[Feedback] Colonies and PvP - Dev Diary

[Mortallicus]

Lol. Presently is more entertaining to read the foruns than to play the game. In fact, funny would be to watch BB headquarters: they must be running around helplessly, not knowing what is going on. Or maybe they just turn off the sound (of us complaining) and are throwing a big party for a job well done.

I am glad I didn't built the pvp buildings. The feedback is terrible, I am sure I won't touch this. All they had to do was, every year or so, some weeks before Christmas, increase the level limit by 10, release new (harder) adventures, new troops, new enemies, new buildings, new resources. It is no big secret, it is called «expansion pack» and keeps a game from dying.

I think good advice is if you are not sure about the new PvE/PvP just ignore it for the time being give it time for people to start giving rational reviews based on fact then make your decision. I think many will come to change their minds unless they have too much pride to show they were a bit quick off the gun with their comments. I think it has a lot of potential.

[Vystress]

Mortallicus, I will definetely wait until the dust settles. I mean, I heard to conquer a colony it requires obscene amounts of iron. Is it true? Also, I see lots of guys complaining of bugs. Also, I just sent my explorer on a long colony search and he returned 9 colonies: 6 produce 262 marble/hour (or was it 6 hours?) and the remainiing 3 produce 306 coal/hour!!!!!!!!! My buildings/mines produce 6k coal/12 hours and even more marble! I don't know if I should cry or laugh...

I have two theories:
1. They nerfed the adventure loot to force us to play this new PVE, hoping players buy gems to get the marshals and such;
2. The game doesn't make a profit, so they are trying to ruin it so all players leave and they can relocat their resources to other projects.

[Mortallicus]

Mortallicus, I will definetely wait until the dust settles. I mean, I heard to conquer a colony it requires obscene amounts of iron. Is it true? Also, I see lots of guys complaining of bugs. Also, I just sent my explorer on a long colony search and he returned 9 colonies: 6 produce 262 marble/hour (or was it 6 hours?) and the remainiing 3 produce 306 coal/hour!!!!!!!!! My buildings/mines produce 6k coal/12 hours and even more marble! I don't know if I should cry or laugh...

I have two theories:
1. They nerfed the adventure loot to force us to play this new PVE, hoping players buy gems to get the marshals and such;
2. The game doesn't make a profit, so they are trying to ruin it so all players leave and they can relocat their resources to other projects.

It does seem expensive and a quite a bit to learn so I am holding back too. The two buildings are cheap to build. The marshalls are bought from the Tavern and are not that expensive even for a level 30 to have one or two. The rewards do not seem good though. But I am sure they will improve. The 2 extra slots bought with gems I would think most players would wait till they feel its really worth it. There are 4 other slots available. So this rather answers your first theory.

With regard to your second. I guess the game does make a profit it would not make good sense to throw good money after bad. I think they are trying to attract new players and to appease those that joined the game thinking there would be some form of PvP. It was in the development diary as due in a few months when i joined the game so its been a long time promised and coming. It would be simpler to give us just a year's notice and stop all new development.

[Thejollyone]

PVP

I came, I saw, I gave up half way through the initial questbook.

Waste of resources.
You cant adventure at the same time.
Too limiting.
Too buggy.
Killed relevant pvp troops to give me back my settlers and tore down pvp buildings.

Not for me, but fair play for anyone else who's interested.

[vulekeva]

I never got to try out Colonies on test, so am testing it now on the live server

Feedback no. 1

Why are there tabs in the combat academy?

It's confusing lots of people on help who overlook them and can't find the heavy troops. There's also no need to use separate tabs since there's so few troops types and so much room in the interface window. Overdesign of the interface has resulted in a bad final product.

Evidence that it's a problem copied from help (I'll post them as I see them, but there were at least 4 I saw earlier):
[22:56] [MVA] TeutaBgd: where do i train heavy infantry? tnx
[23:42] [WoN] freier: does any1 know where can i train some heavy infantery?
[15:29] [Dinos] Iohs: can anyone tell me how to make Heavy infantry please?
[16:49] [PhR] danny12: how do i make heavy cavalavlry

Feedback no. 2

The Marshall Interface is awful.

A button asking you to select units, taking you to another screen where you click on some unit types, then returning you back to the previous screen where you finally select the number of those units you actually want to put on your marshall?

Who dreamed that up?


Feedback no. 3

Marble to make medi-kits? What?

