[Gameplay/Balance] Overhaul gameplay, dramatically reduce turtling, and decrease lengths of games (Conquest mode)

reduce turtling?  If the other players are turtling, you win the game.  If you don't , your doing something wrong.

Of course you win the game, but you win it way slower than you should. These ideas (if implemented) would dramatically speed up a player's loss to literally one gigantic wave wiping out their citadel. ;D

By the time you reach the citadel, you should be able to smash it within five minutes or so unless the other team wipes out your team.

Since I can't edit:

Just a minute or two if you have giants and they don't.

Generally, when the other team gets fed off creeps, and our team is not level 20 in full artifacts to tank several towers, all of their creeps and their team not to feed a death, including how close the crystal is to run back to, we can't just smash the citadel without having to at the very least move behind our line of creeps and wait for an opportunity to take out more towers/wipe a creep wave and take out a few of their players, and try to kill the citadel between respawn times.

Edit: Edit function is broken...Lol

Speaking of giants, they're ridiculously late game, and i'm referring WAY before that. Even before a team has catapultasaurus's available to them, when we're picking off towers and making a push for the citadel, just to be staved off each time. It takes at least ten-twenty more minutes for us to camp their base to make enough for all of said upgrades to finish it faster.

I disagree very strongly with number two.  As I said in my thread about curb stomps, the mechanism to shorten games should not make it so the game is unplayable when you're significantly outmatched.  It should just be over faster.  Exponentially scaling respawn times would just result in the losing side in these games sitting around with his screen darkened waiting to get nuked again.  This would make the game much harder to learn and get into and that is definitely not a good thing.

Moving the respawn crystal and nuking building regen might help speed things up, but you should still be able to upgrade your buildings to get a regen bonus or have some mechanism for healing them(maybe a trinket or a scroll).  Otherwise, you start opening up suicide wave tactics(although these might speed things up, I don't think they're desirable).

I really think towers are the problem though, if you could easily push through all the towers and take their flags, lopsided games would be a lot faster because you'd get far more minions than them and could attack anywhere not covered by the healing crystal with impunity.  I think the way to approach this is either to tie reinforcement spawn times to number of flags controlled(more flags, faster reinforcements so you get a stronger push), or that suggestion someone made in my thread to tie tower strength to war score and have them much weaker initially.

It's not meant to be unplayable. It's meant so that players don't camp in their base and spawn over, and over, and over, and over after dying over, and over and over, and just slowing the game down. I always play the game on mean respawn time because it's a lot more balanced end game when respawn times reach 60-90 seconds, as opposed to a useless 15-30. You can't push when the enemy is always there to stop it. You also have to factor in the fact that you can't *PUSH* until you eliminate a creep wave, which can chew up 30 seconds or more depending on how far in they are.

besides, the numbers aren't in stone anyways. They don't have to be that big, but they have to get bigger. This game shouldn't be compensating for a player's ineptitude. At one point you need to let go of their hand and let them walk on their own. In the end, this only hampers more competitive play. You can't keep factoring in skill differences in balance, because in essence thats IMBALANCE.

Yes, my suggestion was to move that to a mid-end game upgrade at the citadel.

Thats where the opposing demigods come into play and create an obstacle. Then you factor in respawn times and such, and the constant re-appearance after a push isn't fast enough to level a few towers is enough to halt it. Then you factor in the fact that when they're turtled into their base next to the healing crystal, it's rare to get a kill without a godly difference between the two. (Demigod...godly...hehehe). Which is why I suggest that crystals/spawn point be significantly farther from the base in back. (Not extremely far, but at least a length where they need to walk for at least 3-5 seconds before they are in any range to engage.

Moving Building Regen/+ HP upgrades to a higher WR is almost a requirement at this point.  Same goes for death penatly reduction and experience boost upgrades.  These are way, way too powerful in the early game.  The smart team that pools these upgrades up first wins.

Other ideas:  An (expensive) one shot item that disables the enemy healing crystal for a short period or better yet, one that flips "control" of it to the other side for 10 seconds.

Finally, here's an idea:  significantly increase the cost of upgrades with the starting number of players on each side.  As it is, upgrade costs when split among 3-4-5 players are pitifully low.

I think that would make a decent, temporary solution, in my opinion just moving the crystal farther away (for certain maps;) would be an end all solution. Not to say that this game needs to copy dota, but dota puts the well out of range of the throne/tree for a reason, and this is exactly it.

This I agree with, and is 100% logical. However, can you transfer gold in a way I've never heard of? Otherwise, you can only increase costs so much, being that only one player would be buying them. :/

1) i disagree with completly, most good players can take a tower down in one hit.

