December Round Changes

[The Lady Shael]

Hey all,

The last round of changes (and probably more to come) are focused on making the market an active place that is important for all strategies in the game. The ideas is to increase player interaction and make strategies more interdependent even for solo play. The last changes we made introduced autosell on mercs as a way to get the market moving, but I feel that this is contrary to the plan - the market is certainly more active, but it is artificially so.

This round, we have removed the autosell and instead replaced it with a button which allows you to sell any of your shipments on the public market directly to mercs. You still cannot remove public market goods, but instead of automatically selling, you can choose if and when to sell them at merc prices, or wait as long as you please for a real buyer to come along.

This means that indy players now have almost no reason to have less than max troops on the market. You rarely need all of the cash you generate, and if you put the extra troops on the public market at reasonable prices, best case scenario someone buys them and you make a tidy profit, and worst case, you can sell them at merc prices when you need a cash injection, which is that you would have done anyway.

This takes care of the sellers side of the market (in theory). To motivate the buyer's side, we have rebalanced the quantities of troops that are available in merceneries. Instead of having the same amounts of all four troops types, they are now reduced, and are available in the same ratios as barracks production: the ratio is rats:weasels:stoats:skiffs = 6:4:2:1. This means that there is now approximately 1/3 of the net that was once in mercs available at any given time.

This means that cash storing will be a riskier strategy. Since it will now take significantly longer to spend all your cash in mercs (though not impossible) players are motivated to turn to the public market as an end-of-round cash dump. Of course, because indiers could always jack their prices around that time, it means that cashers are motivated to spend cash throughout the round to avoid being stuck with tons of unspendable cash at the end.

The net result, we hope, is that the public market will be a much more active place, and that interaction between leader players and indies will put some power back in the hands of the indies.

Some other, smaller changes, and a summary of the above:

You can now only put a max of 25% of your food on the public market. This is to force food storers to interact with the rest of the game a bit more.
Rebalanced merc amounts so that rats:weasels:stoats:skiffs = 6:4:2:1.
Food sell price on mercs reduced to $7. This is in response to many people saying that it is too high (agreed).
Instead of autosell, you can now sell public market troops to mercs at any time you choose

Finally, we tweaked the aid system a little bit: you now can get 24 credits, and the costs are 1-2-4 for clan-ally-other, with +2 aid credits added to your account per hour. This should make clan play a little more flexible while keeping upkeep free indy strategies suppressed.

Please note that the balances are all early testing - if you find that they are too much, please give us feedback throughout the round

Enjoy,
~RWL Staff



TL;DR:

These are the changes:
-no more autosell, replaced with a merc sell button so you can sell your troops from the public market to mercs at anytime
-max 25% of food on market
-food sell price on mercs reduced to $7 (from $9)
-24 total aid credits; costs are 1-2-4 for clan-ally-other; +2 aid credits each hour


Some of the market changes are still being worked on, so bear with us. :) I will post updates here when they are working as expected.

Also the theme is Race Roulette! This means you can change you race for free every three days. Good luck!

[The Lady Shael]

Okay, all the changes should be good to go now. :)

As always, please contact me ASAP with details if you see something that isn't working the way it's supposed to.

[Shadow]

Note that there is also no commission on good sold this way. I am not sure if Shael took the commission out globally, but either way, market use is good for just about everyone now :)

Everyone should give Shael a big thanks for this one, she worked late to get this working!

[Rakefur]

This IS good news, I didn't like the autosell thing.

How much food could you put on the market before?

I don't really like the price change for food.

Aid credits, that sounds good, but I  haven't tested it yet.

[The Masked Wolf]

this is gona be a fun round

[Shadow]

How much food could you put on the market before?

90%

[Rakefur]

Oh so it's a pretty big change. O.0

Well yeah this will be fun. Learning indy, here we come!!!

[Shadow]

Oops, looks like the rebalanced merc quantities got left out of the changes. That should be fixed when Shael gets a chance later.

[Ian2424]

[[Edit]]This post is removed by Ian2424 for being spam.This better not be spam now...

[Shadow]

This is an example of when you would send a pm instead of spamming. Please do that next time!

[Sharptooh]

Changes sound good to me :) looking forward to testing them this round!

Turning the market into a mini-store house will be interesting, might try a marten again this round.

[Shadow]

Where do you get the storehouse idea?

You can't pull stuff, and marten gets absolutely terrible merc sell prices - it won't work very well.

[Pippin]

how comes leader races are being weakened slightly?

this basically makes wolf top dog to be storing food net all round now even more so, selling food to buy troops was already weak enough but probably wouldnt even make its own back now.

mostly good changes though

maybe next indy as a long term competitive could be considered instead of slowly grinding leader races down with small changes

[Sharptooh]

Where do you get the storehouse idea?

A storehouse for cash, not networth.

You can't pull stuff, and marten gets absolutely terrible merc sell prices - it won't work very well.

I realise you can't pull stuff, I'm not stupid :P

And I never said I was relying on merc sell prices.

[Shadow]

this basically makes wolf top dog to be storing food net all round now even more so, selling food to buy troops was already weak enough but probably wouldnt even make its own back now.

Wolves are now much more open to being sacked.

Leader races are being weakened slightly for solo play because cashers pretty much always win rounds without doing much interaction. Now they need to actually interact with other players a bit to get it done.