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Topic: Dev: Game Concept - Fix by Joe (sticky)
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Bolle, August 2011, edited
So, it seems like a lot of people feel the game isn't up to scratch at the moment. It's development's job to think about this, and last night the inspiration flowed richly in Joe's veins. He came up with the following, which has since passed my scrutinizing eye. Unit cost has been left out because that's a balancing tool and not essential. Contributions are welcome – responses and discussion are welcome. The question is: are we willing to 'revolutionize' the game again? Joe's Concept No heritage All tribes start at 1000 acres with the exception of newly signed up players: http://aatw-live.rob-franken.nl/suggestions/read/8035/tutorial_mode/. (These start at ~750? with protection and are tutored to ~1000 by attacking bots and the like). Market limited (decay formula on goods that belong to no alive tribe) Simple race overview in which each race is rated with stars on strong point and weaknesses. Joe has since posted a grid with which I won't bother you yet, but it shows promise, relating both to the fantasy content and the need for a major picture to aid newbies in understanding the game Orcs Uruk: 8/0; 0/7; 10/4. +25% base unit losses. Oleg: 7/0; 0/7; 6/6. Second general +10% off. Double pillage gains. Immune to reconing. Mori: 6/0; 0/6; 5/5. 3/3 thievery unit. 45% homes allowed. 3 hour attack time. Reptie: 7/0; 0/7; 9/2. Venom Attack (1-4 updates). Double military losses on enemy when defending. Race spell: Mortality. This spell enables your troops to slay immortal units when attacking or defending and adds 5% offence to your troops. Elves DE: 6/0; 0/5; 5/7. +50% mana regeneration. Guilds produce 1/3rd rp. HE: 7/0; 0/7; 6/6. Immortal counterpart of the Olegs. +50% fame gains, +50% fame effects. (eventually: Quadruple fame loss on retreating) WE: 6/0; 0/6; 0/8. +25% max tp. LE: 6/0; 0/4; 2/5. Elendian, Matawaska, Lord of Harvest and Quanta give all +50% bonus instead of +10%. Race Spell: Deep Forest. This spell makes your forests grow faster, giving you +2500 wood per update as well as 5% additional defence and 1-8 acres randomly. Humans Dwarves. 7/0; 0/7; 8/3. +50% weaponry and wall effectiveness (20% max walls results in 30% def bonus). 2 hour build time; Dwarven buildings don't require wood. Vikings. 7/2; 3/7; 9/3. Deals double military losses to enemy when attacking. No increased resting time on destructive attacks. -25% base unit losses. Brittonian. 7/0; 0/6; 4/7. Cheap 1/0 soldiers and cheap 0/0 thieves. +25% science effects. Templar. 6/0; 0/6; 5/5; 3/3 mystic unit (1 MPA = 1 ML). 45% homes allowed. No thievery available. +25% science effects. Race Spell: Scholastic Sciences. Every 500 citizens produce 1 rp per update. Winged Dragons. 35/10; 10/40; 60/15. 3 hour attack time. All buildings hold 20% of normal amount of citizens. +25 years lifespan. 50% damage reduction on all building-damaging forces. 20%(!) of normal farm/yard/mine production. 20% of normal maintenance costs. 20% of normal unit losses. Eagles: 5/1; 0/5; 2/8. Gain 0.3% of maximum population as free soldiers per update (1/0 emensens 10 crowns). Intelligence operations require no tp to perform. Eagle academies give 1/2 to max tp but add no thievery regeration. Eagle hideouts give 1/2 to max mana but add no regeneration. Ravens: 4/1; 1/6; 5/6. 1 hour attacktime, even on retreats. -25% damage on destructive attacks. -10% base unit losses. Owls: 5/0; 0/7; 5/5. 0/5 thief unit. 1 hour thievery return time. 1/2 selfop gains. Owl thieves leave no traces in enemy news on failed operations. Race Spell: Brood. Brood gives +10% base citizen growth, reduces military training time to 2 hours and gives randomly 1-8 acres per update. Cursed Balrog: 13/0; 0/13; 13/13. 15% homes allowed. 25% damage reduction on all building-damaging forces. 50% of normal farm/yard/mine production. 