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Comments
This has been out for awhile, and I know that I'm one of (maybe) the top leveled foragers. While I do enjoy the concept, the penalties are very harsh...
To start out, assuming that people min-max to gain the #Best level gains... 4 hours to send out. 3 hours to recall. So, 7 in total will get you one send out and recall. It takes roughly.. 5 or so send-outs (assuming no kills) to get 1 level. 1 level = 10 hp and +1 wood gained per hour/day.
My highest forager is 38, or 39 now. So, assuming 38.... that's 185 send outs. 7 hours each send out? 1295 hours. 53, nearly 54 days. of non stop sending out. Later on, you can level them up faster by killing other people's foragers (which give a lot of experience, but the exp is not shared around properly, so you will have foragers lower leveled than other ones you have.)
So, before we go on.. Let's talk about how attacks seem to work.
Attacks only occur every 4 hours the foragers are sent out (from your side). So, assuming someone goes on the offence, they hit at 20, 16, 12, 8, 4, or so. You can potentially mitigate one here or there with diplomacy, but the best bet to get out without losing a forager? The second you get hit, recall them.
Now, this isn't necessarily.. a bad thing. It means that there is some modicum of defensive play involved. Though.. it boils almost entirely down to "RUN."
Now you might be asking, "Why just run? I can fight them head on and probably survive!" Well. That's.. optimistic. Really. ASSUMING that RNG is on your side, you'll exchange damage from 1 forager to the other. Which means your survivability is up. On the other hand, RNG is never to be trusted. You can have their five foragers hit one of yours. The chances of that forager surviving that are slim, even with a retreat. So, you might be saying "Well I've hurt his! And theirs other non-hostile friends here. He might hit them!"
Good job, you've activated his trap card. If you level up from killing a forager, mid-send out, your forager full heals.
Whether this is a bug or not, who knows. I've submitted it, but heard nothing back yet.
So, your forager died because RNG fucked you over. What do you do now?
Well. You're going to get a level 1 forager, and restart that 54 day process to relevel them. While the person who has the high level foragers. That killed you last time. Have another 54 days to also level up. Since apparently the level cap is either limitless, or 50/100/etc.
Your level 1 foragers, as I have seen time-and-time again with a shitton of other players so far.. Will get one shot. These foragers are, now feeding exp to the person who instantly killed them.. and.. gets.. more experience.. to full heal.. to keep continuing their rampage.
This is absolutely NOT how this should happen... Miners you can level up through minerals etc, don't cost you a ton to send out each time... though they've upkeep.
Let's.. talk about those costs though.
I spend 18k gold every. Time. I send out. If not more, at this point. What does this mean? Absolutely never friggin send out for fibre. You actually begin to LOSE money for sending out for it, even assuming 500 as an optimistic number for you. (Not that anyone really buys/wants cloth/rope.)
Wood is lucrative as all hell. It's the best money you'll ever get. The price has not gone down, despite the demand being half suplemented by membership credits. One reason for this is that people are still buying at this price... So people will continue to sell at that price, because it's damn lucrative. You could try selling for 150.. or 100.. but guess what? People wanting a quick and easy profit will just buy it, resell it for 200+. This isn't exactly a problem on Achaea's side, so much as greedy people.
I don't know how to fix this, but.. Foraging kind of needs to be looked into. I don't see why it's reasonable to have to spend 54 days training up stuff to potentially get insta-gibbed due to RNG.
Did exp get increased for a full sendout or was it just decreased for the "maximum quick leveling"?
I know it's been a bit hectic, but Shipfitting is still almost wholly a net loss for the game, as people are now having to spend millions on weapons (since weapons didn't get to keep their original price as the baseline, like ships did).. Anything involving wood in Shipfitting is just a "I will not use that. I'll just use shipcloth to cut the cost by some if I'm buying new."
Commodity Market for Wood needs fixing, while we're at it. This issue has shown that, in and of itself, it will not fix on it's own without admin intervention. Right now? Wood is at 340g per for 4.2k. Past that? 350 per.
Similarily, Fibre is 10~20g per. Which I think is very fair given it's nature. Every city burns through 250 wood, assuming max barracks (which I think all have) every month. This puts us at 1,500 wood burned just up in smoke every month. 18,000 wood per year.
So cities are competing for prices on wood. PLAYERS need wood to make houses, make totems, do anything that involves a semblance of "I want some place I can call home.
Commodity Market just needs to have some oversight given, making wood, as a whole, cost less. As is, right now. Shipwood, which is 50 wood, 10 iron.. is clocking in at 10kg for the wood, alone, and only removes 3000 from the cost.
I know that "Well you shouldn't quantify everything by numbers!" but this is a shit deal, no matter how you look at it.
I mostly ask because
Should I be expecting dragon foragers here soon?
Because this is still absolutely broken, and I am able to destroy people that are level 20 or less in one attack. (Which is about 80~100 days of work).
However, I do agree with the sentiment of it being awkward to level up your foragers in 'safe zones' to avoid conflict. Granted, no resources, but definitely awkward.
Foraging is not "New person friendly" in the slightest. It is entirely "I hope you started whenever Foraging came out, because there is absolutely no way you will be able to forage without the looming thought of complete and utter annhilation from RNG."
