The Ladon, A Short-Term Solution, the Player's Council, and the Desperate Need For Communication

kingpg28

Phrourach
For years I've thought this same thing: I've had enough of the same recurring meta strategy on FL between top alliances - HC frequently until you find someone off, land and stack. How 'frequently' you HC has been controlled by the implementation of the spam rule - before it, you might get hits every minute in the worst parts of a spam war, now at worst, probably ~30 mins.

Either way - I find it just terrible to play like this. We are sitting around unable to take cities until we find someone offline...... just how is this kind of game any fun? Maybe some of you find it to be what Grepolis is all about (in CQ worlds, this has certainly been true for the longest time), but for me no thanks. You see me utilizing this all the same because there isn't much choice about it, but if I could I wouldn't. It is much too time consuming and who the better player is becomes a question of who can no life and respond to alarms 25/8 rather than anything else.

Why can we not just conquer players who are online by timing on them? Because of how powerful flyers are vs no wall. One flyer nuke can take out 3+ DLU nukes, especially if it's a snipe, so there is little chance of landing on someone online, especially during/right after an event. Landing online is pretty much out of the question - yes, doable, but very hard, in the end it's much easier to just find someone offline + stack.

The investment required for a single siege is very high too thanks to flyers - you need like 20++ cities of support tied up for 8/12 hrs just to take a single city. This requirement drastically lowers possible city turnover rate no matter how skilled your alliance is (as long as your enemy is of similar size). This is very different from Revolt and is what sucks most about conquest to me. It matters very much in the Domination game mode where you basically have no chance if you are outsized - you aren't going to push your enemy below 40% faster than they can found or take other cities at this kind of rate.

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tldr the ridiculous power of flyers is bad for multiple reasons, so to release a new flyer that's even more broken just destroys the cq game mode. In my past suggestions I have pushed to balance CQ by weakening the breakers/strengthening the takers.

What can be done -

- Reduce CQ time
- Reduce flyer speed (they would still be v. good even if slower than LS)
- Allow DEF token buffs on sieges
- Allow Heroes in sieges
- Enable some small wall building function (eg. with a research, 1 lvl every hr), reducing the stack requirement as time passes

Introducing the Ladon (and Aphrodite's Narcissism) just does not help this situation in conquest.

I don't know if many will agree with me on this, but I find it to be a fundamental balancing flaw in conquest that prevents the game from being fully enjoyable.

this game was made from the start favoring Attackers over defenders tbh, we have talked about this before, possibly with the purpose of encouraging a more aggressive game, but attackers have the advantage in almost every aspect of cq and it is opposite on revolt so when playing you have to keep that in mind
 

thunder123

Hipparchus
Few simple fixes they could do in general to help against not just Ladons, but against all fliers especially since Inno thinks the only way they can make money is flier tokens in events.

Generic increase in population size of the OP fliers (+10-20%) - so less fliers per nuke
Slow them down (10-20%)
Reduced conquest time (9hrs?)

Or go down the new unit route, something like Engineers (pop 200) - Temporary field fortifications - Adds 10 levels of wall during a conquest. Something like that would give players a bit of a chance in sieges, but still a) let you Rage it b) let you quake it c) be temp so cant be abused to instant build walls in cities.

Lots of things they can do, even if its slowly rolled out. However we seem to have dev's who only come to the game once every few months, roll out something and then come back months later with something else rather than actually playing the game themselves and seeing whats happening.
+10 wall levels is actually to much if you think about it. you are already happy when you see an enemy with level 4-5 wal. wall 10 would mean you never lose a siege (other than sniping)
increasing population would be good, is the same as nerfing their damage (a nuke would do less damage, not much difference)
"slow them down" is a must on ladons... not really need on griffs since they are already slower than manti
 

DeletedUser55901

Guest
@The Smilodon Fatalis suck it liberal! The game was broken by TURTLES like you. Staying in your lill cities ,building dlu nukes and going after aggressive players. Let's see how u go 10 against 1 now. Coz, if that one is a ladons lover, well, I dont think I need to explain what will happen to the lill turtles/ hyenas.
 

DeletedUser55901

Guest
Few simple fixes they could do in general to help against not just Ladons, but against all fliers especially since Inno thinks the only way they can make money is flier tokens in events.

