A modest proposal

[bostoncard]

It seems to me that people are devoting more time in this game to levelling commanders on NPC's than, you know, attacking other players. To add to that, worlds now have "rules" to preserve players' abilities to level commanders, and the whole "level commander" thing is a source of friction. For example:

* Almost all top alliances in most worlds now use one or more big bases (34 or, especially a 38) as "training bases", where they are left as NPC's so that people can fling their units at them. Players keep their ports around the bases just so that they can have quick access to them to level comms.
* Several worlds have a "rule" about players not capping level 27 ops, so that they are available to level mid-level commanders
* In another alliance, players were more concerned about leveling their commanders in their training ops than in fighting a cap war against a rival alliance
* I have also seen an alliance fall apart after a player was kicked for leveling his commanders instead of participating in a stronghold event

So, here's my modest proposal... take away (or limit) the experience gained from attacking NPC's, and force people to level commanders by attacking other players.

Obviously, some adjustments would have to be made in the game so that lower level commanders are useful. Thus I would suggest the following:
* As you have with the new hero and champion commanders, make all commanders come pre-leveled. Thus the platinum commanders would be 50/50 instead of 25/50.
* Increase the experience given for attacking and defending against attacks. For defenses, make the experience go to the highest commander that has not been fully leveled, instead of the commander who GREE selects for defense. This would give players an incentive not to evacuate their units in an attack, and would make it useful to defend.
* In order to prevent boosting by attacking alts that leave tons of UV undefended just to level a commander, make the experience gained proportional to the difference in levels (that is, a comm gains no experience for hitting 5 or more levels below, and gets more an experience bonus for hitting a player at a higher level).
* Likewise, give experience bonuses for going up against more experienced commanders (so that nobody does a trade where they leave UV without a commander in exchange for the same from another player). A player that hits a base defended by a commander over 10 levels lower gets limited experience; going up against a commander at a higher level gets an experience bonus.
* Increase the drop rate (for example, from crates), increase the reward rate (from events) and decrease the gold cost for training packs. I see that in the latest box event, GREE is giving out a lot of veteran trainings, which is a good thing. Keep it going and expand it. Also, add a super training that offers 1,000,000 commander XP (instead of the top veteran training of 100,000)

The net effect is that it should discourage people from spending their time attacking NPC's. It would get rid of "training bases" and put them to productive use. And it would encourage people to attack, and to defend.

BC

[DuRieL's Bananas]

Are you serious? 90-100 alone is 8 million exp and gree is bombarding us with 100 plus comms now.

[bostoncard]

Are you serious? 90-100 alone is 8 million exp and gree is bombarding us with 100 plus comms now.

Yes, I'm serious:

" Increase the drop rate (for example, from crates), increase the reward rate (from events) and decrease the gold cost for training packs. I see that in the latest box event, GREE is giving out a lot of veteran trainings, which is a good thing. Keep it going and expand it. Also, add a super training that offers 1,000,000 commander XP (instead of the top veteran training of 100,000)"

Leveling comms 30,000 XP at a time with level 27 NPC's is tedious beyond belief. Level 38 NPC's are of course much more efficient, giving you several hundred thousand experience (depending on how much you want to wait between hits), but creates its own problems in terms of worlds setting up "rules" for their use and benefiting the alliances that control them.

The other option someone suggested is to leave the strongholds in place between events. That would give 4 champion level strongholds plus a bunch of lower level strongholds for people to level comms with, scattered throughout the map.

BC

[Lolsies]

Very good suggestions, bostoncard. This has been a pressing issue for some time. I'll make sure the CM's know of these ideas for improvement of the levelling system.

[fani_l]

You do realize that for 8m XP you need 320m BP
So 320m bp just to bring one com from 90/100 to 100....

Why not have some based just like strongholds on map permanently for leveling commanders..
Each hit would be full xp and no caping possible.

This way people would have more time attacking than leveling for days

[Pa_Freddy]

You do realize that for 8m XP you need 320m BP
So 320m bp just to bring one com from 90/100 to 100....

Why not have some based just like strongholds on map permanently for leveling commanders..
Each hit would be full xp and no caping possible.
This way people would have more time attacking than leveling for days

Gree will never do that they want you to spend on veterans trainings.

[50_Cal]

I just spent 2 hrs and using 740 vet trainings to take 8 lvl50/80 Augustus to his final level of a pm lvl110 ....... Work how much exp is needed to level these comms and give us something which is proportionate in game to help everyone level the comms. The old route of hitting lvl 27's 34's 38's etc is an outdated model as when game was first introduced lvl 60 comms were hard enough to get...., it takes months to level comms on NPC now even lvl 38's

[Kerean]

Your Pure Augustus only took 72 million xp to level to 110. Wait till you level Omega which requires 129 million xp to reach pure 120.

