I've thought allot about glob2 gameplay, and I've decided that its very unbalanced. Its unbalanced in that a player whos skills are only marginally better than another player will almost always beat them. The range of players anyone can play against is very small, and this will make it difficult to grow the community.
Partly of this is because mistakes are so punishing. Warriors can decimate each other rapidly. A single opening of attack can bring great devastation. An early mistake with fruits can easily lose a game, and a single explorer-bomb can take the tide of the war. This is why Globulation 2 games are determined so quickly, its mostly city building, and a rock-paper-scissors style game where you pick your strategy, and hope that its the right one.
To allow players of varying skill levels to be able to play together more fairly, I propose a number of balancing changes. Some of these make mistakes less devastating, some of them balance strong player against weak ones:
* The attack power of warriors compared to the defense of buildigns and workers needs to be cut, drastically, or contrapositively, the hp of workers and buildings could be increased. Warriors can devastate cities, quickly to, sometimes you can lose very important buildings, like swimming pools, before you even have time to react. I think that the hp of buildings and workers should be doubled, maybe tripled.
- This would also intensify the focus on having inns near your enemy, making the game more tactical and strategic * The difference in effective attack power between level 1, level 2, level 3, and level 4 warriors needs to be shrunk. As our current numbers stand, the effective attack power of level 1 warriors is 88, level 2 is 288, level 3 is 600, and level 4 1024. Warriors of different levels simply can not compete with each other, which makes the mistake of being just slightly behind in upgrades obliterating. The difference between level 1 and 2 is huge, which is why war rush strategy is so successful, because your enemy can't defend.At most, I think level 4's should not exceed 2.5 times the power of level 1's.
* Fruit conversion is heavily overpowered, and worse yet, its unpredictable. You could have all the fruit in the world, and be losing in the conversion battle because you don't have the fruit you need in the right Inns, and rarely do you know what the right inns are. The system from conversions needs to be adjusted to be less aggressive and more predictable, but still capable of being used tactically. Methods for doing this are discussed in an earlier thread.
* The difference in walking speed for different levels of walk, and swim speed for different levels of needs to be shrunk, as it puts a heavy focus on the racetrack building. A loss of a racetrack or swimming pool is a huge, huge loss, and because these buildings are big, they are hardest to defend.
* The size of racetracks and swimming pools could be shrunk, and the number of units they can train shrunk to, the idea being that you would have several of these critical buildings, more like the way barracks are balanced now.
* Explorer ground attacks are still to powerful. An explorer bomb can still devastate with little ability to counteract. * Turrets need to be more effective against explorers.
-- Extra cheese comes at a cost. Bradley Arsenault.