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Offence Defense Imbalance

Offence Defense Imbalance

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BiohazarDModerator
Sep 20, 2016, 20:3809/20/16
10/04/13
3759

Alyona Kolomiitseva said:


I've seen different posts about Offense-Defense balance. 

Offenders say this game is for defenders, they have all those Defense boosts in Castles, in Beacons. No real opportunity to overwhelm Defense with current attack limits.

Defenders say Offense is much stronger for the same cost, the bank payout favours Offence, they have Joint attacks, etc.

From this point it looks like it's well-balanced. Of course if you play on one side, you can see all cons of your situation and all pros of your rival's situation. But in fact game balance is considered by several departments, it's analyzed and calculated. 

It's not accidental. And I really doubt our game balance will be changed in the near future. As soon as there are some real reasons for changes which can be proven mathematically, our devs will make their step.

It's not an offenders vs defenders thing, it's more a leagues vs individual players thing.  If all you have to defend is your castle, and you have level 5 walls, then defense seems way better (the introduction of fireballs has mostly nullified this).  But for most players, who want to participate in league activities such as fortresses and beacons, then offense has a massive advantage. 

example:  If you hit a beacon with 3 times as much offense as the defense in the beacon, you'll kill 1.34x as much defense as you lose in offense.  This has already more than made up for the 25% bonus on a level 5 beacon.  Several leagues now have the ability to do a joint attack with over 1 billion offense, meaning that any beacon under 300 million defense can be easily overwhelmed. 

This is the internet, you can find people saying just about anything.  But the vast majority of players who are experienced in the game agree that it is highly skewed towards offense, and the math seems to support this. 

A simple option would be to increase the defense bonus provided by a beacon (perhaps to 15% per level, for a max of 75% at level 5) and add a 2.5% defense bonus to fortress for each upgrade level, for a max of 50% at level 20.  Deeper game changes would be beneficial, but in the short term this would dramatically improve game balance. 
Sep 21, 2016, 04:5309/21/16
08/03/14
1364

yeah, but with 1.5 billion (and growing) hammers, beacons are pointless.


i think the emperors have pointed out that any and every beacon is defeatable.  If a league wants your beacon, why defend it.  You are just going to lose that defense in there and will take 3 years to build it back.


on that same line of thinking, what do you do with that defense if you arent putting it in a beacon?   no one fights at castles any more, again, defense is going to lose. So just park it in a catacomb?



maybe fortresses, but then again, with no safe zone, that seems a waste as well. in order to updgrade you  have to take down same level fortresses. 



with the offense cap on fortress attacks, all one has to do is stuff the fortress to the gills with the beacon defense you arent using and it makes attacking a fortress pointless.


if everyone does that, then how are you going to knock a fortress down a level to increase yours?



you have just rendered both features of the game useless.   Building defense is pointless.
Sep 21, 2016, 05:0309/21/16
07/25/15
2634
IronApex Turok said:

yeah, but with 1.5 billion (and growing) hammers, beacons are pointless.


i think the emperors have pointed out that any and every beacon is defeatable.  If a league wants your beacon, why defend it.  You are just going to lose that defense in there and will take 3 years to build it back.


on that same line of thinking, what do you do with that defense if you arent putting it in a beacon?   no one fights at castles any more, again, defense is going to lose. So just park it in a catacomb?



maybe fortresses, but then again, with no safe zone, that seems a waste as well. in order to updgrade you  have to take down same level fortresses. 



with the offense cap on fortress attacks, all one has to do is stuff the fortress to the gills with the beacon defense you arent using and it makes attacking a fortress pointless.


if everyone does that, then how are you going to knock a fortress down a level to increase yours?



you have just rendered both features of the game useless.   Building defense is pointless.
Well, and the lovely feature we can blame all this on is, ability to buy units with no limits what so ever (other than your soruce of real world cash). Maybe Plarium will see this is a great success but how it looks like from our side, or at least mine, is that the game is infected with cancer and as of late its spreading with faster rate.
Sep 21, 2016, 05:4009/21/16
08/03/14
1364
you know what cancer leads too....
Sep 21, 2016, 05:4509/21/16
01/11/16
144

Dont you think overpowered offense or defense is highly overrated in this game?

For an example you can have thousands of dragons and lose more then really needed to when a battle or war. As your loses are based on percentages only.

