With the caveat that some of my "knowledge" about how experience play works may be so out of date as to be woefully inaccurate, I'd like to propose a fairly major change to the experience system, to try to make the experience ranks something where a modicum of tactics are useful/necessary, and where sitting isn't always 100% suboptimal, while still leaving a situation where people who don't want to constantly live in fear of top OP can still have a rank to win, and the landies can still have their precious little game without it being distorted by undying zomgwtf hero op.
Rationale:
Code:
Academies (and FTs and hospitals) are quite thoroughly useless if you're not attacking all the time. Your economy winds up as such a mess from having all of your land in Acads/FTs (not typically hospitals these days, but I suppose you could make some argument for certain races) that you can't possibly train enough defense to keep you from feeding acres up the chain every time you pop into range of a land kingdom, even with all the "free op" you get from heroes (which, by the way, take forever to train up). So, you just keep attacking, since that's really the only way to "pay back" on academies/FTs anyway. To compound the issue, the one actual experience pack is running four experience kingdoms, and two "burners" who attacks you regularly every twelve hours, despite the fact that they haven't actually gained an acre or experience point off of you in 3 days. Once they knock you down, you can't attack anyone larger than you without getting less than full experience on the attack, so you can't regain land quickly enough to get out of the land penalty zone, and the actual pack is getting further and further away from you, with no hope of you ever catching them. For that matter, all the relic whores just passed you too...
Okay, so might be slightly exaggerated, but that's the gist of how experience play works. It gets uglier in the rare cases where there are two packs going at it, and it's a game of whose burners are more effective, or who gets luckier in quests between attacks (or who gets "lucky" enough to get a 9 hour injury and miss two attack cycles when he decided to play the lotto). I'm also not a huge fan of the way that relics & unique heroes work in the land play realm, so I'm going to bundle a change to those in here as well, at the risk of "effecting land play" while I'm trying to fix the "special olympics"
The suggestion:
- Remove relics & quest party
- Remove unique heroes
- Replace said above with "realm advisors" (details to follow below)
- Remove hero mortality
- Slightly reduce chance to get a hero. Change the balance between common/uncommon heroes so that on average you get 3 commons to 1 uncommon
- Add (as a replacement for mortality) hero strength. Hero strength starts at 100 and maximizes at 100. Every successful attack reduces hero strength of participating heroes by 10% of their current value. Every defense where you lose troops, any heroes that are home lose up to 5% of their current strength value (reduced in same proportion as troops on war razes, reduced by % of land that was burnt). Strength loss is rounded up to the nearest 0.1. Conquest causes 3x strength loss.
- Hero strength regenerates at 2 units per hour while home, 0.4 units per hour while away. Hero strength regeneration happens before units returning update (so the hour they arrive home, heroes regenerate at the away rate).
- Hero offense = hero experience * hero strength / 100 (final value shown on SoH)
Code:
Example:
Sam the Super Hero goes out on attack with 250 experience, 100 strength. His offense is thus 250. After the attack, he now has 90 strength. Due to Frost Temples, his return time will be 8 hours. When he gets back home, he will have 93.2 strength. His new experience is 300 after the attack, so his offense for hit #2 becomes 276. He attacks again and loses 9.4 strength (rounded), to reduce to 83.8. When he gets back home 8 hours later, his strength will regenerate to 87.0.
- Change base experience gains to be 50% of the land taken on the attack (excluding explored land, after burned land). No further scaling of experience gains based on the relative size of your target.
- Add a one-time spell: Heroic Tribute - gain 0.1 gold per hour per experience point of common and uncommon heroes at home. Spell continues until overridden by Heroic Exploration. Cost: 5* land
- Add a one-time spell: Heroic Exploration - gain 0.01 diamonds per hour per experience point of common and uncommon heroes at home. Spell continues until overridden by Heroic Tribute. Cost: 5* land
- Academies:
- Remove extra population
- Remove effect of reducing hero mortality (since that's gone)
- Reduce hero chance increase to 6*
- Reduce XP gain to 3* (base experience change should increase base xp)
- Added: Academies increase the effect of Heroic Tribute and Heroic Exploration by 60*% (no max). Academies cause ruler heroes to have 1*% the modified effect of Heroic Tribute and Heroic Exploration (max 50%).
- Added: Academies increase the effect of common hero bonuses by 2*%
- Hospitals - Added: Increase the rate of hero strength increase by 5*%
- Remove non-ruler hero experience loss in war
- Modify ruler hero experience loss to only occur when ruler hero is home. Ruler hero experience loss in war increased by 10%.
