Artifacts are basically free AP advancements.

If he were to allow use of all, he would have to make levels harder.

Why is this so? I mean, as I said before, you are free to unlock and upgrade as many advancements as you please, and - although I don't know if this has influenced the level's difficulty before - I don't feel the levels getting overly harder although I "wasted" 500 APs into Statisitcs. (*) So, why should having all artifacts operating at the same time, be any different? You can't have unlimited APs right from the start (just like artifacts) and finishing later games grants you more APs than the first ones (just like later games give you higher chances to win rarer artifacts). Granted, both can be "improved" by spending real life cash.

To clarify, I like the limited amount of operative artifacts (hard to find another word for "active" here if I don't want to get misunderstood). If it was my choice, I might not have picked 3 as this number but I probably would have landed in the same ballpark. As you said yourself, artifacts and advancements are mostly the same and (that's my addition to this) can amplify one another.

I don't want to cause a whole discussion about this tiny detail. Fizzer wanted three slots and he wants to keep them (at least that is how it appears to me so far) and that isn't what I would like to be different. I just disagree with the correlation you created between number of operating artifacts and level difficulty, in - as it seems - strong contrast to the correlation between accessible advancements and level difficulty that you imply to already be present. On this note, I can understand everyone who advocates that the slots should be removed (I just don't want it as much as they do).

(*) To clarify: What I mean is that everyone will start the Idle Tutorial with the same advancements (none) and if the level's difficulty would resemble the acquisition of advancements accessible at this point, levels should be harder if you haven't spent your APs wisely. What is in fact apparent is that the speed with which you claim territories decreases over time in each level, but that is nothing the advancements could fully compensate.

They are definitely not free. They cost in game money and real world time.

The problem with that is Fizzer didn't want people to have use of all artifacts. He purposefully limited it to 3, and he is trying to limit a workaround.

Well, from a design perspective you can:
1 - Get rid of the slots; people get all the bonuses and the artifact game becomes upgrading your gear. All artifacts become useful (passive and active).
2 - Stay the way it is; swapping artifacts stay the meat of an efficient gameplay. Not fun for some people (like myself). All passives stay useful, actives become fodder.
3 - Limit swapping with cooldowns or straight up disable swapping; people will probably stay with their best passives unless there is some very specific condition an artifact can help a lot with (I have not played all the maps, but seems unlikely). All but the same three artifacts become fodder.

The third option is what the OP seem to have as his goal, but I think this will lead to the same 3 artifacts being used by everyone and the rest becoming fodder, which is functionally very similar to getting rid of the slots as everyone will have the same setup, but the upgrade game becomes worse because you are simply upgrading those same three best artifacts. The design of all other artifacts is wasted.

If the rationale for limiting artifacts with slots is to generate the emergence of new gameplay styles, I do not think artifacts (as they are now) are powerful enough to do that (maybe they are by the time you get to the late maps, but I remain unconvinced).

If make them all active then it is evem more time management required. Simple thing to do, if you invest the time and resource to purchase artifacts, you should be able to use them. Best thing to do allow more slots like suggested, more slots allow for purpose of attaining and upgrading an artifact in the first place.

I'm thinking something like this: You get two free passive artifact swaps per day. On your third, the artifact takes 3 minutes before its effect kicks in. on the 4th, it takes 8 minutes to kick in. then the time gets progressively longer for the rest of the day.

Note that the battles landing page encourages changing artifacts before a battle.

The artifacts you have equipped (up to 3) when starting the battle will be the only ones you can use during the battle, so make sure to arrange your artifacts before joining.

If there is a daily limit to switching artifacts, I feel battles and challenge levels would need an independent way selecting artifacts to ensure those of us that like to switch artifacts before and after battles/challenge levels are not penalized.

As far as a warm up period, if I have only a couple of minutes to check the idle game, I wouldn't be able to get use out of some artifacts like the hospital boost. I wouldn't mind leaving it in place after using it, but not being able to use artifacts when I have a brief window to play would not be a good experience.

