Dear Devs, please consider making the game harder

[[☆] Zackreaver]

Aside from the bugs experienced in online play, I've noticed that the game itself just isn't hard at all.

We have several options available to us to make the game a literal cakewalk, once we've obtained all the upgrades and have things setup, the game stops being challenging, or threatening. Even though there's only a limited number of gems available, I didn't even have to careful think of where to use them, I just get the baker and shrine upgrades and the game lost all of it's challenge. I sit on island 4, with baker, salamander, archer statue, builder statue, and optionally anything else. The greed cant to anything to me, I burn any greed that come from the cliff portals side, and the dock portals already been wiped out. Even when my run is on shogun so I don't have spearmen to fish with, when winter comes around I just return to island 1, where the cliff portal is already gone, and wait until winter ends to continue clearing every islands cliff portal.

There's no challenge here, it's just a long slow crawl to beat everything. Leading up to this point everything was just handed on a silver platter. Island 1 only ever sent basic greed, island 2 and island 3 were the same deal. The greed were just being so laid back even though I had plenty of options to deal with every threat they sent. I didn't even get attacked by a flier greed until island 4, when I was more than capable of building iron watchtowers, which prevent the fliers from grabbing off the towers.

I've had the baker since island 3, losing population doesn't matter anymore, as long as I have income I can keep recruiting archers, I didn't even need to get the ballista hermit because I can just overwhelm the greed with endless archers. The greed are no threat, and clearing their cliffs with the bombs isn't as exciting as I was hoping it would be.

I feel like once all 5 islands have been cleared, the game will just feel empty, in an online game with a friend, we cleared islands 4 and 5 before doing islands 1 2 and 3. Nothing is really stopping us, were about to clear these islands with our first reign, and all these options we didn't choose with our gems just feel unnecessary.

Even if this wasn't our first reign, losing the crown would just reset the wave severity but give us practically everything we already had, the game is just too easy. I'd like to feel at least some tension to clear the maps before it gets too late, the failstate's that the prior games had made doing things successfully enjoyable. This game gives us so many ways to recover, but the opposition isn't equally as threatening, and that drags some of the enjoyment out of the game.

I was hoping to see more threats in two crowns to contrast the new tools we get, but all we've seen are the crown stealers, which are nice and all since it gives a threat to walking outside the walls, but even still it's easily overcome.

Can we expect something more in the future? perhaps a 6th island that appears after all 5 are cleared? maybe even more to do when we thought it was all over? Maybe make the buildup on the first 5 islands more difficult? Shogun was harder than normal because we don't have pikemen, but it's still just "Wait for winter to end" that's not so much hard as it is just boring.

Edit: Checked out the winter update, glad that winter is no longer a case of "Get to island 1-2 and wait till it ends" but the game is still suffering from being really easy. I also love that ninja essentially got buffed to the point that they are basically better than pikemen at this point.

[[☆] Zackreaver]

Here's a couple suggestions I have that could make the game harder, without having to change too much (Though some things might take a little more work than others)

1. Shrines:
I'm actually shocked that after classic and newlands had effectively set the groundwork for shrines, that two crowns effectively took the strategy out of it. Originally, shrines were coin sinks that you had to activate every couple of days to keep their effects turned on. It gave reasons to leave the safety of the castle walls in order to get a temporary buff that could help win against that all important greed attack. Now you just activate them once and they stay with you for the rest of your reign.

Why not instead, every island has each of the shrines in random locations and their effects are temporary, but before you can use them, you have to unlock the "master shrine" on each island for that specific buff. Island 1 would have the master shrine for archers, and once it's been activated there, you can activate the archer shrine on the other islands, but the effect is only temporary. This would also fix the problem with the knight shrine, where activating it essentially makes the rest of your reign harder, since the knight shrine is mostly hot garbage. Having the knight shrine temporary would solve the problems alot of people have, since they could just wait till it wears off.

Changing the shrines to a temporary version of themselves would make portal placement and traveling outside of the walls more important again, and would make the crown stealers (the new type of greed) ALOT scarier since you will actually be at risk everytime you leave to activate a shrine.

