Research Balancing Update

The disadvantages with regards to the proposed research changes outweigh their advantages. Both advantages and disadvantages will be discussed below.

The main advantages occur in early-game, in which more units are accessible sooner, hence game pacing will increase and a much wider variety of strategies will be available. No longer are games restricted to infantry stacks in the first few days. The research costs in the beginning are manageable for the early game economy, which is characterized by a surplus of food. However, given the time costs of each upgrade are so short, the player would soon run out of rare materials, and now it is no longer possible to be constantly researching. A typical production for rare materials in early game is around +100/hr. The potentially accessible researches, for example in the naval tab are have huge opportunity costs given their cost in rare materials. The current costs would be problematic in games where diversification is needed, ie. Pacific Conquest or World at War.

The main disadvantage is that the costs for the researches during middle game are too high. Given that it costs more rare materials and food for research, it now sacrifices the option of building industrial complexes on resource tiles for economic development. In particular, food and rare material would be a much more valuable resource. Moreover, during this stage of the game, there are many wars ongoing, and those who have conquered lands should start to realize that their food productions are decreasing due to the food consumption of the population and upkeep from the armies. The flexibility of early-game is now reduced as more typically used units dominate many others. For example, the tactical bomber, a focused research on this would result in highly valuable returns compared to a focused research in troops with low anti-air defense values. The costs for focusing solely on the tactical bombers are comparable to troops that it easily defeats. Hence, it will become disadvantageous to research a larger variety of units, and focusing on units such as artillery, and tactical bombers will be norm for more experienced players. In effect, the amount of strategies to work with will be decreased due to the economic costs of researching them. Although the accessibility of researches is earlier, the feasibility of having a particular research is far lower. This would lead to fewer researches being accessible to players, and thus more limited strategies at play on the battlefield. The new research system effectively forces the player to focus on just one or two research streams. Even though some researches are cheap, the resources invested into those can be better used on specialization. ie. Researching many different tanks, only to be defeated by tactical bombers.

Feel free to provide counter-arguments and feedback.

I do not like the new research for these reasons:

• Certain units can be researched to early. you can research rockets and lv. 2 infantry on the same day and you can research Railroad Guns before Medium tanks. it messes up strategy's and makes certain units available to early\
• The best units can be made to early. for example, Nuclear rockets can be researched on only day 20 while on the old one they aren't able to be researched until day 40. this makes advancing more difficult because you now have to worry about nuclear warfare early in the game.
• The update has no effect on building times. you might have Light Tanks researched very early in joining, yet you still have to wait another day for your infrastructure to be built and you can actually start making them. the time of buildings and the time of research are very uneven which makes building units and upgrading buildings in time of your next research challenging.

as you can see, everything becomes elite in day 22, and nukes come around in Day 10. this makes it very frustrating when trying to attack when your buildings are built, your units are produced and your troops move all at the same pace. the only thing sped up is research and in this game, it is a domino effect. if you speed up one thing, it has a direct effect on everything else. one thing sped up means you have to speed up everything else to make the game run smoothly.

I haven't seen the new knowledge yet but I don't like the chart i see here. Knowledge comes very fast now but the resources will lack to meet the building requirements and to produce those units.

Will this be a standard in all games or can you chose between the two different knowledge variations?

BMfox wrote:

Will this be a standard in all games or can you chose between the two different knowledge variations?

Have to agree, I don't like what I am seeing.

A nuclear bomber at day 10, and nuke missiles at day 20?

AA would be hard to scrape up in time.

No offense towards the gold, I understand it is necessary for the game; but I feel gold users would just run wild with all this early research, with little chance of regular users stopping them.

Thanks for the feedback so far! We are planning to do some tweaks and further adjustments, which will be shared later.

The base concept itself, that the research tree will be shortened and researches fastened will not be changed though and will be the new standard for all game rounds (new games after its live release). There can be event games though which make use of a different research pacing. And as I said, the details will be tweaked again before releasing it, to adress some concerns.

It is of course per design that at some point you also have to take resource cost into consideration and not only research time, which makes choices more meaningful. In the current old system you basically research constantly as resource costs for research are in most cases meaningless, and due to that not much thinking is required. The new system will present some more meaningful choices to the players.

This is also only the first step in a larger rebalancing of the game. Things that may seem out of context now will fit better once we also tackle the other areas of the game some time in the future. But that's future talk...

General Nightman wrote:

No offense towards the gold, I understand it is necessary for the game; but I feel gold users would just run wild with all this early research, with little chance of regular users stopping them.

I'm not discussing gold.

A compromise of shorter research time with units not being so quick to be able to research might be perfect.

cerealnerd wrote:

General Nightman wrote:

No offense towards the gold, I understand it is necessary for the game; but I feel gold users would just run wild with all this early research, with little chance of regular users stopping them.

Can you think of a better way to increase profits? It is just a business plan.

I am more than a little unconfortable with all these information (I only hope reality will be different, despite the confirmations). First of all, if ALL reports are negative and the developers effectively say "we know better", then beta is a pure waste of time. At a minimum the reply SHOULD have been "we are reconsidering".

Secondly, increasing reasearch speed without increasing buildings/movement speed is a clear admission that they want a shoot em up game, and not a strategy game. Since super strong weapons will be available too early, the whole game is changing form and becomes one of the many shallow games where people fantasize that they nuke the world.

But not only that - it is admitted that the changes are also part of a not yet implemented concept. I have an idea: when the concept is implemented and complete, so as the ideas that now seem meaningless to make sense, the whole framework will be able to be judged. As it is now it certainly looks like a hasty attempt for we all can think what.

freezy wrote:

Thanks for the feedback so far! We are planning to do some tweaks and further adjustments, which will be shared later.