I'm impatient, so posting my ideas before reading the whole thread. I apologize if this been suggested:

To decrease the incidence of switching, implement a "ramping up" period for artifacts. Conversely, create a "bonus" for artifacts the longer they are in a slot.

You could even add a "Super Bonus" or Auto-Upgrade for those who commit long term to keeping an artifact in the slot. I think this would be especially attractive to long term players and ones with a specific strategy such as maxing troops, mining, etc, or minimizing costs. Particularly pointed at those who are slotting the artifact to get a discount, then removing it. If the artifact gives a 5% discount when initially inserted, but could ramp up to a 30% discount over the course of two months, fewer players are going to be swapping them in and out, and more will use them as part of a more permanent strategy.

Examples:

Artifact improves (production/gain) up to 5%, increasing by 1%/hour, until reaching a benefit of ____%/hour.

Artifact decreases (cost/loss) by 5%, further decreasing by an additional 1%/hour, until reaching a benefit of ___%/hour.

*"Super Bonus": Artifact improves additional 1% after 24 hours, and an additional 1% every week until reaching maximum (say double the regular bonus)

*"Auto-Upgrade": Artifact upgrades after being in slot for X days/weeks/months.

Edited 2/18/2021 17:56:09

@MWL

Good point regarding WZIB ... tbh WZIB needs its own mechanism for switching artifacts already independently of the active WZI map. Doesn't make sense to change the WZI artifacts and hence the playing strategy ESPECIALLY for people who use Auto-upgrades, etc, for the purpose of an Active game (WZIB). WZIB artifacts need a different interface to choose the artifacts to use for the battle, while leaving the WZI artifacts in place as-is on the current map.

Eg: assume you have an Epic MINE DISCOUNT, MINE BOOST & ITEM VALUE artifacts in place b/c you use Auto-conquer, auto-mine upgrade & auto-sell, etc ... but in order to play the WZIB you would likely remove all 3, disable auto-mine upgrade & auto-sell to avoid losing money unnecessarily, then after the battle go swap the artifacts back in & re-enable the AP upgrades. This is also not fun (responding to the base concept of this post that swapping is 'not fun').

WZIB and WZIC (battles and challanges) need an option to change artifacts outside of the current level anyway

Forgot about WZIC, but yep, same principle. 100% agree.

WZIB and WZIC (battles and challenges) need an option to change artifacts outside of the current level anyway

Now this is an intriguing idea ... implies that the artifacts have an XP factor to them. Very interesting recommendation. A number of other games use this concept, where instead of just buying your upgrades/power ups/increased damage/efficacy, you simply wield and use the weapon/item which automatically increases proficiency (XP) with them. Would work well for Passives, but may need some rework for Functionals & Actives, else it means that players are punished with countdowns/dead time for wielding them while getting 0 benefits but must invest in them in this manner in order to achieve long term improvement. Also sounds like an opportunity for some new Achievements ... Wield an artifact for 1 day/week/month collectively (not straight). Wield 10 artifacts for 1 year collectively (so 3 artifacts wielded for 1 month each = 3 months collectively). Etc.

*"Auto-Upgrade": Artifact upgrades after being in slot for X days/weeks/months.

wait what? do you see some hiden meaning in my messages?

Also, idle already got enough tedious achievements that kill your speed if youre trying to get them, no need to add more

Wild idea based on what Z just said in global: WZI achievements give AP instead of WZ xp, so people have a reason to go for them (or even better: both AP and xp!)

An alternate idea:
Give each slot its own lock timer. Slot 1 could be locked in for 1-5 minutes, slot 2 for 30 minutes, and slot 3 for 4 hours. The artifact immediately takes effect when it is changed but is locked in place for the specified amount of time. This would allow a player to swap in a hospital boost to take some territories for a few minutes then swap it back out. It would stop the player from swapping in a hospital boost in slot 1, cache boost in slot 2, repeatedly switching between the three types of cache boost for slot 3, and then reverting back to the original set of 3.

