DeletedUser500
Guest
February 7th, 2023 @Diggo11
As developers, one of the areas of the game we most enjoy working on is fort battles. This year I am pleased to say that changes to them have been placed at the very top of our internal roadmap. Yesterday, we announced our latest efforts, follow-up changes to the attack and defend formulas. Over the next couple of posts, I would like to offer our rationale behind the changes we settled on, as well as show you some of the internal analysis we performed.
After our Christmas holidays, we were immediately given a short brief for the expected changes: raise fort battle rewards (with a particular focus on experience) and adjust the team balance to strengthen the attackers and weaken the defenders. We also examined feedback from the community, whose priorities helped inform the specific design of our changes. In no particular order:
- Spread rewards more evenly between classes/roles, with a particular focus on adventurers and tanks
- Increase the competitiveness of lower-level characters on established worlds
- Balance the teams such that fewer extra attackers over defenders are needed for an even fight
- Design systems that are more robust against the idiosyncrasies of ever-changing equipment and metas
Conversely, this change in isolation would cause lower-level characters to lose some attack value. To offset that, we’re introducing a new ‘beginner bonus’, offering up to +15 attack and defend value bonuses to characters below the level cap. Initially this will scale linearly; for example, if your character is level 125 (half of the maximum), they will receive a +7.5 bonus. We feel this is an improved solution that will also help the survivability of lower-level characters in established worlds.
As mentioned earlier, the distance penalty is undergoing a similar transformation. Here are some simplified comparisons from our help resources:
| Shot Distance | Old Penalty | New Penalty |
| 5 tiles | +10 defend value | −6.5% attack value |
| 10 tiles | +25 defend value | −13.7% attack value |
| 15 tiles | +44 defend value | −20.5% attack value |
You may immediately be wondering, why not 10%, 25% and 44%? There are a couple of other major changes here affecting our comparison. Firstly, we’re reducing the distance’s exponent in the formula from 1.4 to 1.2 or, as you may have also seen it written in the past, the squared distance’s exponent from 0.7 to 0.6. This matches how it was previously; in the past we increased it to offset power creep, but now we are reverting that change with the switch to percentage-based bonuses.
Secondly, we will apply the penalty to the shooter’s attack value rather than as a bonus to their target’s defend value. Now our attack and defend value formulas are monomial, we can make this change without affecting the probability of two characters hitting/missing, calculating it behind the scenes in keeping with how players traditionally understand it. However, this change will reduce the difference between the attack and defend values when a high-level character is shot at by a lower-level character, and likewise when a high-level character shoots at a lower-level character.
I will finish this post with another comparison. Imagine two level 150 characters with 697 leadership, 831 aiming and dodging, 591 hiding and trapping, 22 multiplayer attack and 1 sector multiplayer attack, not standing on any structure. They would shoot each other with the following expected values:
| Shot Distance | Old Attack Value | Old Defend Value | New Attack Value | New Defend Value |
| 1 tile | 149.248… | 135.248… | 159.689… | 140.248… |
| 30 tiles | 149.248… | 251.190… | 101.291… | 140.248… |
That’s all for now! We hope you like our changes so far and look forward to hearing your feedback. There is still a little more time set aside for further fort battle changes so keep attending those battles and help us to help you. Please let us know if you found this post interesting and we may share some more insights about the little utils we developed to analyse our data and the change proposals.
i dont remember anything about resistance
