“overall goal of making 5-star battles less common”
That’s a good idea for world wars and it will make those more exciting again.
But… you are destroying multiplayer as a “side-effect” and multiplayer is the thing the people spend most time with.
I want to log in and play the game for half an hour or an hour
.
If I lose my army in a multiplayer battle, I have to wait for retrain.
Retrain times are that long, that I will have to quit the application and play / do something else.
In addition, you would like to motivate people to use up to now seldomly used troops.
So, consider why they are seldomly used. One reason for sure is because they are too weak.
You got this essential point. Good job! But other reasons are:
- They cost oil.
- The training times are too long. (including tactics and planes!)
Up to now, you sadly missed those points completely although they are essential.
The reason is: Even if you make the troops more compatible, they will still need too long to train and people will not invest rare oil resources if they risk to lose more than they can win.
A simple rule of thumb would be: If you losse all your tactics, [factory-] troops and planes in a battle and hit the retrain button, the retraining should be done for all those at about the same time. Obviously, thats not the case for planes and tactics!
“One of the trends we have been seeing in the data for PvP battles is that players are doing more small-scale raids, using only a handful of troops”
It’s a good thing that you analyze the numbers, but those don’t tell the whole story.
You have to either listen to the community or play your own game in order to understand the reasons for the numbers.
The reason for people doing those kinds of attacks is, that they climbed up the medal league by doing all-in attacks that much, that it is getting more and more hard to do a 5-star attack.
By doing a bunch of raids with only a couple of units, they drop in medals.
This results in getting easier opponents assigned again. A side-effect is that you can collect some exposed resources by doing so.
But it is not as effective as all-in attacks and I personally don’t have as much fun with it as in all-in attacks.
So, it’s a thing that is boring, but the game forces you to do so.
You will not solve this by making tactics cheaper.
The issues are:
- There are no noticeable rewards for climbing up the medal ladder.
- With all-in attacks you risk losing the whole army and having to wait for retrain.
That means you will have quit the application and do something else.
