I really enjoy gbg. However it simply is rarely challenging. Sure, I get great rewards. But if one really wants a challenging competition with guilds one is actually able to truly complete against, I haven't seen that happen much. We're either way to good for the rest of the guilds, or the number 1 is way to good for us. They deserve it, I'm sure. They obviously spend lots of diamonds and goods to get the board that quickly and must have lots of people on nearly all day to be able to take sectors as soon as they become available. I never saw the numbers of fights taken by the enemy go up that quickly. They must have a LOT of great fighters on all the time. It's not fun. There's no sense even racing to take the sector, which can actually be fun when it's a close race. Just not fun with guilds this much better than us. I put my fights in every day anyway. One normally can find a sector to take as even in a bad week, one is not locked in all day. I get more fights in when we're not against a guild that is way better than us, but it's still not challenging. I cannot imagine how some of the guilds we've completed against made it to diamond, the little bit they fight. If I wasn't a phone player id try gvg again and see if it has the challenge I'm looking for. I'll continue to do gbg as I enjoy it, but it is sometimes quite discouraging and definitely rarely challenging. We're rarely evenly matched up
The GBG balance issue comes down to solving the gameplay factor (the fun of the challenge), not with handicapping large guilds by some arbitrary impediment.
It doesn’t appear the GBG beta testing showed up the siege camp - checkerboard exploit fully since the other buildings are, in practice, mostly worthless in the face of 4 or 5 adjacent siege camps.
And further, pointing out such an exploit is not “whining,” “complaining,” or whatever of the many nullifying gerunds are employed to change the subject.
The 4-hour lockdown combined with the ability to pay for instant siege camps with diamonds (and our guild uses this advantage too) can lock guilds on their beachhead for a whole season with only minutes to break out a few times a day.
Doing the rough math, a guild, during a checkboard swap, can flip a tile in as little 2 minutes (even faster) with 7-10 autobatttlers at zero attrition. The other guild, pinned on their beach tile, using an equal number or slightly greater number of autobattlers, will be forced to replace military units as attrition rises and thus lose time. After the second attempt before the daily reset, attrition gets too high to try to win a race.
I performed this experiment in the last Diamond season with what appeared to be slightly better than equal numbers (although it had to be guesstimated). Unfortunately, we missed winning races at 2, and 3-minute flip intervals on over two dozen breakout attempts due to the time lost in replacing units as attrition rose.
We came within seconds a few times, but the mounting attrition forced unit replacements more frequently at the end of the race, even when we were leading for 2/3 of the race. I had two teams (with a 3rd team on weekends) try to break out twice each day for most of the tournament. Lost time in unit replacement was the main factor that couldn't be overcome with such tight timing.
