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
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
