New game mode: Incursion

[Zuul-Emo]

Had an idea for a new mode and wanted to share it. Let me know what you think and fingers crossed the devs consider it.

So, basic idea is the mode would be available every day, like dungeon, but you only get one attempt per day.
You have ten battles to play, and as soon as you lose one, your incursion ends. Each battle is harder than the previous one, mainly in terms of enemy levels.
You gain rewards from each fight, which increase based on difficulty, so each battle gives more rewards than the one before. No chests or reward screens, or complicated points scoring, you just get better rewards from the battle. Again, similar to dungeon, but with varied instead of fixed rewards.
When you start an incursion, you get offered a choice of four “vaunts”. A vaunt is an extra penalty your team agrees to, in return for boosted rewards given in each battle. You basically bet that you can win, even with the penalty, and if you do, you get extra payment for the win.
You can take as many of the vaunts as you choose (out of the max of four), and their effects stack, as do the rewards. However, they will make battles more difficult to win, meaning it’s harder to complete the incursion and win all battles. That’s a trade-off you must decide before you begin.
The vaunts appear on your troops (and hero), in the effects area, like potions and delve traits do, along with the rewards they give. They aren’t removed by effects like stun and persist over all incursion battles, until you win them all or lose one. They do not affect other battles, only incursion battles.
The list of vaunts will reset each day, and are randomly chosen from a pool. Vaunts are fixed, so the same penalty will always give a specific reward. For example, a vaunt may say “Allied troops begin a battle frozen. You gain 5 jewels after each battle won.” for an easy vaunt, but could also say “Matching 4+ gems gives all allies a random negative status effect. You gain 15 dragonite after each battle won.” for a hard vaunt. Vaunts are colour coded by difficulty, with harder vaunts giving rarer rewards.
Each battle in the incursion is a stand-alone battle. Unlike delves, you can swap teams between battles (unless you take a vaunt that prevents this) and nothing carries over between battles, so if a troop dies in a battle, it’s not dead at the start of the next battle, for example. However, losing a troop during a battle earns you a “forfeit”.
Forfeits are similar to vaunts, however they do not grant rewards, and their rarity is tied to the level of the battle. So, if you lose a troop in the first battle, you’ll get a minor forfeit, but if you lose a troop in the ninth battle, you’ll get a much more severe forfeit.
While forfeits make battles tougher, they never have any effect on rewards.
So, like traps in dungeons, certain effects (vaunts and forfeits) persist in all battles until the end of the incursion. However, unlike dungeons, these are selected or earned, rather than randomly assigned.
Battles give general rewards like gold, glory, or gems, as default, with the amounts increasing each battle (plus any vaunt rewards), however the final battle will be against an enemy team with a mythic or boss troop, and will always grant a small amount of a rare currency (such as cursed runes, dragonite or gold marks). This is the “prime reward”.
The prime reward for the incursion is randomly chosen each day, and will be the same for every player (both in type and amount) who wins the tenth battle on that day. However, there will be a small pool of highly desirable currencies it is chosen from (NOT stuff like gold, glory or silver marks).
However, the amount of prime reward currency given is increased for each vaunt you have. So, as well as the specific rewards granted by the vaunt itself, the vaunt also improves the final reward, if you manage to win every battle with the vaunt. Vaunts grant specific percentage boosts to the reward, based on how difficult they are, so an easy vaunt might grant 50% extra, while a hard vaunt might grant 150% extra. This is listed when selecting vaunts.
Taking vaunts and being tactical in how you choose them, is the best way to get great rewards from an incursion, however players will need to be careful how many vaunts they take and which they choose, as taking too many can cause them to wind up with forfeits or even end the incursion early and miss out on prime rewards.
Unlike PvP and underspire, there are no restrictions on troops, weapons, colours, kingdoms or classes during an incursion (unless given by a vaunt), and hero gems will not appear during incursion battles.

What do you think?

[Ivan]

Great idea. What about the enemy team level? Should it be scaled to the player level?

[Wolfchadren]

If there weren’t already several game modes in the game this would be a nice idea. Beside that don’t think it will be good for players as the devs will find a way to ruin it by asking money to make it easier or at the least put some kind of low drop rate for some troops that can only be obtained there in it.
So again the idea is nice but if they decide to do it it won’t be so nice anymore.

[STUB]

I like the main idea of this with the penalties\ rewards stacking, but more daily content could be a bit much but i could definitely see this as an event in place of the seasonal event with more tokens in place of rewards and the usual shop in stead. Cudos.

