But prior to that, we think we owe you deeper insights on all the changes and adjustments we are going to undertake.
1. Removal of the transfer
As already pointed out in a previous hero-related blog entry, we will completely remove all options to transfer heroes from one world to another. This is due to two reasons: first, the transfer feature lead to major confusion on how to use it and what the restrictions were. Second, we received quite an amount of complaints about the transfer endangering the early stage of a new world, as veteran players could chip in their maxed out heroes and thus would have a major edge over inexperienced players.
2. Only one hero per town
There was a tab which allowed you to assign up to two heroes per town. It will be removed! The assignment will now be done using the hero overview.
This change makes the whole feature easier to understand and also provides a greater feeling of the assigned hero actually being the leader of your army.
3. Removal of hero slot limitation
Since you cannot transfer heroes anymore, there is no reason to limit the amount of heroes you can purchase. Thus, the limitation of a maximum of five hero slots per game world will be lifted.
The limitation will now work differently. Each player starts out with 2 available hero slots. You cannot purchase additional heroes without any available slots, and you will automatically unlock another slot with each culture level. You can have just as many slots as there are heroes available.
Using gold will allow you to unlock a slot before reaching the next culture level. Please mind that the advantage is quite minor, since you can only have one hero assigned per town anyway. The advantage lies in greater flexibility as you can swap your heroes depending on the given situation, not in sheer power.
4. Changing the way you level your heroes
When we had the feature running on beta, you could level your heroes by investing resources. This turned out to be problematic in two ways:
a) New players are supposed to use their resources solely for building their empire and shouldn’t be tempted to spend their resources otherwise (in this case training heroes).
b) For end-game players, leveling heroes was too easy or differently put: leveling in the early-game was too difficult. There was no way to perfectly balance this.
As a conclusion, you will now be using Coins of Wisdom or Coins of War to level your heroes (the same currency which you use to purchase new heroes). It’s a currency that all players receive at the same rate more or less and thus it’s much easier for us to balance this. For now, we set the needed amount of coins to reach level 20 for a single hero quite high. However, if we see the need we will implement additional ways to grant your heroes some experience points. As of now, you will have to invest 1155 Coins to reach level 1 to 20 for a single hero, although the first 10 levels or so can be achieved quite quickly.
As an addition, the leveling-window will now display the changes that apply upon leveling up. 🙂
5. More comprehensive interface element
In the old design, you would have seen five portraits of those heroes which you would have activated in the given game world.
Since you can now have way more than five heroes per game world, and ultimately just one hero per town, it made sense to show that hero’s status in detail.
Thus, the interface element will have 4 different states:
a) When there is no hero assigned the element will allow you to access the hero window.
b) When there is a hero assigned and it is at full health you can see his/her current experience points and will also have a shortcut to instantly invest some coins to level your hero up. Clicking his/her portrait will still trigger the hero window.
c) When the assigned hero is wounded you will see the remaining time for that hero to regain full health again, as well as a premium button to cut his/her healing time in half.
d) When the assigned hero is currently on an attack, this will be displayed via a sword icon.
6. Changed behavior in attack and defense
In the previous game design you could use any unassigned hero in an attack and only assigned heroes would help with defending the town the hero has been assigned to. Now, this has been confusing to many players and in the end we decided to streamline the behavior to be equivalent with normal units.
If you have a hero assigned to a town it will help with the defense (as long as it is at full health). If you start an attack from that town you can choose whether this hero should accompany your army or not. If you do so, however, that hero cannot defend anymore. The hero will instantly be returned to your town as soon as the attack has commenced (the moment you receive your report, basically).
7. Timer for new recruitment offers adjusted
In the old concept you could start a “calling” every 6 hours manually and thus would receive an offer of two different heroes.
With the current design you will automatically get a new offer once a day, so there is an ongoing change. For 50 gold you can immediately swap the offer randomly.
Heroes which you already own will not be offered, of course.
We also lowered the cost for purchasing new heroes significantly. The prices will now usually range from 50 to 100 coins.
