I’m unsure if this is the design intent or if there needs to be a tweak somewhere but I’m in a nightmare game which is most annoying - so stating the facts (starting with the obvious game mechanics)
settlement gold production is on a 24 hour cycle
masters of coin steal all the gold every 12 hours
I am a human I like sleep
all my settlements produce gold approximately from the time I go to bed to just before I wake up
the master of coin triggers just before I can log in
the end result is I’ve had next to no gold every day since the start, and until the jester of coin gets killed I will continue to have no gold, this isn’t leading itself to a fun game with choices (oh look 0 gold and next settlement to produce some is past midnight my time).
I don’t really know what to suggest - master of coin claims every 18 hours so it goes round the clock? claims 50% every 6 hours? going oh well you are screwed by living in England?
A practical solution? Have the game creator (in my case, me) pause the game overnight. Or, see if its okay for them to pause the game a few fours to get the cycle to a point where you are awake and can react in time.
We really, really need a timer to autopause things.
Next game I start, I’ll throw an invite to you, Starry. If you want to play in a ‘pause friendly’ environment, my group is good.
I also have the problem that in most games, my gold output ends up clustered together. It is very common for me to have all of my towns pay out within a 6 hour window, and then I have to wait 18 hours to get my next payout, to then get a very large payout (1k-3k) spread out over the coarse of the next 6 hours. It would be nice to have them more distributed throughout the day. Thankfully I haven’t had one of those coin bosses in a long time, but I could be quite upset with it in the many games I have with this clustering.
The towns used to have varying payout rates, but it was different per race. That caused a fair amount of confusion. I think if it was standardized across the board like it is now, but every 12 hours (or 8 or 6) (as you suggest), that would feel a lot better. However, while I think I would prefer that, I don’t mind dealing with the extra challenges the current system produces. So this is one case where I support the change, but don’t mind it not coming.
I was wondering the other day if I should try and write some algorithm that, at the start of the game, looked at settlements next to each other and make sure their production timer was at least 8 hours apart.
It’s kind of hard to know what to suggest, but for that game it basically meant if I wanted sleep I had nothing to do until the masters of coin were gone. On one had you can go shrug such is the nature of randomness in games, another game I wouldn’t of been impacted at all, on the other hand I can certainly say not being able to do much for 48 hours + made that a much less interesting game.
I really don’t like the “take all your resources” bosses. I’d prefer it if these bosses did something a little less game imbalancing; like making units cost more, make abilities cost more, make players pay a small amount per of valor per town or else their towns shut down for a day. Things like that.
I personally don’t mind them usually, it just means you can’t stockpile resources.
Unless, of course, you get bad timing on them like Starry did. Then they’re utterly game-ruining (unless you’re willing to wake up at 3 AM or something).