50% of normal maintenance costs. +25% damage on destructive attacks. Undead: 9/0; 0/8; 7/9. Can not explore. Can not cast selfspells. Vampires are immortal and return in 3 hours. 25% of slain units will join your army as Vampires. Each 100 citizens slain on raids will give 1 rp. Undead also have the option to sacrifice their own citizens for rps. Spirit: 6/0; 2/7; 6/3. Immune to visions. Thief unit has 2 defence points and can is not lost on failed operations. Spirits do not require food. Nazgul: 5/2; 0/7; 6/4. 2 hour returntime. Immune to intercepts. 50% magic & thievery resistance. Race Spell: Pestilence. Pestilence is spread by attacks if either of the opposing parties is infected with Pestilence. On any attack the infection is reset to it's maximum value: 12 hours. Cursed races gain +10% base citizens regrowth and +5% offence. Non-cursed races suffer -20% base citizen regrowth. The only way to fight pestilence is by casting the Heal spell: each succesful casting shortens the infection by 1 hour. (Pestilence is immune to Magical Voids because it is a disease of magical origin rather than a simple spell or enchantment).
Bolle, August 2011
For those hating to read walls of text, here is a short summary made by me in reply to Joe's post on dev forum. This post is also of interest for others, because it highlights a few points which are not incorporated in the above fix but which will either no longer be a problem, or the problem will be far more minor. ^Quote I like it a lot, you fix the troublesome races with original solutions. Undead gets a sci perk, Balrog is made simpler, Nazgul becomes a fancy fast suicidal attacker, but above all the Pestilence becomes a true weapon again. Dragon get improved, but most other races get one fancy perk or other related to whatever they're good at: eagles get soldiers and free intel, Ravens get some safety, Owls get a thief perk. Dwarves become proper attackers enhanced by buildings, Britt get science, Templar need extra homes to balance for their suicidalness, and they all get a fancy science perk. High Elf become the fame masters, LE become simple and fast with options on mage, thief and attacker (do add 'cannot void basic spells'), Deep Forest becomes more useful. Uruks become brutal, Olegs become pillage pros with 2 generals, Repts' elite unit is fixed. But they're the only races that can beat immortality. So much for the quick summing up of what I saw. The best changes aren't even listed: it's the absence of both off and def elite units. Those races that do have both suffer from a citz problem, because the elite is effectively 6/6. There are no more very efficient races. I'd very much like to see the above changes happening. They fix quite a lot of stuff and should allow us to see how bad other factors in the game actually are, like the Meteor Storm spell, the Raze attack, the ease with which walls/weaps are destroyed, the use of the separate branches of science and science in general. Talking of science, I'd like to float this idea: science does not decay based on RPA. When science is invested, it becomes a % based on RPA. Once invested, the RPA is irrelevant and the decay formula starts working on the %. Growth nor death changes the height of the science decay; it disappears through a standard ratio. Thus, investing for 50% science will only yield 25%, and the timer will start with 25% - the other 25% is wasted (in that branch).
Bill, August 2011
I like everything but the race spells, def looks like everything is leveled out though
sanzi, August 2011, edited
pestilence still is horrible :P how does the 5% attack bonus help spirits? *Edit*And I'm not in favor of a complete overhaul like this!!
ScorpiAS, August 2011, edited
Are olegs leets still mercs? Do brit homes still hold 600 citz? Nazgul seem to be quite overpowered imo (unless their leets cost a fortune) *Edit also undead need a cap for the rps they gain else you will be just encouraging bottom feeding. Who wouldn't like an undead at 1m citz getting 100k per tick (possible solution would be to apply penalties similar to those on labs - running more results in less rps.
