Alliance Wars Beta: The Haywired Edition

[Haywire0311]

Well folks - it looks as if the multiple $100 bills I had to fork out to bribe the devs along with my dashing good looks finally paid dividends! (2 of these 3 statements are false). My alliance, OWN2, made it into the beta program. I know some others wanted to participate and some just want to see what’s going on so I’m making this thread to constantly update the community as to the new feature and how it works.

For now, I will post the initial message and countdown as well as some shots about what some of the new screens look like.

Without further ado, here it is.

The acceptance message

The new alliance screen with alliance war feature included

The info screen

The leaderboard

Initial thoughts:

1. 17 hours is gonna feel like an eternity!
2. Adding the alliance wars into the alliance screen seemed to squish stuff together. Think there needs to be some adjustments made to make better use of real estate.

I’ll uodate again tomorrow. Feel free to post questions here and I’ll answer ASAP and provide as much detail as possible.

Cheers!

[Poobgloob]

@Haywire0311

Adding the alliance wars into the alliance screen seemed to squish stuff together. Think there needs to be some adjustments made to make better use of real estate.

Yeah, my self-diagnosed OCD dislikes this very much…
I feel like the Patrols box icon could be resized into a square rather than a rectangle to make both boxes proportionate.

EDIT: Also, why does the event end in 1 day?

[R15HAV]

Congrats bro !! Enjoy!!

[The_Green_Goblin]

Congratulations. My alliance Goblin Funhouse is also participating. Been looking so forward to this. I’ve never had a chance to beta test anything in the game before. Good luck.

[Haywire0311]

Good catch on the time to event end. Also, it shows three wars in the main portion of the leaderboard but then shows 0/2 Wars count at the top.

Just guessing but maybe for the beta they are only doing 2 wars instead of what is probably going to be 3 wars when it rolls out to the whole audience.

[Searash]

Thanks, looking forward to the updates

[Haywire0311]

5 hours left and I have one last thought/potential concern for the future. Based off the rules that were posted in the Sneak Peak thread, I feel as if this matching system may also be abused similar to PVP. In theory, an alliance can stack a few positions with very strong players and then keep the rest of the players at the low end. Then the power hitters could go in and demolish their opponents defenses and let the low level hitters perform mop up duties.

It’s all theoretical at this point but I guess it could happen. We’ll see how it plays out.

[Haywire0311]

Day 1 - CLUSTERF*CK

As promised - here’s the first update since the Alliance Wars kicked off.

Yesterday’s initial post provided a glimpse into what we could expect for the upcoming war. But even with that initial info, we didn’t really know what we were getting into. To sum up the first day of wars, I’d say it was quite a learning experience, AKA - Clusterf*ck.

The Alliance screen didn’t change much other than show info as to how the alliance was doing.

One confusing thing about this is that there are two ranks. One rank shows your rank in the local war (remember there are only 6 alliances per map) and then the overall rank. So we’re currently 4th on our map and 15th overall. If I’m not mistaken, there are currently 9 other wars going on for a total of 60 teams.

Upon entering the war, we were greeted with our Alliance HQ hexagon on our portion of the map (noted by your alliance logo).

The tiles are all numbered. Initially, I thought this was what each tile was worth but I quickly realized it’s just a position indicator to help coordinate attack and provide positioning.

Clicking on the HQ tile will show you your alliance activity, total tiles owned, and victory points per hour (apparently you don’t start earning these til the second day).

The left hand board shows your the currently leaderboard. You can expand/collapse these at any time to get a better view of the board. At any time you can click on the graph icon to get to the main leaderboard as seen below.

This is a familiar leaderboard to what we’re all accustomed too. Right now it’s showing our score for the first war. The only thing weird here was that it shows three wars in the main area but the summary count shows 0/2. Not sure why the difference here. Only thing I can think of is that beta is only supposed to be 2 wars.

There’s different tile indicators but since I haven’t gotten into a battle with another alliance, I don’t know them all. With that said, the ones I do know are as follows:

Grey - this means it is unoccupied and owned by the AI.
Grey + blinking small interior hexagon - unoccupied and partially owned by your alliance. Still owned by AI though.
Full Alliiance Color - Owned by your alliance
Alliance Color + Honeycomb fill - owned by your alliance and currently shielded (don’t really know what this does yet)
Tile with star(s) - this time is worth a lot more than the other tiles and allows more defenders to be placed within. (More on this later)
Another color than your alliance - enemy tile

For the grey tiles, they seem to be occupied by at least 2 AI teams.

