Now that I've had the chance to try it on my main cities, here's the good, the bad and the ugly.
The Good:
1. Reducing encounters down to 1. This is saving a LOT of time. I thought the randomized encounters would slow me down but I've become adept at making split second decisions after years of fighting. For the encounters that gave me difficulty, I simply catered instead of bothering with fighting manually, which I thought I would need.
2. Tournament tent list with cooldown timers. Very helpful.
3. Separating troop production queues. (Since the new system seemed to precipitate this.)
The Bad:
1. How quickly the difficulty ramps up. For marble, I typically do 40-50 provinces to 5+ stars. I cut that down to 30 and still had some encounters that I *should* have won but lost everything. The troop losses were massive compared to what I'd lose in the old system even while doing fewer provinces.
2. By being forced to do less (or endure much higher losses), I make hundreds of KP less than I'd earn in the old system. Working harder for *less* reward is not fun.
3. The difficulty formula including AW levels and expansions, especially premium. You lowered the impact of premium expansions, but this should be ZERO. Don't bite off the hand that feeds you.
4. Randomized encounters seemed to shift my focus to only a handful of useful troops. More specialized troops were under utilized, thus reducing the benefit of the separate production queues. I will see how those troops get used over the next 9 weeks.
5. The orc cost for catering is REALLY high. I'm very glad to be fighting most of the encounters. Catering will be very difficult to sustain from week to week.
6. A minor cosmetic issue. The tournament tents on each province are too small. Please make them slightly bigger to make it easier to jump from one province to another.
The Ugly:
The extensive negative feedback on Beta and EN servers was seemingly all ignored. Sure, there was a lot of complaining, but there was also a ton of very helpful, constructive feedback specifically addressing the problems with the difficulty formula. Inno's response seemed to be "Everything is working as intended." Ignoring all that feedback has me questioning why I should even bother with the game. Why leave any feedback at all? Or is this all just to let us vent to each other?
I will care less about offering feedback in the future. I will not buy any more expansions. I will not buy any more diamonds. And my enthusiasm for the game is at an all time low after playing for 4 years. If that is what is "intended" then congratulations.
Thank you for that post... Spot on.
I've heard some feed back regarding FS being ABLE to do ten chest because it's easier and it just takes dedication. That sort of response. The problem is, some don't have the time. They have family's... they have spouses... REAL LIFE and then there are those in FS's that are just too small. THEY DON'T HAVE THE ABILITY TO DO WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE.
Those of us in the clans that do, and can HELP their clan mates are now being nerfed down severely.
Yeah, the clicking was something that sucked.... it's was hard on the body... Carpel tunnel hard... but it was quick... you rammed through the rounds to over 50 because you could see the match-ups and your experience carried the day even with Autofighting's silly tendency to loose units. The costs of those fights, seemed reasonable and for those that fought without catering the unit losses were something you could monitor without shock.
Now, I feel as though I have to scout ever province. Manual fight every province over 10.. and watch my efforts come to a piddling amount when in the old system I could rock the world for my clan.
Now we see catering that is not just prohibitive, but insulting in it's excess. The fact that Mana and Orcs are an issue for some cities with production... is a killer for them. What they USED to do is now no longer do-able. They can't help like they could in the past...
My clan is seeing a marked nerf in enjoyment, in tourney scores because not everyone CAN do what INNO asks now. And being told by INNO it's all good and better is BS.
It's not true.
What they did is make things harder when in fact they could have based this all on squad size and instituted a one GD click using the old system. EVERYONE would have been happy. What does Soggy's wife say? Jiggly swords... something like that...
Well, we've got that for a lot less rewards and a ton more expense... and Yeah... our ten chest weeks 2-3 times a week are probably a thing of the past if this pans out the way it looks so far.
The biggest thing for me is the enjoyment level just took a major dump and I was so hoping INNO had knocked this one out of the park with a home run.
Instead, they screwed up the park and the game.
It's illogical.
Pure and simple.
From a fighter's point of view... and a good one, I'm proud to say... this stinks on ice. We'll have to boost with unsustainable resources to do half of what we used to do.
Bring back the four and I'll stop bitchin about crappy setup. At least I'll have helped my clan again.
Risen... Nice JOB dude.