Your obscenely lengthy upgrade times are making me lose interest.

Master Contrail Program

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Got to global two weeks ago. Yay! Started and crowned my library and armory. So far so good. Took advantage of the war academy and fort discounts. So now that's 19 days that I have no reason to log in, except to upgrade walls that can still be destroyed 3-5 at a time by one comparatively cheap wall miner.

And we have more ages that are presumably just going to add two more days to each upgrade. Fun! You either need to add a way to get crowns in game beyond stags and ads or seriously reconsider your upgrade structure. I think stacking up to 16 workers on a project is the way to go. Still takes the same amount of time to max everything but gives us more options and more reason to play. Each group of workers can still cost whatever the initial project costs. I'd gladly pay 32,000,000 rather than 8,000,000 to upgrade a barrack, for example, 4 times faster.

Despite what your CEO claims, logging in for 5 minutes at a time just provides slightly more loot for somebody else to raid. It doesn't help one bit in the later ages. If this is a mobile game perhaps you should take steps to structure it like one. Hint: 2+ week build times, with nothing but your broken wars to keep people's interest in the meantime, don't do that.
 
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JMoney

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I've got eight of my workers on a 12 day build on my fort, it is a bit disheartening that they're unavailable for so long. On the bright side, it's not the 20+ days for cutting down forest blocks. Now that's soul crushing.
 

JMoney

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What the ****, it takes 2/3 of a month to clear a forest now?

It's been that way since the start. It's the last row of trees though, not really any priority to cut them down even with an atomic base since the buildings have more than enough room to fit. If there is any redeeming factor, it is only three workers, which, in an age where most buildings besides traps and some uni research start costing more than two workers to upgrade, is a good thing.
 

Wynne D Fanchon

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Would be nice if they could revamp some of the times. Games been out for 2 years and hasn't been much changed much. They need to rally in new players and I remember that Facebook inforpgraphic stating 32mil world wide downloads and 4 millions castles built, so that probably implies people are quitting around medieval age or before then. Not sure what's driving players away exactly from continuing any further.
 

LordJestix

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The build times do suck, but they are also present in other very successful games like CoC.

But the biggest differences i see between the 2 games are

1. In CoC the worker requirement never increases.

2. The extra workers can be obtained without paying a penny. In this game they want you, and it seems are trying to force you, to buy a way overpriced Estate for 3 workers.

If we could all earn the estate just by playing the game and saving up a bunch of crowns then that would help. Hell i bet a lot of players that cant afford to shell out $50 or are just unwilling at that price point would probably buy it for $10 or $15. Then youd have others that would do offers to earn the crowns needed to unlock the estate. I think they would make a lot more money from estates if the made the changes.

World Wars are supposed to be the content that keeps us here daily, but they are so broken right now.

I do have an idea i posted in the marco polo thread that would introduce speedups into the game that would help out a little bit.

I agree though, the vastly increasing build times combined with the increase in required workers is going to push away a lot of players once they realize the time commitment..
 

LordJestix

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It's been that way since the start. It's the last row of trees though, not really any priority to cut them down even with an atomic base since the buildings have more than enough room to fit. If there is any redeeming factor, it is only three workers, which, in an age where most buildings besides traps and some uni research start costing more than two workers to upgrade, is a good thing.

Good to know AA will fit without a full clear. I have 1 row left to clear, will be doing a couple more squares at the end of IA before i go to GA while doing some uni research.
 

Quovatis

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I don't mind the long times. What I do mind is the fact that the building take more workers to upgrade in the later ages. This is like a double whammy. Not only do we have to wait longer for a building to upgrade, but we can do fewer upgrades at a time because they require more workers. I understand progress needs to be slowed, but doing BOTH is a double penalty. Pick one or the other.
 

yemen

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The build times were all set to keep the longest playing people from blowing through the ages and having nothing left to do. So I'm fine with atomic being slow (although the extra workers seems a bit much). But assuming they still want new players to join, and to have a chance of catching up at all - not all the way, but to get close, they need to bump down times for the lower ages when they add a new age. So have fixed maximum build times for the highest age - maybe 8-10 days. When a new age is added, shorten the build times for all previous ages to fit into a progression. So industrial builds now should probably take about half the time it would have when it was the highest age, and global 75-80%. Make some buildings cheaper as well, or do something to increase resource availability.