[dwshasta]

Interesting concept and one that higher level players might find challenging.

[redtoadstool]

I love this idea. It would need to be monetised to be developed, but that could be achieved by paying gems or real money to temporarily remove a vaunt’s disadvantage (but not its rewards) for a battle.

[Zuul-Emo]

@Ivan

Great idea. What about the enemy team level? Should it be scaled to the player level?

Thanks. Yeah, if the enemies scale up every 100-500 levels the player goes up, and the rewards improve, it’d be great. That’d keep it challenging and rewarding.

@Wolfchadren

don’t think it will be good for players as the devs will find a way to ruin it by asking money to make it easier or at the least put some kind of low drop rate for some troops that can only be obtained there in it.

Yeah, possibly, but I’d hope not. The point is that all the boosted rewards come with extra difficulty, so there shouldn’t be ways to pay to make it easier. As for some rare troop that can only come from this mode, we’ve already got a lot of them, so maybe they’d want to add that, but hopefully not.

@STUB

more daily content could be a bit much

Yeah, there is already a lot to do. I was thinking this would be something that you can skip if you’re focused on other stuff, because you know it’s there every day. But, I’d rather see it be something that can be done any time for good rewards, than something that appears rarely. Might need some kind of balance, though.

@redtoadstool

I love this idea. It would need to be monetised to be developed

Thanks. Yeah, monetisation would probably be pushed in somewhere by the devs, but I’d rather it was just a challenging mode that gave players something hard to aim for, and make them want to spend elsewhere to power themselves up so they could take on harder vaunts for better rewards. If they had to add monetisation, paying something for boosts like potions would probably be better than paying to remove vaunt disadvantages, because that takes away the main challenge that makes the mode different. I could see them selling some kind of “med-kit” item that restores a lost troop at the end of battle, so you get no forfeit for losing a troop, or something, too.

[Fourdottwoone]

@Zuul-Emo

What do you think?

Okay, let’s pick this a bit apart from game design perspective.

@Zuul-Emo

Unlike PvP and underspire, there are no restrictions on troops, weapons, colours, kingdoms or classes during an incursion (unless given by a vaunt), and hero gems will not appear during incursion battles.

This will boil down to a single team everybody eventually ends up using for every battle, granting a 99.99% win chance. Dungeon has the same issue, it might as well just skip the battle part and only offer a button to collect rewards. Without constantly changing restrictions this won’t age well.

@Zuul-Emo

However, losing a troop during a battle earns you a “forfeit”.

Some teams are built around losing and resummoning troops, Vash’Dagon comes to mind here. Saying you don’t want to restrict troops, then imposing severe penalties for using some of them doesn’t go well together.

@Zuul-Emo

The prime reward for the incursion is randomly chosen each day, and will be the same for every player (both in type and amount) who wins the tenth battle on that day. However, there will be a small pool of highly desirable currencies it is chosen from (NOT stuff like gold, glory or silver marks).

This just results in players not playing the 10th battle until the reward they consider valuable shows up. Since only this 10th battle contains highly desirable currencies, they will absolutely wait this out, and they will be increasingly unhappy about it. When introducing game elements, it’s usually better to avoid those that make players actively want to play less.

[Zuul-Emo]

@Fourdottwoone

This will boil down to a single team

If you mean each player will have a preferred team, then probably. If you mean every player will use the same team, then I’d massively disagree. Sure, they’ll find what works well and use that more, but unless the mode is so difficult only the best possible team can win (not intended), players will have some choice and they’ll pick what they prefer.

@Fourdottwoone

Without constantly changing restrictions this won’t age well.

I get what you’re saying, but you seem to have ignored the section about vaunts. That’s the constantly changing restrictions. So, say you start an incursion and one of today’s vaunts is an easy one that says all your troops start the battle stunned. Well, maybe your typical tactic of using beetrix is now gonna struggle, because her trait won’t work, meaning you’ll have to figure out a different tactic, or combine her with something that removes that stun, if you accept that vaunt. Now, say the next vaunt says you can’t use mythics or bosses, meaning your usual Zuul’goth team is unavailable, if you want the extra rewards from that vaunt. So, you pick a team you don’t normally use, made of legendary troops. And the next vaunt says you can’t use a maxed level class, meaning that fully leveled elementalist class you normally use is out. Either you pick another class that’s not leveled or you go without a class (possibly not using your hero and using four troops). Or, you decide you’d rather stick with elementalist and skip those extra rewards, but unlike something like underspire, that’s now a choice you can make, rather than a hard lock. And say the last vaunt says your team must all share a colour or kingdom, meaning you still have tons of choice, but you have to pick a team with synergy instead of whatever’s most powerful.
The point is vaunts are where the restrictions come in, and you’re rewarded for them, but given more choice about whether or not to pick them. And, because vaunts are chosen from a large pool, with multiple levels of difficulty, there’s much more variety in what restrictions can be applied on any given day.

