Sabotage Feature

[DeletedUser2139]

@Samuri 4 life- i had raised the same points and gave the same advice as you at the beginning of this post.

Only one aspect worries me about sabotage and made me open to find improvement in the sabotage feature.

The tribe leaders- they will be the target of sabotage and a leader can not win a war without his villages and fighting first in line.

As it is the leaders are target for attacks anyway but they can do something about it.

Of course the leader mates can attack and send spies to kill the enemy spies but the leader will have to face a double attack on him, by troops and by spies.


I am worried that in the future the wars will be more about decapitating the enemy tribe than who conquered the most villages.


I do not want a passive solution of improvement like spies support from the tribe, I want an active solution as activating a counter sabotage measure in 5 minutes after sabotage, or a 24 hour protection that can be earned by some achievement.

​And making the cost of sabotage spies as high as a noble does not work in this case because there is no amount of cost that will keep a tribe from attacking the leader of the enemy tribe.

 

[DeletedUser924]

The only problem is that nothing in this game is earned. The beginning quest gives free items to get you started but after that you either pay for the items or do without baring the special times gifts are giving for to compensate for a major bug. Events may give you these things but i doubt any events will be held in this game for quite some time. and I saw a proposal about spying 100 times would this be a one time thing or for every hundred times you spy? either way one major flaw still stand those spamming the sabotage would have these items but those who are hit would lose their spies to fast to be gaining the advantage thus it would not accomplish your goal. I don't think counter sabotage is the answer either. I feel if any improvement should be made to the system it would be achieved by adjusting the formula for success. It is inconceivable that the spy would be victorious 100% of the time just because a village has no spies. when trying to sabotage a building in a village full of people the odds are much greater that one of the soldiers or civilians in the village would notice the suspicious activity and confront the saboteur. Perhaps a confrontation would cause this spy to detonate in the streets damaging nothing more than a road. And as roads are not a structure controlled by us in this game it would be fixed by the villages instantaneously. Any number of contingencies could occur so I say why not make it so the success rate is 45% in an empty village and drops a set percentage per number of spies available bottoming out at 20%?

 

[Barbiearian]

I hear a lot of of talk about how you can spam sabotage but they have to rebuild each time they do and if you rebuild your spies you have a greater chance of defending i'm sorry but i refuse to believe you can level a village in hours once you acount for rebuilding spies and failed missions do to the enemy rebuilding spies it would take days at best.

Next a player who used only thieves guild would be at a great disadvantage in battle and would be open to a nasty counter attack. you use your 5 spies to sabotage me i'll use the berserkers to attack you. when you think i am week i'll use the tredbuchets to destroy your rams my walls will not fall easily. I find that having few villages with hall of orders is best.

.

Approximately 200 hits will take a city to total useless rubble - 100 hits renders it out of action for quite some time. Lets say each player has 5 thief guilds - thats 25 hits per player - you only need to send a couple of normal spy attempts to remove all defending spies, knowing that he cannot recruit another spy for at least 30 mins - that gives you almost 100% sabotage success rate. So you need 8 players to take down a city to nothing. Thats hours - not days my friend. Add to that, the fact that spies are fast travelling, you have zero warning they are hitting, you cannot support each other - its not brain surgery to work it out And if you can explain how you rebuild your spies with no HQ, no warehouse, no tavern, please share it with me, as I would like to learn this trick too.

You wont get a chance to use your trebuchets - why do they need to attack your city when its go almost zero score?

Then you can wait 24 hours - and the offense spies are recruited again - situation repeated.

Of course, perhaps the real reasoning behind this, is crowns I guess. After all - why remove a feature that enables people to nuke cities with no planning, little losses and that can be repeated day after day. What better way is there to get people to use crowns to instantly rebuild?

And the best part of all - you know that even if the player you are hitting is online - they can do absolutely nothing about it

 

[DeletedUser1993]

i send about 100 sabotages daily, that is a village down each day. and soon i will be able to send twice that number.
however, even though this feature gives me advantage, i don't like it as it is unbalanced.

