Thanks for the constructive feedback!Crash99c wrote:
Okay, having played this for a few days now, and looking at it from a Frontline Pioneer, lvl 100+ player aspect for actual gameplay related comments (since you guys asked) here are some of my thoughts:1) Unit Upgrades - so I understand why auto upgrades are being removed... have had many battles where a golder pops a unit up 3 lvls seconds before engaging and totally changes the dynamic of the battle BUT there still should be a way for units to upgrade to a better version or AT LEAST be disbanded once the better version is researched (on a side note, paras should also be able to re-emplane at an airport). IRL, many units in wars have received materiel upgrades, why prevent that possibility in game? Perhaps have it return to a factory of it's type and spend a day there? As it is, you get many useless units left hanging around burning resources or have to literally suicide your troops, which leaves a bad taste to those of us who are used to trying to, you know, keep our troops ALIVE. The suicide option is very attractive with this format, but takes much of the skill out of unit movement and attack decisions which is a BIG loss to those of us who chose to play this game because it ISN'T a zerg rush with a different skin.
2) Unit Balancing - have noticed several balancing issues, most notable being that a transport ship seems to have better combat stats than a basic DD. Say what?!?! yes, you heard me... a dedicated combat ship can get it's ass handed to it by a transport. (just had that happen in the test game I was playing) so now you no longer have the fun of setting up convoy defenses or trying to sneak a guy past the naval screen and then nail biting for hours while wondering if they will get past, all you have to do is pack 10 infantry into a stack and send it across the sea to presumably board the ship with a bunch of 5 inch guns like they were Errol Flynn in a buccanneer flick and take it over if it tries to stop them on their way to landing in someone's backfield. Other balancing issues of concern to me are overpowered ground aa units, LT's that can take out AT's, and much as I love mech inf, op mech inf that can take out medium tanks anywhere but in the open at early levels from what I am seeing in the unit info tabs. Methinks more thought needs to go into this.
3) Diplomacy - So the morale effects of wars is now different enough that it seems to belong to a totally different game. Not saying that they aren't interesting, but you're ENTIRELY losing the flavour of the existing game, which (to me at least) is a loss. this being still early game, that may not be the case later, but for now, it's annoying. I won't miss the penalty for being the guy who attacks a province, loses a big stack fighting another stack only to watch some guy step in at the last pulse and steal the province and make you the sneak attack bad guy, but that's just about the ONLY good thing I can see about it.
4) Economy - SOoo... the elephant in the room... couple of sub categories here:
a) NOT a fan of the "urban areas only" for build options. There are many instances in the past historically of major production centers being built specifically for a war effort in the middle of nowhere, from the port at Ravenna in classical times to Stalingrad in WWII. How do you think the cities came about in the first place, anyway? They were built because people got together where business needed to occur. Unless building infra past a certain level suddenly makes a province a city, you are TOTALLY limiting how the game will be played. There's a lot more freedom of possible actions when the factory/navy yard/airstrip/etc can be anywhere in your territory instead of the predictable few locations and the starting cities in several nations leave MASSIVE gaps in defenses on one side of the nation being played (most egregious examples are italy with no ability to put a navy yard in the adriatic and russia with no ability to build major troop types in the south and east although other countries have similar problems) as italy (since that is the nation I'm playing at the moment) it literally FORCED me to attack yugo instantly to prevent those overpowered transports from raping me while the navy that could only be built in naples, rome and genoa took it's time arriving and then was relatively ineffective once it got there until I had cruisers patrolling.
b) Infra and ports no longer providing production boosts - this is one of the features that first got me hooked on the game yet here you are taking it away. I LOVED that the more you spent on roads and ports the better commerce could occur and thus the higher your production in a province. Why remove that option? As far as I can see it does not unbalance things to leave it in, and it makes things more interesting to have to decide "do I build another factory level or do I need better shipping and embarkation times" or "another factory or roads, gotta get my troops across the map faster and reduce distance from the capitol for morale" Not sure about later in game, but you have literally made infra useless in the early game and a cool mechanic for the ports is gone as well.
