Fizzer/Warzone,

You need to address the Artifact Slots, since we spend a ton of money for Digging and Upgrading Artifacts.

Suggestion:

We need 4 modes for artifacts:

* Attack Mode: 3 slots for taking territories (Hospital Boost, All Caches bonues [Army, Money, Resource], Joint Strike artifact)
* Build/Upgrade mode: 3 slots ( Army Camp discount, Army Camp Boost, Draft Boost,Territory $$$ Boost, Mine Boost, Mine Upgrade)
* Activate Artifact: 3 Slots ( This will make periodic artifact much more valuable)
* Alchemy Slot: Allow you choose your artifact but requires 7 of the same level artifacts

This would be 10 Slots Total.

Last, allow you to use two of the same artifacts at same time.

Edited 2/3/2021 19:17:17

Not going to happen.

The point of artifacts is that you only have a very limited number of slots available.
You need to decide which artifacts you want to use now, which artifacts you want to use in the future and which ones you are going to sacrifice to the artifacts you decided to keep.

Using 2 of the same artifacts will cause issues with multipliers getting out of hand, so that will never be allowed.

What we do need, however is artifacts presets:
3 presets you can toggle between so you dont have to keep swapping your artifacts in and out every few minutes.

It’d be nice to have a dedicated slot for 1 active artifact.

As of this moment, they are practically useless since Passives are much superior.

Having a dedicated slot for an Active would actually encourage their use.

I agree with Z and JK

Yes, maybe having a 4th slot just for active ones would make the active artifacts useful.

Right now, anything that is active goes straight on the sacrifice pile, including my only 2 epic artifacts.

First of, let me tell you that I also see more potential for the artifacts but I pretty much disagree with most of your ideas.

There are "only" 41 different types of artifacts (based on Z's artifact database). I don't have all of them yet - I just counted mine and the result was 17 different types - but I sure have to swap them regularly to maximize their effects already. But based on your suggestion there would be a slot for roughly every other artifact. What remains as a challenge, if I don't have to watch my artifacts? Personally, I'm no fan of the active artifacts in their current form, so if I had all the slots you suggested, I'd be able to equip all my passive ones and wouldn't have to care for them unless another digging is done. Given, that this is an idle game and there is rarely something to do in the first place, managing artifacts is one of the remaining things to spend time on.

Second, I don't see where some existing artifacts would fit your categories. In which slot would I put a passive cache enhancement artifact? Based on your tone of language (which is, frankly, a bit too much on the demanding side for my taste), I'd expect that your idea is more fleshed out. But I admit, I don't really get the concept of the "Alchemy slots", so perhaps that is my fault.

I haven't reached and unlocked Auto-Conquer yet, so take all of this with a grain of salt, but with all those artifact slots and the fact that experienced players automatically bring more advancements to the table, what would be the motivation for someone who just unlocked AQ to join battles or to try a challenge? Limiting the slots to three is also limiting the advantage of advanced players towards new competitive idle players in battles. And if there were more than three slots, I'd assume that challenges would get even more difficult to counter this change, too.

What I might agree on is that the current design of the active artifacts is very much useless as soon as you found decent passive ones. Especially, because you will find only common ones in the beginning and the common active ones are trash. I would support any suggestion, that active artifacts don't have to be equipped anymore to activate them.

But still, I would personally stick to the limitation that you can only equip one passive artifact of each type and have one active artifact of each type in cool-down at a time. Especially, because changing this would break the game entirely. Some artifacts decrease some aspects. If you could freely combine multiple artifacts of the same type (and you had several Legendary ones), you could decrease some aspects towards 0%, meaning e.g. army camp upgrades would be totally free. If we were able to stack the same artifact, the overall effectiveness of a single artifact had to be nerfed significantly such that stacking couldn't break the game. But then, having a single common artifact would give you say 0.001% effect. Would you want that?

The last days, I was thinking about active artifacts myself and came up with the idea, that their cool-down could be linked to their effect strength. If an artifact with double the effect would have to cool-down for double the amount of time, it would still be better to have the stronger variant of an artifact. You wouldn't have to activate them as often. And if this is too extreme, just make the cool-down for weaker artifacts slightly shorter to compensate their weaknesses (something like, an hour per artifact level (Legendary: 16h, Epic: 15h, Rare: 14h, ...) would be a good start).

PS: And, honestly, if you don't like the artifacts, then don't dig for them. You will have soooo much more money to upgrade your buildings. And technically, you don't spent money on upgrading your artifacts. Unless you buy more spare artifacts to upgrade yours, but no-one forces you to buy them, you can also wait to find them in digging sites.

Edit: Okay, some if this was already said by the time I was done with it but, so what ...

Edited 2/3/2021 15:21:10

I only unlocked it two levels ago, so I can answer one question you raised: the point of joining battles EVEN THOUGH you know you're going to lose your first several battles--and you will--is that battle points (slowly) accumulate to give you boosts and artifacts to help you become competitive.

I only unlocked it two levels ago, so I can answer one question you raised: the point of joining battles EVEN THOUGH you know you're going to lose your first several battles--and you will--is that battle points (slowly) accumulate to give you boosts and artifacts to help you become competitive.

