simulation would be more like an ant farm that you set up and can then watch endlessly, even when you are not actively playing. So, I really wanted the workers in RoC to walk to
their assigned destinations and carry goods around in the city. This feature made it into the game, and I still find it delightful to watch those little simulated people walk across my screen. Also, I wanted to introduce several different cities to
the game. In FoE, you build one big city, and gameplay slows down naturally the more you progress. I thought alternating between different cities would create the sense of repeatedly building something from the ground up. This idea underwent quite a lot of iteration before it was finally implemented in RoC. We overhauled the whole mechanic again when we went from RoC to HoH, turning these extra cities into special timed events to allow for even faster, fresher city gameplay. It has been great fun working on different versions of this mechanic over the years, and I would like to give a big shout-out to my colleague Christian Noack, who does the heavy lifting in terms of game balancing and played a key role in turning these ideas into something that is actually fun to play. Another big innovation was the battle system. FoE
features a tactical, turn-based battle system that is somewhat complex and requires a lot of user input. For a mobile game, however, we wanted something snappier that requires less input but feels more impactful. We came up with a fun battle system where lots of units run across the battlefield. Players can alter the outcome by strategically placing them before the battle starts and making minimal interventions during the battle. We later used this system in HoH as well, as the foundation of the hero battles, so it has proven to be quite a versatile and fun system. Some of the other
innovations I had in mind were also scrapped, but, looking back, I have to say that was the right decision. For example: I wanted to combine the world map feature that all three games have, putting the place where you battle opponents right next to where you build your city. This would mean that all the building and battling gameplay essentially happens in the same game mode. I’m quite happy
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that this idea wasn’t successful – I’d probably still be working on the final design, as it sounds way easier on paper than it actually is.
Has the ludic core of the series shifted? Originally, it seems to me that city-building was central, like Civilization but in pocket format, but today, the city seems to primarily serve as a place to train the heroes with whom battles are fought, almost like Pokémon? What is InnoGames’ view on this? That’s definitely true. The city-building aspect is certainly the “end” in FoE and RoC, whereas in HoH, I’d say it’s more of a “means to an end” – with the “end” being the heroes that you upgrade and collect. Ultimately, players find it easier to build an emotional connection to characters than to buildings, and that’s something we realized when designing new reward systems for RoC and FoE. Players care about buildings, but if we give them more and more special buildings as rewards, they’ll cannibalize their historic city buildings and simply run out of space. But what else can you give out in pure city-building games if not buildings? Our solution was to stop being a pure city-building game. This solved a lot of our problems by not tying rewards exclusively to the limited city grid.
Let’s talk about the relationship between content and gacha elements and how it’s changed over the course of the series: What can you spend money on in your games? Only cosmetics or quality-of-life features? Are there pay- to-win mechanics? Gacha elements are a big trend in the gaming industry, but we always struggled to successfully incorporate
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