Call of War 1.5 round 2!

freezy wrote:

Each level roughly grants a 30% strength increase, and you can skip levels with upgrading while only paying for the final level (e.g. upgrade from lvl1 to lvl4 and only pay for lvl4).

Being able to skip levels makes the 100% cost of upgrading much easier to bear as a level 4 unit will be impressively more powerful than a level 1.

@freezy

Another point, lower level units require less purduce time. Sometimes you may want more lv1 units, instead few lv2 units.

S1 do the best. In S1, I dont feel too many questions need to improved, except Assault Infantry image...

Balance, good.

Graphic, good.

Art, good.

Player Numbers, few...

Now on to page 3

EZ Dolittle wrote:

I am totally opposed to the manpower cost to upgrade a unit. We are changing equipment not the people !

Manpower shortages are rough in the beginning especially with large manpower costs for research.

This needs to change

Torpedo28000 wrote:

From looking through the stats of units here are my thoughts / questions on some of them:

Firstly, I do really like how some troops seem to maybe synergies with others, planes and no metal, tanks and no rares. Whether with production this is possible to build together idk yet but in theory I like it.

Tanks don’t seem do enough damage to infantry units, looking at stats, they seem to do like a bit of inf damage but LA (light armour) and MA (medium armour) but they don’t seem to do enough inf damage at all. Infantry lvl 1 does more damage to inf units than LT? This seems a little not right how does this work? Yes they will win due to armour difference, but they should be doing more damage to inf right? Is this a conscious choice? Day 2 inf does only 0.5 inf damage less than day 3 MT. This follows into higher levels. So I feel esp since MT are meant to be offensive (I like that) they don’t do enough damage to infantry units. MT in my mind should slaughter infantry (If no AT) but they wont, or at least not compared to other troops which to me means they are not a clear inf killing troops, at elite lvl only 3 difference between inf and MT is just I feel not enough at all! ESP as AT are very strong.

Finally (for my tank bit), I super strongly believe offensive melee combat is never a good idea. I almost never offensively attack someone with anything unless i’m 5x+ stronger, I use arty or planes but never tank attacks, tanks on defence yes! So to change my mind about it, tanks need to **really** pack the offensive damage which they are not. I really hate doing this but no tank melee attacks has lead me to win 8/9 100 maps and not ever seen a successful player win using tanks on the offensive. I really think MT need to smash in the offensive damage, not do okay in it when I can just let my arty kill from a same distance and let the enemy run into me with some AT and tanks in defence. I’d love to see large tank attacks do well, but for their cost and relatively low inf attack I don’t see myself using them esp with strong AA and AT HA defence values. I will have to test this ofc, but it will all depend on what my opponents do, and i’m rarely wrong with troop stats and combats... I may play to much...

Motorized infantry (I think stat wise this unit looks really good) does more inf damage than a MT at elite level. And it an inf unit so more difficult to counter (no AT to kill it/ anti-infantry unit) so to kill infantry I’d be using motorised infantry, and to kill armour AT / TD. So what is the point of a MT? A HA inf killer? Not really, a good armour killer, TD better.

I think MT inf attack needs to be buffed.

AA has better HA defence than infantry?

I always felt inf was the average at everything but not great at anything, now AA has ofc better AA defence and better HA defence just seems odd. I feel AT should have good tank defence and crap infantry and air, AA good air defence and crap infantry and armour etc. Why does AA have better HA defence?

Troop consumption and cost: Is the aim of 1.5 to on average have less total units produced than in 1.0. Seems so but wanting to know for my tests if this is intentional or not. May not be as i’m basing off 1.0 production capabilities with 1.5 costs. But is it?

Similar to above, I am very active, so I want to ensure my testing is inline with what the planed build amounts are: So I guess how often do you think we should be able to build a troop, factory and IC? Equal, more, less than 1.0? On average as each troop/building costs different.

Inf are strongest vs. unarmored, so in my eyes it is absolutely justified that anti-inf damage of Inf is comparable to anti-inf damage of tanks. Otherwise Inf would be worse than tanks in every regard, making Inf underpowered again (as in CoW1.0). But we want Inf in CoW1.5 to be a valid unit even in the lategame. It is more about the counter system in 1.5, because now we have 3 ground armor classes and units which are discintively better vs. certain armor classes.

Medium Tanks beat Infantry greatly, because Inf does not counter heavy armor very well. You may use motorized Inf to beat other Inf, but the motorized Inf also takes much more damage in return and has much less HP than the Medium tank. The Medium tank does not have as many "natural enemies" as the Inf does, as far more units are anti-UA than anti-HA. Don't compare only one damage value but consider all traits of a unit, that would be my recommendation

I just ran some internal calculations with units of equal unlock days. A Light tank lvl1 should win with ~44% remaining vs. a Inf lvl1 (without any terrain or home defense bonus and without x-factor). A Medium tank should win with 80% remaining vs an Inf lvl2 and a Motorized Inf lvl1 should be tied vs. an Inf lvl 2 (both dead). Well maybe you now see what I mean.

Regarding successful tank attacks: I saw enough other players going for a tank strategy and win. I think you are a pretty rare case if you only attack melee if you are 5x stronger, majority of players don't do that. It's all about preferences though, so its ok if you like to play differently. That doesn't mean that other ways of playing won#t work though.

