SAVE Evony! (a battle engine review)
Been reading for a while the battles posts on the forum and thought I might throw my 2 cents as well.
DEFENSE IS OVERPOWERED?
No doubt about it! Yes! People are complaining about the 100/125k limitation on the troops you can send in the attack but mostly about the range bonus that a defender gets from the walls.
Cities can pretty easy reach a level where is almost impossible to get conquered, unless a lot of attackers gang up on you, plan this way ahead and you are offline. Not good for the medium-endgame stages! The game gets boring, players leave, evony loses money.
SHOULD DEFENSE BE OVERPOWERED?
Let's look at the game from a NOT so hardcore, uber active defender perspective. Do you agree with me that this type of player makes the bulk of the evony players on the servers? And I believe is safe to assume that these players represent the main source of evony's income ...
For this type of player, building a city takes weeks and months and loosing it in 2 hours to any attacker that can muster let's say only x2 or x3 of his troops count would be very unfair. And training is pretty fast (doesn't take months) in evony so getting those troops is not a big deal. It's OK to loose troops fast, it's not OK to lose cities that fast. Conclusion? Players get frustrated, players leave, evony loses money.
WHAT SHOULD CHANGE?
My first impulse was to say "Change everything!" ... from battle engine to the building and researching times.
But an easier solution might be a few changes to address just the 2 situations described above. The changes would have to be done in the same time and would involve:
a) dwarfing the defense bonuses (aka give attackers a chance to actually win the battle). Example: change the range bonus for the walls and/or increase the limit of troops for attackers.
b) make cities harder to conquer (aka give defenders a chance to at least save the cities from conquering). Example: extend the time period when loyalty reaches 15 and drops by itself to 12 hours by either extending the 6 minutes tick or by extending the period to start at 70-80 loyalty.
SUMMARY:
I believe that by making attacks against troops easier BUT making cities harder to conquer the game will address the current complaints regarding the battle engine for defense.
Your thoughts?