c) Unit research, build and upkeep costs - so I was one of the guys who years ago suggested changing up research and upkeep costs to reflect differences in unit types... blanket costs of ALL resources was NOT what we had in mind when we suggested that. The idea was that infantry needed more food and goods, planes needed more rares and oil and metal, tanks needed metal and oil, rockets needed rares and oil, and like specifics. the INTENT of the suggestion was to make different army compositions require different resources and therefore require different strategic goals for each nation to add to the dynamic. Instead, we have "everybody needs everything, so NOTHING is more important than anything else" Cue for elevator music and boring blandness.
d) Market Revamp - I know as a player who has had a youtube game ruined by market cheating and resource dumping that you had to fix the problem but DAMN this is not the way to do it. Closing off all ability to trade outside your coalition is just STUPID, and a blanket tax doesn't seem to accomplish anything gameplay wise other than annoy EVERYONE since the tax applies to all transactions now so is no different in effect to taxless transactions. Where's the tax going anyway, graft for the customs inspectors? Last I checked, taxes were implemented by nations, so why can't we impose taxes of our choosing upon transactions if you want to have them? As it stands, it's just a resource drain that does not prevent the behavior of resource dumping to another player that it was meant to stop.
e) Multiple options for building types optimized for specific unit types - hey, I bet you thought my entire post would be negative, but SURPRISE, here's something I am very happy with! (unlike a lot of others) I've always felt that the basic infra/factory requirements for unit types was too broad, having been in manufacturing, each type of vehicle or system needs very specific and DIFFERENT machine tools and fixtures to build, this change reflects that, and further, (not certain as we haven't hit that point in the research tree day-wise yet but it seems likely) allows you to build things like commandos and paras somewhere else besides your capitol meaning you are no-longer limited to one or the other, and no-longer need to wait literal DAYS for the commandos to get across the map.
Okay, so those are my long winded first impressions of the new game format so far, based upon issues and decisions influenced by actual gameplay. Hope you devs find it useful, and hope you other players comment on my points with thoughts of your own.
Have fun gang
-C
1) We actually plan to implement a functionality in the future to manually upgrade units on the map to higher levels. This should alleviate your concerns hopefully.
2) The balancing is still very rough and will be tweaked alot in the coming months, thanks to the help of the players. Regarding your specific examples: Transport ship has lower fighting values than Destroyers, so I could not really confirm this. You can check the stats yourself. Maybe there was an additional damage source?
Regarding ATs: LTs should not be able to take them out when the AT is defending in a city.
Ground AA needs to be much stronger than in the old version as long as we don't have ranged anti air. That's because AA is always only a single purpose reactionary,unit and can never catch or damage planes on their own. A smart plane user can always outrun a ground AA user, who in turn needs to build alot of AA and spread them everywhere to have an effect, which is a huge commitment and makes him open for ground attacks.
I can also not confirm mechanized units being stronger than medium tanks, the values show it is clearly in favor of medium tanks. Remember that MT are now heavy armor while Mech Inf is light armor, when comparing the values (plus also keep hitpoints in mind).
But yes, balancing is far from final and we will finetune it.
3) Yeah its different but from what I heard alot of players actually disliked the morale penalties forwar, as they were punishing you for what the game wants you to do, and them being exploitable (e.g. 5 players declaring war on you to ruin your morale).
4)
a) noted
b) we wanted to clearly separate building roles, to give them all their own purpose. We want players to really make a choice of "I want to upgrade my economy now" or "I want more movement speed" or "I need to produce ships now", instead of building 1-2 buildings and just taking all of their effects as a bonus. Your specific examples given are still in the game btw, naval bases still decrease embarking times, Infrastructure still decreases movement times.
c) The new balancing reflects that, Infs need more Food, Artis more goods, tanks more oil, planes more rare etc, the difference is just that you now also need small quantities of the other resources. This version won in our internal debates. The other version would be to have certain units cost only 2-3 different main resources (plus money and manpower), and the others not at all. Both were a departure from the old model. Maybe we will still discuss and change this again.
d) this is not part of the CoW 1.5 update, it was already in the game beforehand. Reasoning and discussions about this topic can be found in other threads. We are thinking about adjusting the most critisized aspect though in a future update (no promises yet).
e) thanks, glad you like it.
Your feedback was indeed useful, maybe you can make another comment when you are much further into he game how your impressions changed, if at all .