Generic increase in population size of the OP fliers (+10-20%) - so less fliers per nuke
Slow them down (10-20%)
Reduced conquest time (9hrs?)

Or go down the new unit route, something like Engineers (pop 200) - Temporary field fortifications - Adds 10 levels of wall during a conquest. Something like that would give players a bit of a chance in sieges, but still a) let you Rage it b) let you quake it c) be temp so cant be abused to instant build walls in cities.

Lots of things they can do, even if its slowly rolled out. However we seem to have dev's who only come to the game once every few months, roll out something and then come back months later with something else rather than actually playing the game themselves and seeing whats happening.
The only decent solution is to let the hero to stay in the cities during sieges. The rest of your ideas, are just a simmer dream, let's build dlu slowly and when we are ready, let's go and get them.
It's enough that u can make yoir dlu cheaper and faster. What else do u want more?
 

DeletedUser41523

Guest
@The Smilodon Fatalis suck it liberal! The game was broken by TURTLES like you. Staying in your lill cities ,building dlu nukes and going after aggressive players. Let's see how u go 10 against 1 now. Coz, if that one is a ladons lover, well, I dont think I need to explain what will happen to the lill turtles/ hyenas.


uhh I don’t event stack dlu front island?Mostly olu/ls
 

Shuri2060

Strategos
this game was made from the start favoring Attackers over defenders tbh, we have talked about this before, possibly with the purpose of encouraging a more aggressive game, but attackers have the advantage in almost every aspect of cq and it is opposite on revolt so when playing you have to keep that in mind
It favors the breakers over the takers.

Yes it is the complete opposite of revolt. In CQ the city protectors have to commit barely anything compared to the city takers.

No LTS commitment needed if you respond to alarms for snipe, unless deep red city, but city takers need to commit 20++ cities to a CQ.

Revolt is complete opposite - the city protectors commit 10++ cities to LTS/stack vs revolt (yes, can snipe, but down the line it is inevitable a mixture of stacking/sniping is needed). Takers need much less in comparison to start putting pressure on the protectors - it might cost some to break a stack, but it is relatively low cost to run an OP and mass revolt 50+ cities.

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The city turnover rate in CQ is so bad compared to revolt - similar sized alliances fighting each other take at most 5 a day on avg, and this would usually only be because someone went inactive for whatever reason. In revolt it can be like 100 cities a day if one side is much better than the other. Or maybe even +50 -50 - both sides are turning over cities at a high rate simultaneously. This kind of activity sounds much more exciting than <<1% city turnover rate per day in CQ (compared to the city count of alliance).

That is not good for encouraging an active war and people to spend gold.

Revolt worlds get really heated up compared to CQ for this reason. The most active a CQ world gets is during a spam war, during the End Game mode or when someone goes IA/gets banned/ghosts. Otherwise people aren't really playing compared to revolt. They are just simming and founding cities bar the few on FL who go aggressively HC all day and find someone off once in a while. If I had to make a guess, outside of events, there is much more gold spent in revolt than CQ.
 
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Albozzz

Chiliarch
Yet you still play?
giphy.gif
 

Myrddin Emyrs

Phrourach
Hi Inno do you even care do you even listen to what is being said you lot broke the game well done get rid of ares army spell as that is the one that causes the damage not the actual ladons but this whole ares army spell and the full fury pool, it is a joke why did you do this without consulting the players first or letting it get tested first, you lot are a joke from new gods with spells buffed right up to events that goals are unatainable whats next, a entry fee to play the game.
 

Sound

Lochagos
I think the big problem is ares army, 500 spartoi = 5000 population attack + 3600 troops = 8600 population attack vs wall 0 its a rip
 

Lethal-Bacon

Polemarch
I think the big problem is ares army, 500 spartoi = 5000 population attack + 3600 troops = 8600 population attack vs wall 0 its a rip

+ the more defensive units there are in the siege/city the more damage ladons do, sometime i even ask myself if people who come up with new units even have a brain.
 

