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My thoughts on Aug SotN

LordJestix

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As mentioned in a previous State of the Nations, 5.7 - Allied Front was focused on improving Alliances. We added Rubies and Alliance Perks to reward players that actively participate in World War with their Allies. Rubies are an Alliance-focused currency which right now can only be acquired through World War and spent at Marco Polo, the Traveling Merchant. In the future we’ll add new ways for you to earn Rubies and new places to spend them, which you can expect will remain tied to Alliances.

- Its great that we are going to have other ways to earn rubies as i can really only purchase a chest every other week because the war loot for rubies isnt that great. With that said, making rubies and for the most part buying things at Marco Polo an allinace exclusive feature is bad. alliances are for everyone, some people just like the multiplayer aspect and you exclude them from a feature because of their play style. Rubies should be giving for every sucessful battle at a rate of either 1 or 2 rubies per star earned in multiplayer battle.


Alliance Perks reward Alliances that earn XP through World War and level up their Alliance. Perks provide all players within an Alliance with various bonuses. While most of the Perks are World War focused, some are more broadly useful. For example, the level 10 Perk automatically upgrades all donated troops to Global Age rank if they were below it. Unlocking this Perk allows lower-Age Alliance members to donate more frequently without worrying about filling up donation space with weaker troops. Currently the maximum level for all Alliances is 10, but you can expect to see this cap increase at some point in the future.

- Level 10 alliance perk is great for low and middle aged alliances but is useless for advanced age alliances. Both of the troop improvement perks need to be reworked. to +1 level/upgrade to IA, and +2 levels/upgrade to GA
I understand the cap is going to increase and you guys will add a AA/CW/Space age level eventually but if you just change level 10 to be +2 levels or minimum AA then tehre wouldnt need to be more of the same levels rewards and you can give us more interesting and useful perks.


Before we get into 5.8 - Combat Intel, I’d like to mention another update which we are planning to release first. In a few weeks, after Summer for the Ages concludes, we will put out the 5.7.5 Balance Update. This will be the first of a new type of release that will not require you to update your game, unlike full releases such as 5.8. In this very first Balance Update, we will be making two changes. The first is that we will be turning on the World War tiebreaker that resolves stalemates based on time elapsed in battle. The second is that the citizen costs and times for Expeditions will no longer increase as you level up your Dock. Though low-level Expeditions have become a little more expensive, high-level ones are now much cheaper. This should encourage players to upgrade their Docks, since there is no longer an incentive to keep it at a lower level. Moving forward, you should expect to see more Balance Updates like this in between full releases.

- You need to leave the tiebreaker turned off. What is the harm in if both alliances fight hard and end up tieing that they get full loot rewards? Just dont give the alliances any glory. You guys continue to ingore us and our hatred for p2w features and this is exactly that. In a war with equal allinaces the one with the best cards will typcially always win based on the tiebreaker.

- Great you lowered? the worker cost for expeditions. Do you not understand that most smart players still wont ever use this feature? Why is that you may ask? It takes over 2 years to max an AA bases buildings only, and if you want to add in the university research, that takes the time up to 4.5 years to max an AA base. This is also the same reason why people quit upgrading their farms and caravans. Workers are too important to waste on things like this. We need to use them to only upgrade buildings, clear forests, and research in the university.


In 5.8, players in the Global and Atomic Ages will get access to a new defensive building called the Missile Silo which heavily punishes clusters of attacking troops. The Missile Silo begins each battle inactive. Deploying troops or tactics of any kind will generate “threat,” and when enough threat is generated, the Missile Silo will arm itself and begin laying waste to the enemy army. The building scans the entire map to find the biggest cluster of hitpoints in the attacking army to fire upon. When it finds a target, it locks onto the location and fires. The attacker can see where the Missile Silo is firing a few seconds before it launches, so you may be able to save your troops with a well-timed Rally. You may also be able to guide the Missile Silo away from your troops with a well placed Decoy. After the Missile Silo has fired, it will take some time to rearm, then begin looking for a new target. The Missile Silo can be built and upgraded once in the Global Age, then upgraded again in the Atomic Age. We’re eager to see how base layouts and attack strategies change with the introduction of this deadly new building.