Theoretically, if RNG was on someone's side, they could potentially kill one of my foragers outright by virtue of all of their's hitting one of mine. On the inverse, I could absolutely annihilate someone's level 70ish forager by having 3 of mine hit them. They are now unable to really send their foragers on aggressive, because their singular level 1 forager will constantly die.
Which brings us back to the "What happens if one forager dies and you want to hire new ones?"
Ship crews lower the overall crew EXP to factor in the new blood.. but they level up quicker due to it (tm). Buying a new forager for your existing team should either A) Give you the option to lower group levels to average... or B ) Automatically average out the levels of your foragers.
In that sort of setting, if one of my level 83's died, I would be able to recruit a new blood and my overall group level would lower to 69.2 (or just 69). This would be much, MUCH less awful for the defender...
Not to mention I have been called a plethora of things (@Tesha) for sending my foragers out on aggressive to the same area constantly. The only time I've changed that up in the past 20 levels was because I heard someone I dislike had sent their foragers somewhere in spring and I wanted to merk them. (They weren't there. Turns out sending your foragers to the Inferno's not such a hot idea.)
The key difference between all the things you compared to his time and effort in foraging is that all of those things have counters to make them fun.
Hunting is a personal game. The only reason to be the best hunter is either for personal satisfaction or bragging rights. Bragging rights don’t hurt anyone’s play experience. The only negative effect on other players is sometimes their fave spots are hunted out.
PK is balanced to have counters. You could theoretically be top-tier at level 80 with no arties if you have a few years experience. Similarly, you can spend thousands of dollars and steamroll most people. However, this only affects the people who want to PK, and even those people have plenty of counters. You can run, hide, hire, train and fight back, and any number of other hypothetical things to at least not die over and over again.
You can’t do that here. You could spend a RL year training your foragers, never have one die, and have a perfect run... but eventually adrik’s foragers will kill yours and you will have to start over because there is no possible way for you to ever, ever catch up to him. Because there is no way for you to ever catch up to him, you will never beat him because there is no amount of RNG that could save you. Things that aren’t able to be countered somehow are anti-fun. It’s not that they aren’t fun; it’s that they actively squash the fun around them because there’s nothing you can do about it.
That said, I only have brief understanding of foraging and it’s balance, and that’s because of talking with Adrik about it.
eta: I tagged adrik because it’s late and I’m an asshole.
And never say never. Life has a funny way of interfering with your goals and plans. There will always be a new top person, eventually.
Foraging sums up the game really well, ironically. Come in at the right time, have RNG favour you or find that first or find that safe to extort method until it gets nerfed, everyone else is now behind and having to play eternal catch up, except you never really catch up.
Achaea: dreams of unchecked capitalism.
mining has a few issues, but is mostly fine. How did they make a mining-lite that’s worse than a system they already have?
Also note: Adrik would still be leveling his foragers too, so it would have to have a cap, and even then, RNG could just outright tell you "nope eat shit". Having something completely out of my control outright kill weeks/months of invested effort. . .
As someone bringing in a decent amount of wood every couple of weeks, I have literally no idea why the admins feel like this system is fine and not worth more attention. It's completely fucked.
I half-wish Adrik would send his dragon foragers on a rampage so that the rest of the cities' improvements will inevitably collapse or the price of wood will skyrocket to whatever Adrik decides to sell it for and somebody is forced to take action.
In foraging, attackers get the home field advantage. If you attack, and kill someone's forager with your first forager. That forager doesn't get to retaliate. They are dead. Your next forager hits one of their other foragers. That forager dies. Rinse, repeat ad nauseum. The only thing keeping me from steamrolling through people is the fact that foragers only attack 4 times per send out if there is a victim available. Hour 20, 16, 12, 8 (or 6?). That is it.
Due to the nature of foraging though. If I kill someone elses foragers, my foragers get a spike in experience from it. (Whoever killed whichever forager gets about 1, maybe 2 send-outs worth of exp). Which means the odds are stacked massively in the favour of those who are aggressive and kill other people's foragers. I make 101 wood every day. Each area has about 2400 of each resource. Let me say that again. I can literally drain an area dry and then some. On my own. In one send out. If you come to my area to try and block me on that, I can literally just kill you and go "Thanks for gathering that wood for me and bringing it to me!"
This is incredibly wrong and you need to stop spreading misinformation. This has never been the case since foraging has been around. You can send out to literally anywhere, and so long as they finish their send out, you get exp. You can send it out to an area devoid of resources and get exp. I do it literally all the fucking time during spring.
I'm not making more than the gold cap in a day, and it's not gold that's generated "out of thin air" so I can't really be pegged for that in regards to "This is a broken system. Please fix it." The wood I generate goes to other people, who had gold, to pay for it. (Pretty much always my city, to pay for barracks upkeep. I am pretty much the sole provider of wood to keep the things running.)
It also doesn't help that right now, everyone in Hashan is benefiting from my foragers, whether they really realize it or not. They have a safe place to forage, without fear of death (or, if they do get attacked and die, they can absolutely expect whoever dared to enter the den to die.) Also the fact that since my foragers aren't attacking them, everyone else has theoretically lower level foragers.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UykYp4pJAMkFfcZAk-iJQNLTCkTGletbVFGBzEs11XM/edit?usp=sharing
Please, see if it correlates with the time of your slain foragers. We can see who has learned Lesson One of Adrik's Foraging Tips.