If you open the sortable spreadsheet and to to the "value" tab you'll notice the top buildings in the game are as follows.
So you can see the top SAT and SASH GB's are still excellent.
The new Frontier Citadel in GbG is excellent and is far superior to the older GbG towers. The level 1 is better than the level 2 Tower of Champions.
The Tourney Grounds is still excellent.
You see event buildings particularly the gold league prize that makes other event buildings are at or near the top of the list.
You see the usual assortment of other time-limited event buildings of some ascended variety and that's all great.
The Royal Bathhouse is still top dog for settlements.
and then you see all the Neo buildings from QI which are not time-limited and by comparison very, very easy to get.
So consider this when talking about game elements currently in FoE. The game element, what you get and what it takes to get it.
Settlements:
Each settlement you get a unique building (meaning you only get one of them) and if you put in enough work you can get an ascended level. Bless the hearts of people who do this as I can't be bothered. It takes a long time to get that fully leveled unique building and unless you're going for ascended levels then once they're done settlements can be ignored.
GbG:
For people in guilds that win enough GbG seasons the towers are great and the new one is better than all that came before. The Tourney Grounds is still great. So if you're in one of the top guilds and get the towers and do about 4k fights per GbG season you get the Tourney Grounds. To me it's worth it but that's a lot of click, click to get those rewards.
Rival Quests:
Two days of blitz quests which often require all 80 encounters of GE be completed. That may cost SASH age players millions in medals.
GE Trials:
If you're not familiar with how GE is changing and has already changed on Beta server you can click here to read about it. They have added silver and gold upgrades to GE buildings you are currently familiar with but are so stingy with the fragments to get them it may take a year to get all the fragments. By then surely the new and improved GE buildings will be well out of date. I was also made aware that FoE stooges are trying to frame the rewards as too generous on the discord. Primarily one "as seen on YT" influencer that is getting paid by Inno to shill for them. It's pretty pathetic to not be honest with your audience. The reality is GE Trials have increased difficulty and decreased the rewards. Particularly the diamond rewards. All four of us at this site have completed GE Trials for 2 weeks now. We have completed Trial 4, 5, 6 and 7. All four of us used to auto battle GElv5 with barely one unit loss and never close to losing an encounter. Now the player doing Trial 4 that has roughly 6k attack 5k attack def lost one encounter on lv4 against an army that had someting like 3.2k fight bonus. The one doing Trial 7 is stuck on lv2. Sure with power creep we'll all be able to auto battle Trial 25 eventually but right now it's not worth pushing the higher levels. There's no way I'm manually fighting and building supports just to get through GE and maybe in a year build a golden terrace farm. Negotiations are completely broken as well so that isn't an option. What I'd suggest is just complete the lower level trials on easy mode and get your Forgotten Temple and revisit the higher levels if it gets rebalanced. Remember GElv5 was rebalanced from Beta before it went to live server so I won't be surprised if the Trials get rebalanced as well. The rewards also need to be rebalanced, particularly with diamond rewards but others as well. We were able to get 90 diamonds on lv4 of Trial 4 but only 45 from the entire Trial 3. Yes boot-licking youtube influencers will defend that as a good thing but it's a nerf of diamonds. You can't boot-lick your way past that. If trial 3 was the closest to what live server is now then it's a nerf. Let's not pretend it isn't. As for the other prizes geting a few FP, some coins, BP are beyond underwhelming. Getting 10 more encounter turns when I only had 6 more enounters to complete was also dumb. Come-on FoE. Do better. Want to crank-up the difficulty no problem. Make it worth it. Right now it isn't.