Some people will grind away and end up getting close eventually. But right now, the top player base is exclusively people who have been around a while, or have spent a lot. Catching up from a late start is discouraging enough that I doubt they are adding the number of players needed to keep this game alive for 10 more years. It is not that hard to get to enlightenment, but then the game slows way down.
 

Motaz Tarek

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i know upgrades take much time but as an average user who play 1-2 hours per day i find it difficult to collect resources, i got 2 buildings 2 university 2 armoy 1 library upgrades running which in each 2 days one of them finishes and a new one requires 5-6 million or even more resources to start
so if ur upgrades finish in rotation of each 2 days u will find it pretty challenging
beside my walls now cost 5.4 million and 6.3 million which is another challenge for me
the new leader finish in little time and requires much resources is so challenging too
 

LordJestix

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i know upgrades take much time but as an average user who play 1-2 hours per day i find it difficult to collect resources, i got 2 buildings 2 university 2 armoy 1 library upgrades running which in each 2 days one of them finishes and a new one requires 5-6 million or even more resources to start
so if ur upgrades finish in rotation of each 2 days u will find it pretty challenging
beside my walls now cost 5.4 million and 6.3 million which is another challenge for me
the new leader finish in little time and requires much resources is so challenging too

How are you raiding? Other than Oil, resources seem pretty easy to get.
 

Master Contrail Program

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Food is not easy to get. Between global armies costing more, defenses being better, food for walls and the devs nonsensical decision to make farms take twice as many workers without producing twice as much food it's a pain in the ass to get.
 

BeerMan

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If you don't care about your medal count, food is very easy to get. I target bases where farms are on the edges and can get 300K+ with minimal investment (6 or 7 heavy infantry, 30 second raid). I generally run up my medals and then do a medal burndown in this manner. I can collect 5 or 6 million food in less than an hour.
 

LordJestix

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If you don't care about your medal count, food is very easy to get. I target bases where farms are on the edges and can get 300K+ with minimal investment (6 or 7 heavy infantry, 30 second raid). I generally run up my medals and then do a medal burndown in this manner. I can collect 5 or 6 million food in less than an hour.

This is how i raid as well. Lots of skipping bases to find a prime target, but well worth it.
 

Navalis

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I tend to raid in the same fashion. Works great if you don't care about medals! To this point food has been slightly easier to get but I'll be GA in a few days and I expect things to change just a bit...
 

obsidi

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this was my first impression of the game ... that the constant increase in upgrade times would eventually make it unplayable; there is a QoL penalty the more advanced you are.

there should be some short-term benefit to raiding, something making a 'grind' worth it more than just walls.
they somewhat realized this in last week's marble->stag offer from marco polo ... if this was a regular thing we could expect then it might rekindle lost interest.

i expected a food/gold->oil->crowns type of currency exchange a while ago, steep enough not to compete with their business but good enough to make it tangible to just play. there is certainly caution that this will compete with people buying crowns ....
but they are also certainly losing player attention at high ages when players cross their line of boredom.

my brief thought was that an exchange of nearly all your age's capacity of food/gold would earn 5 crowns, and oil 10+...
it would take an olympic raider to compete with crown sales.

i think that the endgame benefit from obsessive play should be to make the game go a little (negligably) faster; i think the only threat this poses is managing sales expectations.
 
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Master Contrail Program

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I raid the same way, but you must get incredibly lucky with farms as 3/4 that I raid barely have anything in them. Yet another annoyance that adds to the grind and detracts from the fun.
 
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