In my humble opinion, CEO has two primary goals during game play. Everything else is a subset of the two basic goals. Some focus more time on one then the other, some multi task and work both simultaneously. Goals are:
1. Building armies to fight (bandit camps, adventures…).
2. Building your community (advancing your resources and tech).
I tend to focus on goals regarding resource and technology advancement. However, the second goal (clearing bandits) is not far off. Probably, because in my eyes the first goal is more significant since the principal can then help with the second goal.
Something I noticed during resource upgrades, nearly everything slows down or comes to a halt at level three. Moving to level 4 is when the cost of gold comes into play. Looking at farms for example:
Farm Level 1 40-Fir 20-Stone and 20-Tools
Farm Level 2 120-HW 100-Marble
Farm Level 3 300-HW 150-Marble
Farm Level 4 500-Gold 300-Marble
To get farms to level four, considering how many farms the average player has, is a significant cost. Other buildings like the noble residence requires 1000 gold coins to reach level 4. Gold mines, smelter and coinage are not available until player character reaches level 23, and they are expensive with minimal coins in return over long periods of time.
At a minimum, recommend the Game Developers consider increasing the gold production or re-look the cost of resource upgrades beyond level 3. I have noticed the trading is slowly migrating more and more to players trying to sell resources for gold. Also recommend the Game Developers adopted a set of goals and timetables and or periodically conducts surveys measuring the resource progress. Sorry, today is my day off and the server was down. I had too much time on my hands.
I think that going this route of only coins will make it easier on the players and will standarize the currency. Right now people post very bad trades that take advantage of people. And it is difficult to keep track of everything, since you have hunderds of possible combinations. You might be great to understand how much bread is traded for fish, but what about iron, or copper, or hardwood planks, or coal? Or longbows? By going the single currency route you know that anything under 15 coins per 100 of bread is a bad deal. And if you are offering bread->marble, I just figure out the coin cost of marble and that is it. At most 3 jumps instead of figuring out everything else.
I hope an auction house is implemented with both sell orders (I put up 100 bread for X coin) and buy orders (I put up 30 coin to purchase 200 bread) with only coin as currency and the ability to post more than one trade that lasts either until the order is fullfilled or until you bring it down and not with a 10min timer.
Nice thread ISRJimmy. There are many things that seem slow initially once you get to them, and for 2 reasons: 1) you were anticipating it for a period of time, and 2) CEO does it intentionally so the game doesnt burn out as fast. Speeding up vitally important things like gold would make the game burn out faster all in all losing them lots of revenue in the process. Its a delicate balance, but I think it is a good system so far and some things(esp the highly sought after materials) not only need to be hard to attain, but also a slow grind that takes time(most probly will disagree with me here, but we all know the bottom line for why ANY games are made and its not for user enjoyment). Also, trade hasnt been migrating to gold more and more, its been that way since peeps were able to make branch offices. Its still the most sought after material no question, but to really gauge the schematics of why they did things the way they did you would most certainly have to progress well into it(ie large gold line production) or past it to fully understand the system. Just my opinion, good thread and I really liked how you broke things down in the first half of your post to explain building troops/building resources. You made some excellent points and I think my style of play is very similar.
@ Ozrak auction house is one of the better suggestions I've heard since the game was released here in the states
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