one easy (or so it seems to me) way to balance is to take the word "chance" out and put the word "rate" in the spy actions.
in a similar way with the normal troops, to come up with some calculation, and not a toss of the coin, for successful action. right now one of the reasons why it's so easy to use the sabotages is that it is too easy to clear the home spies first. even if the target villlage has a full set of 5 spies, those can be killed with a single spy. this is ridiculous.
part of the equation could be the number of defending and attacking spies, another part could be the level of the tavern, faith could also be brought in, or level of the hall of orders. anything reasonable that would boost defense, just like the troops defense is being boosted by a number of factors. to clear a village that only has own defense troops, but up to the max farm place, you will need at least 2 full nukes. why then not follow the same or similar pattern with the spy wars? i understand this will make it similar to the fighting feature, but why not? thus, if a village has 5 spies inside those five spies should survive for long enough to make the clearing of the village harder. and then the saboteurs will not be successful
and also the various spy actions could be fixed rated, and not decided completely and only by chance. let's say the spies "attack" at 100% strength when spying on buildings, at something like 80% when spying for troops, and 50% when sabotaging
even morale could be brought in, so players like me don't overuse this feature against players with less villages

with all the above said, i see this feature as part of the game, and until it's removed or modified i will use it and use it and use it

 

[Barbiearian]

Well said Rusty - if its part of the game, then people would be mad to not use it. Its not the players fault that something so clearly screwed is introduced. Of course, as more and more players learn of this tactic and use it, and the smaller players realise that they can be wiped out with no possibility of defence, I guess they'll be checking out Crownofthegods which is due to start beta in next week or two. Thats been written by players who actually play these games (LOU), so, maybe it will be better. Remains to be seen - but I'm guessing they dont have a feature that allows 500K players to wipe out 5K players with no penalty.

 

[.ExplosiveMinds.]

Today I have been attacked with more than 200 spies.. Only on two villages. Tell me how you can protect yourself to that kind om attacks? This feature is just f***** *p. This made me angry, I liked the game (It has a lot of errors and problems what you not expect for a game you have been waiting for more than a year.) but things like this just destroy the whole experience to fight on a equaly level. If you defend well and make some good counter attacks you can survive. But know your army can as good as you want if they destroy your whole village the army isn't very efficient.. There is in my eyes no upgrade possible to avoid this kind of abuse of sabotage attacks.. I just hate it how the developers can destroy such a good game... I am very sorry but I don't like to play a game where you can't protect yourself.. They should know that before they launched the game? More than a year and then you deliver a game like this? I thought you were better than that. Sorry if I overestimate you guys..

This isn't the game I liked.. This isn't the game other players liked.. I hope you do something about it.. Now it is just crap.. I can't say it otherwise..

(English isn't my mother language so there are certainly faults in it. My apologize.)

 

[DeletedUser924]

Interesting how you apologize for your grammar errors while your whole message insulting the game makers. You are obviously ignorant about the work that goes into a game like this. You knew when you signed up for beta you were not playing a game you were testing its raw creation for bugs and imbalances. yet you seem to think this game was supposed to be perfected before it was tested. I personally don't find a problem with the feature the problem is with the strong picking on the week. if you have only 2 villages and they had at maximum 40 the seriously what chance in hell did you stand?

 

[DeletedUser924]

i send about 100 sabotages daily, that is a village down each day. and soon i will be able to send twice that number.
however, even though this feature gives me advantage, i don't like it as it is unbalanced.

one easy (or so it seems to me) way to balance is to take the word "chance" out and put the word "rate" in the spy actions.
in a similar way with the normal troops, to come up with some calculation, and not a toss of the coin, for successful action. right now one of the reasons why it's so easy to use the sabotages is that it is too easy to clear the home spies first. even if the target villlage has a full set of 5 spies, those can be killed with a single spy. this is ridiculous.
part of the equation could be the number of defending and attacking spies, another part could be the level of the tavern, faith could also be brought in, or level of the hall of orders. anything reasonable that would boost defense, just like the troops defense is being boosted by a number of factors. to clear a village that only has own defense troops, but up to the max farm place, you will need at least 2 full nukes. why then not follow the same or similar pattern with the spy wars? i understand this will make it similar to the fighting feature, but why not? thus, if a village has 5 spies inside those five spies should survive for long enough to make the clearing of the village harder. and then the saboteurs will not be successful
and also the various spy actions could be fixed rated, and not decided completely and only by chance. let's say the spies "attack" at 100% strength when spying on buildings, at something like 80% when spying for troops, and 50% when sabotaging
even morale could be brought in, so players like me don't overuse this feature against players with less villages

with all the above said, i see this feature as part of the game, and until it's removed or modified i will use it and use it and use it

read my post two posts above yours. its similar to yours but breaks the ratio down even farther to display how the presence of the spies in the village could render the success rate down to as much as a quarter of the times.

