Call of War 1.5: Mechanics & New Balancing

Something I haven't seen mentioned yet: To make units in captured Urban center, only need to build barracks, factory or whatever. No more broken IC1 !

Can the devs explain why they feel the need to change CoW in the 1st place?

I really really would like to know why you feel it is necessary to change the game.

@Arcorian @GaiusUltima I mean it's quite a risk, since you had a great game netting 300K euro for you every year. Aren't you afraid you are killing the goose with the golden eggs?

Lvl 1 Convoys in the water have same stats as Subs...???

LoLz

A bit overwhelmed by all the changes, but look at at reduction of combat ticks to 30 minutes as a way to speed the game a bit. Another way would be to reduce requirement of going from Embargo to War from 24 to 12 hrs ...

Rather different to have no negatives to armored vehicles in urban areas. Is this correct or is this a bug?
Seems to be correct given the way my level 2 light tanks are running over things.

Infantry units now have a +50% bonus in urban so I believe the focus is now giving troops bonuses rather than making them weaker in different terrains.

Greetings gentlemen.

As this is only a beta test of a beta test, I do understand changes can still be made.
These are my current thoughts.

1) requiring manpower to build facilities and upgrade is very constraining.

2) requiring a little bit of everything to build or upgrade anything is very constraining. In the original COW if I lacked a resource to build one type of building or unit, I could still build another that did not use that resource.

3) no unit upgrades. Why? Historically when new equipment was developed it was issued to existing units as well as new units. The german army started the war with panzer II, and ended the war with panzer 4 and 5. The Russian army started the war with BT-5, and ended the war with T-35/85 and JS-2 and 3. If you do not want to allow automatic upgrades, the give us a method to manually upgrade them.

4) unit strength progression. This is way to much. doubling the strength of a unit in a single upgrade is very unrealistic. This currently means that the first combatant to get upgraded units to the front lines has a major advantage.

5) Intelligent AI. I am all for the AI fighting well, but having it initiate a war is a bit much. I was invaded by an AI country without provocation.

I understand you are in buisness to make a profit. This update makes this game one in which if I do not spend large sums of money, I am guaranteed to lose. It almost guarantees that the person who spends the most money will win. While this will make you a good profit, eventually you will lose because players will get tired of being out-spent and unwilling to put out the kind of money it will take to win.

I agree completely with 1&2.

As for 3,
it is realistic that troops don’t get the new equipment/tech immediately but you’re right they do get them eventually.

I suggest either a 12 hour delay or simply take existing troops to a province with a building that can produce the upgraded version of the troop and upgrade manually
For a small fee

im not sure about 4 I agree that they have a significant advantage however retreating is a valid tactic until you can regroup with your own upgraded troops

5) yeah that can be annoying but it’s necessary to keep the game going when people go inactive. I do think they need to add a way to improve relations with ai

Deleted

Analysis was flawed.

There are some issues bugging me:

- Why are you alpha- and beta testing "CoW 1.5" across all servers with all players? I didn't buy High Command and avoid Frontline Pioneers to eventually become a alpha/beta tester anyway. You are now "forcing" me to play a unfinished game?

- Why change the game anyway? What is wrong with it? @GaiusUltima @Arcorian @Ibeses Low retention rate? What is the problem?

Well into day 4 of the event map 1.5...

Yes, indeed; I can positively confirm, this 1.5 is the final end of CoW.

With the start of the BAD CHANGES and now this completely new game in the old jacket (new wine in an old bottle....someone said something about that)

The realism is gone.
The varied game play is gone.
The diplomacy is gone.

On top of all that it:
- the game has become very, very easy. No more knowledge to be discovered, no more skill required;
- the game has become very, very boring. In 4 days I did less military actions than on the 1st day in CoW;
- the research activity is just a plain silly thing now; and I did less than in 1 day in CoW;
- the economic development is a one way street now and offers not a single challenge or choice;
- the development of unit stats is cut loose from anything that resembles anything natural or real.

Enhancing realism?: you failed profoundly!
Enhancing game experience?: you failed even more profoundly!

Now, again I reiterate that I fully understand that innovation is necessary and that companies need to innovate to keep making money. This is even an obligation for a company, as it will not survive if it it doesn't.

However, did anyone ever hear of a company throwing out the door their main product, and replacing it with a completely new product, without any proof that the new product will be at all an acceptable alternative to the client base?
In short: that a company throws out its clients and trusts that they will be back for the completely different product?

Rhetorical question, but let me answer it for the-apparently-not-so-well-informed-Bytro team: NO!!

