Hi Sanutua, Nancy, Sparta Players and Plarium.
This is very important topic. Hundreds of players representing tens of percentages of the players will look at it. Sanutua is playing for many years, I also play for 4 years. I have a lot of experience with diverse tactics and playing modes. I don't think any Plarium personnel, game designer, programmer, team leader or architect have even 20% of the experience Sanutua or myself have separately.
I state confidently that the Greek Assassins that are called also Political attacks do ruin the game and I challenge anyone inside the game or inside plarium to state otherwise.
Now I will demonstrate in length how the game is destroyed by this. Some players I know might say that I used Political attacks in a battle just few days ago. Yes, I used them since the battle tactics forced me to choose assassins as a better way to do battle results. But this doesn't mean I like or agree to this general direction being forced to use.
Nancy, what is the main purpose of Sparta game? Answer: it is said in the name of the game "sparta - war of empires". The war itself is not just one out of many of the aspects of this game but its main purpose. And when saying "war" it means battles, and most of the battles are city battles. So city battles is the aspect that brings the most fun and excitement to the players that play this game and while doing this also the players pay a lot of money to Plarium.
99% of the time is building troops time, including raiding dead cities for resources, and not doing real battles. Already players mentioned this many times, this is way too high percentage used to build troops relatively to the wars themselves. Try to rename the name of the game to "Sparta - Building Troops game" and let's see how many new players will join.
However, the remaining 1%, which is way too low by itself, it is important not to destroy the fun that it still does. War or Battle means to me army against army, no shortcuts. Greek Assassins are like missiles being shot from thousands of kilometers doing a lot of damage.
1) I don't see any real life historical justification for such a missile phenomenon in 500 B.C. For modern warfare games maybe, and players will object to that too, but definitely not ancient historical ones.
2) Let's enter now the mind of the 10,000 players of Sparta from offensive and defensive mode. I estimated this number in a different topic calculating overall different human players that play Sparta.
3) When wanting to do offence, sending political attacks instead of assassins will result in few political attacks destroying hundred of thousands of defense points, without any loss to real troop to the offender. Real troops that the offender can send more now to other targets, mostly pantheons or emporium. So from offence point of view, sending political attacks is the best way, real troops stay in acropolis.
4) Defender, when seeing that few political attacks can destroy even big army, his own defensive army will always stay in acropolis and not defending his own city.
5) So in the most common battles now, as demonstrated in points 3 and 4, the troops stay in the acropolis for offence and defense alike. My say now is as above, where is the battle? where is the army against army?
Nancy, you cannot say there are many tactics to choose. Once there is a better tactic like using political attacks all the others will be neglected naturally.
6) To add things worse, in the last months Plarium is giving free many political attacks as rewards. Not good, as demonstrated above.
7) Rich players, called Coiners, buy city scheme that protects them from these attacks, spending 80-100$ per month just for this protection. This makes the difference between Rich players and regular players even higher and makes regular non rich players to be the main victims of these political assassins.
My suggestion is to eliminate completely the political attacks, as it is now it makes the game to be less fun.
