The Great Experiment

1. Small biography

2. The dynamics of the event? What did you like?

3. Distribution of crystals.

4. "Generate army" button.

5. Setapes of troops, builds, counter-builds.

6. How much gold have received, what is durability of the artifact?

7. To change or improve, to remove, to add – what would you like change in this event.

8. Wishes for this tournament. Wishes for future tournaments?

9. Wishes to other heroes.

Hey.

Ingenious [10]

1. My name is Saurabh, I am a student. Currently doing my graduation. I am 21 years old, and I live in India. :) Big fan of this game and very addicted to it as well.

2. Well, personally I liked dynamics very much. Playing against AI of opponent was fun, and thus increased the chance of winning too. I was a bit surprised too because AI played much better as per my expectations. I had faced some very tough opponents as well, most of which AI seems to overpower quite easily. The key strategy was to wait with your units and let AI come ahead, so you could have an early strike, which couldn't be possible if the real player was an opponent. So in a nutshell, I think if you had selected good army, it shouldn't be a tough job to beat AI.

3. It was a great idea by implementing the new set of crystals for each day with re-balancing crystal amount of creatures as well. One day if any unit is strong, next day its crystal amount was being reduced and vice versa. So to win it was key strategy to identify good creatures for each day, which I liked the most. I personally played with new set of creatures everyday, never repeated ( except 1-2 units ), which made the event enjoyable. Although I think they could have given big set of crystals, like 3000-4000 for 1 day so that Magic Guilds could have been made playable. I have seen people with magic guild on 1 day only, but that too only Magic Guild 1. Magic guild 2 and 3 were unplayable due to low crystal distribution.

4. Perhaps its the only thing which I didn't like in this event. To be honest it wasn't the great addition as it destroys the innovation and cretive thinking of player. After winning few battles, I started facing opponents with similar build as mine. Of course it is possible to win against similar build from AI, but again, its difficult for our AI to win. I just failed to understand the purpose of introduction of that button. I wish to play this event again, and I also wish it to happen without that button. Only thing in which it was useful is to think of counter-builds. 

5. It was deciding factor of event, you had to identify good troops and setups for each day to ensure win. Luckily I managed to achieve that. I would first list out all 'cheap and strong' units for the day first, and then shortlist best 7 out of them, with 2 buffers/debuffers for each day ( likeclerics,exorcists,orc shamans ) Meaty build would seem to be dominating, troops like treefolks,sphynx guardians or death envoys were most important for us since no tier 7 is available to lvl 9. Also shooters like cyclops,succubus are great addition to the build. As much as I hated the Auto-Generate button, but I used it as an advantage for creating counter-builds. I would first generate all set of available armies to check out what builds people were using. According to their build, everyday I created my counter build. Like when I saw many shooters in generate army set, I would recruit orc shamans for confusion. For large creatures and meaty defensive build, I have taken pit demons. So it was indeed helpful in creating counter builds.

6. I have received 68,544 with a 100 dura artifact. Which easily covered all my gold spent, so this event was a big success to me, financially as well as emotionally too, as it was fun. :)

7. The only thing which I would like to remove is 'Auto Generate' button. Well sure it was useful for counter builds, but later it started generating counter builds as well. So till end of the day, eventually almost 90% people were using same builds, and it became game of LUCK. Luck hits were determination of winner. After realizing this ( from 4th day if i remember correctly ), I started playing this event from 0:00 server time. In addition, as earlier mentioned too, I would like them to give more crystals for atleast one day too, so that builds with Magic guild 2 and magic guild 3 can be made playable.

8. I am very thankful to admins for this event, any new kind of event is always appreciated. It maintains the fun and good atmosphere amongst players. Also its great to play new things rather than repeated events everytime. So its my big thank and regards to admins for introduction of such wonderful event, it was by far BEST event I ever played. For future tournaments I would wish for some innovation as well, I know its not possible to everytime introduce unique event, but what I would want is to implement some changes when repeating same event. For example, in portal of times, high amount of crystals can be given from first day itself or cyclic events of 1vs1,2vs2 and 3vs3 should be made, rather than 2vs2 always. Or even crystal cost of creatures changing each day for Portal of Time would be nice change as well.

9. I wish all other players the best. It was great playing with you all, whomever I faced in event. I am looking forward to meeting with you in next event as well. So I wish you all guys great success in game as well as in real life. Cheers, Greetings from India!

