I want to start a discussion here about playability issues to improve non-reg WOE. Please post any ideas that you think would improve things.

Its become more of a sim city builder to me, I have done some attacking in the last couple of days, but when I do it is so much more lopsided to the defense it gets a bit to expensive to attack. Same when my opponnet fippy retaliates, even with his much larger army my army dominates his on defense. Nobody wants to attack me because my archers usually die 1 to 10 ratio. I think the battle system needs some work. I also think maybe some requirements on manning what you conquer is in order.

Only problem to manning what you conquer is that then the strongest person in the game becomes the person that doesn't conquer anything because they will have the biggest number of troops.

i like this non-reg version lot more than reg one
bear is right about attacking to much expensive, i attacked him with my best effort but it was only loosing my resource fighting, cataphract are best attacking units still too weak in front of best defending unit longbowman, they die easily.

example:
(thx to siege weapons Bear has no wall on time of attacking, still result is awful)

Attack Log Details

Attacker: bangool
Defender:Bear

bangool's forces:
Horseman: 59
Cataphract: 419
Shortbowman: 122
Longbowman: 210 (total troops count: 810 + 27 Trebuchets)

Bear's forces:
Longbowman: 585 (total troops count: 585)

bangool's army suffered a total of 34,250.33 damage which is 28.39% of the army's total health.
48 troops have died.
The surviving troops drop 105 in stamina from their wounds.
Bear's army suffered a total of 39,370.53 damage which is 26.45% of the army's total health.
20 troops have died.

bangool's assault failed!

My major concern for the non-reg version is actually that new players or offlads will fare even far worse in this version than in the reg version. True, you don't have to worry about losing regs over night. But the amount of population you can get in a day is completely dependant on what you do and how much time you spent in it.
Not only that, the gap between good players and/or those with much time ingame will be significantly larger than in the reg version.

If a veteran gets a good raiding day in, let's say, the first week of regular woe, he gets some buildings and perhaps gets to 15/day while the 2nd person in the recruiting race is still on 11 or 12 a day (Just a hypothetical scenario where someone just did a richest raid or something). It's rather easy, even as a new player to get to 8-10/day in the first week. Over the course of the game, that's perhaps a difference of around 100 population.

Now take non-reg WoE. Someone gets lucky as well. He now gets + 100 (or even more) population in a single day. (I had 138 in one day and I'm going to get 84 now and I have enough gold to build more. Market rates are just screwed up).
So just one day further into the games, there is one person who is likely to be 100 population ahead of the bigger part of the game. With that extra 100 pop, he is almost undefeatable in defence since he can afford more troops and his production is far larger as well. He will also have an easy time raiding even more people.
With the extra production, it's likely he can even take more lead on the bigger part of the game.

Basically, I'm just worried how one good day of population increase can be a major impact on the game, gap wise. I mean, just take the open beta. While the bigger part of the game is around 500 pop - 800 pop, we have one person on 2496 population and one on even 3000 population. That is a scary difference.
So I'm afraid that the desired more offlad friendly aspect of non-reg version is actually not achieved. Actually, I think that onlads and espacially veterans with good raiding and plundering skills will do extremely well in this game, far more than in the regular version.

What Ylnath just explained is pretty much how this went, first few days Me,Elzud and one other player had a good jump on everyone else no body could beat us we didn't need storage so everything went to production and defenses got large populations. Got my first land i think around 800 population and had 200 troops on each land and easily defended both lands after awhile everyone stopped attack i moved all my troops to main defense and boosted production with the better eff and number of workers and it was pretty much cruise control, now one thing that is slowing me down is the rate i need to upgrade my walls i've had 180 inc recruits evertime i upgrade my wall since i upgrade so much other stuff.
I have to agree on the battle part needing more work it does get expensive attacking alot. It takes me at minimum, i want to say 1.5, maybe a little more, times the defenders army to win and then lose alot of troops doing it.
Offlads i don't see would be too much of a problem if we were required to defend our conquered lands they would be smaller armies allowing them targets with greater resources to catch up much easier and earn xp doing it instead of losing it to surrenders which that still needs some work too, i've had 11 troops at an outpost and it was being attacked by Smerto with his full army and they lose no xp on the surrender so i moved them mwhahaha
one other thing that might make it better would be maybe make it to once you make an army and move troops to it they can't be moved anywhere else so you won't have so much adjusting of armies to attack everyone

i was also thinking make it so you can conquer land anywhere on map not just adjacent to your already owned land, this would allow more players to stop a GO.

