Dear forum visitor,
It looks as though you have not registered for a forum account, or are not signed in. In order to participate in current discussions or create new threads, you will need to register for a forum account by clicking on the link below.
DeletedUser2753
Guest
Since earlier there was a quote from Marindor from the International Forum and there is so much discussion here of intent I looked to see what else he said, and below, though I cannot quote across forums, I will paste one long post he made two weeks ago. I hope this helps everyone.
Sorry, but in that case my message didn't come across clearly. As I've said before as well: It's not about blaming players for playing the game en progressing as far as possible. There's nothing wrong with that. It was our fault in the first place to make it able to scout this far ahead. That shouldn't have been possible and is the result of errors in the game balancing, which has now been corrected.
There were several reasons why the redesign/rebalance of the battle system was necessary. I'll try to list them here for you, hopefully that will help:
Unresolvable bugs
The old system was technically limited compared to what we now have and due to this, there were bugs in it for moths that couldn't be resolved without breaking the code. This means that if we kept to the old system, these bugs could never be resolved.
New Battle Units
As I said, the old system didn't allow us to implement the new battle units. That's exactly the reason why the Fairy Units were on "coming soon" for several months. The only solution here in the old system, would be to keep upgrading existing units, which isn't fun at all.
Expansion Balance
One of the main complaints at the moment, is the limitation on World Map expansions this rebalancing brings. We know about this, but the truth is that a lot of top players currently have way more expansions available to them then they should in this phase of their game. This takes away the strategical decisions you have to make as a player to design your city as efficiently as possible, because there is space enough. This disrupts the game balance too. There are a lot of players who can build so many manufactories e.g. that they literally have hundreds of thousands of goods in stock. There's no fun in that. Tech tree progress should be a bit challenging as well. We're going pretty well on it with the Guest Race goods that you need, but the rest of the required goods can just be laughed at because you always have enough of those, for there is room enough for a bunch of manufactories anyway.
Also: The more buildings you build, the more culture your city needs and at the moment it's very hard for these players to reach higher culture levels, because the culture buildings that will be able to provide enough culture for such big cities, are still to be released in next chapters. With less manufactories you will need less residences and will need less culture, so in comparison the culture bonus will be higher by default, increasing the output of residences and workshops. This would also resolve the current situation we have with players always lacking supplies to train their armies, for the Workshops would give more supplies due to higher culture. This means you'd also need less workshops (and thus less residences again and less culture buildings again). It's like a circle: The more you have of everything, the more you need of the rest and at a certain point you're falling behind because the output of the buildings is too low to keep up with the size of your city.
Of course there is the point that a few weeks ago we introduced the 33 premium expansions available from the start. This is true and premium players indeed do have access to more expansions than non-premium players, but it's like that in many cases and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Truth is that premium players also build premium cultural buildings (which give a higher output) and can cope with the challenges I described above in their own way. For me personally (not an Inno statement), this makes the game less fun as well to be honest. The fun of a City Builder is building your city in the most efficient way. That's why with every chapter the buildings change in size, you get extra challenges with the Guest Race and the goods they produce/require and you're constantly triggered to keep reshaping your city so that it fits your current needs. This is what we want the game to be about. If you want a battle game, there are a lot of other games on that, which are great at battling. For Elvenar, we want the main focus to be on the actual City Building aspect and decisions you have to make there. Battles are just a side effect and it isn't our goal to make them the main focus of the game. Sure, for people who like fighting we introduced the tournaments to give them something to do and score some extra rewards, but it's not what the game is mainly about.
Scouting Balances
With every chapter you unlock in the Tech Tree, new "Advanced Scouts" technologies will be unlocked as well. These help you lower the scouting costs and scouting times (and enemies you face). If your World Map progress matches your Tech Tree progress, the balance here is completely different than how it is now. Scouting times now can be up to 3-4 days per province and if we didn't do something about this, they'd go up to about 10 days when you're a few rings further ahead. Scouting times should be about 1 day when you're an active fighter and even less for less active players and they will be like that when your progress on both areas (WM and tech tree) are in balance.
The same goes for the Scouting Costs. When you're that far ahead and haven't researched all these "Advanced Scouts" techs that should be researched at that point, you're paying way too much per province you scout. This in term requires of you that you have more residences to cover these costs, hence requiring more city space, hence requiring more expanions so we're back in that circle again. Scouting costs shouldn't take up your main coin storage space every 2-3 days. When WM and Tech Tree progress are in balance, scouting these provinces costs way less as well.