AA has a larger caliber gun (e.g. Flak 8. and this is better vs. HA than Infantry, yes. Most units have a secondary prefered target after their focus target, and for AA its HA after Air. For Inf its LA after UA. All about diversity and different roles. AA is still much worse vs. HA than ATs though.

As said we will probably revise troop costs once more so you can produce more of them.

Upkeep cost right now is 1/20 of the production cost, means after having a unit for 20 days you could have used the upkeep to build a new one. That's an ok value in my view, considering the round only lasts 28 days.

Probably you should be able to build slightly less troops than in 1.0 because starting resources are decreased a bit and costs for units and buildings are increasing while in 1.0 they are not. But current amounts seem slightly too low.

Teburu wrote:

sure; but as @Mc_Johnsen already said; these (insane) fast mobilizations time paired with the "normal" movementspeed feels like a weird mix of a speedgame and normal one

Also I would not call that insanely fast. Play a round of our other game Supremacy 1 if you want to see insanely fast lvl1 production times

EZ Dolittle wrote:

Noticed that you can not build a port in a non urban province. While we have airfields and aircraft factories why not have Harbors and Port Industries. This way you can speed up the embarkation and debarkation of troops.

cycle9 wrote:

Ja, Really!

In CoW 1.0 we can spend 1k goods and iron, 1.25k oil and 7.5k cash

to save 1.5 hour embark time. Not to mention the other 1.5 hours we

save retreating our forces back home.

Where is the justice?

EZ Dolittle wrote:

Common mistakes seen:

1. INFRASTRUCTURE

by habit players are doing infrastructure on resources places but they have NO advantage to them. Infrastructure is now a luxury item to increase speed of bringing troops to the front. as an experiment I am doing this as Egypt in a game to go from Luxor to Benghazi so as to ship to the Southern European front.

NOTE TO DESIGNERS: infrastructure needs to have a little more incentive to use.

2. Production type

Multiple build types in a city. You start with 5 cities and four should be devoted to ONE type: Armor, Artillery, Navy and Air. The 5th City should be used for a duplicate of the Navy or Air or Tank as per your style. I would save the Barracks for a captured city since the upgrade costs for infantry is outrageous.

3.Research Manpower Sink

The early game there is a shortage of manpower, so avoid going for things like AA AT and maybe even Destroyers.

Wait till later in the game when manpower is more readily available as the research times are not much.

NOTE TO DESIGNERS: the manpower costs for research is absurd.

4. SILENCE

Too many people do not talk to other people. You should ideally send a message to every single player in the game and say Hi or simply ask if they know anyone in the game.

5. FAILURE TO DIPLOMACY WITH AI

You still need to set RoW or better with every AI country in order to secure maybe a RoW or even an Alliance with them. Having an Alliance with Estonia as Egypt gives you the equivalent of some spying around that area.

That said we can still make it a little cheaper in the next Event.

Manpower cost for research is so high because in our test rounds before the event we realized that players now had too much manpower after our rebalancing, with manpower stockpiling alot compared to the other resources. I have to say in the tests afterwards and also my live test that the resource need is now pretty much balanced across all resources, there is none where I would say it is much more or much less required than others. Overall of course we could use a little more resources in general. The balancing is still not finished though, so resources will probably change again in the next event.

Torpedo28000 wrote:

Yes I do agree, or at least no value in a small 22 map. Possibly in Siberia in a 100/50 map for faster speed... but really that is a luxury. The moral boost is great but I will be building up my core and spreading out from there, and thus it is unlikely I would spend the rss to get the this boost. While it isn't crazy expensive, it doesn't give any bonuses that are really worth it. Possibly the moral boost but late game in a 100 map, day 30+ im thinking. Rss seem quite tight so far so the extra even small cost I wouldn't be building at this stage in the game.

I think it is similar to building forts in a 100 map for moral, only something I do when I have soooo many rss it doesn't matter. As well as I have NEVER built infra for the speed boost but always for the rss boost or to build troops.

I think if it had no moral bonus and pure speed but a VERY low cost it may be worth doing. And I mean maybe 300 goods for all levels or less. Then I could see myself building it.

I have always liked the idea of supply into the game, cutting off someone or investing to get your front sorted for a prolonged war, and IK this is not something that will be implemented due to them being far too difficult to implement, and im not suggesting to do so. But perhaps changing the name of infrastructure to supply lines - or something more creative, giving them a LOW cost but improving speed could be a way to implement the notion of "supply" into the game without actually changing anything. Or simply using them to increase troop speed and not supply but infrastructure. The end result is the same really.

You dont need them, but a 200% movement speed increase for perhaps 300 goods per province could be something used later in the game. (300 goods is just a number but I feel is cheap enough for me to do this probably day 10+) as speed increase is nice, but I will 99% of the time invest in troops or production given I don’t fight stalled fronts really ever, so for a straight speed increase building it needs to be cheap.

• Perhaps a sliding cost scale of 50 goods for lvl 1, 100 for lvl 2 and 150 for lvl 3. Just as idea - Perhaps one to explore pending how many users use Infrastructure from your data collecting.

Torpedo28000 wrote:

Anotherbit of feedback regarding plane vs plane dog fighting:

The new plane air damage with planes doing far more damage in the attackcompared to the defence is a feature, in theory I LOVE! I think it makes sensecompletely and is an awesome change…in theory.