That wasn't the point that I wanted to make but thanks nonetheless, I didn't know that. So, is there another advancement system just not for APs but for battle points?

Guys,

If you expect not to get a fair request when I started this threat you will not get it. 3 slots required way to much micro-management and time, and 10 slots makes a lot of sense when game require a ton a money for digs and artifacts. At least give of 6 slots,

If you expect not to get a fair request when I started this threat you will not get it. 3 slots required way to much micro-management and time, and 10 slots makes a lot of sense when game require a ton a money for digs and artifacts. At least give of 6 slots,

The money is generated for free for you, so it doesn't cost anything besides time.

While it is called an idle game, if you want to play as efficiently as possible you will indeed need to micro manage it at least 3 times an hour.
If you dont want to play idle non-stop and micro-manage it all, you will just take slightly longer to complete a level.

I wouldn't want anymore slots. I use Bonus Money Boost, Army Camp Boost, Mine Boost and Speedy Crafters all the time. It adds to the strategy to pick which one not to use at any given time. It would make the game 'dumber' for a lack of a better term to increase the number of slots.
What I would love to see changed is to have the Actives put back to 24 hour cool downs, but you can swap it out after use. Only being able to use it once a day, but not taking up a slot would make them somewhat valuable. Other than Inspire Mercenaries none would been in my top 10, but at least I would use them until I sacrificed them. This would be the number one thing I would change about the game, artifact or not.

I think the reason why you can’t swap actives is that you could have multiple copies of the same active, and switch them out for a huge boost.

Having a dedicated Active Only slot would solve this.

Z

I think the reason why you can’t swap actives is that you could have multiple copies of the same active, and switch them out for a huge boost.

Didn't think of that although all dupe artifacts could also go on cool down at the same time one is used. Having one slot would still make most of them useless. Inspire Mercenaries would always been in my slot, just using as soon as the cool down was up, where if they didn't have to stay in a slot, I would use and save more of them.

A couple of months ago I came with the following suggestion: add an advancement "Allow active artifacts to cool down in a storage slot at 10x time penalty, upgradable to 1.5x (or 1x) in -0.5x increments". This would make active artifacts a bit more valuable.
Regarding using duplicate active artifacts simultaneously, I don't know any active artifact that would mess up the game mechanics by reducing some values to 0, when used repeatedly. What would happen is a proliferation of poor artifacts, messing with the economy of the game. Example: you have 5 poor fog busters, revealing 1 territory each, for a total of 5 territories. If you combine them into a common artifact, it will reveal 2 territories, less than half of what the originals did.
To counter this, there are solutions:
- deny activating an artifact while a duplicate is in cooldown, or
- allow activating an artifact, but cooling down will start only after the duplicate finished its cooldown (my favorite solution).
Example: you have 5 inspire mercenaries artifacts (all rare, 6%). Using them simultaneously will give you 30% of a mercenary camp. Assume you maxed out storage cooldown, so it's either 16 hours cooldown in an active slot or 24 hours in storage, and you have all 5 of them in storage. However the cooldown clock is ticking only for one of the five artifacts. 24h later one artifact cooled down, the second starts cooling down and the first can be reused - however reusing it takes it offline until all the orhees cooled down. So effectively you will use one 6% artifact per day after the 30% burst; combining them into a 12% epic that can be used daily would be preferable.

[ And it's currently possible to reduce costs to zero. Army camp cost can be reduced by 30% through advancements, 40% through technology, 24% with a legendary passive artifact - total so far 94%. An active artifact reducing army camp cost, that can be equipped sinultaneously with the passive one, can discount up to 48% of the next army camp upgrade cost. ]

@Dj Storm, I liked your ideas because it's more or less what I was thinking about. Sure, you could solve some of the problems differently and it would still be superior to today's approach, but all in all, this is - from my point of view - a viable suggestion.

Most active artifacts cannot be stacked in the first place because they require an immediate action. E.g. supercharging a building requires you to select it. You can't activate several without assigning them their target (at least that is what I think to remember from the few times I used active artifacts). So activating the same active artifact is hardly able to screw the game. And even getting an army camp upgrade for free is no problem, AS LONG AS this required the use of an active artifact because this artifact is only usable once for whatever time-span. What I (and others) pointed out is mostly concerning stacking passive artifacts: If it is possible to reduce upgrade costs down to 0% with passive means (yes, this includes techs, advancements and other passive means), then I'd say the game is broken. And on this note, I have a certain feeling (but I can't prove it with the APs and artifacts I have) that you could bring down the smelter times to 0%. Again, if this is possible, the game is broken and this should be fixed one way or another.

If I was making a change in this vein, I'd have the $9.99 super army camp also give a power to auto-swap the artifacts that are only useful for certain clicks. Like, when I click an army cache, it'll swap in my best army cache boost artifact. When I click the draft after that, it'll swap in my best draft-boost artifact. And so on. That's something a player can do, it's just limited by an annoying UI. Automating that as a paid upgrade seems legit to me.

Also, +1 to the dedicated active slot. Or else, raise their effects hugely, or make it so they can cool down in storage(max one per type, to avoid hoarding and encourage improvements). They're just junk right now.