Creature Attacks

I have seen two great ideas posted on the "closed" thread.  The first is to have a poll as has happened for most additions to game content so the developers can get a wide representation of player reactions and hopefully respond accordingly.  The second, if the developers feel that the addition of the creature dens is a necessary addition, is to provide the option to each player to toggle it on or off, or perhaps have some intermediate setting.

I ask others to NOT turn this post into a negative discussion which benefits neither the players or developers, forcing them to close the thread again.  I understand the frustration out there, I'm incredibly frustrated too.  But flaming doesn't get any of us anywhere. Let's keep it factual and not personal.

I would like to here the latest opinion of the dev's on this concern.  Do the dev's plan to make any changes, or do the dev's feel that there is no problem to resolve here and no change will be made.  So far, there has been little feedback.

Many thanks team

Well I do have a little something (that I detailed thoroughly though): since battles in habitats are instant/we can't link 2 attacking armies, and the runway has a capacity of 40 maximum, then the direct consequence is that it's impossible to attack an habitat with more than 40 planes at the same time, can something be done about that ? Because it's quite unfortunate to have 20 or 40 extra jet fighters that can't help fighting 35 dragons while even with an army using 3 sulfurs, a battlecry etc you will still loose at least 10% units.

One way would be aircraft carriers but you don't seem to be releasing them any time, and for monarchy players it can be impossible to have a river/sea, and anyway to make carriers you have to use 1 sulfur so that's 20 AAA guns less so that's a bad idea anyway.

It wouldn't hurt also being able to defend one town with more than 40 planes: in term of realism, if the runway is full and more planes are sent to defend the town just before the attack, and then they come back where they were after the battle, they should never have to land on the runway and thus crash. Maybe you could simply add another button that would allow them to stay flying in that town instead of landing in the runway, and as a logic penalty they would keep using oil/electricity upkeep. This would also allow to attack an habitat with all planes from one town.

There is currently a way to have more than 40 planes in one town I think but it's quite a mess and works only on one town (they cannot be moved once prepared): make a runway level 20 in one town, make 40 jet fighters in other towns, reinforce them to the town with the runway, then make 20 more fighters in that town per aluminium linked: you actually end up with at least 60 fighters in the same town, you just should never move any to keep that defense. Technically, from this situation you do can attack an habitat with 60 fighters instead of 40, but that would be even more absurd: if all the fighters survive the attack, you are guaranteed that 20 of them will crash when they come back, and you don't even know which ones (if it was the 20 trained in that town, then at least you could retrain them and once again have 60 fighters, but even so it would be incredibly expensive).

For me, my main suggestion would be that they do not acheive anything possitive currently.  They do not  make me build defense, as this is not the best way to deal with them.  They do not make people engage in more pvp, They do not teach alliances how to defend or attack together.. etc. So, I would encourage reconsideration of how they work to acheive what you intend,.  perhaps if you could elaborate on the objective, we can give some suggestions.  As I have stated before, they could be a very possitive addition to the game if they acheived more benefit for the players.

Without knowing what you specifically want to acheive with these, I would suggest to at least reduce the negative impact,  I think the main issue is the number of habitats and speed they appear.  4 habitats on day 1, and a new one every 2 weeks.  The troops in them are much more advanced than the hero they are attached to.  I would have braves and archers and am facing muscards etc.   it is a number of weeks before you can even have catapults to deal with them/\.  so for my game, now i must go plunder repeatedly 6,7 or 8 habitats for perhaps 6 weeks until I actually have a destructive army that can do something about it..  So my minimum suggestion would be to have NO habitats for at least the first 4 weeks, allowing the intial growth of army and seige.  And then perhas also reconsider the maximum number of habitats.  Start then with one evaey 2 weeks and reach a maximum count of 4 or 5 rather than 20 or whatever it is if you do not destroy any..  Even better would be to also make the habitat power relative to the hero.  If the hero is still in medievil age, then do not make dragons. even if it is day 140. 

I hope this helps.

If the hero is still in medievil age, then do not make dragons. even if it is day 140.

That's an interesting point, as medieval towers simply cannot target aerial units, and crossbowmen, even if you have 200 of them, will kill none. That being said, maybe one is simply not supposed to still be in medieval by 140 days so I don't know.

The habitats can’t teach an experienced player anything, but they do teach a newbie to build towers and stashes, explore faster, send out armies on the world map (good thing) yet they teach that an early collectivism army is a ridiculous nothing (not so good thing as that’s quite discouraging to realize). A game which has the lower difficulty option would indeed scale their growth in power according to the player’s growth speed (and probably cap the early ones’ max strength at some much lower point, so that even a slow learner could kill at least something, upd: also their emerging from the fog could be more dependent on how fast the player tends to uncover), but if the real world some people in less civilized societies still live in does not care whether one’s able or weak and treats everyone with _this_ kind of fairness, then maybe this game should as well. (I mean first of all the endlessly self-filtering society i stay to live in, where incompetence always leads to being cheated on, weakness leads to being ‘fairly’ overcome by the stronger etc., and this game anyway keeps reminding me of this side of non-fairy-tale reality way more often than most others.)

when players are pre-arranging the game with diplomacy to reduce or eliminate PvP, this makes overall game ballance suffer.

Is that something that should or should not be the outcome of humans having a human nature, when the game is so deep and variable that it does give the options? Could it be an unexpected model of a real world society learning to live without war and even turn to demilitarization? Should it then be forced to turn back because the real world must be seen as cruel?

