Team Covenant Writing Contest - Why do I play Saga?

So Team Covenant is running a contest to generate content for their site. I have no issues sending this in, but as I always struggle for blog content, I figured I'd cross-post it here as well.

However to plug their contest and their entry post, here are some links:

https://www.playsaga.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6354

"Your Source For Everything Saga http://teamcovenant.com"

"Lowest Prices On All Units, Guaranteed http://store.teamcovenant.com"


Below is my Entry:



Player Nation Name: GOSLAND

Favorite Faction: Nature

Why do I play Saga?

General Answers:
Saga is by far the most relaxing RTS (real time strategy) or MMORG (Massively Multiplayer Online rollplaying game), or CCG (Collectible Card Game) that I've played in years.

Saga vs RTS:The feeling of building a city that is persistent, (doesn't go away when the game is over) is pretty unique. Unless you have alot of resources from buying gold or from transfering from another city, your city takes alot of work and efford to max out and make complete. This is both different than the normal RTS games, (whereas you can complete a build order city in several minutes), but it gives you something to plan offline.

Saga vs MMORG:In an MMORG you control a single player, and often can not stage massive battles unless you have lots of friends in a "Raid". This reliance on playing in large groups carries a level or coordination that Saga doesn't require. Saga give you an army of 100s of characters that you can general.

Saga vs CCG: In a CCG you play a game where each player has the same cards as soon as they can acquire them. So often people will post a strong set of cards on the internet, and everyone copies the "net-deck"immediantly. This results in alot of similar play, alot of mirror matches. In Saga even if you have the full set of all characters, you will have certain units that are leveled higher then others. I haven't seen the same exact army used in any of the games I have played. It adds a level of variability that you often don't see in a CCG.

Nature Specific Answers:

Nature is my favorite faction because of the following reasons:

Level of Detail for the Elven Characters: Saga Developers have definitely spent a great deal of time on designing the elven races. They have a much better look and feel then the War orcs. They seem to have been very well design. I quote Illian, "Elven Bear riders are Elfs riding on Bears". How singularly cool is that?

Treants: The first time I saw the treants I was in awe. 8 foot tall trees chucking bolders half a football field? Then after I got a few treants their strong utility in every quest I played. Such a good unit.

Elven Sabercat Riders: I loved the chicks on a cat. They make the best kiting unit for PvE I've ever seen. Human Cav Archers were my previous favorite kiter unit, but after I got some chicks on cats, my kiting was way more fun.

Walls around my main city are tighter: Compared to my Light army the Nature walls are very tight to the buildings. This is useful for pvp city battles as I can store my basistas in my town and they don't have to move very far to fire. If someone wants to nuke a city wall, they have to get closer with my city then with Light, which gives me more Stronghold archery fire, and makes them take more damage.

Four gatehouses vs two: I get four gatehouses with Nature on my city which is nice for City fights. Give me more directions to get to the battle, and makes my city looks much cooler.
Elementals: Fire, Lightning, and Earth elementals are way better looking then the light Giants. Their abilitiesare nice, anti-chain/plate, point blank area effect attack and a DPS melee ability. And they all look cool.

Quantity of Flyers, but not too many: compared to Light, (the best flyer faction), Nature still has good flyers. With the 4 unit limit, Nature can have 4 dragons, and 4 units of elven hawk riders, which is 8 units of flyerspotential. I've never seen a mission that I needed the 12 units of flyers that Light can field.

Speed of Flyers: The speed of the Elven Hawk Riders is one of the top flyers speed. This allows for very good pvp kiting. Many times my dragon has been smooshed in pvp because it has crappy range and slow speed. Having the ability to string the elven hawk riders around the map, gives me a speed advantage.

Cherbus's Special Ability plus Hawk Riders on a mass of Archers: Cherbus's can do a stacking Attack power buff on a group of archers. This stacking with Hawk Riders can give a 35% or more attack power bonus to a stack of Treants orlongbowman. Treants get a big damage bonus, so if you can buff their attack power and make every boulder count, you can basically make a high dps archer group that can spike incoming melee. In a large CP pvp game, my archer stackhas stredded a incoming melee group with this buff.

Druids: I started out assuming Druids were pretty weak like light Clerics. Fire and forget healers, no real utility after using the heal. Then for some reason I keep getting Druids in boosters, so I started playing them more. Druidsare pretty awesome. Main reason, SPEED. They can keep up with my Heavy Cav. Their heal is not single targetted, its instead a friendly AE with a large radius. I love it, makes it very useful. Also druids atack power is poor, but their ranged attack is pretty cool looking. They don't rock the damage, but they can help you take something down. Betterthen getting into melee and getting killed.


