Frustrations with Game

[76mm]

I've played this game alot, and not long ago finally won an epic campaign. In trying to repeat that achievement, I've come up with several frustrations which are really starting to take away from the game for me:

1) No Spiked Chariots? I usually play the white faction, and after the last few hundred (yes, that's right!) races I've run (in many towns in all regions), I've been offered a spiked chariot exactly once...one time out of probably 400 races. And of course that chariot was destroyed the first time it was used in a race...

Many of the faction members that I race against have spiked chariots--why can't I buy them?

2) Best Horses: The two-arrow, two-drop horses are supposedly the best, but frankly they seem slower than the horses with just two arrows, and don't seem to have any more endurance than the horses with one or no drops. It is frustrating to watch my horses flag after a few whippings while the AI seems to whip around the track with no ill effects. Also, it gets frustrating two watch when my quadrigas with top quality horses and very good chariots and aurigas get outpaced over and over again during the races by quadrigas with lesser stats. Why are they going faster than my team?

3) Drunken-Crowd event: This event, in which the drunken crowd throws things at the auriga in the outer lane, is a death sentence if your auriga ends up in the outer lane at the start of the race. This only happened to me twice, but both times my guys died without me having a chance to do anything about it--right out of the start they are typically boxed in by other chariots, and then they are stunned and cannot change lanes until they die... This is VERY frustrating, especially when it happens to your lead auriga and there is nothing you could have done about it. The effects of this event should be toned down so that the crowd throws fewer things, at least at the beginning of the race.

4) AI Aggression: The AI attacks pretty much every time I am next to one of its quadrigas. Every time. So whenver I am next to, or might end up next to, another chariot, I am basically forced to select the "guard" option. This leads to boring game play. I'm not saying that the AI shouldn't be aggressive, but currently I don't even think about whether to select "guard" or not, because I'm pretty much certain that if I don't, I will be attacked...

5) Small controls: Not an issue on the computer, but on the iPad, I've lost lots of races and several aurigas because I accidentally hit the wrong control with my finger. This is bad enough, but what is worse is that many times when I am resizing the screen on the iPad, I accidentally press a button because they reposition themselves unpredictably during the resizing. [EDIT: Crap, it just happened again, lost a race because I accidentally hit "slow" rather than "guard"...)

[76mm]

Let me add a couple more things after just completing another epic campaign:

6) This epic campaign lasted for 263 races! Of the last 100 races, I would guess that about 85 were races in which my sole objective was to kill someone ahead of me in the ratings, which got very tedious, very fast. Again, at least without the spiked chariots, it is very, very difficult to kill a particular auriga in a race.

I think victory conditions should be changed to be most faction wins, or something, so that players have some incentive to win races rather than kill opponents.

7) After the massive, epic win, I got a little victory screen which scrolls quickly and which is in colored fonts which made it very difficult to read, and it kept scrolling until it was off screen, then it disappeared--there does not seem to be any way to retrieve this information without winning another epic campaign, which at this point is a rather unappealing prospect. Why not allow players to call up some kind of stats/scores from the home screen?

[smallie1]

Yeah, I echo the spiked chariots. Have had the game for many months and have run many many races and have not seen a single spiked chariot.

The AI does seem very aggressive in attacks. But instead of guard I try to move lanes or block. But yes, it seems you can count on the attack almost every time.

[vonRocko]

For spiked chariots, try the purple or blue factions. Of course, you have to advance a bit before they are available.
They might be the only two factions that the player can get them.

[76mm]

I've tried those factions, but don't seem to do well with them.

And as the White faction, I found a spike chariot once, out of maybe 500 races, so it is "possible", although barely. However, I noticed that many of my AI-controlled White-faction colleagues have spike chariots, which doesn't seem right...

[76mm]

Turnopia, any chance you could respond on any of these points?

[Niessuh]

Sure!

