Feedback on Domination world

[Odin29]

This is the best world.
Best rule set, but like all worlds, very quiet.
And, with a 100 day limit, it is not worth putting much effort into building up.

Players are quitting because it is too quiet.
There has been a very small amount of raiding, but no war anywhere near me.

I see an abundance of empty charters.
Not much need for war when charters are abundant.

Odin29 says there is lots of war.
Maybe I should move to his area.
But, with only 43 days left it is hardly worth the effort.

As for defining winning, I think quests should not count.
Winning should be purely by territory, control of capitals.

Quests should be purely for the prizes/bonuses.
Glory from quests severely undermines the game, making it farmerville.

I would love to see the level of action that we had during Beta and the First Age on World 1.
Nothing has come close to that since then.

It has been a good farmville game.
But it could be so much more.

You're in House 11, which I believe is a weaker support house for House 6. The major war is between House 16 and House 6, and of course all of their allies. If you want to fight, you're naturally on the side of House 6, so start attacking House 16 and it's allies. You'll get plenty of action, trust me . Or heck, just join up with House 16's allies and fight House 6, you're dead center of their territory.. you'd get a lot of action lol.

[metroman]

I would recommend for future Worlds as this one was, remove some of the Village Charters in the Parishes and increase the Gold Tax....there's too many empty Charters around that no one ever takes, and there are some Parishes where no one is even in them...and if someone is in one, they are inactive...nice to steal Flags, but that's not even needed to do unless it's a Quest.

[Odin29]

I would recommend for future Worlds as this one was, remove some of the Village Charters in the Parishes and increase the Gold Tax....there's too many empty Charters around that no one ever takes, and there are some Parishes where no one is even in them...and if someone is in one, they are inactive...nice to steal Flags, but that's not even needed to do unless it's a Quest.

Only 3 charters have spawned per parish so far. I feel like that's a good number. If it's reduced any further then the wait time to convert a captured village definitely needs to be removed.

[metroman]

That's the problem...even if there is three there, no one comes to take any of them, so I've got my village being the only one in the Parishes...next to impossible to even get the Parish strong enough to fight in this 100 day window soon enough to do anything significant when wars begin...difficult to get Guilds created, and near impossible to get enough Gold to get troops (outside of sending them from my village, making me more threatened from other attacks on me)

[Odin29]

That's the problem...even if there is three there, no one comes to take any of them, so I've got my village being the only one in the Parishes...next to impossible to even get the Parish strong enough to fight in this 100 day window soon enough to do anything significant when wars begin...difficult to get Guilds created, and near impossible to get enough Gold to get troops (outside of sending them from my village, making me more threatened from other attacks on me)

Reducing the number of charters won't help that. You could buy those charters then you would have more villages in the parish to help build it up . Charters are also pretty important strategically in a war zone, especially with no interdict.

[Lord Alacrity]

Nice to see so much useful feedback from players! We are very interested in hearing your comments, critiques, and suggestions regarding this special type of world and we will no doubt incorporate some of these into future special worlds.

[AuKhan]

There are so many empty charters and inactive villages.
This seems to be the case in other worlds as well.

The problem is not too many charters, but too few active players.
There simply are not enough players in the game for the size of the map.

A smaller map would be more dynamic, and more contested.

I would guess that a map about 1/2 the current size would work well.
Maybe an Ireland only world, or create a fictional land with a mix of islands and a large land mass.

[Teutons]

Hello,

reading through the feedback/comments here, I think Odin's were very good.

I came to this world w/ not much optimism or expectations, & w/ more of let's see what Domination gameplay is about & from being completely bored in the "Dead World" known as World#8.

After taking a slow, & wait & see approach I hooked up w/ H6 & moved up to Scotland & as time went on, got a better grasp of the gameplay & too be honest I prefer this type of world to the rest.

Like some have mentioned here, I won't go back to the regular world gameplay after playing Domination.

some suggestions:

1) Maybe expand the Faction capacity from 20 to 30?

2) Add new or tweak current quests for Domination? for instance completing a normally hard quest like "raid 100 flags" is very easy in domination due to how quickly the flags spawn compared to reg worlds. Certain quests appear too easy or useless in this world compared to reg. So either introduce new quests for "Dom" or tweak current ones.