I think most armies are pretty well balanced. You definitely can play any army, but Nature has the main advantage ofsimply looking the coolest. This is why I like Saga and Nature.

Mid-Game Leveling Boring, need a Change? Try 2v2 PvP!

Leveling troops and leveling to Nation Level 35 is somewhat boring if you repeat and repeat the same missions.

One thing that is fun to do, INSTEAD of quest grinding is to do some 2v2 PvP Battles.

Rushing Battles are fun, just do 225 CP and throw the kitchen sink against your opponent.



Steps to Setup a Game:

1. First of all you need a friend that you can fight against.



2. One of you setup a game. Make sure it says either Normal Mode or Hardcore. Set the CP to 225, so you can use all your troops at once.



3. Rush in! This is a friendly game so play with your troops and don't get to worried about losing. Even if you lose you win, because your troops are leveling up at a 10% exp gain.



4. One of your will end up losing, and the other gaining the gold and god favor. God favor is important as sometimes you run out to rez your troops.



5. However as you will see in my screenshots, the god favor requirements aren't too high. And losing you get troop and nation experience at a 10% bonus, so the loss penalties are minor.
   

Experience, Loot, Rating gain on a Normal Battle:

Experience, Loot, Rating gain on a Hardcore Battle:

God Favor Before a Rez:

God Favor after a Rez:

So basically about 1100 Godfavor a game, which if you win you get 2200 gold and 220 godfavor.

I was getting between 33,000 exp and 66,000 exp a game, so this is better then any mission.

And way more fun :)

Vitaris - Interviews Part 2

Vitaris is an admitted MTGO (Magic the Gathering Online) player, ex-Pro tour, now playing Saga due to frustration with the MTGO v3 engine.

He was unaware until recently that he was top 10 in terms of economies.

I decided to interview him to ask some question about PvE and impact on the end-game.

General Questions:

Q: How long have you played Saga, and what armies are you familiar with?

Vitaris: "I started May 20th, and Nature is my only army. I meant to play Machines but picked Nature accidentally."

Q: What is your favorite unit and why?

Vitaris: "My favorite unit is the Druid. It is under-rated and damn hard to level. In PvE when you have to cap stuff, I use Druids to heal the capping unit and use them to cap stuff. They are also fast."


PvE Questions:


Q: If you remember, what is the max experience you've seen from a single quest?

Vitaris: "I think about 120k experience."
Q: When your nation is max built out, what do you do with all your resources?

Vitaris: "I'm waiting for global conflict. I store it up, or give it to someone in guild that needs it."

Q: Do you find the max level quests fun to repeat?

Vitaris: "Yes. However you have to look up what to grind alot on the forums to find what items you need."

Q: Do you find yourself COOPing or soloing at max level?

Vitaris: "Mostly soloing. I can solo everything but the newest Heroic."

Q: Do you think end-game PvE is fun?

Vitaris: "PvE is a means to an end. I joined this guild to learn how to PvP... I still suck. However I do what I can for people that need help, as I got help. If I'm online and see someone needs territory help, I'll always help no matter what level."

Q: If you had to change one thing for PvE what would it be?

Vitaris: "The quests grinding for items is a pain. I think like MTGO we should have tourneyments for prizes."

Q: Would you like to do a shoutout to any other players?

Vitaris: Showstopper, Spookys, Kelethin.

Thanks Vitaris, good luck on your PvP. I also think you helped me with one of my territory quests early on :) Thanks again for that.

World Nation Icon Screen?

One thing I was thinking about was the one of the things I miss in Saga vs other games is the ability to see the other cities people have build. At first I didn't realize why this was important, then I remember how much time I would spend looking at the Shadowbane map to determine which cities I wanted to attack :)





Here is a link of what it looked like in Shadowbane:

You could pull up the map and if you moused over a nation it would show you the Nation and the Faction. They would also show the flag icon for the nation based on the level of the city at different sizes. So as you can see from above, the bigger cities icons were the highest level.

This was pretty nice, it made deciding who to fight very fun.

I don't like to bother developers with pie in the sky suggestions, I often believe they are so busy that it is often a burden, but after figuring out what I was missing in Saga, I did figure it meritted a Blog post.

Illian - Interviews Part 1

Illian is a Level 35 Nature Player. Currently and for the last month the top PvP Nature player in Saga. Additionally Illian is sponser by Team Saga Units, for upcoming tourneyments.

From the Saga forums Illian has a aggressive reputation, in my perspective always being ready for PvP, and with alot of experience in it.

I did an interview with him today, where he was nice enough to answer a few questions for me:

Q: How long have you been playing Saga?

Illian: I've been playing since the last year in closed Beta.

Q: What is your favorite Unit Type?