Joe, August 2011, edited
Oleg leets are no mercs. Actually, anything that is not explicitly stated in the post above should be assumed to have disappeared. This means that Dwarfs are back to normal 300 pop homes too.. And that Britt homes are 300 pop too. UD though, suffer from a lack of selfspells, making them not really great in regrowing citizens. Before your UD is able to regrow 1 million citizens in 1 tick, he would need to have 6.6 mill citizens + pestilence running, which is not very likely to happen when you consider that UD will be a very slow (but tough) race. @ Sanzi: it seems that you very much underestimate the pestilence as proposed above. It is a very powerful feature in starving away enemies already under attack. Note that the market is no longer infinite and that it will become more possible to starve ppl to death rather than kill them. Pesti is a big tool in this. One of the great things of the Spirit race is that they are immune to this starving way because they can regrow 25% citz per tick in an unstoppable way (5% + mata + pest), do not require food to feed them and have also extra space for income buildings. Next to that, they can be played as both thief and mage, making them one of the best allround t/ms. Finally they are also tough to kill in general because they cant be visioned and thus one has to rely on calculating skillz or luck to kill them.
Bill, August 2011
Also 12 heals is pretty nuts, I expect every attacker in the game to get pestilence? Just saying
Bolle, August 2011
I like the 12 heals.. also note that -20% basic citz regrowth means that mata still gives +10% citizen growth (or so I suppose). Anyway, -10% citz per tick seems much more realistic to me. 0.9 / 0.82 / 0.74 / 0.66 / 0.6 in 5 ticks is still pretty sick. But that's the idea. Because, let's face it, the cursed attackers have less destructive power than the orcish and human ones. They sort of rely on pestilence, and that's merely one hell of an annoying thing (and good for MS kills).
Sweet, August 2011
Race Spell: Deep Forest. This spell makes your forests grow faster, giving you +2500 wood per update as well as 5% additional defence and 1-8 acres randomly. Imba at Low lvl after that not so impressive. Give it a boost % of the wood you produce instead? Race Spell: Scholastic Sciences. Every 500 citizens produce 1 rp per update. Kinda cool but you have made Brit and Templar science booster instead of dwarf. And they will produce insane amount of it. With TA and race spell and 30% labs will be a sick amount of rps a britt can make
Bolle, August 2011, edited
Sweet: it's the only race spell boosting defence. There's a reason there's no non-DH spells boosting defence. Note that britts are no longer 600 citz per home, but 300; that halves the napa (not TA) and race spell gains a lot, to probably less than right now. Also, templar/britt aren't science boosters but science effect boosters.
Joe, August 2011
The DF spell is an Elf booster at low level. At bigger size it is less useful but still adds 5% def which is always very good to have, and it might also be surprisingly useful when you are being KAed and manage to run out of market credits. The human racespell equals about ~6-12% labs if you run efficient military. Britts will indeed be good at pumping sci (though maybe less so than currently because they no longer have double amount of citz/thieves)
Plato, August 2011
Since everyone seems to get lower def, raven might become a bit to strong with 5/6 elites.
k-man, August 2011
I like the idea of a complete game over haul however or perhaps a completely separate game, however I also feel that this could easily set the game back even further with more potential problems then we currently have. Of course I could be wrong but to me it would be far easier to work on what we have rather than to develop new problems. I realize the effort put into this idea and I'm grateful for such compassion and dedication to the game so please don't take this the wrong way it just seems backwards to me.
Joe, August 2011
@kman: I can understand your thoughts and your point is definitely a valid one :P I can assure you however that there has been thought about the idea behind these kind of changes quite a bit. The reason why I post the idea here is so people can shoot holes in it. Yours is a very general hole and also a very good hole, but I wouldn't mind if you would post up any potential detailed problems that you see ;) @ Plato: you are very right indeed. They should be 5/5, especially now I gave them a defpoint on the offspec.
Sweet, August 2011
One more thing would be kinda cool if moris hade no ML and only TA and their selfspells comes from thievery (the oposit for Templars)
Sweet, August 2011
@Joe then plz take away that free acres it's a burden for attackers :). (on the elf racial spell).
fear, August 2011
Good work, I like it!
