Last knights Forum

Ok

I posted some suggestions few months ago, and now i am returning with few more thoughts about the game, after playing it some more.

How do we get new players to tlk, and how do we keep them? That seemed to be discussed a lot in these several months that i played. And my conclusion is that new players are joining the game, but they quit very fast. Why? In my opinion, mostly because of the old and veterans players, and then because of the steep learning curve of game mechanics.

Most of you will probably laugh, but if you come as a new player in tlk, without prior knc experience, its a very complicated game. You dont know what army to make, how to use it, how to protect yourself, and you end up after few days thinking you have much better ways to spend your time then TLK.

So first, TLK needs guides. Tutorials. On everything: how to train, how to use the right scenarios, how to rank up fast, how to build a pvp army, how to build a rank army, how to pvp, what army to use to counter a specific army, and so on, how to use heroes for rank/pvp, how to alocate points, etc. Things that most of you take for granted now.

Yes, you can join chat and maybe you.ll find there someone that will explain things...i heard this argument. It doesnt suffice. You want people you play your game, make it easy going and explain all mechanics. Tutorials. Guides. With pictures or gifs even, if possible.


Next, the major factor of people quitting - the gangbang wars. Yes, i heard the arguments of the people defending them: everyone id doing them, in turns you gangbang, or get gangbanged, thats where the fun is, thats how the game always has been. Thats so wrong. The game isnt like that, we make it like this. We want the medals, we want the easy glory and victories, no one wants a real challenge.

Every single age, is the same scenario: four or five teams of experienced players seize their countries leadership, then team up and take out the rest, and then chase each other around in circles for 3 more days, get their medals, and wait next age.

This game already is very very time consuming, and when you add a 3 or 4 vs 1 war on you, you end up saying fck this shit. No matter how good you are, in a war against 3 or 4 enemies you end up losing sooner or later. And while this might be very fun for those old and hardcore tlk fans, for the rest casual or new players its a stop-game experience. I have seen it, i have talked with people that quit, and they all said the same: fck this shit, this is no fun for me, i have no reason to keep playing it.

So what can it be done? My ideea - add more tactical options, that will allow casual players and those not hardcore active, to survive and outmaneuver their enemies. What options are there? I have just a few ideas i am afraid...but if admins are really interested they can always start a focus group with some of the players and come up with more solutions.

Here are my ideas:

1. eliminate gangbang wars! this should be a priority. You can do this in several ways:

- warslots - i mentioned this in my previous post. its pretty musch self explanatory: each country has a limited number of wars in which it can participate. Lets say 2 real wars and 1 friendly war. This brings up lots of warblocking options, which can be use to counter those hyper active countries
- remake the country strenght formula, and when the combinated strenghts of the attackers surpases the defender strenght over a certain limit, no other wars can be started against that defender. This is a very raw ideea, i didnt put too much thought into it, but, maybe someone will expand on it.

2. When an alliance is broken, an automated message is send to all HC members and there can not be war declared between the former allied countries for a number of tick. 6 hours seems a fair period of time. Again, this is a measure against unfair behaviour of some players, and also provides a tactical safety. I have seen cases when a country declared on their ally, for different reasons, without any notice, and when most of their allies were offline.

3. Add more escape routes to each map, especially to africa map, where its very easy to corner a country. A nice example is Rome map, with all those routes between cities.

4. Make border training harder as you rank up, or give less XP for each fight. These days in day 5-6 of the age half of players are counts and marqueses. Maybe add several more ranks also and expand the xp gaps between them.
This will work best especially if you eliminate the posibility of joining an army set up by a player with same rank as you. This would be a radical change, and make planning lot more difficult, thus maybe, more tactical and interesting in long term. I am not sure yet if this a good ideea or not.....but i would give it a try for one two ages at least.

5. PVP area is best as it is now. I would only bring one change only. No more dead units. Instead, after one unit is losing all its HP and should have been killed, its put in hospital for a certain BIG amount of time, without the posibility of beeing dismissed or replaced or healed, and returns to encampment only after this period passes. This has a double effect - protects the armies of those offline, that will eventually get it all back, limits the behaviour of pvpers that i have seen, which will pvp even if they know they.ll lose or get killed units, cause they know they will just buy new one ( hardcap, softcap, anyone??). so it will make people think twice before hitting someone, as one hit bad hit can put their armies out of action for a while.

I am sure there are more ideas you guys can come up with. I had some more, but its enough for now.


The real question is, do you want the game to change? Or keep it like is now, a cult-like game, for a small grup of hardcore fans....

After someone presented me with an issue regarding the warslots ideea, i thought about it, and came up with a new version of it.

He said that if you have 5 countries remaining a,d 4 of them are engaged in 2 vs 2, the 5th country is out of war options, as it can declare war on no one.

He was right.

Here is another version:

Each country will have 2 Offence Slots and 2 Defence Slots. This will unlock a lot of tactic playing options, and will also make agressive planning much more difficult, as one would easily put himself in a 3 or 4 vs 1 if not playing his cards careful. This also, puts back on the table diplomatic talks.

For example, if X is attacked by two other countries, will have no more defence slots free, so a 3rd country wont be ablen to attack X. However, X WILL be able to declare on other 2 countries, if they choose to. And yes, that will be a 3 or 4 vs 1 war, but it will be BY ITS OWN CHOICE.

This also raises another question. Do friendly wars count, and do they take a slot? i think they should take slots, because if they dont, this can lead to a total block, and stalemate, which we dont want, cause its a war game after all.