As a variant of this, you could also give each artifact its own slot lock time, based on the way it might be used. Things like army camp boost, bonus money boost, and mine boost wouldn't need a locked in time at all and could immediately be unequipped without penalty. Item Values, Ore Values, and Alloy Values might have a lock time of 30 minutes. The timer starts when it's equipped, but can be cancelled if the artifact's effect wasn't actually used. For example, if the hospital boost was switched in but no territories were taken, the player could swap it back out immediately without penalty. If it is used, the artifact can be replaced, but the slot will be marked as "locked" or "inactive" until the timer is up. When the time's up, the new artifact's effect kicks in. The player would still be able to move the artifact that triggered the lock back in and get the effect again (without restarting the timer). For example, they could put a Hospital Boost artifact back in if they noticed they forgot to take a territory.

I think this gets the best of both worlds. A casual player can log in, equip their hospital boost to take some territories, then put their bonus money boost back in so that it kicks in when the lock time ends. This way, they don't have to come back in 30 minutes to fix their artifacts.

Edited 2/18/2021 21:13:16

I’m going to double down on my statement that everything being proposed involving timers, locks, cool downs etc is way too complicated and not a good user experience.

Dangermouse is likely right. Anything along these lines that is implemented will likely result in people getting confused on the mechanics and thus going into global chat and forums posting, "Why are my artifacts not working properly?"

Not dissimilar to "Why do I keep automatically join QM games?" Can't count the # of times global chat regulars have answered how to uncheck "Invite me to multi-day games" checkbox on the QM page.

I see it very diferent way than Fizzer. There are 2 issues, that have partial intersection, but there are also certain nuances. Raw power of artifacts and their duration over time. Fizzer has problem with duration over time of passive artifacts, but is combining evalation of raw power into it.

First of all, I fundamentally disagree, that passive artifacts are overpowered, I rather see active ones as very underpowered. Let me make an example. There is passive artifact for discount to purchase camp/mine upgrade and active one with about doubled raw power bonus. Then there is also tech, that does same thing and basically works the same way as related passive artifact. For duration of 16 hours, I can upgrade like 10 camps/mines each of them 2 times while getting bonus from tech or passive artifact, but active artifact is usable only once during those 16 hours. If I would not use that active artifact at all, it would be probably not even noticeable for common eye. To justify 16 hours slot occupation for active artifact, it should do something like giving one camp/mine upgrade for free (100% discount). So, I really do not think that passive artifacts are overpowered in term of raw power (especially if I compare them to techs), but active ones have really minor effect.

Regarding duration of artifacts over time, I find use of active artifacts very complicated, if I want to play idle battles every 30 minutes for duration of 2 hours. When active artifact is on cooldown, I can not swap it for idle battle, if I used it in normal idle game. If I do it with 3 active artifacts, I am stuck with them for all 4 idle battles in those 2 hours. If there is going to be added some limitation to passive artifacts, there should be also lowered time limit for active artifacts, becase if I want to play both normal idle and battle idle, I "have to use" passive ones, even if they would give noticeably smaller bonus, for sake of flexibility and experimentation in idle battles.

PS: I forgot to mention advancements too. Basically passive artifacts seem to be along line with advancements and techs, while active artifacts are very underwhelming not just to passive artifacts, but also to techs and advancements.

PS2: For example artifact "Idle Time" is really meant for swapping. There is no use for it when you play, you want to swap it in at end of your playing session and swap it out at start of your next playing session. I do not know all artifacts yet, but there could be more artifacts like that whose purpose is swapping and without it, they do not make sense.

Edited 2/19/2021 15:32:55

To put this discussion on solid feet we should perhaps first discuss under which circumstances artifacts can be seen as "overpowered" or in general, what power level we want to achieve. I, too, am guilty of just comparing actives and passives, but as long as we don't agree on some sort of base level, there is no way to decide whether passives are overpowered or actives are underpowered (or perhaps even both). We can only state that passives are more powerful than actives.