I havetwo concerns with this change. If there is a plan to solve these issue then Iwould love for this change to stay as I think it makes sense the attacker hasan advantage, and I think more troops should have attack and not defence stats.(I also feel it gives ints an even bigger air role)

1. Because now the attack is significantly more deadly than defence and alsoovertly (whereas in 1.0 the defence is better due to game mechanics and notstats) I see fights with planes being very dull and no action occurring. If 2players now are doing plane vs plane combat you generally have all your planespatrolling over each other and let the combat go given the attack and defenceare almost the same. (stat ik are the same). But in 1.5 the attack is vastlysuperior so I see lots of cancelling the patrols to ensure you don’t have todefend, in battles against active or competent players I see the only way tokill a plane is to hope the enemy forgets his planes are still patrolling, noone will actively let their planes defend and therefore these fights will nowbe long durations of cancelling the patrol hoping the enemy doesn’t - notsomething that sounds enjoyable.

2 theobvious way to counter this problem is just to DA (direct attack), this meansthe first person to press the DA and if planes are the same lvl the one to doit first gets a lovely advantage and gets to attack first, this should resultin lots of attacks and defences. BUT, due to the patrol and DA mechanics, if Iwas to DA a stack of planes, but there are 1 or more stacks also patrolling, Iwill lose more than I will kill, (hard to explain but im trying to refer to thefact when you DA a stack and planes patrol, the patrolling stack loses nodamage and inflicts 100%). Because of this, DA is also not a viable option.

As withall my suggestions, im no coder at all, and so im not entirely sure how tosolve this easily without just simply "deleting the DA and patrolmechanic" (im assuming it isn't that easy? And it is something I do like as well, so a better idea would be nicer).

Is this a known issue/ something now that will be addressed? Again, if there isa way to solve this then yes I really love the fact planes now do far moredamage in the attack, I think it makes sense and could add some nice game playmechanics. However with these two limitations I have outlined, I do not likethis change.

This should answer already your second point: Direct attacks should now be much more viable than before.

To the first point:

When a plane is on patrol and does its patrol tick, it uses its offensive damage values. So whoever patrols in a certain location first will get the first offensive patrol tick and thus do more damage in the first tick. I think you are aluding to that the optimal strategy is therefore to cancel your patrol after the first tick in order to have a gain from the fight? That certainly would be a possibility, not much we can do about that. It is certainly much better compared to the previous behaviour where players circumvented the stacking limits during defensive ticks, with which players could establish some "no-go areas" for enemy planes on the map. I also don't see this avoding of defensive ticks to occur that often, maybe only when both sides are pretty much equal. But if one side already has an advantage in numbers it will certainly pursue that advantage and won't cancel patroling no matter the mechanics, while the player with the smaller army would most likely cancel his patrol anyway no matter the mechanics. So I guess in normal situations the mechanics change won't change behaviour that much. Especially since now DAs are more viable vs. patrols. So as a summary I don't see a big problem here right now and would just let it play out instead of theorycrafting too much about it.

Akulla3D wrote:

So far this iteration is looking good!

I haven’t found any bugs and the game play seems smooth enough. I really like this version of COW as it makes the player have to focus on strategy more as the buildings you choose make a difference, where in current version you must throw up some factories and your good to go.

--- comments below

• Overall I feel that it is still a little expensive in the beginning, doing initial upgrades and research and building units I have run out of resources really quickly, as this does not happen in current game – if this is intended then leave it – because it really will slow people down in the beginning and give people a chance to not get slammed early game.
• Oil seems to be a bottleneck early on and I found myself almost out of it by end of 2^nd day where in other game this doesn’t happen until 15 or 20 if you are not paying attention.
• I feel like the Infrastructure improvement has lost its importance, as there really is no reason to build it unless you are in Russia or something and need the speed to move your troops across them faster.Not sure what to do with it maybe at end game it would be worth it for Moral.
  • Note I might be convinced to use them if there were very cheap.

Overall well done on this version, it is polished and purposeful. Looking forward to playing this in 100 man game.

Akulla3D

Players certainly run out more quickly because initial build times are lower. That may shift in later stages as resource production picks up and build times become longer. But we still may tweak resources for the next event.

In my 1.5 game I don't feel that oil is a bottleneck. I have pretty much all resources on nearly the same level. I guess this comes down to 2 things: a) country differences (countries now produce more or less from certain resources) and b) prefered game style. if you focus on buildings and units which cost alot of oil, you will run out of it more quickly. I recommend trying to spend equally to maximize your output.

On the Infrastrucure I already commented. It lost one buff but the other 2 remaining buffs are now greater and the building is cheaper. But we can still lower the cost in future events.

cycle9 wrote:

Day 5 commentary;

As observed in round one of CoW 1.5, rares are anything but rare.

In 4 games of round 2, rares selling for .

@Vorlon:

more than one game, more than one engagement with one submarine:

several instances of destroyer bombarding a troop convoy of just two units,

and NO damage in first two ticks.

another example:

submarine attacking a convoy of 6 units, who'e HP had been drastically

reduced prior to the engagement, the sub eventually won, but with only

32% HP remaing.