Are we hitting marshals across the face with a brick to try to wake them up? Seriously, this just smacks of trying to make the Colonies system into a resource sink that absorbs as many different resources as possible.


Opinion so far: regretting investing resources into the buildings and weapons. Let's see what the returns on investment are...


Feedback No. 4

First attack done. Wasn't real-time as lag was so bad I had no idea what was going on until the fight finished. Not sure what the 2nd fight will be like where I have to switch troops during combat... Also, why no combat report?

Basically, I have no idea what just happened and got no entertainment value from it at all. Which should be the main point of a game...

Feedback No. 5

Weird thing happening in the main Colonies interface from the home island. I click the globe button and can see my training expedition. If I click "show details" a screen comes up saying that there's nobody playing the (one-player!) expedition and I'm giving the option of inviting one of my friends along. Haven't dared do it as I don't know what "exploiting" this bug would do. Looks like there's a programming error here somewhere.

Feedback No. 6

Tutorial quests aren't very well written. I need cavalry for my 2nd attack, yet the tutorial system only told me to make archers and infantry. A tutorial shouldn't leave you having to go back and make more troops like that.


Opinion has not improved much since first impressions...

Feedback No. 7

So, I made new weapons and then new troops so I could take some cavalry back for the first boss camp. Lag wasn't so bad, so I could see what was going on and was able to swap troops round. It was a little bit of fun, but not much. Certainly not enough that I prefer it over "fire and forget". And it's all a little imprecise. I'm not convinced it's responsive enough and I don't know if I lost cavalry unecessarily when the enemy swapped from bows to melee.


Opinion has improved slightly, but now see it as a missed opportunity. This concept of "real-time combat" is not enough fun to justify the attention it requires. You've got to sit around and wait for your general to walk to the enemy camp, then watch the fight unfold. I like the simple strategy options that make it , but it should have been based around strategically setting up of troops in advance, then sending them off to fight their battle, and you can come back later and see how they've done. Real-time? Meh...

In summary: get rid of real time combat and make it so you set up your troops in advance then "fire and forget".

If I were to guess, I'd say real-time combat is a leftover from a time when this was going to be real pvp and you thought players would be able to swap new stacks of troops in and out on the fly in combat against one another. Then that idea got abandoned for being unworkable, but the real-time idea stayed for no good reason. Close guess?


Feedback No. 8

Either blocking is rubbish or the tutorial is badly done.

I blocked the second boss camp, as the quests suggested. In doing so, I lost 20 troops from the blocking marshall. I might have been able to lose fewer if I'd been quicker off the mark and the lag had been less, but I don't think I did too badly for a first attempt.

I just looked at the simulator and see that I could have attacked the camp and killed it with losses of only 7 troops (or maybe 12 if I've remembered the troop numbers in the enemy camp wrong).

So, either the blocking balance is way off or the way the tutorial is set up is rubbish. If you want to promote this idea of blocking, then the losses on doing a block should be significant less than attacking each camp in turn. Even similar amounts of losses would be understandable. But recommending doing a block that looses you around twice the number of troops is beyond ridiculous.

In summary: not thought through enough. Return to balancing drawing board and start again

Feedback No. 9

Finished expedition (nothing new to report on the above experiences). Received loot mail with subject "[undefined text]". I thought this game was out of beta? Not impressed at all

Feedback No. 10
Loot = 3 star coins. THREE?! THREE?! You are having a laugh!

Either give a reward or don't give a reward. Don't insult players with something so ridiculous.

Feedback No. 11
Opened colonies interface, and there were options to build defences and claim colony - presumable from the expedition I had just completed.

Clicking "build defences" brought up an error message saying it had expired. Clicking "claim colony" brought up a spinning timer.

Clearly something has gone wrong. Don't know what. Don't really care at this stage. It's obviously an unfinished product that needs seriously reworking while on the live server or removal back to the test server. Presumably a lot of these problems have already been reported on the forums there. Time to not just (reportedly!) listen to feedback but actually act on it?

In summary: Apart from not being all that much fun, the system is bugged and unfinished. Final score: 1/10.

Feedback No. 12

Marshall's just returned home: [undefined text][undefined text]

And two of them couldn't find a landing spot

Still not impressed.

