Making upgrading buildings less useless

[melheor]

I'm currently finishing up 3 barracks upgrades due to Atomic Rush, which basically means I had to abandon the game completely for 2 weeks. As a result of long upgrade times, you're forcing your most active players to become inactive. I understand you're trying to incentivize in-app crown purchases but it's getting to the point where free players will soon have no choice but to quit.

I want to propose a library/university research that allows partial functionality to the building being upgraded (because in real life, the entire building never gets shut down to add upgrades, all rehab is done in parts). Maybe we can have something along the following lines (either one or the other):

- University Research: building that is being upgraded can still research/produce troops (10 levels with +5% bonus per level, such that when maxed building can research/train at 50% its original speed)
- Library Research: level 1 - barracks can train units at 50% speed while upgrading, level 2 - factory gets 50%, level 3 - airstrip gets 50%, level 4 - castle generals heal at 50% speed, level 5 - university research at 50% speed while upgrading.

So for example, if a cannon takes 15 mins to train, and you decided to adopt the university research approach, at level one the same cannon would take 300 mins to train, and at level 10 it would take 30 mins to train while barracks are upgrading.

 

[Swinton]

If you want to train troops while upgrading barracks, just don't upgrade all 3 at the same time.

 

[Manifesto]

I'm currently finishing up 3 barracks upgrades due to Atomic Rush, which basically means I had to abandon the game completely for 2 weeks. As a result of long upgrade times, you're forcing your most active players to become inactive. I understand you're trying to incentivize in-app crown purchases but it's getting to the point where free players will soon have no choice but to quit.

I want to propose a library/university research that allows partial functionality to the building being upgraded (because in real life, the entire building never gets shut down to add upgrades, all rehab is done in parts). Maybe we can have something along the following lines (either one or the other):

- University Research: building that is being upgraded can still research/produce troops (10 levels with +5% bonus per level, such that when maxed building can research/train at 50% its original speed)
- Library Research: level 1 - barracks can train units at 50% speed while upgrading, level 2 - factory gets 50%, level 3 - airstrip gets 50%, level 4 - castle generals heal at 50% speed, level 5 - university research at 50% speed while upgrading.

So for example, if a cannon takes 15 mins to train, and you decided to adopt the university research approach, at level one the same cannon would take 300 mins to train, and at level 10 it would take 30 mins to train while barracks are upgrading.

Would you have asked for this if you hadn't been impulsive and upgraded all 3 barracks at the same time?
I can understand the incentive during the Atomic Rush discounts but really bro, you should've given it some more thought!
Just crown one, you should be close now that it won't cost much.

 

[melheor]

Barracks is not the only building with this bottleneck, and in fact it's easier to avoid with barracks than buildings like airstrip or factory. And no, second factory doesn't help because it requires over 1 mil oil to get to level 7 like the first, I'll probably leave it at level 1 for a while. Moreover, given that my barracks are finishing up, this change would have no effect on me until later ages are added, so I'm not really being impulsive here.

 

[yemen]

I actually am happy to have the atomic factory done while my barracks upgrade - TH and APCs replace my healing carts and tanks, so I can still have three buildings working on my troops even while the barracks are upgrading.