Well you can compare the stats of destroyers/subs and Convoys to see how good they will fare in a battle. Certainly convoys on lvl1 are more durable than in CoW1.0, but that is also because damage values are rising greater than in CoW1.0 when leveling up, so on higher levels Convoys get more and more into a disadvantage. So yeah you probably need to build more ships in 1.5 if you wanna yield the same results as in 1.0, but on the other hand we also made ships more accessible with less build requirements and less costs.

There should never be a case where 0 damage was dealt. Maybe server connection lost at that moment or a submarine hidden that was hit?

A sub winning vs. 6 convoys while having 32% left is a fine value for me. I see nothing here that needs to be changed. Convoys are not only transport ships but also have some amarment and supporting vessels. By that you already destroyed resources much greater than what you invested. If you want even better results, well than you have to build more subs

Tasmine wrote:

@freezy

Another point, lower level units require less purduce time. Sometimes you may want more lv1 units, instead few lv2 units.

S1 do the best. In S1, I dont feel too many questions need to improved, except Assault Infantry image...

Balance, good.

Graphic, good.

Art, good.

Player Numbers, few...

Naval battle dynamics has completely changed! Battleships are cheap units now, as they cost about the "same" as subs... and the single sub now has trouble beating an unescorted single battleship! Single sub against two battleship loses easily... surely this isn't as intended? Did the need to "always" escort heavy ships against subs get scrapped on purpose?

Small feed back after playing 5 rounds each day 5 yet.

Feedback to CoW developement.

CoW 1.5.2 is even more quicklier than 1.5.1, wich was more quicklier than common 1.0/2019, wich is more quicklier than 1.0/2017, sorry but more than 50% of players are working peoples. If we dont get x0.50 speed rounds event, then CoW would lose huge amount of player base of working peoples.

Just testing 5 random rounds now is same challenge like 2 Player league rounds same time. Hello? No way it is correct dirrection of game developement. I see, working players are forced to use currency for sleep time, sorry, it is only a game, a product wich should relax. I can pay if im good relaxed, not if im burn outing because of game...

I paid in 5 years in all projects of Bytro and DORADO in summary over 500 €, mosty several 1 year VIP and first purchase deals.

Since changes of 2019 i dont pay a single penny.

It is ok to sell good product, it is not ok to force pay for not enjoyeble product.

And now feedback of changes 1.5.2 to 1.5.1:

Very much single fixed issues, but still not really optimal ballance. Late game is scrumbled by high prices of high level buildings, wich are permitted to deploy highlevel units in suitable time.

I miss possibility of recruiting low level units, since level up researched. But because of ballance it is reasonable change. You answered already to asker, and your answer is right that what i thought as i realized time skip of upgradeble unit compared to recruiting new one.

But still i miss that. Because of new mechanics i never can use level 3 militia and only very seldom level 2 one.

Even AT over lvl 2 is questionable.

Please dont lowering upgrde costs too strong. It should have at least 50% manpower of researched level unit. and may be even 200% of cash, but may be only 30% till 50% of other ressources. Time skip should be expencive. But may be not such expencive like in 1.5.2;

Comparing 1.5.1 i know that middle game continuing floating of ressources take end if you have too many units and too many highlevel buildings. Even with new prices and boostes it would not be enough for common player for use of level 4+ units with more then some lvl 4+ factories. This implements, that some players gain too huge edges.

Also a) steamrollers, b) wolfpackers, c) mmacc user, and at least but not last d) p2w players.

And power up of level 5 unit to level 4 is more powerfull than in 1.5.1; That means, early game is more important, that mean, burn out like gameplay at beginning of rounds. This is a really worst thing of new CoW 1.5.2

We want fun and relax, we want half way passable simulation of WW2, we want challenge of skills, not challenge of online time/virtual clans powers/counting of mobile devices owned/wallet power.

Naval warefare is not tested yet enough, but Convoy seem to be nerfed a little bit too strong, even is some players already whinning about. At least level ups for convoy should be more productive.

Price of submarines is same to destroyers. It is a step back compared to classical CoW.

New SBDE still seem to working bad. Either we have graphical bug, beacause even 40er stack is 100% of single unit stronger than 39 one. May be in fight it work like announced, but we dont see that, also we can not be prepared for right taktiks.

Proposals:

Prices of middle and highlevels of buildings lowering by at least 10% better 15%. Upgrade cost of units lowering by at least 10% max 40% may be with time delay of 10% till 20%.

Price for infrastucture lowering at least by 20% and building time by 25%.

Building time of airfields in rural provinces exstend by at least 50% for level 1, and 33% level 2.

Defencive value of middle and highlevel infantry buffing for at least 10%

would be nice to have proposals:

Limit of direct trade ressources by 200% daily encome every day. (for both direction, reseived and gifted).

Moral debuff for TOP 5 most dreadfull, even if 5% for one day for TOP 1, and 1% TOP 5.

Moral buff for most popular. Even if only 3% for each of TOPs.

miscount

The main issues I've been frequently encountering seem to be a lack of starting resources/really low rate of resource production even with industry complexes built in major resource nodes. The second major issue I have run into is that I can no longer build troops on day two because I have completely run out of resources/money in the middle of a war. I believe the best way to remedy this is to either increase the rate at which resources are produced, make things cheaper, or to just increase the starting resource amount back to what it was in non 1.5 games.

