The first pandemic age of the year is wrapping up, and it seems like a good time to talk about the changes we did to the gamemode before the age and how those impacted the age. There were a couple of suprises in there and a couple of good fixes, which resulted into a better package, if you ask me. A short summary about our fixes and our thoughts.
- Myth fixed the emperor logic in a way where its now possible to have multiple emperors at the same time. Last year that was broken af and this year that went quite smooth. We had one instance inwhich both ended up in the same city, what happened then is that they kill eachother and one gets to respawn. (new tacticzz?).
- We also revamped the Emperors strength. It is now based on the avarage country-strength, multiplied by a random modifier. Now, I think there will be comments about that the Emperors were too strong, too heavy and just big walls sitting on the map. And eventhough I'm about to nerf their strength by about 5-10%, thats about how far I'm willing to go. I know pandemic has its own ranking and I know a lot of people are in it for themselves, but at the end of the line Pandemic is supposed to be a players vs. gamemode-mode, inwhich nations have to work together to get rid of them. So, I will not give a guarentee that I will nerf them that far, so that any nation can drop them on sight.
- We removed battlepoints from failed battles on the Emperor. Last year it was a farming-showdown of who could do the most battles on it without actually killing it. This destroyed the whole HC-medal/Country-ranking balance and you can blame me for this change. I think that worked out perfectly this age and prevented abuse, but still made it worth killing them for points. However, killing them came with a price and needed the deep pockets of the commanders.
- TODO on the Emperor, I would like a system in which I don't have to manually enable and switch emps. I think I have been fair this age with when to place what emp where. If there was one south, I would place the other one north, and if one nation was in trouble, I would wait a tick or two before I launced an emp on them. And if there was nothing going on, I used an order in which the colors were representing by the emperor. Now, since this was all manual work and I don't like it when any of my integrity is questions on this matter, I'd like to automate this, inwhich when an emperor dies it automaticly switches to another color in a random amount of ticks.
- Then, the rewards. Yes, we introduced penguins. Never tell me again that I never deliver what players ask for
. Nah in all fairness, when I proposed the idea behind the scenes people where enthusiast about it, it took Nuvelle and myself one full evening of coding and getting everything in place. We closed off dev/staging to not spoiler the suprise and I hope you guys had as much fun with it as we did. We monitored all the channels on how the reactions were and if players understood it all correctly and personally that was lovely to read and see. The penguins on both sfs and pvps had to be counterbalanced in some way. So we introduced a system inwhich units would 'expire'. That was new to the game, maybe it gets used again in any other corner of the game, but thats into our toolkit now. The fact that penguins despawn after 24h, you can blame me for, but I think thats a good deal between having them for a good time, and not ruining the game with having 20 at the same time, if they would have stayed.- Not sure if everybody picked up on this, but penguins don't fight in training, they do not fight in 'normal pvps'. They do fight in all the pandemic battles, both pvp and sf, and they do fight in 'normal sfs'. So basicly they act like royal guards on the matter. Again, I was strongly against them participating in training or regular pvps, I can explain why, but lets say thats a balance-thing for the normal medals.
- Also, the odds of getting MPs were highered. I saw reports that people felt like it was nerfed and whatnot, but the odds got roughly buffed from 1 out of 7; to 1 out of 5ish. Those are not the exact numbers, there is still random to it. But I think we have seen on the map that people have been lucky with it, the planners were on their knees and it gave a new challenge into the game. Well, not new, but yeah, personally I'm a big fan of the mps as the curveball in the gamemode, so I had no problems with making that more likely.
- Unused options, the settings of pandemics give more options than I actually used. For example I didn't use the fact that fevers can spread onto capitals. I believe the challenge was high enough with the emperors (which can move over capitals). So I never used that setting. In the pandemic rules it says that caps can never be spread. That should change, because it could, but if I was to turn that on, you would hear that in one of the cryptic messages. A second option I never use, is that I can make pandemic prefer bordering commanders or not. This is standard turned on. So bordering fever is never a good idea, it prefers cities with commanders in it. The other side of the coin is to ignore commanders, but I guess that just leads to getting people stuck in random villages.
- Lastly, when do I enable pandemic, this has always been a shitty discussion, im going to be honest. In my opinion, launching pandemic with like 8 nations remaining is destroying the gamemode. Because everynations hides into a corner and farm the pandemics for themselves. While real wheels can't be done because of not enough players. This age I did pandemic start on 6 left and emperors start on 5 left. I'm not saying this goes into the rules as a strict line, but it is a very good guideline on how I think about it. Please don't ask where pandemic is, or why it takes so long for me to activate it. Dropping the nations down to atleast 6 is something that I find mandatory.
Then, we have atleast one more pandemic age, maybe two if it goes fast, we will see.
You are most welcome to give your opinion on any of the matters above.
It is and was a team-performance, between coders, testers and nuvelle (not sure what he is..), to make me able to run the show.
Not all credits should go to me, except for the penguins
. But in general, be nice, don't say its all rubbish and be constructive.Im pretty sure we had a nice age, leave your vinegar at home and lets make this gamemode better where it can be.
And last but not least: Merry Xmas!