For those that have not seen this posted before or are unaware....you will see a large plunder drop if you upgrade most or all of your t6 buildings to the new levels. Chaos already mentioned this in the release thread saying he had upgraded about 1/2 of his hoarfrost buildings and saw a 16m per hit drop in plunder from HTE. I've seen the "why did my plunder go down" posts in forums so many times and many don't seem to understand the math behind it. This happens because the algorithm used to compute plunder per action uses a ratio of total strength to number of troops. That means, if your strength goes up but your troops do not, you make less plunder. If your troops go down but your strength stays the same, you will make less plunder. If your strength increases a lot but your troops barely increase, you will make less plunder. This is why towers kill plunder. Towers contribute strenth but do not add to your troop count so plunder goes down. Same situation for castle upgrades although the strength boost is minimal so the effect is fairly small. T6 buildings were the first ones where this issue really became obvious. The strength of t6 buildings is very large comparative to the level of troops you get. So lvl 3 upgrades decreased plunder for almost every type of build. This issue is now significantly more apparent with the new upgrades. T6 level 4 and 5 provide a much larger strength jump than prior buildings and upgrades but the increase in troop numbers is quite small. You can expect plunder to drop for every upgrade you do of lvl 4 and 5. The converse of this is also true. Guild hansels used to make ridiculous plunder for their size because their total strength was quite small for the total number of troops. The devs nerfed that by changing the algorithm for the lvl 4 guild building. Obviously, the closest replacement is now the Shadow Hansel, using lvl 1 buildings for a similar result. There are a number of additional factors used in plunder computations. Caps on plunder per eb, build size of your kingdom versus the defending kingdome in pvp and EE, etc. We'll see how the new t6 levels affect those situations as well but for now, the clear result is t6 lvl 4 and 5 will give you increased build stats but will decrease your plunder more than anything you can build other than towers.
Very funny... this already was the case when going from T6 lvl2 to lvl3 when hitting low ebs like haunting or HTE. You are supposed to hit the highest tier ebs at that stage, the plunder does increase for SS for example. HTE gets much less interesting at the new HFBC.
If you bump the troops though, then they have to reduce the strength per troop or total CS would be crazy high(er). I had discussed that in an earlier thread. Only way to counter the plunder drop would be if devs cut the strength in 1/2 and doubled the troop amount or something like that. Same result for total CS but no plunder drop. They won't do that though cuz then atk builds would make WAY more for troop plunder because they'd have a ton more soldiers.
Is it only on hte? Or is it dropping for ss and summoner too? Hte plunder starts dropping for me as soon as i upgrade hf to lv 2.
Op is the first person to give a plausible reason for the plunder droppage. I hope it gets fixed . I know players who have put down lvl 1 builds in hoarfrost until LC because they knew their plunder was going to diminish as they upgraded. Never made sense to me why the devs would nerf plunder as you grew.