This is a new game in an old jacket.
This new game is simply far less interesting then the old game.

And you already have Supremacy 1. Really, if I am going to play this type of game, I will play S1.

So... Why destroy CoW??

Hello,

I've played about 20 games of CoW, so still a relative new player but it is a game I truly enjoy and I've always loved the Axis & Allies board game. I tried to limit my comments around unit balancing, but the feedback provided is based off the perceived desire for a more realistically diverse force combined with my background of graduating from West Point and serving as an officer in the U.S. Army.

I'm excited about some of the changes and the overall vision you are attempting to accomplish with 1.5 for deeper play and more varied strategies. I'm playing in one of those games right now, so below are my thoughts being a few days in. I'm trying to offer constructive criticism here instead of just saying "oh no my world is ending" like has trended in many other posts here.

• Economy / Building Purchases: The economic complexity has increased significantly, or at least it's not as intuitive as first described. I feel like my pace is crawling, particularly with the manpower - cash bottleneck that's appearing early. So here are some thoughts.
  
  • Building Complexity: It is very difficult to actually produce the designed units and not intuitive, which will make 1.5's new player retention worst then CoW. I have a couple thoughts here.
    
    • Industry Building's Role: Industry harvests resources, it also produces all of the components used in the assembly plants (i.e. ordnance, tank, etc.). I recommend having the level of your industry impact the economy but also impact the level of unit you can build.
      
    • Unit Factories: Instead of tying unit level to the plant, tie production time to the plant. I think this would be easier for people to understand while reducing some of the complexity needed to produce advanced units while achieving the same outcome of specialized cities based off someone's strategy. Armor guys will build top-tier tank plants to quickly produce armored columns, same for barracks, etc.
      
    • Unit Advancement: I'm not sure how much I like the idea of deployed units not advancing as research increases, but I also understand the logic of why that decision was made. I think some middle ground is needed here, but I'm sure the coding related to my next comment would be difficult.
      
      • Option A: A unit has to stay in the same player controlled province for 24 hours and not engage in combat. I.E. providing time for the new equipment / modifications to be deployed.
        
      • Option B: Return units to a city with the necessary Industry Level (if using my economic recommendations listed earlier)
        
  • Morale, Manpower, & Cash: I'm not sure if this is the case for everyone, but the cash/manpower bottleneck is tough in the first few days. I think there is an opportunity to solve this by creating depth around morale, since most buildings now increase morale instead of production capability.
    
    • Compounding Manpower / Cash with morale: I think you should tweak the income of these resources to morale, with the idea that high morale increases popular support for the war (more people sign up, more people buy war-bonds, etc). Obviously morale already impacts resource productivity, but I suggest a more aggressive scale for these 2 resources where "100%" is really something like "80%" morale, and you can significantly increase morale and cash by having high morale provinces. This will create an excess of both mid-game as people conquer capitals, but become a constraint again in the late game as countries get very large.
      
      • If morale is tied to core provinces, you can use this as a method to keep rural provinces relevant if all core provinces take a hit of any core province is lost. Thus encouraging protection of core provinces even thought they aren't a huge economic factor.
        
  • Unit Balancing: I am not going to say a lot here because I'm sure you have lots of tweaks to this anticipated. Despite what everyone says, attacking is much more difficult then defending so some of the bonus's make sense. The rate of HP increased per level is too significant, and you need to tweak armor's advantage over infantry when not in cities. The parity between armor and infantry is too close.
    
    • Traditionally, a 3-to-1 ratio is used in the real world for infantry on infantry traditional combat planning. Since cities are now more important, I agree it should be very difficult to take out entrenched infantry in a city. Motorized and Mechanized infantry should be the key to taking those places out, supported by air and arty. That being said, in hills and plains, tanks should really own that space vs infantry unless supported by fortifications.
      
      
  
  

CoW is the goose with the golden eggs for bytro and has been for years. So it can't be innovation to keep making money.

i agree with him.. the game right now its too easy because you just have to choose in which type of unit you want make progress about levelling up and such and thats it... so someone will do anti air ( OP ) and artillery someone else will go just tanks ( aggressive style since day 1 ) and some unlucky will go planes and thats it ! we dont have the resources to make a real army and this is not changed on day 4 and will not change even on day 20 duo to high cost of your high lvl troops and structures.
Even with high resources at the begining it would end in a total war between anyone and the real strategy there is its to understand which one to attack first.. there is no more strategy in develop your army since you cant upgrade anything even trying to upgrade 2 type of troops at its finest lvl is damn hard.
So if you want to not close your game you need to work better around these points and start to make the game more fun at the early days thats where you attrack new costumers