So people who spend all this money on thousands of dragons not to bright and not sure why ppl waste all this money.

Alyona KolomiitsevaCommunity Manager
Sep 21, 2016, 09:1809/21/16
09/17/15
8278
If any of you has some more points to add to the topic, please share. Maybe you have some calculations, or some examples from your own experience.
Sep 21, 2016, 10:0309/21/16
Sep 21, 2016, 10:06(edited)
06/22/14
448

I think that Plarium made what it wanted. It took pretty much amount of RL money, and lived for more than 2 years with average quality game.

Lack of similar good games on internet is probably one of important factor.

In meantime, Plarium had hence with golden eggs.

Time of golden eggs is past. Now we will see how Plarium will feed hence. Will it die soon?

There is no cure for this game, because it is made with so many (wrong) contradictory features.


  • League oriented game where your troops can't get bonuses from mate's castle, 
  • Differences between usability of your def troops inside castle, beacon and fortress, 
  • Disbalance between coiners and non-coiners in sense of awards for spending hours in the game 
  • Too long recovering after any battle killed wishes for fights 
  • Rule about only one castle, which is allowed to be disrespected, made fool of every honored player
  • One game forever allowed big coiners to took top place forever. At same time, every new non coiner has no any chance in the game
  • Strategy game where you cant plan anything on long terms because Plarium could change any mechanics in the game. Hidden logic of mechanics just made new problems in planning

There are more, but all of this is simple wasting time. Plarium is satisfied with owns game and too conceited to hear any real suggestion.

What we want/suggest is totally different game, and Plarium only could make new one (I doubt in that), but this is so ruined that even if it wanted to change it is no longer possible.

We only can enjoy while game being on alive.


EDIT: I just saw new splash screen in the game. Someone wasted own time for this. That's talk so much about Plarium, us, forum, ... whatever. Terrible!

Sep 21, 2016, 16:0509/21/16
Sep 21, 2016, 16:10(edited)
01/26/15
488

you only need to activate 3 x 50% boosts when attacking a beacon but to defend one you would need a whole league to activate there 50% boosts ............need i say more ?


Edit: i wish to add any boosts crate an imbalance always yielding offense advantage in terms of Beacons that is

Sep 21, 2016, 19:5109/21/16
12/18/14
1835

adding additional defense bonuses would balance things out


split rewards on battle grounds make it hard for anyone who is trying to improve their defensive army, if you play defense bg to improve your defense stats and are rewarded with a split of offense and defense troops you are actually losing defense

Sep 22, 2016, 03:0409/22/16
311

Gadheras said:



"alexander wept for there were no more worlds to conquer"  Life on top not necessary any more fun when whats left is just to steam roll anything in their way. So in the end its like "gg guys you won, now lets find something else to play". Who got the biggest regrets after something like that? the ones who spent a fortune maybe. But at least they had their 15 minutes of fame -)







perhaps it is the player who spent over a year @ 3 hrs per day, who then realized they still don't have enough power for 1 minute of fame let alone 15 minutes.  that may be the player with the most regrets.  you get what you pay for.  but the gap is just too extreme for a game.





BiohazarDModerator
Sep 22, 2016, 08:4409/22/16
10/04/13
3759

Alyona Kolomiitseva said:


If any of you has some more points to add to the topic, please share. Maybe you have some calculations, or some examples from your own experience.

Here are some numbers:


-cost for buying troops using most efficient known method


offense:  1mil/7620 sapphires  (with 50% and max dragon stone, 25% hero item bonus, level 10 fortress)


defense: 1mil/8930 sapphires (with 50%, without dragon stone, 25% hero item bonus, level 10 fortress)


So you get about 17% more for same price with offense.  I assumed that the defender would not have dragon stone defense boost active, because they would not know when attack would come, and there is a limit to how many activators you can get, so it's impossible to run it constantly even with coining.


-cost for buying troops straight from black market (same player bonuses as before)


offense: 1mil/37398 sapphires

defense: 1mil/52024 sapphires


So with this method you get about 39% more for same price with offense vs defense.


So there isn't a huge difference in the cost of building the same size armies.  The problem comes from the fact that the attacker can send all their troops at one target at a time, while the defender usually has to protect lots of targets at once.


