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Make fort battles great again!

After a long stint on the beta servers, last week we finally released our fort battle changes to the Polish servers. The results were very pleasing: defenders once more resembled a well drilled force instead of WW1 conscripts waiting to go “over the top” and workers loudly roared. But as we wave goodbye to the era of fort ownership transferring more easily than the common cold, it is difficult to part with killing all defenders being the preferred method of attacker victory. While the suspense of capturing and holding the flag can lead to some of the most exciting battles, nothing beats the satisfaction of sending your enemies for a nice long sleep. Of course this trade-off is through necessity — if it’s possible to wipe all defenders then capturing the flag is mere child’s play — but what if we could change that?

The core balance behind fort battles is quite simple. The defenders receive aiming and dodging advantages via sector bonuses while the attackers receive numerical and line-of-sight advantages for an even fight. To shift the midpoint of this balance, merely adjust team sizes and/or the fort’s sector bonuses. As you know, this balance breaks down completely once the attackers pierce any section of the fort; defenders are forced to huddle around the flag allowing the attackers to seize the towers and walls. Prevention has been the prescribed cure to date, strengthening the walls to avoid the scenario in the first place, but clearly that also makes the defenders harder to kill. A new approach is needed.

The flag is providing the pictured defender with a bonus instead of a penalty.
A well fortified defender ready for battle. An attacker standing here would be penalised -20 instead.

After a little brainstorming we devised a simple change to make the flag more defensible: invert the aiming and dodging penalties of the negative sectors into bonuses for defenders. (The attackers continue to receive a penalty as normal.) This significantly slows the cascade of defenders being funneled towards the flag only to be killed almost immediately. It also provides leeway to reduce other building bonuses without adversely affecting overall team balance, as requested by our Polish testers. Of course, it is not our intention to add a fifth tower to the centre of the map, so the bonus/penalty to aiming will be lowered substantially to prevent sniping out the gate while the bonus/penalty to dodging remains high.

Besides making for happy Polish players, reducing the sector bonuses of buildings should improve our other metrics. Consider:

  • Reducing the dodging chances of 9 defenders shot at by 50+ attackers has a greater impact than reducing the aiming chances of 9 defenders who can only fire 9 shots collectively per round. This decreases the likelihood a battle will reach 55 rounds.
  • Decreasing sector bonuses increases the relative importance of player skills, which are in competition with health. This encourages players to diversify their skill points.
  • Reducing the effectiveness of the defenders means fewer attackers are required for a balanced fight. This allows us to bring the maximum attacker to defender ratio closer to 1:1.

Despite that, of course, these priorities are secondary and the overall team balance comes first. We cannot allow the defenders to continue to get steamrolled every battle 😉

6 Comments

  1. poprocker
    poprocker June 13, 2016

    Hi

    Many thanks for trying to improve players’ interest in fort battles.

    Defenders used to die when they tried to go to the flag too early indeed. So a bonus instead of a penalty for flag and around sectors is most welcome. Except that if defenders have too many HPs they can easily lock all sectors around the flag and prevent any victory for attackers if the defenders have a bonus there 🙁

    I’d rather think that a revolution would come from a real penalty in fort battles for players with high HPs. That would completely change the game : no more HP tanks but players building according to real FF skills with low HP and then forced to be more active and to swap in the right time if they want to last in fort fights 😉

    well, that’s my thought from my FF experience 😉

  2. Bilas
    Bilas June 18, 2016

    Hi,

    while doing the fort battles changes, could you add more ranks? It is very required by the players…

  3. HIV-
    HIV- June 18, 2016

    Hi,
    problem of fort battles are not some formula but empy forts. Players haven´t motivation to fighting in battles. I remember to International Fort Battles Championship and after tournament i visit one fun battle. I have got premium chest, 2 health points, 10.000$ and 100 UP more. Make quest to visit fort battle every month with reward like this and battles will be much more better.

    And make new maps or game mode to adventure. Rush of Tombstone is good but after 2 years it is a bit boring.

  4. smiggy28
    smiggy28 June 18, 2016

    the problem with FFing at the moment isnt the formula, its that usually one alliance is super strong with the best gear, equipment, and player numbers. whereas the opposition alliance isnt, so that makes for unbalanced FF’s and theres nothing that will change that.

  5. smiggy28
    smiggy28 June 18, 2016

    maybe not give attackers any tower/wall bonus if they mount? or half the bonus that defenders get? you could say theres a wall on the outside so defenders hide behind it but no wall on the inside so attackers have nothing to hide behind.

  6. boss285
    boss285 July 13, 2016

    why you dont make new guns for 500 played fort battles ? or something like that ? why rare guns can be only purschased by nuggets ?

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