I just spent 2 hrs and using 740 vet trainings to take 8 lvl50/80 Augustus to his final level of a pm lvl110 ....... Work how much exp is needed to level these comms and give us something which is proportionate in game to help everyone level the comms. The old route of hitting lvl 27's 34's 38's etc is an outdated model as when game was first introduced lvl 60 comms were hard enough to get...., it takes months to level comms on NPC now even lvl 38's

[Zac Landry]

It seems to me that people are devoting more time in this game to levelling commanders on NPC's than, you know, attacking other players. To add to that, worlds now have "rules" to preserve players' abilities to level commanders, and the whole "level commander" thing is a source of friction. For example:

* Almost all top alliances in most worlds now use one or more big bases (34 or, especially a 38) as "training bases", where they are left as NPC's so that people can fling their units at them. Players keep their ports around the bases just so that they can have quick access to them to level comms.
* Several worlds have a "rule" about players not capping level 27 ops, so that they are available to level mid-level commanders
* In another alliance, players were more concerned about leveling their commanders in their training ops than in fighting a cap war against a rival alliance
* I have also seen an alliance fall apart after a player was kicked for leveling his commanders instead of participating in a stronghold event

So, here's my modest proposal... take away (or limit) the experience gained from attacking NPC's, and force people to level commanders by attacking other players.

Obviously, some adjustments would have to be made in the game so that lower level commanders are useful. Thus I would suggest the following:
* As you have with the new hero and champion commanders, make all commanders come pre-leveled. Thus the platinum commanders would be 50/50 instead of 25/50.
* Increase the experience given for attacking and defending against attacks. For defenses, make the experience go to the highest commander that has not been fully leveled, instead of the commander who GREE selects for defense. This would give players an incentive not to evacuate their units in an attack, and would make it useful to defend.
* In order to prevent boosting by attacking alts that leave tons of UV undefended just to level a commander, make the experience gained proportional to the difference in levels (that is, a comm gains no experience for hitting 5 or more levels below, and gets more an experience bonus for hitting a player at a higher level).
* Likewise, give experience bonuses for going up against more experienced commanders (so that nobody does a trade where they leave UV without a commander in exchange for the same from another player). A player that hits a base defended by a commander over 10 levels lower gets limited experience; going up against a commander at a higher level gets an experience bonus.
* Increase the drop rate (for example, from crates), increase the reward rate (from events) and decrease the gold cost for training packs. I see that in the latest box event, GREE is giving out a lot of veteran trainings, which is a good thing. Keep it going and expand it. Also, add a super training that offers 1,000,000 commander XP (instead of the top veteran training of 100,000)

The net effect is that it should discourage people from spending their time attacking NPC's. It would get rid of "training bases" and put them to productive use. And it would encourage people to attack, and to defend.

BC

I only see one problem with this. Player boosts are not taken into account... If a player has good boosts they can level their 80 against your 100 for exponential gains and you still lose tons of UV. you aren't preventing alts from being used by using commander levels. Not everyone is created equal and you can only build UV at a specified rate. This form of leveling would cause the game to become even more unbalanced. UV would be blown through at a rate equal to that of SH. Most players can't keep up with that rate. When top players run out of UV and still need to level who do you think is next, because some experience is better than no experience.

While in theory this sounds nice, This would require ALOT of limitations and changes to be made to the game. Implementing a leveling system like this would cause more people to quit.

[ThisGameSucks]

Why not tweak the XP curve so that it flattens out slightly at higher levels?

Some amount of "grinding" does not hurt the game experience that much, it should be expected in any game like this. Capping lots of NPC18-27 is a good way for anyone to level up to about 60 (after that it becomes too time consuming).

About buying Veteran trainings to level commanders:

The 985875 XP gained from a single hit on a full NPC38 is equal to 2957 gold worth of Veteran trainings. I highly doubt anyone finds buying these to level commanders a viable option. To put it another way, a single hit on a NPC38 is about 20 USD worth of Veteran trainings (calculated from the cost of a "Stockpile of Gold" and the current price of 350 gold for a single Vet).

Alternative suggestion:

Reduce the "refill" time on all NPC outposts to 5 minutes, same number of hits still required but time required will be significantly lower

Reduce the time between each occupation battle on NPC27 and lower to 10 minutes (maybe increase the morale so that the number of battles are higher). Hunting players levelling by capturing NPC is always fun.

Personally I value my time highly in game, but 20 USD corresponding to a single NPC38 hit is way out of my range, if it was about a factor 10 lower I'd seriously consider it. I cant know how many Vet trainings sold each day but I can only assume that the number is very low.

I like the idea of a much higher XP gain from hitting other players, but the worries that apply to hitting a farm or mutual XP exchange are overrated. With the slow rate of producing units for a player compared to hitting a NPC , pure XP exchanges should be very unlikely (the 1M uv per minute rebuilt in a NPC38 corresponds to about 50 factories worth of hailstorm production). A 10x or even 100x XP gain in player hits compared NPC could easily be added and still make pure XP exchanges a non-problem.

[phalanx1337]

well gree are throwing huge numbers of commanders around, its easy to reach 80+ where the exp balls become useless, so focusing on training IS important.
people are also hitting NPC because every other event is boxes so you can do both.