Bonus Stars & "Titan Wars"

[MoustacheHerder]

Bonus Stars & "Titan Wars"


Ideas to improve Clan Wars within Clash of Clans to both reward players for more skilled attacks and more skilled base building as well as a new tier of Clan Wars raiding for hardcore war clans.



Bonus Stars

This idea is very simple. In a normal clan war Bonus Stars are also now up for grabs. There are 2 types of bonus stars available, defensive and offensive.


To gain a defensive bonus star your base defends an attack, if an attacker gets a one star attack then no bonus star is awarded. This will reward players for building good bases, as well as penalising players who are just dropping a couple of archers to access a replay for nefarious purposes.


Essentially if your army is unable to 1 star a base, then you have no business attacking it, but if you can 1 star a base, say because the base has an exposed TH, or your troops are strong enough and you want to run a legitimate scouting attack to locate traps etc, you do not get penalised for this.


Offensive bonus stars are available for perfect (3 star) attacks that are made within the first hour of war. As long as the attack is started inside the first 60 minutes of war day then it's eligible. After this time no offensive bonus stars are available. We'd see a lot of players starting to use dummy bases on prep day to counter the other side getting 24 hours to work out how to beat their base, and this also rewards base building too. Internet bases, i.e. base designs that are copied from popular websites/videos would be easier to 3 star, so we'd see more and more people designing their own layouts, or heavily tweaking internet bases in some fashion.


As a fair amount of Clan Wars are won/lost by only 1 or 2 stars bonus stars could have a large effect on war results, and as such being able to practise an attack many times over using a ♥♥♥♥♥ method is less useful as players are rewarded for attacking early in a war, oftentimes on a different base layout to the one that was up for the majority of prep day.


Bonus stars would also improve the diversity of base layouts, which in turn means newer attack strategies would develop to counter the new base designs.



Titan Wars


While I'm not good at naming new features, this is intended as a whole new tier of Clan Wars designed to cater to the hardcore war community.


It has a number of tweaks designed to make it harder, an increased difficulty, and increased prestige.
• 5 stars per attack, not 3
• no prep day
• shorter duration (but limited to one war per 24 hours)
• allows arranged matches
• shorter time allowed for each attack (2mins 30secs)
• Only TownHall8s+ are eligible.

5 stars not 3
The biggest difference is that a perfect attack now grants 5 stars, not 3 stars.
1 star for 50%, 1 star for 75%, 1 star for a TH kill, 1 star for 100%, and a fifth star for a first attack.
Adding a star at 75% differentiates between a 2 star 50ish% attack and one that gets very close to 100%.
Adding an extra star for a first attack puts more emphasis on attacks without scouting. While lower players could attack their designated bases and then run scouting attacks for the higher TownHalls some bases will need to be attacked blind, which is more difficult to do.


No Prep Day
All war preparation is done before war is declared. No advance scouting of enemy war bases. Players have access to what is now the 'Prep Day' screen at all times when the clan is not active in a war to allow donations to war Clan Castles.


Shorter Duration
Wars would last no more than <arbitrary small amount of time>, say 4 or so hours. Though are limited to 1 war in any 24 hour period, or say 5 wars in a 7 day period. It should be long enough to scout out enemy bases, and cook required offensive Clan Castle troops, but short enough so that using a ♥♥♥♥♥ method to practise your attacks is much less effective.


Shorter Attack Time
Instead of the 3 mins allowed in a normal war, attack time in Titan wars is reduced to 2 mins, 30 secs.


Allow arranged Matches
This feature allows clans to setup arranged matches, perhaps limited to 1 arranged war per week. With limits to only allow arranged matches if the weights are within a narrow range.


Limited to TownHall 8s and higher.
As any TownHall 7 can 3 star a maxxed TownHall 7 trivially, only TownHall 8s are eligible for Titan wars. War strategy starts to get more complicated, and more difficult at TownHall 8 so only higher level TownHalls can play.


While the details of 'Titan Wars' could easily be altered, adding a new tier of Clan Wars could do really good things to the game. It would need features like reduced time and increased rewards for early attacks to negate the advantages that ♥♥♥♥♥ software currently provides.