DeletedUser54192

Guest
My long-term solution is unchanged. Last year I started a petition to bring back the Grepolis' Player's Council. While that system wasn't perfect and a lot of communications errors and a lack guidelines really hampered the council. This is the kind of update that would have gotten shut down and re-balanced on the spot and if Inno is going to continue to try to release game altering updates such as this, they're going to actually need input from the players.
I am perhaps a little late to the conversation, however I thought it worthwhile to address this particular point.

The Grepolis Player's Council was a good concept. If InnoGames promised to work on the flaws of the original incarnation, I would fully support the reintroduction of the GPC as a way of giving the player base a more direct route to those making the big decisions. However I speak from personal experience when I say that I don't believe that the presence of the GPC would have shut down Ares or Ladons on the spot. Perhaps things were different during the 1st Term of the GPC, but during the 2nd Term I can give two strong examples about the lack of GPC involvement in the introduction of new features.
  • Casual Worlds:
    • The first the GPC knew about this whole new type of game world was through the public announcement.
    • The GPC almost instantly identified an issue with Casual Worlds which would allow for situations where a smaller player could not retaliate against attacks from a slightly larger player due to the way the percentage windows were calculated. When this problem and the mathematical proof was posted by the GPC in the feedback forum, it was initially refuted by Arci, the Beta LCM. InnoGames chose to roll out Casual Worlds to other servers such as EN without fixing the problem. The problem was fixed 1-2 weeks after the EN's first Casual World started, over a month after the GPC pointed out the problem, and again we were not directly informed about this change.
  • Attack of the Hydra:
    • The GPC again only found out about this through the public announcement. Even better, it was introduced just under 3 months after the Lead Developer informed the GPC that the Dev Team were not working on anything event-related beyond minor adjustments or improvements. This was a significant overhaul of the Hades' Portal event, not a seasonal graphics change. As it turned out, the event had been designed the previous year and inserted into the event schedule at short notice. Either way, the GPC was never given the opportunity to give pre-release feedback.
    • Attack of the Hydra was significantly worse than Hades' Portal: increased mission duration, increased troops requirement, significantly decreased success probabilities, and reduced event completion rewards (half the number of Land Expansions compared to Hades' Portal, despite the fact that Land Expansions aren't subject to 'abuse' in the same way as BP multiplier tokens). Even with increased event duration, the event was significantly harder to complete. The GPC's questions about the detrimental overhaul of the event were repeatedly ignored by the member of staff (either the Lead Dev or the LCM) responding to that thread, and the event was released on all servers with no changes or even a justification.
    • In parallel to halving the number of Land Expansions available in the event, InnoGames released expensive packages with large quantities of Land Expansions. This was directly after the LCM acknowledged the negative feedback from having pulled exactly the same trick with BP multiplier tokens (which the GPC were initially scapegoated for), showing that they had no intention of acting on GPC feedback. The LCM never responded to GPC questions about why this move was repeated after the previous negative feedback.

While the GPC did have positive results, there were a number of occasions where feedback or ideas were only considered if they tallied with existing plans or opinions of the staff that we were allowed to communicate with.

In summary (because I know this is a long post): while the return of the GPC would definitely be something to celebrate, I wouldn't count on it to have prior awareness of, let alone the ability to prevent, negative or even 'game-breaking' changes.
 
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Thooury

Hekatontarch
In summary (because I know this is a long post): while the return of the GPC would definitely be something to celebrate, I wouldn't count on it to have prior awareness of, let alone the ability to prevent, negative or even 'game-breaking' changes.

this.
why would a dev who clearly doesn't listen to the community and its feedback, suddenly listen to a player council?
even better yet, why would a company that is so out of touch with their customers that they give a useless bonus as an "apology" because of their mistakes. (It's on par with roman emperors hosting entertainment to keep the plebs happy) even remotely care about fixing this sort of thing?
 

DeletedUser41523

Guest
@Kal Gordon

I can’t speak to the second term. But for the first term the devs seemed interested in our feed back and working with us as well as giving clear guidelines on what they could and couldn’t do and some insight into their resources and their timeline to make things happen.

Nerfing myths in events and buffing Dlu was something that we had a say in. As was domination to an extent though they changed a lot on release.

but I will say a lot of disorganization was an issue in the first term. A lot of council members got switched out. Maybe by the time the next term rolled around they decided the experiment was done.
 
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