Thanks to everyone who responded to our last dev blog post, we are very encouraged by the positive feedback we received. Previously I planned to write this post about the experience changes and some other small utilities we wrote along the way, and that post will still come soon, but today instead I will mostly share some explanation on the next tranche of changes deployed to the beta server yesterday. Onwards!
Simply Irresistable
The battle summary from our admin tools.
Some of you wrote to us that despite the previous changes to our formulas allowing you to hit more often, many lower level players still registered 0 damage, which is no better than missing. To investigate this further, we did a deep dive into this battle, with a particular focus on the attackers. Looking at the players’ stats, we had some interesting observations.
Factoring in most sources of damage and resistance such as weapon average, item buffs, leadership, hiding, own sector damage bonus and resistance bonus (but not critical hits), we found that the attacker with the highest damage had about 3.5x the damage compared to the resistance of the attacker with the highest resistance. The players with the highest resistance tended to be high level and receive the majority of it directly from resistance bonuses on items, with only a small portion coming from other sources, ie skills.
We also simulated a ’round robin’ where every attacker fired one shot at every other attacker but couldn’t die. From our calculations, we found that approximately 10.6% of shots resulted in zero damage because the target had higher resistance than the shooter had damage. Of course, we cannot directly apply this number to an ordinary battle – not every player fires the same number of shots and certainly not at their own teammates – but it’s a helpful approximation and one we want to lower.
To achieve this, we decided to split the resistance formula into two parts, giving different priority to each. One part contains the direct resistance bonuses given by items and buffs, the other part contains the remaining sources of resistance (which you remember means skills). For now we’ve given these parts the names of secondary resistance and primary resistance respectively in our code but we’re interested to see how the community chooses to label them. At the moment we still show both combined in the battle interface but this may change in the future, if we decide to keep the change long term. The differences are shown below:
| Damage Source | Previously Mitigated | Now Mitigated |
| Weapon Damage | Yes | Primary Resistance Only |
| Sector Damage | Yes | Yes |
| Shooter Damage Bonus | Yes | Yes |
| Critical Hit Damage | No | No |
Going back to our small simulation, we found that across the 19 740 shots, there were a little over 6 400 shots that resulted in some resistance being clipped, up from just under 1 900. (After all, once you resist all the damage, your extra resistance won’t heal you!) This resulted in an average damage increase of approximately +50 per simulated shot. Using some back of the envelope calculations, we estimate that would convert to an extra 76 000 total damage for the attackers based on the number of shots fired in our focus battle.
There are some caveats to these calculations. Firstly, this is only a rough guess – more incoming damage generally means more knockouts and fewer shooters in later rounds, but also less players available to block sectors – although we’re satisfied that the results appear reasonable and worth trying. Secondly, we must also bear in mind that our focus battle has an abnormally high number of lower level players for an established world; high level players with high resistance bonuses being shot at by other high level players with 3.5x higher damage bonuses are less affected. In particular, we expect this change will have the largest impact on the international servers.
All the Small Things
Your community managers have been collecting feedback about the changes so far and we were pleased to see that most markets except one were generally positive about them. The rewards were a recurring theme in your messages to us, which will be discussed in a future post.
If you have any other requests regarding fort battles, please be sure to share them with us. Based on your earlier feedback, we already scheduled some time to change how the fort battle player caps are shown in the planning screen, which we hope to include in the next beta update. In particular, since converting our fort battle frontend from flash to HTML5, any interface ideas we may have previously passed over could be back on the table.
See you next time!
“0 damage” was a big issue, yes, but I believe we have a bigger one: Resistance being (almost) useless against high level Damagers.
And since we won’t be seeing “percentage based” Resistance.. Wouldn’t it be better to strengthen the “Primary Resistance” formula as Skills bring almost nothing to the table thanks to HP. (No wonder all-in-HP still a thing)
Meanwhile..
