here is some practical game play example for
@anonglitch @Silmaril @herodite @Muf-Muf
The idea was: Progress makes tourneys easier so difficulty should increase accordingly (I fully agree with this idea)
Here is an example of what the tourney formula does:
City 1:
@Far Reach ranked number 1 in our world (EN3):
Expansions: 148
Research: Finished chapter 16
AW levels: 712
City 2: Gargon667 ranked somewhere between 100 and 200.
Expansions: 129
Research: Beginning of chapter 16
AW levels: 324
Looking at those numbers and the underlying idea: Far Reach should be easily able to beat me in tourneys every single week.
In reality I pity him. His town has become a huge block of concrete on his feet while trying to swim the ocean of new tourneys... Why? Because the formula is complete nonsense!
lets look at it in detail:
He has 20 expansions more than I do, what´s the best possible thing he can do with it? Well not much he can do for troop production, but he could fill them with Orc Startegists or vallorian valor for some extra troops. How many squads a week would that produce? Lets say we talk about province 40. Maybe 1 encounter? maybe 3? As an alternative he could fill the 20 expansions with Magic houses and Factories for catering. What´s that give him? 12 houses 6 factories? I think he probably would cater even fewer than those possibly 3 encounters with what he can make in those factories.
He has a chapter worth of research on me: What does it help him? Zilch, the chapter is a complete waste of resources to play and then shoots you in the foot during the tourney as a bonus. It gives absolutely nothing worth talking about in return. Not a single tech that would the tourney easier, while every single one of them makes it harder. Yes there is a training ground upgrade in there, a building so useless I never built it to start with, now with the 3 separate queues I will build it (why not?), it will give me a bunch of free cannonfodder troops. None of those troops will win a fight in province 40 (with the exception of the Orc Strategist which noone makes in there because of ridiculous costs)
If you think the above two are bad, we now come to the absolute killer:
AW levels: He has more than double the AWs compared to me! He is completely destroying me in troops production and can bulldoze tthrough the tourney? I wish it was (then I had a goal ahead). In reality he has exactly the same troop production I have. Needles/FA/Simia at lvl 31 (OK he has a 32 simia lol) with the 3 queues his VicSprings 30 will guarantee he gets double my cannonfodder (YAY!)
At least it means his units must be way better than mine then? The 3 most used units are LR,M and HR, he has a total of 3 AW levels on me for another week or 3. His HM and LM are better than mine for sure (YAY better cannonfodder!)
The rest of his AWs does pretty close to nothing for his tourneys (other than making it double as hard for him). And to be honest I have 2 brown bears instead of his 1, so in reality I have an extra 50% bonus that he doesn´t have. All the cannonfodder in the world is not going to make up for that one. So his tourneys are way harder than mine, while I have far more of the useful troops to fight them.
now finally we reached the end you hope? Unfortunately not. Everything so far is actually OK. Sucks for him, sure, but he chose to do all those things, now he has to life with it. That´s how the progress factors work. They are not perfect and can of course never be perfect. but in general we could say at least he gets a little bit out of having all those things.
The really completely insane part comes here: We don´t just add all his factors up, we MULTIPLY THEM WITH EACH OTHER!
This poor guy is stuck in the muck so deep now he can hardly move! Last weeks tourney I saw him climbing the tourney ranks in the end trying to catch me just before the end. Out of habit I make it a bit harder for him to pass me and did a couple extra encounters just to tease him, but he immediately stopped moving! Why? well because just doing 5 encounters has cost him an insane fortune! I felt bad for doing it after! I should have let him pass me for all the effort he put in! And this situation is truly ridiculous! I should not have to feel pity for a town 4 times my size!
From now on it is me who decides to let him pass me instead of him deciding to do all his provinces or not lol. I assume he has zillions of resources of all kinds saved up and he could probably push his way past me once, but only by completely wrecking his reserves.
I want a fair fight, we never had one, not in the old tourney, nor in the new one. I like the new difficulty of the tourneys, but blocking big tourney towns like Far Reach from competeing on a fair level is just not OK, yes his town is the exception, but still a formula that does that should never have passed a first draft! So somebody go and fix it! It really doesn´t look good on any devs CV to have a piece of junk like this for a formula on it. No matter how elegantly it is programmed a basic understanding of maths is still essential and this formula is a complete fail.