Piranha,
piranha wrote:*Remove the 3 new resources and make all resource buildings generate gold instead. They need to be balanced with city income and ruin income.
*change cities back to buying unit production instead of buildings and do whatever we can to make new users understand that they are buying production.
*Make wall upgrade also upgrade the guard tower (view radius)
*Optimize city management to reduce clicks as much as we can.
Two big thumbs up from me.
Not just because it's going back to the game style I know and love but also because you guys tested it prior to release and have the courage to recognize when ideas don't work as you hoped.
Income management
We have a townhall that can be upgrade in our current version. Basically you pay 3 turns of gold on the lower levels and up to about 10 turns before you break even for the last level. turned out that when you have bunch of cities its not too fun looking around if there is a townhall somewhere that you want to upgrade.
One idea is to make a kind of global income page where you can spend gold to increase city income but don't have to do it on a city by city level. Another way would be increase townhall when you upgrade wall too. Or any possibility to affect city income could be ditched.
Two suggestions here:
1) I've suggested this before, but you could have items/hero skills that provide +X gold per city. The items existed in War2 and the hero skill (and items) existed in DLR. This provides a boost to income without any need for management.
2) On a per city basis, you could adopt an idea from another old game called MULE. In that game income (was called production) increased based on the length of time you owned the city (land). The idea being that over time you became more efficient and had slight population increases. So maybe each city can have a base gold amount. Then say for every 2 consecutive turns you hold the city the income increases by +1 gold so that after 20 turns the income would increase by 10 gold. If the city is captured by another player it reverts back to it's base gold with the idea being the change of ownership causes an economic upheaval. This puts more gold in the game without requiring any user management and just about anyone can grasp the idea that a city becomes more valuable the longer you own it.
Portal management
Vector is called portal and it is distance based now and also upgradeable. Boring to manage your portals so either we just lock the portal speed or we can make it increase levels when you upgrade the wall or perhaps with the townhall. Any thoughts on this one?
I like the name. Makes it sound like magic which is why the unit 'appears' at its destination.
I've mentioned before DLR had timed vectoring rather than a fixed 2 turns. The time was 2-5 turns based on the distance between the 2 cities (when you created the vector in the vector screen the line would have a color + number on it to indicate the travel time in turns. So yellow for 2 turn vectors, orange for 3, red for 4 type thing). I'd suggest using the DLR model because once again it's point and click and you see the length of time instantly so you know whether you want to vector there or pick another location slightly closer.
Distances were 0-30 squares: 2 turns, 31-50 squares: 3 turns, 51-70: 4 turns, 70+ 5 turns.
If you want to later increase the vector distance based on the town hall upgrade you could still do that. So maybe 10 gold increases the distance by +10 so it would be 0-40 squares: 2 turns, 41-60 squares: 3 turns etc. But in reality it won't often make sense to spend that kind of money for only 1 city unless you have gold to waste.
Incidentally, DLR made timed vectoring a game option so players who wanted a fixed 2 turns ala War2 could do so.
Sites / resources / mercenary
We skip the whole extra version of units.
While we haven't tried the sites thing it sounds like something that you need to manage too if it is connected to a city. Also seems like it will create units that have different stats than whats standard (just like our other idea did).
I think this is for the best in Beta4 (making them all gold sites of various amounts). It gives players a chance to get used to sites + towers and learn strategies/tactics related to them.
You did not manage DLR sites in any way. As in, you can not assign a site to a city. The game automatically linked the site to the closest city on the map. This is OK, but limited because if you capture a site and you don't own the closest city all you can do is raze it because it provides no benefit to you. What I hoped Warbarons would do instead is automatically link captured sites to your closest city (even if it was half way across the map) so that you got a benefit from owning the site. No need to have players linking all sites into 1 city (which requires management and is unbalanced). DLR then had a sites screen that showed which sites were linked to which cities so you could quickly see what was linked in your empire.
You would then simply need to adjust the production screen to color the upgraded stats in another color to indicate the city was getting a site upgrade (right now the base numbers are all in black. An upgraded stat would be shown in say red to distinguish it).
And yes, it clearly creates units with different stats than the base ones. This has been a staple since War1 as different cities had bonuses to strength, move, production time etc. I believe almost everyone would like this to be added in some form or another eventually as several have asked for it before in posts.
Our current idea at the moment is to turn all the buildings for the city into buildings that a map maker can place on the map that will allow a player to buy units directly on the map. Mercenaries.
Should be pretty low management and then all units will have the stats you expect + possible blessing.
Any thought on this one?
Can you describe this in a bit more detail. You are planning to move the city buildings (that are no longer needed) onto the map. But only placed at map creation time. Then when you go there you can hire mercs. That part I get but here are my questions:
1) Do you need a hero on that site or just any unit (like a crow) there can do the hiring (A hero only would be best).
2) Do you chose what unit you hire (based on building type where the Tree can only provide Elves or Unicorns) or is it a random unit type?
3) Any limit to the number you can hire when you arrive? Is it random or can you simply hire 8 if you have the gold?
4) Can a hero (or unit) simply step on/off/on/off repeatedly and hire endless mercs based on gold or it is one hire per turn or once per site per game?
For balance reasons I'd suggest you need a hero to visit the site. I'd suggest the unit type (elves/unicorns in a tree) and number (2-6) is random and you can only visit a site once per game per hero. That way it won't be overpowering.
Incidentally, DLR had Mercs too. An 8% chance per turn of 2-8 units of a randomly selected unit type offering themselves for hire at one of your cities (assuming you had the gold). Certain heroes could acquire skills to increase the merc offering chance only when that hero was located in a city. That concept worked out well because DLR had limited army sets where Warbarons lets you build anything. I provide that model as a reference.
KGB