The base concept itself, that the research tree will be shortened and researches fastened will not be changed though and will be the new standard for all game rounds (new games after its live release). There can be event games though which make use of a different research pacing. And as I said, the details will be tweaked again before releasing it, to adress some concerns.

It is of course per design that at some point you also have to take resource cost into consideration and not only research time, which makes choices more meaningful. In the current old system you basically research constantly as resource costs for research are in most cases meaningless, and due to that not much thinking is required. The new system will present some more meaningful choices to the players.

This is also only the first step in a larger rebalancing of the game. Things that may seem out of context now will fit better once we also tackle the other areas of the game some time in the future. But that's future talk...

Moreover, the nuclear rocket effectively disables most strategies. There are the few specific counters that must be researched, and again, this defeats the intent of allowing more strategies.

Research Update for Beta

Attention Generals!

We would like to give a big thank you to all our Frontline Pioneers who help us testing the update to the research tree in beta games. According to your input we added some changes to the update so please keep testing and share your feedback with us as it helps tremendously.

NOTE: Mentioned changes only apply to newly started games. Games that were started before this update will not be affected.

Please find a list of recent changes below:

- We increased research durations again, especially on later levels, while keeping them low on the first levels.

--> This will encourage researching a wide variety of units more than just focusing on single units.

- We decreased research costs again, especially on later levels, while still having a cost progression.

--> This addresses raised concerns that the new research tree drains too many resources at a certain point. While we still want research choices to become hard decisions that are dependent on both time and resources, it should be done more gradually.

- We made nuclear bomber and nuclear rocket research more expensive, in comparison to other researches.

- -> The overall research costs were reduced for all units as mentioned above, but they were reduced less for the nuclear rocket and nuclear bomber. This change will give higher opportunity costs to researching nuclear weapons, to address the concern that they may become too important in the game's strategy.

- We increased metal cost of nuclear bomber from 500 to 1500 and increased rare material cost of nuclear rocket from 10000 to 12500.

--> This change makes nuclear weapons a bit less cost-efficient to address the concern that nuclear weapons may become too important in the game's strategy.

- We postponed the day of availability of most of secret units by 2 days.

--> This addresses raised concerns that secret units become available too early.

- We postponed the day of availability of the first levels of nuclear bomb and nuclear bomber to day 14.

--> This addresses the concern that nuclear weapons become available too early.

- We reduced the construction time of Infrastructure level 1 from 24h to 4h and of Airbase level 1 from 18h to 8h, to align them more with other production buildings.

--> This addresses the concern that unit production capabilities cannot be kept in sync with research progress. Unit production of all classes can now be started earlier in the game.

- We reduced the hitpoints of Infrastructure, Barracks, Airport and Naval base to 5, and also reduced their economic ranking factors to 5

--> This change addresses the fast construction time of these production buildings. They are easy and fast to construct, but also give less ranking points and are also fast to destroy.

- We changed the minimum condition at which airbases and infrastructures on level 1 become functioning to 5 of 5.

--> This change makes these buildings consistent with all other level 1 buildings, as all of them only function when at 100% health. This change was also necessary to prevent forward operating airbases too powerful due to the reduced build times of airbases.

We hope you like these changes! We cannot wait to hear your feedback and your insights from playing and testing the new adjustements. Again, thank you for testing and sharing!

Your Bytro Team

Very nice to see the team trying to address almost all the concerns.

Really well done!

freezy wrote:

This is also only the first step in a larger rebalancing of the game. Things that may seem out of context now will fit better once we also tackle the other areas of the game some time in the future. But that's future talk...

I created a 100p 4x speed map on the EN server for you guys to quickly run through a game with the new changes. Please test and give feedback again!

Game ID 2742438

medhat_2000 wrote:

I understand that we probably can't get an ETA on these changes. But roughly, are we talking about a couple of months in the future, or more like in 2020-2021?

freezy wrote:

Really no idea, its also not set in stone on our side. It was just a vague outlook that we have plans to overhaul more aspects of the game. Once we have something to say about that, we will.

alright, I will test the new tree. these updates look better and thank you for taking in my input!

I like every suggestion except one.

Arcorian wrote:

- We reduced the hitpoints of Infrastructure, Barracks, Airport and Naval base to 5, and also reduced their economic ranking factors to 5

--> This change addresses the fast construction time of these production buildings. They are easy and fast to construct, but also give less ranking points and are also fast to destroy.

Perhaps 10-15HP?

Just thought of something that might not fit well together with the new research speedup.

Forts

Forts are already devalued (Infra is now giving morale) and now the faster advent of their real killers (Rockets Lvl4) will be the end of them I think. Even if they become MUCH cheaper, this might not be enough because they are practically almost useless (or perhaps in more diplomatic terms practically suboptimal).

Do you have any thoughts on that?

atreas1 wrote:

Just thought of something that might not fit well together with the new research speedup.

Forts

Forts are already devalued (Infra is now giving morale) and now the faster advent of their real killers (Rockets Lvl4) will be the end of them I think. Even if they become MUCH cheaper, this might not be enough because they are practically almost useless (or perhaps in more diplomatic terms practically suboptimal).

Do you have any thoughts on that?

General Nightman wrote:

I like every suggestion except one.

Arcorian wrote:

- We reduced the hitpoints of Infrastructure, Barracks, Airport and Naval base to 5, and also reduced their economic ranking factors to 5

--> This change addresses the fast construction time of these production buildings. They are easy and fast to construct, but also give less ranking points and are also fast to destroy.

Strategic bombers would be extremely powerful against these, one bombing run and another building is gone. Resources are tight early game, having to rebuild that much would be devastating.Perhaps 10-15HP?

We forgot to mention one point in the update, I added it at the end of Arcorian's list on the previous page.