Foraging!

13

Comments

  • Please not cloth. Tailoring is already such a slow business as it is!
  • Housing could go back to using credits instead of commodities. I miss those times!
  • So.

    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.
  • Well that... Didn't really help any part except the foraging for fibre bit...

    Did exp get increased for a full sendout or was it just decreased for the "maximum quick leveling"?
  • Awesome, looking forward to it. Thanks Mak!
  • Makarios said:
    More to come, just the two changes I had time to do between the coming promotion switch and some other things. Stay tuned!

    So... About them foraging changes?

    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. :)" and to add to the cake.. Shipfitting requires (See: Doesn't require, but it's kind of part of the thing) wood as well. It's actually cheaper to just forage for all of the wood required for making a galley. Selling said wood on commodity market and then buying the ship for 10 million gold, minus what you can get off for the shipcloth.

    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.
  • So.. has.. anything been expressed about these changes to foraging? The coming promotion has kind of gone past... 5 times now, and "some other things" is a bit of a mystery, so that's whatever.

    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).
  • KresslackKresslack Florida, United States
    Would be great if Foraging and Mining systems worked more on RNG or simple unit type instead of who has been power leveling the longest and can steamroll everyone else. Those levels are insane.


  • Kresslack said:
    Would be great if Foraging and Mining systems worked more on RNG or simple unit type instead of who has been power leveling the longest and can steamroll everyone else. Those levels are insane.
    There is a reason I stay in one place all the time. You go there once you learn never to come back.
  • KresslackKresslack Florida, United States
    Adrik said:
    Kresslack said:
    Would be great if Foraging and Mining systems worked more on RNG or simple unit type instead of who has been power leveling the longest and can steamroll everyone else. Those levels are insane.
    There is a reason I stay in one place all the time. You go there once you learn never to come back.
    Is it Rheodad? Because I just recently lost all my foragers there!


  • When it's more beneficial, and productive, to send your foragers to areas without anything to forage to gain levels (so they maybe don't instantly die), you know your system's kinda fucked.
  • I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from, as far as the level of your personal forgers. It's not absolutely broken. You spent an entire real life year grinding and figuring out the mechanics to get to be where they are. And you want the Admin to...nerf them because they are more powerful than people who spent less time than you? That's not something I can get behind. Especially if you put in the work, time and resources to be where you are today. I feel like that goes for everything though. You want to be the best combatant? You're going to spend many years of hard work. Want to be the best hunter? You're going to spend many years of hard work. I don't think everything should have to be newbie friendly.

    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. 
  • I will add that is very nice of you to stick to one zone to allow other people the opportunity to learn and grow, themselves. Not many other people would do that, nor should they, but it was personally nice to read.
  • Iohanna said:
    I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from, as far as the level of your personal forgers. It's not absolutely broken. You spent an entire real life year grinding and figuring out the mechanics to get to be where they are. And you want the Admin to...nerf them because they are more powerful than people who spent less time than you? That's not something I can get behind. Especially if you put in the work, time and resources to be where you are today. I feel like that goes for everything though. You want to be the best combatant? You're going to spend many years of hard work. Want to be the best hunter? You're going to spend many years of hard work. I don't think everything should have to be newbie friendly.

    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. 
    That's the thing. Yes, I put in a year's worth of time doing foragers. Think of it like this. I spent a year's worth of time to get my foragers to level 90. I can very easily kill someone's foragers that are level 50 or so, given just 3 attacks (about 12 hours). I can wipe out, effectively, 5.5 irl months of work they have put in. By simple virtue of "My numbers are bigger than yours."

    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.)
  • That pun was terrible, and you should feel terrible. I think your proposal for averaging out is an interesting idea. There is roleplay flavor in it that if you have a bunch of highly experienced goblins bringing in a fresh-faced goblin to replace the slain one. The higher level ones would very quickly be able to teach the inexperienced one. So to speak! There will always be a gap, because it's not possible for everyone to start at the beginning. I honestly think that's okay. I am one of these people who started last week, and I have been wiped out 4 or 5 times now. The risk versus reward feels very exciting to me, and I just don't want to see people who have been working at this for a long time to be punished. Perhaps your proposal is a good solution for the middle-ground. We'll have to see what the admins think.
  • edited August 2020
    I’m with @Adrik on this, and that’s for one specific reason: there is no balancing mechanic.