CBeast, August 2011
Oleg: 7/0; 0/7; 6/6. Second general +10% off. Double pillage gains. Immune to reconing. I think being immune to recons is a horrible idea, it would be far to hard to ever know if you could kill an oleg! I really like the idea of a human spell that produces rps...I think it should be considered even if a lot of these changes are rejected. My big question is this...What would this big list of changes actually do for the game? I really appreciate that you (Bolle and Joe) put so much effort into this, but I want to make sure that if a large amount of changes are made, they will result in more people playing the game as well as a better game. Is there anything in these changes that will make the game more attractive to new players? I assume that is the intention of the bot system, but I'm not sure if it will work. Won't this still eventually put noobs at the same level as big allis who will pwn them? I think that to make this change effective, noobs will have to be forced to join alliances with other players. But can the training bot system still work if they're in alliances with other players? (PS sorry if I'm just not understanding the bot idea correctly )
mazja, August 2011
the bot idea confuses me a bit too- not sure I'm clear on that- but, just a thought that's derived from the so-called “tutoring bot”- would anyone think that bringing “levels” to the game would help? I know many games do this however i don't know if any mprpg's do- but it seems it would have pro's and con's- i see people getting hooked on games that they must continue to beat barriers before they can reach the “next level” which then rewards them goods, spells, etc. although i am not sure how this would be implemented with a small-player base currently, but think maybe has some potential to attract new players?
Bill, August 2011
I think the overhaul would really change game play as we know it, which I think they hope will bring more peeps.
scarlo2, August 2011, edited
It's very encouraging that you guys are stepping up to address well known problems - and I like the proposed solutions! It's nice that I get the feeling that I don't need to scan for the hidden abuse mechanism that some players used to design into the race changes. Some initial thoughts: - DE are badass - thieves are crap efficiency - dragons seems a bit too op with their efficiency and decrease in TM vulnerability - pestilence? wow. what if i get it and i'm in an inactive or lame alliance and can't get some heal action? overpowered imo. I'm sure there are some other items that will come to mind as I reread this (just got back from vacation though - more time tomorrow perhaps). Again, it's really cool that someone who actually has the ability to make changes is seeing the races the way they should be viewed and trying to encourage individuality between them with creativeness by using many of the game specs that are already there (just tweaked). That makes this set of changes both exciting, AND realistic. Great work and definitely going in the right direction.
ScorpiAS, August 2011
the only race taint uruks will have is +25% military losses? Seems like making them kinda useless..
Joe, August 2011
Uruks are designed by me to be the most boring, simplest and at the same time the best growing-attackers in the game. It's the perfect choice for a new player to start because Uruks are one of the most efficient attackers. That increased losses and further boringness are mainly to prevent them to be too good in the hands of pro's (while for new players who don't use their attacking for destructive purposes but rather for growth as a start it is of lesser importance). Any Uruk vs. Vik battle will very soon be won in favor of a Vik (much like raven vs. Vik currently) Dragons might be a tad too strong but it seems everybody is overlooking the simple 'all buildings hold 20% of normal' trait. Currently, Dragons do gain significant citz compared to their homes in non-homes buildings. In this change the difference disappears. The Draggies have a little higher stats because they will have less citz. Pestilence might indeed be overpowered, but one way to fight it is simply to not hit and not get hit. A tribe that is not getting killed or in the resourcefarmlist should have little problem with pest. Tribes that DO get KAed will have to deal with Pesti too now though if their enemies are smart enough to use it. (although non-cursed enemies will suffer Pest effects themselves too :P) Also, all birds with a racespell running have a total of 25% citz growth, making them still gain 5% citz per tick if Pest is running. Basically Pest is just very annoying against the Elf, Human and Orc races.
ScorpiAS, August 2011
how are uruks efficient compared to all leets based races ? :) I suppose their leets will have some nice price and having 4 def only will mean that they have to run some def specs as well... As for pesti - it seems to look perfect now :)
Joe, August 2011
Oh.. Where do you see leet based races?
ScorpiAS, August 2011
Oleg, Balrog, Raven,Nazie (yes I will play leets only nazie, and yes it will be accepted with the same skepticism as my leet only rept last age ;)
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