- I like this addition as its similar to the Eagle Artillery in CoC. I just hope it doesnt require oil. as we already have a low oil economy and millions of oil already required for the current buildings, library/uniersity techs, and troop/general upgrades.


We’re also adding a new Great Leader to the University in 5.8: Moctezuma. Once you’ve upgraded to a level 2 University, you can begin researching his skills, which are mainly focused on improving your economy. For example, you can gain a 90% reduction in hunting, mining, and gathering time, a 50% increase to your Oil Well capacity, and 30% more power from Coalitions. His capstone, Triple Alliance, provides you with an extra random National Trade Good whenever you earn at least one National Trade Good from battle. Since the extra National Trade Good is random, this will help improve your income of all National Trade Goods regardless of the popularity of specific nations.

- I was really looking forward to what the new leader would bring, you have disappoted yet again.
- 90% reduced hunting/gatering time...really? It only takes a few minutes to do this with 2 workers, assuming you have those workers available and they arent upgrading buildings/researching. This is an absolute waste of a skill.
- 50% oil well capacity - this is good but it shouldnt be a research it should be fixed in the actually building stats.
- The capstone is pretty cool but where is the Oil Based research takes 1 less citizen capstone?
- Where is the oil based reserach cost/time reduction? Where is the tech to make Mercs strong/cheaper? Where is the tech to reduce building time upgrades? Where is the tech to reduce coalition costs?


So, what’s next? Well, there are a lot of things that we’re excited about beyond 5.8. As this current World War Replay Beta period comes to an end we’ll be compiling all of the feedback, bugs, etc. into a plan of action for how to improve the feature. We’ll also be doing the same thing for Summer for the Ages. We’re also mapping out what will be in the 5.8 Balance Update, with a few things currently planned. We’re going to be changing the Tactical Helicopter to make it less efficient at raiding Oil. We still want it to be a valuable troop, but we feel that the stats that it released with were a bit too strong. We will also make APCs spawn their first set of troops faster, which will make them useful more quickly.

-You are going to ruin the TH. It is in a good place right now. How about instead of nerfing it to the ground you just remove its ability to carry Raider type troops? They will become like most of the other factory troops, useless. The factory/airstrip troops should be the most powerful troops in the game based on what it takes to train them up and upgrade them, yet other than fighters/apc/TH/tanks i dont ever see any other troops get used.


Lastly, we’re going to change how the Castle handles garrisoned Generals when it is destroyed. Instead of being lost, any Generals remaining inside of the Castle will be released onto the battlefield which is similar to how the Stronghold functions with donated Troop Tactics in World War. However, unlike the Stronghold, the Generals are injured in the destruction of the Castle and will appear with less than 100% hitpoints. Defense-minded players will find with this change that the Generals they’ve invested heavily in will be able to more effectively defend an attack. An attacker’s ability to Sabotage a Castle and destroy it before any General has spawned continues to make Sabotage an incredibly strong Tactic, too strong in fact. One Tactic can shut down the damage that the Castle deals along with what amounts to millions of resources and weeks of time invested into Generals. Sabotaging a Castle and destroying it will still incapacitate a defensive building and will deal significant damage to the defender’s Generals, but will no longer completely shut down an entire aspect of defense.

- Yet another direct nerf to sabatoge. Why dont you just remove it from the game if you guys hate it so much.
A much better option would be to make it harder to destroy. Buff the fort HP by 15% Increase its spawn triggering radius, decrease the general deployment time(make the first one instant)
The bigger deploy radius would allow for more strategicly placed situations as it could be deeper in the base thus harder to get to with a sabo.

You have removed most of strategy there is to trying to take out the fort before it deploys generals. There is almost no reason to use sabatoge now, other than 1 to stop FH from being deployed out of the TC in wars.