Battle Balances
Although it might not seem like this now (because at this point you're facing a wall), the current battle system is way more balanced. Because players are scouting and fighting this far, enemy squads are way bigger than they should be (they depend on the scouting costs of the province). So let's say you have a province at ring 11 while you're in Dwarves, you might pay 4000K for scouting but if you'd be in Orcs (and thus have researched 2 more Advanced Scout techs), you might pay only 2000K for that same province. This also means that the enemies you'd face would be a lot weaker and the battles would be more in balance. In the old system you were able to defeat armies about 6 times as big as yours, when using some overpowered units. This will be different now. The battles you're facing would match your progress, you'd "need" the new Battle Units to face them and you'd suffer way less losses. Therefore you'd need less supplies, wouldn't face the situation anymore where you have too few supplies to keep your armies up and running, and will be able to fight a lot more, not needing 20 Workshops to keep producing enough supplies to support that.
Of course it seems different now because battles suddenly became harder when you're far advanced on the WM, but they will become much better balanced when the progress on both sides is in balance again and this will make battles more fun as well. Not just using Golems for everything, but actually needing to think strategically about which units to use when. Also keep in mind that new chapters will bring new Squad Size Upgrade techs, which have a much bigger (exponential) impact on your armies than they used to have, making your army strength grow a lot quicker than in the past. This is also the reason why that was changed.
Well, these are the main reasons behind why the rebalancing is/was needed, aside from some other reasons like wanting to make the battle system more clear and things like that. We changed focus from a "unit based" system to a "unit type based" system, which is a lot better to understand for most players. We know it isn't perfect yet, especially the AI and we're working on that. Also, parts 2 and 3 of the new system still have to be implemented on Live and they will change a lot of well. It was technically not possible to implement the whole system at once, PLUS we need player feedback to know on which things to improve and we don't want to wait for another few months as well because the longer we wait, the more imbalanced the game would get, the more difference between the players and the bigger the impact would be. If players were 3-4 rings further than now even, they might have had to wait for another 3 chapters to catch up and we don't want that to happen.
Does this explanation help?
Unresolvable bugs
The old system was technically limited compared to what we now have and due to this, there were bugs in it for moths that couldn't be resolved without breaking the code. This means that if we kept to the old system, these bugs could never be resolved.
New Battle Units
As I said, the old system didn't allow us to implement the new battle units. That's exactly the reason why the Fairy Units were on "coming soon" for several months. The only solution here in the old system, would be to keep upgrading existing units, which isn't fun at all.
Expansion Balance
One of the main complaints at the moment, is the limitation on World Map expansions this rebalancing brings. We know about this, but the truth is that a lot of top players currently have way more expansions available to them then they should in this phase of their game. This takes away the strategical decisions you have to make as a player to design your city as efficiently as possible, because there is space enough. This disrupts the game balance too. There are a lot of players who can build so many manufactories e.g. that they literally have hundreds of thousands of goods in stock. There's no fun in that. Tech tree progress should be a bit challenging as well. We're going pretty well on it with the Guest Race goods that you need, but the rest of the required goods can just be laughed at because you always have enough of those, for there is room enough for a bunch of manufactories anyway.
Also: The more buildings you build, the more culture your city needs and at the moment it's very hard for these players to reach higher culture levels, because the culture buildings that will be able to provide enough culture for such big cities, are still to be released in next chapters. With less manufactories you will need less residences and will need less culture, so in comparison the culture bonus will be higher by default, increasing the output of residences and workshops. This would also resolve the current situation we have with players always lacking supplies to train their armies, for the Workshops would give more supplies due to higher culture. This means you'd also need less workshops (and thus less residences again and less culture buildings again). It's like a circle: The more you have of everything, the more you need of the rest and at a certain point you're falling behind because the output of the buildings is too low to keep up with the size of your city.
Of course there is the point that a few weeks ago we introduced the 33 premium expansions available from the start. This is true and premium players indeed do have access to more expansions than non-premium players, but it's like that in many cases and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Truth is that premium players also build premium cultural buildings (which give a higher output) and can cope with the challenges I described above in their own way. For me personally (not an Inno statement), this makes the game less fun as well to be honest. The fun of a City Builder is building your city in the most efficient way. That's why with every chapter the buildings change in size, you get extra challenges with the Guest Race and the goods they produce/require and you're constantly triggered to keep reshaping your city so that it fits your current needs. This is what we want the game to be about. If you want a battle game, there are a lot of other games on that, which are great at battling. For Elvenar, we want the main focus to be on the actual City Building aspect and decisions you have to make there. Battles are just a side effect and it isn't our goal to make them the main focus of the game. Sure, for people who like fighting we introduced the tournaments to give them something to do and score some extra rewards, but it's not what the game is mainly about.
