Discussion: The Watchtower

[DeletedUser121314]

As an attacker, the watchtower stings a bit. However, for a good one, they must take up the population of an entire village. On the defense side of things, I feel like it gives a slight boost as defenders already grow slower than offensive players and defensive troops are slower on the rebuild. I personally feel that it should stay.

 

[mattcurr]

They're not overly op since even with pp abuse setting them up or losing it is a huge deal. You don't insta build a 20 wt it's too much res. However level 1 build time being 22 seconds means if you messed up the set up behind wt you can get the information in any village immediately for a low cost it's saved by butt a few times defending accounts already. What I recommend is a limit of 1 village with a watch tower per 10 villages and they are demolished upon conquering like a statue. Make someone pay for losing it and it not just an emergency stop gap for sniping when you failed to employ strategies to build a good account

 

[DeletedUser119782]

Good day, just wanna ask/clarify;

When you say "This does not only affect attacks on villages within the range but also attacks traveling through the range."

Does it mean, you can see attacks on other villages on other players/allied players that were in your watchtower range?

No, it does not

 

[DeletedUser119782]

So I have a question. There is debate going on over it, but can your tribemates benefit from your watchtowers? Like can their watchtowers tag incomings for tribemate's incomings?

Nope

 

[DeletedUser116381]

I think the watchtowers are dumb, and a waste of people slots. What I want to see is increased attacking power for heavy cavalry, and the introduction of crossbowmen, pitchbuckets, and bubonic plague!

 

[Serious George]

I play Tribal Wars because it is unlike most any other game out there. It has always required a player to invest time into the game on a regular basis in order to succeed. Over the years, new features have made the game easier to play especially for new and inexperienced players but the new features have sent the message to the experienced players that their time and energy investment into the game isn't appreciated as the new features have closed the gap somewhat between experienced and inexperienced players.

The Watchtower is the biggest reflection of my point. Players no longer have to collect intel as much regarding another players troops, villages, and online times because they have the watchtower to do a lot of work for them. If a player has watchtowers set up correctly, they can get away with not tagging attacks because the watchtower will tag for them when it gets in range (obviously you can prepare better if you tag when the attack is sent, but I saw a lot of accounts in w90 that just let the watchtower tag everything for them). They also can get away with ignoring green attacks and not dodging (yes small cat attacks will work on offensive villages but if I don't dodge a defense village because of a green attack, your fang of less than 1k pop will do little damage). Watchtowers lead to more defensive play by a lot of players and also to more barb nobling to cluster up which has an impact on those of us who put in the time to farm on a daily basis.

At the end of the day, the watchtower removes what some refer to as the "fog of war." Sure you can try to adapt attacking strategy to neutralize watchtower effectiveness, but in my experience there were few players who attacked well before watchtowers and even those players are now struggling with the addition of watchtowers to the game. Watchtowers certainly benefit lazy defenders the most. Quality defenders were great before watchtowers existed and now are close to impossible to break now that watchtowers exist.

 

[DeletedUser112872]

Tribalwars has been declining for years. Technology to help noobs, to the cost of those that have learned to play the game. Premium Point Prostitution, the Watchtower, Fake Limits, noble trains sent by built in additions to the attack game. It's not the great game it used to be.

 

[DeletedUser117362]

They get A+ from me.
I thought they'd kinda ruin the game too, but getting mass attacked for months will change your mind about that.
mass attacks/fakes have always been OP.
This is the balance.

I always feel there should be a launch cost in a game like this. For example a certain amount of population needs a certain amount of food to be launched.
One person being able to send 10, 000 attacks is ridiculous.
I shouldn't have to be a master at pattern recognition and spend half or the entire day trying to deduce fakes from reals.
I should not have to be online 24/7 to defend my account when 5-20 players spend 15 mins each to send attacks on me.
This is what makes people quit.

Maybe this isn't the fix we all wanted, but I'll take it.

 

[DeletedUser121311]

the only ones who like watchtower are bad players.
please respect good players too.

I see all we are experienced players

 

[DeletedUser117362]

the only ones who like watchtower are bad players.
please respect good players too.

Not everyone wants/can afford to spend 6+ hours a day on this game.
Except kids. (Read: college students)

Please respect adults too.

 

[DeletedUser119686]

I truly dislike them. Gives the defenders an advantage.

 

[DeletedUser120558]

i think it will be more realistic if we can request a tribemate to detect the attack from his own tower
and it will solve the pop problem as we can build less towers for the tribe

 

[DeletedUser121307]

@finalbarrage If you level it completely to level 20 (15 fields of view) it'll take a total of 11,607 population - which is crazy!

I haven't been attacked much in either of my worlds, so I don't have any experience with it.

I can see it being useful and as other have said, it makes attacking a bit trickier. Means you've got to think about how much troop population you're sending in an attack instead of just sending it, although I'm sure you can still just spam nukes to get the job done.

Really I think you won't be levelling it up to 20 until later game, as it take's close to 5m resources in total.

