Now the servers are down, I decided to spend some time on the forum to post my ideas. I appreciate the effort that Quark puts in this game, so why not help them with some player feedback?
Introduction
So far we have two kind of cities: lords and barbs. The main differences are the available buildings and troop types, production levels and the way they are captured (loyalty vs influence). It is pretty well balanced, but in mid game I notice a pretty high number of zerks around in most worlds.
The reason is that barb cities are capped much easier. Trainling lots of zerks there is quite effective to expand your territory big time. Since rams are needed to bring down walls, lords need to be capped/converted at strategic positions for optimal growth. So a typical good player will have some lords and a much higher number of barbs.
This affects the way people defend their cities. Sentries are best against zerks, so it will be no surprise that many players have them in high numbers. In turn this opens up some possibilities for the relatively expensive mounted units, cause they do well against sentries. And so all units indeed have a function.
Suggestion
These high numbers of zerks are a risk for even the strongest defenses. I would like to assign one city as my capital and give it an edge against zerks. This opens new tactical opportunities for taking lords in enemy territory, but also has other uses. For example a player can build his palace (and thus creating his capital) at his first lord to defend at least one city properly against strong aggressors.
To leave room for other improvements with future updates, I would like to add two new buildings for this:
- Palace: adding an extra 25% to resource production
- Archer Tower: adding a 75% defense bonus against foot soldiers (cumulative with walls)
Of course both buildings need to come at a price, so a player should think twice before moving his palace to a new city. The resource bonus will make a maxed capital produce 10k of each resource instead of the current 8k. This bonus could makes it more interesting to choose where you want your capital to be. If it is in the center of your empire, you can send goodie packs to freshly capped cities quickly. If it is near targets, you can choose to replenish troops faster.
The archer tower is all about defense. One of the great things in this game is that it actually punishes players who are not aggressive enough. I like that, so I tried to come up with an idea in line with offense. By strengthening the capital one can keep chasing barbs with less risk to lose everything at once (by his only lord capped).
A player can only build one capital and archer tower. To move it around, he/she first needs to demolish his/her current capital and archer tower. In my opinion this way the demolish option at lvl 15 city halls would also make more sense. But this also adds a new question: "What happens to a capped capital & archer tower?". I think it would be great to keep those as long as you don't demolish them. So it's not like a player can cap 10 other capitals and rebuild them at other places, but it is a nice bonus to be able to keep them.
In a nutshell:
My idea is to be able to build a capital at one lord city, which will increase your production output. At a capital special building types can be built. My first idea would be an archer tower, so the capital can be defended better against zerks. Capturing a capital and archer tower is the only way to get more than one of those. But at all times a player can only build a new capital if he doesn't already have one.
Combined with the archer idea (read the archers thread) this would add new tactical possibilities. Quark Games wants to target the hardcore gamers, so creating room for new tactics is a smart way to go. I think both of these ideas combined would bring Valor to another level, but of course that's just my opinion. I would love to see your thoughts on this. If devs show they will do something with these ideas, I will be motivated to keep the ideas coming.
