@crackie recently started a new city and she said she got the old tech tree. I do not know if this is a situation where existing accounts get grandfathered into the old rules. Or if it is random right now which tech tree a new city gets.
Yes, my 2 wk old city got the old tech tree.
@Yavimaya It's currently a random roll of the dice which tech tree you get, but I assume as time goes on, everyone will likely be tracked to the new tree. I've also heard the new tech tree is actually a whole lot easier to get through because it costs less for everything--KPs, coins, supplies, and goods.
Simalarly we have people that argued, that the new bagde-collecting is bad, because collecting every badge individual would be a skill and not a waste of hours of your lifetime...
Wait, hold on... the Germans are complaining the new collection system is...a
bad thing?
Not a bad idea at all. I am considering taking a parked city that I struggle to play often enough and do the same.
Ed
You also need a city just to meet new people to chat with.
As a member of the team in question, I would say mainly that this apparent blowout is also largely attributed to the team which has gotten 1st place every other time for the past many FA's decided not to push this time.
As a member of the team that decided to collectively observe Canadian Thanksgiving, I concur. We tried to
retire from FA back in March, but were chuffed and somewhat annoyed to find we were still in 1st while "not trying". We tried harder at not trying this time, with honoring Canadians on the line. However, our choice to observe Canadian Thanksgiving has no bearing on your team's efforts so congrats,
@Farinx and the rest of your team, on the FA win. I did thoroughly enjoyed fielding all the random inquiries from people on Ceravyn asking where's my shantytown and educating them about Canadian Thanksgiving by pasting random tidbits from wikipedia.
On US4 Khelonaar the FS you are so worried about would have lost by 28K because the top scoring FS in Khel had a final score of 131,300. Not going to name the FS here in order to be polite, but anybody who plays there probably knows who it is. But I will say I double checked Elvenstats and there were no membership changes in that FS for several weeks previous to the FA. So there were none of the substitutions you are concerned with. Nothing questionable at all, this FS is just THAT good at FAs. As far as I can remember: since I started playing in Feb 2020, they've been top ranked in every single FA except for 1.
I thought the same thing. There are gigantic jumps in competition going from 30k to 50k to 80k to 100k to 130k. My baby city is in a FS that doesn't seem to care for FAs and they took it easy, finishing in the top 20, which is still pretty good,
but it felt like we stopped in the middle of each map to build a settlement! FA moved in slow-mo there compared to my other FSs that are FA junkies. I think that's the difference between the bell curve and the outliers. Groups that "take it easy" might drop 20k-30k in points from their "all out" effort, which means a group hitting 130k can "relax" their way into 100k and that's still a crazy lot of points. The 100k "all out" group can "relax" their way to 70k-80k range.
Remember, people taking it easy have no need to spend diamonds! So if a group's "all out" effort is still below the threshold of someone else "taking it easy", then I question how much do they really know about competing in FAs seriously. There's so much more to being good at FAs than just building shantytowns. To me, it's kinda like the Spire. People that climb Spire regularly think it's no big deal. Those that don't have a litany of reasons why they don't, won't, or can't. Groups that compete in FAs seriously have just built up the muscles and conditioning for it so even when they relax, they're still in better shape than most.
I think there is probably way more diamond spending in the non-competitive tracks with fellowships struggling to complete 3 stages than the groups that are really competitive. Just like in general, early chapters spend more money than more established, late chapter players that already have all the bells and whistles. The first group is desperately trying to finish and probably need the prizes. The second group knows the prizes are not commiserate with effort and were never doing it for the prizes to begin with. I am sure some competitive groups spend diamonds, but I don’t think it’s as much as people are led to believe. There's probably a whole lot more cases of groups that want to assume other people are spending diamonds because it's easier than convincing their own group to commit/attempt/try for 100k without using diamonds themselves.
My EN group is in the position of being so close, yet so far away. We're good enough to land in 2nd and hit ~90k, which may win on some servers, but it's still 45k short of the leaders on the server that matters because they also can hit 135k. It's still a crazy large gap! If I were the leaders, I'd prob not bother spending any diamonds with such a commanding lead. We're not too concerned about what they're doing though because what they do have no bearing on how we acquire points. I tell my group to just focus on their cities and trimming the fat so long as they still want to keep trying. If they're bored or sick of it, then we'll just go celebrate Chinese New Year or something instead. Until then, we're still sharpening our skills and trying to get better. We're mostly competing against ourselves.