I joined S1914 back in 2011, enjoyed the game and played it long enough to reach Field Marshall rank before moving on to CoW, which I have been playing on and off since. With these new changes, which I like, I fear your moving along the same path another of your games, Thirty Kingdoms, went. I loved Thirty Kingdoms, but it was a very detail oriented game, unlike CoW and after a time, the player base went away. Not sure if younger generations want such a detailed game, as they like things to move quick. So far I have enjoyed the play testing of 1.5, I am in five games and like others learning. I hope the player base of CoW embraces these changes as I would hate another game I enjoy going the way of Thirty Kingdoms.

They can easily prevent this by making CoW 1.5 a totally new game and preserve the original CoW.

For the record I am, it's fair to say, a top competitive Call of War player. (2nd place team in the most recent Alliance World Cup.) I know better players than myself, but I have a very strong understanding of this fine game.

I agree with others who mentioned that we'd like to hear what the devs are trying to fix exactly in the status quo (pre-v1.5) game. You can't find a solution before you identify the problem.

As an expert player who stretches the status quo game to its limits and knows most (still not all probably) of the tricks... While the status quo game is a lot of fun, there are some glaring problems (focusing on competitive play):

1) Elite AI diplomacy. Without getting in to details... If you want to conquer territory in this war game, all of the AIs are going to hate you and randomly declare war and attack you, even if it's suicidal. There is no way to make friends with AIs long term, only enemies. This is especially bad on large maps, where there are huge numbers of AIs and it assures you of a persistent -25% morale penalty compounding the problem of the resource shortages and stretched supply lines inherent in big maps (likely to cause a frustrating morale death spiral.)

1a) In competitive team games, the random chance of a key AI offering one side Right of Way and not the other can break the match before the human peace period even ends (ex. will USA be able to land their whole army in Portugal, or end up stuck in convoys all game waiting for the submarines to come?) Way too decisive for a random chance.

2) Exploits, i.e. important game design elements that are non-intuitive (or counter-intuitive) and give the player who knows about them a huge advantage. Probably the three biggest are:
- Artillery shoot-and-scoot (+ intensive micromanagement): When you attack with artillery against enemy artillery, the defenders won't get a chance to shoot back if you run away within a couple of minutes. Completely counter-intuitive, since dug-in defending artillery batteries in sight of an approaching enemy should have a huge advantage, but instead are unable to return fire at all!
- Tiny plane stacks (+ intensive micromanagement): If an enemy is attacking you (direct attacks or patrolling) with a planes, the very best way to defend is to break your planes up into many groups of 1 interceptor + 1 TB (maybe add 1 SB + 1 NB for bonus lulz). You then must micromanage so that your planes patrol over whatever the enemy wants to attack, and keep moving them so your planes never do their 15-minute 'tick' attack, and are always re-positioning when the enemy planes tick.
- Moving through the defending stack: Say I attack a fortified city. I have enough troops to win, but the defender has a lot of reserves he can bring to reinforce. The reinforcements will be able to move in to the city and help the defenders unless I instruct my attacking troops to move through the city in the direction the reinforcements are coming from. If I use that trick, the reinforcements will be stuck outside the city (no fortification bonus, fighting alone, on the attack which is a further disadvantage.) Unlike the previous examples this one actually kindof makes real-world sense (the attackers encircle the garrison and lay siege), but the implementation is 100% opaque - Nobody would ever guess that clicking the mouse in that way would make that happen, and it can easily be completely game-breaking for those who have been told the trick.
- There's lots more: I don't want to share all the tricks!

3) Sleep. It's a huge obstacle to success in this game at even a moderately competitive level. While you sleep, an opponent can easily break through your lines and probably crush your armies using exploits while you can't react. I get that the devs want to emphasize 'activity', and the game certainly does that... But sleep is crucial to real-world health, and a game that gets in the way of that for weeks at a time is actually bad for humanity.

4) Inability to defend allied provinces. This horrifying mechanic is mainly game-breaking in competitive team games like the Alliance World Cup, but shows up in any game where coalition mates are trying to work together to fend off a concerted attack. Say I'm Sweden trying to help defend Germany, who has invested most of the team's Iron building border forts to defend against France, Spain and Italy. Germany is spread thin naturally. France moves to attack a German fort with a large stack, and I rush there in time to defend the fort with my 25 Swedes. Bloody melee ensues with the defenders having a big fortification advantage, right? Wrong! The attackers will ignore the Swedish stack and attack only the small German garrison. And once the Germans have been killed off, the French will capture the fort! The Swedish troops are then stuck there in an enemy-held fort, and as soon as they try to move they will be on the attack at a huge disadvantage, instead of logically having a huge advantage by defending in a fort against the original attack. Ugh.