Here’s the first thing I learned - there’s no point using your weakest teams to kill them off. You end up using 5 heroes which count as battle points. When my battle points refill tomorrow (they take 24 hours to refill), I plan on only using 3 heroes per attack so I get 5 attacks per day.

As you can see, regular tiles are the least valuable. The more stars on it, the more they are worth.

When you defeat a team, you partially own it until all opposing teams are defeated on that tile.

After the tile is defeated, you have the opportunity to add heroes to the tile. Anyone from your alliance can add teams of heroes to the tile. It appears regular tiles can hold 3 defending teams, 1 star can hold 5 defending teams, and 2 star holds 10 defending teams. You can add and remove teams as your see fit.

One thing that’s weird is that there’s an info icon in game but it gives no instructions as to how any of this works. We’re all figuring this out by ourselves. I would have thought they would have put something in there to give some type of guidance.

And for now, that’s it. Tomorrow will likely include more info on battles against alliances as we are close to another alliance.

I’m sure some of the above will be adjusted as well once I understand a bit more as to how this all works. And I can definitely see how treaties between alliances will play a big role in this event. Alliances will make and break treaties to defeat lesser opponents and take over boards. One thing the devs may want to consider is limiting the ability of sister alliances being on the same board. I can see a main alliance with multiple feeders dominating a board and making the event for that board boring.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Feel free to ask any questions you have.

[Poobgloob]

Howdy there neighbor

[The_Green_Goblin]

I find it sad that 6 alliances have done nothing. Why register your alliance if you’re not even going to do anything?

[Haywire0311]

Yeah, doesn’t make much sense. Those bottom six only have 1 to 4 members per alliance. Not sure what type of feedback the developers expected from alliances like that.

[The_Green_Goblin]

Especially with how many people actually applied. There’s a lot of alliances that would’ve done something. It’s too bad they’re being left out when they probably could’ve given good feedback.

[Haywire0311]

Here’s some additional thoughts I had after a night of sleep:

1. It would be cool if you could make treaties with other alliances. I have additional thoughts on how this could work but it would be nice to ha e a formal system vice an informal offline one.
2. This style of playing requires a lot of comms and strategy. It would be good if there was an internal alliance chat channel specifically for alliance wars.

[Huginn]

Excellent recap!
I’m looking forward to seeing how this war unfolds. I expect the second war to be much more aggressive once everyone has a better foundation of how it all works.

If you were to give one “pro-tip” to other Alliances before joining an Alliance War what would it be?

[Haywire0311]

@Huginn

If you were to give one “pro-tip” to other Alliances before joining an Alliance War what would it be?

Don’t blow your battle points all once. That first day was the Wild West as far as what we had to do. Unlike the other events, this is purely strategy and don’t involve grinding. Use as few hero’s as possible to take a tile so you get more attacks. Also, don’t attack all at one go. See how the war unfolds over the day and place your attacks when the timing is right.

The other thing is once you find out who else is on your map, start figuring out who you want to ally with. No way you’re going to survive battling everyone all at once.

[Haywire0311]

Day 2 - We Got This Sh@t!

Second day into the wars and I think we’re getting a handle of this war thing. There are a couple things I wish would be implemented but we’ll discuss that later. On to the good stuff.

We keep learning as we go about the different aspects of the war. Seems we’re learning quite fast because we jumped significantly in score which is a nice development (although it means crap because there’s no rewards in Beta). Currently ranked #2 on our map and #7 overall. Not too shabby.

Couple new learning points for those interested.

Once you’ve conquered a tile, you may want to defend it depending on where it is located within your territory. If you don’t assign a team to it, it’s automatically given a AI KLG Irregulars team that is around 40k team power, similar to teams found on unoccupied tiles. However, when you place teams on a tile, there’s always a chance you may want to move them to a different tile to defend it instead. I spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out where I left my defense teams until I realize that the tiles that have a little green bar on them are the ones where you left your teams. Glad I figured that out sooner rather than later!

