The trick with idle games is to make the player feel there is always something active to do to progress. Playing a Warzone game in the arena is a perfect example of this: win a game, get benefits. However, once you've beaten an arena, it disappears. If we had a permanent arena, you'd not only attract more players to play warzone and maybe get a membership, but also give players the idea that whenever they're waiting around for breaking that next large territory, they can earn something to speed up the progression.

I just mailed Fizzer the exact same thing.

+1

Another good thing would be to have something similar to Golden Cookies in Cookie Clicker. Make players want to look at the screen to maybe get lucky.

Isn’t drafting kind of like that? I’ve never played cookie clicker so I honestly don’t know.

I'm not sure what you mean by drafting.

A golden cookie in cookie clicker is a random event. Once every n minutes, one of them spawns and gives you a random bonus for a random amount of time. This helps keeping the player in the game and not abandon it, following in quitting the game altogether.

Drafting is a tech you can develop.
It gives you additional armies, when you click on the draft symbol that appears at a random place on the map.
So far it seems that the symbol appears every 6/7 minutes.

In that way, it is similar to the golden cookie, yes.

The first time a player does an arena game, you should just require the tutorial, not make it an option. I am well aware some players will get annoyed by this, but the tutorial is fast and I would imagine you are trying to gear this moreso towards players who haven't played warzone before.

Could make the first arena literally the tutorial.

Could also make 2 arena-esque functions; one is multiplayer and always an option as farah is suggesting, the other is single player and appears on map (or vice verse)

Edited 7/9/2020 19:57:48

+1 for permanent arenas, so far I never found an opponent (admittedly I didn't wait very long)

When you play in the arena, who is your opponent? Other people playing Idle? People playing QM? Does you game just get posted in the open games list?

And is it worth playing? The time invested in playing a WZC game you otherwise wouldn't play is worth the rewards you get in WZI? Especially concerning given you don't know who will accept your game, and you need it win it.

Edited 7/28/2020 12:09:05

I think it's normal person playing QM.
Your game just get into the QM queue and it finds you someone around your rating.
Might affect your rating too, will check next time I went into the arena.

Edited 7/28/2020 12:11:20

Definetly affects your QM-rating.

Afaict it's functionally almost equivalent to clicking "Play Now" on QM with only the Arena's forced Template enabled, although of course with Idle now rewarding you when you win.

Given the templates and QM settings in general, the time investment is small. It may be higher if your QM rating is high since you will be more likely paired with a serious opponent (although I don't know how well this matchmaking works- my opponents so far have all been similar to the opponents I'd get on RT QM). So far, about 67% of the way through Ursa:Luna, my games have been:

1. A Small Earth Auto Dist arena (https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=23283000) that took ~15min vs. a ~480-rated opponent (I was rated ~80)
2. A Small Earth 1 Wasteland arena (https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=23295274) that took ~9min vs. a ~480-rated opponent (I was rated ~490)
3. A Strategic 1v1 arena (https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=23329112) that took ~5min vs. a ~400-rated opponent (I was rated ~350)
4. A MME Commanders LD No Cards arena (https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=23357009) that took ~2min vs. a ~125-rated opponent (I was rated ~70); this game ended fast when my opponent surrendered upon realizing what template we were on

Another angle on the time investment is that you're probably not going to be able to do much more than wait if you spend the same time on WZI. Imo Arena complements WZI very well since you play a short game (or games, if your QM rating is high and you end up playing good opponents, or if you lose for some other reason) and then you come back and you have these extra armies and stuff to do in WZI. Most of my arena games have been the perfect duration for having a new Draft when I get back.

Imo SEAD is a bad fit for Arena since you could end up spending an inordinate amount of time on it if your starts aren't great relative to your opponent's. SEAD and SE1W also have template specialists that are different from the main strat community, so this could be an unpleasant experience for a good strat player used to normally winning their games against randos pretty fast. I've been on the other side of this, as a QMer playing SEAD who got matched with someone playing Idle, and that person who got matched with me was not having a good time with the Arena on that template. They had to play at least 3 times for their Arena bonus and had to navigate the auto dist lottery of SEAD while also getting paired with good opponents they couldn't rely on to make mistakes if they had superior starts.

Edited 7/28/2020 17:55:21

Strange. I always got my opponent very quickly.

Single player arena where you would play a random community level under certain parameters (winrate 20-40%, world record 5-15 turns, >15 likes) would make sense. I think arenas could have cooldown. For example: you can take reward from arena only once per hour.

I always got my opponent very quickly.

Even on Strat 2v2? That one took me 10 minutes to find players and the game itself took 25min. I was also the only player in that game to make more than 5 picks and to not just clusterpick. I'd much rather play Muli's trick SP level than get roped into Strat 2v2 again...

I do not have membership. This means, that the only arenas I have met were for small earths.

yep, I'm small earthing like hell

Huh, where does it say that only Members get non-SE Arenas? If that's how it works, then I hope Members also get at some point the option to just play SE too. The first few Arenas are SE, btw, so it could just be the case that you haven't found the first non-SE arena yet.

Now i passed to ME.

However i found myself playing a managerial game, switching between different barrels and alloys to maximise production. I do not know if I have developed really bad or what

wait. what is cookie clicker!!?? what did I miss. I mean we have the three door thing and the video thing. I didn't see no cookie clicker