DoctorAwesome

Join Date 04/2009

Poll--value of citadel upgrades

Why can we throw money at this again?

Hey, I've been thinking a lot about citadel upgrades recently, so I wanted to gauge the community's opinion of the various upgrades available. Basically, put the citadel upgrades in order of importance, and also give a rating to the importance of the upgrade, ranging from 5 (must have) to 1 (only to embarass the enemy team.) This is important, because although you might put one upgrade ahead of another, that doesn't necessarily mean the later one is unimportant--just less important. Also include notes if necessary--i.e., "buy only one rank", "max out as soon as possible", etc.

Remember, the buyable upgrades are:

Tower Health (increases tower health and grants regen)
Tower Power (increased tower damage and supposedly adds splash but doesn't seem to work)
Reinforcement Attack Up
Reinforcement Defense/HP Up
Increased Gold Income
Increased Experience
Decreased Death Penalty (stay dead shorter)
New Reinforcements (priests, angels, etc.)
New Weaponry (trebuchets on fortresses, Finger of God, etc.)

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Tower Health - (5) first level only, get as soons as someone starts attacking your towers

Tower Power - (2) I only get it against berserker enemys that like to chase deep inside the own base, first level only

Reinforcement Attack Up - (4) very important later

Reinforcement Defense/HP Up - (4) very important later

Increased Gold Income - (5) as soon as possible, first upgrade only

Increased Experience - (3) good, but only get it when you got enough gold to spare

Decreased Death Penalty - (1) absolutely worthless

New Reinforcements (priests, angels, etc.) (5) very important, get as soons as possible (usually)

New Weaponry - (1)

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Interesting, I actually didn't realize the Reinforcement buffs were considered useful. I thought the defense one was useful to make farming more difficult... but aren't tougher reinforcements worth more exp?

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Tower Health - 5 - First level only, Get more levels if the game is going to last long or the enemy is really pushing you

Tower Power - 1 - Towers already get splash to start. Doesn't grant enough damage fast enough to be worth it

Reinforement Attaack Up - 4- Only long games

Reinforcement Defense/HP Up - 3.75 - Not as important as the attack and only for long games.

Increased Gold Income - 5 - ASAP but only the first upgrade. Unless it's 5 on 5. Later upgrades just dont' pay off enough.

Increased Experience - 2 - Personally I never need it and it is only useful when you either have extra gold or the game is really close in level where 10% could tip the scales.

Decreased Death Penalty - 1 - Only decreases time dead. So noobs can die even more often. Needs to decrease gold or experience gained.

New Reinforcements - 5 - Good but it seems that some upgrades don't do as much as you would like. (angels)

New Weaponry - 1 - Fortresses just don't do the damage needed. Trebuchet's are anti building not anti personel yet we put them on a building so it can attack personel. Either the trebuchets need a buff or the fortress itself needs to be redone. Finger of god is almost completely useless due to it's low fire rate. More of an annoyance. Plus trebuchets are too late in the game to do much.

*edit* I like that someone finally did a post of this. This is what the devs needed.

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Glad you found it useful! I'm going to use the opinions collected here to make another thread later.

What I plan on assessing is, if there are options that nobody likes or uses... why are they even on the citadel? I think the devs, like any good game designer, intend for everything they put in the game to be used by somebody, or be useful to somebody, so it seems like kind of a waste if there are certain clever but unloved options that nobody ever buys. After getting some more opinions--although it sounds like everyone pretty much agrees on what's useful and what isn't--I'll make another thread with my proposed modifications.

Until then, I'd like to see more people's thoughts on this!

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Skipping tower regen in smaller games is often a good idea. For example, if you've got 650 gold leftover on your first trip back in a 2v2 Prison game, we're talking about Tower Regen vs Scalemail + Potion. Thats a no-brainer if I ever saw one.

Priests aren't horrible feeders anymore, but I still don't like them enough to buy them right away. My policy is usually to just upgrade them a little after the other team does, so I get a small jump in xp/gold but don't get swamped by superior creep waves.

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Quoting DoctorAwesome,

reply 2

actually those upgrades are pretty good, once you got priests you can get the first damage and armor upgrade to push towers more easily and deal some extra damage to enemys. Later once you got giants these rule even more, fully upgraded giants just destroy everything and are really hard to kill.

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Well good to know. Like I said, I originally thought attack was useless and defense just made farming harder, but that makes a lot of sense. This gives me ideas for my proposals later...

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Blacksmith/Armory are only useful late game. Any decent aoe will destroy a wave even with 2 armory upgrades.

Not a fan of number ratings, so i'll just explain each:

Tower Health (increases tower health and grants regen) - Tower Regen 1 is almost always good but it will not keep a tower up if it's being assaulted by a enemy DG.
Tower Power (increased tower damage and supposedly adds splash but doesn't seem to work) -Tower Attack is also a very good upgrade, mostly because it is so cheap. Inital aoe/damage from towers just doesn't seem like enough. Definitely have this if the enemy team has priests.
Reinforcement Attack Up - Useless until you have catapults or giants.
Reinforcement Defense/HP Up - Useless until you have catapults or giants. Sometimes I will buy rank 1 because it's only 600 gold, but it seems to make little difference.
Increased Gold Income - Buy Gold 1 ASAP. People seem to disagree, but I think Gold 2 is awesome for any game 3v3 or higher. They say it doesn't pay off, but at the end of the game when you have 10000 more gold than the opposing team (assuming you had no feeders and it was a close game), it most certainly did pay off. If the game looks to drag out for a long time, gold 3 is worth it too. Just make sure that you are spreading out gold upgrade purchases with teammates.
Increased Experience - In my experience usually not worth it. If you get some early kills and land extra gold it would be nice though.
Decreased Death Penalty (stay dead shorter) - Good late game. If your opponents have giants decreasing your graveyard time could be the difference between victory or defeat.
New Reinforcements (priests, angels, etc.) - Priests are a pretty good upgrade, but still situational. Don't buy them if your opponent has a lot of aoe. Catapults are almost always good but be careful if your enemy has a lot of aoe and you don't have money to upgrade armory/blacksmith along with them.
New Weaponry (trebuchets on fortresses, Finger of God, etc.) - Trebs are a great upgrade if you are behind and don't have the warscore for catapults. On Zikurat it's a must buy IMO. Finger of God is usually a throw in when teams are swimming in money and everything else is already upgraded.

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Personally, I find that the later Gold upgrades don't deliver a large benefit in terms of quantity of gold, but more in the rate: you won't get much more gold overall than your opponent, but you will get more of it earlier than them, meaning you can buy critical upgrades like Giants or Artifacts before them.

In addition, buying the gold upgrades are generally awesome for everyone who didn't have to pay for it--the gold upgrades are generally considered not worth it when accounting for the cost of buying them, but if only one guy forks up the cash for them, his teammates will reap a much bigger reward, while he'll more or less break even. In that sense, it's not a bad upgrade--if one or more of your teammates are clearly stronger than you, you're basically paying money to push them over the top--sacrificing your cash to super-power your teammates.

That said, I don't think it's a very good idea to have an upgrade on the citadel that's basically asks one player to take the fall and be weaker so that everybody else can benefit, particularly a bonus so passive as straight-up increased gold income.

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