Lord Thane
@TheKeeper
I implore you to listen to my opinion with a more open mind.

In the initial game design, peasants ate 6 food. There were thousands of players back then. All of them came together and then sometime shortly afterwards, peasants were eating 0 food.

There were no "undeads" without food upkeep on combat units. Everybody on equal footing, more or less.

If the MUCH larger community felt at that time that peasants eating food is unsustainable, maybe we should re-explore that? I'm saying don't start with 0 food, maybe try 3 food for a while.

As the game currently stands, you build to 2 castles, hit somebody for your third with a good sustainable army, if enough units survive and are away, you're slightly pressed for food. Mind you, you also get a tonne of unbuilt land because 30% buildings destroyed, all your resources go to building this up. This was only 15% in the previous version. Now if your opponent pre and retals you before your army returns, you're down to 1/3rd land and not enough farms/gh to support your away army. This = time to quit and say the game is too broken to play.

I've seen two people go through it already.

Not everybody has the nerves of steel I do 😃

Thank you for listening.

Edit: Also to add that retals not giving retals means even if you rebuild back, max you'll come back to is 2 castles. Even though I used the retals not giving retals to my advantage yesterday, I implore you, let's stop encouraging strategies that will lead to FarmVille! Attacking first really isn't worth it unless it's a bottom feed where the target doesn't have any friends and cannot get you with a pre and a retal. Really, as the game stands, the best strategy is to farm until you get hit. Not a big fan tbh. We need changes to encourage hitting not discourage it.

      saadht I couldn't take someone seriously who would quit a game while participating in test rounds. The whole point of test rounds is to fix things, and this is a brand new game.

      Anyways, it's still too soon to know if food is really a problem or not. As a Dwarf I haven't had any issues with food at all. I had a big surplus when I came out of protection, ran a deficit after my first attack which my surplus was easily able to absorb, now I'm only running at optimal level with 1:1 farms and building a huge surplus. We'll see how things go as armies get bigger and wars get more complex.

      We'll have the grand market to help with resource issues soon too 🙂

          Lord Thane

          You haven't been in a war at the outset. Basically confirming that the best strategy is to farm.

          We need more wars!

          I haven't quit, so please take me seriously. I implore you to think about it deeper, would you want strategies that encourage hitting or discourage it? On your first attack, how many units survived? If less than 10% were killed perhaps, how would that change your experience?

          And then along come undeads, completely unhurt by this problem. Gold is easy to come by. Even fighting orcs can't keep up with the other resources. There's something wrong. Please try to look at it from our viewpoint too.

          By the way, my previous post was wrong, 40% of buildings that you absorb are destroyed. Can we at least take that back down to 15%? It's a start perhaps.

              saadht You just gave me a new idea, what if we do a new tech tree? we can implement your ideas and everyone should evaluate if takes that route

                  @TheKeeper

                  I feel like this problem will be more severe early game, especially at the castle jump stage.

                  Can you elaborate how you imagine the tech tree going?

                  Thanks.

                    saadht my first attack the target didn't have any troops, so zero casualties lol

                    We have the castle defense rule and the unit weighted damage allocation, those should help reduce casualties and distribute damage to the cheapest units. That's some help at least. We'll see how the rest of this rest round goes before making anymore battle engine changes.

                    The thing that is wrong is the tech times are low. I think that was a big mistake for this test round, it's ruining any sensible estimate of how a real round will go, making many opinions moot, especially around resource allocation. And it's promoting farming, hence this test round is completely ruined as far as any game balancing goes imo.

                    We have the poll up for currently suggested changes, and we may implement some more of those items. Other than that, I just want to test techs to verify they're all working and then wait for the real round to begin.

                      saadht I think should be: reduce food consumption for peasants (gold and time to be defined) -> reduce buildings destroyed if you win (tbd), and we should make a poll to add more tweaks

                        Can be a good compromise @TheKeeper but really, in this case, you must first do these techs before the game is properly playable. God forbid you get into a war before these, then all bets are off.

                        I mean, let's see, maybe it's a start but I can't understand why we don't just incorporate these ideas that were well tested and come to by a larger community years ago. We appreciate your thankless and tireless work, but with the undeads introduced in the game, it makes everything different.

                        Also retals giving retals should be immediately reinstated IMHO.

                        • Jets

                        • Post #52
                        • Edited

                        TheKeeper you know me, I'd love to have even more tech trees. I also don't think we shouldn't discourage farming if that is someone's way of playing. I feel like it's okay if someone wants to drive fast and take chance, but if you want to be smart and methodical....that's fine too. As both you and @Lord Thane have been speaking too, this game isn't to be catered to one person's style of gameplay, but to make a strategy game based on decisions and repecutions.

                        Diversity within the tech trees help allow players to follow how they want to play.

                        For science.

                          saadht re food, peasants still ate food but didn’t die when starved. It mattered when you had army. Because you would need to feed both peasants and army to ensure army didn’t starve, we have so little information about after protection as the game only ran 1 week before the resource dump. I understand and sympathize with the fact that food was different or approached different in the other game however this is a different game we are seeing that more and more. It’s community driven which og was not. Which makes it harder when others opinions are seeming to get through over yours.

                              Higher food costs just means smaller armies.

                              As undead I’m having to run 5:1 houses and 1:1 markets just to have good gold production. That leaves 4:1 for forge GH mill mine tc and atc. BuT ThEy HAvE NO fOoD upKEeP

                                TheKeeper

                                .5 with irrigation to be positive a few hundred. When I train a bunch and the pop has to regrow it is nice.

                                  TheKeeper

                                  Now I do need to maintain 2 mine per forge just to keep up with my sword production. So yeah .5 forge needs more than 1:1 mines if you want to max everything every tick. I haven’t done that math but it is terrifying. Thats without blacksmithing techs which sure would let me reduce my forges and get more mines but…… yeah can’t keep iron for anything. It’s a very iron heavy race that is meant to die a lot.

                                    what if we got a resource bonus for attacking and winning. this does not include retals. must be an initial attack. essentially you plunder the village you just won against BUT, the losing village doesnt lose resources. consider it the daily bonus that used to be attached to the game years back that now encourages hitting first

                                    plus its more realistic, since to the victor go the spoils...

                                      Wild Dogs I like the idea of stealing some resources. However much % of their kingdom you take, get proportional cut of their resources. Loot!

                                        Wild Dogs

                                        I really like this suggestion.

                                        But the core part is that although you may steal a little from your target, you should also get some extra for "salvage of destroyed buildings."

                                          Xliest

                                          Also, it is confirmed through one of my old spreadsheets that peasants were, in fact, eating 0 food. They weren't eating food but not disbanding as stated here.

                                          I don't know what to say here. Definitely others' opinions are getting through over mine, and although I fail to understand why given that I am trying to back them up with as much logic as possible, I guess I'll keep quiet and let others suggest.

                                            Wild Dogs

                                            It’s an idea. But it’s not going to fix the problem as castles are the key to growth. That’s not going to make me suddenly want to attack someone.