Feedback No. 13
Just working out how many resources I spent on this...
Troops lost
= 27 attack cavalry (AC), 20 heavy infantry (HI), and about 125 attack archers (AA)

(NB, currently the other 30 HI I made aren't showing up in my supply. Hopefully this is a display issue rather than a real bug and they've gone AWOL)

Resources to make troops
1 AC = 5 horse, 6 sabre (question: Why does one soldier need 6 swords? Always bugged me the way this game does that and though it might have been fixed with this new combat system. No such luck...)
1 AA = 10 brew, 6 bow
1 HI = 10 brew, 3 mace

Resources to make weapons
1 sabre = 12 iron, 10 coal
1 bow = 10 hardwood, 10 iron
1 mace = 1 steel, 4 coal

Total resources spent
60 steel (150 if my other 30 HI have gone AWOL)
1860 coal
7500 hardwood
9444 iron


The wood and coal are nothing to me. But an investment of 10K iron for almost zero return? Is this seriously considered a balanced tutorial experience?

Awesome post, you nailed it! I killed off all new units and i will probably demolish new buildings very soon.

What is very annoying is lag issue, so I cant play adventures with blocks because I lose a lot of resources every day failing blocks I never failed before.

[bigburp]

Please please stop this madness !!!! is there anyone in charge there at BB Wake him up!!! The free movement is good if it was alone without all the other awful changes as well.

[YedCogito]

Lets review this from a BB point of view. Or even more so, lets review this from a BB-Management (Ubisoft) point of view.
BB: Having launched some very succesful computergames over the years. Settlers being one of them, selling over 3,5 Mio copies over the years, BB is a flourishing company.
Ubisoft: You try to adapt the game with a similar concept into an online version by the guys from BB which was bought in 2001 by the French.
After having been in Beta for quite a bit, investing a lot of money in developing the game with running staff-cost of some 50.000 per month at least, you have to invest another 30.000 per month in marketing and online marketing in order to build a solid community base. I guess some 270.000 in total (and I'm not talking about guild-coins here)
Making the game free and giving the possibility to advance faster for a player by investing real money buy purchasing gems, you hope that over time, the players who initially play for free will invest in the game and you get a return on your investment. All logical so far.
Why on earth would BB upset a solid fan-base squandering at least another 200.000 to regain that fan base or acquiring new players whereas it would have been a lot better to reduce the staff-cost by sending the ones who came up with the bright idea's to upset the community to another adventure. Get rid of them. Under what kind of pressure did they put these guys to generate more money for Ubisoft so that they came up with thoughts not entirely thought through? Will this be the downward-spiral for the game inevitably? Making even less money since people loose their trust and refuse to invest real money because they feel betrayed because the rules have been changed and your investments made worthless? Time invested in making Maps wasted.
Cut on the staff cost and progress slowly, implement changes carefully. Listen to your community. Implement ships or whatever other suggestions were made before ruining your fan-base. Have the decency to reply to the feedback given. Don't be so *uckin* German and communicate openly. No-one will hold it against you when you made a mistake. We all do. But be open about it. Recognize when you've made a mistake. You don't even have to say sorry, but be open to suggestion that you can re-implement something as well when something went horribly wrong. You've got so many fans who've enjoyed this game. you've done such an amazing job building this game. PLEASE DON'T Squander this. Don't make Ubisoft pulls the plug on you BB!

[BAAAHHHHHJJJAAA]

I hate the new battle system and think the capture the flag game is rubbish but most all ready knew that.

What I REEALLLLLLYYY hate is that you have removed certain adventures (DB, IoTP) and made the high level xp adventures gem based only.

As if there were not enough reasons for players to leave this game you have now taken some of the very few saving graces you had and shot them in the head.

[Mortallicus]

Adventure drops from explorers has definitely improved. I have picked up Nords, IOTP and DB very easily since the changes.

[Jim_B]

Adventure drops from explorers has definitely improved. I have picked up Nords, IOTP and DB very easily since the changes.

I have also picked up several of the new "totally blank space" adventures. So until BB fix that bug no more wasted adventure searches.

Let's see:

Island economy - wrecked by ill conceived resource sink event, risk of locked zones from moving buildings.
Explorer searches - bugged
PvP - buggy, unbalanced and with pathetic rewards
Adventures - riddled with new bugs (looping attack animations, garrison rebuilding several times), horrible new intrusive "info" elements and horrendous lag.

So what's left? rebuilding mines and not much else.
I admit I'm addicted to this game, but with *nothing* to do I'm quickly kicking the habit