5) Unrestrained gold usage. Yes, I fully understand that the Devs want people to contribute money to the game. I have done my part by paying for a High Command subscription for several years now. And then I join a 100-player game looking for a little relaxing diversion... And some clown next door immediately attacks me with 20 bombers on day 1. I guess some people have more money than brains or whatever, but I can't see how it's fun to spend $100 for what is effectively an 'I win button', just instantly teleporting in as many max-research units as are needed, instantly healing any damage received, and so on. As a competitive player, when I see that I simply quit as there's obviously no point. How can that be considered good game design? Here's a thought - Would it make sense to develop a game mode where a player could spend as much money as they want beating up on AIs? That way they don't get in the way of the enjoyment of people who prefer to play by the rules of 'L2 airfield takes 1.5 days to build, and after that you can start building a trickle of TBs'. Or maybe those people would actually enjoy to play against each other, as a choice to make the competition become about who can spend the most money? I have no issue with that, as long as they aren't ruining my games!

6) Recent balance changes have had a negative effect. Any damage to an airfield grounds and cripples all planes operating from it. Elite AI diplomacy problems per above. Seems to be too expensive/hard to effectively keep units upgraded now.

6a) Can't trade troops (or resources outside of the coalition) now. This one is so bad that it needs its own line, because it dramatically compounds some of the other problems. Sweden can't defend the German forts with their AT guns, and now they can't trade their AT guns to their ally so that they could become useful garrison troops in the forts. And while the tech tree is now more expensive so that it's too prohibitive for Germany to build all of the different rock/paper/scissors troops themselves, the obvious measure of having Sweden build ATs or whatever and contribute them to the cause is prohibited. (I saw a Bytro rep saying "for obvious reasons", but I can't for the life of me imagine what they think it helps!)

...(cont'd from previous post)

So, that's a fairly comprehensive list of problems we might want to fix. Now we have v1.5, and it has fixed... None of them, I guess?

Instead, 2 days into my first game of 1.5 (to be fair it's possible that my perception will change as I get further in), I see a number of new problems.

1) Resource costs seem to be tuned so that it will be impossible to keep up with upgrades and produce max-level troops for more than one, possibly (not likely) two types of units (from Artillery, Tanks, Infantry, Air, Naval.) Bytro reps mentioned that they wanted to 'emphasize the rock/paper/scissors advantage'. How I see this playing out is, Player A decides to focus all his resources building artillery, and rolls over Player C who focused on infantry hoping to be able to build Commandos. Then Player B comes along, and having focused on Bombers he rolls over A's artillery. The glaring problem here is that you are being forced to pick one of rock/paper/scissors and stick to it, and as soon as you encounter the paper to your rock you are defenseless.

2) Old troops don't upgrade when new tech levels are researched? Seriously?? So I start with 20 infantry, and by day 2 they are already obsolete as newly-built infantry units are more than twice as strong (and it just gets worse from there). Instead of my longest-serving veteran troops being the core of my elite divisions as has been the case throughout the history of war... They just water down my shiny new troops due to the diminishing returns of stack power. And worse yet, if I leave them back home they will be sucking up my precious manpower as upkeep!

3) Everyone has the same resources. Boring AF. (May be a problem specific to the '1.5 beta' map.)

4) It seems likely that it will be way too expensive to ever be worthwhile building any 'sexy' unit, like Heavy Tanks, Commandos, Rockets, etc. That's not what you want in a game. Boring AF (and frustrating to have those unattainable toys sitting there on the tech tree taunting you!)

5) Core cities are sitting around completely idle on day 1, and likely to stay that way. There just aren't enough resources to put them to use effectively. Looking at the costs of things on day 1 I immediately figured that each city was going to need to specialize, i.e. one producing navy, one air, one tanks, two artillery (none producing infantry or 'secret' tech tree.) Because L1 troops are way less value for money compared to L2 troops, I planned to skip to L2 and hold off on building until day 2. I immediately ran out of resources, and have now given up on building anything but Medium Tanks (1 city) and L2 Artillery (2 cities), leaving 2 cities building nothing. (And on day 2 none of the cities can make further buildings. Need Industry upgrades to increase manpower production? Forget it, not enough manpower! (And it's a 15-day payback of the initial manpower expense anyway, which is not remotely worth it.)

