Firstly credit to woodi for his thorough analysis on this issue which was posted here:
LINK
That analysis was on patch 1.04 and showed clear faction snowballing issues.
In a similar fashion i have made 3 simulations on patch 1.05. I have posted the result in woodi's topic, but since we are no longer on patch 1.04, i will post these simulations as a single separate for anyone interested.
The conditions for the simulations are:
- The simulations ran for 10 ingame years (840 days)
- No player interaction with anything - just waiting at a town.
- Simulated at 50x speed
- For every ingame first day of Summer and Winter (42 ingame days), data was collected in correspondence with woodi's measure of faction power. This means number of towns for each faction was counted. The exception is simulation 1, where data was only collected every ingame year (84 days)
- A screenshot was also taken at the time of data was collected to give a visual overview of the map status.
--- Simulation 1 ---
Days of faction wipe:
Day 43 - Western Empire wiped
Day 551 - Southern Empire wiped
Area-chart
Map after 10 years
Screenshot album:
LINK
--- Simulation 2 ---
Days of faction wipe:
Day 124 - Southern Empire wiped
Day 241 - Western Empire wiped
Day 438 - Sturgia wiped
Area-chart
Map after 10 years
Screenshot album:
LINK
--- Simulation 3 ---
Days of faction wipe:
Day 256 - Southern Empire wiped
Day 455 - Battania wiped
Day 495 - Northern Empire wiped
Area-chart
Map after 10 years
Screenshot album:
LINK
Assuming these 3 simulations give a valid measurement of faction development, the snowballing issue seems to have improved with patch 1.05. Now there is no longer only one single faction owning the entire map at the end.
There are large factions by year 10, but no "winning" faction which was often the case on patch 1.04 and below.
Furthermore it seems to be quite random which factions growns into large powers, which looks like an improvement, as Battania and Khuzait seemingly used to be the worst steamrollers.
Its great to see that the developers have managed to improve upon this issue in only a few days.
However there are still a few concerning issues, which i hope will be looked into in later patches:
1. Several factions are getting wiped out very early on. The worst example on this is in simulation 1, with Western Empire wiping after only 43 days. RIP Garios.
2. It seems that no matter what 2 out of 3 Empire factions are more or less destined to wipe every time. This could be a coincidence having only 3 simulations, but it seems to be the case.
3. Sturgia is a constant underdog. I am aware that this has been reported already in serveral topics, and i hope this will improve.
4. Sometimes factions will conquer 2-4 towns in 42 ingame days (half a year) and almost wipe out a faction in very short time. This seems a bit more like blitzkrieg than medieval warfare.
Hope this information will help both forum users and developers.