Grepolis United: DevBlog and Rebalancing

Richard

Strategos
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DevBlog and Rebalancing
Dear Community,

We are happy to announce that today we will reach another milestone of the Grepolis United project with the official opening of our developers blog. In the DevBlog, game designers and developers will give regular insights about their work on Grepolis. You can access it at any time at http://devblog.grepolis.com

And to start the blog, we decided to talk to you about one of the biggest changes planned on our roadmap: the rebalancing of our units, researches and special buildings. Due to the fact that it is an important topic and that we want to involve you – the community – in finding the right balance, we decided to translate this blog post in to all of the languages for each of our communities. With accurate information in your hands, you will be able to provide us valuable feedback in the threads mentioned below.

In the past we increasingly observed that certain units have been overly popular while others have been built rarely. That's not how it should be! Every unit should have its benefits and flaws, so that they open up individual strategical momentum. Some units may be too expensive, consume too much population, or are simply too weak in combat compared to other units. Due to that circumstance we've decided to evaluate and rebalance some of the aspects of Grepolis. This doesn't go only for land, sea, and mythical units, but for technologies and special buildings as well.

Units

To work with exact values, we made an analysis worldwide. We summarized the amounts of units that were being built in your cities.
Here are some of the results: We noticed that chariots and slingers get built twice as often as horsemen. By looking closer we realized that horsemen are too weak in the offense. Slingers are just more effective and cheaper. Therefore, we want to add another 5 points of damage to the horsemen, making it a total of 60 damage. We hope that you will start recruiting some more horsemen as they will be more balanced.
Catapults were pretty unpopular. This might be due to the high consumption of population, that's why we plan to reduce the required population value from 15 to 10.

UnitSwordsmanSlingerArcherHopliteHorsemanChariotCatapult
Amount of units56329468548584024451747250245584989824015014218444714
Population consumption5632946854858402445174725024558429694720600568726670710
Consumption of available population7.8%7.6%6.2%7.0%4.1%8.4%0.9%
Researched in citiesN/A76%70%82%66%58%27%

We have also seen that mythical units get built too rarely and that we should make adjustments there, too. In that regard we significantly lowered the favor costs while increasing the resource costs. Most of the offensive mythical units will be buffed as we also want to shift the Grepolis gameplay slightly towards a more aggressive playstyle. Mythical units will keep their disadvantage of only being able to support cities of the same God, but in return they will be more efficient in combat than usual units.

Looking at the naval forces, we have noticed that especially Triremes and Fire Ships nearly never get used. Instead, people rely on Light Ships and Biremes. We will make enormous changes to this situation to open up new strategical possibilities. We propose changing the speed of the Trireme from 9 to 24 and increase the damage from 180 to 250. This way, the Trireme will keep being slightly worse than the light ship and Bireme in their special positions, but it will be much faster. By this you will have more time to react on certain combat situations. The Trireme will become an attractive hybrid unit in the end!

The Fire Ship is kind of a kamikaze unit that will destroy itself after combat while destroying an enemy ship in the process. However, they don't fight against transport and Colony Ships. We would like to ask you - independently of our own ideas - to have a think and make some proposals on how to change the Fire Ship. Maybe you'd rather replace it with a completely new type of ship? We are looking forward to your ideas!

You can leave your feedback about the rebalancing of the units mentioned above on the following threads:
Researches

The Plow is the most favored research in the game, closely pursued by Ceramics. Both researches are done in nearly all cities. On the other hand, diplomacy, espionage, cryptography, meteorology and breakthrough are seldom researched. To change this, we've planned several adjustments; to name a few:
  • Diplomacy will in future decrease the chance of a (farm village) revolt by only 10%, but in return the technology will increase the amount of resources you get from demanding and looting by 10%. You will also get to trade with a farm village up to a mood of 60%
  • The Espionage technology will increase the amount of silver coins of your spy by 10% when sending him away for an Espionage
  • Cryptography is good to counter an espionage. If you research this technology and an enemy spy infiltrates your city, you will lose 10% less silver coins from your cave
  • The research of Breakthrough had a too low an impact when attacking other cities and trying get your transport ships through. We will decrease the overall chance for a transport ship to breakthrough by 30% if you do not have the research. In return, the research will increase the chance for a transport ship to arrive by an additional 10% compared to the way it works now
  • The research Meteorology increases the speed of land units, but the opportunity to research it comes too late in the game. That's why we think about putting this research into the first column, so that you can start researching meteorology with the very first academy level

You can leave your feedback about the rebalancing of the researches mentioned above on the following threads:
Special Buildings
The evaluation of the special buildings conveyed that there were 2 favorites, the Thermal Baths and the Tower. We don't want to make these buildings less efficient, but instead buff and change the effects of the other buildings. It's our goal to enhance the variety within the game by adding more viable options. There shouldn't be THE perfect building.

BuildingsAmountRatio
Theatre1523131.7
Thermal Bath254002728:8
Library883091:0
Lighthouse1452761:6
Tower203208222:0
Divine Statue4241954:6
Oracle923121:0
Merchant's shop2066302:2
Here are some of our thoughts:
  • The Theatre play will become cheaper so that you can use it at the same time as the city festival. The new costs would be 10000 wood, 7000 stone and 10000 silver coins. Additionally we want to reduce the time it takes from 5 days to 1 days (speed 1), so that it has the same time as the city festival and the Olympic Games
  • The Lighthouse will increase the speed of your ships by 20% instead of 10%.
  • The Oracle will be replaced by the "War Council". The War Council will increase the offensive values of your land and sea units by 10%
  • The biggest change will go to the Merchants Shop:
    • You will have the possibility to instantly trade resources between 2 cities.
    • A city with the Merchant's Shop will allow you to declare a target city, if you wish to do so. If a resource storage is full, the production won't stop, but 50% of the exceeding resources will automatically be delivered to your determined target city. So you can have cities that are not part of your front line and use them to feed your front line cities. A city can only take resources from one city at a time through this mechanic

You can leave your feedback about the rebalancing of the special buildings mentioned above on the following threads:
For general feedback regarding the rebalancing or devblog post, please refer to this feedback thread.

We are looking forward to rebalancing Grepolis together! We will keep you updated with more blog posts about different topics in the future.

Have a nice weekend!
Your Grepolis Team
 
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