2. Naval Greed Invasion:
When you still have islands to clear, and the greed still exist on some islands but not others, it's very boring to return to a fully cleared island where the threat is all gone. We usually do this to wait out winter because we know that winter sucks and we just want it to be over, and the best way to wait is to just sit on an island where the greed no longer attack.

How about if the greed attempt to invade from an island that isn't cleared, to an island that had the dock portal destroyed. It could be some aquatic blob that's shown on the map traveling towards a cleared island, you could wait at the blobs destination to intercept the blob to deal with it, or deal with it later, after it's landed on the island and made naval landings break the boat again.

This could make clearing EVERY island feel more exciting and important than just simply clearing individual islands. Since dealing with the dock portal is just a simple attack anyway, compared to the cliff portal which requires the bomb. But needing to return to cleared islands again for more than just "Stock up on coins and troops before moving out" could add a little bit more challenge to the island hopping part of the game.

The game was always more fun when there was that iminent threat of attack, and "winning" always felt like something we had to struggle to finally achieve. Currently that feeling isn't really there, but this might be able to help with that slightly.

3. More types of greed:
This one is probably the most work, but the crown stealer being the only new threat added in kingdom since classic and new lands is a bit underwhelming, especially since you don't even see this greed type for a very long time.
Masked greed aren't really threatening when you have maxed out walls, catapults, flame barrels, salamanders fire breath, fully upgraded towers, ballista towers, etc.
Everything just bashes it's head against your wall, which often times you can defend against greed without any casualties. Originally the flyer greed were gaurenteed to eat your population, first this was counteracted with the baker, which made getting new recruits easier, but now it's counteracted additionally with the fully upgraded towers. And even still, the flyer greed fly behind your army before actually picking anyone up, I haven't lost a single population to flying greed anymore.

How about an internal threat to deal with, something that we have to worry about within our walls, maybe have some threat that lingers inside the walls, and has to be dealt with in a certain amount of time, or it erupts into a problem. And the method to deal with it, it's a special hermit that comes out of the castle during the day with the bookkeeper, and carried over to the lingering threat to deal with it using a certain amount of coins. You have until nighttime to deal with the threat, or else the hermit goes back into the castle with the bookkeeper (This special hermit can't be stolen) and it gives the player(s) something more to worry about. After all, the game is multiplayer now, but often times one player could end up with nothing to do because everythings pretty easy to take care of solo.

4. Make the game harder in co-op:
Is it just me? Or is the game the same exact difficulty whether I have a co-op partner or not? Because that's silly if it's the case. The game isn't even hard in solo play, when I have a co-op partner to take over half the work I'm already doing, the game becomes EVEN EASIER, especially since we now have 2 special mounts to work with.

Even if it's something as simple as "The greed attack in larger number if you have a co-op partner active" would be fine for starters, but I feel like just giving more things for the players to manage and take care of would be the best solution all together. That way if the solo player is "really good" they can handle everything themselves anyway, but the idea is that it would be very stressful, and the extra helping hand would lighten things up.

I think it's quite silly that for a game where it's main focus is "co-op play" that I don't actually need the 2nd player. In fact, I'm half tempted to just trigger split screen during solo play, just so I could have the second player for my solo run, since half the time I could just use the second player to do dangerous things without worry about crown stealers, since I could just buy the crown back with the monarch that's sitting safely within the castle walls.

And speaking of buying the crown back, losing our crowns in co-op doesn't feel like a bad thing at all, it's only a problem if both players lose their crowns. Coins can be made in such large quantity that rebuying the crown makes losing the crown feel not scary at all.

How about if your partner loses their crown, a blood moon triggers the next night. And on top of it being a blood moon, a "King Greed" comes out of the portal, have it be like a breeder except it's alot scarier and it has the crown. That way, instead of buying your partners crown, the way you get it back is to survive and defeat the "King Greed" then the king greed's crown could have coins spent on it to return it's shape into a normal crown again, and then picked back up.

