Tournament Changes

[Dominionofgod]

This keeps being brought up. I cant be the only one who hits tournament timers with a handful of speedups to keep my sleep undisturbed.
Edit : to be fair, as a spire fan I might have several hundred hours of speedups laying about.

This might vary some if your doing more then the first floor of the spire.
I usually wait until the tourney starts, at which time the spire already started. In the evening ill use my pet food on my fire phoenix (24h feeding effect). And ill do my entire round of 1st star tourney fights. Then ill do the first two sections of the first floor on the spire. After 3h and next door opens in the spire, ill do that. - Then ill go to bed.

When i get up the next day, all the tourney timers are ready, and the final section of the first floor of the spire is ready. And my pet food effect will still be going. So i can finish the first floor of the spire, and finish all the 2nd star tourney fights.

So i get all my tourney and first floor of the spire done within a 24h time period AND i only have to use a single pet food. No time boosters needed... unless i forget to do a section in the spire, then i might need some.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

I just finished my tourney run of 2 starring 22 provinces and here are my initial thoughts.

Province 22 is now my new stopping place with the new tournament format. Using the difficulty numbers from the last adjustment on Beta, which is what we have now, anything past 22 goes over the 160% difficulty of the old system for the 6th star of any province.

My plan is to work back diagonally, so that every fight I do stays under 160%. That means province 22 - star 1, province 21 - star 2, province 20 - star 3, province 19 - star 4, province 18 - star 5, and all 6 stars of provinces 1-17. That is 5160 points. This, according to posts made on the Beta forum, is about the cutoff in points Inno was aiming for. Sure, there will be some players still going crazy with high scores, as @MinMax Gamer posted, using a bunch of the temp buildings each week, though that is not sustainable without spending a bunch of diamonds to constantly refresh the crafting list. But anything that gets us to burn diamonds, and maybe buy more, is something that Inno likes.

 

[GlamDoll]

I am so looking for additional nerfs from Inno as clearly tournaments are still too easy. /s

Same, lol. I got on this Forum about 2 years ago(?) because Inno started stripping even more of our options in regards to strategy with mandatory level factories in Events. I came in here in a blaze & I suspect I will crash & BURN...and go out in one.

 

[DeletedUser2870]

I understand that concern. To be clear I meant you can autofight the first 6 provinces easily and never see any of the battles. I don't have a Phoenix, only have a level 6 Brown Bear, and not nearly as many fighting AW yet as others, and I don't have a problem. I think perhaps it's time for those others to adapt, and perhaps this will cut down on those alternate push cater cities.

But your answer reveals that you may not have the same problems.
Players who invested in their city by using real money to buy premium-expansions, invested a lot of time and effort in the tourneys before to gather massive amounts of KPs to help upgrade their AWs now are being punished for having done that.
If the progress one makes is being turned against them because it results in battles being a lot harder and costs rising through the roof, the concept is wrong.
I have no issues with the new format in my mid-level cities, they now can easily score more points. But my cities in the last few chapters suddenly face far higher losses for doing far fewer provinces.
It's not about everyone being able to do 6 or 10 provinces for 6 rounds without a problem. Like I said; if province 15 in round 1 already requires 15.000 orcs you cannot possible maintain Inno's statement that catering costs have gone down because it simply is not true. And if I usually did 20 provinces for 5 rounds and another 20 or so for 2 rounds with and average of x-amount of squads lost, but I now hit that same x-amount of squads lost after finishing round 2, the fighting definitely hasn't gotten any better either.

 

[Beatleguise]

To add to what I have already said...
I am a very active player, but I work long hours, so I can only play once a day. Time instants cant change that, Polar Bears cant change that, and having the Timewarp AW can not change that. Which means I get 5 rounds , period. And while the new changes help my smaller cities a lot, so far in my main city, I would say I can only do about 75% if not less compared to what i was doing before. That is significant.

 

[Risen Malchiah]

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.

 

[qaccy]

I don't fully agree with that. Light Melee and Heavy Melee is an easy combo, because you can take out the light prior to having to deal with the heavy.

It might be an 'easy combo', but each of them individually is still easier than both of them together, right? I think what I said still stands, which is that a mix of units is trickier to deal with than a single type.

 

[Yogi Dave]

Up until this week and the change, squad size started at 5% of world map squad size and then increased 5% per province.

That 5% was for each of the 4 battles. To compare with the new style, you need to use 20% of your world map squad size since there is only one battle.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

That 5% was for each of the 4 battles. To compare with the new style, you need to use 20% of your world map squad size since there is only one battle.

Well, I was just showing the progression. Plus, with the new system, it is different for every player how soon their tournament squad surpasses their world map squad, since the two are no longer linked. For my Live city, my tournament squad surpassed my world map squad in the 7th province. But in my Beta city, this does not happen til the 10th province.