2)exponential death penalties.... NO NO NO NO, it would cause problems with leavers, once u die, u have 10-30 seconds out of the game, which is alot of time, if u keep dieing u lose more and more gametime and end up being levels lower, if u make this exponential why wouldnt the player leave after the second time he died?, why would they sit down for 1 minute doing nothing?,it takes away from the playing experience, and removes the chances of a comeback.

3) maybe but i dont think it matters.

Been playing the game for less then 3 days and you are already saying stuff likes this

Well, that's kind of the point.  If upgrades become expensive, then people will have to each buy a few rather than one person having to be the upgrade slave and everyone else getting the cool toys.  The important upgrades (with the exception of grunt types) are way too cheap.  If one side gets on a roll, that gold can easily be pumped into upgrades that can keep that momentum going easily.  You don't have to transfer gold if everyone can just drop the gold from a successful forward push into a half a dozen quick upgrades to the Citadel.

Faster upgrades = better defenses = stalemates.  Good for less experienced players and more forgiving, but bad for everyone else.  If one DG player on a team of 5 can easily purchase all the Citadel upgrades, something's wrong.

It would also force people to learn to play the opening 2 minutes of a match better and make WR even more important, encouraging offensive play over defensive.

Really? How does being a 'good' player allow them to take a tower down in one hit? I haven't seen one attack yet that can hit for 7,000 damage. They can take them down very fast in the end-game, but not fast enough to warrant a one-hit. And this is, very late game at level 20 with a few artifacts, mind you.

Okay, I don't care about leavers. Thats your problem. Not mine. I don't want to play in a ladder and get hampered against a GOOD team that doesn't leave because they can spawn at static rates and force a game at a static pace regardless of skill gap and progression gaps between opposing sides. You obviously don't understand.

You know why that happens to people? It's because they suck. That is, not my problem how good they are. This game already gives a lot of compensation for crap players. No offense, but I want to play this game with good players. I'm not trying to be egotistical or condescending, but it's true. This imbalance won't happen when the sides are uneven, but when they are, they NEED to be uneven. They can't be compensated for. This is easily solved by avoiding good players. When clans are implemented, you'll know what to look for.

This is also solved by being a better player and learning, not crying in a corner because you refuse to learn how to play a game to match up to better players, and instead insist on being a static 'casual' player, stubbornly rejecting any new ideas/forms of gameplay for the sake of not being 'hardcore.'

Because they suck. They went out and died multiple times instead of playing smart. Because they suck, they don't get any help from the game mechanics to hold their hand for them because they can't use common sense.

EXACTLY. Do you NOT understand my point? I don't WANT them to come back. They lost at the beginning because they were an utterly inferior team, and the game should reflect that.

Allow me to explain the logic. Team A, is really good. Team B, is really bad. Team A kills team B five hundred times. Team B spawns every twenty seconds and pushes Team A's rush back, who slowly pushes regardless but gets slowed down in the long run. Team B is 0-20, but still fighting a game they will inevitably lose, and force the game to the thirty-forty minute mark because the game mechanics allow them to, but they inevitably are going to lose, because in the end they are worse players. The game, should REFLECT this, not COMPENSATE for it.

What do you define as a 'higher' level of play, since you're obviously the all-knowing pro here. So explain to me, regardless of skill gap, how a player comes to get fully upgraded in no less than forty minutes, without the other team able to level OFF of the upgrades they purchase and still keep up. You don't know this game sir, at least not nearly as well as you seem to think you do. Kay thanks. I really don't want to be egotistical or make it seem like I know everything there is, but you really, really don't understand.

I don't need to pick apart your response because I guess in the end that's correct. One problem with easily obtained citadel upgrades as well, is the fact that the other team can farm off of it and just level up. Me and my teammates play extremely aggresively and always push/setup bursts whenever we can, and have one person always upgrading. However, they feed on the extra gold/XP from the minions. So I have another fix that could easily be implemented that i'll put in initial post.

Might as well play a one-man slaughter game.

How are 15 minute games too long?

They're only long if both teams are evenly matched..

I think it works well now with the flow

The game is balanced, and both sides have complete potential to play to the maximum capabilities that the restrictions of the game allows. They both have access to everything, including everything I suggested. Its their performance that ultimately defines the game pace however, except Demigod doesn't reflect this...

Average game including the lag to be fair for me, is always forty minutes every time, when the teams are unevenly balanced. When I say unbalanced, I mean me and my teammates are 15-0 holding all flags and with every tower still standing. The enemy has a LOT of capability to come back. However, when they aren't quite good enough to come back, they just lose very slowly. Very...slowly...

There is indeed a flow and I can acknowledge that, but it is much too slow for me. I'm probably too used to dota but again, people arguing that players who aren't as good should get compensated.