That would make crown stealers ALOT more threatening, instead of just a way to kill off players playing the game solo. Additionally, mount abilities should be unusable without your crown, and instead of purchasing your partners crown, you pay coins to trade mounts with them, so if the person who lost their crown was on the salamander, you can swap mounts with them to use the salamander for the upcoming attack. It's a bit silly when you can lose the crown on purpose just so you could sit next to the portal and burn the greed right as they are coming out, since you have no crown and your bag is empty, the greed completely ignore you, extremely broken when your on the salamander.


5. Bring skull island into two crowns:
Skull island in new lands wasn't necessarily hard, but it was something somewhat interesting, since you had to deal with cliff portals on both sides. This would be an interesting finale for two crowns, having to deal with a final boss cliff portal before finally completing the game, and cliff's being on both sides means you can't just clear the dock side and focus entirely on the other. With two players to manage the kingdom with, the threats should be designed around both players working together. What better way than to have threats constantly coming from both sides. Skull island could be where the players gem investment and unlocked upgrades truly count. Certain threatening waves could have greeds drop gems on death, so if there was a critical upgrade that you missed you could build the boat and evacuate in order to get, but before that you'll have to fight off terrifying greed to get those last few gems that you were looking for. Since skull island wouldn't have a lighthouse, you would have to rebuild the boat everytime you want to leave, and the greed won't make it easy.

That's the kind of finale that this game needs. And when we bring the bomb into the cliff portal, give us a special surprise to deal with as the final battle. Maybe have the bomb get ensnared at a spot, and have us do a final boss fight where moving the troops around is something we have to do to dodge something that we fight, then once the boss is defeated, the bomb can be moved forward again to deal the final blow. There's alot of potential here.

[CrashToDesktop]

You must realize that some people find this game incredibly difficult, right? It's not as simple as "making everything more difficult". Adding depth would be the far better option.

[[☆] Zackreaver]

Did you even read what I mentioned after my initial post? The solutions I mentioned would actually increase the depth as well as add difficulty. The game is incredibly easy, once you get the baker you can sit on your ass building up population and steamroll every island. People finding the game difficult are just people playing this game for the first time ever, anybody who actually knows how to play this game have 0 trouble beating it.

Unlike any of the prior games, losing your crown doesn't reset you to nothing, you keep everything you built up, the only thing you have to do is rebuild walls and make a couple tools. The only actual difficult achievement to get is the single reign achievement, which isn't even hard anyway. The game is incredibly forgiving to failure, and there's alot you can do to come back from a slightly bad situation, but if you have everything going perfectly the entire remainder of the game is a bore.

If people don't agree with me on this, I could make a guide on how to beat the game easily each time, shogun or regular, it wouldn't matter.

The problem I'm addressing is that most of the strategic options players are getting don't ever need to be used since the game doesn't challenge you enough to need them.

[CrashToDesktop]

I don't agree with much of this increasing depth, only difficulty.

[lefiath]

Originally posted by 82DK-ARZackreaver:

Did you even read what I mentioned after my initial post?

No offense, but I've read your post (next time you do something like this, make it shorter, please) and I agree with Soldier - I'll trust his judgement regarding basically anything, because I remember him being one of the OG guys back in the days of original Kingdom, he knows what he's talking about. For example, adding more variations of monsters or bringing back repetitive activities like activating shrines doesn't necessarily translate into better gameplay. Which is why these armchair developer suggestions usually can't be taken too seriously.

It's not that your suggestions are necessarily bad, but you fail to acknowledge that not everybody has similar capabilities or determination or whatever, to be able to find the game lackluster, easy and boring.

Originally posted by 82DK-ARZackreaver:

I could make a guide

And what's that supposed to prove? People who find games difficult don't necessarily want to follow guides, that's not an issue you will be solving...

[[☆] Zackreaver]

how does it not increase depth though, the purpose is to increase the strategic value of other options in the game. Currently you only ever need to do the same thing each time, unlock baker, archer statue, builder statue, and salamander with gems, then get stone and iron unlocks, all the other gem unlocks are completely optional and entirely unneeded.