5a) My brother has noted that because the game 'spotted' us a L1 tank factory in each city, it might be extremely effective to 'zerg rush' by teching nothing but L1 Light Tanks and building as many of those as possible on day 1 until running out of Manpower. He may be right... But that's, you guessed it, boring AF!

Suggestion in Reference to the Units Leveling Up/Upgrades:

Be cool if all fighting units were produced at a LV 1 regardless of current upgrade level researched and the ONLY way to level up fighting units was to 1) research level upgrade, and then 2) units gain experience battling with leveling up with victorious battles!

In short, units must fight to gain experience in order to level up

Well, there we are at he core question.... WHY? Why do this silly operation, pissing off your loyal customers?

These costumers came to play CoW, because CoW was a unique game !!
(indeed you created a UNIQUE game!! I can't find anything like it out there! Tens of people asked me what I am going to play now and I have yet to find anything remotely like CoW)

What was so good about CoW and made it worth playing over a gazillion other so-called strategy games ??:

- CoW was as realistic as a Grand Strategy war game can get, with realism approaching mechanics and lots of knowledge based 'thingies' that represented aspects like skill of troops, good or bad weather, which rewarded dedicated players for their choice to gather the required knowledge, but didn't make the game impossible for those who didn't..

- CoW had an extensive diplomatic framework, allowing for a multitude of diplomatic interactions, which was extremely realistic; ranging from cooperation agreements on various levels to full fledged coalitions or simple one-off transactions between nations, depending on the players' choices..

- CoW had a wealth of things to research, allowing to adjust to your nation's resource output and still have a powerful army, even when you lacked certain resources, or allowing for a multitude of military approaches to future conquest and defense, all depending on your choice among a few givens.

- CoW offered a realistic and well developed economic mechanism, in which i.e. an IC itself did nothing except increase economic output, but by adding Infra, Harbour or an Airfield, the IC would be able to do more. All depending on choices that had to be made.

- CoW offered an ever changing challenge with its ever changing starting country, offering a realistic dilemma to what to do. Almost true geopolitics! Needing acces to sea-harbors or oil or grain? Are you based on an island like UK or landlocked like Tibet? Nasty mountains ranges to cross on the north, but open field on the south? It determined your campaign or defensive choices as realistically as it can get!

Did this wealth of options and choices make the game complicated???
NO!!! Conversely ... it made for the number 1 reason to play THIS game!!

Add to that:
- the pretty good AI; especially with Elite AI becoming the standard.
- the fair and level playing field, which allowed for gold-victories at an appropriate price only, but even allowed lesser or non-gold-users to put up a fight without having to lose. NOTABLY this provided a challenge to both the Gold-user and the Non-golder and thus was a GOOD THING.
- the accurate historical contexts of certain maps and wealth of historical info on weaponry to be discovered (that even made a some-what-hooked on history guy like me look up certain things to verify it, just to find out your description was correct, or offered a new insight in things that a fool-for-that like me did know little about, like German Artillery or long range bombers).

All that possibly was too much for a multitude of fly-by players also visiting this game...and going inactive after starting a number of rounds.
All of that, however, NEVER being a reason for a low retention rate, because there was NO OBLIGATION to go this deep into the game, and still be able to play a nice game.

IF combating LOW RETENTION RATES is at the base of this game wrecking project 1.5 ... you will fail.
Because:
- Anyone not understanding the old CoW, will still not understand the 1.5. It is now less complicated, but more befuddling, because the logic and realism is gone out the window.
- Anyone finding the old CoW too slow, will still find this 1.5 too slow, if not slower!
- Anyone seriously attracted by the old CoW now loses interested and will start looking at other games (90% of the fervent old and loyal players here that bothered to comment bc they CARE!)

IF making more money is at the base of this game wrecking project 1.5 ... you will fail.
- You will find out that players like me, Anzac, Alphared, RogodeterSnowl etc and so forth already did not renew their HC and play less maps or have stopped completely or soon will have and are ALL looking for an alternative and actively communicating about this. And maybe they were not your biggest monthly spenders, but they were regular and loyal spenders, even if only on HC for years on end.
- You will also find out that the fly-by-players-of-1-day - for whom you are dumbing-down the game - who did not spend then, will still not spend on the new game now (too slow, too befuddling, too illogical, too unrealistic)


The mistake Bytro makes is in its marketing, CLEARLY attracting too many of the wrong players and too few of the right ones.

Fix the marketing and stop 'fixing' the game!