Poll: Round length and End Game!

[LordRahl]

Hmm... some interesting ideas! I was actually thinking of that portal stone in the MD's lair myself, would make it a lot easier for alliances to coordinate attacks. Love the idea of events, especially good vs evil ones!

[Jenilla]

I am getting bored with this game. I have built my village and my troops are at maxed out. Every week our alliance attacks the MD in Midgard, which by the way is a small nightmare of organisation to accomplish in itself.
We barely make a small dent in the MDs huge scaly body and then it's back to rebuild our troops, wait until the fright of the fiery flames are gone so that we can attack again. Meanwhile of course I have my little heros running around collecting treasures and eggs etc. but nothing that I really need. Nothing that is really useful in completing our goal of killing that big MD
And I used to love this game. I loved the idea with short game rounds. Jump in, learn something, start over, try again and use a new strategy to do better. Now I feel I'm being milked for money. I don't know why I keep paying the premium for really since it's mainly useful when having long building queues etc. and now I have none of that.

Sorry I just needed to vent a bit

[ooykaas]

I agree with Jenilla. The end game takes too long. Specially from 100-75%. I think it would help if the MD starts with 500M iso 1000M life. That would speed up things. With PvP changes (e.g. demolished villages can be repopulated iso rebuild) this could also be more interesting on that part....

[Crowye]

The game from 100% to 75% took extra long since we prolonged it since we didn't have enough content at that time.. But I do agree that its taking too long.

However in the latest patch we also added the MD taking periodic damage to push things on (even if players arent attacking).

Currently it is set to ~4% damage every 14 days (After the first village been claimed in molten).
If this would have been active from the beginning that would have meant that she would have gone down to 75% a couple of weeks earlier.
These values can also be tweaked... e.g. setting the periodic damage to 10-12 days would push it on even more.

Personally I like that she has 1000M life which makes it easy to calculate how much 1% or 0.1% is.

Unfortunately due to some bugs you haven't even seen the new epics.. they should be useful when attacking the MD.. as well as upgrading the Dragon Items.

But some thing to think about is "how easy is it to acquire the new content that is unlocked". If you can't even lay your hands on the items.. what point is there ?
How many have unlocked new buildings/units so far? (Midgard).

The rounds simply were too short before... maybe they are too long now. But everything is tweakable
In the pace that was pre-patch I guess a round would take ~6 months. The old rounds were 2 rounds. I guess optimally a round would be around ~4 months.

[Guzzer]

I don't like how plans/unit upgrades are random drop. If you get bad luck, it really puts you behind.

[mysterious]

If you don't have a magician hero with the item finding improvement skill (don't know exactly it is called) you have like no chance on finding these epics. What if Iron/Ruby Dragons would drop the epics, and Emerald dragons would drop the building plans too? This would make it fair for the players that chose for PvP/PvM (So more the war side) and not for the searching for ruins/fishing (So more the science and exploring side).

[aernoud]

I like the idea of red dragons dropping them with a higher rate of success. There is no real incentive to go hunting them today. To much losses of troops to justify what you get....

Maybe emeralds too, but they are fairly easy game at 25%. Maybe for the 'less interesting' plans...

[Doriath]

The rounds simply were too short before... maybe they are too long now. But everything is tweakable

I think that one problem is that I never feel like having enough units even though I keep training for weeks. For instance, I trained 11 fenrir wolves which took me about 3-4 weeks just to see all of them gone in 2 battles that took less than one day. I mean if we have it like this the game is doomed to be going on forever and get tedious.

Also one thing that I have find a bit awkward with PVP is that I have had a guy constantly plundering me for 1 1/2 month in my Dry steppes village. The fact that he plunder me over and over again I don't care much about, but I think that there really should be something done to units lost when fighting against stronger players.

Let's say for instance that I would keep ALL my units in my defeated army when fighting someone with a greater civilization size than me. This wouldn't affect my opponent that much because he/she are still superior and I could still make progress in the game and focus on the PVE.

An improved idea to this is that civilizations could be grouped into divisions and when a player fights another player in a higher division all units will be kept when defeated.

The reason I like this idea better than just making all civilizations neutral with each other is that a player could still declare war with a weaker player.

Scenario
Just want to get this our of my mind. I think that there is not much motivation for new players that joins a server today due to all goals being accomplished. What if the scenario goals could be done in intervals instead and start over, then new players would still feel motivated to gather scenario points by sealing gates and visiting dragon obelisks.

Of course there should be some kind of "GREAT STRIKE" against the mother dragon when a iteration is accomplished. i.e. giving all civilizations a really nice civ effect that either boosts them or makes them stronger against the dragons.

With this change I also think that the divisions I talked about earlier could be used so that new players could collect scenario points and compete with players of their own level. I mean then it would make sense to start playing a scenario even though it has been going on for a month. As a new player I could still be motivated to win a division.

What do you think?

[indrif]

Just want to get this our of my mind. I think that there is not much motivation for new players that joins a server today due to all goals being accomplished. What if the scenario goals could be done in intervals instead and start over, then new players would still feel motivated to gather scenario points by sealing gates and visiting dragon obelisks.

Of course there should be some kind of "GREAT STRIKE" against the mother dragon when a iteration is accomplished. i.e. giving all civilizations a really nice civ effect that either boosts them or makes them stronger against the dragons.

With this change I also think that the divisions I talked about earlier could be used so that new players could collect scenario points and compete with players of their own level. I mean then it would make sense to start playing a scenario even though it has been going on for a month. As a new player I could still be motivated to win a division.

What do you think?

/like!

Sounds like a cool idea! This would certainly make late-joiners feel a bit more motivated I think!

[Toric]

Since the biggest loss that can really happen from pvp is the loss of your main army, right now it is best to not defend yourself at all. The loss of a village does take some dedicated effort, and is a lot of damage, but an army can be lost in a matter of minutes as you note.

If someone of a higher division attacks you, and you keep all your troops, that would certainly be a step in the right direction. It would take the sting out of accidentally running people over in the green fields, for example. I don't think it will fix all the problems, but it sounds like a good idea to start with.

I'd still like for defenders to be able to inflict enough damage on attackers to actually create casualties, unlike the existing system where an attacker can lose next to nothing simply by being in an alliance. Perhaps the damage value given by your towers can be boosted to something like 10% per level instead of 1%? with both towers at lvl 10, that would be x3 damage potentially to one element, or x2 damage to two elements of defenders. Giving some teeth to defending armies would at least act as a deterrent to attacks, and would let players have a reason to put defenders into their village.

The other idea I have is to reduce or eliminate the amount of population troops use while they are stationed in a home army. This would effectively let players build large defending armies that could potentially take on even an alliance coordinated attack. If a player really chooses to "turtle up" this would be a great way to do so... but if they put these huge armies into the field they'd immediately face overpopulation problems. That debuff might need to be made stronger to balance this ability.