You’d still be pulling from a pool of roughly 10% or less of the total troops in the game that represent the meta at the time. Forced changes would simply inconvenience starting and casual players while not really affecting any sort of real change at the top end. Ideally, there’d be enough variety where maybe the top half of troops would be seen on defense, rather than the top 10%. Expecting troops like Tau and Elwyn to be used on a defense team (or any team) ever is probably asking too much no matter what the circumstances.
Overall, I’m not sure how I’d feel about fighting someone’s invade team on a revenge attack. Surely those are all pretty similar, too. Not that I’d complain if revenge rewards were boosted, but I really don’t see how that incentiveizes variety on defense. Even the “best” (and most annoying teams) get invaded and defeated enough to queue up a revenge battle every now and again. In the one week I had up my “troll” team to test how effective mana drain was (2 manticores, succubus, khorvash), I still had about 50 losses by the end of the week. Besides, getting losses and therefore a chance at revenges is already more profitable than getting defense wins for over 90% of the playerbase, everyone just fails to see it somehow.
This is harder and much more delicate than it sounds, to the point where it could never be an automatic system and would require devs to do new balance passes every time they did this. Certain kingdoms or troop types getting a slight bonus would put them in the spotlight for a bit, whereas others would need a huge bonus to even remember they exist. Increasing team bonuses would help those themed teams that can already synergize in some way, but for the ones that can’t, its pretty much hopeless - for example, and I know this is an extreme case, but the full construct team bonus would be utterly useless even if it was increased tenfold. Even elves, while having a couple decent troops added recently, would need some pretty big bonuses to see them on defense. And if you increased their magic by too much, you’d just see Lady Anariel stall teams everywhere that week.
I concur. Once again I would like to put for that variety for the defense team should be the players main goal, and that winning with variety should be a secondary goal. The goal would be to put together a team out of the least used troops that can still occasionally win. That way we can keep out those miner, peasant, and fortress gate teams, but also expand the pool of troops used in endgame defense builds by (hopefully) 3 to 5 times and spread out the stuff that is regularly see among that subset as well.
I won’t repeat my whole spiel here, but heres a link to the outline of things I think could be fixed for the better for anyone that hasn’t read it yet.
Nothing needs to be done to incentivize variety on invade. Thats on the individual player, and doesn’t affect anyone else. Unless of course we start fighting those teams on revenges. Lets please not make than an issue, too.