Greetings, Godville gods!
It’s time to shake up one of the oldest part of the game – the Arena. A refresh of the arena duel experience was long overdue and finally the time has come to make it more interesting… in the unique Godville Random way.
The fundamental idea of an arena duel remains the same – a god sends his champion to fight some other hero. The winner gets a golden brick, accumulator charge, all of the opponent’s gold and a win record for the pantheon/achievement. However, there are important changes:
- Each fight can have slightly different rules – a fight can be twice as fast, or have an extra reward for the winner (or even the loser), or each turn will restore some godpower, or there will be a certain limit on the total number of accumulator charges that can be used, etc. Pay attention to the introductory messages at the beginning to know what kind of extra rule this fight has.
- To make pairing easier the level of the opponents won’t matter in new arena duels. From now on a match between level 15 hero and level 45 hero is possible and quite normal, as both opponents will be made equal. Nobody has advantage due to a level, hp, equipment, strike power, etc.
- After teleporting to the arena the hero will wait for the opponent for 10 minutes. If he doesn’t find an opponent a godpower refund or a golden brick is guaranteed.
- In addition to the old “attack/heal/pray” duel voices now there is a new one – “defend”. This will order the hero to take a defensive stance, which will decrease all upcoming damage during the turn, and should add a refreshing twist to dueling tactics. Btw, this command will work in boss fights too.
- There will be a new pantheon for arena duels, which will be more tolerant of duel loses and will only rank heroes who’ve been active in the arena within the last few weeks. The new pantheon will appear when there have been enough fights held under the new rules.
- Finally, heroes have became more civilized and won’t fight each other outside of the designated area. So your champion will no longer get into a duel while you’re asleep or something. Bye-bye skirmishes!
There have been many internal changes, so some bumps here and there are quite possible over the next few days. Any feedback on the new arena duels is highly appreciated.
UPD: There are some matching restrictions worth mentioning: a new player won’t get matched against a seasoned player; a hero with a temple can only match against another hero with a temple. Oh, and special artifacts teleporting to the arena are no longer require godpower. Oh, and now we have special arena teleporting artifacts that don’t require godpower!
Hmm, will see, some of the stuff looks fine but… Arena was fine and fixing what’s not broken doesn’t sound like a good idea.
Looks good. My only comment is that I quite liked the random skirmishes and will miss them.
Lets ser how it works
No more random duels. Freakin’ finally.
So, what’s the idea behind the Defend command? Why would you use it over a Heal? I believe the Heal command heals for at least as much (and I think it’s even more) than a single strike. If it even heals for as much as one strike and not more, there is still the possibility your opponent will miss anyway, in which case Defend does nothing and Heal does.
Can it block an enemy Punish? Or at least an opponent’s strike command, in addition to the regular hero hit? In that case, it may serve some use… in the Arena. But if so, that just propagates the Heal command further over the Attack one, since Heal currently has no “failure” (it either heals or strikes), whereas the Attack command can result in the loss of an artifact or GP for the enemy when successful.
In boss fights, it’s even worse, since you generally fight a boss with other people, so the chances of you getting hit (and Defend having any effect) is even less. It could possibly be useful on Nimble or, to a lesser extent, Summoning bosses, but again, that’s assuming it blocks all damage and not just one hit. And getting the hero to listen at the same time as the boss decides to strike you twice is an abysmal chance.
I’d rather see the Taunt command suggested in the forums, it’d be far more useful for boss fights, to allow healthier/more active/pure good players to take damage to protect their teammates.
Yes! No more skirmishes! Finally!
Thank you for removing skirmishes. I never liked that forced player vs. player aspect of the game. I do think a user setting to toggle skirmishes on or off would have been a good option, allowing people who want random fights to have them, but I’m OK with them just being gone.
This is AWESOME! Very good job on this one Dev’s!
“Oh, and special artifacts teleporting to the arena are no longer require godpower.” Such artifacts exist? I’ve never seen one, can’t find any on Godwiki either. I was just recently suggesting an artifact that does that, but it was rejected sadly.
Ah, finally no random skirmish. Thank you for that. I rarely enter the arena though. But I’ll check it out again.
No skirmishes? Too bad, I like them. But I really wanted a permanent limit in the use of godpower in the arena. It’s ridiculous to fight a god that uses it every single round.
Strange how my hero got into a skirmish the day before this happened… almost like she wanted to get one in before they couldn’t do it anymore.
No skirmishes?? YAY!! This may actually tempt me into the arena. Thanks for keeping things interesting!
Yay, no more skirmishes :D
I’ll miss skirmishes… could they not still be included but not included in stats?
Very nice!!!!! As usual, thanks to all the people always working to make of Godville a better place!!!!
I love the fact of fighting only when I want!!!
I do not like that there are no more skirmishes. I enjoyed them and I am very mad that you took them out. I hope enough other people feel the same way.
I think that the level and equipment advantage should still be in effect because now the winner is random since both opponents are equal
Great work devs! I really like the new arena rules and I’m looking forward to trying out the defend command. I will miss the skirmishes, though, because that’s how I won a lot of my duels and it’s fun to get into one once in awhile. I have an idea for skirmishes, though. There could be a thing in settings where you can set a time of when you want skirmishes, that wan no one gets one when they are sleeping so they will most likely be there for them. And those that don’t want skirmishes at all could change the thing in settings for no skirmishes. That way all the people who want skirmishes can have them and those who don’t can have it set to no skirmishes. :)