Hi,
today we want to start discussing the announced changes. To have an educated discussion I want to provide some more insights.
Introduction
First I want to introduce us: I am Jake, responsible Game Designer for Travian: Legends. With me is Brian, which you might already know as responsible Product Manager as well for Travian: Legends. Together we want to face your concerns and argue about why we think troop forwarding and merging is an interesting change for Travian: Legends.
Before I go into the details, I go into a very high level view. Travian: Legends is the “more hardcore” big brother of Travian: Kingdoms. With that, we want to be the game where you can hit hard (and of course be hit hard as well). We want multiplayer engagement, because we belief in Travian: Legends as a game able to forge friendships and rivalries which both can span over years.
Feature Details
The discussed features consist of two parts. First there is the possibility to forward reinforcements within an alliance. That means, that players are able to forward reinforcements received from alliance members to other alliance members’ villages. This is a huge buff for defending as the need to walk back to the troops’ home village first is removed. With that defenses from far away can be used as they would be pretty local.
Merging Troops allows players to change the home village of troops within an account. With that it will be possible to save troops if you are about to lose a village. Or use these troops in an offensive way, as they can start attacks from their new home village. Changing the home village will cost twice the resources needed to train them, or an amount of gold.
So why do we think this whole thing is a good idea?
In the current Meta it’s a fight between clusters of villages belonging to one alliance or confederacy. Usually at least two parties have world wonders, usually some of the “outside the grey area” ones.
There are good reasons why clusters are a good thing: they are easy to defend, as reinforcements don’t need long for their way to defend. And, for the changes more importantly, the way back to their home village is not needed anymore. With the forwarding changes clusters can be spread more out, using better resource slots, more oasis and so on. With that the game allows more strategic decisions, because it decreases the need to settle next door of your alliance mate.
So defending got easier. Defending is buffed. We need to buff the offense as well. One of the limiting factors for offensive troops is the troop production time. We already give bonuses on them, like the trainers talent artifact, so just decreasing the troop production time further is not a good way to go.
Also offensive players usually focus on a few villages. We want to add value to these villages as well. Both supports a feature where players train troops in different villages and join them together in one hammer.
We’ve discussed different approaches as well, e.g. just buff training times, but these changes would buff defensive players as well. As they are already buffed, these ways wouldn’t achieve what we wanted to achieve.
And the gold
Whenever we introduce new features of course as a company we want to make money with them. And the usual way free-to-play games monetize is that players can remove restrictions or timers paying. As there is a resource limitation, it is a pretty normal way nowadays to offer a shortcut for gold. So we’ve added that as well.
Okay, that’s what you’ve thought – but what did Scattered Empire Players say about it?
Instead of “just bringing it to live game worlds”, we put it into the Scattered Empire servers. And alone because of technical difficulties at the very start of the SE game worlds, that was a really good way to go.
But now these features are stable from a technical point of view, and the feedback we’ve got was pretty good. We did multiple surveys on Scattered Empire servers, and yes, we did not ask Travian: Legends players, and for us that made sense – they haven’t seen the feature yet, nor played with it – so all points are based on assumptions and “what if’s”.
We also had pretty similar discussions in the forum when we started the SE servers, but once we saw it in action the fears did not become true.
But now we do discuss it as we care about our players.
Thank you for your time and dedication.
For me, the worst part of these changes is the Merge function,
I think the problem you have is that you are watching the game from Worlds Tournament point of view where the numbers of deffences in the WW are too heavy and every WWK become useless, so maybe it has more sense to buff them in this case.
But if you see it from the regional servers point of view this new feature is an aberration, because in those servers the deffences in WW will become useless against the new WWK that some players will create (with a great amount of gold and parking). This will cause eternal games where the all WWs will be zeroed many times until Natars win.
I hope you understand the mistake that you are committing introducing this new features to Travian Legends.
First of all i would like to ask you, what performance as TRAVIAN PLAYERS did you have? How manny servers have you finished?
I will ask you some questions, please respond me like travian players, not like designers.
I will try to make some scenarios with this “downgrades”.