Scouting Balances
With every chapter you unlock in the Tech Tree, new "Advanced Scouts" technologies will be unlocked as well. These help you lower the scouting costs and scouting times (and enemies you face). If your World Map progress matches your Tech Tree progress, the balance here is completely different than how it is now. Scouting times now can be up to 3-4 days per province and if we didn't do something about this, they'd go up to about 10 days when you're a few rings further ahead. Scouting times should be about 1 day when you're an active fighter and even less for less active players and they will be like that when your progress on both areas (WM and tech tree) are in balance.
The same goes for the Scouting Costs. When you're that far ahead and haven't researched all these "Advanced Scouts" techs that should be researched at that point, you're paying way too much per province you scout. This in term requires of you that you have more residences to cover these costs, hence requiring more city space, hence requiring more expanions so we're back in that circle again. Scouting costs shouldn't take up your main coin storage space every 2-3 days. When WM and Tech Tree progress are in balance, scouting these provinces costs way less as well.
Battle Balances
Although it might not seem like this now (because at this point you're facing a wall), the current battle system is way more balanced. Because players are scouting and fighting this far, enemy squads are way bigger than they should be (they depend on the scouting costs of the province). So let's say you have a province at ring 11 while you're in Dwarves, you might pay 4000K for scouting but if you'd be in Orcs (and thus have researched 2 more Advanced Scout techs), you might pay only 2000K for that same province. This also means that the enemies you'd face would be a lot weaker and the battles would be more in balance. In the old system you were able to defeat armies about 6 times as big as yours, when using some overpowered units. This will be different now. The battles you're facing would match your progress, you'd "need" the new Battle Units to face them and you'd suffer way less losses. Therefore you'd need less supplies, wouldn't face the situation anymore where you have too few supplies to keep your armies up and running, and will be able to fight a lot more, not needing 20 Workshops to keep producing enough supplies to support that.
Of course it seems different now because battles suddenly became harder when you're far advanced on the WM, but they will become much better balanced when the progress on both sides is in balance again and this will make battles more fun as well. Not just using Golems for everything, but actually needing to think strategically about which units to use when. Also keep in mind that new chapters will bring new Squad Size Upgrade techs, which have a much bigger (exponential) impact on your armies than they used to have, making your army strength grow a lot quicker than in the past. This is also the reason why that was changed.
Well, these are the main reasons behind why the rebalancing is/was needed, aside from some other reasons like wanting to make the battle system more clear and things like that. We changed focus from a "unit based" system to a "unit type based" system, which is a lot better to understand for most players. We know it isn't perfect yet, especially the AI and we're working on that. Also, parts 2 and 3 of the new system still have to be implemented on Live and they will change a lot of well. It was technically not possible to implement the whole system at once, PLUS we need player feedback to know on which things to improve and we don't want to wait for another few months as well because the longer we wait, the more imbalanced the game would get, the more difference between the players and the bigger the impact would be. If players were 3-4 rings further than now even, they might have had to wait for another 3 chapters to catch up and we don't want that to happen.
Does this explanation help?
Quite obviously there were pages of active discussion after and most make our discussions here tame LOL. Here is just one example:
No, no no!
You can't say those two sentences, they do not match up.
"We don't blame you" followed by "You are not playing how we want" or
"We are not punishing you" followed by "You will have more fun doing it our way, so stop playing the way you want"
This is the problem! People hate you making decisions for them and telling them do "do it our way" when there are ZERO reasons they should.
Please, PLEASE stop saying "balance" when you mean "restrictions" Be HONEST about what is happening.
The MA is a perfect example of this constrictive thinking. You could make it deletable, to no detriment (except maybe something in the future?) but you don't because of .... reasons ....
The players have spoken and are still speaking (the ones that have not left)
https://en.forum.elvenar.com/index.php?threads/version-1-15.3224/page-7#post-22747You can't say those two sentences, they do not match up.
"We don't blame you" followed by "You are not playing how we want" or
"We are not punishing you" followed by "You will have more fun doing it our way, so stop playing the way you want"
This is the problem! People hate you making decisions for them and telling them do "do it our way" when there are ZERO reasons they should.
Please, PLEASE stop saying "balance" when you mean "restrictions" Be HONEST about what is happening.
The MA is a perfect example of this constrictive thinking. You could make it deletable, to no detriment (except maybe something in the future?) but you don't because of .... reasons ....
The players have spoken and are still speaking (the ones that have not left)
Last edited by a moderator:
