The Iron Age I Tournament Review
The tournament’s reward pool has finally emptied, the game has stopped, and it is time to share how the tournament looked from the developers’ side all this time. Like most players and observers, our view was formed from the open game statistics and some surface-level rumors.
First and foremost, we want to note that this time, there was a qualitative leap in the level of play in the tournament, and almost all players were experienced professionals.
This happened for a combination of reasons: a large reward pool, crystallizing power poles, and the intense competition between them, resulting in a race for settlement prices and pricing rules that led to a shortage of settlements and did not lower prices until the tournament’s final.
Before moving on, we would like to point out that we, as developers, like such an outcome. However, on the other hand, we still prefer inexperienced players and players with a small amount of funds to have a chance to participate in the main game events, not only as spectators. In the next iterations, we will pay attention to forming a broader range of entry prices and trying to lower the entry threshold overall.
New Environment
Since a completely new environment has formed in this tournament, we were very curious to see how players would use our mechanics, which were designed for entirely different conditions, and whether our mechanics would withstand such a severe test without breaking the game.
Toxicity as a weapon
Perhaps the most significant discovery in this tournament was the use of toxicity as a more effective weapon than armies. Toxicity allowed for quickly and efficiently excluding whole zones from the economic chain, while armies enabled players to preserve and develop what they gained through this advantage. This practice caused several dramas and escalated the confrontation spiral to the max, forcing players to count every resource point carefully.
However, besides the positive aspects, some unpleasant consequences for the game were also noted.
Cultists
Cultists transformed from a chaotic element restraining the economy into a full-fledged and reliable weapon in the hands of big guilds and large alliances.
They were powerful even before, but now opposing players deliberately directed the impact of toxicity to one place, ensuring that the cultists’ army not only became enormous but also supported by allied player forces.
As a result, cultists could only be prevented by reducing toxicity in advance. Once they appeared, fighting them was useless. Economic development could be forgotten in the zone they occupied for a long time
Wipe
Considering the above-mentioned, the wipe, as a derivative of cultists and toxicity, also became a tool for guilds. An unpleasant reality was that a wipe was unnecessary for the winning alliance, and the options for a losing alliance to lead the game to a wipe were very limited.
As a result, the game ended with a single epoch, a significant part of which was dedicated to keeping the current status quo with simultaneous resource accumulation for the reward pool withdrawal.
There was enough content and drama even with just one epoch, but we wouldn’t mind more.
Economic Halt
As it turned out, there was a point in the game where economic development stopped. All settlements located in safe areas reached the development limits. Spending resources on upgrading settlements in the risk zone benefited the enemy more than the player. As a result, all resources were spent on armies or to prevent the enemy from hiring troops.
The role of the economy was the resource movement through the production chain. The cost of workers became minimal without upgrades, reducing competition for workers to zero, and the benefit of hex bonuses no longer mattered.
It could be said that the game has phases, each with its own gameplay. But we didn’t plan to categorize the game into clearly defined phases like development, war, and reward collection by the winner. Different types of gameplay should intersect and not have clear temporal or geographical dividers.
A Bit of Everything
Hex capturing proved itself well, extremizing passions from the game’s early hours but losing its strength till the end, along with the disappearance of a worker shortage.
Passive production: It may be good that some players have this option, but this mechanic did not gain popularity for most players. There were two reasons for this: clear underdogs who could suffer from a worker shortage throughout the game disappeared thanks to the new logic of prosperity accumulation. Also, in the heat of the confrontation, the ability for greater control and manageability of processes was valued more than economic reliability
New logic for battles with small armies: the number of abuses has significantly decreased, reducing to a couple of cases that did not affect even the local outcome of the confrontation. It is a good mechanic that has made the game better.
This mechanic became possible because we have seen many real examples of confrontation. This allows us to create new mechanics and edit old ones that wouldn’t break normal gameplay but prevent various abuses. This tournament has also provided us with enough information to keep this up.
Exhaustion: Even though most players were experienced, this mechanic, or rather its consequences, led to a significant number of tactical mistakes, with at least two episodes involving a large number of armies having global effects.
Probably, it seemed from the outside but players had rational reasons for such actions, such as a “psychological attack” to take the enemy by surprise and provoke panic. In any case, it did not work. Due to exhaustion, any aggressive actions with armies became extremely risky and required long preparations and meticulous calculations, while defense with even smaller forces always had a chance of success.
Perhaps, thanks to exhaustion, the described “toxicity attack” became more popular, as it became more reliable compared to the classic army attack. This proves once again that players will always find a loophole for the most effective way to leverage their advantage.
Conclusion
Observing the tournament was interesting and beneficial for us as developers. Many mechanics behaved as expected, but many also surprised us, forcing us to reconsider our attitude towards them in negative and positive ways.
Observing the evolution of individual players and the audience as a whole was exciting. We hope that players also found it interesting to witness the game’s evolution and the team’s approaches to its creation and development.
Thank you for reading,
Dan Pavlenko — lead game designer in Mithraeum
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