Last knights Forum

hello guys

i am a former KnC player, and just logged here in tlk and played last 3 ages (damn you Fear!).

Everyone keeps talking about how small the player base is here in tlk....so, as a....kind of a new player to tlk, here are my suggestions.

TLK as it is now its a niche game, focused on hardcore fans of it, with lots of online time needed. If you want to attract and more importantly, retain new players, i think you need to make more casual-player friendly.

A few ways to do that would be, in my opinion, these:

- make the first 24 hours of each age war-free. Meaning, its imposible to declare war on first day. Some, if not most of you old players would say that this is the fun of the age, warring after 2 hours. But i think that would bring a bit more ballance into each age. More countries will be able to form a HC, and succesfully wage a war after full 24 hours, leading to more countries staying alive, longer ages, more options for alliances, etc.
Right now, depending on the time zone, you join a country, click to green, then wake up in the morning with army fucked up by pvp and needing to join a new country.

- implement war slots (old knc feature) - each country can wage only 2 real wars, and one friendly war. Why? First, no more gangbanging. Also, more tactical options. For example, when one real war expire, if the attacker doesnt pay attention, the defender can ask one friendly country to declare war on them, thus blocking one real attacker, transforming a 2vs 1 into a 1 vs 1 at least for a while. And there are more other blocking options.
As it is now, there is really no tactic...2-3 stack countries go kill the rest in first day or two, then go running around on the map, waiting opponents to make a mistake, and all its over in 4-5 days. I remember ages in knc of 15 days or so...

- make some guides available. TLK is unforgiven with new players. People need guides about how to make an army, which army is suitable for what, what to use to counter a specific army, how to use Heroes, examples of heroes build, etc. There are very few players in the game that will give new players real valuable info, especially about Heroes.

- make Vote to surrender option available to avoid farming, and/or beeing stuck in an inactive team...(i know its already posted on this forum this ideea, but its a good one)


These are just a few thoughts....most of you will not agree, but, try to give it some thought. Or come with other ideas. For me, as it is now, tlk is burning to fast, to use a methaphor. And, if nothing will chamge in the future, i wont continue playing for long.


PS

AND GET BACK NAVY

I'll have a fairly comprehensive new player guide ready and posted in a few days.

I've only played the last two ages and before that way back in 2005 & 2007. I'm pretty sure I remember trying KnC back then and finding it just too much for me (was it blue, rather than brownish, but otherwise looked pretty similar?) Anyway I was like 13 so that isn't surprising.

I agree with Luci on the player guides though which is why I'm writing one. I hope people find it useful.

EDIT: New player guide released (https://lastknights.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=34)

The 24h of no war I like, the warslots I don't like.

Vote surrender option I also dont like.
Lets say the LD wants to surrender, but the HC doesnt agree, LD can take away those HCs and vote surrender on his own.
If you let whole country vote for it, then you already have the activity to do something with the country, instead of voting for surrender
Abusable at the least, not a fan.

The time needed to be really succesful in the game, was always a thing. People like that about the game, being active pays off. And its really hard to give casual players some kind of boost, without giving active players what they deserve. Im not saying I dont agree, I just dont know how this should work.

The playerbase is stable, going up and down here and there, and turning the game into an app might be crucial for its survival. Thats a huge task for the small devteam we have, its a work in progress, not a lot we can do about it. Niche is the right word, we do what we can.

Navy well. Yes, Navy. The prejudice that we as TLK-team, say no to anything that has sails or a sea connected to it, is not true. We are open to suggestions to implement a fun navy aspect to the game. However, with creating suggestions for that, you should forget everything you know about KnC. KnC is gone, the code is gone, the databases are gone. And even if we had the sources, they wouldn't work at all with the code TLK is running on nowadays. That being said, anything that could be added to the game navy-wise, has to be coded from 0. And we dont have the resources, nor the will to create knc from nothing. However, good ideas about searoutes/-battles that make sense and give a fun gameplay, we are always listening to.

About Navy.. If u implement navy into tlk, a lot of old players will start gaming again, im sure, and ppl playing tlk nowdays are begging dornnavy too'') old navy system was good, work very well, maybe just fit ships into era. Btw what u need to start working on it? Maybe call a donation for navy and u will see, ppl will support u i think. Navy part makes game more interesting and a bit harder (and soo much fun ofc'')

Luci has some good suggestions,

-implementing a 24H no war rule at start age is certainly a good idea giving everyone a better change to get the country going.
-1 ally only i agree on
- war slots kinda silly idea because of to much war blocking. i do get the idea it prevents any major gangbanging possible.

we could do some polls about these ideas, i think the 24 h no war would be a good thing to start with.

navy, yeah allot of folks would love to see it back, but altough im also a big fan of the navy part, we have to accept: its GONE!

what tiralan said the coding and everything navy was sooooooo outdated, everything has to start from scratch.

im pretty sure if someone with the skills and time to build it up the new dev team is more the willing to see what is possible and what not!


either way, keep up the good work!