About spiked chariots, you will be able to purchase it with teams that starts with one chariot size upgrade (praesina, aurata, purpura). Other teams will only be able to get some chances to purchase the full upgraded chariot at camulodunum or toletum (iron forge)

2) Unharmed two-arrow horses have the same speed regardless of its endurance (drop) level. Endurance control how speed decay when horses suffer damage: White horses (two arrow, no drops) suffer a lot of speed reduction with any damage

3) The Drunken-Crowd event is quite mortal if a low contitution auriga gets boxed in the outer lane yes. I will totally give up on disputing that race in this scenario, braking in one turn and changing to the inner lane next

4) AI compares stats between opposing teams. If an auriga has a higher skill or a chariot is bigger than a posible target for the next turn, it is very likely that he choose to attack. The solution is to even skill and/or size [:)]

5)I guess we should have made buttons for the iPad versions even bigger [:(]

6)The "have the better charioteer in you team" could be a piece of cake sometimes and really difficult when some other leader takes an advantage during the campaign.

7)I admit that the end screen is not sufficiently rewarding after a long epic campaign. Will take this into account for the future!

Thanks for you analysis

[76mm]

Hi Turnopia, thanks for your responses. A couple of comments in bold below:

ORIGINAL: Turnopia

3) The Drunken-Crowd event is quite mortal if a low contitution auriga gets boxed in the outer lane yes. I will totally give up on disputing that race in this scenario, braking in one turn and changing to the inner lane next
The problem as that I was never even given a chance to change lanes; I guess I might have been able to brake the second turn out of the gate, but both times after that my auriga got clobbered and remained stunned until he died...I never had a chance to react...

5)I guess we should have made buttons for the iPad versions even bigger [:(]
Would be nice!

7)I admit that the end screen is not sufficiently rewarding after a long epic campaign. Will take this into account for the future!
Even if you simply have the screen stop scrolling when it reaches the top of the screen, it would be helpful, as I'd be able to read the info then--as it is, it just keeps scrolling up and off the screen, and I never got to read the data!

[76mm]

I was just on a couple of very long flights so fired up another epic campaign to while away some time.

Once again, I had a great time until I got to Circus Maximus, at which point the game descended into complete tedium--the faction leaders where far ahead of my leading auriga, and catching up would take many many races, assuming that my leading auriga even survived that long. And it is very very difficult to kill specific aurigas in a race. So after about 50 races like this, I just quit the epic campaign, which will probably be my last.

I really think you need to change the victory conditions for the epic campaign, right now the end game (as in the last couple hundred races) is simply not fun.

A couple more frustrating issues:
1) I mentioned previously that when re-sizing and moving the tablet screen, it is far too easy to end up with one of the action buttons under your finger, and thus accidentally choose the wrong action. This happened to me several times in this campaign;

2) I managed to acquire a spiked chariot this time, but several times when I ordered it to ram another chariot, nothing happened. I don't mean that no damage was inflicted, but that no ramming occurred at all. Why?

3) It really seems like there are very few crashes at Circus Maximus compared to other places. Again, this makes the end-game very very dull. Not only are my aurigas far behind, but the races are rather dull, and the rival aurigas are not as likely to be killed in crashes. Am I imagining that Circus Maximus is too safe? Why is it like that--was it historically wider than other tracks, or what? For game-play reasons it should be more dangerous IMHO.

[Jones944]

I won my epic campaign by winning my three races at Circus Maximus and then moving on to win other races at the smaller tracks. Like you I was finding myself chasing one Auriga who had 10 more wins than I did, but I found him in a race with me on one of the smaller tracks and I managed to kill him! It was a great moment and a high point of my play with this game so far. After the race was over I was taken to the winners screen for the campaign. Tough to do but very possible.

In my current epic campaign, I am taking great pains to stalk and kill any other faction leader that I can find, even to the point of not trying to win the race, just kill my one target. This has worked to a point, as I've killed off some of the other leaders, but just by changing tracks more show up. Another layer of strategy in the game!