DrDoom34 wrote:

The main issues I've been frequently encountering seem to be a lack of starting resources/really low rate of resource production even with industry complexes built in major resource nodes

I thought the game was playing well until I tried to upgrade units. The resource cost now imposed for each upgrade is ridiculous. This is a huge balancing mistake. I'll keep playing the round to test my fear, but it looks like you ruined an important aspect of the strategy.

Balhog wrote:

I thought the game was playing well until I tried to upgrade units. The resource cost now imposed for each upgrade is ridiculous. This is a huge balancing mistake. I'll keep playing the round to test my fear, but it looks like you ruined an important aspect of the strategy.

Day 3-4review:

I want tofirst acknowledge that I have seen Freezy stating rss will likely be boosted inthe next event. However, I will still be stating if rss are a bottleneck andhow much as I think it is still useful information. But I am aware that thisspecific feedback will be improved upon, so it will keep coming up probably in all my following feedback, but I am aware this will be changed in beta v3.

So forday 3 I spent most of it upgrading my ordinance factories and barracks toprepare for lvl 2 troops. I also build some IC to increase goods, oil and metalproduction.

At theend of day 3 I produced 4 arty and 2 motorised inf (I did not produce troops onday 2 either)

Not a whole lot to report, rss were severely lacking to do much more.

Day 4 Icontinued to produce 3 more arty and 1 more MI (motorised inf) before runningout of goods, therefore a lvl 5 IC is being constructed in my goods province, alvl 2 IC was also constructed to increase food.

Towardsthe end of day 4 I am building some higher Tank factories, Air factories,Ordinance Factories and Barracks to prepare for day 6 and the new troops thatcome with that.

Again rsswere limiting so not a whole lot was done.

Now, hereis why I think rss are limiting and I know you plan to increase it but perhapssome reasonings as to why both the lower flat rss production but also the factthere is more to do (Anything that involves more stuff I am a fanof)

In 1.0, there is only 2 decision when building buildings really for rssproduction

1 Do Ihave any oil? If not then I will only be building IC

If yes then do I want a 20% increase and no increase to production,or a 10% increase and an increase to production.

2 Do Iplan to build troops here? If so then again an IC should be built

In 1.5with regards to the economy there is only one decision. Can I afford an ICupgrade?

However,you now need to also build additional factories, IC does not increaseproduction so whereas in 1.0 a legitimate strategy was build lvl 1 infra, lvl 5IC and this increases the economy and production time.

In 1.5you need to balance factories which increase troop production time, and rssproduction. But also what troops to produce. To get tanks, arty and planes, Ineed to upgrade 3 buildings. AND to get a rss boost I need to really build 5 ICas each troop requires rss.

Again in1.0, IC increases production for everything, in 1.5, a TF only increasesproduction for a tank. So I need to balance more buildings constructions.

Therefore,because of this, more rss are required to do a similar thing in 1.0. I likethis a LOT. Having more decision to make and more to do is IMO great, and I amNOT definitely NOT saying to change this, if anything have more decisions! Butit does mean more rss are required, to build arty in 1.0. To build anything in1.0, really only needed goods, metal and oil. Now in 1.5, rares and food arealso needed so 2 more IC need to be built. Again, I really like this, but itmeans to do a similar thing, WAY more rss are needed.

Hopefullythis explains in my mind a little bit why rss are so lacking and needing to beboosted.

A final observation, I can really feel how upgrading from my lvl 3-4 IC increased my production, I can visibly see the difference and it is really nice to see this change, whereas in 1.0 it was a such a small change it was not often noticed.However, I do think I am noticing it especially as I am struggling for rss. I see that extra +30/hr and oh boy it is nice to see.

I also have noticed that convoys seem a little too strong. My ally attacked 10 grounded lvl 1 planes with only 1x 2 AC and yes I understand 1 AC vs 10 convoys may not win. His AC died and only did about 8HP worth of damage to the convoys. This does not seem enough to me, the challenge of trapping an air and running it down in 1.0 is something very fun but to now have to send in give or take 5-10 AC to kill them ruins this as that simply is not feasible really.

In 1.0 a feature I like is how I can capture and kill 5-10 (pending how the "dice" rolls) all those planes with one AC. If someone is foolish enough to leave planes on the ground near the front when they are offline then I think they deserve to have them taken out.

So far from day 1-4 my comments/conclusions are:

- Rss need to be increased (I know this has been confirmed )

- I really like the whole need one factory for one troop, this does howeverlead to more rss being needed

-WAY WAYWAY better so far than 1.5v1. Yes rss are limited, but so far and this sounds harsh, but it is playable (1.5v1 really was super hard to play), so it is sucha big improvement there. All my feedback so far has been small tweaks, and I want to really emphasise how much better 1.5v2 is than 1.5v1. So thank you for fixing so much of the issues in 1.5v2, still some to go ofc, but only second beta.

-Troops probably should not be upgraded from lvl 1-2, but perhaps 2-3 times throughout their life to max.Along with a 50% cost not 100% could be not so bad, it certainly will take some getting used to but in theory I can see how it could be a good change. I will have to play around with it more, certainly does add an extra decision into the game. The 100% cost does hurt and I will see how it goes with this 2-3 upgrades up to elite and not every new research unlocks in mind.