To me - and that's the point here, this is just personal opinion which we might not agree on - artifacts should contribute a similar level of benefits to one's game play than advancements. If artifacts contribute less, there is no reason to bother digging and upgrading them, if they contribute more, the advancements become useless except for the ones without artifact-counterpart (like the Auto-xxx ones). Techs, in contrast, should have a higher effect than both because they have to be re-unlocked each time and if they don't pose significant benefits no-one will unlock them over and over again.

Now, given that Fizzer intended us to only use three artifacts (more or less), I'd argue that each single artifact would need to be more powerful than the advancements because of the fact that you can have several advancements but only three artifacts at a time. So, the effects of artifacts would have to be somewhere between techs and advancements.

The problem with this comparison is, that there isn't one artifact with each effect but a whole family of (otherwise) identical artifacts that only differ in their strength. So, which level (common, uncommon, rare, ...) is the default that we try to compare with advancements (and which level of advancements) and techs here? I'd argue that this base line strength should be somewhere between uncommon and epic (the weaker ones are just that, weak, the more powerful ones are basically unobtainable for quite some time, I don't even have an epic one yet), but that again is just my personal opinion.

Yes, this matches my previous argumentation, but I tried my best to write this just from a game design perspective not as a user that is frustrated when we will experience dramatic artifact nerfing. But given such a definition we would finally be able to argue that e.g. active artifacts are way underpowered as I can only use their effect once ever 16h while the same advancement would be "always on".

@Fizzer: What do you think, can we define such a statement about the desired level of artifact strength? Or do you already have one that you could share with us such that this discussion can be carried on on the same level? Because, if your desired state is e.g. that artifacts should have below-advancement strength and we users expect them to be more powerful, we will never be able to agree on anything.

Interesting.

I see it the relative values as:

1) AP advancements should be the strongest (relative to how much AP you invest in them). AP is the scarcest resource to come by in the game, so it should have the biggest reward for investment.

2) Artifacts should be next. They are easy to come by (do a dig, cost in game money) but do require time/effort to upgrade.

3) Techs should be weakest, b/c they are reset anew each level and don't persist, and are the easiest to acquire/reacquire. But there are more of them, so collectively they tend to overshadow the AP advancements and Artifacts.

Interesting piece by Phoenix

@Fizzer: What do you think, can we define such a statement about the desired level of artifact strength? Or do you already have one that you could share with us such that this discussion can be carried on on the same level? Because, if your desired state is e.g. that artifacts should have below-advancement strength and we users expect them to be more powerful, we will never be able to agree on anything.

If I may add, one question that I have mulled over is the design goals of having artifacts in the game. Thematically they are great. Apart from that I am not sure what they are there to do. Are they simply another form of advancement (which is fine - it is the very nature of idle games having different, interesting ways to optimize runs) or are they supposed to add another dimension to the game? If so what are they adding?

Partially as some sort of answer to krinid, partially because this answer reminded me of things I forgot or that came to my mind independently, or just to elaborate further on some things I said in my last post, I want to write this. krinid is definitely not wrong in large parts and I really like that we can have this discussion here. But perhaps (especially for others without a clear opinion by this point) I feel like I have to add some more details.

I said, that it is not trivial to define a base line artifact, aka the rarity tier that we use to compare to techs and advancements. The same is true for advancements and techs, too. Do you compare artifacts with a maxed out advancement or some medium upgrade level? How do you compare techs with both of them given that each level has its own unique set of techs?

How do you account for advancements that are only available in a later phase? Everyone starting idle has access to phase 1 advancements, but even phase 2 ones "cost" 1000 APs straight away plus whatever the desired advancement costs itself. So, comparing for example the Idle Time artifact with the Idle time advancement is relatively easy, comparing some cache artifact that is not Money Cache (as this is already in phase 1, I don't want to spoil too much here) is more difficult to do.

