LAND will be... homogeneous

The Town Hall on Monday way revealing

but not necessarily in a good way. But maybe that is just my first bias talking. Perhaps it will work out eventually when LAND goes live at the end of the year (and in summer for v1.5). So what am I talking about?

Last week I was getting ready for LAND. And in that post I talked mainly about the terrain types and how this would interplay with my cards. We now know that there are buffs and rather massive debuffs of 50% for certain Splinters on different types of land. Here is the table again:

Essentially I was trying to figure out what cards I have that have the biggest PPs and on which type of LAND they would be best utilized. You can see the table for that in the post above. Probably everybody should be making such a table for themselves to get a better overview.

But now for the revelation...

LAND is going to be homogeneous! I always assumed that claiming a plot would be about a 1/14 chance of receiving a certain terrain type. But this is completely wrong. We now know that the team is planning for entire Regions to have a 85% preference for a certain terrain(!). On the test servers this is what people are getting:

Again, this is for an entire region. There will be mainly one terrain type. The chance for the second most dominant one is only at around 10%. In the TH, we also a live demonstration of surveying. A whole tract (100 plots) was being surveyed and we basically only got tundras:

Even @aggroed was surprised by this which is somewhat odd as it seems he also didn't know it was going to play out like this. Even from a map point of view this is confusing. Look at this region for example:

We see a lake, swamps, bogs, forests, plains and mountains. They are all pretty evenly distributed. But it seems all of that doesn't really matter. The artwork is mainly a placeholder. The main terrain type might simply be swamp. So no matter where you claim your plot the chance for getting swamp is 85%... Is that good? Personally I don't like it.

Messing with my card collection

And there is a good reason for that. I would assume most people have a fairly even distribution of cards from all Splinters. But if we mainly get 1 terrain type we know that there are always for two Splinters (except for special types) a -50% debuff. So if you get a swamp you do not want to have Fire or Life on it. It doesn't make any sense to work them with a 50% debuff. But what if you have mainly Fire and/or Life cards with the highest PPs? Bad luck?

Perhaps not completely. I suppose what will happen now is that surveying on certain Regions is not going to be just random anymore. People will want to claim now in a region that best fits their cards. I am supposing that once surveying goes live, it will be apparent what dominant terrain type a region will have. This will make it at least much more predictable and one can at least be fairly certain to get the desired terrain.

Could it make sense to claim in different Regions?

Probably not, since we know that claiming in different regions has a 12.5% tax for transfers. But that is still lower than a 50% debuff... Perhaps the better strategy is to still claim in one region but to trade cards. So trading fire for water that have the same PPs might be the best strategy assuming that one does not want to play with them.

This is probably also what I am going to do; although it is a bit disappointing that the terrain type is so dominant. I suppose they had to do that to mitigate the advantages of people that have entire regions. In this way nobody will have it all and it also encourages trading quite a lot.

What about you, did you expect it to be like this?

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