The design team has sent us some quick responses to the most common concerns about Season 2 updates in Firestrike:
With many AI enemies switching from Single Player to the regional map, won’t L15+ players become even more dominant against lower-level battalions?
Much of the dominance of high-level players comes not from high-DPS/HP units, but from the ability to instantly teleport battalions around the map. The switch from unlimited Gold-based teleporting to Battalion Jump items will level the playing field by giving all players access to the teleport ability, while at the same time capping the number of Battalion Jumps available to each player, so that they will only be used in true emergency situations.
High-level players still have the most powerful units and battalions, but now groups of lower-level players should be able to take advantage of improved fairness in map movement to outmaneuver lone high-level dominators.
Won’t it be too hard for low-level players to gather resources now?
A group of alpha testers has been playing with all TOC L5+ AI enemies changed from Single to Multiplayer, and these players still gather about the same amount of resources each day as they did before the switch.
Of course, we’ll continue to monitor the situation on the Battlehouse server to make sure resource gathering on the map does not become a bottleneck.
Upgrade costs have gone up significantly for mid-level players; doesn’t this cause too much boring “grinding”?
Firestrike has roughly the same amount of upgrades as our previous games, but players have been advancing towards max levels far more quickly than we’ve ever seen, running the risk of exhausting the game content before the design team can prepare additional unlocks and upgrades. The increased resource and time requirements are intended to dial back the pace of progression more in line with previous successful Battlehouse titles. (we’re still monitoring this, and may make changes if the “grinding” becomes too much for a majority of players to handle).
For context, please note that the original design balance for Firestrike was targeted to a more casual, lower-skilled audience than previous Battlehouse games, and thus it had lower resource requirements. But in reality, the current player base has shown significantly more skill and time investment in Firestrike, relative to the average Battlehouse player, and we needed to raise the game difficulty to account for this.