Illian: Elven Bear Riders. They have alot of potential on the battlefield that others don't see, plus it's an elf on a Bear :)

Q: What potential?

Illian: It's the perfect unit to screen against Heavy Cav, and it can be trained to be extremely tough against ranged.

Q: What other games do you play at the same time as Saga if any?

Illian: Eve Online

Q: How many hours a day do you play and how many do you pvp?

Illian: On average three hours hardcore play time. PvP time varies greatly. I try to PvP when I can, but it's hard to get challengers.

Q: Who is your favorite PvP opponent?

Illian: Kheldara

Q: What is the number one change you would like seeing for Saga in terms of PvP?

Illian: I want lots of changes but the number one would be a bug-less pvp with more battle options.

Q: How many active PvP players do you think exist now in Saga?

Illian: I would say less than 20 (that are not low-balling).

Q: What is your favorite strategy for pvp?

Illian: Microing ranged units screen with Elven Bear Riders.

Q: Any shoutout you'd like to do to other nations?

Illian: What's up Showstopper and Gummi :P


My thanks to Illian for being the first in hopeful an interesting series of interviews.

I also got his permission to crosspost his PvP videos. If you haven't had a chance to watch these, I would recommend it highly in terms of explaining why Saga PvP is so good:


Illian vs Gondor: http://files.filefront.com/Illian+vs+Gondor/;10489219;/fileinfo.html
Illian vs Christians: http://files.filefront.com/Illian+vs+Christians/;10490084;/fileinfo.html

My thoughts on Saga

My friend Wilmheath posted on the Saga forums welcoming people to give initial impressions on saga. https://www.playsaga.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6517

I say "friend" because I have spend money at his MTGO and Saga sites http://www.sagatraders.com/ buying no less then 2 full units of treants and other assorted excitingly units :) As much as I like opening boosters, I would have to honestly say that the cards I got out of about 20 booster packs I bought were basically worthless, and I found them impossible to trade for ANYTHING I was interested in fielding. (I don't want to leave out http://www.sagaunits.com/ because when Wilmheath didn't have stock, I got excellent service from them as well. As to other card vendors, I have had no luck in finding what I needed, but the team saga guy seems very nice.)

I guess that's my first gripe from initial impressions. Honestly the booster dynamic is kinda ridiculos. For example let me bring you a comparasion of several of the CCG's I play and how a real collector buys cards:
- When playing Magic and a new set comes out, we tend to get most of our real cards buy buying cases of boosters from volume retailers at a discount.
- For MTGO, we drafted cards in tourneyments. (Basically the tourneyment you can pick either the best card for your tourneyment or draft cards that you want for your deck, but my suck in a tourneyment.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_the_gathering_online#Tournament_effects_on_the_market
- Without drafting or buying volume, Saga really fails in making the unit creation easy. I've done COOP missions with several level 20s, whereas my partner fielded all common troops. I understand that cheap is important for some younger players, but I don't mind buying cards, I just don't find buying boosters is the best way to get what I need. (No matter how many times the loading screen tells me that if I want to help the game to buy a booster :)
- The other thing I found kinda silly is that I can't mail cards from my Light army to my War army. That really sucks, as I have to find another way to get them to try out the troops. I ended up selling alot of my War and Magic cards to the vendor after getting NO bids on the Auction for them. Selling Rares to the vendor seems kinda silly, but gold was more useful then inventory.

- This leads me to my next grip. The Auction seems like no one uses it really?? I know that's due to the lack of players that have the time to use it, but everytime I go looking for units, I see alot of commons, but no uncommons and rares. Except for people looking to trade materials for treants or other rare cards. It seems honestly like the best way to trade cards is to broadcast in channels, or find someone who like you and get something going. I saw this one guy that was looking for iron tanks, and I had a couple that I just gave him for nothing, as when I tryed to auction them for 12k gold on the AH, (like someone told me they were worth), I couldn't move them.

Changing topics I'll talk about the leveling curve.

I do like the way the quests are setup. The bronze/silver/gold is very fun, and rewarding.

However as the end game seems like the most fun, PvP is very well designed, I feel like the leveling to do endgame PvP is slower then a causal player would enjoy. My friend who is playing this game with me, seems to find it overly grindy for a causal player PvP game. It's causal for PvE, but not for PvP really.

Another thing that I observed is that the guild system seems like it's just a resource farming chain. You want people in your guild that give at least as much resources as you contribute. Although really you get less the a couple lumber mill runs per day from the guild contributions.

I only see one person on a day from the guild I'm in, so maybe I just need to hook up with more active players.

I do read alot of the developer post, and am VERY excited about what they post. It seems like if everything is out, this is a great game. Definitely worth waiting around for. Look at MTGO 3.0, they sucked for years, and we still played games.