***

Issues you guys still havent fixed/addressed:

-Sandbagging in Wars
-P2W in wars
-The economy in higher ages(even with the league reward buffs, its still bad)
- poor AI pathing/attacking mechanics
-Balancing of the nations (buffing other nations to make them more appealing than the auto Brit choice)
-Donation bug
-The ability to not lose an attack if we get a call in the middle of it. It feels great when you are in a war or find a really good MP base to loot, someone calls you which closes the game and the battle instantly ends, losing all of your troops and the battle.

***
Something that has been bothering me for awhile is the state of Generals.
1. Why in the world does it take so long to "heal" a general after it has been damaged or killed in a battle? I beleive the maximum downtime in CoC is 15 or 30 minutes. With a cost of 30 gems to instantly heal.
2. Why when generals are killed on defense dose an available general not take post in the fort? In CoC when a hero is killed on defense, they are back in action in that 15 or 30 min time frame.
3. Why dont generals have a special ability like heroes in CoC?

I would love to use generals more in attacks but in their current state they are pretty useless to me. I can essentially lose all of my generals in a few attacks in an hour for an entire day unless i want to spend hundreds of crowns to have them instantly recover. I think this is partially why i see most people upgrade generals to level 10 and then stop. The cost of generals just isnt nearly as worth it with all of their down time. My generals are almost only used in wars, never in MP because i want to make sure i always have them for wars.

---
I was actually considering spending some more money on this game but this SotN just brought on more disappointment to me.
 

Quovatis

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I agree the WW tiebreaker should be left off. It just gives pay to win alliances more power, as now even 2nd attacks need full offense and extra cards to try to secure the win.

The dock change helps a bit, as long as it's something reasonable like 2 workers for 12 hours or something, but the troops you can get from the dock are extremely weak compared to event or paid-for troops. The dock needs an AA upgrade and the troops you get out of it should be buffed to compete with other extra troop tactics.
 

LordJestix

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I agree the WW tiebreaker should be left off. It just gives pay to win alliances more power, as now even 2nd attacks need full offense and extra cards to try to secure the win.

The dock change helps a bit, as long as it's something reasonable like 2 workers for 12 hours or something, but the troops you can get from the dock are extremely weak compared to event or paid-for troops. The dock needs an AA upgrade and the troops you get out of it should be buffed to compete with other extra troop tactics.

if the dock takes longer than 8-12 hours and more than 1 worker, i wont ever use it. i very rarely have more than 1 worker free(for walls). When i go to AA today/tomorrow ill be building Opera house just for the extra worker. That way i can upgrade 4x 4-worker buildings. i could care less about the expedition benefit from it.
 

Green Bird

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I am actually happy that there seems to be a lot of thought going into the game by the developers. We can argue whether there these are good or less so changes but there is no doubt that the development team is live and kicking! Fantastic!

Missile silo... The missile silo is a curious idea that I am extremely keen to see in action. My first reaction is that it will really discourage Industrial players to punch above their weight. Already today they have to deal with nasty surprises coming out of destroyed factories and mercenary camps etc. Global age players such as myself will have less to worry about - great. Yet on other hand, these new additions (plus the new library tech) will prevent Global players from upgrading for longer. I for one will not be upgrading to Atomic until my University is fully done in key subjects (read Saladin).

Generals... I actually think that there will be less people arming castles now. Most of these generals were for show, with people hoping that they would either deter attacks or be destroyed with no loss of heroes. Generals are used in wars, and having them unavailable for hours after death on défense is a big no. If they did not have a cool down period after defensive death - yes, people would be arming them, but not if their hours long unavailability persists.

TActical Helicopter... I do not think it is fair to restrict type of units that can be loaded. However, i would much rather it to be loaded prior to sorties. Then if it is lost to my air defences it is lost with all troops inside - good for me, if it gets through - good for you.
 

Tsamu

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I agree with most of your comments.

I would like to see the time tiebreaker replaced with "total stars from all attacks". That would penalize sandbags whose low bases wouldn't contribute.