My signature on both Beta and .NET forum have many various links to the posts-suggestions (including Battle screen and whatnot) regarding Fort Battles, which you may or may not have checked back in the day.
And while some prolly became useless thanks to brilliant(!) idea of bringing Level 250 fiesta.. I do believe that someone still could find some useful stuff.
Cheers.
Add a new fort rank, “Leader”, that gives the player the option to ping some sectors and add targets there, with at least three different colors. This would make leading the battle easier, and players could see where they need to move.
Sometimes when I check my character in the north sectors to see who is shooting me or who I can shoot, a pop-up with my values gets in the way. Maybe make the pop-up window’s background less visible, or add a turn off and on option.
It would be useful to import some scripts into the game. For fort battles, a battle statistic script would be awesome to have (showing how much hp each side has, personal total dodge and hit, damage per round, etc.), and fixing the maneuver. It would also be awesome to have a similar battle replay option in-game, but I think that one may be too much to ask for.
Damagers will deal exactly the same amount of damage as before, but tanks will deal more damage. This is a nerf to tanks. Because the tanks were the ones using the resistance. Additionally, sector damage will now be useless for tanks when firing at another tank with high resistance. Whether you have 0 sector damage or 300 sector damage, the damage will be the same because the secondary resistance will reduce the sector damage to 0. I don’t really like this modification. It could have been done in a much better way. All you did now was nerf the resistance and indirectly the summer spirits set. High level duelists deal so much damage that resistance is useless anyway, to play with the set of spirits vs duelists, you sabotage yourself, because you lose a lot of hp and defense. It was worth taking hits from tanks in the past using summer spirits set, but now it’s not even worth it for that. Summer Spirits have become weaker anyway since you increased the maximum level, the tanks don’t even do 0 damage anymore, they do 100-200. Now they will deal much more damage, so it’s pointless to use the Summer Spirits set anymore. I don’t like this change at all.
Good update, when you deal 0-100 damage, you just want to leave the game and don’t return
@WhyNot
Thank you for your feedback. When we balance our damage and resistance formulas, our highest priority is to ensure battles don’t always end in a 55 round stalemate. At the moment, we feel this is somewhat too common, so we have opted to remove a modest amount of resistance without a corresponding reduction in damage. As the post describes, we have tried to do this in a way that solely benefits lower leadership players and especially lower level players. In the future, we may try to transfer some damage potential from high leadership to other build types, or nerf the damage of “glass cannons” if we feel battles are ending too quickly. I am also pleased to confirm there is no change to how sector damage is calculated or resisted; please refer to the table in the post.
The only good thing about this is that since there was an sector damage bonus, we FINALLY have something to counter that bonus.
I like that there are now two types of resistance.
Beyond that, I’ve always found it unusual that dueller’s critical shots aren’t affected by resistance. It’s a shot too, I don’t understand why it’s not affected by anything.
On the second part, if resistance (of clothing) is now equal to sector damage, then tanks will take a lot more damage from all characters now and not just duellers.
And with the whole “luck” factor in the fortbattle, going full hp will be a thing again.
I’d also like to see some changes to the damage formula as well.
There have been at least 4-5 changes to fort formulas and the result remains the same. Duellers continue to play full leadership and charisma. We have to get away from the one-dimensional way of playing.
Perhaps to do this a new damage formula will need to be created that doesn’t just depend on leadership.
We need new skillsets on our characters so that each player can create something of their own that has some pros/cons over other skillsets.
Full leadership is the one thing that has remained the same in battles over the past decade.
About the interface ideas.
1) I would like to see more maps in the fortbattles. For example we have 3-4 maps for each type of fort big-medium-small . Those maps are going to cycle through each fight. You will not be able to know which map you are going to battle until you attack a fort.
In this way, each battle will have something special, since the fortmap will swap on each battle.. so the approach will be different for each leader.
