Big Huge Update 8/6/2015

TimTrain

Big Huge Games
Joined
Jul 24, 2015
Messages
18
Hello Leaders!

As mentioned in last week’s State of the Nations post, we will be more involved in forum discussions moving forward. To that end, we wanted to address a recent hot topic: the change in stats for heavy cavalry (HC).

As designers with a lot of experience in traditional PC strategy titles (Rise of Nations, Age of Empires), one of the most fun developments of the last few years has been the ability to look at vast amounts of data to understand how things are working in the game. In the old days, you’d make your best guesses at balancing the game, but you were essentially relying on gut feel. Now, we can take a look at the tens of millions of battles since launch and get hard numbers on how different army compositions are performing, sliced by Age, Nation, and player level.

When we looked at the battle data since the last major update, it was very clear that heavy cavalry were performing far better than all other army types. Even worse, they were more of a “fire and forget” weapon, as opposed to a high skill / high reward army like one based around siege units. Instead of the game providing many different valid, fun choices for players in terms of army composition, there was really only one “right” possibility. We brainstormed a number of ideas for how to fix the issue without actually changing the core stats on HC, but other options would have destabilized balance for the rest of the game. We’re confident that HC are now in-line with other army types, and that players will quickly adapt to the new balance.

In the coming weeks, we will be rolling out some new anti-hacking and cheat detection measures “behind the scenes” (no new update required). We’ll also have some announcements about future content releases, including our first new nation!

We also wanted to address a question from the forums about drop rates on trade goods. We have not changed those drop rates. I know when I get a bunch of “bad rolls” in a row for trade goods it can feel like the numbers have been changed, but your luck will change!

A final note: several people have asked the completely reasonable question of why we would release balance changes before addressing the bugs and other issues in the game. For mobile games, client-side code changes (most bug fixes, much of the security hardening, and new features) have to go through a platform review cycle that can take up to two weeks. Add in coding time and adequate QA to ensure stability, and even a simple change can take 3-4 weeks to get out to players. However, config changes such as tweaks to unit stats can be done very quickly without going through a platform review. As such, we made those changes while the programmers were busy crunching to get new client-side code ready. Again, a completely reasonable question, and hopefully that’s a more in-depth explanation of how the “sausage gets made” in mobile game development!

Thanks as always for your continued support of DomiNations!


-Tim
 

Denquin

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Apr 30, 2015
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251
Well, that's good news. Although there is now an exploit with raiding cavalry.
 

Redgar

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Apr 9, 2015
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Thank you for the update Tim! Even though cheat bases with max walls brought a lot of rage on the forum, you did an awesome job in overall and lot of designers should learn from you. I hope BugHugeNations will do great on the long run :)

Now, to my gut feeling, I have a special one:

- Guerrillas may be overnerfed. I stop using them and I see a lot of players too. Ideally, I'd like to be able to build 4 gattlings and 2 guerrillas for 10 mins, so then it'd be reasonable for me to speed them up if my other army on training blessing is ready. Can we expect any changes here?
- is France building times on training blessing a bug or innovative free-to-win design? :) Please tell me if we all have to switch to France or better not depending on your answer
- Can we expect nations rebalance? I believe this is very good area where you can do more experiments. In short: China - better/more walls, Japan - more traps, British should be more efficient than France on loot (30% loot bonus may be?), Greece needs the biggest buff on parameters.
- Are there going to be changes in economy? My idea is to give super buff for the first production hour to caravans and farms, so if you log in every hour, you get huge bonus, 5-10 times may be
- tactics feel OP, especially when those players use 4-5 in one battle. Should there be a limitation of 2 tactics per combat? Okay, Germans may have 3 and plus 1 in academy. Who uses betrayal?
- max generals and AW is something OP too, it's often looks like auto-loss.
- and I hope new nation is USA

I really would like to see your posts more often.
 

dbukalski

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Apr 8, 2015
Messages
2,015
Changing hc stats is easier. Fixing rally AI. Or heavy cav AI is hard. That doesnt change that the hc stat nerf should have been rolled out after fixing the AI. Even if the hc nerf was ready first. Proper timing is everything. With hc nerf+ BROKEN AI the players were left with a completely broken battle system. Something that was compensated by overpowered hc. Which leads into another failure of launch orders. Industrial should have been released after cheaters had been dealt with. The industrial release was crushed, polluted by the masive amounts of instantaneous maxed wall industrial players something that costs thousands of dollars to achieve with gems. We lost a lot of legit players because the cheaters were and are so pervasive. Just because something is ready to be released doesnt mean it should be if the release will just be overshadowed by underlying problems.
 