I like the change to the dock and will use it more. I only buy upgrades when they are on sale (to avoid buyer's remorse as much as anything) and often have four workers sitting for a day or two. Now they can go on an expedition!

i will like having to spend less time on hunting and gathering. With two workers, it often takes me 5 minutes to clean up all my trees, mines and animals. That gets very tedious.
 

Imaera

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I would like to see the time tiebreaker replaced with "total stars from all attacks". That would penalize sandbags whose low bases wouldn't contribute.
This is a great idea!
 

Skyman

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The fundamental problem with this game is the upgrade times/associated lack of builders as a resource:

The about of time it takes to build something and the percentage of the available workforce it takes up means that you can very easily get to the point where there is very limited value on logging on each day.

Nexxon don't want to have a finish point to The game, but adding additional ages/university research is prohibitive to new/casual players. If id known starting quite how long this game would take to get anywhere i simply wouldnt have started.

When I found out I had 1000 separate upgrades to complete at the start of industrial (I had a few generals/university to complete) I balked. I thought about working how long it would take me but decided it would probably stop me playing.

To stop this finish point the game needs to pivot towards the medals etc.....

it also needs to limit the upgrade times (Actually they need to be significantly reduced).

It is impossible for me in IA to catch an AA age player. So it's impossible for me to match them in a war/medals. Until that changes the end to the game will be a process point 'upgrading' rather than medals/battles.
 
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Evningcome

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Nice wall of text that makes perfect sense but we are the only one that read it ....
 

Manifesto

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Of course it's impossible for you to catch an AA player - he's ahead of you! You will never catch an AA player unless that person stops playing or dies or has their game corrupted or something similar! The AA player has even longer upgrade times than you, yet he/she is still playing.
You'll get there, IF you're willing to put in the effort.
 

Thevinegru

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The change to how castles work is a good thing. I use sabotage on castles all the time so I get where you're coming from but come on. One tactic shouldn't take out 3 level 30 heroes. Is that even really debatable? I'm sorry, but complaining about something that obvious is just silly.

I totally disagree with your comments about rubies, also. They created them as an alliance war reward. That's the entire point of them. There are already a lot of other currencies that are applicable to other parts of the game. If rubies were like that, there would be no reason to even include them in the game. It would be redundant and pointless.

Other than that, you make a lot of really good points. They're doing nothing about sandbagging, which is just odd. The funny thing about that is how easily the problem could be fixed. All they would have to do is add some code that makes it so an alliance with say, 10 atomics, can only get matched with an alliance with +-3 atomic, so 7-13.

I especially agree with your comments on generals. It's fair they take some time to rebuild but 24 hours is insane.
 

SiuYin

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You know, any change to make late joiner to catch up will make some old (and didn't pay) player unhappy.
 

Skyman

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Yes I do have some ability to catch up. However strength is too focused on time served on long term upgrades & process.
 

LordJestix

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The change to how castles work is a good thing. I use sabotage on castles all the time so I get where you're coming from but come on. One tactic shouldn't take out 3 level 30 heroes. Is that even really debatable? I'm sorry, but complaining about something that obvious is just silly.

I gave suggestions to limit the impact of a sabo on a fort but still allow it to be saboed. I shouldnt be punished because 'you" dont strategically place your fort and leave it for me to access and destroy easily.
 

LordJestix

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Manifesto commented
Yesterday, 05:27 PM
Of course it's impossible for you to catch an AA player - he's ahead of you! You will never catch an AA player unless that person stops playing or dies or has their game corrupted or something similar! The AA player has even longer upgrade times than you, yet he/she is still playing.
You'll get there, IF you're willing to put in the effort.

It shouldnt be impossible. CoC it takes a player 2.5ish years to max out their base. The game is 5 years old. Im probably 1 year away from a max base there, so i will be able to catch up with the maxed bases. This game takes 4.5 YEARS to fully max an AA base and they keep adding more time to that, let alone considering CW and SA in the future, potentially increasing this time by 3-4x


SiuYin commented
Yesterday, 10:08 PM
You know, any change to make late joiner to catch up will make some old (and didn't pay) player unhappy.