    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.
  • Just wait for the artie that’ll bandaid fix it but then turn out to make the highest leveled foragers even more broken and then the system just gets left as is. Foraging would have been fine without the janky rng pvp element that can simply fuck someone over with 0 player input, since you can just make it a pve element instead that balanced with forager level.


  • There is a counter. Put in the same amount of time and effort to have your own level 90 foragers, as Adrik did. He played the risk and reward game, just as any other person would have to. There is no difference here. It's still time and effort. As pointed out previously, you can get by with very minimal consequences to level your foragers by choosing your location intelligently. It'll just take longer.

    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.
  • Your point would be applicable if Adrik, and potentially only a few others, couldn't just wallop anyone trying back into the dumpster again, solely through bad luck, and you are forced to put your foragers in a position TO get whomped again to try it. Unlike mining where you can pay a bit more gold and time to level stuff incredibly safe, there is no option for foraging, AFAIK (may have changed) if they don't gather, they don't get XP (tested in 5 instances of full 24 hour sendouts to empty areas, 0 xp gained, without sending them anywhere with resources in between), 2 levels gained in 3 sessions after grabbing fiber. 

    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. 
  • Can confirm you do gain levels without gathering resources. I have leveled mine safely and consistently this way. This is why I have said the things I've said. Perhaps your foragers were too high leveled to notice a level difference, in 5 instances, or they implemented the change after you did your testing.
  • edited August 2020
    That’s still dumb, are you expected to send them to empty places to just catch up then? Do you choose between trying to get resources (wood, mind, is imperative to city upkeep), and even then, you level, catch up to adrik, and rng specifically insta-gibs two of your troops while sleeping, while your damage doesn’t kill one of his.

    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. . . :/
  • When places are hunted out you can always go elsewhere or wait for another time. People can't hunt if they aren't online. Your foragers can fight and dominate even though you are out of the realms. I think that's something that needs to be changed to encourage competition. Of course they return. After some time, but who doesn't have 2 minutes to log in on their phone and send them back? It's where I'd make a change to scale foraging.
  • Silas said:
    The levelling of foragers makes it probably one of the most broken systems in the game. Literally the only reason that other people can participate in this system is because Adrik chooses not to send his foragers out to different areas on recall. The potential time lost for people who he can absolutely obliterate makes it a wholly unwelcoming system, and is why wood is still selling for 260+ per, roughly 10x what it cost in the village commodity market.

    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. 
    The first issue with foraging is that it has no level cap (as far as we know). This works great for pvp, where you get such a miniscule amount of health/mana that it doesn't really start to add up until you're like 50 levels ahead of everyone (and spending literal IRL years autobashing). For foragers... it increases my damage dealt, reduces my damage taken, and increases my max HP. If someone is on diplomatic and I one-shot them, they do not get to attack me back.

    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!"

    Minifie said:
    there is no option for foraging, AFAIK (may have changed) if they don't gather, they don't get XP (tested in 5 instances of full 24 hour sendouts to empty areas, 0 xp gained, without sending them anywhere with resources in between), 2 levels gained in 3 sessions after grabbing fiber.
    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.
  • FWIW I think it's incredibly decent of @Adrik to be pointing out a broken system that he's benefiting from and trying not to destroy people's foragers when he knows they can't do anything about it. I hope admin can help out because that's the kind of thing they should be encouraging on the part of the players. @Makarios
  • edited August 2020
    The alternative was just go on a murderous rampage and bankrupt city's on wood reserves so that I can set the price (or Hashan can) as the sole generator of wood until the admins are forced to deal with it... but I figured this way is more peaceable and less rage inducing for literally everyone else that plays this game (Though it might cause enough of an uproar that people start screaming about it. Which would be nice.)

    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.
  • Adrik said:
    The alternative was just go on a murderous rampage and bankrupt city's on wood reserves so that I can set the price (or Hashan can) as the sole generator of wood until the admins are forced to deal with it... but I figured this way is more peaceable and less rage inducing for literally everyone else that plays this game (Though it might cause enough of an uproar that people start screaming about it. Which would be nice.)

    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.
    That’s fine.... Hashan has pretty good pricing on wood...
  • Have you or a loved one lost foragers in the time between May and now?

    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.
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