Clash of Clans

[Slayerik]

I enjoy this game. If Bat Country falls apart, PM me...we got a pretty active crew of guys in my clan. Anyways, CLASH ON

[Samwise]

This new builder base thing is weird -- basically a "new game plus"?  But it is nice to get to build stuff in 10 minutes again.   

The model of no resource stealing makes the stakes feel lower.  Which I guess is nice when you're trying to build something up from scratch, but it takes a lot of the strategic element out of the base building IMO.

[grebo]

Yeah, I don't get it... but maybe the gem mine is useful for the old base.

[luckton]

Came back to try the Builder Base. It's not bad. From what I've read it's Super Cell's attempt to bring refined mechanics and gameplay lessons learned from Clash of Clans, without actually doing a Clash of Clans 2 and retaining their player base in one game.

Really wish I could clear out debris without upgrading the BB, but I'll manage.

[Reg]

Once I figured out that (for now at least) a good base is more important than a good attack everything got easy. I get my daily bonus in ten minutes and spend it all on upgrades. I'm amazed that some people my level still haven't enclosed their bases.

[Samwise]

Came back to try the Builder Base. It's not bad. From what I've read it's Super Cell's attempt to bring refined mechanics and gameplay lessons learned from Clash of Clans, without actually doing a Clash of Clans 2 and retaining their player base in one game.

Yeah, that makes sense.  I probably wouldn't install a whole new game but having this new thing to mess around with is fun.

Figuring out fun stuff to do with the push traps is pretty cool.  Most people use them to push the troops away; I'm using them to catapult them further IN to my base (straight into my smasher) and that's working really well.   

[luckton]

Working my way through Builder Hall lvl 3, upgrading all the things until I move to BH4. Still enjoying the small-time aspect and simplicity. I can login, get my matches in, and then spend the rest of the day upgrading things.

[luckton]

Playing around with the BH had enticed me to revisit the home village and start playing again. Is anyone still kicking it around here, or should I venture around elsewhere for a clan?

[Samwise]

Bat Country is still going, although a bunch of the f13ers are inactive and K9 just left (splitter!).  We're actually doing better in wars now though due to the way matchups work.   

[Miguel]

Yes, I decided to stop boat-anchoring the clan wars so it should be better. 

[grebo]

I'll be back at some point... but not yet.

[luckton]

Reached BH5 last night after maxing out everything for BH4. After weeks of going against people with the multi-mortar and hero mech, I WILL HAVE MY REVENGE!  

[Samwise]

That hero mech is pretty great.  Of course now that I've got that, I'm up against people with flamethrowers and two smashers.

[luckton]

That's what I love about BH vs TH combat. You can switch up your army right at the start of battle to counter whatever layout you encounter.

That said, until I get research going again, 2x Giant squads, 2x Bomber squads and the mech are carrying me to victory everytime. Combined with a swank home defense, I'm quickly rising out of the upper 1xxx and into the mid 2xxx.

[Krushchev]

I've also been messin with the builder base on my two accounts. I got into the 3500's with max baby dragons and level 5 battle machine. On my other account I'm trying to level Archers/Barbs to see how that plays out.

[Samwise]

Necro for TH 12 update!  It was about time; I'd been in wall-only upgrade mode for a while.

Anyone seen one of the new siege gizmos in action yet?  I'll be able to start producing them in another couple of days (yay for builder books, I'd been holding on to one for just such an occasion and was able to get the TH upgrade built on day 1) and will be handing them out to anyone with clan castle space for one.  

[Samwise]

10 years in and I think I've hit the "okay, that was fun, but I might be done now" point.      Seems like a good time for a retrospective!

Seeing the posts in this thread about the builder base as being a sequel inside the original game is funny; that may well have been their intent, but clearly it didn't work because they completely stopped development on the builder base a while back.  More recently, they added a "clan capital", which is a collection of bases that the whole clan upgrades and raids with together.  As with the builder base, it doesn't really integrate with the home village very well, except to act as a resource sink for extra resources at the home village (which you can "forge" into capital resources).

Looking back, the thing I always appreciated about this game was the fact that it put very few demands on my time, favoring short bursts of gameplay that were spaced out, without any major penalties for wandering away from the game for a while (i.e. nothing you build ever gets lost, and lost resources are easy to regain).  Building the base felt like a tower defense game -- you have four archer towers and twenty wall pieces, or whatever, figure out how to arrange them to protect your treasure hoard.  The stakes were just high enough to make the base building engaging, but not high enough to make the progression feel frustrating.  Perfectly tuned in many respects IMO.

The intractable problem that I think Supercell was stuck with was "now what?"  Once people have built everything they can build, they're probably going to stop playing (I remember originally thinking "okay, I'll play until I've fully upgraded all my walls to the ridiculously expensive level").  So the natural solution is to add more stuff to build.

Just adding levels to the existing structures only gets you so far, so you also add new structures -- and eventually you have to expand the building footprint to accomodate the new structures.  I'm not sure exactly when it was, but at some point I remember going from "oo boy, a new defensive tower thingy to add to my layout" to "ugh, now I need to redo my whole layout to fit this new thingy".  Because once the complexity gets past a certain point, it's no longer a fun little puzzle, it's a big boring puzzle.  Big and boring enough that most people outsource it by going to Reddit to copy standard base layouts from the small percentage of the population that gets off on pushing pixels around for hours.

So they realized they were hitting a wall with just adding more stuff to the existing game -- what's next?  Adding a new game inside the game (the builder base), with different units and buildings, and different rules.  No more delays between attacks, no more stealing loot.  You can scroll up in this thread for the pros and cons of that -- it was fun for a bit to experiment with the new options, but the lack of any stakes at all made it get boring pretty quick.  There hasn't been anything added to that game mode for a while, but it remains in the game as an obligatory "clan game challenge" thing (basically, it's become a minigame that gives you rewards in the main game).  I feel like there's a principle to observe here about the pitfalls of adding stuff to your game that most people find boring and then trying to force engagement with it -- it's nowhere near the scale of holocron grinding, but I think some of the same reasoning went into it.  The end result just feels like busy work that distracts from the fun stuff (or in the case of holo-grinding, it distracted from the lack of fun stuff by promising fun stuff to come).

The more recent clan capital thing was interesting at first due to its potentially collaborative elements but got boring even faster than the builder base did.  The clan capital is not one but a whole series of villages, and I don't want to spend time fiddling with the layout of any of them because, as with the builder base, what happens on defense doesn't have any stakes whatsoever.  Dumping resources into the upgrades is mildly fun in a "number go up" way but that's about it.  Again, it ends up feeling like a set of chores being added to the game, rather than an enhancement to the game itself.  The little bits of the original fun gameplay elements are like butter scraped over an ever-growing slab of bread.

So: what could they have done better?  I think I end up coming back to my theory that the best route for a game with persistent progression (at least from the point of view of "what would I enjoy as a player", which is probably different from the point of view of "what will make them the most money" or even "what would MOST people enjoy as players")  is to reset it periodically, with some kind of prestige system. 

Either that or show a "you win!" screen and let the game die a natural death.   

[Count Nerfedalot]

...

So: what could they have done better?  I think I end up coming back to my theory that the best route for a game with persistent progression (at least from the point of view of "what would I enjoy as a player", which is probably different from the point of view of "what will make them the most money" or even "what would MOST people enjoy as players")  is to reset it periodically, with some kind of prestige system. 

isn't that basically Diablo 3 (and other games) Seasons?