As the release date for 1.0 is creeping closer day by day, we are trying to focus mainly on stability and a good experience.
However, unexpected issues before a release are almost more of a rule than an exception. And we have just found a pretty serious issue with the AI and how its trading has worked.
When the AI tried to trade resources, it looked something like this:
- (AI) “Hey! I want to buy two extra stone to be able to buy this building. How much does it cost?”
- (Trader) “How much gold do you have?”
- (AI) “20.000 Gold. So how much do I owe you?”
- (Trader) “20.000 Gold, please”
- (AI) “Uhm, sounds a bit expensive… But ok, here you go!”
We had a nice, but stern chat with the trader and passed some new laws that it’s not allowed to raise the prices depending on the budget of the AI like that. So, good news, the issue is now fixed. Huzzah!
But as you probably understand, even though it is a small fix, it can cause a snowball effect making the AI much more difficult to beat - on all difficulty levels.
For example: If the AI could break out of the first zone by round 7, it might now sometimes break out at round 5 or 6 instead - which would give it an advantage in later stages of the game.
Consequently, if we look at the end game with an AI that wants to trade a resource to buy research - this would before deplete most of its gold reserves in the process, so now it would just have more gold in general resulting in more troops, research and all that good stuff.
The positive thing about this is that the AI will feel more competent, especially in the later stages of a session. The negative is that the easier difficulties might be too difficult to be called easy - and our efforts to give every player a difficulty that feels appropriately challenging might be unbalanced now.
But the thing is, we don’t know yet. And to find out we need lots of testing and data, something that takes a lot of time.
Yes, we are asking for your help, but we are also treating you with this brand new screenshot from the Barya Campaign! How's that for a tradeoff?!This is not something we expected to happen so close to release, and this is where we need your help. The time is nigh, and we need as many eyes as possible on both our campaign maps and our conquest maps and collect feedback on how difficult it feels to play.
So if you have the time, we’d greatly appreciate it if you could play the game with this in mind for us. If you want to be extra helpful, please use this template below to describe your experience in a comment to this post.
I see myself as a:
I played with difficulty:
On map:
