As developers, one of the areas of the game we most enjoy working on is fort battles. This year I am pleased to say that changes to them have been placed at the very top of our internal roadmap. Yesterday, we announced our latest efforts, follow-up changes to the attack and defend formulas. Over the next couple of posts, I would like to offer our rationale behind the changes we settled on, as well as show you some of the internal analysis we performed.
After our Christmas holidays, we were immediately given a short brief for the expected changes: raise fort battle rewards (with a particular focus on experience) and adjust the team balance to strengthen the attackers and weaken the defenders. We also examined feedback from the community, whose priorities helped inform the specific design of our changes. In no particular order:
- Spread rewards more evenly between classes/roles, with a particular focus on adventurers and tanks
- Increase the competitiveness of lower-level characters on established worlds
- Balance the teams such that fewer extra attackers over defenders are needed for an even fight
- Design systems that are more robust against the idiosyncrasies of ever-changing equipment and metas
A nicer photo than mine of Sydney’s New Year’s Eve.
Previously, we have attempted to address this last point by changing the fort structures to give percentage-based bonuses rather than fixed bonuses. In the upcoming update, we’re expanding this approach to the base bonuses and distance penalty. Currently, your character receives a fixed +25 attack value and +10 defend value bonus. Soon, +15 of that attack value bonus will be converted into a 15% attack value bonus. This is expected to increase the attack value relative to the defend value of high-level characters, advantaging the attackers.
Conversely, this change in isolation would cause lower-level characters to lose some attack value. To offset that, we’re introducing a new ‘beginner bonus’, offering up to +15 attack and defend value bonuses to characters below the level cap. Initially this will scale linearly; for example, if your character is level 125 (half of the maximum), they will receive a +7.5 bonus. We feel this is an improved solution that will also help the survivability of lower-level characters in established worlds.
As mentioned earlier, the distance penalty is undergoing a similar transformation. Here are some simplified comparisons from our help resources:
| Shot Distance | Old Penalty | New Penalty |
| 5 tiles | +10 defend value | −6.5% attack value |
| 10 tiles | +25 defend value | −13.7% attack value |
| 15 tiles | +44 defend value | −20.5% attack value |
You may immediately be wondering, why not 10%, 25% and 44%? There are a couple of other major changes here affecting our comparison. Firstly, we’re reducing the distance’s exponent in the formula from 1.4 to 1.2 or, as you may have also seen it written in the past, the squared distance’s exponent from 0.7 to 0.6. This matches how it was previously; in the past we increased it to offset power creep, but now we are reverting that change with the switch to percentage-based bonuses.
Secondly, we will apply the penalty to the shooter’s attack value rather than as a bonus to their target’s defend value. Now our attack and defend value formulas are monomial, we can make this change without affecting the probability of two characters hitting/missing, calculating it behind the scenes in keeping with how players traditionally understand it. However, this change will reduce the difference between the attack and defend values when a high-level character is shot at by a lower-level character, and likewise when a high-level character shoots at a lower-level character.
I will finish this post with another comparison. Imagine two level 150 characters with 697 leadership, 831 aiming and dodging, 591 hiding and trapping, 22 multiplayer attack and 1 sector multiplayer attack, not standing on any structure. They would shoot each other with the following expected values:
| Shot Distance | Old Attack Value | Old Defend Value | New Attack Value | New Defend Value |
| 1 tile | 149.248… | 135.248… | 159.689… | 140.248… |
| 30 tiles | 149.248… | 251.190… | 101.291… | 140.248… |
That’s all for now! We hope you like our changes so far and look forward to hearing your feedback. There is still a little more time set aside for further fort battle changes so keep attending those battles and help us to help you. Please let us know if you found this post interesting and we may share some more insights about the little utils we developed to analyse our data and the change proposals.
Hello. I’m glad you revived the blog. It’s a promising change, I hope you continue with them and focus more on PvP this year, PvE is what we’re sick of. I hope a rework or buff to adventurer follows. I see you are starting to add a lot of duel items, but you have to do something to motivate people to duel, because the overwhelming majority build the church or farm products. I hope you give all classes advantages in duel, not just soldiers and duelists. I wish you a productive year.
Lets goooo!
Please start doing this again!
So glad we have another über episode of text to read
Glad to see new post after these years, and hope there will be more!
hi, Thanks You effort, im not understand a single world about the value of structure. But im really courius, what do You mean of fort battles balance between the classes/roles.
Be honest, The balance is not exist at the moment, now You can get unrestricted nr. of critical shots from ventures class, at any time, doesnt matter attack, or defence. within a round, they r able to demolish your full hp. No point combination, no clothes / equipment , notihng can balance this unfair advantage. Its more important issue, to do sam ASAP. Its unrelistic, to kill 1v1 fort battle a low hp gamer, with full hp, lower-level characters is irrelevelant, in this situation. pls focus on the real problem, and solve this issiu, just idea restcrict of the nr. of critical shots per round, and give the soldier characters more value, to balance this, or develope that seroius mistake of the fort battle game… ty pedro
I’m glad you came back.
Much appreciated!
Now, if you could also incorporate Current battle caps (the per battle ones set by the mods) into the Fort Battle starting position display then balance is in our sights!
“While it’s great to see that fort battles are a focus area for the development team, this announcement leaves much to be desired. The proposed changes to the attack and defend formulas are complex and difficult to understand, and it’s unclear how these changes will actually improve the overall fort battle experience for players. Furthermore, the promised beginner bonus is a step in the right direction but it still falls short of addressing the real issues players have with fort battles, such as lack of incentives and poor matchmaking. It’s time for the development team to take a more comprehensive approach to fort battles, taking into consideration the feedback and suggestions from the community, and delivering tangible and meaningful improvements. The current changes seem more like a band-aid solution rather than a long-term fix. We hope to see more meaningful and impactful changes in the near future.”
Hello developers, me as a part of community of this game will welcome every change.
We are happy, that someone is working on improoving this gmae because we players will really be happy to hear and see new ideas in this game.
First i wolud like to tell you probleams of game. I think that you dont play this game and you cant see probleams with in game PVP. It is not probleam of old servers but alemost all servers have probleams with PVP – Duels have probleams for years and years, me as a player can not complete quests with duel wins requierment. I have no opponets to duel with. For me is win 10 duel or Ko´s one opponet not possible… Elixir for decrasing duel level is overpriced – Its not worth to buy elixir for 500 nugg/upd elixir which will decrase your duel lever with 2-5 duel levels…. I would never spend on this any UPD even if i would have 1.000.000 upds or nuggets…
There is maybe good solutieon to delte duel level… Who dont want to duel can ko´s every 3 days as usually. Maybe someone will not agree with this but there are more solutions what was posted on Beta forum. Maybe add NPCs with big duel levels to “OLD” servers and exetra. We would welcome really any good changes. We apprichiate it, please hear us requierments, we as a players are still here and many of us are spending many mony in this game.
I would like to welcome new achievemnts dor spending nuggets on your own account there is last achievement for 1.000 used nuggets. Maybe add 5.000 used nugets next chest, 10.000 another chest, 25.000 one item , 50.000 another item, 100.000 2 items or some new set item, 250.000 – 500.000 your own character its really worth. Trust me and its not a lot of work to do something like that.
Really developery we are happy to reicarnate this dev blog forum and we believe that you will continue with listening us, your players and community. We had many good ideas to improve game. Thans and have a good day. Your player since 2008.
Spectacular! A true update with details. My only annoyance is having 10v15 battles with 60% offline, the testing scenarios are going to be terrible. Migrations (preferred) or an event is needed to happen in order to test small/med/large. However, events will be constructed so poorly that chars might choose workers/duelers over soldier/adventurer. Is there a way to force a balanced battle that contains char classes with proper builds and gear in order to test the changes?
would like to see fort damaged after a fort battle
like 1 level per battle
to give builders and town something other than churches to build
I welcome any change in the fort fight. For this already a thank you! But I think the order is wrong, first you need to urgently redefine the character classes. These are unbalanced, whether the duelist sets critical hits or an adventurer is at an absolute disadvantage. Instead of randomly getting a ghost, you can think about resistance here, for example.