[76mm]

ORIGINAL: Jones944
In my current epic campaign, I am taking great pains to stalk and kill any other faction leader that I can find, even to the point of not trying to win the race, just kill my one target.

Sure, this is interesting for a couple of races, but not for dozens. I had one rival survive about 8 chariot crashes before he finally died. And while it can be slightly easier to kill rivals on smaller tracks, very often there are not even worthwhile targets to go after in smaller races...

[Jones944]

Well, I play this game 99% on my Android phone, so it's more about killing time for me than finishing a campaign. It's just about having a fun game to play and having the motivation to not get my aurighi killed. Epic campaigns fit that bill to a 'T'.

Trying to win your first Epic campaign can present the frustrations you describe, though.

[76mm]

Wow, I can't imagine playing on a phone, with such a small screen! Generally it is perfect on my iPad other than the buttons being a tad small and problems with the buttons when I resize/move the screen. You don't have any problems with that?

[Jones944]

ORIGINAL: 76mm

Wow, I can't imagine playing on a phone, with such a small screen! Generally it is perfect on my iPad other than the buttons being a tad small and problems with the buttons when I resize/move the screen. You don't have any problems with that?

I've got a Galaxy Note, so it's a large phone, but even still I need to be zoomed in all the way to avoid hitting the wrong command with my clumsy thumbs. I'd love a tablet, but this phone at least fits in my back pocket and thus I'm not as conspicuous when taking it into the can with me! [:)]

[76mm]

I had a couple of long flights over the holidays so finished one more epic campaign, which I think will be my last. This time I chose the purple team so had ready access to spiked chariots, but pretty crap horses.

Anyway, a few more comments about the game:

1) Maybe everyone realizes this other than me, but I just figured something out: you should NEVER autocomplete the races before the end, because if you do, the game will automatically assign the victory to one of the faction leaders, usually the leading one--so every time you auto-complete, you put your rivals that much further ahead of you. Same thing happens if you crash (although I'm not sure it happens if you crash and your auriga is killed). To avoid this, you have to at least run the race until someone wins by crossing the finish line, THEN you can hit auto-complete. I figured this out after running interference for some of my rivals, putting them FAR back into the pack before auto-completing, and then seeing that they won the race...WTF?

Obviously, this makes the end game even more tedious than it was before (which is no mean feat), because you can't quickly bail out of boring, no-hope races.

2) For the last couple of hundred races, there is no point in winning money, since you can't really spend it on anything, and for most of your auriga team, there is no point in winning races, since they are so far behind the leaders. So the game devolves into (1) try to win with your lead auriga while racing very cautiously so you don't lose him; (2) race aggresively with your "hack" aurigas to kill rivals.

It would make the end-game much less boring if:

(a) there was something we could spend money on--why not make better horses/chariots available (even if not usually available) for VERY high prices? And horses should cost more than chariots since once you have horses, you'll probably have them for the duration of the campaign, while chariots are "disposable" items that are destroyed fairly often; and

(b) It mattered if all of your aurigas won races or not; I still think that the victory conditions should be changed so that victory is determined by TEAM victories, not lead auriga victories.

3) For some reason, despite having a whole screen to play with, when you win an epic campaign it only shows your last two campaigns, rather than all of them. Why?

Probably no more comments from me. I hope that if there is a new version of the game, it will take some of these comments (and the many other comments which various players have posted) into account. It is a great game but could become much, much better.

[SteveD64]

Just getting back into this game after some time off. It can get addicting. I don't have high hopes for an expansion but if 76mm is correct then the AI does not complete the race if you auto-finish. It simply assigns the winner. This should be changed.

Spending money to disable random events would be nice. Sometimes you just want to race.

There have been quite a few good suggestions in other threads but I don't think we'll see an expansion, which is too bad.

FWIW, Rock, Paper, Shotgun said it was the best racing game of 2014- http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/qvadriga/

[Niessuh]

Right now I 'm working on brand new ideas, but surely in future years I will begin to build Qvadriga 2 ... and I hope to meet many of the requests viewed here [:)]