Hi friends! Welcome back to the blog. I am Tabris, one of the two Community Managers at WB Games Boston on Game of Thrones: Conquest. Last week, we had the incredible opportunity to welcome one of our System Designers, Tank, onto our monthly live show to discuss how they develop the numbers behind Gear.
If you don’t remember Tank, he appeared briefly in our Developer Interview series Sitri wrote back in 2021! How things can change in such a short amount of time.
Not only did we lure the elusive Tank onto our show, but he also had the opportunity to answer questions directly from players who happened to be part of our Ambassador Program. You can listen to the questions he answered live on Discord here:
Today we’ll be going over the questions Tank dove into during our liveshow, as well as some additional questions that didn’t make it into the stage.
So, without further ado, let us begin!
Introduce yourself! Who are you, what do you do at Warner Brothers Games Boston?
Tank
Hello, I’m Tank, and I work as a Systems Designer for Game of Thrones Conquest. I work on several parts of the game, but a primary focus is our monthly gearsets we release with our events.
“How do you think about balance in different troop types when designing new gear?”
-Arty of 1637
Tank
Balance is one of the top focuses when it comes to designing new gearsets. Not only do we want to ensure that each troop type feels like it has the equipment to shine, but we also want to make sure that neither attacking nor defending feels like they have too much of an advantage at any point.
With troop types, we ensure balance by providing similar pieces for infantry, ranged, and cavalry for each gear season. With the order of release, there may be moments where a particular troop type has an advantage for a month or two, but we don’t want to end a season with any troop having been given extra pieces or any other kind of advantage.
“How do you know which stats to focus on and what troop type needs what?”
– Tay of 1599
“Do you have spreadsheets of stats based information to track it?”
– Scorpion King of 1590
Tank
When it comes to what stats to focus on for gearsets, it depends on the kind of set being designed. There are certainly spreadsheets involved for all of our sets, tracking the history of what has been used for previous sets in older seasons of gear.
Stats for attack, defense, health, march sizes, and troop vs troop stats are mainstays for our core troop sets. They are always going to show up, but what ratios we use and how much of each changes depends on the history and state of how combat results are across all kingdoms. We track what the difficulty is of turning over control of seats of power as well as battle results from kingdoms to make adjustments each season to the balance.
“How do you decide what stats to allocate to the gear, making it subject to eventual obsolescence, versus which stats you decide to include in armory?”
– Arty of 1637
Tank
We have lists of stats that we consider safe for armory, sort of safe for armory, and not safe for armory. We try to keep those lists in mind when trying to design the armory for each month. Sometimes, we use those “sometimes” stats when we feel like it’s time for a more permanent source.
How the stat applies to combat or elsewhere in the game needs to be considered before it becomes something that is either subject to inflation, like gear, or a permanent addition, like armory. For example, we try not to include generic attack, defense, and health stats in the armory because we don’t want to make the Player vs Enemy (PvE) balance change through it. We use Player vs Player (PvP) stats when possible.
“How much time and initial testing goes into the gear stats before an official release?“
– TARG of 1637
Tank
For just the stats part of gear, we take a few weeks to develop, test, and iterate on each gearset before release.
Gear stats get reviewed by:
- Other designers.
- Our Player Council.
- And our internal testers.
To ensure things are working properly.
There’s usually an iteration pass or a few after each step in this review process. If we are using a new stat that hasn’t been seen before on gear, we have to take care to give our internal testing team some extra time to make sure that things work properly before we let our players craft pieces with it.
“How do you plan out each troop specific gear to be better than the last?”
– Freyja of 1637
“Is the intention when developing new gear to always outperform its predecessor? Or is the intention to open the opportunity for season-gear mixing to be possible? Both? None of the above?”
– Majöra of 1656
Tank
This is another job for our spreadsheets. When we go into a new season, we know the numbers are going to go up a set amount. That inflation helps give us a start in making each set better than the previous season.
The rest of the work lies in looking at previous seasons of gear, seeing the stat composition of each piece in its core set, and developing an array for each piece that will accomplish something better than pieces that already exist.
