City Better balancing of Evolving Buildings

[Far Reach]

The limiting factor on the use of evolving buildings is presumably intended to be the pet food needed to keep them active. However, strategies exist to get virtually the entire benefit from some evolving buildings, using just occasional feeds. Most other evolving buildings can't remotely compete.

I suggest that instead of the feeding effect expiring when a fixed time has passed, it should instead expire after the building has delivered a certain amount of benefit. For example:

The fire phoenix is active until it has boosted attack in 100 battles
The brown bear is active until it has generated extra troops from the training of a certain number of squads

and so on

 

[SpaceCowboy]

This is an amazing suggestion! It would also solve the problem that sometime it is difficult to make the most out of a pet food effect. I usually do tournament fights in batches of 1-2 hours, and that means a large portion of my Fire and Twilight Phoenix effects are wasted. With this mechanic, I would have a lot more flexibility with the timing of my tournament fights.

 

[Jake65]

Big +1 from me.

 

[Jake65]

I'd suggest that the limit is a "chapter * X" number.

 

[SkyRider99]

A great idea @Far Reach. Not to rain on your parade, but the vast range of different calculations that would be needed for every player would perhaps need a server farm with the computing power of a thousand Deep Thoughts.

 

[Far Reach]

A great idea @Far Reach. Not to rain on your parade, but the vast range of different calculations that would be needed for every player would perhaps need a server farm with the computing power of a thousand Deep Thoughts.

The devs are best placed of course to consider the practicality of such suggestions (and as we know, very, very few are ever taken forward), but I wasn't anticipating that game performance would be affected by an implementation of this one. (The coding and other dev effort to develop/implement the idea might be significant though.) I expand on why I don't believe that performance is a problem below.

My supposition is that the current implementation sets an expiry threshold when an evolving building is fed (for example the current time plus 24 hours for a Fire Phoenix). Whenever that building is subsequently used/interacted with then that threshold can be compared with the present time to check that the effect is still active. For each player, the above suggestion could be implemented using an additional set of counters (e.g. of battles fought, squads trained etc.). Each evolving building expiry threshold could use one of these counters in place of time. The possible effects on performance would come from updating counters (which I think only occurs in response to user actions such as fighting a battle or collecting resources and should be a negligible overhead) and from increased amount of player data (which I would expect to be small relative to other aspects such as city build and research tree).

 

[Sir Derf]

I think the timers are implemented as target times and not decreasing interval counts. Target times require less memory manipulation and are more resilient for processing interruptions.