20hr Battle Countdown

If you haven't seen the post for today's update, there are two changes to battles:

1. The turns will be faster
2. The countdown to the start will now be 20 hours

While I applaud the first, I just have to shake my head at the second.

There's a lot of talk in the 2K forums about how warmongering was too powerful as a strategy. I'm not entirely convinced that that was true, but if you are trying to rebalance the game toward peaceful victory strategies, this is not the right way to do it.

The real solution is to change the reward for winning a battle. I've suggested in the past that it be changed to Wonders OR Techs not both. Perhaps choosing 2 techs and 1 Wonder would be workable. Maybe even 10% of their gold could be mixed in. The point is that people who depend on warfare will still just declare a bunch of wars ahead of time. The only thing this accomplishes is frustrating them when the people attack turn out to have nothing of value when the battle finally comes.

This was probably the easiest possible thing to re-program, and that tells me that the dev leaders are not willing to invest significant resources in changing the game at this point. I'll bet even money that the game launches without a single game mechanic being altered in a significant way.

i agree. for a game that typically lasts 5 - 7 days. 20 hours for a battle to begin is absurd. Your suggestions are way better.

Also i wish their was more of an advantage for advanced units. right now the difference is marginal, being ahead in tech doesnt help u much in war.

Shafi-is-back said:

i agree. for a game that typically lasts 5 - 7 days. 20 hours for a battle to begin is absurd. Your suggestions are way better.

Also i wish their was more of an advantage for advanced units. right now the difference is marginal, being ahead in tech doesnt help u much in war.

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Even hinders you at some point -- the 4/1 75 hammer guys and the 3/1 50 hammer guys with different weather (diversity!) changes into 3/6 guys with whom is harder to attack with..

What "game launch" are you referring to?

Verdisian said:

What "game launch" are you referring to?

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This is still "Beta". It's a test version. It's not the real one.

At first I liked the 20hr idea, because I have long gaps where I can't play because I'm at work, etc. But it just doesn't work right, because too much can happen in the interim.

For example, yesterday my team voted to invade Russia... when we first proposed it, they had 10 players, so we were eligible for an era win. Later in the day, they were down to 7, and only 1 wonder and 1 tech we didn't have, so it would be a minor victory. When I went to bed, we had a huge advantage (2 or 3:1), because Russia was also fighting someone else. The battle happened at 3am or so my time. When I woke up, somehow we had lost and they gained all 6 of our wonders, most of which were obsolete.

Also, we are now engaged in a 2nd war with germany, due to start in a few hours. When I went to bed last night, the invasion hadn't even been approved yet. So the 20hr countdown didn't even go into effect for this battle apparently ?!

From 2k forum :

This morning we will roll back the game version to prevent further problems of population and resource loss that some players are reporting. This reset will take approximately one hour. We appreciate everyone who took time to provide information about what was happening, and for your help in honing the CivWorld Beta!

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So, the war countdown went also back to 10 hours.
Btw, that timer is just like all other CivWorld timers NOT SYNCHRONE with real time.

wow, thats really up... I mean, I appreciate them trying to fix the bugs that were caused, but changing the countdown timer this much in a short span leads to a lot of crazy situations.

I wonder if our battle timer will get +10hrs when the maintenance is over?

ALL our battles got cancelled, too.

Creepy Old Man said:

This is still "Beta". It's a test version. It's not the real one.

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I'll lay even money that this game never leaves beta.

Verdisian said:

I'll lay even money that this game never leaves beta.

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Despite all the griping, it seems pretty successful so far. At least in the sheer number of people joining games. There's definitely a retention problem, but I don't know if it's large enough to keep them from making money.

Anyway, I'm not sure what they will do to mark the end of "beta", but as I said above, I very much doubt that the game will change from what it is now.

I didn't mean it was going to fail at all.