Some more numbers:


Buying the packages that offer a 60% discount on $330 worth of sapphires (the common ones for people who spend money regularly), for $1000 usd you can get around 534800 sapphires.  Throw in an extra $10 for the 50% boost, and that can get you 70 million offense or 60 million defense (not including the free units they get from the packages, these add up to an extra 10 mil or so of each) so 80 mil offense and 10 mil defense including the free units.  A good raider who keeps all 4 of their troop queues full 24/7 and knows how to use bgs to exchange troop types can build about 3 million offense or defense per month (we'll assume they don't spend much and therefore don't constantly run the 50% boost).


This means a league of 150 active members can build 450 million defense per month if they get every member to focus on nothing but building defense all month.  Three coiners spending $5000 each can buy 400 mil * 3 = 1.2 billion offense.  So the entire league will need to build for about 3 months to defend a single beacon against these moderate spenders (and yes $5000 is considered moderate now, there are some who spend far more than that).  Want to get in the top 10 rankings?  You need to hold at least 5-6 beacons, at 3 months each... And that's assuming no members ever pull their defense out to defend against a raid and lose some, or make a mistake in bgs, etc.  So it will probably take much longer. 


Sure, you could just buy a ton of defense to hold the beacons.  But not many people buy defense.  Because defense is boring.  You spend $10,000 or more, get a bunch of troops, then put them in the beacon and never touch them, and most likely nobody hits it because they know it's well defended.  If you bought the same value of offense you get to go around and kill things.


Conclusion:

Defense troops aren't inherently significantly weaker than offense troops.  However, because of the frequent necessity of defending multiple targets resulting in the division of forces, defense troops need to be stronger than offense in order to create a balanced game.  This is especially true when there are people spending thousands of dollars to create massive offense armies, and far fewer (if any) large spenders creating defense. 

Alyona KolomiitsevaCommunity Manager
Sep 22, 2016, 09:2609/22/16
Sep 22, 2016, 09:26(edited)
09/17/15
8278

Thanks, Biohazard! That will be really helpful.

I just have one question. What about Defense Bonuses on Beacons and Castles? They make Defense way more effective. Defense doesn't have such boosts only on Hamlets, League Fortresses. Should we take this bonus into account?

And one more thing I guess. While defending a Fortress or a Beacon, there are 100+ defenders (if your League is big enough), but only 1-2-3 attackers at a time. This results in less losses for the defending side, because the Defense in overwhelming. Isn't this balancing the situation somehow?

I just need as many details as possible before talking to devs about this issue.

Sep 22, 2016, 11:5009/22/16
Sep 22, 2016, 11:55(edited)
12/17/14
8

Agreed this is a problem.

Changing the prices, the revive costs so that off and def costs are matched would be a good start. Correcting the BG split payouts to work on power or resource to give true splits would be the big one though.
BiohazarDModerator
Sep 22, 2016, 17:5509/22/16
10/04/13
3759

Alyona Kolomiitseva said:


Thanks, Biohazard! That will be really helpful.

I just have one question. What about Defense Bonuses on Beacons and Castles? They make Defense way more effective. Defense doesn't have such boosts only on Hamlets, League Fortresses. Should we take this bonus into account?

And one more thing I guess. While defending a Fortress or a Beacon, there are 100+ defenders (if your League is big enough), but only 1-2-3 attackers at a time. This results in less losses for the defending side, because the Defense in overwhelming. Isn't this balancing the situation somehow?

I just need as many details as possible before talking to devs about this issue.

The defense bonus on castles can certainly be significant, and is the reason why many people just fireball castles instead of attacking them.  As for the beacon bonus, the fact that it is a 25% boost to the base defense value of the units means that the effective boost is far less.  For a high level player, they can attain a multiplier on their defense of about 2.4 (with 50% bonus and hero items, not counting dragon stone), and the 25% beacon bonus changes that to 2.4+0.25=2.65, for an effective bonus of 10.4% on a level 5 beacon.  This makes some difference, but not nearly enough to compensate for the other factors I mentioned. 

Yes, there can be up to 160 defenders in a league, but their defense is usually split over a fortress, multiple beacons, their castles, and probably some hamlets or settlements etc.  Whereas the attackers are usually the 3 biggest players in a league, attacking with 100% of their offense on a single target. 