dbukalski

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Also is the design team aware that rally AI is extremely broken in terms of pathing and walls? Wall miners and other units will travel excessive distances to go through a gap in the wall rather than break through at the closest point where they were deployed. This is especially aggregious for wall miners who are specifically designed to destroy walls. But choose to travel all the way around the city 180 degrees to go through a gap rather than serve their purpose. There are many other rally, wall AI problems that will cause battles to be lost because of how devastating the AI screwup is. I hope, but fear that is not the case, that ur moderators are able to collect the AI problems we have submitted while understanding the nuance of what the problem is.
 

dbukalski

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I face non stop maxed out wall players. And the rally AI is broken. When u fix these 2 things u will have the best game in this genre
 

dbukalski

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Apr 8, 2015
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Oh yeah, this forum does not allow paragraphs or editing(just deletes the post when u click edit) when writing from a phone. Quite the embarrassing problem considering this is a phone app game the forum is servicing. Being incapable of running a fully functioning forum is an embarrassment in this day and age
 

Redgar

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Apr 9, 2015
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Playing French makes you post like this. Now I am affraid to switch lol )))
 

GKO123

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Jun 6, 2015
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11
You had maybe hundreds of complains about the HC nerf. Never saw so much same meanings in a forum before. But you simply don't care about? Nice that you have hight experienced designers, when you bring them into the game? Not yet it seems, because they would tell you, that you should listen to your paying customers! So, better listen to your customers, THEY play the game and THEY pay your salary.
 

redprince

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Apr 25, 2015
Messages
331
You had maybe hundreds of complains about the HC nerf. Never saw so much same meanings in a forum before. But you simply don't care about? Nice that you have hight experienced designers, when you bring them into the game? Not yet it seems, because they would tell you, that you should listen to your paying customers! So, better listen to your customers, THEY play the game and THEY pay your salary.
I thought the explanation made sense. I'll trust the guys with the data and experience over the emotional gamer any day. This game is improving and moving in the right direction, I'll remain a paying customer and I know quite a few others that will too. I play a lot of games and this is probably one of two that I'm actually willing to invest real money into. Let's hope they keep trying to improve.
 

Hieu Le

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May 3, 2015
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14
I'm getting issue when I try to raid its show up " No opponents found.... " over and over. I'm 2600 medals
 

Haven

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Jul 25, 2015
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Players don't have experience then red prince?! Why do people like you feed a line of BS when we could improve the game with accurate feed back. Point. The rally function has been broken from the start but has actually gotten a lot worse even to the point of causing you to lose battles due to your troops doing a march around the base. Improvement? No. The heavy calvary were nerfed far to much in one big step they should have been rolled back slowly until a balance was achieved. The various soldier types are not balanced right now, the attacks will show this and show the over nerf of the HC. Understanding, which comes from experience not a guess would not have resulted in an over nerf to the point where raiders are used almost exclusively because the army size doesn't compliment the strength of said army. At least BHG is acknowledging that they didn't get it right, you seem to be trying to deny the state of the game. If you are not trying to deceive people stop saying things are improving when they have not, or I will start acknowledging you by the name of another great deceiver, Obama. Evidence of improvement is not show by people leaving alliances and the game, duh!
 
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Motaz Tarek

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Apr 19, 2015
Messages
545
Well am happy u admit the HC nerf was the right thing to do cuz i stopped playing since u did it and now its time to quit, PS : what u say about balancing the game by other methods rather than nerfing HC is just BS, cuz u r just a fail company with no idea how to balance battle and the worst developpers of all time, i regret every second i wasted playing ur game and ur company name is drilled in my head not to play any of ur games in thr future at all
 

Damascus

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Apr 5, 2015
Messages
114
I would be curious as to what your data is on horse use is now. I imagine like many previous HC users like myself that the nerf was indeed crippling. I found that HC spam was in fact, NOT effective. I would also be curious to see some published data as to what you are saying about the HC.
 

forgetthis

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Joined
May 12, 2015
Messages
49
I don't have a major problem with nerfing the HC if it disturbs the balance of the game. At the same time, after multiple HC nerfs, the Greek civ was gutted. With the HC AI still busted, it's impossible to trust HC's enough to reduce their garrison allotment to free up roster space for other troops, so they offer no real advantage. Meanwhile, the civ's other bonuses are pretty much worthless once you hit the Gunpowder Age.

The designers keep talking about the need to balance the game, but they took the Greek Empire from one of the strongest empires to clearly the weakest, and didn't do anything to adjust that. Those of us that chose the Greek Empire based upon the rules at the time feel cheated, especially since it either costs money or a great deal of time (patiently acquiring crowns) to adjust that decision. The designers appear either unconcerned about some pretty obvious consequences - or they're looking to get people to spend crowns on one of the shiny new empires (that they might similarly nerf in a few months).

Why invest in moving to a different civ when the next re-balance could take away the reasons for making the move?
 
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