2) A better way to communicate as Leader with your players. For example we could add different colour symbols(arrow,mark,circle etc). This way during the fight leaders will be able to communicate better with the players. As we know there are players who plays with chat closed 🙁 , at least they will see with their eyes on the map where to move, or what to aim to.
@Diggo11
In this case, all we can do is wait and see how the new formula does.
But I’m still a little confused about the resistance. Can I give an example and you tell me if it is correct or not?
I am a tank with 20k HP, I have 550 weapon damage, 300 sector damage and 25 damage from leadership. My damage against someone with spirit set with 440 resistance (420 from clothes, 20 from his own skills) used to be (550+300+25)-440 so 435. Without the sector damage bonus, my damage would have been 126. Right now, after this change, my damage will be (550-20) + [(300+25)-420] = 530 + 0 = 530. Higher, but even without the sector bonus, my damage would still be 530, correct? So both resistance and sector damage are no longer very relevant for tanks.
So we now have a resistance against any damage, with the value:
(300 + (hide or trap)) / MaxHp
and a resistance against bonus damage only, determined by the clothes/sets, having a horrible name (and bad naming often is a sign of a bad design _somewhere_).
I’m not sure how this will change the battles, though – but anything which reduces the number of 0-hp-“hits” has a good chance to be a good change.
I’m using the following crib / mnemonic, because primary / secondary doesn’t work for me: “Cloth resistance helps against any damage bonus, but not the weapon. Skill resistance is even better”.
But since you mentioned colorado (en15), i’ll give you my point of view.
The battles were unbalanced for a long time, and are even worse right now. The following statistic might show the source of the problems (Jötunheimr, 2023-02-28):
Fighters: 128 : 120, with 1293k : 1243k HP, and avg. Level 144.9 : 141.9.
That looks good, right? But it isn’t.
Adventurers: 33 : 40, 363k : 433k HP, average level 151.5 : 148.7
Duellers: 45 : 32, 75k : 83k HP, average level 131.0 : 136.5, damage done 751k : 430k.
Workers: 19 : 27, 166k : 201k HP, average level 115.9 : 139.8, damage done 192k : 198k.
Soldiers: 31 : 27, 687k : 524k HP, average level 151.2 : 141.7
The level difference is not a big problem anymore. The average HP are almost identical.
But the damage done is vastly different.
The average attacker did 10.2k damage in the fight, the defenders 7.9k (that 2.3k difference is equal to 144 HP per hit).
I’m not sure what the reason is, but it got worse in february, and that likely means it has to do with the distance penalty changed in version 2.192. It may be that many defenders in the first few rounds have a much higher average distance and distance penalty, until they, finally, can come closer (and by then one or two of the towers have been melted already).
Then there is a long-standing problem with the booster players (gringo, murrieta and so on). A booster player on the attacking side can boost up to 33 players, and that might explain the higher average damage.
i’d like to suggest a “small” change for trial: let defender boosters (only the defenders, at least for the first try) _on towers only_ boost that tower and neighboring walls (east/west wall
And i’d like to suggest to highlight the booster players (of the own team) on the map. Especially on colo, where we can fill large forts.
But the worst problem on colorado, right now, from my point of view is the burn-out rate of the leaders. Leading there is 2 hours of concentrated work, often rewarded with being hated and insulted at the end of a normal working day, and the game needs to make that work more easy.
Now for some really different world.
Let’s take the awesomnia fight on kentucky (de25) 1.03.2023. 8 stupid attackers failed to get the message, and ran into 29 defenders. A big fun for everyone (sarcasm off).
I attribute that to two problems. First players betting on the save side to get the hearts, and second to the information available at enrolling.
Would it be hard to add a flag to the forts, settable by it’s owners (and by default set for awesomnia), which causes the enrollment screen to show how many guns are on each side?
This surely can’t solve the problem during events, but it should help at other times.
Regards, Uwe
Could we get back the chest drops from fort fights like in the old days, Diggo?
Bonds just don’t attract the players anymore since it’s easy to collect the bond letters in clicky events.