Squad size upgrades...revisited

[SunsetDanar]

Yeah...I know this issue has been beat to a bloody pulp but I think that what appears to be an algorithm needs adjustment. The fact that the tooltip says that if you do this upgrade, it gives you more troops and it does but what it doesn't tell you is that you also get an increase in casualties which relates to an increase in the recovery process. There really needs to be a fix for this.

 

[samidodamage]

what it doesn't tell you is that you also get an increase in casualties

Since your regular squad size is no longer a factor in the formula for difficulty for tournaments and was never a factor in the formula for spire or map battles, I don't think this is the case any longer. I've gone back and taken the optional SS upgrades that I skipped (using them for event quests) with no impact on tourney or spire performance and it has only made the map provinces easier with much fewer casualties.
The mandatory SS upgrades have a small effect in the formula, but that's just because the formula uses all mandatory techs as a factor, not because the tech is for SS upgrades. Mandatory techs all have the same impact now regardless of what the tech is for.

 

[SoggyShorts]

what it doesn't tell you is that you also get an increase in casualties which relates to an increase in the recovery process. There really needs to be a fix for this.

Samido is correct, this is no longer true, and it's been fixed.

 

[TalimSwift]

Yes it's been fixed, before, the more you upgraded SS the harder tournaments were, Now they "fixed" it so that instead, the more you upgrade ANYTHING else, tournaments cost you MUCH more, same "difficulty", higher cost. Dont they realize, the difficulty has never been winning the damn battles, its always been the ability to raise enough troops or produce enough resources.
Now you research your planks tech to upgrade your factories to make more planks right? that should help you in tournaments, but no, because now they ask you for more planks than before, then you got to upgrade your houses to have more workers for your factories, that will cost you more planks too, its just damn ridiculous

Consider this, I can do spire all the way to the top with a barely 3rd chapter town, but i cant do it with my chapter 7 ones or else i deplete all my resources... wtf man, what kind of game makes it so much harder to achieve the same goal the more you progress... with a chapetr 3 town, 3rd level encounters cost me a dozen treants or a couple dozen archers. With a chapter 7 town, it costs you HUNDREDS and later on, THOUSANDS
So why upgrade at all, much easier to make 10 treants than 1000

The solution is quite simple. the difficulty per encounter in spire shouldnt be based on what chapters you are. Make it constant, 1st level, easy, crap prizes, low towns can do that, mid level harder, average prizes, chapters 6-9 can do level 2, then beyond, only late chapters can posssibly win level 3, for the best prizes.
This way, you actually WANT to upgrade your towns.
To really fix tournaments to stop people from farming 23452 kp PER WEEK, just cap the # of provinces you can open. Is that so hard?

But as it is, i tell you, i stopped growing all of them except my main, they're much more efficient diamond farms if i dont raise the difficulty level.

This fix only made it so that those who abused the system are now the only ones really able to push far in tournament. Easy for them, all their wonders are already at level 30+.

 

[SunsetDanar]

Samido is correct, this is no longer true, and it's been fixed.

Thanks guys. I also went back and upgraded all of the optional ones that I initially skipped. Advised to do so from a member message here some time ago. Don't recall seeing it in release notes though. Do you know which one it appeared in? I'd like to update my FS.

 

[SoggyShorts]

Don't recall seeing it in release notes though. Do you know which one it appeared in? I'd like to update my FS.

It was the one where tournaments went from 4 encounters to 1 encounter about 5 months ago at the end of September.

 

[SunsetDanar]

Thanks Soggy...

 

[SunsetDanar]

Can't seem to find it. Does anyone have specifics?

 

[samidodamage]

@SunsetDanar
The changes to tournament difficulty calculations was contained in the Announcement sent Oct 2 instead of in release notes:
Tournament Changes
The official information on the changes to the formula starts about halfway down the page. The quote that is relevant to the SS change is:

• Tournament difficulty is no longer determined solely by Squad Size, but rather by a series of progression factors, which involve city development and research in general.

Here's the thread where the current tourney data was crowd-sourced to reverse engineer the formula:
Tourney/Spire data gathering thread
And here's where @MinMax Gamer provides a detailed analysis of that data and the resulting formula information on his website:
Tournament Requirements Calculation
He also provides calculators in that explanation (Google Spreadsheet that you can clone) You can use this calculator to find your unique costs at the beginning of any tournament. The only info you'll need to input is your tourney squad size for the first round of the first province. The sheet will return the squad sizes you should have for each province/round as well as the amount of resources you should expect to need to cater per province/round.

 

[Deleted User - 849327848]

@samidodamage As a primarily catering city until roughly chapter 5, do the squad sizes play large enough part where I should pick them up for the only purpose is tourneys?

