The basic idea of this game is to train troops to attack other players' or the goblins' (AI) villages to gain loots, in order to build and update one's own village to defend others' attack. A player can have at most 5 builders, any construction or upgrade of a existing building takes some time. I'm currently a high level player so averagely any construction will take at least 1 week. When all the builders are busy, there's nothing much to do except to train troops for attacks, which only need around 5 minutes in half an hour at most.
Having been playing this game for a couple of months, I have accumulated several ideas to improve it to make it even more fun.
Game play:
1. Auto-training scheme function.
Since most players probably have their own strategy and pattern of attacking (with relatively stable portions of different kinds of soldiers and spells), it's troublesome to manually train troops after every single battle.
It would be great if the game allows players to save one or more troop training scheme, so after each attack players only need to tap on the desired scheme and the game would automatically train the troops with a optimized algorithm to make the training time as short as possible.
2. New kinds of troops.
Currently there are basically two kinds of troops - the ground force and air force. Similarly, there are different defense buildings good at defending different forces - cannons and walls for ground troops, air defenses and air mines for air troops, archer towers and tesla towers for both, etc.
I've been imaging if there's a third kinds of troop which could go underground - they might move slowly or have relatively less damage. Correspondingly, there could be a new kinds of defense building like radar - which could detect the invisible enemies underground so that the defense could eliminate them before they sneak into the heart of the village.
It would really interesting to see how such a new kinds of attacking pattern would make the game more variable and strategical.
Social:
1. The game provides replays for recent defense or attacks, as well as sharing replays within a clan. But all these replays will expire after a short time. There's a considerable need for players to save their most memorable or successful replays as long as they want, so they could retaste the accomplishing feeling of successfully defending a mighty attacker or gaining incredible amount of loot in a great battle. Moreover, it would be just perfect if there's a way to directly share such replays to social media like Facebook, Youtube or Vimeo. This sharing feature would definitely make players more proud of their gameplays as well as help advertise the game itself in the players circles.
2. Currently, the only ways of communication within clan members is to chat or to donate a limited number of troops to each other, which has a huge potential to improve.
In my opinion, there can be a in-clan challenge mode - players can post a challenge in their clan for others to try to attack their villages, which would be very helpful for them to improve their village layouts and defense strategies. There might be actually loot for such clan members if they cost their resources on training the troops in the challenge, or it could just be a practice without any loot or using resource-consuming troops. Further, the players could even try to attack themselves with their own troops to see how their defense work and therefore could improve it more.
There are a few other ideas in my notebook, which I'll further consider to make them sound more practical and valuable.
Your ideas on improving Clash of Clan are quite interesting. I agree that manual training is annoying to some extent. I wonder what do you think of such kind of asynchronous games? Will it break the immersion because it's not real time? Or since it's strategy based so a replay does not hurt?
ReplyDeleteGreat ideas in here. I haven't played Clash of Clan but feel like I have a good idea of what it feels like from your post. I particularly like the idea of adding in other types of troops to vary the variety in the game and enhance the strategy. Sometimes this can have more of a detrimental effect in certain games by disrupting the balance the game has created, but if done with care can lead to a more complex and interesting game.
ReplyDeleteI'm convinced, this game sounds awesome. I especially like your saving trainings idea. You are right, if I am playing a strategy game, I would most likely have a set of strategies I would want to train my troops for and this probably wouldn't change that much. And, even if it did change, simply editing an existing strategy would make a lot of sense. Like we learned in class, I think this would take away some of the innate complexity of the game. Though I do like the idea of "invisible" troops, I think the idea of the underground troop would need to be implemented very carefully. Intuitively, I would assume underground troops would go slower than those above ground. So how fast you would have them move is a concern because it could change the pace of the game.
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