I indeed fail to see how it (the new endgame) would show bias towards those tribes. Feel free to explain it however so I can forward the feedback. We welcome feedback, but it needs to be understandable for us to be able to change or explain things. Just saying it is concerning does not help us, and neither does it help you
You're right its not a very helpful thing to say....but it is true unfortunately. Part of the problem is the fact that the actual mechanics are incredibly vague:
* "The city can vary in size and consists of several districts" - How much variation
* "travelling to them always takes the same amount of time" - How much time
* "Additionally, the districts have a defense malus (negative modifier)" - How much modifier
* "Influence points are awarded to the tribes for each district they hold" - How much?
Are the boroughs controlled by players or by tribes themselves?
Im not sure if thats intentional to encourage people to join and see for themselves or just an oversight, either way its pretty annoying because personally im not going to risk committing my time or effort making assumptions on various things only to find out they're wrong because inno likes being mystic
The reason why this siege is bias towards core tribes is that its clearly weighted towards the tribes that have the largest amounts of troops at their disposal rather than putting the emphasis on individual and tribal player skill which ideally where you would want it to be (correct me if im wrong here).
Generally speaking the core vs rim conflict is one where you have a larger more entrenched tribe against a smaller more dispersed tribe. The core tribe wins by utilizing its troop advantage (because they started earlier and are more established) and the rim tribe wins by more effective troop usage than the core tribe. To boil it down to an essence its brawn vs brains. Core vs Rim -
Generally.
Im sure that some radnom nerds are going to pop up now:
"but on world xx, rim tribe yy were bigger than core tribe zz and they lost still reeeeeeee" - thanks for your valuable contribution to the discussion
Anyway.
The main issue here is partially due to the fact that you specifically did not say that there is a delay in the districts being available to hold from day 1 that the core tribes will get a massive advantage here. In a traditional rim vs core conflict the rim tribe usually has a troop deficit. You get around this by smart play and etc. However with this win condition the goal effectively shifts from beating your opponent to holding and stalling for time while you passively accumulate influence points. The core tribe no longer has to actually 'win'. They can just use their troop surplus to effectively negate skillful play because the win condition is completely passive.
Rim tribe goes on the offensive to capture some districts - they now no longer have enough offensive troops to break down the core tribe frontlines, they lose momentum and stall and lose the world
Rim tribe tries to hold onto districts with their defensive troops - they no longer have enough defense to hold onto their frontline villages, they lose villages and lose the world
Rim tribe tries to time large numbers of noble nukes to within 10ms of the exact time that the borough awards points in order to try and negate the troop advantage of said core tribe. Probably the only chance they will possibly have to score influence points - But have fun doing that 4 times a day for several months while at the same time conducting normal ops and everything else against a tribe that has a troop advantage vs yourselves. The onerous of having to find creative ways to outplay a larger tribe causes players to quit and lose the world
Core tribe sits there and enjoys the easiest win of their careers
The problem with this win condition is that it sounds all interesting and exciting on paper but in reality when you're in the world and actually fighting to win it just boils down to the same basic things and thats not going to change. Inno designers remind me of ww2 armchair generals. They sit in the backlines and move troop blocks around and talk about grand designs and battle plans but the reality is that its completely different when you're actually playing
Here are my two predictions for the world.
1) Districts will be largely ignored until end-game when one tribe has effectively won under normal dominance conditions in which case they'll just afk and hold all the districts to win in like a month or whatever
Or
2) One tribe will have a commanding lead the entire world from day 1 and make it a redundant mechanic as nobody will be able to catch up with them even if they wanted to.
TLDR - Game metric is weighted towards rewarding troop levels rather than player skill. Also encourages diplomacy towards non-conflict as it can be a completely passive way to win