 

[samidodamage]

@MaiSakuta
The optional SS upgrade techs (or any other optional tech) have no impact on tourney/spire encounters at all. Only mandatory techs have that impact. Where they will have an impact for smaller cities is making battle in map provinces viable earlier. The enemy squad sizes/negotiating costs on the map are set for all unscouted provinces when you activate the Adv Scout tech, the first tech of every early chapter. While you will see enemy squad sizes (and negotiating costs) increase in small amounts from one completed province to the next before the next chapter Adv Scouts is activated, those increases are already set. What's not set is your squad size. As you unlock SS upgrade techs, both mandatory and optional, your squad size will increase making battles on the world map easier for you to win.
One note (this one confused me early game!): When you unlock a SS upgrade tech and then look in your army camp, the number of squads available will be less than were there before you unlocked the tech. You have not lost troops! (that's what I thought happened, lol)
This happens because SS upgrade literally means you have more troops in a squad. So, if you had 50 troops in a squad before the tech, and that gave you 10 squads, you had a total of 500 troop units. If you unlock an upgrade that increases your squad size to 100 troops in a squad, those 500 troop units will now form only 5 squads. Those numbers are just to illustrate the difference; I don't think the increase will ever be that severe, lol!
The point to the size upgrade is that one squad is much stronger with more troop units in it. That's why it will make map battles viable earlier. Map provinces are also pretty set on the types of enemy troops you will see in battles based on the type of province. Since it used to be the same for tourney provinces, you can go to ElvenGems and look at the info for fighting in the old tourneys by province type and they'll still apply to map battles for that province type. You may find that you're able to battle in some province types much earlier than you would think would be the case. Steel provinces come to mind: sometimes you'll find a battle in a Steel province where all enemy types are Heavy Melee. Light Range and Mage troops are very effective against those enemies and can defeat enemy squads that are much larger than yours, so you may decide to try those out sooner than you'd think.

 

[SunsetDanar]

Thank you. This has all been very helpful.

 

[Vigali]

Based on everything in this thread then, the question I'm asking is: What is the point of squad sizes?

If there are 3 avenues for combat (Spire, Tournament, provinces), and squad size only factors into 1 of those 3, what's the point? It seems that the initial designs had squad size factoring in (in some way) for all avenues of combat; now, it's barely used at all.

There are 48 encounters in the Spire each week, and far more than that in the Tournament (I personally do 12 6* provinces, but obviously lots of players do many more than that). So, for me, 120 combat encounter opportunities per week that do not factor in squad size.

Assuming constant scouting, the number of provinces you unlock in a week is obviously overwhelmingly dependent on your progress; I'm only on Ch. 12, and I can get around 5 provinces per week, or 40 encounters.

That means, for me, squad size only impacts 25% of the encounters I fight. Given that it's billed as the primary driver for combat capabilities, it seems like a waste of code, and a waste of maintenance effort on Inno's part.

 

[DeletedUser2959]

Blah, blah blah

I love your new sig!!!

 

[Kawhi is a Raptor]

Based on everything in this thread then, the question I'm asking is: What is the point of squad sizes?

If there are 3 avenues for combat (Spire, Tournament, provinces), and squad size only factors into 1 of those 3, what's the point? It seems that the initial designs had squad size factoring in (in some way) for all avenues of combat; now, it's barely used at all.

There are 48 encounters in the Spire each week, and far more than that in the Tournament (I personally do 12 6* provinces, but obviously lots of players do many more than that). So, for me, 120 combat encounter opportunities per week that do not factor in squad size.

Assuming constant scouting, the number of provinces you unlock in a week is obviously overwhelmingly dependent on your progress; I'm only on Ch. 12, and I can get around 5 provinces per week, or 40 encounters.

That means, for me, squad size only impacts 25% of the encounters I fight. Given that it's billed as the primary driver for combat capabilities, it seems like a waste of code, and a waste of maintenance effort on Inno's part.

i just started ch 13 after taking 6 months off and after reading up on tourney changes i decided to go back and snag all optional squad size techs as well as add a couple more armories all for the sake of making my brown bear/pet food usage, shrooms, and dwarven bulwark more efficient

i'm not sure if that really qualifies as an actual purpose for ss techs tho lol

 

[Pheryll]

That means, for me, squad size only impacts 25% of the encounters I fight. Given that it's billed as the primary driver for combat capabilities, it seems like a waste of code, and a waste of maintenance effort on Inno's part.

Squad size influences the other 75% in other ways. Bonus troops from wonders, training size from Dwarven Bulwark, and size of troop instants are all based on your regular squad size.