Hello Skyladies and Skylords,
After the dust in the PvP arena settles there is still evil to slay: We must venture to the Nightmare Shard and take it at all cost! So after a lot of PvP tournaments I want to give some sugar to the PvE community aswell. This is a first attempt to give a little challenge on a map that probably nobody speedruns (and surely not on advanced), so everyone should be able to try some new strategys.
What?
Speedrun contest on Nightmare Shard. Send me your quickest replay to participate.
Find the replays under Documents=>battleforge=>replays
Until when?
Send me your replays via Discord until 25.10.20. I will sort them and cast the quickest run.
Prize pool!
1st place - 3000 BFP + Construct Promo
2nd place - 2000 BFP + Enlightenment
3rd place - 1000 BFP + Amii Monument
4th-last - 300 BFP
most creative strategy (in the top10) - 750BFP
And every participant will get a Booster after the reset!
If you guys like it there will be more and more of these little challenges in the future, let me know what you think about it.
Looking forward to several cool replays!
I would love if everyone got the same quest everyday. For example: win Blight expert (100 bfp). That way it incentivise playing different map and we can find people to play these maps even with our smallish community.
Greetings,
after wanting to share my thoughts about the current state of Battlegrounds for weeks now and postponing it ever since because I am lazy, I finally got the drive to write this one up here.
I want to share my thoughts and suggestions of multiple aspects of its current execution and how they can be improved because let's face it: it is far from perfect. This is not a thread about "hurr durr, nerf Lost Souls , because they are so hard on difficulty 9, the second highest difficulty of them all" and certainly won't start with phrases like: "I don't make suggestions, because I don't get paid when they get implemented."
Obviously the feasibility varies and while some may be easy to integrate, others may be harder or even impossible to realize.
I would like for this thread to become the go to discussion thread about Battlegrounds/rPvE and where it is supposed to go. I am eager to hear about your opinions, ideas and suggestions.
Anyways, here we go:
Map generation and its quirks
Let's start off with something where I think most if not all of us can agree upon; map generation. It works for the most time, but there are times, where your monuments are really close to enemy camps. For Tier 2 and beyond this isn't much of a problem - in solo just build a bigger army than usual and for multiplayer your team mates may assist you with a coordinated push or help you hold your turf. But there are times where your first monument gets immediately attacked on game start before you even summoned any units in which case the game is pretty much over for you either because the camp has long range units that immediately pull the camp or the camp spawns right on top of your monument. This is an issue almost exclusive to difficulty level 10, but I have experienced it twice myself on difficulty level 9 against Lost Souls as well. While it is an extremely rare occasion on difficulty 9, it is much more common on difficulty 10 and happens regularly enough to be a concern. Personally I see this as a priority issue, if Battlegrounds/rPvE ever sees substantial changes.
Other than that, it'd great to see more random/diverse generation. Seldomly you have maps where the path of your team mates directly connects to your Tier 2. I even had a map where my team mates' path after Tier 2 directly went to Tier 4 instead of intersecting at Tier 3. I'd wish to see more of that or completely different spawns, where two or even all four team mates spawn at the same location and have to push a single, more fortified path together. In addition to that more interesting paths or intersections to later camps, as in eight camps that converge to a single bigger area in the middle with each spawn meeting there, so you have one player dedicated to defending the onslaught, which would also promote decks oriented towards defense. Or maps with only few big or one huge camp that inhabits tons of enemies.
Maybe even reverse the roles and have to defend against ever increasing hordes of enemies until the time is up like in Crusade or Defending Hope.
I'll leave it up to debate if you can choose between defensive or offensive Battlegrounds/rPvE maps or keep it completely random.
Balancing and strength between individual factions
This is something where I think a lot can be done to even the odds, but in this small segment I keep it on a rather basic level and get more into detail later on. I think it is pretty much universally agreed on that Lost Souls is considered the most tedious of the bunch, where as Bandit and Stonekin are the easiest factions to play against. Twilight sits somewhere inbetween, although the scale tips more into Twilight's favor with the Evil Eye spam. For most players Lost Souls is the most tedious to play against. Some hate Lost Spellbreakers, others hate Lost Archfiends and some hate everything about Lost Souls. Personally I don't like Lost Vigils in Tier 3 and the inconsistency that Lost Wanderer pretty much only shields at the very beginning, which last indefinitely unlike Stonekin Earthkeeper's. But that's fine, each to their own. Often players want to remove or nerf something of the Lost Souls roster. These complaints often come from difficulty 9 players. 10 isn't up for discussion because it is seldomly played in comparison.
Everybody can think what they like on the part that Lost Souls is "too strong" compared to other factions, the solution to that "problem" is certainly not a simple nerf to a single faction, but rather adjust all factions at once and equalize their power level. It is about the highest difficulty levels after all and Bandits/Stonekin are a breeze compared to Lost Souls or even Twilight. Real strategic gameplay only starts to show if you play difficulty 10, but I will get to difficulty scaling in a bit.
Change up and increase the overall spawn pool
One thing that bugs me about spawns in general are the mixed factions spawns. Lost Souls has Twilight units in early camps that for some reason are stronger than in actual Twilight maps. Stonekin is also less Stonekin and more like 50/50 with Bandits in snow maps. And I don't think that needs to be the case. There are quite a few unused AI unit types in the campaign that could be integrated into Battlegrounds/rPvE. Both types of Stonekin Grinder, Lost Shade, Lost Spirit Ship, Gemeye, just to name a few. And I believe that with additional units it will make balancing individual factions much easier.
Difficulty rebalancing and scaling
What I don't like about the current difficulty levels is the sudden jump in difficulty between 9 and 10 and the weird thing that lower difficulty levels are harder as in the case with Twilight's 8, where unlike in 9 Evil Eyes are present, but that's only one thing. I'd go as far and move all level but level 10 by one level, so difficulty level 1 is effectively removed and a new level 9 can take its place between 9, which would become the new 8, and 10 that evens out the sudden jump. One that starts out with a spawning camp at Tier 2 and stronger camps overall from T3 onwards, so you can get a taste of what 10 will have in store for you.
This would also mean that when going and revising all 10 levels, all individual levels will have noticable jumps in difficulty which will be reflected not only in enemy strength but also how the map is generated. Unfortunately now difficulty 10's challenge comes from the very first camps pushing for energy wells and monuments and drops down noticably when you have your units ready, at least for Bandits/Stonekin.
I believe the highest difficulties are only supposed to be for decks directly build for it, but as it is right now only level 10 requires a decent amount of game knowledge, coordination and team work, where as in level 9 you breeze through with relative ease, which shouldn't be the case for the second highest difficulty level. I know it is a bit much to ask for coordination and team play with one or more randoms, but the game should challenge you earlier for that matter.
For two player and solo play your time limit is usually higher and suffices for it to be less of a concern.
Another thing that has been mentioned a few times and what I certainly support is increasing map size along with higher enemy count and time limit.
Integrating new factions into the mix
Something that has been brought up by other players and where I think that is a nice idea and worthy to mention here is to add some more variety into the game mode by adding more factions as enemies.
In some campaign maps we already fight against Nature, Fire or Shadow units and with the amount of units and buildings each faction has at its disposal, balancing them would certainly be quite easy.
That's about it from my side. I believe on some things I mentioned here you agree and on other you surely don't, but that's perfectly fine and I want to hear your point of view about basically anything related to Battlegrounds/rPvE.