I have a very simple idea: that alliance members do get an alert when someone is about to be attacked by monsters, but, only units from the attacked player participate in the battle (just like when someone under truce reinforce someone under attack, its units don't participate). It sounds good to me everywhere: no one can just keep their phone on all the day, ready to tell his alliance that he is under attack so that 10 powerful members do everything for them, but on the other hand, when someone is offline, a commander can move the offline player's units where the attack is happening, catacombs being late in the tech tree and being expensive, especially the blueprint for each town, and anyway you don't want to put the hero in catacomb because if he is moved by it to another town, he will provide bonus science/culture/resources to that town for the rest of the night instead (or maybe he does stay in his town anyway ? I don't remember, it could be updated anyway), here a commander can put him back where he was after the battle.

Your suggestions are reasonable, BUT you are not taking one thing into account - your heroes have reached victories before, and every victory makes the creatures more and more strong and active. I would agree with you if things you described were happening for new heroes, but for veteran players with multiple victories behind their back I see that as a reasonable extra challenge.

Those veteran players who suffer from creature attacks should consider starting a new hero instead of reviving existing one - that would make creatrues easier to deal with.

This statement is very clear.  When you read the description on the release of creature habitats, it clearly states a difference between new and victory hero's.

I specifically chose a hero that I have used in the past that has NO victories.  A true test of these additions is to use a new hero.  Having said that, my hero is now 42 days old and has 7 habitats, she is only now reaching the stage of siege to go kill these places.  Attacks started at 24 days old, so yes, you have time to get set up before the first one.  Only recently have I lost units to the monsters, I would say in the last week.  All previous attacks were plunder only.  The last few were also plunder attacks but they had bigger units which is why I lost units too.

I do believe the habitats need to be adjusted, but the developer cannot adjust them without clear facts of what is happening.  

Since I am not new to the game, I usually have an idea of what to build to protect myself and to also attack if needed.  However, there is 1 creature habitat that maybe should be removed.  The Hell pit.  99% of players do not completely finish dragon hoard or even try to kill dragons.  Yes, there are the rare few that like the dragons, but most do not.  If you do not wish to remove that one, maybe have it show up at 120 days, like the "end is nigh" part?

I am still making notes on the attacks, the damages, the units lost and such and will update after this test.

One other suggestion, the bit about alliance being notified and being able to move only THAT players units, maybe you can implement this?

I think the tutorial needs to be updated too. New players need to warned what CH are what they need to do with them, either get siege to attack them or build defense and troops to defend themselves.  Also agree with complaints about Hell Pits, they are to strong and show up to early.  Maybe have only 1 Brimstone Geyser in them?

That's why it would be helpful if everyone sharing their experience with habitats would explicitly state the details of their hero.

Mine is, 5 victories, 60 days old, industrial, I don't pvp, and I have no problem with monsters. I didn't meet dragons yet but I know how I will be able to deal with them.

Those creature habitats is a fix to make the game more balanced. TT2 was initially designed to have PvP part as significant part of the game and when players are pre-arranging the game with diplomacy to reduce or eliminate PvP, this makes overall game ballance suffer. You can treat creature habitats as a "tax" to those who decided to play the game without PvP

A few questions please Bers:

1) So increasing PvP is this the main driving force behing Creature Habitats?

2) Is there any other intended goal for the Habitats?

3) Are you able to measure if the Habitats have successfully acheived what you wish? (A way to see if PvP has increased over time for example?)

I am just trying to understand what the full intention is, how it will be measured, and when we will know if it has worked.

1) So increasing PvP is this the main driving force behing Creature Habitats?

It doesn't seem like pvp has increased much since the habitats, I think it's because of the goals, because once you have an army made for the habitats, there is still no much point attacking other players other than the fun of the first times. The current rewards are:

- resources, if you're lucky enough to attack someone when he is offline otherwise he will move out his resources

- xp, once I did get level 50 by doing that but that's just me, other players prefer to kill monsters in locations and explore, and anyway in my case, once I did all the locations that required level 50, I didn't want to reach that level again.

- Another theoretical goal that probably never happens is stealing a world resource from a neighbor by lowering his culture.

- Achievements/ranking can motivate some people too but to me they are pointless, some achievements lower the credibility of achievements overall, like making X roads lead to some people making their domain a complete mess, another one is cancelling a building when it's at 99%... achievements are more fun to watch than to do. For ranking, some people with very high points but none in defense for example, have a lesser rank than someone that has way fewer points just because he has a few points in defense, it's not very well made and even if it was it's just for show and disappears once the hero reach apocalypse/victory.

- And the most recent reason to pvp is to avoid being attacked by monsters, but from what I saw you would have to pvp a real lot to freeze them, it's definitely not the most efficient way to get rid of them.

The only real thing that could motivate pvp would be war victory but it's very imbalanced and I gave up explaining why years ago. All those who did it have used friends that make weak units on purpose so he can get the trophies this way (in gunrox this is called "faking" and you get banned for that, but not here apparently). The consequence is that, if some trophies amount were lowered so that people doing the victory without cheating could succeed, people that cheat would then be able to do it with even more ease, so it's even less likely that it will be balanced now.

So yeah, habitats don't make me pvp at all, I was interested in them since the beginning just for the habitats themselves, as a new content. I could also add a lot about the issues of pvp itself in this game that doesn't make it very fun, mainly that when you are offline you cannot manage the attack well (commanders can't do everything and if one day you implement a "proxy" player, he won't be online all the time you are offline, and it's not fun for everyone to play multiple accounts at the same time).

OK, i think I more clearly understand your objectives, but you did not respknd to question 2 and 3.

How wil we know if it worked, and when?

Thanls Bers