1. Day 15 on travian tournament final 2016, x player 20 villages 20,000 gold investment, y player 18 villages, 18000 gold investment, z player 17 villages 17k gold investment. All three same confederation. One week full resources development on 100 accounts/player (total 300 accounts). Day 5, starting 1 off villa, all level 20, great barrack/great stable, workshop, day 6 of villa number 2, day 7 of vila number 3, etc, day 14, ten of villa. Calculating this we obtain some villages with this armies:
39273 0 0 0 0 9600 3042
31418 0 0 0 0 7680 2434
35345 0 0 0 0 8640 2738
27491 0 0 0 0 6720 2130
23564 0 0 0 0 5760 1825
19636 0 0 0 0 4800 1521
15709 0 0 0 0 3840 1217
11782 0 0 0 0 2880 913
7855 0 0 0 0 1920 608
3927 0 0 0 0 960 304
________________________________________________________
216000 clubs 52800 tk’s 16732 rams
So 3 “ww’s” armies in day 15. This 3 players that are at -300/300 one night (day 16-17) put on the same time some villages in other quad, merge troops on that village, and start attacking all players from 15×15. A regular player in day 15, have around 5-6-7 villages, and around 20k def troops.
You are one of the attacked player. How about it? How could you stop this attackers? They attack only in the night, when 80-90% of players sleep. I am waiting for an answer.
2. With this mega hammers, at the end (for those who reach the final) there will a little def, and mega hammers capable to clean a ww.
So I am asking you, as players, regular players, why to play such a game, where your account can be destroyed in few minutes by a multi/mega golder from -400/390, when you are at 76/-54?
There is no strategy in this game, nothing, just gold. Each server like this will be win by confederation that will have more players like this, more gold abuser, more players that will offer gold for resources. No strategy, no attacking plans, no defense actions, nothing, nothing to think. So, we are not stupid, in few rows i told you all “strategy” that must be do for winning such a server.
Gold, click, resources.
WE ARE SMART, WE WANT MORE THAN THAT! if you will not aware of US, YOU WILL LOSE US, and WITHOUT US TRAVIAN WILL DIE.
i am sorry but this calculation is nonsense. If i would be a member of Travian-Team, i would not answer to this.
But i can do it ^^
You are asking them “if someone cheates by having access to 100 of accounts, respectively their resources all pushed into one account, how can you, as a regular player compete in the middle of the night?”
My answer is: A regular account cant even compete against ONE SINGLE good player during the middle of the night. There is no push needed, there is no gold needed.
Your example is just nonsense, sorry for those harsh words, from a player to a player… 😉
It would have made more sense to ask the Travian legends players what they thought about this idea before deciding “lets put it on all servers!” Because obviously we are all going to have views on this matter, the SE players are those who are wanting to play something different to Travian legends but still want to play a similar sort of game, its a chilled out relaxed style game and from what i have heard from those who have played it, there is not much to worry about at all, no major goals, not much offensive strategies needed, its essentially sim in an area, if an region is taken by another alliance then don’t bother settling there, there is no point. THEREFORE there is no need for huge armies to be created, for there is nothing major to be destroyed? So what major impact would that really have for an SE server, i can imagine less gold is brought on them servers too, since again, there is nothing majorly large (WW, artefacts, WW plans) to be hit.
But Travian legends has goals, has reason to create such large armies and since these armies are being created they will be used. Like mentioned in the first post to this thread, all it takes is some dedicated gold users and within a very short time they will be dominating the server even more than they currently do, none gold users are going to suffer and stop playing as soon as they realise that they can not do anything against these types of armies. Surely it would have made more sense to even add a post to the forums or mention it here on the blog, asking travian legends players if they have any concerns with troop merging, if so what? We would have told you straight up that its an awful idea! Look at the Uk forum, there is a short poll there, 46 people have voted on it, 38 said this implementation is making them leave the game, not a single person has voted “Yes i like the change and want to continue playing” I’m sure us on the UK forum are not the only ones with a Poll like this, that alone should be enough for you as developers to say “yeah lets scrap that idea” You could be encouraging more people to play the game, not more people to leave it.
I personally think the off and deff should be left as it is, there is no need to change it? Stop making things worse! Please!
