DeletedUser25874
Yes, I had fun chewing on one of those guilds in the opening season:
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Here's how things played out on our map: Warriors started in the upper center, and quickly went for the center and grabbed as many of the provinces in rings 1 and 2 as they could, planting VP boosts all over them. We started in the lower left and went for the neighboring provinces at first, but then after the first day or so, focused on the center. Postmen started in the upper left, and grabbed much of the upper part of the map, while making plays for the center. After the first day or so, Postmen had Warriors mostly surrounded in rings 3 and 4, and made plays for the center. Warriors didn't bother to reclaim any of those provinces and spent most of the time trying to control as much of ring 1 and 2 as possible. We seized control of most of the lower left, and made plays for the center as well. Early, Warriors were earning a little over 1600 VP/hr, but after Postmen ate up their lower ranked provinces and we kept going for the center, their earning rate fell. Postmen's control of those lower ranked provinces gave them a steady income of VP, and there was a constant shift between us and them in 2nd and 3rd place as the center provinces changed hands. We managed a decent balance by holding onto lower ranked provinces while constantly grabbing the valuable center provinces. These top three guilds have around 20 players, so in terms of numbers the matchup was pretty even.
Nephilim was in the lower right, and while they never really managed to hold anything in the center, they controlled the lower right side of the map because their immediate neighbors weren't very active. UFOP was right above us in the center left, it's a level 20 guild with one guy in it that has 12M points, so I'm guessing it's a ghost. He had some low value provinces near his start and he occasionally sniped at us and Postmen, but there wasn't much he could do on his own. The other guilds were mostly small low ranked guilds that didn't really accomplish anything, but one of them (Knight I think) had something like 50 or so members.
We and Warriors got promoted to Gold, and the bottom three guild got a demotion to Bronze.
Negotiating isn't terribly difficult, but it's a bit too luck reliant when there are 6 choices. You can't directly stop a siege, but you can end one if you can capture all the provinces the besieger has bordering the province their sieging. I stopped two of Warriors' attacks on our provinces by leading a counter capture one of their provinces. So there's some definite strategy involved in taking a lower valued province for defensive reasons. We did lag a bit in GE early in the week, but yesterday we pulled ahead into first place while securing second on GBG, so it can be done. I can't speak for GvG since we really only have 3 players who dabble in it on occasion.
Another thing that kind of bugs me is that the difficulty is uniform across the whole map. It makes rings 3 and 4 less strategically valuable since the attrition and advancement costs are the same as rings 1 and 2, but the rewards are far less. On this map, the center provinces were worth around 200 each, but some of the provinces in ring 4 were less than 20. Yes, those more worthless provinces can generate a steady amount of VP income, but it's worth quite a bit less so you don't want to rely on it either. I think it might be worth increasing the difficulty and/or attrition costs in the center to better reflect the value.
A HoF can be plundered if it's not motivated. This is a case where players need to improve their social contacts. I'm not a big fan of the HoF since it does take up valuable production space. It does help the guild over the long run, but the Statue of Honor is a huge improvement since it provides both guild power and guild goods while giving the player a nice amount of FP.
Remember, the Statue of Honor produces a decent amount of guild goods when motivated, 50 at the maximum level, and the fragments for it are pretty plentiful. So the costs to the buildings might not seem so steep after a while. Then factor in Observatories, high-level Arcs and whatever players dump in from DC and event quest requirements. I think guilds with a lot of active mobile players are going to be at an advantage here since they're not spending the goods on GvG. There's also the guilds with a lot of AF+ players who do a lot of fighting on the AA map and have tens or hundreds of thousands of high age guild goods they weren't using too.
I do agree the attrition goes up too fast. One of the downsides to GvG is that it's not very accessible to newer players, you need to build up the combat GBs and Traz to be competitive at it. I think the fast attrition growth in fighting poses a similar problem; a newer players will probably be able to do only 5-10 advanced a day before hitting the wall, while the power fighters probably aren't getting slowed down until at least 40 or 50. I think having a shallow growth a bit longer, then a spike would be better here.
I don't really find the goods cost to be a big problem for me. I produce a decent amount of goods every day, but it might be a little harder for a lower player to keep up.
But there's also a long-term view to consider here, and the rewards for even a moderate success here are very good. The potential awards after a fight are really better than what GE offers, FP, units, goods, Statue fragments, and even diamonds. While most of that can be won from GE, there's a lot of coins and supplies, and it's hard for me to feel excited by that:
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Getting tens of thousands of coins and supplies is a big meh for me when I'm in the hundreds of millions and the amount is little more than a rounding error. My city makes at least a million or so coins every day from normal collections and at least half that in supplies.
It's possible Inno will tweak the feature here and there too after some initial feedback.
I think it's fine the way it is and I'm in EST. First, it kind of balances out the advantage EST players have with GvG recalc timing. Second, attrition lasts 24 hours, so having everyone burn out on attrition right after midnight isn't necessarily the best approach. You might want to have a team of players that can respond to things later in the day.
We do have players available later in the day - although with work schedules it's not easy to coordinate (and we don't play GVG) but there was so much activity in our battleground at reset and only a few people available then so a few people trying to stay up until 1am every night is not sustainable. On the other hand, people are around 9, 10 or 11pm so any of those times would work better.