 

[gencyde1]

Well - as you might all notice by now - THEY know that it is quite unbalance - It is either they know of it and are trying to figure out a good balance (might as well disable the feature while doing so) OR they are keeping it for the sake of "experimenting" with it.

The only "good" side I see is that it forces the hands of Sabotage Recipients - to either do an offensive asap or suffer further sabotages. In the end, it will just be a Sabotage Trench war all over the places.

 

[DeletedUser924]

I'm no expert but it might not be as simply as disabling the feature. If they disable the feature depending on how closely the line of code interacts with other features of the HoO it could affect the academy reduction cost or have other side effects. to reiterate this is beta and as we are here to test features the negative effects of the features to a players gaming experience is not the high priority. if you want to play the game as a serious game wait for the final version to be released when beta both open and closed are over.

 

[Barbiearian]

I'm no expert but it might not be as simply as disabling the feature. If they disable the feature depending on how closely the line of code interacts with other features of the HoO it could affect the academy reduction cost or have other side effects. to reiterate this is beta and as we are here to test features the negative effects of the features to a players gaming experience is not the high priority. if you want to play the game as a serious game wait for the final version to be released when beta both open and closed are over.

Lol - the negative effects of the features to a gaming experience is the highest priority. That is the purpose of a Beta. Why is it, whenever someone who is 'beta testing' and points out something that needs to be improved, you get players saying people shouldn't point out the problems because it is a Beta? If we all followed your logic, then the feature would make it to the final game - and by that time, too late. Bear in mind we are talking about a company with 10 years, 50 million registered users from TW1 - you would have thought they would have a better idea how to make a balanced game by now.

 

[DeletedUser1993]

the feature already is on the regular servers. the updates here and there are often made at the same time

 

[DeletedUser2258]

if you have only 2 villages and they had at maximum 40 the seriously what chance in hell did you stand?

Who said that he have 2 villages? He said that the spy attacks hit only 2 of his villages. I personally stopped playing on Alnvick because of this. I am a top 10 BP player although started 2 weeks after the launch but I realized that building a powerful army is useless when a tribe with 20-30 active players decides to mass sabotage you. It's just nonsense seriously. Ofc the developers were aware of how imbalanced this feature was when more and more people complained, and their answer was introducing the Order's reset (cost 70 crowns) which encourages people to build even more thieves guild. At that point I lost all my interest in this game. So I am asking people who are sending dozens or hundreds of these attacks per day what is the enjoyment of this? Where is the satisfaction of a well planed attack? Where is the strategy factor? I don't see any. All you need to do is to send those dummy spies one by one on a defenseless target. Seriously is this the purpose of a strategy called wargame?

 

[DeletedUser1993]

there is absolutely no enjoyment, not for me at least. as you can see from my previous post - i want this feature balanced, as it simply kills the game
the real balance that this feature breaks is the balance between paying and non-paying players. the way it is set up now can chase off the non-paying players but encourages the paying players to use more crowns for instant rebuilding. on alnwick i had one attack on a player and i destroyed his church three times in a matter of a couple of hours. he simply kept spending. he was even rebuilding minor staff that got damaged. it appears that's what the game crew wants.
free games need free players, not only customers who spend their money. but who am i to judge innogames' business model...

 

[DeletedUser2258]

The thing is that those paying players who get mass sabotaged and use crowns to insta rebuild will realize that they will run out of money very fast, bec the spies costs a few thousand resources while a damaged high level building cost is more than 100 crowns plus the resources. So if I send only my 3 cheapest spies from a village which damages 3 buildings that could be a cost of 500 crowns for the defender to instabuild. Note that we are talking about 1 attacker village not 10 or 100. Sure this is a best case scenario but when you are hitting 6k+ point villages it could easily happen. So to sum up that would be ~ 20k resources lost from the attackers part and 500 crowns plus the few hundred thousands resources on the defender's part. The question is how long one can resist even if he spends crowns to instabuild? The result will be that ultimately he will give up and leave the game, because noone is that stupid to spend thousands of crowns just to see that he must do that day after day after day for nothing.

 

[DeletedUser40]

the feature already is on the regular servers. the updates here and there are often made at the same time

Not true. The updates come to the beta server a week before regular servers.

---

We are monitoring this feature closely and have come with some concepts to change how the feature works.
I should remind everyone that we are still in a beta phase, and there might be features that are off / unbalanced, but we are monitoring all feedback, input, ideas and bug reports.

 

[.ExplosiveMinds.]

