Announcement Behind the Scenes: Battle Redesign

[DeletedUser3]

Dear Humans and Elves,

Today we are announcing some upcoming changes to Elvenar. In a series of posts we want to take you through a major overhaul we are planning for the Battle feature that we currently have in our game. Each post aims to give you detailed information about a certain part of the feature, so that by the end of the series you will have a complete and detailed overview of the changes. These will have a big impact, so we want to let you know about these changes up front, even before they are coming to our Beta world. Implementation of the changes will start relatively soon, but it will not be done all at once: we are currently planning to release it in three "packages", as we call them.

So, why are we redesigning the Battle system?
While developing the Fairy units (yes, we know that they are still not done) we found that expanding our current battle system was not as easy as we had hoped. This resulted in delays surrounding the Fairy units - so many, even, that we had to decide to stop development of the Fairy units temporarily so that we could focus on bringing out more content. We since released the Orcs and Goblins and their Ancient Wonders, and we are currently working on implementation of a new guest race which will be showing itself in more detail in the coming weeks too (did I just say that?). In parallel to that we're working a major redesign of the Battle system, so that we can fix the flaws that our current system has all at once. This will make both design and balancing the system a lot easier (and even: possible) for implementing new units. At the same time, this will make the system a lot clearer to you too, and thus will make it a lot easier to plan your battles and understand which unit is good against which other unit. We will not take away from the challenge of battles - you will still need to choose your units before a fight, but with the current design it is almost impossible to fully understand the battle system and that is something we want to improve with this overhaul.

A first insight
One thing we will change is the squad sizes in battle. The general system will be the same as it is now: you can increase your maximum squad size by unlocking the 'Squad Size Upgrade' technologies, and the amount of units you can take into battle will depend on that. But, we will change the increase that these technologies offer. Instead of the current +12 for every 'Squad Size Upgrade' technology you unlock, in the future you will get an increase based on the number of the Squad Size Upgrade technology. This will be 3x the number of the technology. For example: for 'Squad Size Upgrade 17' you would now get +12 on your maximum Squad Size. In the future, this would be +51 (3 x 17 = 51). Of course everything else around it will then have to be rebalanced accordingly as well, but this change allows us to balance the battles way better in the future.

A piece of advice Another change that we will make is the costs of units: it will be faster to train single units, but in turn you will need more to fill a squad. Also, we will make upgraded versions of units the same price as their base unit. That means that the price will not increase anymore when you unlock a unit promotion technology. Due to this, especially upgraded versions of units may devalue a bit per unit. This is why we want to give you the advice to use as many of your units as you can before we implement these balancing changes, because even though you will keep all your trained units after the change, the number of squads they represent will decrease. You still have at least several weeks for that.

As said, we will be giving you more details in upcoming posts, so stay tuned for that! We will be more than happy to answer your questions you have so far in our discussion thread!

Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Team

 

[DeletedUser3]

Dear Humans and Elves,

It is time for a second post with information about the upcoming battle redesign! Today we will tell you all about the new strengths and weaknesses of your units in the new system. Currently it is unclear which unit is strong or weak against which other unit. We want to make this a lot easier to understand, so we will use what we have started calling a "combat pentagon". In short, that means that a certain unit type will be strong(er) against two unit types, while being weak(er) against the other two. Since images say more than a thousand words, let's show you what we mean:

Now this might look a bit complicated at first, but it's really not so bad. Let us give you an example for the Light Melee Units (also see the image below). Following the arrows, we can see that they are strong against the Light Ranged Units and Mages, while being weaker against the Heavy Melee type of units and Heavy Ranged units.

This works in the same way for all the other unit types.

We believe that this change helps make the battle system easier to understand and more consistent in general. Of course we are more than happy to answer any of your questions or comments. Please share your thoughts in the discussion thread - we're looking forward to your feedback! In our next post in this series we will give you an insight in the structure of military buildings - stay tuned for that!

Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Team

 

[DeletedUser3]

Dear Humans and Elves,

Did you spot the odd one out in our last Behind the Scenes post? No? Let us zoom in on him:

In our last post we showed you the strengths and weaknesses of the unit types. As a visual aid, we showed you all units that Humans or Elves have access to in Elvenar. The image did show 11 units, though, and today we explain to you why that was.

Currently, Humans do not have access to any Heavy Ranged unit, while they have two Light Melee units available to them. We want to give Humans access to at least one unit of every type, just as the Elves do. To achieve this, we will do two things.

1. The Mortar
You guessed it: the Mortar is currently not available for players at all, yet most players will have encountered the Mortar at some point while fighting on the World Map. This unit is currently being used in Provinces, and it will soon become playable for Humans! For players it will be a modified version based on what we already know for the NPC units, but the main idea will be very similar. This change will give Humans access to a Heavy Ranged unit. But, that would, at the same time, make it possible to have one more unit than Elves, and that would also not be very balanced. Therefore, we will make one additional change to counter that. Do you want to know what we're planning? Then read on!

2. Cerberus
This unit at this moment is only available to Humans. But, it will be moved to the Training Grounds: a brand-new military building to be added in Chapter II of the research tree. This building will be researchable and buildable for both races, and with that, Cerberus will become available to both races as well. Humans who currently have Cerberuses in their army will not lose them, and they will still be usable for them. The only thing that cannot be done is train additional ones, until the Training Grounds have been built: this building will be required to produce more of this unit.

Shared training queue

The Barracks, Training Grounds and, from the Fairy Chapter on, the Mercenary Camp, will all three share a single training queue. That means that you will have a maximum of 5 available training slots (depending on the level of your Barracks), to which you can add production from these three separate buildings. The Barracks, Training Grounds and Mercenary Camp will each have a number of units available to train, unique to the building. Let us give an overview of what will be available to each of those buildings:

• Human Barracks (Humans only):
  Axe Barbarian, Crossbowman, Paladin, Mortar, Priest

• Elven Barracks (Elves only):
  Sword Dancer, Archer, Treant, Golem, Sorceress

• Training Grounds (both races):
  Cerberus

• Mercenary Camp (both races):
  Drone Rider, Blossom Mage

Oh, and did we already say that you can expect more units in the future, to fill the Training Grounds and Mercenary Camp some more?

We can't wait for these changes to be implemented in Elvenar. We hope that you like them as much as we do. Please let us know your thoughts by posting in the discussion thread! We're looking forward to hearing from you!


Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Team