- I like how each unit uses a different type of rss and its not just metal, goods and oil now. But this does mean rss production needs to be boosted a fair bit as instead of only need to upgrade 3 rss, I now need to do 5 (rares I could get to about 300/hr and not ever need to touch this again, never liked that so good it may be removed)

-New SBDE limits of 15 is nice, better than 20 but I think this still could be too high. Others thoughts on this?

Regarding infra I would like to make another comment about it, yes it doesn’t suite myplay style quite as much as I like to blitz the enemy quickly, but on a slightly different note/take on it.

Butputting a moral increase and a speed increase into one building for me does notquite seem to fit well. A need for one is often, but for both in one provincenot really.

A moralboost is generally needed in far away locations. If I am Africa and take landin asia a moral boost in a province will be very useful. But it will be a moralboost in an Urban province as these produce rss. Given Urban provinces aresmall, the speed increase is somewhat useless and I will only be building itfor the moral improvement. I will build it in an urban province as this is where rss production will more likely be.

A speedboost is the most beneficial in large provinces, my thinking is russia as themost obvious one, Canada also. BUT these large provinces are the rural ones andthus not going to be producing as many rss (unless in the future there will bedouble rss on rural provinces?). I will be wanting the speed boost to movetroops around faster, but the moral boost is not useful as I wont be producingrss in these provinces.

To me itwould make more sense for these two factors, moral and speed to be two separatebuildings to justify the cost as I will likely be only building it for one ofthese features and not both. ESP given there is no moral penalty for wars, mycore should always have good moral so the moral boost is only needed in faraway provinces.

Is it too difficult to make it so infrastructure only increase speed and, idk a "resort" increase moral? (I don't mean for this to sound sarcastic, genuinely is it?

K.Rokossovski wrote:

Naval battle dynamics has completely changed! Battleships are cheap units now, as they cost about the "same" as subs... and the single sub now has trouble beating an unescorted single battleship! Single sub against two battleship loses easily... surely this isn't as intended? Did the need to "always" escort heavy ships against subs get scrapped on purpose?

2:21 pm Algeria built the new Tennessee Class "Tunis".

3:12 pm The Battleship "Tunis" (Algeria) has been destroyed by the 28th Destroyer Flotilla (Spain).

Conversely, a landing party of 5 ground units has been under continuous attack while disembarking. Despite being bombarded by 3 tac air and directly engaged by a lt. tank; the landing party is now within 40 minutes of completing the landing, and still has two units left.

On a side note: BB's can now maneuver in stealth mode, but reappear on the GUI when they go dead in the water.

Reports from day 4, from a top competitive CoW v1 player (I think that's fair, although I rely on my amazing team to carry me through the Alliance World Cup!)

I'm also a WW2 history buff, which is why this franchise appeals to me in the first place. (As a result I have a strong opinion about realistic stats and results.)

I played a round or two of the first v1.5 beta last year, so there is some basis for comparison.

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Action report from my 1.5.2 game:

I'm Italy. Immediately allied with Romania, and determined to destroy the solid Yugoslavia player in between us. Not too concerned about France or Germany, so the NorthWest front will hopefully not need much garrisoning.

Artillery is the king of the battlefield, so I initially built 3 Ordnance Foundries along with 2 Tank Plants. One of those would end up never building a tank so far, as it switched to Naval production - So that was a bit of a waste.

Bought some iron immediately at a reasonable price, being used to having to snap up iron to accomplish early strategic objectives. Regretted that minutes later when I realized that cash is the scarcest resource at the start!

Now that initial builds are chugging away, I took the time to scour the research tree to review the various units available from different buildings (barracks etc) and their relative strengths.

Clearly Industry will be a long-term need to increase production of key resources. I upgraded my Goods city to L3 and my Iron and Oil cities to L2 for now (after 4 days.) Noticed that Industry is actually very buildable on non-city provinces, and provides good value for investment even compared to the double-resource cities. I would do that, except that Italy has no compelling non-city location to build one.

Decided for now to ignore Light Tanks (although I built a couple of ACs, and am currently building an MT), Tank Destroyers (obviously great against a tank zerger, but I expect to face a lot more infantry than tanks, and TDs are hopeless against inf)..., ignore all air, all 'Secret' tech

Built a bunch of L1 artillery and a couple of ACs, and attacked Yugo. It turned out that he had focussed on Tactical Bombers, which gave my Romanian ally a significant headache. Yugo cracked after putting up a game fight for about a day (Romania shifted to Interceptors to deal with the bombers), and he didn't have much fight left to offer on the Italian front by the time I got there in force. (Man it seems slow moving troops even the short distance from the NW Italian cities to the NE border with Romania!) He has now turtled a large army (24 including 7 arti at last count) in his capital. The rest of Yugo is ours.

In the meantime though, a 3-country alliance has unified Africa and they have apparently decided that the Italian boot offends their sense of asthetics. They aren't very active, so fortunately my scouts in Southern Italy noticed a large invasion fleet massing. Good thing I built some destroyers from the start! Several destroyers encircled the convoys containing pretty much the whole Libyan army, and wiped them out without boots ever reaching the shore. The fish population in the Med rejoiced.