So if league A has an average defense per member of 20 million and 8 beacons plus a fortress, with players contributing an average of 60% of their total defense to the beacon/fortress defenses at any given time, each beacon will have around 213 million defense on it (230-250 with beacon bonus on a level 5).  If league B has an average of 20 million offense per member, but a high standard deviation, they could easily have several dozen people with 1-2 million offense, a bunch more with 3-4 million, and the top 3 people in the league with 300-400 million.  So even though a look at the total league stats would imply that they can send 20*3= 60 million offense in an attack, using the top 3 people they can actually send 900-1200 million offense, enough to overwhelm each of league A's beacons by a factor of over 4 to 1, resulting in the defender taking significantly higher losses than the attacker. 
Sep 22, 2016, 20:5509/22/16
11/04/14
8

The castle defense bonus is substantial, it can increase defensive strength by at least 3.5 times. The beacon defense bonus of 5% per level is puny.


The strategic fact that offense can choose when and where to attack means that defense actually needs to be much greater than offense in total. The unfortunate Unforgiven Kings lost nine beacons and probably in excess of 300 million in defense in one set of blitz attacks by an offensive hammer somewhere in the range of 800 million. Medieval castles were so difficult to take because the walls were an enormous force multiplier, so the offensive advantage of mobility and choice of target was lessened.


Imagine two leagues in a war, each with a billion offense and a billion defense. If there isn't a significant force multiplier for defense, neither side could defend any point because the defense is scattered over 160 castles, a fortress, and some number of beacons, while offense can be concentrated at just one place.


If you can't reasonably defend something, then no one will bother to try to defend.

Alyona KolomiitsevaCommunity Manager
Sep 23, 2016, 08:0009/23/16
09/17/15
8278
Thanks for details, guys! Now I have something to pass to devs 
Sep 23, 2016, 12:0609/23/16
03/08/15
43

The game in terms of offense and defense is certainly balanced.


Yes +50% did wack this balance out a bit and should be removed.


ridiculous castle defense bonus and castle reviving just compensated for the fireball strategy (so i would consider this balanced)


Beacons however are somewhat unbalanced and this has came about because a certain league decided to make a pay-pal account to fund their league hammer. Simple would be to limit how much a player can revive on a 75% discount, if you are buying more then 20M of revives in the infirmary during a 75% revive which happens once a month something is seriously wrong. A league using a pay-pal account would under that only be able to buy 60M a month (not including boost building pathfinders) This would still mean it would take them a year to build a 1B hammer which would somewhat more balance. Also beacons should be force limit restricted. We know if updates like this would happen certain coining leagues would still find a way around it (as i already know these ways) but it would be a good step in the way to make it that leagues do not need 100's of millions on a beacon to not fear being overwhelmed significantly.


Seige rules v raid mechanics are very balanced, risk v return, otherwise you would only send enough to kill 51% on a beacon every-time (which in itself wouldn't be a dumb strategy if you wanted the beacon)
Alyona KolomiitsevaCommunity Manager
Sep 26, 2016, 09:1109/26/16
09/17/15
8278

Timmyboy said:


certain league decided to make a pay-pal account to fund their league hammer. 

Didn't know that...

As for your suggestion to set limits for 75% discounts, I'll pass this idea to devs.
Sep 26, 2016, 15:4909/26/16
Sep 26, 2016, 16:06(edited)
12/13/14
1282

Beacons have no attack limits in Stormfall, but have 300,000 limit in pirate game @ plarium.com and is only 100,000 on kabam server?

Where is the balance?


I can send 250,000 against a level 2 castle ... but the same limit applies to level 100 castles???


yet can only send 200,000 against a level 8 Fortress???

Level 20 Fort is 500,000
Level Zero Fort is 100,000


So .... who wrote the algorithm for this garbage?


If anyone is playing Sparta, Total Dom etc then I would love to see the figures

Force Limits need a major re-vamp in all plarium games and linking Force to Food Consumption is insane, especially when food has no value in this game. Top players have massive negative food production, but can send starved armies to attack.
An army marches on its stomach, remember?

Sep 26, 2016, 20:1009/26/16
08/03/14
1364

it should be more of a risk to attack than it is to defend. 


when you can swing 1.5 billion hammers and most people are catacombed anyway, why even bother spying.

in the same line of thinking, when a 1.5 billion hammer is swinging about why defend?  


the day to day game as it was designed is pointless. the meta game that DJMoody talked about in another thread is all thats left and that is slowly decaying.



this game, simply, isnt fun. 


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