Some suggestions
Hi everyone!
I decided to share with you my suggestions regarding a few aspects of the game.
Resources:
This point is clear: if a game has resources, all of them should be “farmable” by all types of players. It is good that there are sapphire hamlets, but why are there no soulstone or scull rune hamlets? Both soulstones and scull runes have a far less implementation than sapphires, yet the later can be gathered, which is not possible with soulstones and scull runes. Strange… Therefore I recommend to create soulstone and scull rune hamlets. The harvest speed of soulstones can be equal to sapphires. As for scull runes… Well, they can be made farmable only with “Dominion” level 20 and, let’s say, only 2 per hour.
Graphics:
1. I think that there will be much more people playing the game (and more potential clients for Plarium), if they have a chance to customize not only the castle’s skin, but the internal look too. For example, if I change the skin of my castle to Teer Hael, I would also like to change the internal look to a more “elvish” one – greener landscape, more water and the buildings should look more like in stuff like that (instead of the annoying standard look).
2. Currently the castle’s interface is too boring. Add some citizens. I would even buy them for sapphires, just to enjoy watching them walking around, stopping near the buildings, admiring them, talking to each other or doing something else. I even think that this is one of the reasons, why people leave the game. There are many other competing projects and some of them have a much better look than Stormfall. If nothing changes with the graphics and animation, there will soon be no warriors left to stand against Balur.
Most likely the moderators of this forum will tell me that this idea will not be implemented as it “requires much work to be done”, “cannot be implemented because of technical reasons” or something else. Guys, I’m pretty sure that there will be some challenges, but this feature does not change in any way the game balance (as we are talking only about graphics). Yes, it requires some work to do, but I am pretty sure that for your work you are paid in dollars/euro or whatever other currency and not sapphires, so don’t be lazy. Otherwise, your current players will sooner or later find other projects, which will meet their demands in a better way. Don’t search for excuses – search for solutions.
Advisor reports.
1. Whenever we send out a group of spies, we pursue certain goals. We either want to find an army to attack (in order to earn tournament points, for example) or to get as much resources as possible. In the first case those reports, where our target has no army are useless to us. In the second case those reports where our enemy has less then 50k (or any other amount) resources are useless too. Therefore, new report filters for spying missions should be created. They can look this way:
a) “Do not show spying reports, when the enemy has zero forces”
b) “Do not show spying reports, when the enemy has less then …. Total resources”
Dragon.
I have been playing the game for already 2 month, but still did not understand the meaning of “Dragon/Lost Art Discovery Speed”. Let’s suggest that your Lost Art Discovery Speed is 25% and you want to research a Lost Art, which will require your sage to read a book for 4 days. You smack your dragon, it wakes up and your sage now needs only 3 days to study (nice motivation, by the way). Though 3 hours later you dragon falls asleep and your sage says “what a relief” – and the timer is back to 4 days (or 3 days and 21h). Is this really supposed to work like this? What’s the point? I think it would be good to have the dragon/lost art discovery time been permanently reduced…
Attack on hamlets.
Very simple: when someone attacks our hamlet, we should an incoming attack to have a chance to safe our troops.
No Lost Art secret requirements.
I was very much surprised, when I gathered the necessary resources to upgrade “Dominion” to level 16, but the system told me – “level 56 required to research the lost art”. I double-checked, if this information was shown anywhere in the requirement’s section, but could not find it. There were only the resources needed, but no information about any level requirements. I tried even another thing: purchased some units so that I had less resources than needed for the upgrade and hit the “upgrade” button again. The pop-up window showed me that I need to gather a certain amount of gold, iron and food, but again – nothing about any castle level requirements. Dear Plarium team, please note that this can be treated as cheating , because players do not receive what they want, even though they fulfilled all visible requirements. You should fix it ASAP.