Poisonous troop upgrades: the problem and a fix

At the moment my witch doctors are level 10. They have every upgrade except for a +3 defense and a +5 defense. They also currently cost 50k grog each, and if I upgrade those last two levels (taking them from 132 to 140 defense) they'll cost 100k each.

It's a terrible deal to double their cost for only a 6% increase in hit points. So I won't upgrade them, which is frustrating because it hurts my OCD. But what worries me more is players who didn't realize these two skills are such a bad deal and bought them already. If you buy that +3 defense early on, you won't be able to get the final skill (which is a huge upgrade) and all the range increases without your recruit cost going up to 75k. Or more personally, while I saw the WD "trap" before I fell for it, what if I bought an upgrade for another troop that dooms me to 50%-100% more recruit cost than I should be paying?

I might advise someone who bought one of those poisonous skills to delete their village and start over (which might not even be possible? not important to this thread...). This is bad game design. In a modern game, it shouldn't be possible to get "stuck" in a way that cannot be recovered from.

So here's my idea for a fix: make the individual upgrades toggle-able after purchase. I'd go to the academy, click on that +3 defense upgrade, and slide a switch to turn it off. Then my recruit cost would to back down, say from 75k to 50k. This will allow OCD players like myself to buy all the upgrades and then later decide that some of them aren't worth it. Later yet, once I've maxed all my upgrades and I don't need grog as much, maybe I'll turn it back on again. Then maybe if I get low on grog I might turn a few skills off to avoid a crunch.

Another fix would be to reduce the ballooning costs, but that's not really necessary. I get the idea that, once you max out your troops, you don't have anything else to spend grog on anyway. My only complaint is that someone (myself included) could easily get down a path making a particular troop unusable, from which they have no way to backtrack.

What say you?

 

+1 to this. Everyone is bound to make some bad choices the first time through, and some of them can have some serious consequences that, IMO will lead to annoyance/frustration and quitting long before other players. 3-hour build times being one of those things.

 

I like it. For those who haven't skipped those ridiculous WD upgrades this is an especially good idea.

 

+1 Cool idea to have them toggle-able...or even delete-able.

 

Yes I really like this idea, luckily I noticed each price & time increase so I left my WD not many upgrades after its special ability, the huge price & time increase just isn't worth it for a few extra Hitpoints, mine are 30k each & that's where I'm leaving them for the near future anyway. Their spell does the same job until the very last upgrade so it's no way worth the huge increase. I'll also be doing this with one or two other troops, Bombers are one of them, mine are lvl13 now, I'll be going to lvl15 & stopping. With a lot of them it's the time increase that's the killer, the cost to finish with gems gets expencive, and the increase per troop means you can't do as many with the 4 minute trick.

 

Yeah. My WD are also 30k and I'm wondering whether to keep them that way or add the ability...

 

The guardian is a key upgrade. Since unlocking it 1 WD allows me to level any base. Sadly if you don't skip the 2 toughness lvl's your screwed really. Either way I think you really wanna have that guardian upgrade.

 

So you're saying the last upgrade at least doubles the protection spell? Since the cost is over triple what I pay I'd really hope you only need one. So you're saying one at a fully upgraded level would be better than using, let's say 3 at my price & level? As you say one maxed WD is enough for you.

 

I don't know about all that, but at 50k grog and 13 minutes they are appropriately priced imo. In fact I would argue that it's borderline OP'd. Not sure why I would ever use more than one tbh.

 

I hear most top players use at least 2 WD in every attack, some I've heard use 3. I only use one in my attacks now but I'm only PH6 so I'm not dealing with fully maxed defences yet. It's the time increase that I don't like, I do the 4min/1Gem method to finish troops so the WD messes it up a bit, especially since it's getting longer with each upgrade, but since it's only one I don't mind too much.

 

My problem with the WD is that his resurrect ability only works half the time, just now I used it with a load of dead pirates around him & noting happened, he did his little thing but no skeletons jumped up.

 

That's true. Its only OP when res works well which sadly is terribly inconsistent. The protection is always a nice help but the OP part is when a dozen skeletons are spawned.

 

+1 to this. I agree cus getting a skill that will make the cost 2x higher is not cool, not cool at all.

 

+1 to this idea. It is worth "disabling" certain upgrades just to reduce the recruitment cost/times.

 

I'd like some clarity on the WD's resurrect ability, it only works on some dead pirates, not all the dead ones around him or sometimes doesn't work at all. It's things like this that we need to know.

If Chris@Midoki sees this can you please give us some information on how it works? Or at least tell us why it doesn't work, most of the time? For me, the main reason I want to use the WD is because of the resurrect ability, if it doesn't work then I'd rather add 2 more Bombers to my crew.

 

It only works on the dead ones that are moving. Not sure why some are moving and some are not, my guess was something to do with range (thought maybe the resurrect range was smaller) but now I honestly have no idea. Seems random.

 

It does seem random, I tried the ability where a load of my Gunners had been killed by Mortar fire, they were right beside the WD so range wasn't the problem, it did noting, none at all came back. We really need to know how this ability works.

Right I'll leave it at that, don't want to derail the thread by going slightly off topic, so back to being able to deselect abilities after they are unlocked, great idea. Should have made a poll thread & got people's votes in.

 

The Second Chances ability does give you some info about which piles of bones will resurrect. Near the WD the bones will come to life play a little animation of jumping up and down. In my experience these are the exact set of bones that will turn into skeletons when you press the button. I haven't noticed any randomness myself.

Are you saying that sometimes the bones are jumping around when you activate the ability but they don't come to life? Some of that could be explained if they stopped jumping in the time it took for you find the button and press it.

Or maybe you didn't notice the bones? In your example with gunners killed by mortar, the bones do tend to get thrown away from the mortar blast, so maybe the were too far away from the WD after that?

Hey, the longer we keep posting to this thread, on whatever topic, the better chance a staff member will see it, eh?

 

No I've noticed the ones that the bones rattle & skull jumps are the ones that are resurrected, what I'm wondering is why don't they all do this, what makes those special? I've had up to 20 or more troops die right in front of a WD & none can be brought back, even though they are in range, right beside him most of the time.

What makes it worse is I can't even look back over replays to try & see can I find a pattern or sometime to give me an idea of how it works, it's pointless because all my replays are wrong.

 

Exactly. What's random is which ones are a available for resurrection. No rhyme or reason that I can see either.