Hilary Briss
Merchant
For me, the best feature is that when you remove the defending army, you no longer have the annoying exclamation mark to remind you to play it, unlike with the harbour where it doesn't go away when you don't have a Cultural Settlement underway.
The defending AI change was a good move, and restructuring the rewards had to be done, so at least some improvements were made.
Overall, it works, so I've beta tested it, but even if the gameplay was better balanced for the hard fights and the towers (with no reward) were reinstated, it is still just another bolt on that adds little value for me as a player. It takes less than a minute every 10 hours to do 5 fights on auto with very little engagement needed, and rewards I can live without.
Due to the hard fights being virtually impossible unless you are in the late Eras or lucky, it is going to be really hard to compete on the global level for most. You can now compete against your entire age, except that includes people who have levelled up and stay in your PvP category for up to an entire month, so that again removes some of the incentive to try and compete. I spent several weeks having to avoid medium fights with some who jumped from ME to FE.
If there was a desire to make it more balanced, then restrict the units you can use to your era, and restrict them to that era until the monthly reset. Fighting against players 3 Eras above who can have units 4 Eras above their Era is just ridiculous.
The defending AI change was a good move, and restructuring the rewards had to be done, so at least some improvements were made.
Overall, it works, so I've beta tested it, but even if the gameplay was better balanced for the hard fights and the towers (with no reward) were reinstated, it is still just another bolt on that adds little value for me as a player. It takes less than a minute every 10 hours to do 5 fights on auto with very little engagement needed, and rewards I can live without.
Due to the hard fights being virtually impossible unless you are in the late Eras or lucky, it is going to be really hard to compete on the global level for most. You can now compete against your entire age, except that includes people who have levelled up and stay in your PvP category for up to an entire month, so that again removes some of the incentive to try and compete. I spent several weeks having to avoid medium fights with some who jumped from ME to FE.
If there was a desire to make it more balanced, then restrict the units you can use to your era, and restrict them to that era until the monthly reset. Fighting against players 3 Eras above who can have units 4 Eras above their Era is just ridiculous.