@Fourdottwoone

Some teams are built around losing and resummoning troops, Vash’Dagon comes to mind here. Saying you don’t want to restrict troops, then imposing severe penalties for using some of them doesn’t go well together.

OK, I get what you mean, and that’s me not explaining it well. I don’t mean that each time you lose a troop and summon a new one, you get a forfeit, because that’d be way too harsh. I was trying to say that at the end of the battle you get a forfeit for each empty ally slot, so up to a max of three (if you lost four, you’d lose the battle), kinda like how journey takes miles/points away for empty slots at the end of the battle, but if you summon a new troop it doesn’t.
That allows for more variety of teams, but if your team doesn’t replace lost troops, then you get the punishment. And that’s designed to make later battles harder, so once you start struggling, it snowballs or you have to change tactics to counter it.

@Fourdottwoone

This just results in players not playing the 10th battle until the reward they consider valuable shows up.

I think you mean they wouldn’t play any battles until the day a reward they want is given by the 10th battle. They’d have no benefit from playing the first 9, and skipping the 10th since the incursion resets each day. If you don’t finish by beating all 10 or losing a battle, then the mode still resets to zero at daily reset, with 10 new battles and 4 new vaunts.
If that’s what they want though, that’s their choice. If the prime reward that day is something they don’t care about, they can just skip that day. No problem, there’s tons of other modes they can do.

@Fourdottwoone

Since only this 10th battle contains highly desirable currencies

Again, you seem to have missed the part about vaunts giving rewards for each battle. If you pick a vaunt that gives a reward you want, every battle will give that reward. Say, you pick a really difficult vaunt, meaning it will give high rarity currency, since harder vaunts give rarer rewards. Well, that reward is given by all ten battles. So, even if you don’t care about the prime reward, but you care about one (or more) of the rewards from the vaunts, it’d still be worth doing all ten battles.
Put it this way. Say you really need dragonite, and you check what the prime reward is for that day and a guildmate says it’s something else, so you decide you don’t care about the prime reward that day, you can still check the vaunts to see whether any of them offer dragonite (or something else you want), and if they’re a hard vaunt, they might. The highly desirable currencies aren’t only behind the 10th battle, they’re also behind the vaunts which pay out every battle, including the 10th.
But, assuming the prime reward and all the vaunt rewards are stuff you don’t want, then you could skip the day’s incursion if you wanted. Just like if the dungeon is giving a colour you don’t need and you fail to hit a perfect run for dragonite, you can decide not to fight those battles.

@Fourdottwoone

When introducing game elements, it’s usually better to avoid those that make players actively want to play less.

I agree, and hopefully that’s not the case here. I want the vaunt rewards to be clear upfront and given for every battle won, so that every battle has value you choose. The prime reward is more mysterious, but I know once one person gets it and tells others, they’ll use that to decide what to do. And while prime rewards are rare currencies, not everyone will want everything in that pool. But that’s no different to any other mode, especially a daily mode. The rewards in stuff like adventure board are often things that won’t mean much to high level players, for example, and they can decide whether to play those battles or not.

Hope that makes it clearer.

[STUB]

@Fourdottwoone

This will boil down to a single team everybody eventually ends up using for every battle, granting a 99.99% win chance. Dungeon has the same issue, it might as well just skip the battle part and only offer a button to collect rewards. Without constantly changing restrictions this won’t age well.

You could have “vaunts” that would restrict your choice for example “no mythic” " no legendary" or “only common” for harder challenges and more reward this would garantee variation to taeam builds, that wouldnt be unique over time, but could prove challenging espicaially if you consider cumlitive “vaunts” which could be kingdom colour etc obviously Zul has just painted a broad picture of an idea and think picking it apart is being a little over critical i think in theory this is a good idea. ( sorry for typo’s typing with gloves on)

[TheIdleOne]

At this point, I’ll take almost any game mode that doesn’t have a forced team restriction at the start of an activity. (now if it was an optional restriction for optional benefits, that’d be kinda cool too… and I dont mean forcing us to use a terrible weekly event troop for 2x points kind of optional)

spam web and invulnerability for all I care

[Fourdottwoone]

@Zuul-Emo

If you mean each player will have a preferred team, then probably. If you mean every player will use the same team, then I’d massively disagree.

