OK, done venting. Here's some constructive criticism and hopefully useful suggestions. You're going to need it.
Pros:
- Awesome looking new buildings. A shame that none of us got one but that's under Cons.
- More FP rewards in levels 1-4! Very welcome!
- Selection kits provide more flexibility and eliminate the problem of have a dozen upgrades but no base building.
- Nice artwork, though Inno might want to lose the associated cultural appropriation. GE really doesn't need the whole "noble savage" vibe and now would have been an excellent opportunity to lose it.
Cons:
- The play-style of Level 5 is dull and unoriginal, largely reusing exiting elements made more expensive.
- The buildings in Level 5 are largely useless, providing a negligible or dubious advantage. In many cases they cost more than they're worth.
- There is absolutely no reward for Level 5until you've played it for at least a month. A let-down like that the very first week that any of us played it is exactly what Inno should have avoided.
- Too many thrice-damned fragments of everything. Use a different system. We already have these thing called blueprints thank you very much. Go reward your management with fragments of pay-cheques and stock option.
- The Lost Temple expires too quickly.
- Except for those lovely new portraits. I am hard pressed to think of a more pitiful "reward" short of extra turns on encounter 80.
- Fewer diamonds. Already mentioned by others.
- Using Defence, while interesting, goes against all the rest of the broader FoE game mechanics, was released without warning, and had no prior support from Inno.
Suggestions:
- The play-style, arguably the largest flaw, is probably the easiest to fix. Well, at least on a conceptual level. Might give the Devs some headaches but they should view it as job security. There's so much potential here that I'm left wondering how they failed to use most of it.
- Combat.Rather than this lacklustre bigger armies with higher bonuses you could do any combination of:
- Send us up against higher era troops. For SAJM you'll have to create something like the "Incomprehensible Future", a time so distant that none of us will ever get there and from which you can pull all sorts of wonders and horrors.
- Send us up against non-standard troops. You remember those Barbarians from some of the EMA provinces? Whip up a bunch of nasties like those for us to cope with.
- Extended multi-tier battles. Was there some reason that you had to stop after two waves?
- Negotiation. Rather than sixteen monotonous 10 factor negs let's mix it up a bit:
- Negs with more than 10 factors. Was that really such a leap? We have 13 possibilities already in play, so this should be easy. Might need another extra turn here though. Hey look, a use for those previously useless buildings.
- Multi-tier negs. Again, how did you miss this? We already do it with combat. Send multiple waves of diplomats.
- Negs with higher age goods. And now you have up to 18 possibilities. SAJM will need some mechanism to barter with the Incomprehensible Future.
- Negs that carry over. If you can crack it in two attempts then that extra attempt can be used later on when you really need five! Encourages those of us who'd otherwise combat stomp lower levels to farm negs there and get crafty about it.
- Hybrid! They say that war is the ultimate extension/failure of diplomacy so let's do both! Combat one wave then neg the next. Or the other way round.
- A building that costs 50 goods to save 20 is worse than useless and a +30 bonus against a +200 opponent is laughable. Either beef these up, make them do something else, or get rid of them.
- Seriously? We played all of level 5 and have nothing to show for it? You need to fix that or next week is simply going to reinforce this week's disaster.
- Lose the fragments. There are better mechanics for most purposes. For levels 1 through 4 you get 100 of 100 fragments at the end of level anyway, so there's no sense in dicing them up into itty-bitty pieces that you have to collect. Just chuck the selection kit on the final encounter for the level and have done. For level 5 I get why you can't just be handing out monstrously stompy buildings like that. Use upgrade kits instead. That way we get an immediate reward that we can plant this week which actually provides an incentive for playing again this week. Same notion as for the SoH and event grand prizes.
- The Lost Temple expires in exactly the amount of time that it takes to acquire a new one, so nobody go on vaca or you're back to square zero. Extend the duration a week or two or add rejuvination kits. Potentially resolvable if combined with 3.1 above if you add a mechanic whereby the LT sheds a level every week that it isn't upgraded.
- Portraits as a "reward" are an insult that just cost us something useful. Put these on a randomizer and add them to encounters 68, 72, 76, and 80 as additional rewards.
- Also, just throw in some other actual rewards. Some nice stompy troops, big bags of FP, nifty buildings, etc... are good rewards and break the monotony of "100% chance of splinters of Temple!"
- I get why Inno did this, diamond is how they make the bulk of their money after all, but cutting it back like this was just plain silly. They should move a small amount of diamond back into level 3 from level 4, and move the rest of the diamond to level 5. The smaller number of players completing Level 5 means that you could probably increase the amount of diamond offered while cutting the actual payout. The diamond remains as an incentive but now it's an incentive for Level 5.
- Defence was an interesting twist but all the rest of the game is based on attack. That's GbG, the rest of GE, the campaign map, quests, and events. Retooling your entire city just to finish one level doesn't make much sense, especially when you lack those tools. I'd honestly just drop the defence thing but if you're going to keep it then give us the damned tools to make it work!
- Defender's attack is the biggest problem. A few tactician's towers and the odd event building are about the only source. You might want to skew the AD's contents heavily toward helping this in the coming weeks. It does us no good to have heavily armoured defenders chucking snowballs.
- Both defensive GBs are second-rate at best. I do not need more worthless medals. Kindly implement one that doesn't suck.
- The Tavern Boost for defence is worse than useless. The +30% boost would be handy but locks up your tavern for 72 hours! That means that you can't access your extra turn, so there's no possibility of switching from combat to negs. Either fix the duration or let us activate two boosts at once.
OK, that's just a lot of half-baked notions off the top of my head, many of which are likely ill-considered. But seriously guys
Fix This. If you don't then level 5 dies a bad death. It isn't just a few grumbling players. It's a lot of pissed off players. That means that right now a lot of guilds are wondering why they'd bother wasting the resources to pay for level 5 when only a tiny minority might ever use it. In the coming weeks it simply won't be an option for many players. It will be relegated to a small minority of players in only the most competitive guilds. The rest of us won't even remember that it's there, much like PvP.
So put this back into Beta testing and fix it. It doesn't work as is.