i think logically farther lands to mainland should have differences, like lands near mainland should enjoy receiving help from main army.
and meanwhile i was thinking about somehow merging adjacent lands
having separate lands to defend while its right next to the main land is not so great.
this way requiring minimum troop for far lands is a must, and for near lands other systems can be used.
plz excuse my bad English

Well, I don't know what bonuses extra lands give now, but I was thinking that extra land should actually cost you something, as in, costs to maintain, like x gold per turn per land. And in order to have extra land up your production, you also need to have troops stationed there as well. Because, realistically, there is no way any worker would go to lands in the border of the kingdom to lead a farmers life when there is absolutely no protection. Not in a world where raiding and plundering is absolutely common. No, those farmers and miners and lumberjacks will just stay happily close to the castle where a vast amount of troops are to protect them.

In gameplay terms, as I understand it now, you can conquer a land and then leave it undefended? And it will automatically give you a x% production bonus. Maybe I'm missing something, but that's just how it seems to me.

I'd like to see that changed too that any land will cost you gold per default (Think of infrastructure you have to support, housing, barracks, etc) and the further away the land is from your main capital, the more gold it'll cost. And only when you station a certain amount of troops in the lands, it'll start giving you a production bonus to your capital, since only then will workers feel safe to work in outlying lands. That will make it much harder to grab tons of land without having sufficient armies and gold production to maintain it.

The main issue I have is that it requires even more time logged in to do well than reg WoE. In reg WoE you get a certain number of recruits every day yet in non-reg WoE you need to be logged in so you can build buildings all the time to up your recruitment. Maybe a combination of the two. Using the same system as reg WoE you can get a max of 10 recruits a day but can supplement this with buildings. Also archers are too freakin' strong. It is really the only viable strategy in war so far and it takes away the fun of attacking knowing that if you don't outnumber your oppponent 2:1 you will most certainly get mauled.

The idea behind the "recruiting" system was that if someone really wanted to, they could come online, attack tons and tons of times against anything and everything, build a whole crapload of buildings, queue another building, and then not return until the next day. When they login, they would have to buy back dead troops, and then they could repeat what they did the previous day (e.g. attack, build, buy, queue). So if implemented correctly, non-reg WOE should take less time. However, the battles aren't working right, and it costs more to fight versus the returns. So I need to get archers lowered in strength, and I need to add some other changes to make the game playable as I intended it to be.

I'm not sure I agree about requiring more time than reg WoE. When I actually tried, I did pretty well, and that with only logging in twice a day. I love that it doesn't matter when you build the building, you still get the recruits for it the next day. That takes a lot of pressure off for me. In reg WoE, if I can't build whatever I need for the next recruitment in the morning, before work, that mostly means that it'll be 10-12 hours before I get back online and can build it. That costs me recruits here and there (even if I've often earned enough fractions to get them, the times when I earned those fractions, I didn't get the recruit. But here, I can take it easy, and use the time of day that suits me best that particular day and get some things built. That's great! As long as you have at least once a day when you can play for more than a few minutes, you can do ok. Probably not win, but you really shouldn't expect to with that little online time.

I agree that the difference between attacking and defending units is too large. Since I am online so seldom, I've mostly invested in longbowmen. OK, so I still lose most attacks on me, but the attackers are much, much bigger than me. But when I go trying to attack anyone myself, the archers are useless, and since I can never afford switching them all around, I don't, and instead I hardly attack at all. I don't mind that different types of troops are good for different things, but the differences should be more of a nuance than the dramatic difference there is today.

Main thing for playability, though, is more players. You run out of targets quickly when there's such a small player base, and find yourself left with targets where you lose xp, or targets where you lose badly. So more active testers would really help :) Unless there is a restart soon, maybe you could boost newly created accounts somewhat, to even the playing field? Or just even it all out, by boosting some and taking some down? I think that it would be much easier to get a feel for how things would actually work with a larger player base that are similar in size.

