based on my personal battle experience I have a feeling that there is some kind of dis-balance in the way attacks work - let me explain.

Attacks can be targeted at either the player with highest armies per second, most territories or random. From my experience most people target them non-randomly, which makes sense.

But that means that players with high army income get targeted most of the time, and the balance issue that I see is that I never saw a player with highest armies/sec income win a game. The problem is that if a player invested in armies/sec and auto-upgrade army camp bonuses (e.g. to pass challenges), there sometime is no way to reduce armies per sec generated to be behind others, even if you have less army camps. E.g. from my experience, even if all but one of my army camp are destroyed, I often still get the most armies per second, and thus get targeted by a lots of attacks. IMHO the basic idea to attack leaders is right, but the power of attacks is such that whoever gets ahead gets thrown behind much much further. Another problem is the option to attack the player with the most armies/sec, since that player may already be the last one with a lot of territories hit by attacks and requiring 10x armies to get (while only having 2x the income).

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The data that resulted in the conclusion above is from my experience:

- initially I tried equipping my best artifacts, using actions to conquer the "best" territories (e.g. army camps or so that joint strike is active), collected draft armies, etc. - but always without a single exception ended up the very last, being hit 80-100 times by attacks compared to 10-20 times for the winner (and often having final income of about 3 times or even 10 times as much as the winner - both at end of the game and during the game)

- so I changed my strategy, equipped artifacts that give no automatic boost (e.g. draft and mercenary boosts, which I can choose not to use until the final push), and spent all my actions to make sure that the most inefficient territories are conquered, and that all money are spent on mines (so that army camp auto-upgrade has less money to work with) - and then finally and more or less consistently started finishing the idle battles near the top. This just sounds wrong, that the most "destructive" and "inefficient" way of playing is rewarded more than trying to do what would be best in a game with no attacks.

That's the nature of WZIB. At least how it is right now. Maybe that'll change in the future.

It's a wait for the opportune moment to make your move type of game. It's not a strongest-shall-win type of game. It's whoever-picks-the-right-time-to-make-the-right-move-wins type of game.

The plus side is that anyone can win regardless of your experience/artifacts/AP investment/etc.

The minus side is that anyone can win regardless of your experience/artifacts/AP investment/etc.

> It's not a strongest-shall-win type of game. It's whoever-picks-the-right-time-to-make-the-right-move-wins type of game.

I'm totally fine with "the-right-time-to-make-the-right-move-wins" concept. The problem is, that when auto-upgrade army camps and auto-conquer can't be disabled, and when they are upgraded much more than those of other players, there is no way for you to pick the time of the move. You can't stop auto-conquer, and it is hard to stop auto-upgrade army camps (and you have not to wait but to very actively work to stop it).

That is my problem, you have no say in your advancement (at least no say in slowing it down), and if it is fast enough after some number of attacks on you it no longer matters what you do or not do any more


> The plus side is that anyone can win regardless of your experience/artifacts/AP investment/etc.

This is my other observation, that in all games I was in, the players (not just me) with highest incomes at the start of the game (which is affected purely by advancements and artifacts, since no actions have been taken yet) basically never win. For me I was able to slow myself down enough to do a bit better by not using good artifacts. But a few more AP investment and that would not work again.

I would enjoy this game more if no AP investments and no artifacts would be at play actually, so I'm not trying to say that players who invested more AP or got better artifacts should have an advantage. But they should have no disadvantage either. If attacks were better balanced they would do just the trick, not let people with more AP/artifacts go ahead, but not throw them too far behind

Edited 12/23/2020 20:31:38

Ha, funny! I did not notice there was another idle update just today (thanks JK_3 for pointing this out in another thread)! I think it just improved this problem, possibly fixed it: https://www.warzone.com/blog/index.php/2020/12/update-5-07-9/

"...Second, the way attack sizes are calculated was overhauled. Prior to this update, when someone attacks you, it used your armies/sec value as the basis for determining how many armies it took to re-capture the territories you lost in the attack. With this update, it will not look at your armies/sec value and instead will base the attack size purely off of how much time has passed in the battle. While this may seem like a subtle change, it actually has a profound effect on the strategy used in battles. Now, getting a higher armies/sec will be much more beneficial than prior to this update..."

Will be interesting to see how this impacts the game. Maybe upgrading camps in advance of the last 10% of the game will have purpose?