The higher difficulty war tier could become more of an esport, and increasing the number of stars per attack makes the scoring system more nuanced and less granular.

Adding a new difficulty level also would motivate more people to become better at Clan Wars, more players working on improving their bases results in more revenue for Supercell and a better game for the players.



tl:dr add bonus stars to normal clan wars and add a new tier of harder Clan Wars designed for the hardcore war community.

[Radiating]

While it is an interesting solution to combat bunnies this would favor those who have clans in one timezone rather than international clans. So, I don't see that happening.

Could you elaborate on the criteria for the five star system?

[LemoneyFresh937]

I love the defense star idea. Keep em comin!

[MoustacheHerder]

While it is an interesting solution to combat bunnies this would favor those who have clans in one timezone rather than international clans. So, I don't see that happening.

The bulk of the player base is in the US and Europe. California time is GMT -7 (Western US) Eastern Europe is GMT +3 that's a span of 10 hours.

If you scheduled a war to start at 10am in LA, it'd be 8pm in Bucharest so it's possible to find windows of time that everyone could compete at a reasonable hour in. Most international clans will end up with easier scheduling than that. While it does favour clans that have more members closer together geographically, if the war lasted 6 hours, it's not as huge a problem as it might be.

Could you elaborate on the criteria for the five star system?

Basically the more stars there are available to gain, the more accurate the scoring is.

Also as any game gets more competitive, people push any extra edge they can find, so a new tier of Clan Wars would need to include measures to counter the advantage people get from using 3rd party software.

So 'Titan Wars' uses extra stars to both make the score system more accurate, and rewards players more for their first attack, than their second. A fourth star is added at 75% destruction, primarily to differentiate between a 2 star TownHall kill that gets 50%, and a very close 90+% that kills the TownHall. So better attacks get more rewarded and the scoring is more accurate. Right now at TownHall 10 the majority of good attacks are 2 stars, and these attacks cover a range of outcomes.

A fifth star for the first attack works along with reduced war time and no advance planning in prep day to greatly reduce the advantage gained from bunnies.

In order to get a scouting attack in a lower player(x) first has to scout their own target and plan an attack, cook an army and execute the attack, before scouting at all for other players. If they go straight in and scout for someone else first they give up a potential extra star from their own designated target as their 2nd attack only counts for a maximum of 4 stars not 5. That eats up some time.

Then they run their scout attack to locate traps etc, now the higher player (y) uses the scout info to better plan their attack, if y uses bunnies then they only have a shorter period of time to practice and they still have to leave time later in the war to also do a cleanup attack. If the whole war time was 6 hours long and it took 30 minutes for x to scout and you need to leave 30 mins to do a cleanup run that's a whole lot less advantage you have.

It's also much easier to 100% a base when you know where the traps are and what troops are in the CC. So only giving a maximum of 4 stars for a players 2nd attack reflects this reduced level of difficulty.

In a 20v20 war using this 5 star system a perfect score is 100. Everyone 5 stars their opponent on the first try. This would make perfect wars very hard to achieve as a by product as well.

[andrewchang]

You seem to have a penchant for long posts, could you please add a TL;DR summary to your posts and threads?

[MoustacheHerder]

You seem to have a penchant for long posts, could you please add a TL;DR summary to your posts and threads?

there is one in the OP

tl:dr add bonus stars to normal clan wars and add a new tier of harder Clan Wars designed for the hardcore war community.

2nd post is more detail on how the scoring system in Titan Wars works and why.

[andrewchang]

Interesting idea!!!

[Radiating]

The bulk of the player base is in the US and Europe. California time is GMT -7 (Western US) Eastern Europe is GMT +3 that's a span of 10 hours.

If you scheduled a war to start at 10am in LA, it'd be 8pm in Bucharest so it's possible to find windows of time that everyone could compete at a reasonable hour in. Most international clans will end up with easier scheduling than that. While it does favour clans that have more members closer together geographically, if the war lasted 6 hours, it's not as huge a problem as it might be.



Basically the more stars there are available to gain, the more accurate the scoring is.