Oh, I'd really, really love some explanation about how the stamina works in this version. It confuses me completely, and a newbie wouldn't be any wiser about it. I can't find a common factor between the percentages and the numbers shown, and never really know how far my victim has dropped, or if I can still attack them. It's not a huge deal for playability, but it would leave me less confused :)

I take the opposite view. I actually deleted my account the other day because after a week of trying to produce enough to build a wall, I was still at the same point where I had started. I can hardly make any improvements to my empire at all without needing a new wall again, and I cannot queue the wall or bank anything, so I cannot produce enough to build it. I lose all my production to raids and troop replacements, and to defend, I need to retrain all my horse as archers, then to gain anything on raids, I need to retrain them again as horse.

Sadly, I seemed to be one of the few around my size who was producing, so after training the horse, I got diddly squat on my raids, anyway. All it did was upset my victims so that they'd pound me after I logged off, and I was in a worse spot than when I had begun.

Also, I am not a fan of losing tons of xp to someone on their first surrender after a couple of successful raids. It makes no sense, and more importantly, it makes it too hard to gain XP and improve my army in the only manner available to me that does not nudge me closer to needing yet another expensive, un-queueable wall. For the way that I like to play, I do not think that non-reg WoE could suck any worse. I appreciate what you're trying to do for us though, and I still love the normal version of the game. :)

I see that the key difference here is that Bear was part of the elite group of less than 10 players who got off to a good start, whereas Coel is like me, stuck in the middle. I'd like some ideas on how to make it so that the ability to get off to a good start is not there. I guess that having all Barbarian Villages start with no gold and resources, and be stuck slowly producing them would be one method. Any other ideas?

Hmm, maybe if you could set it so there was a max amount you could get from the barbarian villages in one day, but that everyone who attacked them could get the same amount? If I attack them until I've reached my max for that day, then they run out and give nothing for me, but when the next person comes along, they have magically refilled. And the amount should be enough to build something, but not to get off to a too good start, I guess. Might be a bit tricky to code, though... :)

One problem i've come across so far is that theres only a few players around my troop strength on there right now, and no barbarian villages that are within my troop strength as well. Basically the only way i'd be able to get resources is to lose a crapton of exp raiding the villages with zero or 1 defender, or attacking no one and hope my little production will get me some more population. I do like the concept of inactive people turning into the barbarian villages though as i noticed, thats was a great idea. Maybe adding in something about you can only attack barbarian villages within X spaces of you on the map would ballance it a bit more in the begining, that way you dont have 1 or 2 people rampaging across the whole map snapping up all the resources before every one else can. It would make sense because if your too far away the barbarians would know your coming and have enough time to pack up all their resources and run and hide from your army :lol: . Perhaps we could have some stronger barbarians added to the edges for people with say 20 troops or so to raid, and then farther out say 50 and so on, basically the farther out they are the stronger they are kinda thing (the distance rule wouldnt come into play on these ones). And to make it even better you could have these bigger barbarian castles (since they're stronger than the villages) raid peoples conquered lands, and if they dont have a big enough force to protect the lands they would lose it. This way if no ones attackin a certain player they would still have to worry about the random attacks from the NPC's so to speak, and the ammount of troops attacking should be semi random. This would be so that some one couldnt put X number of troops there and always be safe from the barbarians, maybe even have a code in place so if land X had so many troops for so long without being attacked a barbarian force of Y would attack with a superior force to take it from them. Thats all of my thoughts for now, I'm not sure if my rambling helps any or not :lol:

Yeah, maybe the barbarian villages could have a certain amount if available resources and gold for each player. The problem is that way it is just whether people are motivated enough to get of their butt and go farm all the barbarian villages they can. It cuts out competitiveness but makes life easier.

Back to the archer problem though, I think that the best defensive troops should have the same amount of defensive strength or a tad more than the neutral units attack strength. That way all you need to do is train up some offensive units and then it works.

