Welcome to Feedback Loop #3! This feedback round was dedicated to artefacts. Let’s see what’s been asked and what was the Game Centre answer.
➡️ – Players’ feedback
⬅️ – Game Centre Answer
Artifact Spawn
➡️To give everyone a chance to take an artefact, the artefact spawn circle should no longer be fixed:
The circle of Uniques (20/20) becomes flexible and can be between (50/50) and (150/150) (for example).
The grey zone player and the boonie player would have the same chance to take a unique/large/small artifact and it becomes impossible to predict in advance!
⬅️ Generally speaking, RNG* can cause a lot of unbalance and disappointment in gaming. While its purpose is to replace “static” balancing to provide some unpredictability, it often leads to what can be perceived as pure randomness – which can be very unenjoyable, as every player may know… We learned that this kind of randomness is even more problematic in a strategy game, because strategy needs a consistent environment, and with that in mind we removed a lot of the random instances around the early game with static adventures, nature troop spawns and so on. This explains why we’re not really confident that totally randomly placed artefact spawn would benefit the game that much: players invest time and resources into a position which would then randomly turn out to be either valuable or worthless.
*RNG: randomly generated numbers used to create a somewhat unpredictable outcome to a recurring or habitual action/event – often used in gaming.
Effects changes
➡️ Small architect becomes small def strength x2 -> troops BELONGING to the village have their def strength multiplied by 2.
➡️ Small confusion becomes small raid x1.5 -> if a looting brings 100 resources, with the artifact, it becomes 150.
➡️Large confusion becomes large raid x1.25.
➡️ Unique confusion becomes Unique raid x1.75.
➡️ The Fool artefact should have its activation time reduced, 24hrs activation/24hrs active becomes 18hrs activation/30hrs active:
It costs a lot of resources for a chief and when you get the effect you want, it activates for such a short time compared to the cost involved.
➡️Confusion artifacts become merchant artifacts to have faster merchants who carry more resources.
⬅️While all these changes do sound interesting, they will probably also come with some negative effects. Let’s imagine that I have Small Confusion active, and go about raid my neighbour ally village and yield additional resources. I can practically do this forever and have an almost infinite amount of them. Unless what was meant was more of a 50 % carry capacity bonus?
In general it seems uncertain as per being able to provide an improved experience to all players with the proposed changes. Thus, for the time being, we wouldn’t consider taking this route.
Adding artefacts
➡️ Create a Unique Great storage artefact: This artefact would give the possibility to transform warehouses and granaries into great warehouses/granaries without having to destroy them. The cost of the transformation is equal to 50 or 75% of the total cost of the great warehouses/granaries
⬅️This idea is interesting but in the past we preferred to it an alternative solution that would make the “Unique storage masterplan” artefact to reduce the build cost of the great warehouse and great granaries. This is something we can consider for special servers.
➡️ Artefacts that gives: +10% off against nature/Natar troops.
Since the according item isn’t that much used, we do not consider it necessary to propose an artefact against Natar troops. As per Nature troops, they do not seem to be worth an artefact themselves.
➡️ Artefact that doubles the bonus of each tribe. Examples: brewery x2 / trapper x2 / etc.
⬅️The issue is that we regularly get feedback about the perceived strengths or weaknesses of tribes, therefore a *2 bonus would most likely not address any issue, nor add meaningful new content, but would probably end up creating unbalance.
➡️ Artefact that allows to train settlers to build an alliance village that produces resources only for alliance bonuses.
⬅️Villages which alliances can access were evaluated in the past and unfortunately brought a lot of issues in terms of usability and consistency, in a way similar to what we have with sitters and duals, but on an even larger scale.
➡️ Artefact that doubles the speed of merchants.
⬅️Game designer said: “I can see this working out!” We have received a few suggestions for this in the past. We may conduct a specific feedback round on just this in the future to consult the community in detail.
➡️ New “Engineer” Artifact:
- Small artefact with village effect: 20% reduction in building construction costs and time.
- Large artefact with account effect: 15% reduction.
- Unique artefact: 25% discount.
⬅️We see the benefits for fast account growing with these artefacts. We would suggest submitting this as a suggestion to make sure players feel the same way. This would help us decide if this should be developed.
➡️ Other artefact (unnamed)
- Small artefact: Training a club-swinger gives you a 20% chance of seeing a rat, 10% a spider, 5% a bat. The axe fighter gives you 10% a rat, 20% a spider, 5% a bat, 5% a wolf… and so on with other more expensive units, which could make crocodiles appear.
- Large artefact: same bonus, effect counts.
- Unique artefact: the treasure room becomes a nature troop training barracks for a cost in resources and training time.
Note: Nature Troops can participate in attacks as long as you are in possession of the artefact.
⬅️Unfortunately, we consider that being able to train or summon additional Nature troops would diminish the value and achievement of a great zoo, which is something we would prefer to avoid. In addition, sending additional troop types in an attack is something technically out of our current reach without major refactoring of core pieces of the game.
➡️Other artefact (unnamed)
Small: halves the cost of troops in hospital and their training time, 10% more wounded. Multiples the effect of the hero’s bandages by 30.
Large: reduces to 66% with 10% more wounded. Multiplies by 50 the effect of the hero’s bandage.
Unique: like the small one, effect counts and 10% more wounded. Multiplies the effect of the hero’s bandages by 75.
⬅️We believe this to be valuable. However, the 3 different effect types would hard to convey in a single entity. For example the effect of bandages is in %, running it thru a multiplier, e.g. by 30 would be over 100 % and basically generating new troops out of thin air. We are practically sure that this is not what was requested, but it’s still a real possibility to understand the effect(s) wrong and generally we try to avoid mechanics which are hard to explain for this very reason.
Change in artefact design
➡️ Consider having the artefacts attached to villages. The artefact can therefore no longer be moved. It becomes a position to defend. The alliance leaders can grant the effect of the artefact to a village chosen within the alliance.
⬅️We had a similar change in Ancient Europe, an Annual Special long time ago. A change this huge would be a high risk for a game like Travian, as it would mean that everything based on current strategies wouldn’t work out anymore. We can see this as an interesting change for a special server, but not for the regular version of the game. With that in mind please see that this is also a tough change to develop for only a special server, and that we also don’t want to have too many of those specials as it is also hard to keep an eye on which ruleset is now applicable for which version, making the life harder for operations, development and support.