3) Tweaking/fixing the battle AI. This gameplay when attk castles is still too much of a crap shoot & hoping that your troops don't act stupid. Too many times when I'm about to attk, I setup my troop formations in front of openings from previous attks on the castle & when I view the battle report I see most of the troops don't march forward through that opening I placed them in front of, instead they start to march around to where the castle gatehouse is, getting slaughtered by arrows the whole time & ruining the strategy.

Maybe putting in a feature where we can highlight the infantry troops (pike/swordsmen) & aiming their march/movement to a specific area, sort of like how we get the option (green circle) when aiming captain tactics & catapults.

4) More customizations! w/ our avatars & shields. Being able to add more personal touch to our avatars/shields is nice small touch.

[Kheva]

First of all I would like to say that I completely agree with Odin, also I do agree that the map may be slightly larger than is needed. Though I do feel that much of the world is active. Then again I am in House 16 and am located in Ireland, so things have been very active lately with House 6 invading.

I have seen one potential change and while it is not huge, it could present some new game play dynamics. With monking, the only real gain in this world not related directly to questing would be voting. While blessings and inquisition do play key roles in some situations, with the lack of interdiction in this world, absolve and excommunication seem solely to stop people from voting, which I agree is definitely important. What I would like to see though is something new in relation to individual villages. In previous worlds interdiction was great to use when at war, but something like an inquisition that only hits a certain village would give a new aspect to the game, slowing people's army building power. Of course it wouldn't be able to work exactly as inquisition currently does but something like that would be cool as it would give a new aspect to monks in this world in a more "aggressive/defensive" sense than that of solely voting. I imagine that many wouldn't like this idea, but I have thought about it a few times and slowing invaders progress in parishes without hurting your allies also in the parish would be a good addition in my opinion. Maybe this would hurt non-carders more than those that spend money and it would make the game unfair, but I still think if it was tweaked the right way and only lasted a certain time and cost a good amount more faith it would work.

One other item that I have noticed is that of faith production, players with 20+ villages produce so much faith, with no real purpose, that eventually it just becomes an afterthought. In previous worlds with Interdiction saving faith was a huge part of the game as Interdicting one village took large amounts of faith to perform. In this world everything only costs 30 or 40 faith at a time and when you are producing upwards of 2000 a day, that is nothing. Maybe increasing the cost to influence votes would help change that.

Last thing is that of house and faction size. While I really do enjoy that houses can only hold a much smaller amount than the previous 480 (I think, I'm bad at math), I think 4 or 5 factions of 20 would be a little more reasonable. Then again, I believe the developers meant for houses to be unable to hold the amount of land that is being held currently by H16 and H6 and instead wanted there to be 4 or 5 houses in contention with each other holding 3 or 4 countries each.

[Odin29]

I completely agree that faith is entirely too plentiful. Faith management is a big part of a normal world, while on this world, as you said, it's not even an issue. The problem is 3 fold though. Firstly, this is a much faster paced world, players rank up and get more villages much more quickly, which allows them to complete all the quests much more quickly, resulting in much more faith much earlier in the game, plus there's no real need for "long term planning" when it comes to faith management since the world will be over soon.

Secondly, without interdiction the uses of faith are much more limited. On a standard world it costs 780 faith points to keep a single village of a Prince under ID for a day. Not the case on this world, so the other uses of faith don't add up nearly as quickly.

Lastly, everyone has a lot more villages, so faith production is naturally a lot higher.

I'm not really sure what to do to provide a solution to this. I think one of the first things to do would be to drastically lower the amount of faith rewarded from quests, and perhaps take faith off the quest wheel. Beyond that, I don't really know. That might actually be enough. If people didn't have a massive pool of faith from quest rewards to tap in to to flip counties or send out a week of excom, they might have to make the decision of whether they want to excom someone or monk a parish / county back.

I also like the idea of monks being used for something other than just votes and preventing others from using them. They don't seem very dynamic anymore. I suggested in another thread giving them a defensive ability that wasn't as silly as the old interdict. Maybe something that just increased the hit points of your castle towers and your archers on the towers and / or increased your chances of stopping an AI attack. Maybe also consider making the buff get stronger if someone is attacked while they're offline. Not a big buff, maybe just something like:

Increases the strength of your castle structures and archers by 15%. This is increased to 25% if the attack is launched AND lands while the player is offline. In addition this spell increases the chances of diplomatically stopping an AI attack by 50% in the targeted village.

Could make the FP cost so that it balances out at about 200-300 FP per day to keep a village under this buff. If nothing else that could give people something else to spend their FP on .