Perhaps I shouldn't have said never, but FB games tend to stay beta for very long periods of time(1.5-3 years), and when they do remove the Beta tag it doesn't actually mean anything. You likely wouldn't even notice it if you don't see an announcement about it. The game is already available to everyone, and everyone can already spend money on it. The Beta tag is essentially meaningless except as an excuse for people to defend it.

Several people's complaints about the 20 hr countdown have mentioned that it's going to be very difficult to fight battles in a game that has been reduced to 3 days.

After reading several of those, it finally hit me: the main purpose of the last update was to slow the game back down. They slowed down both domination wins and science wins (with the new 1000 beaker mazes). I'm not sure what the motivation behind that is, but the question that leaps to my mind is: Why did they leave Econ victory conditions the same?

Cultural wins are usually through war after the first one or two, so those are probably slowed as well.

So, do you think it's desirable to make the game last longer? The devs seem to think so.

zbgayumn said:

Several people's complaints about the 20 hr countdown have mentioned that it's going to be very difficult to fight battles in a game that has been reduced to 3 days.

After reading several of those, it finally hit me: the main purpose of the last update was to slow the game back down. They slowed down both domination wins and science wins (with the new 1000 beaker mazes). I'm not sure what the motivation behind that is, but the question that leaps to my mind is: Why did they leave Econ victory conditions the same?

Cultural wins are usually through war after the first one or two, so those are probably slowed as well.

So, do you think it's desirable to make the game last longer? The devs seem to think so.

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I wonder if econ victories can be powered -- maybe a hybrid (for the civ) cash/culture strategy for the GPs and golden age the rest of the way. Not sure though.

zbgayumn said:

So, do you think it's desirable to make the game last longer? The devs seem to think so.

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I get why they THINK it is desirable, so that games don't go so quickly that casual players complain the game is over before they even got a 5th guy, or whatever. However, the problem I have observed is that games that drag on forever lose tons of players.

For example, I joined 1561 late, to help out a friend who was in a one-person civ and finding it slow going. He's winning, it is just SLOOOOOOW. So, we are getting cultural victories through war, but we can't get any Domination victories because there isn't a civ that has more than 14 players. Why not? There are more than 100 inactive independents in the game. All these people joined, and then wandered off and are not coming back.

Glinda said:

There are more than 100 inactive independents in the game. All these people joined, and then wandered off and are not coming back.

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It really amazes me how many independents there are in these games. Basically, over 50% of the players in these games never figure out that they need to join a civ? I realize that some do, and then get booted by Meritocracy, but the vast majority just never join.

As a devoted Civ player, it just baffles me. The only thing I can think is that these are facebook gamers who will try it for 30 minutes and lose interest. There's probably some attrition from the fact that the wiki for learning how to play the game is horribly inept, too.

Most of the independent players probably never have played CivWorld for 1 minute.
Their facebook account simply put them into CivWorld because of a friend
and when a game ends they will be auto put into a new one just like everyone else.

I don't think it PUTS you in a game unless you accept the friend invite. I would have thought that now that you can quit a game, there would be fewer non-active indies who are people who got sick of a specific game for some reason, so I guess most of them are people who tried it and didn't like it?

In my list of indies in my game (I looked) there are people with medals, although most have 0 points and 0 medals.

Well, admittedly, the tutorial for CivWorld isn't very good, and doesn't entice new players to the Civ series to stay.

bronzeager said:

At first I liked the 20hr idea, because I have long gaps where I can't play because I'm at work, etc. But it just doesn't work right, because too much can happen in the interim.

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I agree. In my current game, the reasons for several battles have gone awry---the enemy civ lost a crucial number of players, lost a wonder due to counter-building by another civ, or the civ jumped ahead to Gunpowder (gaining a 20X strength advantage). Those made the war fruitless, by eliminating the object of the war.

I think instead there should be a very short timer (say 4 hours) with the Defense minister and the King each having the option to forestall the attack and additional number of hours to let more people insert their forces into the battle. Also the King and Defense minister should have the option of canceling a war, if they both agree to do so by a vote.