They’ll gravitate towards the same builds, similar to other activities (e.g. gold farming). At least those players that don’t play entirely isolated on their own, there’s simply no reason to stick with some iffy homegrown build once someone comes up with something performing significantly better. However, you are right that vaunts have the capability to shake this up. I’m just not sure how viable they are, considering that they carry over between battles. Offering 4 x 10 = 40 distinct enough ones throughout a run feels challenging to implement, especially if the player isn’t supposed to end up with impossible combinations that lock out every troop (e.g. team must only contain troops that are from both Silverglade and Broken Spire).

@Zuul-Emo

Again, you seem to have missed the part about vaunts giving rewards for each battle. If you pick a vaunt that gives a reward you want, every battle will give that reward. Say, you pick a really difficult vaunt, meaning it will give high rarity currency, since harder vaunts give rarer rewards. Well, that reward is given by all ten battles. So, even if you don’t care about the prime reward, but you care about one (or more) of the rewards from the vaunts, it’d still be worth doing all ten battles.

Your prime reward has to be the jackpot everybody wants. No jackpot, no players, because they’d just consider it a waste of time. This is similar to the Arena Event, there are some rarer rewards, it still gets treated as weekend off by just about everybody because there isn’t any jackpot. If your standard battles have the same payout as the jackpot, you don’t need any chained battles leading to a jackpot, just make it individual battles similar to GaP.

@Zuul-Emo

If that’s what they want though, that’s their choice. If the prime reward that day is something they don’t care about, they can just skip that day. No problem, there’s tons of other modes they can do.

They can either play the 10th battle and receive something useless, forfeiting all the effort they’ve put into getting there. Or they can wait another day, possibly many times in a row due to randomness, each time forfeiting a tenth of their next useful reward. It’s not really a choice, it’s a lose/lose situation. Think of it as the soul forge capping at 4k diamonds, discarding any further ones gained until you craft a mythic, with the one you want possibly not showing up for a long time. Players would also hate that with a passion, and it wouldn’t help there are tons of other resources they can collect in those game modes other than Dungeon.

@Zuul-Emo

I was trying to say that at the end of the battle you get a forfeit for each empty ally slot, so up to a max of three (if you lost four, you’d lose the battle), kinda like how journey takes miles/points away for empty slots at the end of the battle, but if you summon a new troop it doesn’t.

It’s possibly still too harsh. Journey only affects the current battle, not from all future ones on top. Not sure if this can be balanced well, if the handicap it too little it might as well not be around, if it is too much players will rather completely restart on losing a single troop instead of wasting their daily opportunity attempting to go deeper.

[Zuul-Emo]

@Fourdottwoone

They’ll gravitate towards the same builds, similar to other activities (e.g. gold farming).

Now you’re kind of just criticising the game itself. When players want to farm gold, they pick troops which are better at farming gold, how’s that a problem? The point of incursion is that every day they have different restrictions they can pick, and so it’s more likely they need to adapt and change their team up. Sure, there’s gonna be troops that are better than others, within each restriction, but that’s just because many troops aren’t balanced well against each other.
I agree, I just don’t see that as a problem with this game mode compared to any other.

@Fourdottwoone

However, you are right that vaunts have the capability to shake this up. I’m just not sure how viable they are, considering that they carry over between battles.

Thanks, glad you see what I’m suggesting about using those restrictions to shake up teams. Hopefully they can be viable, if done well.

@Fourdottwoone

Offering 4 x 10 = 40 distinct enough ones throughout a run feels challenging to implement

I’m confused. You only get 4 each run. You pick them at the very start of the run, and they apply to every battle in that run. You don’t pick more or change them after each battle. The only way you get more restrictions is from forfeits.
Still, I agree you’d need a large pool of possible restrictions to offer as vaunts, among others that do different stuff like give status effects or lower stats (like losing 10% attack in return for specific rewards). I’m pretty sure it’s not that difficult to come up with them though.

@Fourdottwoone

if the player isn’t supposed to end up with impossible combinations that lock out every troop (e.g. team must only contain troops that are from both Silverglade and Broken Spire).

This is a good point, and (unlike daemon offers in explore) it would definitely have to have some kind of exclusion code, so certain vaunts can’t be chosen at the same time. Like in your example, if there was a vaunt that specified a kingdom, you couldn’t have two get offered on the same day.