As for your comparison, I started with a tournament squad of 826. A twentieth of 5316 is 265.8 and times 4 is 1063.2. So less troops to start in the new system.

 

[GlamDoll]

Don't bite off the hand that feeds you.

I don't know which blows me away more...That they have to be told, or that I KNOW they wont listen.

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.

You are not alone with that, other than my time is about half & I am really doing a Qbert on Inno right now!

I paid them to do this to me (us?)! >.<

 

[Deleted User - 1178646]

I just finished my tourney run of 2 staring 22 provinces and here are my initial thoughts.

I do love how much faster it is now. When your doing ~25 provences or more, on the old system that is 25*4enounters=100*2star=200 encounters * how ever many cities you have. ... in short.. its a looooot of time involved to do that. So the one encounter is a lot faster and easier to work with.

I have noticed a increased lag on elvenar during the tourney. But iv also noticed this increase the last month or so as well. Im sure my older comps dont help that matter any. But i think that's just something ill have to deal with.

One suggestion: Increase the space between each reward in the tourney menu. They are very close together and there is enough room to give a little bit of space between each of them.
View attachment 8473



And my one concern is the negotiating costs. Now i mostly fight, i only negotiate when i think a battle will be lost or my troop lost is far to high, so i only payed a small bit of attention to negotiating costs on each encounter. And i know that since it changed form 4 encounters to 1 that the single encounter would naturally be higher over all; even despite the adjustments to negotiating. But... i did notice on one fight that i had to negotiate, that the cost included 40,000 supplies for that single encounter. And it was the first star, some where around prov #12~. That one caught me off guard; seemed very very high.

I actually are considerably slower in this new format, the only compensator being that you can do a lot less provinces to make it not a complete impossibility.

• I takes considerably more time to select your units as you now need to think more, this changes unit selection from a few seconds to now often over 1 minute.
• Because I am near maxing out the game, my costs are huge, this forces me to go manual for at least a decent score. This makes it really slow, tedious and boring.
• I noticed this tourney unit mixup was very very favorable to manual fighting with 50% of this fights without losses are at worst with very very very few, the other fights had "normal losses" and I had only a hanfull of dradfull battles, I wonder how this turn out in the comming tournamaments where it looks this trend will not continue
• Those dreadfull battles all asked for mana from 180K around province 15, to near 600K around 50. I also noticed numbers as 20, 25m+ coins ect. really scary numbers, it makes at least for me that negotiating beyond lets say province 10 is undoable if it askes for limited goods like mana or orks, those numbers are just to big.
• Looks like there no longer is any use for melee units in the tournament, reducing the unit options to only the 3 ranged unit types. this is especially bad for the training grounds as the only "trainable unit" is now the druid, not because it's good, but because it's not unusable.

Because I am near maxing out the game, my costs are huge, this forces me

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

I actually are considerably slower in this new format, the only compensator being that you can do a lot less provinces to make it not a complete impossibility.

• Looks like there no longer is any use for melee units in the tournament, reducing the unit options to only the 3 ranged unit types. this is especially bad for the training grounds as the only "trainable unit" is now the druid, not because it's good, but because it's not unusable.

What about the Orc Strategist that everyone loves so much? That is a Training Grounds unit. Remember that most people do not see the Grounds of the Orc Strategist show up much at all in crafting. And yes, it uses orcs and not supplies, but that is only a problem for a small group of players in specific points in specific chapters.

 

[Dominionofgod]

This keeps being brought up. I cant be the only one who hits tournament timers with a handful of speedups to keep my sleep undisturbed.
Edit : to be fair, as a spire fan I might have several hundred hours of speedups laying about.

This might vary some if your doing more then the first floor of the spire.
I usually wait until the tourney starts, at which time the spire already started. In the evening ill use my pet food on my fire phoenix (24h feeding effect). And ill do my entire round of 1st star tourney fights. Then ill do the first two sections of the first floor on the spire. After 3h and next door opens in the spire, ill do that. - Then ill go to bed.

When i get up the next day, all the tourney timers are ready, and the final section of the first floor of the spire is ready. And my pet food effect will still be going. So i can finish the first floor of the spire, and finish all the 2nd star tourney fights.

So i get all my tourney and first floor of the spire done within a 24h time period AND i only have to use a single pet food. No time boosters needed... unless i forget to do a section in the spire, then i might need some.

and of course im multi talented. I managed to do day 1 of tourney and forget spire. Do day 2 and forget spire. Then type up how i do tourney and spire together and still not remember that i forgot to do spire... -

 

[Dominionofgod]

Province 22 is now my new stopping place with the new tournament format. Using the difficulty numbers from the last adjustment on Beta, which is what we have now, anything past 22 goes over the 160% difficulty of the old system for the 6th star of any province.