Algeria made a bit more headway, capturing the two Italian homeland islands along with some oil and grain resources. The defending single inf on Palermo made a heroic defense of the beach, killing 4 enemy troops as they landed before succumbing to overwhelming odds. A motorized inf tried a hail mary attack to recapture Cagliari but was repulsed by an unexpected bunch of reinforcement invaders

Algeria then shifted to Cruisers, and sent an initial pair to defeat my Destroyer force and support his landing efforts. Counter-intuitively, Destroyers are a very reasonable match for Cruisers. With a little help from one allied sub, a couple of waves of Cruisers have been sunk so far with one DD lost (and a bunch heavily damaged). In CoW standard as in 'our timeline', when Cruisers show up Destroyers pretty much scatter.

As of 4 full days, the Libyan army is gutted, Algeria continues to hold my two islands with fairly large garrisons (~6), one of which I'm shelling with my 9 Destroyers. He has done far better than Libya, but has lost everything he tried to send to the Italian 'boot'. I've researched Battleships belatedly since things have become very naval-intensive against Africa, but skipped building any L1s and will start building them once I research L2, halfway through day 5. My land army is in Yugo, eyeing his larger army turtling in his capital city. Pretty sure he's archived the game. I am going to attempt shoot-and-scoot and see how it goes. (Edit - It works fine - I'll destroy him without taking any damage until he reverts to AI.) I've also brought over some fresh L2 artillery, so if shoot-and-scoot proves futile I will take advantage of the hills bonus in the neighboring province and just trade shots to destroy him. Romania is also working on Rail Guns, which of course are great for cracking a turtle.

Seeing that a L2 Ordnance Foundry can spit out a L2 Artillery 2x as fast as an L1 Foundry, I have upgraded one of those (not all three since I don't have nearly enough MP to stream them out anyway). One of the tank plant cities switched to building Motorized Inf with a L2 Barracks, and the other to Destroyers (soon Battleships) with a L3 Naval Yard. I'll probably build a L2+ Tank Plant in a captured city, and possibly a Secret Lab if I decide I just must have Rail Guns, Rockets or Jet Fighters.

No plans to ever build much air, it feels for now like they can't be fit in as long as I need to invest heavily in naval supremacy. Romania has been building bombers instead of naval, and getting good use out of them against the solid Yugo player (Worth noting, CoW standard is like that in competitive team games too. If France's job is to go hard into naval and protect Europe from UK/US convoys, they won't be building bombers at the same time.)

My kill ratio is thriving - Destroyers so far have 43+ kills to 1 loss, I think.

(Too long... Continued)

Good changes (from v1.5.1

• Upgrading is possible once higher tech levels for a unit have been unlocked.
• Resources seem less constraining. I was still able to build some stuff on day 2.
• The 'banzai motorcycle' mobile infantry huge advantage on attack seems somewhat muted.
• 'Killer Convoys' have been nerfed appropriately. Beach defenses seem very effective, as they should be.
• The notion of building L4 tanks slowly from an L1 tank factory, I like so far. It's also easier to build units in captured cities early on compared to CoW standard, where you have to obsess about whether the AI got around to building a L2 Industrial Complex in the city before you capture it. The prohibitive cost of cruicial L1 ICs always kindof bugged me, now it's gone.
• Artillery still get an advantage shooting from mountains instead of a penalty per CoW standard.
• Shoot and scoot may have been nerfed? I think I've seen defending artillery now shooting back 1 second after the attackers opened fire on them. Needs more rigorous testing, but if true that would be awesome - Shoot and scoot is one of the worst things about CoW standard, as it makes it so that playing competitively basically requires you to sacrifice sleep for days, along with your health. Edit - Just gave shoot-n-scoot a real controlled test, and it seems to have worked.

• Money runs out on day 1 after initial builds, despite being pretty cautious about not building anything unnecessary. No opportunity to buy anything from the market (no money to buy).
• Manpower for research remains an unfortunate choice, as it bottlenecks troop production and makes no apparent sense. Sure you may need a bunch of scientists to work on your V2 project, but when the research is complete they don't die! And they also don't dramatically thin out the available conscripts who could otherwise be sent to man artillery or battleships. The MP costs of completely different units are way too similar. Why call the resource 'manpower' if an infantry division is going to suck up just as many men as a unit of submarines or King Tigers?
• With the prohibitive cost of upgrading the only advantage of doing that instead of just building a new max-level unit is travel time to the front, and reduced upkeep if the obsolete unit will be of no use. Chances are you're better off ignoring upgrades in most cases unless it heals a damaged obsolete unit to full...?
• Prohibitive upgrade costs also mean you are still (as with v1.5.1) better off to not build anything and hoard manpower until you have researched the upgrade, if you can get away with that. That's not just unrealistic, it's boring.
• I definitely miss the differences in range that used to come with upgrading artillery/ships.
• One L2 Destroyer can fight on a completely equal footing with a L1 Cruiser? Come on now... Cruisers are historically the 'rock' to the Destroyer 'scissors'. A 1941-model Destroyer would have maybe a 1% chance of defeating a 1940 Cruiser with a lucky torpedo hit, if so equipped, and only if fighting at night in a fijord or around islands where it could hide. And the DD would still be sunk with gunnery before the Cruiser went down in that unlikely case.
• Battleships also aren't nearly as impressive as they should be, imo. In real-world WW2 smaller surface combatants were basically helpless against them, and in CoW standard someone building a BB is an 'oh sh--' moment worthy of being announced in the newspaper as a sort of feat of strength! Again, I'm not sure why the capital ships needed to be made so close to Destroyers in terms of naval combat. Destroyers shelling ground-based units to death is also a departure from the greater realism of CoW standard, and I'm a big fan of realism.
• The huge change regarding units in a stack not dying, I love and hate. Love it because it makes it pointless to micro-manage stack splitting down to many-single-unit stacks, which was a super-annoying OP exploit in CoW standard. Hate it because it takes forever to start actually killing anything (the Libyan convoy that I sunk had 15 inf for about a day, and they didn't start actually dying until I had reduced them to 20%). Having a lot of crippled units left after a big fight is likely to get pretty annoying for someone who has unit resource upkeep problems. Compared to CoW standard, this also dramatically increases the impact of that 15% heal each day. Instead of 10 inf taking 75 damage and being reduced to 5 full-health inf (getting no healing benefit at day change), now those 10 inf would all remain at 50% health, and gain back ~10 hp. I'm not sure if that's a love or a hate change - Time will tell.
• It's apparent that heavy damage reduces troop speed quite significantly, which makes sense, but that adjusted value doesn't seem to show up anywhere on the troop info screen? It needs to be visible, for strategic figuring. (If I merge this 25% AC with my artillery stack, will it actually slow the artillery down?)
• Infrastructure's place in the game seems sketchy for now. Are you really going to build it in cities for the morale boost to resource production? The movement boost is quite significant, but only in large rural provinces where morale is pretty irrelevant. I guess I can see it being good value for investment in a large rural province containing resources, on a key strategic movement corridor. Time will tell if the high cost of upgrading to L3 is worth it in more than rare cases.