The deff forwarding, this idea sounded alright until i spoke to some people on the SE servers, i heard that it created “deff hubs” “one player controlled a huge portion of defense” “Defensive players no longer had control over troops, they were essentially simming to be taken for granted” This does not need to go into the game, the idea of the game is to be smart, is to plan everything out, it is a strategy game, adding these “ideas” in are taking the strategy away, its essentially a “Don’t buy gold? You lose!” “Get ready to lose your account at day 15!”
Sure you lot over at TG need to make money, i appreciate that! But this really is not the way to do this, ideas like gold club and farm list is what you should be focusing on, things to make it easier for the players (like hyperlinks to the barracks) Not huge game changing features like your trying to force us to play.
I am a programmer myself, i work with code, but i still know the ins and outs of my games, i know the flaws, I make sure i sit there and discuss it with the people i am working with, we discuss what problems “updates” could cause to the game, this is one update that i feel was not discussed enough, or even tested on the correct people, seriously, what you need to do is create a “Travian: Legends Test server” Have people test this new feature that are the “hardcore gold buying” travian players! please do not just dump this idea on us and expect us to play it, because even a lot of the gold buyers hate this idea.
Anyway, i’ve been rambling on now for a while, so to wrap it up, using this troop merger is not needed, we don’t need gold buyers making MASSIVE armies and ruling the server more than they already do, it encourages multi accounts, bots and “Slave alliance members” – which can also be said for the forwarding defence. Don’t take the strategy away from us, keep it how it is now!
Hi guys,
I am a french player, playing on Travian.fr (logical). First of all, I’d like to apologize for my english. My message will be full of langage mistakes. However, I’ll do my best 🙂
I am going to share my ideas, but not only. I have already spoken on the french forum, and some of the following ideas are taken on it. I think Milvort has already made you some feedbacks about our arguments, but here are some, directly to you, who are inside the TravianGames Headquarter.
The way this update is made :
You told us that those ideas where introduce on Travian Scattered servers. That is true !
You told us that you have made “multiple serveys” on those servers. Thats is not true ! Some of my friends had played on Scattered servers. No one asked their opinions. There were just discussions on the forum, that’s all.
The point to not ask Travian players is not an argument. Yes, they didn’t try the new ideas. But why ? Maybe because they disagree with them even before testing them. Players on anniversary servers are not players on “normal” servers. This is a fact.
Moreover, even if the background were good when you asked people on Scattered servers, it doesn’t mean that those updates could be made on others servers. Why ? Because the goal of an anniversary server is not the same goal ! I would even say, it is not really the same game. Maybe it was a good idea on Scattered but maybe it is not on normal servers.
Now, I talked about the way you choose to make it happen, let’s talk about the updates.
About transfer of troops inside an ally : I think it could be a good idea. It develop a new way to defend our village.
However you evoke “clusters can be spread more out”. Maybe. Maybe not. In french server, with the decrease of the number of players, there is often one “big” ally per face (NE/SE/NW/SW). Intra are quite easy for such ally, no mater the distance. Therefore, it is possible for them to spread out a lit their clusters. And I do not think that an ally in 50/50 would creat defensive village around 150/150. I explain myself. You are a defensive player. Your village are located around 150/150 and all of your teammates are in the center (50/50). In your mind, you mean that you will send your defense to your teammates to be able to move quickly whereever you want. But the troops need to be fed ! And sending cereals every day for all your army is going to be hard to do. Especially when a defensive player need more than everyone else his merchands to distribute his ressources to develop himself.
However, I do not think (and most people on french forum do not care) transfer is a bad idea.
Now the blessing point : The fusion of troops.
The only thing in Travian which is nowadays incompressible is time. Time to produce troops. Why are we happy when an offensive army come to a wall for her death ? Not to humiliate our ennemy (maybe a little^^), but mostly because we know that the offensive player will not be able to send us his army during a few weeks ! We know that we have a break ! With unlimited mergers, there will be some abuses. You do want to buff offensive because you just buffed defensive players (I do not think that transfer is a huge buff ! it’s just a gain of time for assistance). But offensive players are buffed already with robbery. On normal server, it’s easy to have 100k of offensive troops when not a lot of defensive players have 50k. Moreover, troops artefacts are mostly use by offensive players. If you want to reduce those time to make an army, why do not you reduce time to produce troop, but only offensive troops ? I think that it is possible. Because mergers have a lot of issue :
– A big golder is able to save is offensif village by mooving his troops in a few minutes.
