1. What information do tribe leaders look for most when they sit in on their members to check their accounts?
As mentioned by many others, the general reason is for troops. Basically once you get past the early game and into the midgame then onto endgame wars generally the tribe that wins is the one that uses their troops most effectively.
2. What information is most asked for on a weekly/bi-weekly basis in the forums?
Troop counts. Its much easier obviously to get them this way rather than having to actually sit an account but a lot of people are lazy and dont care or just lie unfortunately
3. What information would be most valuable for tribe leaders to see at all times?
Cant really think of anything in particular to be 'most valuable at all times'. There are valuable things to know certainly but considering you need to know different things at different times its kinda a misconception here. Like you dont need a day-to-day overview of peoples troop counts or how many x farm runs they've done in the past hour etc. However there are things that i think would be useful to know if you're looking for ideas:
a) Noble counts
b) Activity levels - maybe something like number of hours logged in per day/week for each account?
c) Statistic screens shareable with the leadership like premium options would be incredibly powerful but maybe too big-brotherish idk
Actually the only thing that might be valuable to see at all times is how many 'tagged' nobles an account has incoming but thats about it. Not sure if that would be a good idea either, too powerful
4. Would you like to see any changes to how report sharing works in the tribes?
- - a. Could we aggregate recent reports into a more central screen for easier organization?
- - b. Perhaps organized into a timeline, and then grouped under different target villages or hostile tribes?
Yes its pretty bad, why cant you create your own forwarding groups? Im not typing out every name with a ; in it each time i want to forward to more than a single person but not the entire tribe. If you want to improve report sharing then perhaps allow more than like 10 reports to be shown under a village when selected on a map. The problem is that 99% of reports that are generated is basically fluff and useless and i dont want to see everyone elses fluff and useless fake reports when i have my own collection. You could generate a shared report bank for a village where you could upload your report to a bank for that village similar to the way the archive function is intended to function and then you would be able to see historic and current data for the village.
5. What is currently the hardest part about keeping track of support between tribe members?
Basically the game gives you a crash course on how to do the most rudimentary start-up possible then completely abandons you with no explanation beyond the first couple of weeks. 90% of the player base probably never even looks at the overviews and of that 10% that do probably 90% of those never actually explore and work out what their being shown really means. Its left to trial and error and experimentation and most people just wont bother. You can see where your troops are by going to the troops - support overview but its so clunky and awful looking that its really hard to tell at a glance what you're doing and where your troops are. It really needs to be made more user friendly so that (beyond early game obviously) you're not confronted with pages and pages of arbitrary numbers that look meaningless unless you make a real effort to break it down and understand it. And even when you do understand it its still hard to interpret sometimes
6. What is currently the most difficult aspect of organizing tribe members when trying to gather support, pick targets for attacks, or manage village growth?
Most people are lazy and want to be spoon fed. Same as any walk of life. They want to be told where to do what and when to do it by the leadership and often without any specific instructions they'll just sit passively rather than proactively doing something.
7. How can the noble claim system be improved?
I dont actually have a problem with the noble claim system, has its flaws but they're relatively minor. Perhaps add claims as a part of command sharing? Shared noble planners with other tribes is clunky and restrictive af and most people wont bother
8. Would tribe members like to be able to designate targets on a map that all members can find?
How do you mean? Thats what coords are for. You give them a coordinate and then they can see the village. Do you mean add like a function that adds a big glowy red X over a village or something? Maybe i guess? Like if you clear a village then you can mark it on the map for easy viewing for tribemates so they dont have to open the village manually each time. Could work i guess
9. Would tribe members like an overview of incoming attacks on all members? What would be potential issues with this?
Not really, why do i need to see how many incomings someone has? Its an irrelevant number unless you're into 5k digit numbers. This is kinda just fluff information again.
However having said that i suppose it would be useful for noob tribes to encourage interaction between each other. That would be nice for them i guess. Maybe have it as a leadership thing that they can toggle it on/off? They can just look to see who is at the top for incomings in the tribe then mail around to the person in question to help out or tell people to mail xyz to ask them if they need help etc. This is catered towards making defending as a tribe more 'noob friendly' which i am okay with as a design philosophy but needs to be carefully considered in context of the current metagame. I dont really see a downside to the leadership being able to see this information overall provided it doesnt include information that the WT provides. That would make this too powerful if you can see exactly what is going on for other people.
10. Anything else you want to mention!
Are you sure you wanna go down this road?
Im guessing the gist behind all of this is that you're looking to introduce more ways to encourage interaction between players and give more tools to leadership. This is good stuff and i approve of it. At the moment leadership is generally a figurehead role. They cant really do anything at all to manage their members and this should be improved.
People should be able to 'gift' inventory items in the same way they can 'gift' premium. However there should obviously be a strict cap with it, maybe allow a recipient to receive 1 item per week? Dont think this would cause too much problems but it would be nice to be able to help each other more
Watch towers need a nerf. Should be max allowable say 1 per 100 villages for an account. They should also be less static to counter-balance this.
I have a lot more to say but kinda pointless to right now. Might as well save it for when im made chief mod of everything
edit: I've just been informed that the address book features for mails is also used for reports. So goes to show you can learn something new every day, even as an esteemed skilled solider. But if nothing else this demonstrates that theres so many random things in this game going on without any information at all available to players and it's so easy to miss useful stuff
Also MA need a buff
Also noble books are ridiculously overpowered.
Also cap the maximum bonuses your troops can receive to their fighting power. Suggest 30%
Also implement an inbuilt fake script generator
Finally most importantly the cost for renaming accounts should be reduced for repeat customers, just saying.