Feedback: Early colonization changes and foundation screen

Arci

Community Manager
Grepolis Team
The new world zz7 is now open from about 10 days, some times have already been conquered and a lot were founded.

We'll be very happy to hear your feedbacks about the new change in terms of early colonization.
Please let us know on this thread your opinion!
 

DeletedUser4351

Guest
positive:
- the resource management is more balanced (on previous version often the villages ran out of resources before the final steps to be CQ-ready and it could cause long hours setback, now that we can build the CS earlier this setback shouldn't occur in my opinion considering similar activity)
- more cities to pick from after beginner protection
- the tokens from the camp battles can be used more reasonably, shared between more cities

negative:
- anchors are not open for colonization on the farming islands, players are forced to found on rocks if they want to keep up the competition
- it is easy and more likely to be left with a single or more rock cities after you lost your beginner city than ever before, you can even lose the camp - no ability to farm, many players are still forced to restart the game

prediction:
- this change will increase the (gold) trade intensity of early stages, building more cities needs more resources

suggestion:
- open farming islands for colonization, that together with the current change would be the real progress in keeping more players motivated, let them travel a few islands away to be safe and keep their slots
 

DeletedUser2458

Guest
- anchors are not open for colonization on the farming islands, players are forced to found on rocks if they want to keep up the competition
- it is easy and more likely to be left with a single or more rock cities after you lost your beginner city than ever before, you can even lose the camp - no ability to farm, many players are still forced to restart the game
Exactly. I think, all players are forced to restart as until you don't lose all cities, you don't have anything in fact. No resource bonus production, no tutorial rewards, no bandit camp... and these "on rock" cities usually grow really slow. They can't economically independent if they should be useful. If you lose your main city, you lose it before you can upgrade buildings on higher levels in that founded city.

As I said before (when this change was firstly annouced), it's still better to start completely again if I consider possible bonuses. So, the devs should imho work on encouraging of newbies to restart (and playing with these bonuses), show them that they can easily "catch up" game progress, not to keep them in the game with such small cities. It's boring and frustrating to see how everybody has xyz cities and you don't have even academy nor strong army. And after they build them, they will be conquered. I don't speak about that these players are often farmed afterwards.

These facts are why I don't test this feauture. It's wasting of time. If there are another adjustments which will follow this feature, we should know about that.
 

Super MM

Divine Envoy
I think it's a good thing, because his first city was less vunerable, making the first battles more exciting
The biggest problem was not having points for colonization on islands with villages, so many cities on islands without the same
 

Arci

Community Manager
Grepolis Team
First of all, thanks for your feedbacks.

As I can read (and I personally agree with it) in the first weeks this change is probably less effective as you can only start a foundation on island without farming villages.
Do you have any suggestions for that? For example as ********* said, opening the new spots could be a solution. Anything else?

On late game instead, it will work much more, do you agree?
 

DeletedUser4351

Guest
Every day the inactive players are wiped from the servers and they leave anchors behind open for founding too, therefore a few lucky players can found on farming islands... what makes me think on long term this change without adjustments might trigger creativity how to increase the number of those anchors.

You could maybe open farms on rocks too, at least 3 would fit on all of them :D
or screw the farms and make the rocks special... add farmable camps, so more players would want to populate them and found early, who could reject extra camps?

or to develop the original idea: whenever an island is filled with beginners, a neighbor island will open and then a 2nd island...., what if you would offer on the first neighbor island anchors with possibility for invites and founding and only let the random new players join on the 2nd island? This would help to stay in cluster, but give a healthy distance for beginners too later on, who join a few months late for example.

Late game: it is good to have higher population without losing the chance of CS capability.
I consider keeping level 10 harbor in flyer cities from now on. Normally I demolish every building, but it only costs 40 population that's not a big sacrifice.
Most of the time I only lose the land units and spare my transports and naval escort in defense cities, therefore the barrack works on overtime and the +10 extra harbor levels were luxury for flexibility and to be CS capable in all cities. If I lost the 80-100 bireme escort in support cities, the rebuilding time of a level 10 harbor isn't much longer (about +19%) compared to level 20, you can compensate it easily with spells, tokens, researches.

On a 100 city scale these logical changes could probably spare almost an extra city worth population for conquest players like me, without affecting rebuilding time. That's bigger change than I thought, I like it more now.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

DeletedUser2458

Guest
On late game instead, it will work much more, do you agree?
In the late game stage this adjustment quite doesn't fulfill its role. In early game stages, you don't have enough resources to support your main city (from which you need to fight) and some others small cities. After these small cities are grown, you most likely have such a strong account that it's almost impossible that you get totally conquered. It's nice that player can have the second city earlier but it's important to find some avail of it... which you can't find in this case. These early-founded cities have to be useful. Otherwise this change doesn't solve anything.

It's also interesting point that the rock islands aren't favorite. Players don't want to have cities there until it's not required by ally leaders etc.
 

DeletedUser3554

Guest
OK - this works well in principle and should deter players quitting early, which can only be a good thing for the worlds, the players, and Inno.

Suggested improvements - open up islands with farms earlier, and allow an additional starting city slot so that players get to explore conquering cities earlier (i.e. compensate for the initially founded one).

Would suggest a minimum of 7 days bp on new worlds to allow players to build the second city, and even an autocasted increased build speed / reduced resources buff for a few days for the second city only as part of the reward from founding the city.

Would hopefully help player retention, must be horrible to try the game first time, work away for 7 days and then some ****** like me comes along and steals all your hard work :D

Thanks Inno for trying something new, much appreciated.
 
Top