Ares Rebalancing

[Ryvirath]

Hello players!

Over the course of the current sprint (2.243), we’ll be making our first batch of rebalancing changes to Ares. These changes are in response to Community feedback since Ares’ release, and we’re hoping, should address the areas where Ares is overpowered as a God. The intention of these changes is to reduce, but not completely diminish, Ares power as a deity, whilst retaining his uniqueness compared to other gods. It is incredibly important, and can’t be understated, how much we appreciate your feedback and for helping to understand where Ares impacts the meta, as well as suggesting how we can address these imbalances.

So, without further ado, lets get into what you’ll see over the next couple of weeks. These changes will go live with version 2.243, but will be rolled out on beta progressively as the respective tasks are implemented into our daily deployments. We’ll continue to clarify which changes are in via our daily changelogs as they come. The rebalancing is split into three subtasks, so there will be three headings for this post.

Part 1: Ares Sacrifice and Ares Army
First up is Ares Sacrifice and Ares Army, both of which will be rebalanced. Below you can see the original spell description, alongside the new description showing what we will change (changes in red):

Spell	Old description	New description
Ares Sacrifice	Sacrifice up to 100 population’s worth of non-mythical units you own in this city and gain 1 Fury for every 1 population sacrificed. Costs: 100 Favor	Sacrifice up to 50 population’s worth of non-mythical units you own in this city and gain 2 Fury for every 1 population sacrificed. Costs: 100 Favor
Ares Army	Consumes the entire fury pool. For every 10 points of Fury consumed this way (rounded down), add one Spartoi to the offensive command. Costs: 380 Favor + 100% of current Fury	Consumes the entire fury pool. For every 25 points of Fury consumed this way (rounded down), add one Spartoi to the offensive command. Costs: 380 Favor + 100% of current Fury

With these two changes, we adjust the effectiveness of Ares Army significantly, whilst retaining that it is a high cost/high risk strategy for players to employ if they want to have an edge. We also make generating Fury with Ares Sacrifice cheaper, which leads us onto the second part of the rebalancing.

Part 2: Bloodlust
One of the big pieces of feedback received was it was way too easy to generate maximum fury, meaning that the costs associated with Ares Army were diminished. Bloodlust is by far the main cause of this ease of generating Fury, so we want to adjust it to impact the overall cost associated with using Ares Army.

Spell	Old description	New description
Bloodlust	Improve offensive ability of all attacking units by 5% + 1% for every 200 Fury available. Additionally, 50% of your dead unit’s population return to you as Fury once the battle has ended. Costs: 100 Favor + 50% of current Fury	Improve offensive ability of all attacking units by 5% + 1% for every 200 Fury available. Additionally, the battle points for this attack are increased by 1% for every 1000 Fury available. Costs: 100 Favor + 50% of current Fury

This change is quite radical, and coupled with the Ares Sacrifice change, we know already we will need to keep an eye on Fury generation to see if this addresses the issues. If we see this hasn’t quite made the right balance, we’ll make some future changes. However, Bloodlust, with the addition of Fury generation, we see as being difficult to balance without making it worthless, so we will not re-add this to the spell. We also recognize that the battle points bonus may need some tweaks, so please be sure to let us know your thoughts on this in the comments, so we can adjust it if need be, hopefully before live release.

We will not make any changes to Spartan Training.

Part 3: Ladons

Our vision statement with Ladons is “The Ladon is not a unit to win a battle but to weaken a highly defended city the most“. We wanted to introduce a brand new flying unit which changes the established strategies. We want Ladons to be a very powerful unit, which players use to weaken a heavily defended city, without making them so powerful they change the game too much.

Unfortunately, we pushed too far and made it too powerful, especially when combined with Ares Army. With the rebalancing, we will adjust several aspects of Ladons, keeping it as a very powerful unit, without making the costs of using them be so inconsequential when compared to the reward. We especially wanted to adjust Ladons to ensure they don’t mess with strategy too much on conquest worlds. The table below shows the original stats, and the new stats.

Old	New
Cost	Cost
Wood: 21,000 Stone: 12,500 Silver: 22,500 Favor: 490 Population: 180 Build time: 25 hours, 20 minutes (speed 1)	Wood: 9,240 Stone: 9,460 Silver: 9,020 Favor: 490 Population: 85 Build time: 11 hours, 18 minutes (speed 1)
Stats	Stats
Attack (Ranged): 2530-6325 Defense (Blunt): 2390 Defense (Sharp): 1950 Defense (Ranged): 2100 Speed: 100 Loot: 2200	Attack (Ranged): 1195-2988 Defense (Blunt): 478 Defense (Sharp): 390 Defense (Ranged): 420 Speed: 40 Loot: 1000
Passive	Passive
Attacking targets with higher population than the combined population of all Ladons , increases all Ladon’s offensive power in this attack. For every 10 population difference, Ladon’s offensive power increase by 30% (up to 150%). Additionally, all other units in this attack gain 1% attack power per Ladon (up to 10%; this does not stack with Ladon’s offensive power increase).	Attacking targets with higher population than the combined population of all Ladons , increases all Ladon’s offensive power in this attack. For every 3000 population difference, Ladon’s offensive power increase by 6% (up to 150%). Additionally, all other units in this attack gain 1% attack power per Ladon (up to 10%; this does not stack with Ladon’s offensive power increase and does not apply to ghost units).

As you can see, this is a very significant change in how Ladons are used. We feel this achieves what we set out to deliver, which is to essentially make Ladons have a very specific use case when used against your enemies. But, to talk about some specific reasons, lets take a look at each topic.

Passive boost:

The passive for Ladons was originally designed to give players a strong reason to use this unit over other units in their arsenal. The new balancing keeps the Ladon as the most powerful unit at maximum boost, but this maximum boost only triggers when the population difference between the Ladons and the defending army is significant. The plan being you don’t send Ladons to completely clear a city, you send them to make huge damage to their defenses, giving you a window of opportunity to attack!

Population and resource costs:

We’ve more than halved the population cost for Ladons. This is to bring the favor/population costs in sync with other mythical units. With the reduced cost of population, we wanted to also reduce the resource costs to be inline with other units.

Attack value:

To keep it in line with the population and other costs, this has been a little over halved too. Additionally, with the changes to the passive, it means that Ladons are still most cost effective when used for their intended purpose. An unboosted Ladon is comparatively not as powerful as other units, but that is kind of the point.

Defensive values:

We’ve very significantly reduced the defenses of Ladons. It is an offensive unit, not a defensive unit.

Speed:

The Ladons were way too fast. They are still a very fast unit, but not nearly as fast as they were before.

Closing words
We hope the above gives you some insight into what is coming, as well as our rationale behind these changes. We know they are a lot, but we also know that Ares is causing some very significant strategic issues for our players.