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helya
Beloved Ex-Team Member
Tournament changes
Dear Humans and Elves,
After weeks of testing, tweaking and fixing bugs, we'll soon be bringing the new and improved Tournaments to your worlds, namely with the Marble Tournament starting on October 6th! Many of you have likely heard of the new system already, given that we invited all our players for testing on our dedicated Beta servers, but for everyone else, we will of course also take the time to conveniently summarize all the changes here.
Several years have passed since we introduced the first Tournaments in Elvenar and many things have changed since then. Players have grown with their cities, events have brought us powerful rewards, and many an improvement has been implemented, bringing changes to the ways we build and expand on our cities daily. All the while, Tournaments remained the same, with only relatively minor tweaks to their functionality and rewards.
We have decided to improve on the old Tournaments and prepared a big list of changes, aiming to make the Tournaments more enjoyable and less tedious to play, while at the same time addressing some unintended strategies that have been established over the years. Improvements aim to make the entry into the Tournaments easier for everyone, while still offering a challenge for those who manage to reliably achieve 10 Chests in each weekly Tournament. The changes range from interface changes, to balancing adjustments and also affect other areas of the game, e.g. the Spire of Eternity. Overall, we believe the changes will make the Tournaments less of a frustrating and click-heavy experience, and should allow Fellowships to distribute the contributions more evenly across all their members, rather than putting a burden on a few select members weekly. We also aim to stop some unfavorable strategies, which we are aware were caused by flaws of the old Tournaments system. Some of these were tedious for players who were using them, while others provided unfair advantages over other players that needed to be addressed.
Tournament changes
- Tournament Encounters are now played directly from the World Map. To achieve this, the 4 Encounters per Tournament Province have been merged into 1 Province Encounter, combining the efforts of 4 Encounters into just 1. This also means that the Goods required for Catering, and the Units faced in Battle have been scaled up accordingly, to keep the general requirements of each Province comparable while having only one Encounter.
- The Balancing of Tournaments was reworked completely, aiming to allow for an easier entry into Tournaments and better Tournament contribution from new players, while maintaining an interesting challenge for more advanced players:
- 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.
- The difficulty of a Tournament province no longer exclusively increases for each level in the Tournament, but now also with each Province, providing a steady increase in difficulty with each Province and level completed. At the same time, the entry into the Tournaments is made significantly easier than for any previous Tournaments ever since the implementation of the feature. Below, you can see how difficulty increases with each Tournament Encounter played:
- To make Catering a more viable option and to bring it back on par with Battles, Catering costs have been lowered significantly. Costs per Province on comparative difficulty level was about halved in comparison to the old Tournament system. This allows for more strategic options and brings the balance between investments for Battles and Catering on a more comparable level.
- Requested Goods in Catering are no longer tied to Tournament types (e.g. previously mostly Planks, Silk and Gems in Planks Tournaments). Instead, a random selection of resources available to players in specific Chapters is made for each Encounter. These resources can now also include Coins, Supplies, Mana and Orcs. The table below indicates in which Chapters certain resources can appear in Tournament Encounters:
- Enemy armies faced in Tournament Battles will now always come to the battlefield with 5 Squads, instead of having alternating numbers of Squads as opponents. This should enable for easier assessments of battle difficulty and subsequently which player units should be selected to counter and defeat the enemy.
- Enemy unit types for each Tournament Province are selected at random, with different weighting based on Tournament type. This means that, while it is possible for each enemy unit type to appear during any Tournament, there are higher probabilities for specific units to appear than for others, allowing for some preparations, but still bringing a challenge by including further unit types in the mix.
- Tournament Bonus Chests are added to provide a new challenge for any Fellowship that previously managed to finish 10 Chests in the weekly Tournaments. Upon having completed the 10th Tournament Chest, a new set of 9 additional and very challenging Chests is unlocked, allowing Fellowships to progress further and to grab some additional rewards as they do.
- Each Bonus Chest contains 1x Royal Restoration and 1x Ancient Knowledge 10. The contents are rewarded along with the contents of all other regular Chests at the end of each Tournament.
- Bonus Chests are meant to be very challenging to achieve, and thus have an increasing amount of points required to reach them. Being a long-term challenge, we don't expect even the most dedicated Tournament Fellowships to finish all Chests in the first weeks after release.
The changes listed above were presented in more detail by Andreas, Rike and Steffi on our YouTube channel prior to the Beta release. You can find their explanation for more details on each change, as well as the reasons for each change, below:
Please note that the information provided in this video was accumulated prior to the initial release of the new Tournaments on Beta and that, while explanations and reasoning still hold true, small details have changed since the initial release of the video. To complete the picture, we have listed all changes that have been made based on feedback from testers on Beta and the English/International game worlds since the original announcement was made:
Please note that the information provided in this video was accumulated prior to the initial release of the new Tournaments on Beta and that, while explanations and reasoning still hold true, small details have changed since the initial release of the video. To complete the picture, we have listed all changes that have been made based on feedback from testers on Beta and the English/International game worlds since the original announcement was made:
- No optional Squad Size Upgrade requires Guest Race Resources anymore. This change has been made on all Live worlds already, where it was part of version 1.110, and allows to more easily complete these Technologies if you had already progressed to a next Chapter, without the need to (partially) rebuild Guest Race Settlements of Chapters you had already completed.
- For each Tournament type (Marble, Steel, etc.), a certain selection of Units is more likely to appear in the enemy army. This is not necessarily one Unit type. Example: The Steel Tournaments will have a strong focus on Mage units as enemies, and the Crystal Tournaments have a focus on Light and Heavy Melee enemy units.
- The impact of placed Expansions on the costs formula has been reduced. This was done for both Regular and Premium Expansions, where Premium Expansions' impact was reduced more than Regular Expansions'. Note: Premium Expansions have always had a lower impact than Regular Expansions. This change also affects the Spire of Eternity, and was released with the 1.111 update on all Live worlds.
- The chances of Coins and Supplies as possible costs for Catering a Tournament Province were lowered. The same was applied to Orcs and Mana, but these resource requirements were made even more rare than Coins and Supplies.
- Barracks, Training Grounds and Mercenary Camp no longer share their production queue, which means that more units can be recruited simultaneously to keep up with the demand of units in the Tournaments. This change was released separately, with the update to version 1.113.
- We have adjusted the difficulty of fights in several more advanced Tournament Provinces to be easier, because we saw that fewer people were succeeding at those levels than we anticipated. This change was part of the update to version 1.114.
Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Team