era 5 thoughts so far

[Squishy]

so we are a few months in have seen some rogues some wars and all that fun stuff so whats everybody's impressions so far? whats been good? whats been bad? do you think the game is going int a right direction?

keep in mind constructive feedback is appreciated as long as its constructive.

[Prophet_Plurp]

I hope to see the cost of turns creep up. Still far to much slaying (unpopular opinion I am sure). Honestly, the changes to things such as limits on holding race changes *cough cough* need to be on the front page, perhaps I missed it last era idk. I think more changes being listed at the start of an era on the front page would we nice, did I hear somewhere sabbing was going to be limited to 10%?? but its not?


I like the new features being fleshed out, I hope things continue down this path dev wise.

[Wiz]

Game is great only a few minor modifications to make it more user friendly (have posted in era-6 ideas)

Everything should stay the same for structure, I just believe we could give users more information in the help section about certain things
ie. AAT (what it means and how it can be affected, tech does not raise AAT) Sab % (no longer set to 15%, unknown value not stated) Spy/Sentry Ratio for spying and sabbing, Full Conscription/Economy/Spy/Sentry Upgrade list like shown in Technology, Tech should lower all upgrade costs not just conscription.

More to come once I unwind.

[bon]

@Wiz, if you feel there should be more info added that is missing by all means pm me on discord what needs to be added and I will add it asap, up to last era I thought I was pretty close to covering everything.

[Prophet_Plurp]

@Wiz, if you feel there should be more info added that is missing by all means pm me on discord what needs to be added and I will add it asap, up to last era I thought I was pretty close to covering everything.

Bon,

What do you think about adding a wiki as the 'help' section, give a few of the more knowledgeable community members editing rights and they can move information there and flesh it out as they feel is needed? It would be much easier to organize and search.

[Screwy]

This Era warring is fun and interesting (at least to me but don't tell Dank lol). Slaying is still powerful because I can do tons of hits per day and generate a lot of gold but in fact there is a penalty for this aka exp used purely for turns, not for techs or econ upgrades. I would also like to see more commnader changes (free ones). Maybe from 1 to 3? Having commander changes or race changes to cost exp is a good idea actually.
Also it would be nice if the Projected income line could show also the 24 hours generated gold not just 1 min/15 mins/30 mins ?

[bloodpirate]

like all upgrades .. each one is more than the last one. unlimited commander or / and race changes. each one would cost more than the last one. up to you to make the amounts

most people wouldn't use them. but leaders, people with big accounts, ... the ones who can afford them ... would use them.

[bon]

@Wiz, if you feel there should be more info added that is missing by all means pm me on discord what needs to be added and I will add it asap, up to last era I thought I was pretty close to covering everything.

Bon,

What do you think about adding a wiki as the 'help' section, give a few of the more knowledgeable community members editing rights and they can move information there and flesh it out as they feel is needed? It would be much easier to organize and search.

I will not give players editing rights but players are more than welcome to message me with information to be added to the help page that isn't already there or that can be expanded on. I have asked players on discord if there is anything that needs to be added or adjusted and only a few have offered to help.

I have no issues with players helping to keep the help section current but I won't give players access to edit it.

[Prophet_Plurp]

@Wiz, if you feel there should be more info added that is missing by all means pm me on discord what needs to be added and I will add it asap, up to last era I thought I was pretty close to covering everything.

Bon,

What do you think about adding a wiki as the 'help' section, give a few of the more knowledgeable community members editing rights and they can move information there and flesh it out as they feel is needed? It would be much easier to organize and search.

I will not give players editing rights but players are more than welcome to message me with information to be added to the help page that isn't already there or that can be expanded on. I have asked players on discord if there is anything that needs to be added or adjusted and only a few have offered to help.

I have no issues with players helping to keep the help section current but I won't give players access to edit it.

Makes sense, was just thinking it would make moving things from the current format to a wiki one easier on you is all. <3

[brandonito]

A couple short things to start with:

-Conscription is too cheap. I got all important upgrades (exp/min conscription) in the first 10 days of the age. This should take at least 30 days, if not more. Deciding when to sell for big upgrades in exchange for hurting your account in the short-term has always been one of the more interesting decisions people get to make in an age, but there are no more expensive upgrades. Theoretically with the power of exp/min upgrades, these could perhaps be more expensive as well.

-Max sabotage has clearly been stated multiple times that it's 15%. It's very definitely not 15%. Fix it or clarify please.

-Trading experience for soldiers is far far too weak. It literally needs to be 7x better before anybody will start using it as an income source compared to econ, and nobody would use it still because the TFF will make it impossible for them to slay.

-The statistics page is cool, but many of them are wrong, and some of them are all age and some of them only for the past 2 weeks. It could also use a better formatting of: stat total rank 3 columns.

-Turn trading is still too strong. In an age you get approximately ~1.2 million experience. You only need about half of that to max tech. The remaining 600k experience is either put into turn trading, or economy. I won't bother showing the math, but simply put economy is no match for turn trading in terms of profitability. If you can steal something like 25 million gold per attack in profit, you're gaining far more than you would by going an economy route, and you're getting it instantly rather than generating it throughout the age, and you're not relegated to a super slow start with low tech like you are with an econ start. I also think it's a little sad that slaying has gone the way of spamming attacks rather than looking for the best hits. Increasing the experience cost to gain turns will help in both regards. Depending how much you nerf it, a buff to economy upgrades may also be wise to keep strategies diverse and competitive.