Next up, availability: If you desire to improve e.g. your Money Caches, you can go for it and buy this advancement. If you wanted an artifact for this, you would rely on this loot-box-system to get this exact artifact. Even purchasing an artifact doesn't give you the ones you are looking for. So, with 41 artifacts according to Z's google sheet, you have a success-rate of roughly 2.5%, if you wanted to buy some specific artifact, you needed about 120 trials to get this exact artifact with a confidence of 95%. Even with poor ones, this costs you 2400 coins or 24$. Sure, if you were lucky, you would have picked up a lot of junk artifacts on the way to upgrade the desired poor one you got. But there is still a chance that you will NEVER find the one you are looking for.

Some have pointed out in this forum that artifacts don't drop with the same likelihood. I don't know about that but if it is true, we have a whole other problem here. If is was easy for everyone to define their three favorite artifacts (which it isn't) and you wanted to use these three, you had a hard time getting them. Because if the likelihood of different artifacts is different, than I assume that the more valuable, more desirable artifacts are rarer (in general). That would again screw over every calculation I did in the previous paragraph. Now, defining the best artifacts isn't that easy (and in my eyes it depends on the situation in-game, therefore, I value swapping), evaluating the effectiveness of each artifact isn't easy, too (you can to some extent evaluate the effectiveness of your artifacts in Idle Challenges, but only the passive ones and only if you have the matching Auto-advancement; you can't evaluate your Ore Values artifact without Auto-Seller, etc), so the whole game builds upon gut feeling ("I feel like Territory Money Boost made me finish this level faster."). That isn't a good basis for asking players to stick to one set. If you can't put a number to some effect, the player will always try another strategy over and over again.

Finally, regarding comparison of techs, artifacts and advancements. What I tried to emphasize the last time was, that I think that "my whole collection of artifacts" should be equally effective than "my whole set of advancements". I never wanted that Artifact X is exactly as effective as Advancement Y or Tech Z. The overall effect of all your advancements should in my eyes be comparable to the overall effect of all your artifacts. Or, to draw a picture here, give someone some APs and a set of artifacts (that are equally hard to get in realistic levels) and let them first choose their advancements and then swap freely between these artifacts and then evaluate what benefits they had from both individually. My opinion is that both should be (more or less) equally helpful. If you now are limited to less than "your whole collection of artifacts" (if some can or will never be used; among other reasons, because you don't want to swap too often), then each individual artifact should be (slightly) more effective, such that "your whole collection" keeps the same level of effectiveness. Same picture, if you give the same person some APs and a set of artifacts but they must choose three of the artifacts the same time as they choose their advancements, then if the individual artifacts are way weaker, there wouldn't be a point in using artifacts at all.

Now commenting on krinid's post:

Sure, APs are in a way the "premium currency" of WZI, but on the other hand, you can pretty much farm them. As I described for artifacts, you can farm junk to upgrade what you already got, but you can't really farm for one effect of artifact. So, I'd argue that the comparison is more complex than that. APs are a placeholder for specific effects, artifacts ARE the effects. Would you rather win a million dollars or a (large) house? Given you may or may not already own a house. What would a house have to be worth for you to choose the house if you don't know yet if you need one? A similar argumentation can be formed for APs vs artifacts.

And regarding techs: Sure, items and alloys are (for the most part) easy to get, BUT:
- Artifacts and advancements keep their effect over the course of a level, for techs you start each level with zero, so for some portion of a level you will get 0% Mine Boost. If the Mine Boost doesn't improve significantly after that, you will never even start smelting for techs (but rather for money directly)
- Over the course of several levels you buy the same tech multiple times. The price and the effect still have to be comparable to artifacts. If you rent a car or buy a car, sure, rent will be more expensive normally, but doesn't cost as much up front, but you still want to "own" the same car after all no matter when you pay how much.