– It would be possible for them to take a village in the center of their ennemy’s cluster, sending all their army, made a merge and kill everything around ! In one night only there will be a lot of damages and it would be so hard to deal with it ! Even with transfert of troops.
– Merging is for me at the opposite of the goal of a server : Build a WW. This point is a remind for my introduction. Let’s say an offensive player has 30 villages. He is able to produce around 1,400 catapults a day ! Every 10/15 days, an offensive player is going to be able to take a WW down. And I don’t speak about missile which are prepared for a very very long time !
On the french forum I proposed to be able to merge only ONCE in a day, in the limit of the cost of ressources. Meaning, if the village capacity are 1,000k ressources, you can gold only for a maximum of 1,000k ressources per day.
Because for one of the first time, gold are going to introduce a too big difference between players ! Even if Travian is a company and has to make money, for players it would have a too big gap between golders and non-golders. With gold you can merge as many troops as you want in a second. With ressources it would take a very long time I think to merge a big army (something bigger than 100k).
I am not the biggest economist ever, but if Travian wants to make money, there are much more better ideas that those. I know that you do not give a shit about our concern, but all of my friends that I knew were playing Travian told me they would stop if the measure was taken. Travian should concern more about the number of people on server (and you should reduce the dimensions of the map too ! Economicaly speaking, less space, more fights, more golds). A server with 200 people will not produce a lot of benefits imo.
Well, I have already said a lot. There are more details on french forum, but I except Milvort to explain everything to you 🙂
However Milvort, it would be cool if you do not delet the link to these page in the french forum.
Hopping you have understood our point of view, hopping you’re sometimes playing the game to understand why this measure could creat too many issues according to us.
Maybe one day, you will creat an new IRC (like in the past) but on Skype.
Aurélien.
I will skip first paragraphs, many people will comment on them, but this is my pet peeve:
“We did multiple surveys on Scattered Empire servers, and yes, we did not ask Travian: Legends players, and for us that made sense – they haven’t seen the feature yet, nor played with it – so all points are based on assumptions and “what if’s”.”
I played on SE as a leader on TM, likely one of the most active alliances on SE servers so far. I have never seen a survey in my mail box or in game. I ask in old alliance chat but so far did not get a single “yes, I participated in a survey”. I spent time today and went through all discussions on forum I participate (com and ru) and read (uk and us), as well as through comments to earlier on the blog. Forwarding and merge were barely mentioned anywhere. Everyone cursed about goldron and pretty much nothing, good or bad, was said about merge. At the best you got no negative feedback which by far is not equal positive.
Second, I understand it did not make sense to you to ask players on regular servers because they have not tried the features. However, vast majority of SE players played on regular servers before. I wonder if your surveys included questions about introducing this feature on regular servers. I’m pretty sure we are very capable of making correct “what if” assumption.
Third, whatever surveys you did, were with goldron in presence. yes, it’s good idea to introduce something awful and than back up to lesser evil. main reaction i heard from SE players was “whatever. I’m glad they removed goldron”. Again, this is not exactly positive feedback.
With that being said, I still think both forwarding and merge is interesting and acceptable feature FOR SE. That does not mean it’s the same for regular servers. First, no WW means no one really cared about building huge army with massive siege portion. Did anyone on developers team estimated what size WWK can be made with unlimited gold and how many on average server? It’s pretty clear that forwarding feature will not balance that increase in WW case. Have you estimated how many servers will be won by Natars and what effect it will have on the player population? Second, on SE alliances and players settle villages all over the map, sometime 20-30 hours trip for merchants. It would be next to impossible building new army in different region if you settle there mid-server. Because of that merging troops in a village in the different region is useful feature in my view on SE. This is not the case on regular server. hard to believe such obvious moments were simply ignored by developers.
As I already said on the other blog entry, I like merging and forwarding features themself. Maybe they are not working on common Legends server, but I don’t know it as I never tested it there.