We finally encountered rival alliances (2UP, Ghost Legends, and Patriotic Bastards). Stuff got interesting then as we began to find out what battling opponents was like. First thing we found out is you can’t atrack shielded tiles. A tile gets a shield for several hours after it is conquered. An opponent cannot attack it if it is under shield. A shielded tile looks like it has a honeycomb fill to it.

I think I mentioned it in my last post but markers are a good way to tell your alliance where to attack. You just click on a tile and flip the on/off switch. It will place a green light indicator on the tile. One thing to note is you can only have 5 markers on at any single time.

You’ll also note in the picture above that the bar under one of them is partially green and partially purple. This means that it is a tile that is under attack and owned by multiple alliances. When you click on it, you can see what teams are currently occupying it.

For a tile that is occupied by another alliance, you’ll see what teams are in that tile and how strong they are. You can select which team on that tile you want to attack. Remember that starred tiles can be occupied by more than the typical 3 teams.

One more thing I want to reiterate is that normal tiles are usually worth around 500-600 points and starred tiles are about 2-3 times higher.

There’s a few other things we’ve yet to experience so I can’t comment to much on those. Apparently there are gems that can be uncovered that are somewhere in the middle of the map but I haven’t been able to confirm that yet.

A few things that I’d like to comment on:

• The 24 hours refresh for battle points seems like an eternity. I’d say twice a day would be enough. Anymore than that and it would become a full time job.

• Would kinda like the ability to actually manually fight teams, similar to PvP. The automatic battle that occurs is ok but I know there are times when I could use much weaker teams to destroy the enemy but I’m forced to use a team that is at least a few points stronger to ensure a victory. It would be nice to click on battle and then be brought into a PvP arena and fight the AI team.

• If you play this strategically, it requires a lot of coordination. What we have for alliance chat barely suffices, especially since we’re using chat for other comms.

• We have no idea what the reward system will be like for this but I hope it’s worthwhile. This is a purely strategic event and if played right requires much more than simply grinding through bounty. If the rewards aren’t sufficient, it will become a dead event quickly.

• Definitely need a way to communicate amongst alliances, especially if partnered. VIP chat and private messages aren’t going to work. This event is definitely bring to forefront the importance of alliances and new tools will be needed to make it work properly.

• Please don’t introduce any pay feature for battle points. That will destroy this quickly.

• It’s weird that if some of my heroes are on patrol, I can’t select them to defend a territory or attack. However, if a team of heroes is defending a territory, they can be selected to go on patrol. So you can do it one way but not the other.

That’s it as far as the updates for the day. I’ll discuss strategy in a different thread a little later on. And someone asked me to post the alliance rankings so I’ll do that in a following post.

As always, if you have any questions, please let me know and I’ll do my best to answer. I’m sure some stuff may change as we learn more.

[Haywire0311]

Here’s the current leaderboard for those that are interested (NOTE: This is the leaderboard for the whole event, including the other maps with the other wars going on. Also, I didn’t include the bottom 6 since they have no score)

[R15HAV]

@huginn hope in the second war the rest alliances will also play I’m going crazy in this war although my alliance is not selected lol…

[ULFPAM]

It’s not sad. Maybe they hoped for more explanation of what’s going on, how to play, etc.
Personally I feel that I want to get into it but I don’t have the time to browse the internet to find a guide on “how to”. I just attack until I’m done.
Even passive alliances are important for the developers to include in their review later on. They’re proving that the system is too complex to not have a proper tutorial

[Haywire0311]

@ULFPAM

Even passive alliances are important for the developers to include in their review later on. They’re proving that the system is too complex to not have a proper tutorial

The passive alliances that haven’t done anything, I doubt it’s due to complexity. Those 6 range from 1-4 players so other than the commander of each who I assume probably volunteered them, the rest are inactive players. Looking through the rosters of each, you can see as much. With that said, don’t want this thread to become a ■■■■■ session about why they chose certain alliancesnover others. The devs had their reasons so let’s move on.

@ULFPAM

I don’t have the time to browse the internet to find a guide on “how to”.

Yeah I agree. You don’t need a full blown how to guide. But maybe a quick intro tutorial like most games have when you first boot them up. Or maybe info icons that explain just a couple of the basics. I’m finding that most everyone playing is doing it by the seat of their pants. Which is fine I guess, especially in Beta, but not always the best in release especially for a complex strategy game. But again, we’ll see how things progress and maybe the devs end up making a few slight adjustments.