8. Adjustments to individual heroes
Since we took out the option to transfer your heroes, some heroes suddenly became too weak if they would only survive the duration of a single world. More importantly, leveling them wouldn’t have paid off as much.
We have made adjustments to four heroes:
Helena: Helena will now reduce the silver cost for buying units from the Phoenician trader by 22% (up to 60%).
Cheiron: He will now automatically recruit 11 (up to 30) hoplites every 3 hours as long as he is assigned to a town. Of course, you will need to provide available population.
Terylea: Instead of boosting the silver production by 30% (up to 90%), she will now increase it by 44% (up to 120%). This should make her somewhat more beneficial in mid and end game.
Andromeda: For the same reason as with Terylea, Andromeda will now boost the production of all resources by 16.5% (up to 45%).
That’s it! If you have any questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to write a comment. 🙂
When are they coming?
As mentioned in the article: If all goes well -> in December. 🙂
Are you serious? December?!?!
There are dozens of Bugs that need to be fixed before you put such a big change into the game. I’m expecting a flood of bugs with this release and all the unsolved bugs atm.
Resolving bugs is an ongoing things. We always have developers who are devoted to bugfixing. However: As I mentioned, we will test the feature before putting it on live worlds. 🙂
Testing as the rest of the Updates?
1. How many heroes will be avaiable? Is there a overview about all heroes?
2. Will the effects of the heroes depend on the world speed?
3. Will the feature directly been integrated in the normal worlds or will there be an beta phase?
4. Are the heroes coming this year or later?
5. Are there also nice big pictures of other heroes then Helena? We always only see her.
1. There is an overview in the English Grepo-wiki: http://wiki.en.grepolis.com/wiki/Heroes
2. No. But keep in mind that most heroes affect parameters as a percentage, so they already inherently scale with world’s speed. Only Cheiron and Hercules do not depend on world’s speed.
3. There will be a beta phase of course. The length of the testing period pretty much depends on the state of the feature. If a lot of bugs occur, we will take the time to fix them. If all goes well, the testing period might be pretty short.
4. As with (3), it really depends on the length of the testing period.
5. You can see some more of them in this article: http://devblog.grepolis.com/?p=367
Thank you for your answers. The only thing that surprises me a little bit, is that Cheiron’s effect is always the same. He will be much more useful on a Speed 1 world than on an speed 3 World.
I have another question.
Is this list of Heroes total forever or do you think about implementing new heroes after a period of time?
We definitely want to add more individual heroes as time passes. 🙂
grepolis is becoming a farming game. hero should be leveled with battle not farming a mission
I agree, if you add another way to obtain coins(which I suppose you will since it will take over 1,5 year to get and level up all heroes) it should be by battling!
Anyway i’m very excited to see the result 🙂
Cheiron will be best hero in start, with 88hops a day. I suppose we can get 4oo of them by the time, bp runs out.
Good job,finally something i expected for a long time.
But,heroes attack and defense values should be reconsidered.A level 1 Leonidas is equal in attack with a level 1 Helen?
Also the choice of heroes is a bit poor,i think more popular names must be put like: Bellerophon,Achilles,Perseus,Hector of Troy,Theseus,Perseus,Odysseus,Cassandra etc.
Leonidas is better in defense than Helen, so … 🙂
As we will add more heroes in the future, we will surely make use of the rich lore and also introduce individuals like Perseus, Hector and so on. 😉
One more question about heroes,are they available on beta.grepolis.com ? I want to try this feature before it implements on grepolis worlds.
It will be available on Beta as soon as the implementation is done. 🙂
1. As i understood a Hero have to be assigned to a city before he will able to participate in attack from this city. How long this assignment will take?
2. How to unassign hero from city? How long it will take?
And where are this heroes will be while unassigned?
3. In previous version Leonidas and Helen was available after special quests. Is it the same in new version?
4. Proposition. Cheiron was a special hero for mythtical units.
Why you decide to change this behavior? Let Cheiron will reduce Favor costs of mythtical units and make them stronger. With such features he will be perfect Hero for city with myths! And myths becomes more popular in game!