I agree with some feedback as I also think the more intense a server is the more people start to throw gold into it. But I don’t know what will happen really. Yes, I also like maths and be able to throw numbers here, but I see no benefit on making extreme examples. Sure, I also have several concerns.
Point is that the way to introduce those features is a mess. Nobody (even SE players) were prepared for such an implementation on Legends servers. I also did not think about what will happen on a server with wonders. So I understand current outcry completely and I also said it for cauldron, mostly problem is not the feature, but the possibility to use it endless by gold. Many wouldn’t mind if there is three hits a day limitation. Same stands for merging. There is no limit. It might be expansive to merge troops constantly, but some people don’t mind what their hobby costs or if you are pissed off a player/ally it will not bother too much to kill it with whatever it will cost.
It is TG work to find a balance (for SE servers as well, don’t know how much cauldron instant troops influenced gameplay and how much was merging) and in particular to test it BEFORE going on live mission with every server.
I think this could all be solved by doing three simple things: (gleaned advice from my US19 team that absolutely slaughtered our competition on Scattered Empires using the merge feature and cauldron)
1) Maintain the changes you announced recently (no cauldron, keep merges and forwards)
2) Get rid of WWs, the gold advantage in merging is greatly diminished when we don’t save up for months for a boring single strike on a WW. We loved Scattered Empires — give us that or something new and exciting like that which forces us to fight all server. Then the merge feature won’t be quite as insane.
3) Make it impossible to merge catapults. When a player has the ability to instantly transfer enough catapults to a 2 pop village next door to my capitol, his gold is the only thing that won him anything there. Remove that, and again — the advantage of merging is diminished.
Merging is really awesome. Especially for early game when you want to get some good raiding going in a new area. But my team and I did some really messed up stuff with catapult merging on SE. We shouldn’t be able to do that — it promotes far too much instability.
No need to get rid of anything. There is enough room for different version – just replace some near dead servers with no WW version.
I played the first round of SE, it worked somewhat there, but problem was that some players got an insanely big sweep, we won the server before halfway, mostly because we were lucky to have those players willing to pay that much money to merge offensive troops from several cities.
SE dont have World Wonders, the ability to forward defensive troops wont help anything at all when it comes to defending the World Wonder (WW). And this will have a MUCH bigger impact the smaller the server, because offensive sweeps can be just as big no matter how many players there are on a server, if its 100 or 10k. Issue is that when a player sends his sweeep to crush WW, he will only need 30 days to build another Sweep to crush WW again.
On small servers there are limited defense, and as I already stated, forwarding defense wont help defendig the WW at all. So this “buff” you speak of for defensive troops wont help anything at all. In endgame crushing of WW only offensive troops are actually buffed.
How do you expect anyone to be able to finish a World Wonder when its that easy and fast to build a Hammer to crush WW? You havent even tested this properly on your test servers, and the smaller the server, the bigger the problem! When you boost an offensive army 10x and more, because some people are going to really exploit this, and we dont get stronger defense, then I dont understand how you can do this.
The problem is also that you can merge only with the cost of gold, to merge should cost resources, no matter how much gold you use, but should at least cost 3x resources, then you could add a cost of gold on top of that, for example you can merge only a certain number every day for a certain amount of gold, then if you use more gold you can merge more, but it always has to cost 3x resources too.
I know players have protested your changes before, because of the use of more and more money in the game. You have done this without directly boosting the power of an account by using auction houses and Artwork sales, this works to some degree, and you need income, so I can live with that. But never have you added a feature that directly means you can buy yourself a huge army. Im sorry, but this is the main reason im playing Travian, and not any of those other copies where you can buy troops, now you do the same.
I sincerely hope you will keep a few servers without merging feature, there is absolutely no point for me to play on a server like that, because I cant compete, skill is completely taken away from the game, money will completely rule who wins and who lose.
Hello, Jakob.
First of all, I want to debunk your idea of servers being “cluster versus cluster”. This is a playstyle that alliances did maybe 5-6 years ago, but these days, the experienced players are spread around to effectively get use of oasis and cover more area. You might be drawing all these assumptions based on the tournament server, where the sheer number of players create an illusion that this is still the general playstyle, but that is wrong. There are some alliances though that still do this, but they tend to be larger, less experienced ones – “strength in numbers”, but the better players no longer do this.