• I've noticed a couple of situations where a ranged unit moves towards an enemy with the same range (L1 artillery, Destroyers) and starts shooting, but the defender seemingly never shoots back despite the attacker just sitting there shelling. This does not appear to be a 'shoot and scoot' thing.
• When trying to move to the beach (expecting a convoy invasion), it seems like if you are waiting right at the edge of the water the convoy will have to attack you, which is clearly very good for the defenders. (It may depend on how the attacker micromanages, I'll know more when I try a landing myself). So I've found that a unit can move right to the edge no problem, but if I send an additional unit to reinforce that stack, they will appear to be planning to embark into the water instead of stopping with the others at the beach. To make them merge properly I've needed to move the beach unit away from the shore, group them together with the coming reinforcements (holding down Ctl and selecting both), and then plot the combined group back to the shore.)

CityOfAngels wrote:

Having a lot of crippled units left after a big fight is likely to get pretty annoying for someone who has unit resource upkeep problems

upkeep is 10-20%>

CityOfAngels wrote:

Money runs out on day 1 after initial builds, despite being pretty cautious about not building anything unnecessary. No opportunity to buy anything from the market (no money to buy).

CityOfAngels wrote:

Manpower for research remains an unfortunate choice, as it bottlenecks troop production and makes no apparent sense. Sure you may need a bunch of scientists to work on your V2 project, but when the research is complete they don't die!

And it is full realistic, if you 1000 worker of single project dont go employless after research complete. Because in RL you need, a way more workers, then scientist only for great projects. Even drivers and cleaner are needed.

CityOfAngels wrote:

Why call the resource 'manpower' if an infantry division is going to suck up just as many men as a unit of submarines or King Tigers?

CityOfAngels wrote:

One L2 Destroyer can fight on a completely equal footing with a L1 Cruiser? Come on now... Cruisers are historically the 'rock' to the Destroyer 'scissors'.

And shipnumbers in squadron of destroyers are greater than in squadron of cruisers.

CityOfAngels wrote:

Battleships aren't nearly as impressive as they should be

CityOfAngels wrote:

The huge change regarding units in a stack not dying, I love and hate.

cycle9 wrote:

CityOfAngels wrote:

Having a lot of crippled units left after a big fight is likely to get pretty annoying for someone who has unit resource upkeep problems

Absolutely agree with this, 5% per day upkeep costs for heavily damaged units is crippling.

upkeep is 10-20%>

Consider that while a crippled unit still costs 5% of the cost of a new one for upkeep each day (I gather), if they are sitting at 1% health they will 'heal' back 15% at day change for free. Now I'm totally in favor of healing, but the new tendency to end up with stacks of 10+ infantry all crippled and healing 15% each day does seem to have made healing look a bit OP. Of course if players had to pay 15% of the unit cost in exchange for that healing, the new meta would become 'bombard your enemy's stacks until they are right at 20%, and then leave them alive to completely beggar his resource production with healing costs!'

Torpedo28000 wrote:

Balhog wrote:

I thought the game was playing well until I tried to upgrade units. The resource cost now imposed for each upgrade is ridiculous. This is a huge balancing mistake. I'll keep playing the round to test my fear, but it looks like you ruined an important aspect of the strategy.

I think it should have been explained better in the initial information drop. But upgrading from lets say lvl 1 - lvl 4 will only cost 100% of the lvl 4 troop. So I do not think it is designed to be done every level, but every 3-4 levels probably. Additionally Freezy stated (correct me if I am interpreting this wrong pls) it will be lowered a bit next testing round.

One comment not sure how the plane dynamics changed but I have noticed that refullng takes alot longer it went from 14 min approx to 30.

Oh one more thing.

Not sure why you would build Militia now, as they have the same requirements to build as Infantry. Other, than cost of course.

Loving it though keep up the good work.