Actually SuperCell has done this very thing more than once to help players advance faster.
 

Manifesto

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It shouldnt be impossible. CoC it takes a player 2.5ish years to max out their base. The game is 5 years old. Im probably 1 year away from a max base there, so i will be able to catch up with the maxed bases. This game takes 4.5 YEARS to fully max an AA base and they keep adding more time to that, let alone considering CW and SA in the future, potentially increasing this time by 3-4x
Actually SuperCell has done this very thing more than once to help players advance faster.
Nothing is ''impossible''. The game is very easy in the lower ages so ''catching up'' to higher level players is not as bad as you think. When you get to late Global or AA that's when things are at a snail pace, which allows younger players to get closer.
Apart from the upgrade times, which should be rebalanced, I like that the game is adding new ages all the time. If, as you say, you can fully max out in CoC, then what-----------------------> ? What's your incentive to keep playing if you've got everything you need?
You must really like cartoon graphics too much if you don't move to another game at that point! :D
 

LordJestix

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Nothing is ''impossible''. The game is very easy in the lower ages so ''catching up'' to higher level players is not as bad as you think. When you get to late Global or AA that's when things are at a snail pace, which allows younger players to get closer.
Apart from the upgrade times, which should be rebalanced, I like that the game is adding new ages all the time. If, as you say, you can fully max out in CoC, then what-----------------------> ? What's your incentive to keep playing if you've got everything you need?
You must really like cartoon graphics too much if you don't move to another game at that point! :D

I am not Maxed in CoC, and i would play it for the wars as well as their 2nd game mode they added to the game a couple months ago. There is also belief that CoC will get a new town hall(age) in the future. Maybe once i get maxed out on both game modes i will end up quitting, but i got 2.5 years or more of game play out of it. Most people are going to quit this game out of frustration the end (max) is no where close for them.

I am no way against them adding new ages in this game, but in its current state its a bad idea. IF and this is a big IF, they re-balance the upgrade times with the release of cold war and also re-balance the research time in the university then im all for them adding more ages and university tech.
 
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Evningcome

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In CoC there is nothing , absolutely nothing that can buy you a win in WARs , beside this there is nothing , absolutely nothing that can buy you an extra workers .Is that enough how much more fair is it ? ,Is that enough how much more skills are involved ? Apart from usual pay to advance (which is pretty much acceptable) it's fair play .Yes cartoon graphic is not my favorite ,but CoC is years in front Dominations in pure game play , organization and fair play .This type of games depends on their player base and you can guess why CoC have such a huge one ....
 
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Manifesto

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I'm a long term player with 2 accounts, I know people with more accounts, and we're all frustrated but we like this game. Plus we stick with it because it's fun but also it's challenging.
I have no doubt those who quit because it gets harder at the later ages do so because they're part of the new generation, the 'disposable' generation.
Us older people will see it through to the end. :)
 

Skyman

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Nothing is ''impossible''. The game is very easy in the lower ages so ''catching up'' to higher level players is not as bad as you think. When you get to late Global or AA that's when things are at a snail pace, which allows younger players to get closer.

This is Zeno's paradox. Though you are catching up you cannot actually catch up

The difficulty is that the most precious resource is, workers and time.

Given I can't change either compared to the higher grade players and the upgrades like missile silo are of such importance I cannot 'win' against someone who has more exp than me.

To solve this the ability I'm the game should depend less on time served and more on the individual ability of a player..ie their ability to gain resources in attack and defend them.

That would mean lower worker numbers for upgrade, lower upgrade times. However it would mean significantly higher cash/food resources to upgrade.
 

Manifesto

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I don't tend to overthink things. For me it's like this:
I've put in the time. If other people want to get where I am, they should too.
Complaining about things won't get the job done. Doing the work gets the job done.
Life will always seem unfair to those who aren't prepared to put in the time (or effort).
 
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