So, I don't have any insider information that Fizzer is actually going to be adding new hardened levels, but if he were to add hardened levels to the post-superascend levels, what would you want the rewards to be?

Here are some thoughts that I have (in ascending order from weakest to strongest):

- Notepad: allows you to keep notes for yourself within the level. Can be useful to remember where hospitals are, a list of things to remember, or specific instructions for the next time you play the level.

- Artifact stats: shows the impact that each artifact has had on your current level. Could be something that is real-time and able to be viewed always, or something that can only be viewed after a level is completed.

- 1st battle bonus: doubles the value of the arena reward if you win on your first match. If you lose on your first try, it goes back to normal.

AND FOR THE GRANDDADDY REWARD:

- 2 Live Crew: allows you to have a second dig crew, so you can essentially be digging for two artifacts at a time.

Let me know your thoughts on my ideas as well as any ideas of your own.

There're already existing hardened level reward affecting artifacts, arena, digging. Probably it's better to add rewards on game aspects not yet being touched, especially aspects that are currently not touched by any types of benefits, whether it's hardened level rewards or advancements or super-ascension rewards or clan war rewards or artifact effects or techs.

One aspect that's not being touched by anything is hospital upgrade time. So I propose:

Tower crane: Hospital upgrade time reduces by 10 minutes

I'd like to see:
(A) some new Hardened Levels - only a handful of levels have them, but a few candidates like Triskellion, Hex Earth, etc, would be good candidates for one
(B) a new category of Super Hardened Levels (Evolved Levels?), maybe that are unlocked after a certain # of SASc's

And some ideas for new Hardened/Evolved rewards . . .

Army camp visibility

Hospital visibility

Reduce hospital upgrade time (Math's idea, I like it)

2nd dig team sounds initially interesting but the P4 Auto-Dig Adv + P4 50% Faster Digging Adv & SAsc reward for 20% reduced dig time kind of already fills this role; reduce to 50% speed = essentially a 2nd dig team; exceed 50% speed reduction and enable Auto-Dig = even better, and if you really amp this up with successive 20% reduction buffs, you can get all digs on every level in little time

Artifact cooldown time reduction; currently the only way to reduce is the CW buff which is limited to 2 weeks iff your clan even achieves that reward

Enhance artifact strength, buff efficacy of all artifacts by 5-10%

Artifact crafting - a way to spend resources (AP? something else) to change how artifacts work, maybe you can combine different artifact functions into 1 artifact, maybe an option to upgrade an artifact so that it doesn't have to be equipped to be used; each artifact needs to be augmented/crafted separately (Fizzer did mention he didn't like the idea of constant swapping and was open to the idea of having some mechanic to enable artifacts to provide value without having to swap them in/out/repeat); could also change duration/strength/cooldown/etc properties of a single artifact individually

Additional artifact slot - add 1 slot for passive artifacts only, converts an existing slot

Increase mortar hit rate - tbh, anything that makes mortars useful would be great; they are too expensive, too weak, takes too long to become active & then they either don't do enough damage or miss entirely (so maybe problems)

Eliminate mortar load time (wait time) - same as above

Some way of "leaving your mark in the Idle world"; don't know exactly what, but have some way of either adding your name to a leaderboard, some kind of in-game message board or pop-up message to other players, maybe as simple as leaving a note like "krinid was here" that pops up when someone starts a new level? Not sure but seems like a minor opportunity

- Third Eye -
Creates a visibility tab which lists various structures (army camps, mines, smelters, hospitals, markets, etc.) as rows with two check box columns labeled “captured” and “uncaptured”. These check boxes cause the icons to appear/disappear. This could be used to easily locate any uncaptured hospitals/markets/merc camps and would pair well with the existing visibility achievements.

In parallel, add Hospital Visibility as an advancement because… why is this not an advancement already

- Blast Chiller -
Reduces artifact cooldown from 16 hours to 12 hours

- Rapid Fire -
Mortars are instantly loaded when captured (subsequent uses still require a one hour loading phase)

I tried to stay in the spirit of the thread, in a “wish list” thread I would say to revert the market change so mines/smelters/crafters do something again and this becomes an idle game again

@graemes
That's not the spirit of the thread at all, unless you're suggesting a new Hardened Level Reward actually be a nerf to weaken markets so you can find purpose in smelting and crafting again (and extend your level clear times by 2-3x).

I made two posts. The first post is very much in the spirit of the thread. The second post explains where I would place “New Hardened Level Rewards” in my personal roadmap.

I would prefer the focus be on fixing the features that don’t work (e.g. mortars, crafters) rather adding new features.

You can go for the smelting/crafting technique if you like. It should be made way more worth it, that increases the fun of Idle

Some more ideas for hardend levels:
Pre SAsc levels:
Increases Hospital range by 1 territory
Mortars are 50% cheaper to load
All Techs are 5% cheaper
Post SAsc levels:
Gain 2x BP for every battle you play
Can Upgrade any artifact (rare or lower) by 1 rarity
All SAsc bonuses are increased by 25%(multiplied, is lost on SAsc like all other rewards)

Mortar should be earased in Idle. They will never be useful at all

I sometimes use them when I'm out of mercs

* Artifact cooldown is reduced by x% (maybe 15%, so half of the CW reward)
* Battle preparation: during the wzib countdown, you can rearrange your artifacts (ie, sort our artifacts which are on cooldown. All changes are automatically reset after the battle, so that after wzib you have the same state of artifacts as before)
* Challenge preparation: before starting a challenge level, you can rearrange your artifacts (same auto-reset after the challenge is done)

Talking about challenges, why not make hardends of those, with extra rewards?