5. What about Hercules? His special feature was hidden with unclean “honorable battle”. I never got additional Favor while try defferent condition of battle. Will it be described in Wiki?
—-
P.S. You changed order of bug reporting and make it more difficult. For example, i couldn’t to enter to forum and post about bugs. For this reason a lot of bugs in interface was un-reported and now this bugs occur in all worlds.
Please, roll back to old style of bug reporting and let’s make this game better.
1. Yes, a hero needs to be assigned to be used in an attack. This will take 6 hours, divided by the world speed.
2. You can do this in the hero overview and unassigning will happen instantly. 🙂
3. Yep, you still need to do a storyline quest for Leonidas and another one for Helen. These storyline quest can appear as soon as you have at least 6000 points.
4. Before, Cheiron would increase the experience points other heroes gain. Cheiron was a mentor afterall, so his new skill (training hoplites) is still quite in line with his lore. 🙂
5. We improved some of the ability descriptions. The description will now state that an honorable battle means that you need to get at least 50 combat points of that battle (in order for Hercules to gain favor).
Thanks for your answers.
1. In previous version an assignment Hero to city takes 1 hour.
May be 6 hours will good because a cheaper training for heroes will reseached in one city only. Long time of reassigment will make this research a little bit popular.
2. I dont see unassignment button on screen above.
Hi there! The hero feature, how much will it cost? Can you only pay whit gold?
It’s going to be available for anyone. There is absolutely no need for gold in order to purchase or level heroes! 🙂
How many coins you can get from one quest?
This depends on your overall progress in the game. In the earlygame (when Island Quests spawn every 2 hours), you will get 2 coins per Quest. In midgame (spawntime = 4 hours) you will get 4 coins per Quest.
Finally, you will receive 8 coins per quest in endgame (spawntime = 8 hours).
In the end, all players can earn up to 24 coins a day.
And what about players who receive quests only once per eight hours?Do they get the same amount of coins as the one who receive quest every 2 hours?If that is the case then…goodbye grepolis from me.I am not gonna play this game if some low points player gonna have advantage on me for no reason.
Why do you think they would have an advantage? The fact that you have more points usually means you are also more advanced (or started earlier) and thus were able to acquire more heroes and reach higher levels for them.
Thanks, i thought you receive same amount of coins for every quest so low points players will have more coins.This way everyone will get 24 coins per day and that is how it should be.
Please read as this is critical – if Heroes will be leveled up by doing missions you MUST provide alternative means of completing missions that require land units! To be fair, both mythical and sea units should be an option.
Because what if I get a mission on an island where I only have my LS-nuke? I can’t complete my mission and will be severely handicapped by this.
As you know, land units can’t fit within a city that’s specialized.
Best wishes
I agree – that’s a really problem.
I only variants i found
– make pure naval city as second city on islands
– build naval cities on uninhabited islands
What advantages will premium members have concerning the hero feature????
What will you be able to do with gold???? with the hero feature
You can do small stuff like swap heroes in the recruitment tab or cut the recovering health time of heroes.
what happen ? we have to wait more ?
It is out now. The day has 24 hours so please be patient next time 😉
What?
You said that “Cheiron: He will now automatically recruit 11 (up to 30) hoplites every 3 hours as long as he is assigned to a town. Of course, you will need to provide available population.”
But in the beta-tester server (zz1) this appears
http://vvcap.net/db/joVbl2hVsTfyENS4eKW0.png
Although we initially planned the mentioned ability for Cheiron, we unfortunately came to realize that it was technically quite difficult to attach such an ability to a hero, as it also comes with a lot of edge cases.
On top of that, some players had viable negative feedback concerning such an ability.
Is it also possible, the Hero accompanied a support to a siege, and then there is more than one Hero in the siege-City?
Nope, heroes will return the same moment you receive your report. This is why they won’t stay in a siege. 😉