I understand travian is a game for all, but you can’t do something like this to cater to the less experienced players, when the high-end players will abuse the living hell out of a function like this.
Did you consider how long a server would last, when the average non-tournament server usually keeps 3-5 million deff in the WW’s? That’s right, natars will win almost every single round, unless the sides simply agree to end the misery.
I wrote a more extensive post of all the cons that will come with a change like this on the uk forum, and yes, I do know what I am talking about. I urge you to read it:
http://forum.travian.co.uk/showthread.php?t=79339&p=1501806&viewfull=1#post1501806
Although a condensed tl;dr version:
– Players saying it worked well on SE does not mean it will work well in Legends.
– Endgame will last forever.
– Player differences and disparity will increase – the ones that are not on top will feel left out and used.
– Only teutons will be viable for large hammers.
– Small trainers will become almost completely useless, while large traines will be godmode.
– Players are encouraged to cheat, or otherwise engage in immoral play. Drama will skyrocket.
– You can no longer chief or snipe a hammer, since they will all be built in capitals.
Please, listen to us just this once. A fun idea is not always a good idea, when it risks completely breaking this game. Travian has never seen a change this big before, and people will beed to relearn the entire game all over again. Hero system and auction has got nothing on this. I’m the type of player dedicating alot of time and money into this game, and always ending in a top position (currently ended rank 2 pop, almost every week rank 1 raider (400+ million per week), rank 6 attacker etc.), so I would be one of the select few that actually gets to utilize this to the fullest.
– Placebo
Another top attacker chiming in. The problem is that you say you’re listening, but you’re not. You can’t just make the statement and it becomes true. You have several forum posts with many detailed comments explaining to you why this is going to be exploited and your response is a long blog post about why you think it’s a good idea.
This is just serving to show that actually, you’re not listening. You’re talking.
The theory of what might work in a server is not the same as considering the human element. You are proposing to introduce a structure where people can build enormous armies and you are limiting those army sizes by the cost of gold and/or res. But you’re not thinking the way a greedy leader would think. The mechanisms are there for a “motivated” army builder to go way over the expected amount of resources available simply by harnessing a large number of cooperative players’ resources to build his own army.
20 villages building clubs in a designated “hammer builder” player who is in “no alliance” so as to avoid the pushing and raiding limits. Half an alliance being raided to support it (with players’ permission of course, even if they aren’t happy about it, they’ll do it or get kicked out). In just one hundred days that’s over two million clubs. The hammer player then fakes ten players from the opposition and hits one. That opposition, even if they have a couple of million in defs and are well organised with their def hub, can’t possibly defend all ten villages against two million clubs. Unstoppable army.
Repeat that at WW time. The WWs will be levelled over and over again. It’ll never get to level 100 and nobody wins. I’m sorry – but that’s the most disgusting and disappointing end to investing 8-10 months of your life in a game and community you care about. It’s a job for you, but it’s a social life for the players.
I can only assume that since you’re not paying any attention to the multiple doomsday posts about the proposed changes that you think it’s all hot air or exaggerated. Well here’s a wakeup call. The chat room of a top alliance has already noted what would be needed to even consider competing. All players paying a membership fee to join (it’s a bigger advantage for us if we merge using masses of gold, so all players large and small will need to pay it or they’re out). Nominating which couple of players will be the hammer builders. All our other hammer builders – whom I might add are all well above average players – we are wondering why bother playing since we’d have to either convert to defense or just be simmers producing resources (boring). Unsurprisingly, once the choice comes down to simming fields for 8 months or leaving, we’d just rather not play. Half the alliance only logging in once a day just to queue more fields to be raided by the hammer builder – are you kidding me? How is that a fun game?