Erathia [17]

1. Hi, everyone. I'm Erathia from Clan  #7279 'The Dragon Slaughter'. Most of my friends are from China. I don't speak Russian and my English is not very good either, so if I made some grammatical mistakes please forgive me :)

2. I think this event was very interesting and innovative. Firstly, the settings (price and total crystal) changed every day and we had to think hard and find the best army setting. Secondly, more important than our self-controlled battles, we had to consider how AI would use that army. It was easy to beat AI but not easy to make sure that our mirror (controlled by AI) could beat a real player. Accordingly, instead of finding the best strategies for ourselves, we focused on finding the most appropriate troops and tactics that AI could use easily. It cost most of our preparation time. Thirdly, the mode of pair battles was interesting. I think after this event, the AI will be promoted again.

3. I'm nor sure whether I understood the meaning of this question well:) The idea of dynamic change of price and daily change of crystal was cool. I think the only problem was the setting of price that limited the use of magic builds. Not only because of the price of unlocking Magic Levels, but also for the cheap price of troops that made the damages of magic seemed powerless.

4. The "Generate army" button seemed to be a double-edged sword. It provided oppotunities for players to see which types of builds were popular and prepared for counter-builds, and also helped the players who didn't want to spend much time in building the troops. On the other side, this button reduced the divesity of troop settings and decreased the fun of this event more or less.

5. The price and total crystal changed every day, so there was not a fixed distribution. The first things I did everyday was finding the armies with best performance-price ratio, and discussing the strategy with my friends. I learned much from them, especially the guyRevolutionRebel, the best player I have ever seen in this game. In different days, I have tried balanced and defensive builds according to the setting of troops. For example, in that day when behemoths and berserks were cheap enough, I used the defensive build. Besides, for a better performance of the mirror, a balanced build seemed better.

6. I lost 1 battle for myself and 6 for the mirror, got 986 points, ranked tied No.5. I received 104,580 as the reward together with an artifact with the durability of 100.

7. I think there is still something that could be improved in this event.

• The change of price could be made dynamically (e.g. several times a day, like the pirate event) so that the players could explore more kinds of troop combinations.
• The "Generate army" button could generate any random type of troop combinations, whether onnot it has been used by players.
• The setting for magic build could be rebalanced.
• Maybe the AI could be made stronger, and I believe it will :)

8. Although this event has ended, I wish everyone enjoyed it and it will come back again someday. Thanks for all my friends and opponents. For the future events, I guess the alt-dwarf may come soon and also look forward to something new :)

9. Good luck everyone in every battles! Thanks for all of you that make this game interesting.

Nowar [15]

1. My name is Lukas and I come from Slovakia which is in the middle Europe. I have just finished my engineering study of road constructions and I am about to continue in studying on 3rd degree. Although my game character seems to be something over 1 year old, I had another character that reached combat level 16 but I abandoned it because it was pimped (too much exp and low faction level due to lot of battles before server merge). As I am a bit of perfectionist I wanted to create a character that would be pumped and competitive. And so it could be now. 

2. I must say that I am a big fan of 1vs1 PvE events because it is easier to manage my time. In the past I liked mainly 1vs1 pirate and villagers event (Settlement Defence) that suited very well to my Unholy necro main faction. However this one, Great experiment was even better and more enjoyable for me. I like this new idea of letting two players face each other in 2 independent combats where they face enemy’s army controlled by AI. Battles are very fast and that is good. Moreover the idea to choose army based on crystals (similar to Portal events) while both sides had always the same crystals amount , made it exciting and I was always looking forward to next day to try out new setup with new amount of crystals. I would not lie when saying that this new format of event going to be my most favorite one. 

3. The same amount of crystals for all players (differences only between combat levels) was definitely good idea. I can’t even imagine what would it look like if you would increase the amount by every fight. I don’t know how would admins make it balanced then. I am also glad that they decided to change the amount every day so players must change their builds and find out what works well every day. Maybe it was a pity that magic guilds 2-4 were unplayable. I think admins should make them cheaper next time so players can try new tactics. Changing the cost of crystals per creature was also good idea otherwise players would mostly play with the same creatures every day. 