I really like the 24h age start no war thing, but I would make ranking up to green a bit more difficult than it is now in that case. Not sure how to do that, but if you take any ranking army u can almost always loop to green ranks. Even when using xbows last age I easily made it to green. It's good if (almost) all countries have HC's up when wars start, but 24h ranking and getting ranked up easily might give the more active countries a T3 main when inactive countries still hold t1+t2 and that would be just as painful in a MvM as being pvp'd and kicked so early in the age.

I also see what u want to achieve with the vote to surrender, but I think farming could be countered in a different way. As it is, all players, when pvp'd or SF'd, get 6 ticks protection. I think pvp protection should be tiered to prevent farming. For instance:
A blue rank will only need 4 ticks of pvp protection. The units they have will be healed by then anyway. If I compare that to the farming we in Kediri have just been the target of: My duelist hero got injured for 13 ticks! This would mean, if I can't be online in between, I could have been pvp'd twice without my duelist. This would have resulted in many dead units and maybe even a dead hero or CK in the 3rd pvp. Especially since Mst t3 ranking units get injured for 7 ticks a lot as well.
My suggestion would be something along the lines of this:
Blue rank: 4 ticks
Green rank: 5 ticks
Red rank: 6 ticks
Baron+: 7 ticks

Of course this is just an estimate, I could make some calculations to see the amount of ticks that would be "fair", but I think this would prevent a lot of people from waking up disappointed after being pvp'd twice or even three times after going to bed and waking up with lots of deadies. The change away from soft- and hardcap doesn't make up for it imo.

Edit: Example:

2020-01-31 00:33:52
Kingdom of Luwu Marquess Iamgodslefthand 4.9% loses to Kediri Emperor Akh_horus 2%
Soldiers Tot Inj Dead Capt Soldiers Tot Inj Dead Capt
Commanders 1 -- -- -- Commanders 1 -- -- --
Heroes 3 -- -- 2 Heroes 3 3 -- --
Artillery 0 -- -- -- Artillery 0 -- -- --
Cavalry 0 -- -- -- Cavalry 0 -- -- --
Infantry 52 39 -- 5 Infantry 44 19 -- --


Battle Result
2020-01-31 03:44:34
Kingdom of Luwu Count Rezin 3.6% defeats Kediri Emperor Akh_horus 2%
Soldiers Tot Inj Dead Capt Soldiers Tot Inj Dead Capt
Commanders 1 -- -- -- Commanders 1 -- -- --
Heroes 3 -- -- -- Heroes 0 -- -- --
Artillery 0 -- -- -- Artillery 0 -- -- --
Cavalry 46 10 -- -- Cavalry 0 -- -- --
Infantry 0 -- -- -- Infantry 31 22 3 1

And what about to make some voting if player base want to see navy implemented into tlk, and if they want it, start some crowdfunding for navy?

First come up with ideas how to implement navy, then we can say what is possible in our current code.
Ive said this a million times, but forget about KnC and think about how navy can have a fun gameplay as extension of TLK, and not instead of TLK.

Horus dead units are not really an issue since you cant go lower than 0 , so if 1 dies you buy the same one in seconds
in knc you had soft and hard caps and then deaths were problematic

That's exactly my point though Bialy. You can rebuy units, but it isn't enough to compensate for a farming session. For instance, on Wednesdays I normally work 14 hours and go to bed right after. I might be able to check in once in between, but theoretically it'd mean that I could be pvp'd 6 or 7 times in that time with the current pvp protection. At red ranks and up this means your hero will participate in about half of those at best due to longer injury times than pvp protection. In normal circumstances (1 or 2 deadies tops in the first pvp) this could potentially result in over half your army dead.

I understand this is worst case scenario in a situation that doesn't happen often, but even after that, rebuying isn't worth it. You'd spent T3 std price x 20 = at least like 1.5M. If you have a unit with rgd accuracy, you also have to retrain that.

As I said, this is worst case scenario, and won't happen often or ever. However, farming KILLED the little activity we had last age in Kediri. The entire example is just to say how extreme it could get, but the point I'm making is: we need to counter farming if we want people to stay active. You can ask any Kediri HC last Asia age and they'll tell you that we didn't have much activity before farming, but when we had one night of farming people didn't even bother to come online anymore for rest of the age. That's the reality and that's my aim with creating a tiered pvp protection: The higher your rank, the longer the pvp protection.

Yeah fair enough about farming - its frustrating i admit, but it happens also - you can just suicide - i mean not every1 has to be a Marq every age
Its a war game so not everything should be nice and walk in the park so to speak - you want to do well - then you have to invest time

Akh_horus wrote: ↑Fri Feb 07, 2020 1:16 pm At red ranks and up this means your hero will participate in about half of those at best due to longer injury times than pvp protection.

The take from this is that we need to look at injury times for heroes.

Not going to bother copy-pasting examples, just look at PVP results for Slackedonia and you'll see another couple dozen reasons why something needs to change in either hero number of ticks in healing for heroes and high HP units or in pvp protection to stop farming.