But more than anything else we know that our biggest advantage is working as a team and being active. Both things you’ll be blowing out of the water with this update. We will lose years of work in getting to know and trust each other. Our excellent def players – traditionally very difficult to keep since def work is not generally very exciting – they stay with us because of the community, the sense of teamwork in our alliance, the shared high fives when they land seconds before an attack lands. Def hubs will ruin this. Most of those dedicated players will have nothing exciting in the whole game. Never get to send on time, never have to juggle crop consumption vs troop numbers, simply because one hub player will take this job on and replace ten players’ need to log in more than once a day. Only one def player needs to care whether troops arrive on time. Great job, take away one of the only fun parts of defending – what are you thinking?! How does this even remotely foster teamwork? Watch the enormous arguments on the day that the hub manager makes a mistake and forgets to send the defs. Watch ten players quit in disgust. This game is supposed to be fun. There is no fun in losing months of work from one players’ mistake.
You claim you got feedback from SE players. Others already pointed out that it’s not comparable. In addition, since nobody so far has admitted seeing the survey, you clearly didn’t ask enough people. Here’s three players’ experience for you directly: player one (9 years’ experience, at the top) almost deleted in week four, but stayed around only to recruit some players for the normal upcoming server. Player two (holds a record for rammer size): whole alliance deleted after being hit by a monster army twice, because the army was flattened by teamwork but rebuilt in record time via stacks of gold (caused by the cauldron, but since the same size can be created with troop merging, it’ll happen again). Player 3 (another record hammer holder): started an account one month late just to see what the SE servers were like. Had their v2 cata’d to nothing twice because they had had the misfortune to land in a very congested area. Deleted account.
There’s your feedback, your regular top players hate the SE “features” and are pleading with you not to put them on the regular servers. Players who would most stand to gain from the changes because they have the networks to exploit newer and smaller players to build big armies. It speaks volumes that they think it’s wrong to be able to take advantage of the changes.
I got no survey on what I thought about the proposed cauldron coming in for SE. It was a disaster. It’s easy to have 20/20 in hindsight, but I am 100% sure if you had surveyed us by saying, “It’s a system where you pay gold and each time there’s a chance of getting troops, and the turns are unlimited” then players could have told you how it would all go wrong.
We’re telling you now how we believe the troop merging will all go wrong. You’re mad not to take this free advice. It’s your chance to avoid another disaster.
**So defending got easier. Defending is buffed. We need to buff the offense as well. One of the limiting factors for offensive troops is the troop production time. We already give bonuses on them, like the trainers talent artifact, so just decreasing the troop production time further is not a good way to go**
Appreciate Defending got easier, But with the Legend Servers – Being WW Based. Where in any of these update does this increase the defense count. It can already be built in all villages, WW Defense Counts will stay the same while hammers at least double in size. Leaving no winner other than natars.
I’m sure it’s a great idea for the Scattered Empire Servers, But this doesn’t work with a endgame based server – Rather than making assumptions and what ifs, Test it on a few servers, see the result – Rather than rolling it out everywhere. Why make assumptions when you don’t have to.
I’m seeing a lot of objections based on what “might” happen. I was the founder of the winning alliance on us19 (the SE server).
Forwarding was one of the best ideas I’ve seen in Travian in a long time. The ability for all the hammer accounts to hold a few thousand cav defenders in their caps is far stronger than you might think if you have not tried it. And feeding them became the responsibility of the holders. So, in a small way, that increased the total amount of defenders an anvil could make. This feature is far stronger for early and mid-game than it will be for end game.
Merging is EXPENSIVE. There will be far less use of it than the speculations I’ve seen in these blog posts. Granted that there are a very few players that are willing to spend thousands of dollars for a round of Travian. These players can be stopped by good team play. Especially if you have used forwarding to place defensive troops in accounts active at night and well located. The big difference in my mind is siege. You can use raiding income to merge these over time into your hammer. But giant clears? Not many. Because of the normal challenges of feeding those massive beasts.
In conclusion. I believe that these features can be incorporated successfully into Legends. Without the gloom and doom I am seeing in many of these blog posts.
On SE servers it was not possible to set up traderoutes. On Legends servers there will be absolutely no problem keeping a huge army fed, as long as the owner has an Artifact it requires an absolute minimum of teamplay.
Even though merging will be expensive, it will be enough to ruin endgame if only 1% of the server accounts exploits the merging feature to its limits.
And before we introduce this feature into every legend server to see what “might” happen, lets test it on a few servers first, makes sense not to risk ruining the game completely if us “doom and gloomers” are right.