In the other game areas, the character classes are also out of date and in keeping with the times. Which adventurer cares about staying in a hotel for free? Or the 10% increased speed in the duelist, where there are numerous speed sets. A builder pays less bank fees, unimportant bonus. The best is the soldier. On the one hand only 4 advantages, the duelist has 6, then the level requirement when carrying a weapon…. what for ? Almost all weapons are now from Lvl1. Here is first need for improvement and then you can go to the Fortkampfbalance. The other way around is …. from the ass.
Each character class should have an advantage in combat, duels, jobs. And especially in PvP, this must be able to balance itself out.
Good God!!! You’re alive..
We’re really glad you came back.
We hope you guys continue with the blog and also hope that more changes are made to the game.
The german servers are having fort battle championship and i think that will give them alot of needed informations to test small/med/large etc.
Too much maths, fort battles lasts too long as it is. Chance to aim, chance to dodge, calculating on skills, distance ratio, that s all. If attackers are in worse position, just raise maximum allowed attackers. That s all.
More tactics, less black-box magic.
Character/character classes Rename towers. Tower 1, 2, 3 and 4. True already in fk where it says. Soldiers first, adventurers then duelists or workers
please keep working on the west, adventure mode needs a revamp too just as fort battles !
It is nice that something is happening, but in my opinion you are starting at the wrong end. The hits are not the problem, but the imbalance of the classes. Duelists should never do more than 20% crits with PA, but actually do 40% and more, and as a leadership player, deviant amounts of damage. After fixing Critrate back to max 20%, you can then fix the hitchance.
@Lets go
That’s good, .net is stuck with syntex speed server mode. Are the battles recorded online anywhere?
Thanks for your suggestion, we will look into this.
Nice to see that you are still around, Diggo!
Like others mentioned, class rebalancing is a long time overdue. Many of the bonuses from 15y ago are absolutely obsolete in the current state of play and each class deserves to have a functional bonus for duels and fort fights (maybe even adventures if there will ever be enough dev time to fix that mess).
Fort fights reward pool is not enough to attract the attendance nowadays. Consider increasing the max amount of bonds or add a special chest that randomly drops every few fights, similar to loot chest for adventures. Also, offliners lose all their HP and energy for 4-5 bonds, consider offering a HP/energy buff to encourage offline participation too. Something has to be done also with fort ownership, perhaps introduce a cap how many forts one alliance can own to prevent the fort domination which is a big issue especially on less active worlds. Perhaps forts could go back to being owned by NPC town when the cap is reached.
For adventures, they are quite boring since there is the same one map since they got implemented. Not sure what happened to the map where a player fights a bear that was tested back then.
Travelling fair needs a serious improvement. Most of the buffs are useless nowadays and also the number of bonds awarded for fort construction is not worth the effort, consider boosting it.
Then, there is a biggest issue of them all, lack of players. Not sure if the code is an issue but game would really benefit of having a mobile app. It is becoming harder and harder to attract the new players, except for ocassional newcomer from other Inno games.
Hope you will work on some of these issues soon and welcome back!
Your buddy from old days.
Hello,
We really have serious problems with fights for fort on Romanian’s servers/worlds.
Some guys have a very sad and disgusting behavior. They use same strategy and people on the world aren’t play anymore. Because they don’t want to all the people play on medium or large fort, they have been joinning on attack or defense and fights have been playing 90 vs 40 or similar. This behavior is very bad for the game, people give up to spand money for itemes, bonuses or so on… or give up to play this game.
We really need to a way how to stop people with bad intantions to distroy fights for fort and in the end the game.
Some suggestions:
1. If you are considered “traitor” you can’t participate on the battle.
2. If you are considere “traitor” all the players must shotting first in traitors if they see them.
3. Another rank/degree which give the posibility to ban to participate to a fight for fort (it is more or less same thing with first suggestion)
Please make something in this way because fights for fort are very interesting and a big plus for this game in the competition with another games.
Diggo11 How and why did I have a fort fight after 13 stunt later on the screen? It should actually be visible earlier? german world