more difficult than level 1 of the 4 click tournament (greater than 85%). By province 23, every encounter is more difficult than level 6 of the 4-click tournament (greater than 160%)
For level 2, which was 100% difficulty in the 4-click tournament, every encounter from province 8 an on is more difficult and by province 22, everything is more difficult than 160%.
For level 3, which was 115% difficulty in the 4-click tournament, every province from province 10 is more difficult, and by province 21 everything is more difficult than 160%.
For level 4, which was 130% difficulty, every province from province 12 is more difficulty and by province 20 everything is more difficult than 160%.
For level 5, which was 145% difficulty, and the highest difficulty many player play, by the 15th provinces everything is more difficult and by the 19th province everything is more difficult than 160%.
For level 6, which was 160%, everything up to 17 is easier and from province 18, more difficult. But this is a level that many only played the first 9 provinces because after 9 provinces you get a rune and broken rune and unless you need them, it isn't worth the resources.
Once you get to province 18, the difficulty of each subsequent province increases by 3.6%. Province 33 is the last provinces with anything with a difficulty below 200%, but the last province below 200% on level 6 comes 5 provinces earlier.
@qaccy
1. Yes,
some expansions help improve your city in the tournament since space lets you upgrade your barracks, or add factories for catering etc. but if you use space for decoration, FA, events, or settlements, those are going to hurt you going forwards. Buying space used to either help you, or at worst was neutral.
2. Again,
some AW help your city with tournaments, some like the BTG do not. This comes down again to space hurting you.
3. Yet again,
some techs increase your abilities in the tournament, most do not. Inno claims the balance favors progress, but they are mistaken.
A few points of clarification:
Yes, choices should matter, that's what makes games interesting, but the choice to not advance or grow or improve shouldn't be encouraged.
Inno's basic mistakes in their calculation are conceptual. E.g. if you upgrade a wonder that increases your catering ability by 1.1% and increases the costs by 1% then inno thinks this is a win for the player. The problem is if you don't cater 100% of the time then that 1.1% drops well below the cost increase and you have hurt yourself by upgrading your wonder.
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The old system was simple:
"oh these SS techs will make the tournament a little harder, so I better push on and get that next barracks upgrade"
and either the barracks upgrade made you better than you were before, or not quite.
If it wasn't quite enough, you could hang out for a bit and "grind" by upgrading wonders, clearing the map for expansions to increase goods productions, etc. Many options were there and they were
all good.
Now every choice comes with a downside that almost always outweighs the good because each difficulty increase is
multiplied by each other and affects both catering and fighting but the upsides do not.
Excellent explanation!
I have several concerns. First, separating the military production queues was a good change. But there was no compensating change in supplies required.
Just wait until the slaughter to the ability to get PoP spells catches up. Already people are using more PoP for supplies and they can not be replenished from the tournament like you could before because the vastly increased difficulty prevents you from going very far.
Second, the changes reduce the difficulty of lower province later rounds, while increasing the difficulty of higher province early rounds. When there's a 16-hour wait between rounds many players never reach the last round or two. The result is harder fights to reach the same points.
I've suggested a couple times the tournament time be increased to 4.5 or 5 days. If you don't have the time warp, it is really difficult to get 6 levels in and I think you have to mess up at least one night's sleep. People that are doing say 25 to 40 provinces for level 1 and 2 but do say 10 provinces for the higher levels, but only get up to level 4 are going to be hard hit by this new tournament
Fifth, magnificant mage and enlightened light range buildings are obsolete. There's no point in crafting a building that may or may not help in any given encounter. Keep unleashed unit upgrades and add a general troop attack increase. Move dwarven armorer to the magic academy because they're too rare in the spire and many players don't get many chests.
At 3.6% increase per province, in something like 7 provinces difficulty has increased by 25%, so it is even less useful...
Another giant arse nerf we didn't need: the new tournament format will MASSIVELY screw players over in events, since now you're going to be forced to gobble up map encounters for both the, "solve 4 encounters OR 16 tournament encounters", etc... type quests, and the "gain X relics" quests...
It *used* to be that during events, I could for example, after the first round of the tournament do things like:
a) when getting a "solve X encounters OR Y tournament encounters", I could complete just 3 of the 4 encounters, and move on to the next province, there by leaving the relics unclaimed.
b) for the "gain X relics" quests, I would be able to gather up the single fight from the highest paying provinces, thus saving a few extra encounters for the inevitable next round of the "complete encounters/tournament encounters" quests.
But now? I'm fethed over completely, because the idiot devs are too lazy to fix the specific "encounters or tournament encounters" quests, meaning you're now basically forced to do potentially 10x (or more!) map encounters, as the tournaments don't count for jack anymore!
Even worse, your crafting is now basically forced to waste resources & keep a relic pack waiting to collect as a way to help make the "gain 20-30+ relics" quests even remotely sustainable.
Great change Inno - way to feth up the game to nearly unplayable levels.
With the old tournament players could just add 5 or 10 provinces to help. That just isn't possible with the new tournament, so now your going to want to hold off in case a quest is coming up and this is happening in the time squeeze of trying to get more levels in... I think the events are going to be a lot harder for some players with the new tournament.