It should defiantly be a feature in some worlds but not all, unless you add it to Tribal Hugs.

so you pay half a village to gain information on literally every attack that comes within its range.. that, is a nobrainer if you ask me..

i mean its always good to have a scout village right?

 

[DeletedUser]

It was difficult to break decent defenders before in the mid-late game, a hard grinding process that required the teamwork of the entire tribe since defenders have the clear advantage in TW. Watchtowers make this virtually impossible.

I think the worst thing about Watchtower isn't that it makes defensive play stronger, or even that it prevents creativity in attacking but that it causes loss of agency. As an attacker, it feels like the only way to break through a competent defender with a non dogshit tribe in a semi-decent position with level 20 watchtowers peppered on the front is for them to give up.

Attacking into decent defenders was always difficult, but you could outsmart a defender through intelligent use of faking, especially with noblemen and catapults or keep them on their toes with surprise ops within a normal fake pattern just to give a few examples. Much of these avenues are closed today, especially when combined with other factors, namely the 10 defensive paladins, inventory boost and PPing wall between attacks.

Whilst it is good to an extent that it gives a crutch, I think so long as you do not mentally give up, a decently run tribe with an active frontline cannot be beaten irrespective of game ability. That is why WT is so bad. I feel Jorge's pain, he's one of the few who really has first hand experience of how broken WT is as WT doesn't care one iota about your skill as an attacker past midgame, it is made irrelevant.

 

[DeletedUser]

What I will say though, is WT is less broken than it would have been 6-7 years ago, but that is because TW is dying, there are smaller less competitive worlds and no-one takes it as seriously which means tons of inactive and shitty tribes in top spots.

You could have had old worlds go on for 15 years with WTs with the extended stalemates and stubbornness/addiction of players back then that were often even present without WTs.

I suppose the question is should TW be an easy game? It may surprise people talking about 10k incomings like it's a deathblow, I guarantee you every single world winning tribe before W65 or so had to deal with an account with that amount of incoming. I know on W60, we had accounts at 50k+ constantly for months on end. Everyone forgets that TW is a team game and yes it was hard, but that was what made winning worth it.

The real problem with TW is the value of winning is zero because nearly every world is won by a premade you can readily identify at the start of the world which sweeps to easy victory. WT only enforces this by making defending comically easy.

 

[mattcurr]

What I will say though, is WT is less broken than it would have been 6-7 years ago, but that is because TW is dying, there are smaller less competitive worlds and no-one takes it as seriously which means tons of inactive and shitty tribes in top spots.

You could have had old worlds go on for 15 years with WTs with the extended stalemates and stubbornness/addiction of players back then that were often even present without WTs.

I suppose the question is should TW be an easy game? It may surprise people talking about 10k incomings like it's a deathblow, I guarantee you every single world winning tribe before W65 or so had to deal with an account with that amount of incoming. I know on W60, we had accounts at 50k+ constantly for months on end. Everyone forgets that TW is a team game and yes it was hard, but that was what made winning worth it.

The real problem with TW is the value of winning is zero because nearly every world is won by a premade you can readily identify at the start of the world which sweeps to easy victory. WT only enforces this by making defending comically easy.

With every advantage you get a disadvantage ive already thought up of a dozen ways to game what they're seeing and implemented a few that have seemingly worked every time to our design. Ive yet to launch a full scale opp for late game in 95 but I can already see how watch towers will be to my advantage as an attacker. And I too am from the era of 100,000 incomings and breaking people through force of will is not a strategy it was an abuse of the system imo.

 

[DeletedUser119596]

Watchtower is a pile of poo, completely useless and a game spoiler...IMHO

 

[Leather and Latex]

Looking at comments here its divided some love it some loathe it.

Simple solution- let's split the baby and give everyone what they want. Watchtowers on some worlds and other world no watchtower. It's a win win.


And I'll stop moaning about watchtowers at every available possibility.

 

[DeletedUser120905]

The watchtower is too skewed. It uses a lot of resources for a big reward, completely different from normal buildings. It doesn't help beginners either, since they won't get far enough to actually enjoy the benefits. That being said, as a defensive player, I like it

I think the only way for TW to be more fun is to get more players to join, and for worlds to be played faster. I have actually thought about this before, though it would completely change the game...which is to go with more popular play styles. One is like open worlds (like World of Warcraft), so not having complete death of a player, but perhaps a penalty, and a continuous reward system (rather than winning a world). Another is like the skirmish system (like League of Legends and Dota), where you have a small number of players play on opposite sides of short (<1 hour) games trying to destroy one another.

Like my post if you like these ideas.

 

[DeletedUser118206]

I'm 50/50. I hate it as it tells turtles which villas to stack, or the noobs can find that out too, even with sniping. Makes attacking frustrating

However even though it does cost a lot, it can be a time saver, lets be honest who really loved having no life spending 24 hours a day tagging attacks. It slows you to not spend 24/7 on it, you can actually go outside for an hour or whatnot. Also makes attacking more tactical, brute force seems the way to go. But need to make it like a church, some worlds have it some worlds don't.