@Fourdottwoone

Your prime reward has to be the jackpot everybody wants.

It would be the main jackpot. Totally agree. Which is why it would ONLY be the most desirable currencies that could be offered as prime rewards. Which should mean that most days, the prime reward is gonna be something you want, no matter how far into the game you are. But, the most advanced players are always gonna reach a point where all existing currencies become useless and they’re just waiting for the next one.
But, my point is that there’s two places you get currencies, the main one being the prime reward, which gets boosted by vaunts to persuade you to take as many as possible, but also from vaunts which give better rewards for harder ones, to persuade you to take more difficult challenges.

@Fourdottwoone

If your standard battles have the same payout as the jackpot,

Nah, they wouldn’t give the same payout. Say we’re looking at dragonite. The hard vaunt might give 10 dragonite per battle, but the prime reward would give 100. And that’s increased per vaunt, so while you’d get up to 100 dragonite from doing all ten battles with the vaunt, you could get far more from the prime reward if you have multiple vaunts (especially if they’re hard ones, as those give the biggest boosts).
Maybe this comparison will help. In an event like bounty, you get rewards for (kinda) all the battles, because they give points that you trade for reward tiers, but the biggest rewards are given after the last battles. I’m suggesting something similar, but you have more choice over the rewards and they’re given directly, instead of getting points you trade for rewards because the battle just gives those rewards immediately when you win.

@Fourdottwoone

They can either play the 10th battle and receive something useless, forfeiting all the effort they’ve put into getting there.

Except, they’d get the vaunt reward, too.

@Fourdottwoone

forfeiting all the effort they’ve put into getting there.

Well, they’d have got rewards for every battle along the way.

@Fourdottwoone

Or they can wait another day, possibly many times in a row due to randomness, each time forfeiting a tenth of their next useful reward

Again, the mode resets each day, so if they skip the last battle, it makes no difference on the next day. They just lose whatever reward that last battle would have given. And then they start again tomorrow.

@Fourdottwoone

Think of it as the soul forge capping at 4k diamonds, discarding any further ones gained until you craft a mythic, with the one you want possibly not showing up for a long time. Players would also hate that with a passion, and it wouldn’t help there are tons of other resources they can collect in those game modes other than Dungeon.

I’m not understanding the comparison. you play the battles each day and earn rewards, then the next day everything resets, so you start from scratch. There’s no cap, where anything beyond that gets discarded.
It’d be more like to craft a mythic you had to perform ten tasks, each giving 400 diamonds. If you only do nine and stop, you don’t get the mythic because you lose all the diamonds at the end of the day. That would suck, but there’s nothing stopping you doing the tenth task, unless you’re not powerful enough, in which case that pushes you to keep powering up elsewhere.
And if you did the tenth task, you’d automatically get the mythic. No chance at losing those diamonds, they’d just transform straight into the mythic. So, no cap or lost diamonds to worry about.
But, also, each of the ten tasks would also be giving you other rewards like jewels, as well as those diamonds, and the jewels don’t reset at end of day. So, even if you did nine tasks, you’d get a bunch of jewels, making it worthwhile. You just wouldn’t get the mythic.

@Fourdottwoone

It’s possibly still too harsh. Journey only affects the current battle, not from all future ones on top. Not sure if this can be balanced well, if the handicap it too little it might as well not be around, if it is too much players will rather completely restart on losing a single troop instead of wasting their daily opportunity attempting to go deeper.

It’s harsh. But then, this is a mode where players can earn some of the best currencies in the game. I want it to be harsh, especially if they did monetise it and make it easier for those handing over currency. You get rewards for every battle you win, so even if players struggle to win all ten, they’ll be getting something to help them improve, and it’s a challenge to win all ten, especially with vaunts. It’s something to build up to. And the idea of winning all ten, with four hard vaunts, to give the absolute best rewards, would definitely be something to brag about.

@Fourdottwoone

players will rather completely restart on losing a single troop

You mean wait for the next day and start from scratch. Not really any extra benefit to that. They might as well keep going and try to get more rewards. Worse case they fail and lose nothing. Best case, they succeed and get the rewards.
Sure, losing troops and getting forfeits is gonna make players think twice about how much further they can go, but it’s no different than losing a troop during an event battle, in that things got tougher but that usually doesn’t mean you quit the battle and waste the event sigil, to try the next sigil. Usually, players will keep trying to win the battle, then use the next sigil to try and win that one as well. Either way, that next sigil isn’t going anywhere. The only difference is that instead of a next sigil, it’s a next day’s run.