Selling:

Simply put, accounts selling off and up is bad for competition, bad for fun wars, bad for end of age competition, and far too strong, especially due to the abundance of experience and turn trading. If you haven't noticed, 10 of the top 11 accounts in buy value have been loaded with sells. here's why:

Trickle nerf shifted power to sells
The nerf to trickle shifted the power of top accounts from who receives the most trickle to who receives the most sells. Nobody's going to argue that the nerf to trickle was bad, but the goal was to create a more even competition. It felt fucking terrible when someone had so much more income than you from trickle that you couldn't compete, and it still feels fucking terrible for people to know all the accounts beating you aren't because they clicked better, or banked better, or slayed better, but because they receives a truckload of sells.

Trading experience for turns
The most common argument from people who say this isn't currently overpowered is that in order to trade for turns you have to give up tech, which is also a very powerful mechanic. This is partially true, until we introduce sells. It's crazy easy for an account to sit on the first ~20 cheap techs, sit on low TFF, and then just do 200 slays a day for 10-20b+ gold. And then simply sell it up to someone with good tech. And it's being done by TONS of accounts this age, both inside and outside of war. I understand it's teamwork, and I don't fault these players for taking advantage of good strategy, but it's ridiculous how much gold you can generate by ignoring tech and selling off to someone who has tech. To a lesser extent, it's also re-introduced what people used to hate about officer bonus via safes. You can basically play the first 2 weeks, get max conscription, get max experience per minute (or receive sells to do this), put all of your experience into econ, then basically never bank/slay again. You login once every 2 days to sell your safe to someone (or yourself). You can easily generate 200b+ over the course of the age by basically not playing at all/logging in once every day or two.

Selling strength pressures people to sell off in war
Selling up to a handful of extremely powerful accounts has always been the strongest war strategy in koc. One side does it, and then the other side has no choice but to respond and do the same or the other side will have 3+ unsabbable accounts sabbing all of your accounts. Eventually 90% of a chains value ends up in the top 2-5 accounts in a war, because it only makes sense to put your chains gold value on the people getting sabbed the least, and to help them get sabbed for even less, or allow them to sab an extra big from the enemy. You can LITERALLY see this if you look at GLD vs NWO/LaCN - and the DEMK vs RB~RL war has slowly been headed that way as well with a few big sells in the past couple days. But doesn't this fucking suck that you feel pressured to sell just to keep up in a war? Wouldn't it be a better showcase of ability from an alliance if koc mechanics didn't pressure you to do this or you get dominated in war? This has become even more important as a strategy as people will ignore tech so they can trade for even more turns, so they can sell it up to their big accounts. I understand and appreciate the teamwork aspect of doing this, but it would lead to far better and nuanced wars to see people incentivized to play their own accounts. It'd also lead to less people going inactive during/after a war.

End of age competition
With the nerf to trickle, the goal was to open up more people competing for #1. But it hasn't. Top TFF players will still just receive all the sells from their alliance, be the only one with enough TFF to hold the weapons, and win. It's actually a travesty, because with the introduction of turn trading and experience per minute upgrades, slaying is now on par with big TFF/econ bankers (or arguably, slaying is now far better than banking). How cool would it be to see accounts competing for rank 1 using unique strategies based ONLY on the effort THEY put in? A few small TFF big ass slayers going man mode on the battlefield for 4 months competing with SR's huge TFF main, competing with DEMK's mid-tff hybrid slayer, competing with some other guy who went plantation or industrial econ and banked like a god. We're literally so close to some really fucking cool and diverse competition if we can just get over the power of selling off to each other. It'd also separate individual vs alliance ranking systems. Alliances could win via top ally power, individuals win by getting rank 1 individually.

In short, selling off was already a broken mechanic before the trading feature, and now it's off the charts. I have two options to combat this (this isn't exactly an ideas thread, but I'll go for it anyways).

1) Remove the ability to sell to other players completely.

This has been suggested before and the admins weren't interested, but I do want to mention it regardless. This is the only way you'll see an accounts strength being based on their own clicking, banking, slaying and planning. It's also the only way you'll ever see the scenario I mentioned above with multiple people with unique play styles competing for #1. This wouldn't even be a difficult thing to implement (I think), as we've introduced the Safe feature,and the safe feature initially had a way of buying upgrades straight from your safe. You simply would have to make sure the max safe amount was higher than the biggest upgrade cost, and that any weapons sold were sold at 70-80% value straight into the safe rather than your treasury (up to the max amount), get upgrades straight from your safe and voila. You'd also have to make weapons buyable straight from the safe rather than emptying it into your treasury.

The obvious downside to this that people don't like is it removes the chaos factor of losing or catching a sell. I do understand that, but I think it's a small price to pay for more competitive wars and a more open competitive fight for #1.

2) Drastically lower sell off value of weapons to 20-30%.

This won't really stop the winner of ages from being the person who receives the most sells, but it will make people think twice from doing it in wars/end of ages as well as disincentivize people from playing 'sell' accounts where all they do is trade turns and sell to people with tech. It will lower the impact of sells which is only a good thing.

The obvious downside to this is that people need to buy upgrades. I'd argue that with the introduction of the safe feature we have a good way to get these upgrades without needing to sell weapons for them. People will need to adapt to getting safe upgrades faster. Low TFF/no econ strategies would need to adapt and play with econ/tff/safe upgrades at the start before transitioning. Or you can just take the loss of value and sell weapons for upgrades. Your choice. You also wouldn't be able to shift stats so easily, but that just requires you to plan your account/play style better.

TLDR: nerf turn trading and nerf selling for better competition please.