Events:
The top gold league of every event usually has buildings that are well worth trying to get into gold league. Now you may have noticed that it has gotten a lot harder to get into the gold league. The reason for that is previously the top 1% encompased all players on your world. Every world has inactive players so that made getting into the top 5% possible for free to play players. There was an outside shot of free to play players getting into the top 1%. Well now all the inactive players are not part of the calculation so it's near impossible getting into the top 5% without spending diamonds. Not impossible but near impossible. Now the top 1% requires diamonds and a lot of them. Now you will surely talk to someone in your guild that says they got gold league and didn't spend diamonds to do it. They are lying. To give an example the gold league for the St. Patrick's day event on Beta required players to do 28-29 towns. That's an average of 1.3 per day. Each town required event currency and there was nowhere near enough event currency to support that. I will defend Inno on this. There should be some incentive for whales to spend a lot of money against other whales for that top 1%. And if they balance the game so that it may take a tiny bit of diamonds for mostly free to play players that's fine too. What's not fine is making it near impossible for a free to play player to get a fully levelled main event building. That's bullshit and again a certain "as seen on YT" influencer calls it "stretch goals" and defends this bullshit. The way it used to be a moderately active player (login daily, completes event quests) could get a fully levelled event building. Better players could get two main event buildings or one complete and the first few levels of the next one. Even if there are silver and gold levels not obtained during the event that's fine as long as the main building makes fragments for the silver and gold levels. We've accepted that the real full level will be delayed for free players but to paywal the final level is also bullshit. Yes more active and more strategic players can for the most part get it but the more casual player can't. Want to kill a game? Kill-off the casual players. One of the most obvious bullshit tactics is to allow players to get the base lv1 and 7 of the 8 required upgrades then you see another base lv1 on the prize line before the 8th upgrade becomes available somewhere futher down the prize line. Can we all agree that's bullshit? I sure hope so. If a casual player plays the event for 3 weeks and has two lv1 base buildings and not enough upgrades to make one fully-levelled that's bad design. All that said the event buildings tend to be pretty good and worth playing the event.
QI:
People don't like making a new settlement every two weeks and I understand that. It's so formulaic for me that it's a non-issue but it is a pain point for players and I hope some of the plans to make settlements easier come to beta and live servers. QI is a twice a day mechanic and the rewards are outstanding. Especially if you're in a top guild that gets you the end of QI rewards on top of the rewards you get while playing it. In fact it is our concensus that QI offers the most reward/action compared to all the above game mechanics. Consider this. I get better rewards from QI than I do GbG. I do about 30-50 fights/day in QI and 800-1000 fights/day in GbG. I can do QI whenever I login. I don't have to wait for donators or red or blue team anymore. I can just login, harvest my settlement, get my fights in and leave. GbG is far more dependant on when sectors open and then competing with other members in the guild to get my hits in. I have to do this multiple times a day to use full attrition and on most days I don't. It doesn't cost me medals like in GE either.
So why are we making this post? Every city has limited space and if you're a new player you just plant all the new stuff and don't worry about it. For established players we have to decide between one really good thing and something slightly better. We used to just increase all red fight boosts and farm GbG. Often exceeding city collection of FP, goods etc from fighting in GbG. Well times have changed. We're no longer getting 800 FP a day from collection and 1k FP from GbG farming. Now we're getting 13k-15k per day in city collection and 700-1000 FP/day in GbG. But city collection is 14 days while GbG is only 10. City collection requires almost no time while GbG takes a while. So we would argue that the emphasis has already shifted to city collection from GbG farming and that trend will continue.
What has also happened is we now have
Red attack, red attack defense
blue attack, bue attack defense
Red attack, red attack defense GbG
blue attack, bue attack defense GbG
Red attack, red attack defense GE
blue attack, bue attack defense GE
Red attack, red attack defense QI
blue attack, bue attack defense QI
Blue fight boosts were ignored by most of us for 10+ years and now blue and red are on par in all aspects of this game.
When players have an advanced city they have to decide what to place and here's the entire point of this post. QI boosts are more valuable than all the other boosts. When having to pick between better GbG or GE boosts when you can place a QI boost instead that is the better option. Having 13-15k red attack boosts for GbG is great but if you have no QI boosts then your city needs work.
Power creep is real and we will passively increase all our boosts by just playing the game but when you decide to target something it should be
- QI boosts
- Main city boosts (FP or regular red or blue fight boosts)
- GbG boosts
- GE boosts
Old time players will remember guilds used to specialize in GvG, or GbG with some not even playing the other game mechanic. I suspect we'll start to see that again. As people get bored with the click, click of GbG and the new GE trials you may see some QI specific guilds that demand say 4k points in QI but no demands for the other game aspects. That would be farmer friendly while also getting great game rewards. People playing events and doing QI will still be very active but also able to have a life outside of this game.
I have to believe top guilds that do everything will experience a high level of burn-out. It's just not sustainable in the long-term especially with a new version of GvG coming next year.