Also in reg-WoE, you can easily wear down your opponent with a couple x10 attacks and then you can’t start really squeezing him for resources and gold but in this you have to spend much more time to kill enough troops to weaken them.

I daren't risk taking more land as I've been away a lot and with my large production I'd get plundered badly. Indeed when there was that surrender bug I lost about 1 day's production, it was tons!

imposing 50 troops for each land is not very good
amount of troops should be compulsory
but the thing should be different is effect of legion armies on total efficiency not the bonus percentage
and i told bhaal before, academy should not give extra pop directly (like the main defence), but each conquered land adds 10 (same as main land) to minimum pop. this offer still valid, but should revise 50 troop req which is not logical, where the number 50 came from !?

The 50 number was an arbitrary number. I feel that it is only right that there be some sort of requirement to keep your land. After all, many people were just conquering a piece of land, and then retreating their armies entirely from it. In warfare, if you conquer land and then retreat, you lose that land. So it made sense that in order to maintain your production bonuses from conquered land, you would need to place some troops on it.

As for the idea of conquered land adding pop, instead of military academies adding pop, that isn't a bad idea.

Freak Nasty said...since we have to man our outlying lands now(which i like), wouldn't make sense that those walls count toward our population growth, as in maybe a total wall strength as in relation to population.

and my vote for him

I agree with Freaky,
I think you should get around 10-15 POP bonus for each outpost level...
OR perhaps 10 for the first 5 upgrades, 20 for the 2nd 5, ect ect ect.
Something like that? It will encourage us to keep troops on the outposts...
Oh and speaking of troops, I feel you should only be able to upgrade the defenses on a outpost if you have met the troop requirement. Or perhaps forgo the pop bonus if you leave them unmanned...?

I think the main reason people do not man their land is because you don't need to. Sure you lose resources but you still keep most of it. Now if the map was smaller and it was more likely that someone could conquer your land then sure but this is just the only smart thing to do. People can't attack your land without losing huge amounts of exp and can't take it because it is far away so your safe. If people were forced into close quarters conquering and that business would requiring much more strategy.

I'm getting annoyed with the amount of food I need to attack... tons and tons. So I'm attacking with -140 stamina because I can't be bothered to wait. What does food or stamina do for me?

My prod buildings are so good now I don't need to make gold, just sell on the BM... we need a gold prod upgrade option.

And in an age with more people, they would lose their land, because someone else would take it.
Perhaps to encourage people to keep more troops on their conquered land, instead of only being able to conquer lands right next to you, you can conquer any land that is within 5 spaces of a piece of land that you already own. This way people that are at war with each other will have to defend their land otherwise an enemy would be able to attack you easier.

my other thoughts on the troops requirement for conquered lands was to require 10 troops per defensive lvl but here's a new thought why not make the conquered lands be similar to your main land and have workers also this way your conquered land could also be self sufficent while giving x% of produced resources also with conquering the land you should be freeing room in your main defense to get recruits since those recruits aren't there but at another land.

That makes lots of sense except that it means that the game will take more time because you will have to build and manage and setup all these different lands.

I state the continuing argument that archers are way to strong. I should be able to to attack someone with 1400 troops and be sure to win against 800 yet I get trounced even on a raid. Yet if I try really anything lower than that my numbers count against me and they surrender and I lose hundreds of exp. This issue needs to be resolved or at least discussed

Well the big thing for me seems to be the big imballance still between units, and the fact i found my self bottle necking alot on defenses in respect to my buildings, seemed like every time i built a defense twords the end i'd have to build another level to it every time i built a few buildings. then i'd be building more storage for the defenses, then build the defense and boom 2 buildings later i need a new one again. the early defenses seemed fairly ballanced to me, but right around the 500 mark i started running into this issue, and was still experiencing it around 1000 pop that i had when the age ended. Though alot of this issue is probably just one of those things that more experience playin out the age would deal with, but thats the major thing to me :). and yes, i still feel archers are OP, even when its archer vs archer

Yeah, that's another issue. The fact that with full construction you only get a hundred and some pop before you need a new one and you practically have to spend all that on storage to be able to buy the defence without getting it all raided.