Lack of variety exists because we have few viable troops and “new is always better” (power creep) while metas doesn’t changes fast enough to please everyone…
There are games where you can only unlock new units and powers at certain levels, this adds some (unwanted by most people here i assume) restrictions, but at least it allows some more control over the metas for each level tier (101 ~ 200 for example) as it makes more significant the changes on old/low tier troops. The three options we have in pvp now kind of covers this, but i’m a bit surprised that end-gamers are not expecting the best kind of defenders people can assemble for the best score/rewards… Really?
I don’t know if in a End-Gamer vs End-Gamer you can really blame the other for trying/copying the best team he can, nobody wants to lose, specially if it comes with a penalty no matter how small, and if there are no penalty people wouldn’t assemble any defender at all aside from a Peasant and it wouldn’t be fun or even rewarding at all…
So far, the best suggestion i can make for all of this would be to restrict the use of each troop on a team to a single copy, and every copy of the said troop should be accounted for each team you have, this way if you have 4 Manticores you could have four teams using one of it on each.
This would have a lot of impact in how people deal with their teams and collections:
- Disenchanting and Ascending would have much more impact in team building if you want enough copies for all of your teams.
- It would avoid some of the past “4x something” teams.
But even this wouldn’t solve a lot of issues until a new team is created in the likes of this one. As an example:
- Manticore/Spirit Fox/Deep Borer/Bone Dragon → To keep double mana drain.
- Manticore/Deep Bore/Courage/Bone Dragon → To keep skull/status gain spam.
Anyway… To cycle the meta as much as people desire i don’t think there is a way to it so without adding restrictions to team building, even as a parallel pvp like i suggested before:
Simply adding bonuses to using certain troops/kingdoms could also work, but it would require a faster pace on the rework of old troops to some end-gamers even consider the bonus worth the trade in the possibles defensive losses…