4. I am not sure whether implementing this function was a good idea or not. The advantage was making it easier for players to find out what build could work fine but it ruined the part of this event where you had to use your brain and find it by yourself. OK, after 12-15 hours of event you could easily find what setup is good on forum but still…

5. I think there were two options how to play the event: 1st was to play during first hours of each day when not many players know what exactly can be “the build of the day”. 2nd was to wait until other players find out it and copy their builds. The problem was "Generate army" button that partially spoiled the first option however this button probably never provided you the best build so 2st option was always different from 2nd. As I fortunately had a time to play each day during night and it’s -1 hour there from server time, I decided to go fully for 1st option. Each day there were only few builds that worked really well and for some of them there maybe weren’t any counter-build (if we don’t consider the same build to be counter build :- ). Some days there was better variety of build to choose from, other days really only few worked well. When it comes to winning ratio and aiming top score, you had meet two conditions – you had to choose your setup carefully and really find something strong, 2nd: your guild had to be at least very decent for your combat level and you had to use expensive arts otherwise you would maybe win all battles against AI but your copy wouldn’t win many battles. Also a bit of fortune could help too when you chose wrong build and won against better build, if you were smart enough you could just copy enemy’s build and next battle be stronger again. Worse if you lost that battle and lost points before you copied the build.

When talking about how to find out what build is really good, it is not so easy question. It requires some experience of players, the player should understand how the rules of damage (attack vs def) works, he should know the abilities of units. The player should realize that certain amount of low tier units can’t destroy certain amount of t6-7 units who have much better stats and with defensive stats low tiers deal zero damage to them unless you can use really huge numbers of low tiers. During nights where t6-t7 were dominating I very often won very easily because my enemies used low tiers and they simply didn’t stand a chance even if I had -20 stats. Distributing your stats properly was also very important thing. Maybe first day offensive stats was the best option but all other days I used either fully defensive stats or balanced stats (something like 35 attack and 45 def). The mostly I used balanced because you know – it is nice to have 55 def but there is always a point where more defense doesn’t help you so much while few more attack could make your damage 20-30% higher. 

6. I did all my battles on lvl 14 before I leveled up to combat level 15. I got 99.600 reward + 100/100 art which I sold for 150k. That is maybe a funny thing when now we know 100/100 could be easily sold for 100k more gold only few hours later. But when we got that art, I was like: “Hey! What a scrap is this art? I must sell it fast before the price drops too much!” And here we are I really don’t understand why is that mirror so expensive, I would probably use it only for survival tournament… I would expect the prices to drop if admins canceled it in PvP format battles. And they really should because it ruins CG battles to many players I think.

7. There is not really much to change for me although I saw many complains on forum. I would probably reconsider that auto-generate button as better is when players find their build by own. In general I would welcome implementing one thing in these army-choosing events – it would be easier if you could disband whole tier and get crystals back without resetting the whole setup. I mean that you have bought tier 7 and want to cancel it to have only t6 and you must reset whole build. Another idea is to choose from playing style for your copy – something like in auto group battles or quick tournaments – to choose from defensive and offensive style. Some build could really rock if troops were defending. And as I mentioned above, would be good to make magic guild 2-4 cheaper so they would be usable. Also I would like to see adding bonus to attack, defense, initiative or recruit just like in portal event. The last thing that would make this event maybe more competitive would be to give to each copy 10% higher recruit. It would be very interesting then to see how can players deal with it. 

8. I enjoyed this event more than any from past and so I thank admins for that. I know everybody can like something else but I wish we had more 1v1 events because it is so difficult to manage time in events where you have to co-operate with other players. But it is only my personal dream. Hopefully we get more events with this AI/copy system, maybe even something like minor tournament where you fight copy of enemy player. In that case it would be maybe fun to give 5-10% more recruit to copies. 

9. This game is developed by Russians and the community is mainly Russian (or from Russian speaking countries). Maybe there is only 10-15% or even less of us, foreigners who don’t speak Russian but we are always very glad when we can find a way to communicate with you in combats. Often our players aren’t very polite to you and vice versa but we, players from #7705  † Angels & Demons Ψ thankful for opportunity to play this game even when there is language barrier between the most of us. I wish you good luck in your combats but remember that luck and success in game is not so important as happiness in real life. So enjoy your days, see you on battlefield! 

Thank you for opportunity for players from our clan.