How unit heal and build times increase attacking and lower strategy

[DeletedUser4800]

So I've heard from Anwar the developer that long heal and produce times for units are intentional as this isn't supposed to be a military game. This is just such an ignorant statement it made my head spin, but I didn't want to address it back then and it that thread, but I'm going to address the issue right now.
His response is an oxymoron to what the intent of the game is and how it is currently played.

First of all today's military play is actually more beneficial to attackers as opposed to not having any military units or having military units to reduce plunder. This is done so by the fact that units do actually take too much time to build and heal and it is FORCING players into building long range units, which are the most optimal units in terms of not loosing them, after all if you don't loose your units or minimize damage you don't get to waste hours healing or building new units.

So the simple fact that unit heal and produce times are so long is creating the advance of the military aspect of the game over simply having basic units for defense or no units. This simple fact is also why the most optimal strategy right now is building long range units, most commonly ballistic towers and short ranged like archers.

The AI doesn't help the case, but at least in attacking you could be using other units other than long ranged units produce and heal times were shorter.

Fact of the matter is that the biggest turn away from military combat is the plunder system. The fact that you can only attack a person once per day and plunder one building once is the real limit to military play in this game and it has nothing to do with the unit heal or build times.

One slight problem that reduced heal and build times might add is the ability to finish off fields on the map, but barely so and could be offset by increasing the price of units. Why are even LMA units costing so little money? If you reduce the unit heal and build time, but increase their cost in terms of gold and production you make that aspect of the game more dynamic and meaningful and so attacking would be limited by your gold and production costs, rather than time.

So I'd like to make my case that in order to add strategy to the combat aspect, make it more interesting, keep the same level of militarism in the game and still bound players to a certain conquering time-frame of the map you need to reduce heal and build times on all units to at max 2 hours(preferably 1) and just increase the cost of units depending of age. This would also have a positive income level for InnoGames as healing with diamonds would be a lot more worthwhile, rather than buying new units which say at LMA would cost about 10k gold and supplies.

 

[DeletedUser]

not wanting to be rude, but just build more military buildings....
this game is about balance and you have to figure out yourself what balance of various types of buildings you want - and it sounds like you should have more military buildings

i dont really agree with more expensive units since it would just make attacking more expensive while defences continue to not lose anything

 

[DeletedUser653]

....... Fact of the matter is that the biggest turn away from military combat is the plunder system. The fact that you can only attack a person once per day and plunder one building once is the real limit to military play in this game and it has nothing to do with the unit heal or build times.

Not sure your correct here, many "plundering" players have no goods buildings (I am one) and only get good via plundering and trading. Yes I can only attack a player once a day but most players have a choice of 80 players to attack and to attack all 80 each and every day is not too easy in terms of RL time or healing of damaged troops.

the only real drawback to "military combat" as you put it is that you are fighting AI and not a real life player (maybe one day?....). If you wanted to go down the real "combat" route you would have to be killing defense troops and taking over their village, but thats not and has never been the real point of this game.

As Aerozol states, if you have the troop buildings you can pretty much attack all 80 players every day and if you have troops from each era you could take each tower even. I know, as before Colonial time I used to win all towers from bronze to LMA which means I had to have lots of troop buildings from each of the ages (once you hit colonial you need the space and population for colonial troops).

 

[DeletedUser4089]

Actually, Anwar is a designer, not a developer.

And, he's right (what a shock), FoE isn't meant to focus on military or PvP. Innogames have plenty other games that are much more battle orientated. This game is meant to appeal to a wider range of players and not just those who want to crush other players armies all the time.

I think the limit should stay at 1 plunder per day, I have 70+ neighbours, so already that's 70 possible plunders per day on my town, if each player gets to plunder 2 or 3 times, I could lose out on 140 or 210 collections. Suddenly there wouldn't be much point in playing at all.

 

[DeletedUser4800]

@Bartimus: I'm going to go on a limb how you didn't read my post. I comment that the unit build and heal times add to the attacking aspect of the game, because it forces people to go for long range units which are at a certain advantage over the AI.

If people attacked with more melee range units and they will if they build and healed lower, you would have harder battles and more interesting strategies and combinations of units.