Also as any game gets more competitive, people push any extra edge they can find, so a new tier of Clan Wars would need to include measures to counter the advantage people get from using 3rd party software.

So 'Titan Wars' uses extra stars to both make the score system more accurate, and rewards players more for their first attack, than their second. A fourth star is added at 75% destruction, primarily to differentiate between a 2 star TownHall kill that gets 50%, and a very close 90+% that kills the TownHall. So better attacks get more rewarded and the scoring is more accurate. Right now at TownHall 10 the majority of good attacks are 2 stars, and these attacks cover a range of outcomes.

A fifth star for the first attack works along with reduced war time and no advance planning in prep day to greatly reduce the advantage gained from bunnies.

In order to get a scouting attack in a lower player(x) first has to scout their own target and plan an attack, cook an army and execute the attack, before scouting at all for other players. If they go straight in and scout for someone else first they give up a potential extra star from their own designated target as their 2nd attack only counts for a maximum of 4 stars not 5. That eats up some time.

Then they run their scout attack to locate traps etc, now the higher player (y) uses the scout info to better plan their attack, if y uses bunnies then they only have a shorter period of time to practice and they still have to leave time later in the war to also do a cleanup attack. If the whole war time was 6 hours long and it took 30 minutes for x to scout and you need to leave 30 mins to do a cleanup run that's a whole lot less advantage you have.

It's also much easier to 100% a base when you know where the traps are and what troops are in the CC. So only giving a maximum of 4 stars for a players 2nd attack reflects this reduced level of difficulty.

In a 20v20 war using this 5 star system a perfect score is 100. Everyone 5 stars their opponent on the first try. This would make perfect wars very hard to achieve as a by product as well.

Except that wars don't last 6 hours, they last 24. And yes, while it would be possible to create something that is reasonable for most, you can't have all of them. Take my old clan, for example. Say I'm an Australian leader who starts a CW 1 PM local. That's 12 AM Eastern and 4 AM British, which probably make up half of the normal warring team. We will get faced with Malaysian clans who are probably all unified under one timezone, and they could probably win on bonus stars because they can get more attacks in the first hour. Now, that wouldn't be fair, would it?

Thanks for clarifying that.

[ginko1992]

I agree with many of the ideas in this post, ESPECIALLY the defensive stars.

I am not a fan of the offensive bonus star since it undermines the international nature of many clans (including mine). We have people from USA, Canada, UK, Lithuania, Iran, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia (from what I know). It would suck if we couldn't get our first attack in in the first hour because we were asleep. Or had to set the alarm for 3:30am to do our war attack half asleep.

The 5 star system you propose is the 4-star system already proposed on the forums (which I think is a good idea by the way) and another star for fresh hits. I AM a fan of this idea and for the same reasons as OP.

Again the shorter duration of the wars will be difficult to manage for an international clan for the reasons I already mentioned. So I do not like that idea although I understand your motivation and reasoning behind it.

Arranged matches is a good idea. Limiting it to TH8 and above is also reasonable.

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These features can make clan wars much more competitive and fun! I hope to see some of the ideas implemented in the game (at least those I like anyway )

[MoustacheHerder]

Except that wars don't last 6 hours, they last 24. And yes, while it would be possible to create something that is reasonable for most, you can't have all of them. Take my old clan, for example. Say I'm an Australian leader who starts a CW 1 PM local. That's 12 AM Eastern and 4 AM British, which probably make up half of the normal warring team. We will get faced with Malaysian clans who are probably all unified under one timezone, and they could probably win on bonus stars because they can get more attacks in the first hour. Now, that wouldn't be fair, would it?

Ah I see what you're getting at, and it's a fair point.

I like the defensive stars idea and I think that to balance that you'd need to have some kind of offensive star bonus as well.

Would having the offensive stars to be a bonus for your first attack be better?

That way it's not time dependent and international clans are not disadvantaged, but the bonus reflects the fact that first attacks are harder as you don't know the trap placements/CC contents.

Say for a normal clan war you get a bonus star at 90% destruction, and for a Titan clan war you got the bonus at 100% destruction.