In my mind, the players plays the game when they fight in epics battles, when they manage their tribes, and all the things that can animate a world and make it living and interesting. Divas and the others said everything. But, the daily management have to be easier and maybe need to have a part of automatical stuff. We have currently automatical stuff, what the Presets are ? The challenge is to have more time to fight, to talk, and for all others important and fun things we can do, and less time to click to change the active village every 10 seconds and click and click again... with a small loading time of three or four seconds each time.
In the French community, we have some feedbacks
(a part of them are also in the last comments) :
1. Sitting : It's not a problem only for the big accounts but they are affected. A lot of players have winter holidays in France like in each country, I guess. When you are at 2000 meters in the Alps, it's difficult to find an Internet connection.
Or you don't have the time
(especially if you have a big account). And you don't want to restart the game for one or two weeks of holidays. Without the winter holidays context, everybody can have the need to make a break, for his job or personal reasons. It's not good to have that feeling to be trapped. This is maybe the
first priority. The first thing that discourages big players as small players.
A cooperation system is expected. I don't know if it will resolve the problem, but it's important to insist on the expectation of the players about this feature.
2. Minimap : Maybe that is not the subject. But, I cannot talk about improvements without all there essential things. It's not a problem only for the big accounts but they are affected too... Everyone lose time because we don't have a clickable minimap to move quickly. You cannot play to the game if you don't have a good vision too. How a tribe and a player can organize themselves without a global view ? When you have a big account with distant villages, you spend a lot of time dragging the map
(especially when the map freeze ).
A minimap
(in a pop-in screen on all the width) with small colors tiles to have a better view and navigation
(when you drag the minimap, the map follows behind the pop-in).
3. Internal clock : The time in the game is not the server time but the time of our own machine. We have players in the whole world. 6 hours separate our Canadian frenchspeakers friends to us, for example. And even in the same time zone, the time of each machine is not precisely the same. You can have more or less few seconds or minutes. It's horrible to coordinate operations when you don't have the same clock. And more you have villages, and bigger are military operations between players and more this inaccuracy is impacting. We spend to much time with this kind of details. We have to install the same clock, or asking everyone about that, etc. Not easily at all.
4. Automatization : As I said in introduction, Presets are automatical stuff... When you have 2 or 3 villages, that can be a pleasure to go in each village. But, when you have a lot of villages, how you do ? The morning, before going to work or school... You have to open Academy and, after that, HQ, Barrack and Tavern for each village. If you build your buildings and recruit your units and your spies, maybe 18s by village with hotkeys. If you have 100 villages, you spend 30 minutes just for these basic actions. And, you have to farm barbarian villages... And, you don't have the time to talk to your tribe or do anything else. The 1st rank player on the Alnwick french world, opened 6 months ago, have 234 villages. I don't know how many months or years a world is opened on TW2 ? But it's a problem. It's difficult now so how they will do in the future ?
Some features can be necessary for the big accounts :
-
Mass recruitment for units : we can create models and the mass recruitment system take the orders. Or just a simple version : a table and each line is a village and you can recruit your units in each line quickly and see all the units are recruiting or already recruited for each village. That could be include a tab for the spies because is the same problem. You have different levels of automatizations.
-
Construction plans : same thing for buildings.
-
System of groups : an automatical system of groups could be awesome. It's just more simple... You give some conditions and the system can attribute the village to a group. It's not an important action but it's boring to actualize all his groups. So, it's just to have an usefull function, not just a static flag.
-
Resources balancer : a system to use markets and automatically distribute resources between nearby villages, villages in the same group or all the villages, etc.
5. Overviews & Cie :
A) 'Active village' button in the 'Villages' overview :
Overviews > Villages
Use arrows is too long and use the map requires a search for the distant villages.