[AMA] Ask The Developer Anything - December 18th - Accomplices

[Engram]

No one wants accomplices. Can you revert back?

Based on where we are in the lifecycle of the game, our team determined that we needed to introduce a new feature in the form of Accomplices in Crime City to:

1) Preserve the investment of our loyal, long-term players in their stats
2) Enable us to innovate on new game features to ensure the health and longevity of Crime City
3) Give us the flexibility of providing new types of appealing rewards in various events (Accomplices are just a start. There will be completely new types of rewards coming in the New Year.)
4) Give us a new way to control stat inflation

[&dra]

We’ve gotten a lot of questions about how battle calculations work, so we want to give more context on that.

The calculation is about 50% mafia power, 30% equipment power, and 20% kingpin power. Each one of those is computed separately. Within each segment, the attack of the attacker versus the defense of the defender is the most important factor. We do also allow for the attack of the defender versus the defense of the attacker to have a lesser influence as well. Within each segment we basically look at a margin of victory in percentage terms. Then we add up each segment weighted according to the above to determine the final outcome.

A lot of people have asked about how the skill points influence the battle. The answer is, skill points have the same modification impact on the player’s attack and defense that they have always had, and are applied the same way to accomplices and accomplices that have joined your mafia. We likely will change this in the future, and are looking into adding a way to allow players to reallocate their skill points to be fair to everyone.

A lot of people have also asked more about the relative importance of attacker attack versus defender defense versus defender attack versus attacker defense. The answer is that they are not a fixed percentage of each segment of the calculation. The bigger the discrepancy between attacker attack and defender defense the less the defender attack and attacker defense matters. In other words, if I attack you and my attack blows away your defense, then your attack and my defense will be largely irrelevant. On the other hand, if my attack is exactly evenly matched with your defense, then your attack versus my defense makes up half of that segment’s calculation.

Several people have asked whether we “cap” the win/loss in a given category. The answer is basically that it ranges from “total win” to “total loss”. In other words, let’s say I have 1B mafia attack and you have 1 defense. I will win 100% of the mafia segment.

Several people have asked why the attacker defense and defender attack stats aren’t shown in the battle results. We are considering how we can surface this information to you better in the future, however because attacker attack versus defender defense is the most important factor those are the stats we chose to surface. We're definitely looking for more ways in the future to make things clearer to everyone, and also for new ways to make the feature more fun and exciting.

[Clementine]

Thank you all for joining us for the AMA!