"As for the why of the change itself – we changed it because the game was not intended for players to get more resources from using blessings than they do from combat. We think the game is most fun when it rewards PvP battling..."
I think herein lies the crux of the problem. Of course, we understand that you and your team must have spent ages developing this game and continue to spend your time maintaining and improving it and, as a result, it's become important to you. "Your baby" so to speak. However, you are a company and companies should strive to please their customers, most of whom I would presume do spend money on the game, I certainly do, rather than the management and the developers themselves.
I understand you have a vision of how you wanted the game to be played but things don't always work out the way they are planned and I think you need to look at your customers' views, listen to what they say and model the game accordingly rather than to some pre-formulated plan. We players also have a vision of how we want to play the game but, just as we get used to and like something, you take it away.
I'm sure there are many different ways people play the game and there should be opportunity for each of us to play in our own way. Why do there have to be hard limits as to what we can do? Apart from bug exploitation, hacking, cheating etc of course!
I personally did used to use AB quite a lot since it was the perfect length of time to fit in between battles since my preferred set of troops take about 15-20 mins to train. I used to look forward to a long session of several hours with a few beers alternating between a battle and a GB/AB hunt and spent plenty on diamonds and metal once my supplies ran out. This was especially true after you silently tripled the cost of buying extra metals to three crowns each rather than the one crown it was previously. A full AB now costs 29 crowns if you have no resources!
Now I have very little option but to do the TB/raiders tactic which brings in the resources but is rather repetitive and not that much fun to be honest. I used to find my AB/GB hunts a relaxing interlude between hard-fought battles and, since I was also taking in resources from the hunt and only battling every 15 mins or so, it gave me far more freedom to try out different strategies with different sets of troops and tactics. Some were more successful than others admittedly but it was fun and allowed me to think more about strategy and plan a full-on war against a city rather than just spamming raiders to the TC and hoping to take the loot too over and over again.
I presume your overall vision is that people either develop a good enough strategy to take troops home with them or log off and log back on every 15-20 mins when the new troops are trained.
The first option is, for me anyway, difficult to get consistently right since there are so many variables in each attack since cities are set up differently and you can't always guess where the spike traps etc are or where your troops are going to go when you rally! Straight at that redoubt is not a good idea Mr Raider!
The second option is OK until you get to 1.5-2 mil of a resource, in which case, you get attacked when you log off and lose whatever you gained from the last battle or even more and, to attack again, you have to break your peace treaty which then usually means you get attacked as soon as you log off again resulting in attacking being a waste of time and the player just keeping the peace treaty and stopping playing, which I'm sure you don't want.
Not only did you cut the AB duration in half but you also reduced it from +77% to +55% and it still costs a diamond? I tried one today since I had a lot of diamonds left over and managed less than 100k in resources...
When you reach the latter ages then things are very expensive and I don't think people using AB is really going to matter that much overall. I've never seen anyone complaining that people are gaining too many resources from AB anyway. Although, of course, I can see it's very hard to know unless you're on your side of the fence!
I really don't think any of your players mind that much so why should you? Even with AB, it still takes hours to reach the necessary amounts in EA/IA.
Basically, I think there needs to either something else to do in between battles in order to keep people playing and not logging off/on all the time which is just going to test players' patience and probably lead to them just giving up the game altogether.
Or you could just rebuff AB to the way it was. Don't fix things unless they're broken they say apparently...
I don't mind ether way, despite my previous enjoyment of simple, relaxing animal hunting, but we really do need something to do in between battles. There's only so much micromanagement for an extra 10% road bonus and studying of your layout you can do!
Well that turned out a bit long for a first post, eh?
Cheers
it would be cool if Brits would have heavy tank buff and better synergy of their loot bonus(which also needs to be increased) with loot blessing (timed may be?). Regarding Germans, they'd be cool if soldiers somehow buffed and rally cool down may need to become a bit less to make a difference imo. Greeks speed up in % would work or it should be at least 6-12 hours in IA to make a difference. Also, their unique could have more attack buff.