Great idea. Hardened challenge levels are 3x as hard as the normal ones and give 3x the AP as reward)

And give a rewad like the normal ones, otherwise they'd be even less worth then normal challenges

It should be normal to change the artifacts for battle. NOT a reward of something like that

Mortar should be earased in Idle. They will never be useful at all

But they could useful. If they didn't take 1 hr to load, if they didn't miss so much, if they weren't so expensive, if the damage wasn't piddly & if they didn't require you to already clear a bunch of the territories up to the mortar, they could be useful. Yes, a lot to change ... but it's all changeable. Imho, don't force them to be deployed from the spot they are collected, just pool the mortar resources ("mortar powder") up and allow the player to deploy them elsewhere on the map. Small territories (small # of armies on the territory the mortar comes from) give small amount of mortar powder, large territories gives more mortar powder. And either just reduce/eliminate the load time or give players an easy way (artifact, advancements, techs, all of these) to reduce the load time. And eliminate the % miss chance - just regulate the efficacy based on amount of mortar powder used. Mortar powder is just another resource that doesn't carry over to the next level (like all the money, armies, ore, bars, items, etc).

* Battle preparation: during the wzib countdown, you can rearrange your artifacts (ie, sort our artifacts which are on cooldown. All changes are automatically reset after the battle, so that after wzib you have the same state of artifacts as before)

This has been suggested a # of times. Maybe put it on UserVoice and campaign for people to vote for it. Most Idler/WZIB'ers would gladly jump all over that ... most annoying thing is having an artifact cooling down like TS or QS that you are then forced to use in WZIB. WZIB and WZI-Main are 2 totally different games altogether, requiring different Adv & Arti combos b/c of the no swap limitation of WZIB. WZIC is even farther removed from WZI-Main b/c not only no swapping but no Actives (well you can equip them if you want, just can't activate them). But the UI does not give any consideration to this. Imho, the Advancements tab should be available from the WZI map menu. You should be able to check/uncheck Auto-Adv's there, assign available AP to unlock advancements, swap artifacts, etc, without having to actually go into a map. And just make this also available from the WZIB & WZIC interfaces

Talking about challenges, why not make hardends of those, with extra rewards?

Absolutely. Something beyond 100 AP per level. Notably for post SAsc players, there's 0 reason to do the Challenge levels b/c the AP required to upgrade the Auto-Adv's required to succeed at them outweigh the 100 AP gains per level (see middle point above for details on why it's not worth it, TLDR, b/c WZIC is so different from WZI-Main, they require different Adv's & Artis to succeed). If there were real rewards, that would change everything. This is yet another missed opportunity in WZI. There are lots being discussed in this thread and many more elsewhere. It would be easy to fulfill a lot of these missed opportunities, but alas . . .

Oh I have another idea.

Make a super hard hardened level. The reward name is "The Epic" and it gives a legendary triple strike.

Give the man a gold star for an excellent idea. lolol

But let's be realistic ... we all know that "The Epic" would give a Rare Triple Strike. (;

And if you're really lucky, a Rare Fog Buster.

Hardened challenge levels would be nice if they filled out the list rather than just being added to the end. It's just not worth investing in anything WZIC requires when the return is so terrible. If you got x3 or x4 the AP over the same number of maps via hardened versions maybe it would not be pointless. As it stands there's several huge difficulty walls that require way too much AP, because that AP doesn't contribute in WZI and only somewhat in WZIB.

The protection hardened reward should extend to WZIC to make it even vaguely related to how anything else works.

Getting a toggle button that will in some way show you how many armies it actually costs to conquer territories, or maybe just highlight those that would cost 0/grey out those that are not free. It's kind of annoying having to check many individual territories. Maybe this or a different reward would also enable auto-conquer to conquer 'free' territories as soon as possible regardless of your army stockpile.

After making mortars actually useful, they could have several rewards. Starting off loaded, having extra ammo, longer range, more impact, etc. I wonder if mortars would be reasonably useful just by making them free and never miss.

Smart auto upgrades that allows you to individually toggle camps/hospitals/mines to upgrade and mortars to load/fire, or perhaps an ROI slider. It would make auto-upgrade mines not a terrible money-sucking mistake.

Auto-artifact usage with a toggle button. Would make actives in WZIC not entirely pointless, and allow activations while you're AFK sleeping for instance in WZI and just on-time in WZIB.

Scrying circles Pro: draft icon shows up in the top right because i'm lazy and don't want to look for it.

Shut up and take my money: allows you to end your current ad bonus so that you can start a new one (primarily to fix timing issues so you can get the full length of time while AFK)
reward that has the ad bonus apply to WZIC.

Bootstraps: start with a lump of armies and money to help get things moving faster, including WZIC.

Spies: for each tile you start with visibility on, also reveals one connected tile.

lend-lease: when you fulfill clan requests, returns a refund in both armies and money.

seconding hospital range, WZIB artifact management (though that should just be a thing you can do in the WZIB wait room/challenge screen, along with checking your rewards), hospital upgrade time, artifact effects and active cooldowns.

The more I think about it WZIC is just too disconnected from everything else. It'd be better if it was WZIB, just against a fixed AI opponent on static maps. Then it fits right in with all WZIB advancements and artifacts and doesn't need multiple special additions to merely work.

Edited 3/13/2023 01:54:08