We intend for each new set of gear to be good and worthwhile to craft. However, we don’t want each piece to be the best at everything. Some have high attack, some have higher defensive stats, and some have great march size. We want some mixing between sets to try to maximize different stats and combat objectives. Your attack set and reinforcement set having different pieces mixed from a few sets is intended.
Figuring out how to get the most out of your gear is part of the puzzle.
“How much of what you do in gear design considers the stats available through heroes and armory, or is it all looked at independently?”
– Arty of 1637
Tank
When we design gear, we also look at heroes and armory. We have meetings together every week to talk about the stats we are releasing in those systems. Making sure we don’t push a particular troop type too far or other balance concerns.
“What have you been surprised at in terms of popularity in terms of stats (or something you thought would be popular/well-received but wasn’t)?”
– House Chienne of 1590
Tank
This happens often when we try out new things. We can only make educated decisions of what new to try, and we hope that everyone finds every new set useful, but sometimes things aren’t as in demand or popular as we hoped once we release them.
For new stats being released, sometimes we do a good job at guessing how people will feel, like max march size being well received. Occasionally, we miss the mark for things like our experiments with giving player troops “piercing damage” that would bypass the defense stat.
We certainly heard the feedback during playtesting. The way we tried introducing it was not as welcomed as we hoped it would be. Players were heard and we didn’t end up using the stat.
“Has the design team ever experienced an instance where they ended up being dissatisfied with released gear once players got their hands on them? If so, what does the conversation look like afterwards?”
– Majöra of 1656
Tank
Certainly, we have had sets that haven’t performed as we anticipated. We hope for players to want everything we release, but sometimes the demand isn’t there.
Usually, what happens after something like this happens is we sit down and talk about what we can do better next time; sometimes, this means not making new sets with the theme that didn’t work out, and sometimes, this means creating a better array of stats for next season. On occasion, we do release something that we know players won’t exactly “love,” but the set includes stats we want players to have access to for the health of the game.
We prepare ourselves for a bit of negative feedback before and after release in these cases, but overall, we try to create things that make people happy.
“More general curiosity than curiosity for implementation: Has the idea of “vs Dragon” stats gear or a way for troops/troops types (only) to have a buff against dragon-based combat ever been considered?”
– Majöra of 1656
Tank
We have thought about this, and actually this stat exists already in our game. The ‘Vs Dragon’ stat is how PvE map creatures interact with your dragons. They have a special stat that allows them to deal damage even though they don’t have a dragon.
Unfortunately, It’s fairly hard to balance putting it on troops, mostly because of how many troops show up to a fight and dragon health not being infinite. The idea has been tossed around, though, certainly. It sounds pretty flavorful if your siege troops were able to shoot down a dragon; just challenging to make it not feel really bad to get your dragon shot down.
“If ever considered/possible, what would a F2P-supportive gear set look like?“
– Majöra of 1656
Tank
We like to support our free to play players. When we revamped our new player experience, we released the Ceremonial Targaryen Warlord set to help new and free players farm more easily.
When we release utility sets that provide cost efficiencies, we hope that free to play players have access to easier leveling of buildings and research or just make training less painful to keep up with.
“Are there things you’d like to address or change over time? If so, how does that factor into your design process?“
– Arty of 1637
Tank
Balance changes over time are something that gear creation has always been working on. The earlier seasons of gear had a focus on trying to fix our troop balance. Cavalry was extremely popular in the early seasons of Game of Thrones Conquest. We had more cavalry players than both Infantry and Ranged combined.
We made fixing this imbalance a focus of the design process, looking for stats that could help underrepresented troop types. Over time, we made those non-cavalry troop types more appealing by including stats that made them feel better to use, like march speeds. It was also important to improve stat availability to take advantage of what each troop type is best at.
Early on in our game, march speeds were not nearly as prevalent on gear, and the numbers were much smaller. It slowed down, marching your troops across the map quite a bit if your army wasn’t all on horses.
Addressing these issues through gear has created a much more balanced representation of troop types.
Thank you Tank for coming on to our live show to answer questions from our Ambassadors about how we design, and iterate on our Gear Set process!
And as always, thank you so much for jumping in and reading this interview. If you have any interest in joining our Ambassador program keep a look out for bi-yearly raven messages promoting Player Court applications!
Have any questions, or suggestions for future interviews? Feel free to tag @community in discord!