You never need ballista, the greed are so easily killed with just swarms of archers, you don't need the farm statue, hunters and spearmen with all the money you need. You don't need gryphon, stamina horse, or armored horse, they aren't worth the gem investment. You don't need the rancher hermit since if your playing with 2 players, you can mount the only 2 mounts you'll ever need bear/unicorn + salamander. The knight statue is widely known as the most useless statue in the game, actively causing your game to be harder because the knights charge past the wall and kill themselves on defense.

The entirety of the game at island 3 onward is build bakery, make bread, guard bread, spam archers, attack portals until all that's left is the cliff portal. Then island 4 onward your breaking every cliff portal, and every cliff portal is the same.

You don't need the knight hermit, as 2 knights per side are more than enough to handle everything, and only 2 knights can escort the bomb anyway. You don't need the horn hermit, since if you have the bakery you can just make enough archers that both sides are flooded with archers anyway, and the greed can't overwhelm the defenses because they die too fast.

There are so many features this game has that see no plausible play or use because the greed threat just doesn't merit their use or investment.

The only time the game would actually be hard is if you happened to lose all of your gems before unlocking the baker on island 3, but that would require an incredible amounts of error on the players part. And even still, you can get the gems back now by blowing up the cliff portal where the gems got lost.

The only way to make the game hard is to not use any gems on anything, which just sounds like a boring way to play.

[GordonVanDyke]

I need more time to read all of this great feedback, but before I do I want to mention Challenge Islands are still coming. Those might wet your thirst for difficulty and will be much more challenging than the campaign. Will confirm Skull Island II here first. :)

[Epleskront]

The game should have different difficulty settings. At least settings that add multipliers to the greed wave growth rate, if nothing else. The base game is very easy.

[Sapador]

Originally posted by GGBergen.God2:

The game should have different difficulty settings. At least settings that add multipliers to the greed wave growth rate, if nothing else. The base game is very easy.

Devs have told about a custom mode 8 months before the game been released. The game was obviously released with the campaign mode only because it narrows the bug reports spectrum so they can track and fix bugs much more quickly. I know people do expect the game been extensively tested before release, but for an indie game (and a game of this quality), I'm very well with this procedure.

[RambOrc]

Originally posted by 82DK-ARZackreaver:

You don't need gryphon, stamina horse, or armored horse, they aren't worth the gem investment. You don't need the rancher hermit since if your playing with 2 players, you can mount the only 2 mounts you'll ever need bear/unicorn + salamander.

So how do you get out of a cave in time?

[Epleskront]

You don't. I died on island 4 because my stag mount ran out of stamina too early.

[Sapador]

I only play with the Gryphon. It's good for everything I need: defense, explore, winter, cave, expand and much more.

[Howru]

Originally posted by GGBergen.God2:

You don't. I died on island 4 because my stag mount ran out of stamina too early.

I managed to run out of cave on island 4 on the Lizard. But it was really close.
If you properly use stamina, you should be able to run away on stag.

[Dragon]

Originally posted by GGBergen.God2:

You don't. I died on island 4 because my stag mount ran out of stamina too early.

I got out of island 4 on the Lizard and realised I was not gonna make it out of island 5 so I went back and got the Griffin instead. That allowed me to escape comfortably.

[[☆] Zackreaver]

Originally posted by RambOrc:

Originally posted by 82DK-ARZackreaver:

You don't need gryphon, stamina horse, or armored horse, they aren't worth the gem investment. You don't need the rancher hermit since if your playing with 2 players, you can mount the only 2 mounts you'll ever need bear/unicorn + salamander.

So how do you get out of a cave in time?

You just run. The lizard has enough stamina to get out if you just run immediately after starting the bomb, don't doddle, use all stamina to run, once they slow down to catch breath you walk normally, the moment the breathing stops you run again.

It's not really that hard, it's unnerving but it's doable, I did it each time.