My plan is to work back diagonally, so that every fight I do stays under 160%. That means province 22 - star 1, province 21 - star 2, province 20 - star 3, province 19 - star 4, province 18 - star 5, and all 6 stars of provinces 1-17. That is 5160 points. This, according to posts made on the Beta forum, is about the cutoff in points Inno was aiming for. Sure, there will be some players still going crazy with high scores, as @MinMax Gamer posted, using a bunch of the temp buildings each week, though that is not sustainable without spending a bunch of diamonds to constantly refresh the crafting list. But anything that gets us to burn diamonds, and maybe buy more, is something that Inno likes.

Well im no where near that far yet. My normal tourneys atm range form 22-26 provinces because that's all i have explored right now. Ivjsut been spending my time building my army and army strength to reach my first base goal of 25 provences at 2 star. That would reach me the 1600 points and max out my kp rewards without going crazy on troops losses. - So all my comments were from that perspective.

 

[DeepTerminal]

For a mediocre tourney player like me, the new tourney format doesn't actually decrease that many KPs. Using the tourney calculator:

In the old system, I usually do 2 stars on province 1-20, which gives 1320 points and 73 KPs (not counting Ancient Knowledge).

In the new system, I'm planning to do 6 stars on province 1-6, 5 stars on province 7, 4 stars on province 8, 3 stars on province 9, and 2 stars on province 10. This gives 2160 points and 68 KPs. So far, it looks like this strategy is totally doable given my troop training speed.

Of course, for hardcore players who do 45+ provinces on 2 stars, the KP loss is very significant.

 

[Deleted User - 1178646]

What about the Orc Strategist that everyone loves so much? That is a Training Grounds unit. Remember that most people do not see the Grounds of the Orc Strategist show up much at all in crafting. And yes, it uses orcs and not supplies, but that is only a problem for a small group of players in specific points in specific chapters.

How are your supposed to train those in decent numbers? no matter in which chapter you are.
You also need your orcs in the spire/tournament for battles you cannot win.

I think there are to few people with enough armouries / brown bears to make it actually work, and surely it will not work for 24/7 production.

Just as an example:
To train orc strategists for 1 day (24h) I need 57520 orcs.

With a theoretical production of a level 37 armoury you get 1600*2=3200 orks

37520/3200 = 18 armouries.

If you assume only base production speed without wonderboosts you still need 8-9 armouries with 0 spare for any other place in game.
How many people are running that many armouries?

This is why the orc strategist and orc warrior are only "paper units" as you cannot train and use them in the same way as other units, these units are hard to make and should be treated as such.
As long as the orc requirment ain't lifted they will be nice units at best only to be used a special cases to preserve these "rare" units as much as possible. where other units can be thrown under a bus and you won;t bat an eye.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

@CrazyWizard

 

[Black watch]

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.

 

[Beatleguise]

On Beta I am only in chapter 5, so it seamed really nice. But now on the main servers... Yes my smaller cities are doing much better.
But here is a comparison to show just how out of balance the new system has become for a bigger city.

On Elcyandir I have a Human city in Orcs, I use to do typically 9 tents, sometimes 12. I have 4 armories not yet updated for Orcs, a lev 7 Fire Phoenix, lev 7 Sanctuary, and lev 6 needles. With no enlightenned buildings from the Academy, in this tournament I have done 19 tents for 3 rounds, with less losses.

On Winyandor, my main Elf city is in Halflings. Lev 10 Fire Phoenix, Lev 11 Monastery, Lev 8 Needles, Lev 8 Hero Forge, Lev 5 Dragon Abby, Lev 7 Bulwark, lev 7 Shrooms, 6 max Armories, with enlightened mage and lt range builds placed. I use to do typically 33 tents on 1st and 2cd round. Then a little less each round for 5 rounds (I cant do 6, because I work and only play once a day in the evenings.) IN this tournament, 1st round I only made it to tent 24, 2cd round to 21, on the 3rd round I cant fight tent 16 and cant afford to cater it either. I went from being one of my FSs big hitters to being average. My Orc city does better with no boosts.

I am happy for the people who struggled on tournaments, the changes have definitely helped these people, and smaller cities improve.
But it doesnt make sense to so severely hinder those who obviously enjoy the game and play hard.

 

[Deleted User - 1178646]

@CrazyWizard

View attachment 8478

So?
It shows you havent used them (much) and have been collected them for a long time.

It does not change the fact that unless you have an overkill of armouries it's impossible to sustain orc strategist production in your training grounds.