Interesting how you apologize for your grammar errors while your whole message insulting the game makers. You are obviously ignorant about the work that goes into a game like this. You knew when you signed up for beta you were not playing a game you were testing its raw creation for bugs and imbalances. yet you seem to think this game was supposed to be perfected before it was tested. I personally don't find a problem with the feature the problem is with the strong picking on the week. if you have only 2 villages and they had at maximum 40 the seriously what chance in hell did you stand?

I have also 40 villages. My point is that this feature is not been deactivated.. They had plenty of update moments so they could do it I guess.. But now the whole experience of the game is dissapeared. I made just my point clear and maybe I wasn't that polite but you understand that things like this make you powerless to react. Normally there is always a manner to defend yourself, it can ask a ot of time (like snipen/support timing) but these things made the game what is was. Now they just blow it off and destroy there beautiful game by this sabotage spies.. They could now it in the beginning. This gives the feeling the developers do not play the game by thereselfs.. But oke I made my point clear. So we wait for some adjustments..

 

[.ExplosiveMinds.]

Who said that he have 2 villages? He said that the spy attacks hit only 2 of his villages. I personally stopped playing on Alnvick because of this. I am a top 10 BP player although started 2 weeks after the launch but I realized that building a powerful army is useless when a tribe with 20-30 active players decides to mass sabotage you. It's just nonsense seriously. Ofc the developers were aware of how imbalanced this feature was when more and more people complained, and their answer was introducing the Order's reset (cost 70 crowns) which encourages people to build even more thieves guild. At that point I lost all my interest in this game. So I am asking people who are sending dozens or hundreds of these attacks per day what is the enjoyment of this? Where is the satisfaction of a well planed attack? Where is the strategy factor? I don't see any. All you need to do is to send those dummy spies one by one on a defenseless target. Seriously is this the purpose of a strategy called wargame?

Thanks, I am a top 25 player on Beta world. So I know the drill and my satisfaction is gone.. They just destroyed the game so I am thinking to leave this game. It is not because this is a Bete and I can't handle this testings. It is the point that the developers no not listen.. The normal worlds are already open and they deliver the game as it is in the Beta.. Then you no not need a Beta if you barely listen to the experienced players.. But I make my own conclusions..

 

[.ExplosiveMinds.]

there is absolutely no enjoyment, not for me at least. as you can see from my previous post - i want this feature balanced, as it simply kills the game
the real balance that this feature breaks is the balance between paying and non-paying players. the way it is set up now can chase off the non-paying players but encourages the paying players to use more crowns for instant rebuilding. on alnwick i had one attack on a player and i destroyed his church three times in a matter of a couple of hours. he simply kept spending. he was even rebuilding minor staff that got damaged. it appears that's what the game crew wants.
free games need free players, not only customers who spend their money. but who am i to judge innogames' business model...

Strange that I receive 200 sabotage spies from your account.. If you said yourself that there is no enjoyment about this?

 

[Barbiearian]

Strange that I receive 200 sabotage spies from your account.. If you said yourself that there is no enjoyment about this?

LOL - you can't moan at Rusty for using the part of the game - he knows if he doesn't do it to others, they will do it to him. So, even though he clearly says he doesn't like the feature, he has no choice but to use it.

I personally don't find a problem with the feature the problem is with the strong picking on the week. if you have only 2 villages and they had at maximum 40 the seriously what chance in hell did you stand?

Samuri - what drugs are you taking. You seriously want a game where players with 1 million score can wipe out everyone with 10K score after they have just started? You'll have fun with that - playing with a dwindling member set that ends up killing the game entirely.

Yes - big alliances who play well should be able to kill smaller alliances - but, if the game is simply about who has the most members, or who spends the most money, people are not stupid enough to carry on playing. Do you really want a tribal wars game that has one alliance?

Any other strategy type game has provisions in it to allow for smaller alliances to compete. They might not be able to win - but definitely compete (and if very skilled - can win too). I don't normally wish ill on others, but I really hope someone like Rusty and his friends send sabotage attacks on you. Lets see how you feel about the feature, the devs and the game, when you go from 200K score or whatever you have, to 30 cities all worth 50 score overnight. You wouldn't even be able to rebuild, coz you cannot abandon a city - and if you dare to get over 100 score - they will just send sabotages again. And no, you cant ask people to help - because of many reasons discussed. I suppose your solution is to join the biggest alliance - well enjoy the one alliance game - its not for me. I've stopped playing because of this feature - but thats coz I can see farther ahead than some I guess.