For example, lets say that X and Y both attacked Z and W. so, their attack slots are occupied, they cant declare on a 3rd country. If friendly war dont count for slots, they can easily take cities and shield one defender, since neither X or Y will be able to attack those friendly, and wont be able to pass thru their cities. So, yes, friendly war will ocupy a slot i say.



This is just an ideea, like all posted in this thread. They can be changed, build upon, to make a trully fun game.

The need for tutorials/gifs/guides etc is something I share with you.
We have a text based tutorial for new players, which I love to spice up with gifs and whatnot.
I would even go so far that I like to see an onscreen animation if you enter a certain page for the first time, explaining every function presented on that page.

However, in the current dev team, we have nobody with those skills. So if anybody is able and wants to help with that, be our guest.

You talk about the community as a whole, the greed for medals, the (sometimes) toxic environment it creates and how that affect new players. Well, thats something for the community to sort out. We can't ban everybody for a misplaced joke, hell, I might be part of it myself.

I like warslots, but it could backfire at the same moment aswell. A country trying to escape, but bound by the boundaries of warslots, is something that you don't want to see I reckon. I like the idea, I think it would also prevent a lot of gangbangs or something that looks like it. But whether its the mechanic that will stop all the problems on this matter, I truly doubt that.

Training needs a revision. We tried one, and that one failed. We want to make training harder and also not make it blind-clicking, but have some task in it or whatever. We tried implementing scenarios, in which the text prior to the battle would give you a clue about what you are going to face. Ive been stuck in balancing for days, and I couldnt get it right, always some kind of unit that looped, it was horrible. We gave up on that and we are back on the training structure we have for years now, only this time the exp is calculated differently, resulting into higher exp per battle. Not a bad thing, but yes, training needs some attention.

The Africa map can be adjusted yes. Several players have actually suggested new routes, adjustment to terrains and whatnot. Im certainly listening to all those suggestions, aslong as it helps the gameplay and balance.

Maybe i didnt express myself properly.

I didnt want to say that community is toxic with their behaviour. No. You can always find someone that will explain a thing, or help you solve an issue you encounter.

What's toxic is the gamestyle some of the players adopt. Is that gamestyle thats killing the fun for new players, not the jokes or behaviour on chats. And that is something that dev team can adress, with game mechanics.

I dont know what can be done about training, i am certain more can give feedback about this.

Like i said, add different scenarios, each with different degree of difficulty, and make those scenarios known. That way you will be forced to click looking for the right scenario for your rank, if you dont want to end up with all army in hospital, instead of just clicking away regardless, like we do today.

Or, another ideea would be to eliminate clicking whatsoever and just give missions, tasks, as you mentioned. And here you can get creative. You can either make several tasks, each with its own duration and xp/gold rewards. For example, you can send your soldiers in one mission for 10 minutes, or 5 minutes or 1 hour. The higher the time, the higher the rewards. This will also allow people that cant be on too much in one period of the day, to train and gain xp and gold.

Other choice would be to just create a buton to send your army in mission, and the server randomly generates the duration, dificulty and rewards.


And about the warslots, i dont see it how a country trying to escape would be put in difficulty by them. Maybe you are right, and it eludes me now, i.ll think about it. But it is something to build on. Because if you want to eliminate the gangbangs you neeed to do it from game mechanics. People will never stop doing it.

Some comments:

1. I like the idea of warslots (2 off; 2 deff). But then another question rises - what if it's a 3 vs 3 war xD
First of all, I think the time of wars needs to be extended or re-done. Either by putting a shorter time limit from last sf done and refresh on every sf, or make it so that it takes longer for a war to time out starting from the first sf.(I prefer having shorter time limit after last sf, for example 4 hours)
Next, think of ways to improve wars and alliances in-game. Warslots as i mentioned I like as an idea, but it also brings up a lot of issues depending of the type of war - 2 vs 2, 3 vs 3, 4 vs 4 (should we limit people somehow?). Instead maybe you can have an additional rule where for example if you have 7/8 countries alive on the map, the max countries you can war (warslots) is 4, 5/6 countries alive - 3 warslots, 3/4 countries alive - 2 warslots. That will significantly decrease the gbs or atleast make it a little bit of a challenge (blocking would still be a thing i reckon, but less than usual)

3. I think Africa map needs a refresh (tbh I think the same about Rome map). Maybe I'll get to that after I finish another project and if I have nerves for giving ideas for reshaping)

5. I don't really like that suggestion. I will just say why by using an example: You drop a main and win - you rebuild in 1 hour and leave 2-3 people behind. In the matter of 2 hours those 2-3 people get wrecked in pvp, sf-kicks, cap-kicks and whatever - their armies are a mess and basically they need to stay constantly online for hours in order not to get pvped and wrecked even more (add the online pvp suggestion too and they're doomed). This suggestion is good for preventing offensive stupid pvps, but not good for those who accidentally suffer from pvps and kicks.

I like the idea of a forced truce between countries after breaking the alliance. It will prevent a lot of hated actions.

I also love the idea of warslots, the counter arguement given by Tiralan though... I can not wrap my head around it. (On phone I can't read back the wording he used due to the way this forum works). He said what if you want to escape through other countries? That is exactly the kind of behaviour i hate. Stay within your own and your enemies territories, don't get third parties involved in your quarrels. They have probably been avoiding you on purpose so they don't make the war (more) unfair. As thanks you get attacked in the back because the wounded country isn't agile enough to pass their enemies. Before you complain about how I am a stacker and I have never been pushed back... i have been pushed back multiple times by either multiple but also by single countries and i have never attacked a third party to escape. The best thing about tlk is slipping past your enemies in a way they never expected.