Call of War 1.5: Mechanics & New Balancing

Someone disagrees with you, so you switch on to a condescending speech to make a better point ? Do you now want to continue in that direction and start comparing K/D ratios vs. players between the 2 of us ?


Tac bombers are still very strong against all artillery and all tank units, starting at first levels.
Now against armored cars and infantry, they are indeed less effective and are matched in damages, but only where armored cars and infantry receive their respective terrain bonus as you described. Still, bombers have more HPs than both of them at the last upgrade.
I agree on the fact that infantry and armored cars may have about 10-20% too much AA defense values though (but still give more AA defense to motorised infantry). Armored cars also seem to have too high damage values vs. light armor and heavy armor.

In summary, the air force (or more precisely the tac bombers) loss of effectiveness in general (which needs to be balanced) is aiming at encouraging players to build all different kinds of units of rather equal amounts, in order to find solutions in most situations.
Bombers have been the fastest and close to the most powerful unit in CoW for a very long time, only to be balanced a bit more recently, which gives more breathing space for other units to exist on the battlefield - And again, letting that happen is a good thing, because having players win most battles by just sending a patroling pack of 40+ bombers on almost anything is a bit sad and unrealistic.

Just tried out the new features, and it's hard to find anything positive in this update.

- New research tree is a bit more interesting than the last one, but I don't like the fact that they removed the nuclear plant from it.

- New buildings just make everything more complicated, while it does make it more interesting, the original system was much simpler.

- I don't like the new attack and defense value for the units, the original values were much better imho. I also don't support the fact that a units HP increases with its level.

- Don't support the new resource distribution. I used to like the fact that every country had its own play-style.

- Why the hell did you remove the rare requirements to research a new unit. While you still need rares to make buildings, using them to research units was a much better idea.

- It's hard to conquer any country with your infantry now since an infantry defending against infantry will always win. Why does infantry's defense have to be double its offense?

- This new "Light armor" class isn't really interesting. You've now made light tanks and armored cars completely useless, they're only a threat in large numbers or against each other.

- Nukes are much cheaper now, that isn't an improvement. And now since you don't need rares to research new units, they're in abundance.

Overall, this isn't an improvement. I just hope this update isn't here to stay.

well I disagree with you about making all around troops.. with this starvation of resources there is no way to make all type of troops and you will face problems even to just make all type of structures. they really need to power up the resources if this game is going to get again fun as used to be or to lower the resources needed to build structures because its way too way.. also about air forces another nerf is the airfields which are so damn expensive and it takes just 1 artillery lvl 1 to destroy it xD
The game needs heavy balance around resources because its not considerable fun to wait 20 days to have enough resources to make some decent troops and structures

Agreed Michael; I personally wanna see this go back to the old days, before they got rid of the unit trading. I personally find it harder and harder to love these games, other than NWE, when they simply change too much to reform into the same game as a sister game. If call of war would either A) Give back Unit Trading, or B) Not do the overhaul to change everything so drastically, I would be happy.

First Observations...

The unit progression/improvement from Research is way too steep.

If we just take a timeline that WWII represented 6 years.

Infantry begin with Attack/Defence vs Infantry at
Lvl 1 - 5/10
Lvl 6 - 30/60

This means that it would take approx 12 Divisions trained in 1936 and sent to the field, battle-hardened after 6 years of combat to try and take on a single division of Infantry fresh out of training in 1935?

A division is 10-20,000 men... so say 15,000 is an average? So are we saying that the training improved so significantly in those 6 years that it would take 180,000 experienced, battle hardened troops to handle 15,000 new recruits...?
Considering:
-M1 Garand was the standard U.S. Army infantry rifle from 1936-1959
-Colt 1911 was standard issue sidearm for U.S. Armed Forces from 1911 until 1986
- Soviet PPSh-41 used 1941-1960's and still used by some nations
-Thompson Submachine gun 1938-1971
-......
And the list goes on. So it's obviously NOT technological advancements that improved, training did not change so radically as to make the units 6 times more effective did it?

Medicine did improve so as to justify a 35 to 180 improvement to Infantry Hit Points (lvl 1 - Lvl 6).... How did the new recruits get 6 times healthier? Medical improvements can not explain units ENTERING the field 6 x healthier.

Some Justified Increases
I could justify some of those values for SOME tech tree branches... such as Armour-VS-Armour, Or Air-VS-Air as tech improvements in barrel, armour and shell design for armour or the Mark I - XV of most air-frames as improvements in wing design and completely new planes arrived on the scene, older models became fodder to newer tech, but an infantry mine affected that tracks of a 1938 tank just as it did in 1945, so their effectiveness against infantry wasn't 4x better.

This Improvement curve was even smaller when it came to navy, only significant change was tactics, from Battlesips to Carriers improving their Air wing capacity from aprox. 50 at start of war to 150+ by the end.

So I can see these Steep improvements affecting certain unit effectiveness within their own class as tech improved, but not so much across classes.


On that note... NOT fighting.. and staying "out of the way" in some corner.. and just putting all resources into Tech, and building upgrades.. waiting it out till Day 10... Ever single Unit you produce at that time is worth 5 or 6 of the units on the board...

This kind of play would discourage fighting... and promote "King-making"... keeping one player protected long enough to advance and put out a few "Super-units" to rampage across the battlefield like Godzilla or King Kong.

That's Whacked!

---------------ALSO
I think many are getting hung up on how far OFF the BALANCING is in the 1st iteration of the units... once they are more balanced, the unit interaction will be much closer to current CoW "feel".... How units act Across Classes as they are Researched and advance will be interesting.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the Economy.... It's so Whacked ... no words yet.

To be honest, this doesn't feel like CoW anymore. The changes are just way too big and you guys are removing core mechanics of the game we know.

I have bad impression of this 1,5 update for now and if you guys insist on keeping it up, I strongly suggest you guys make an entirely new, separate game from CoW or make a LOT of changes.

I don't like the idea that we need rares for everything. I don't like the fact you guys took away our ability to build a new troop production center in provinces. The shortened time of troop production is a good change once in a while but I feel like it will ruin any speed maps.

I haven't got into the combat just yet so I can't speak anything about it but I got a feeling combat might be faster now and to be honest, I kind of dislike the idea. For me, CoW is kind of a game where you can leave the game for entire day, come back and find your country (for the most part) is still there.

Removing the morale penalty for on-going war is a bad idea imo. The idea of morale penalty for each war is to prevent people from going too aggressive and slow them down, giving time for other players to expand or annoy that aggressive player by declaring war on said player.

In short; Current 1,5 update is unbalanced. If you guys insists on keeping it up, then make an entirely new game please. Also, I wonder if whoever suggested the 1,5 update may be inspired from Conflict of Nations because we can only build units in cities.

Initially there is some confusion learning a new set of relationships.

However, at first try the most serious choke point is manpower.

The items that give a manpower boost takes too many days to pay back the investment in manpower to get the boost.

The sharp escalation in troop value Level 2 infantry is twice as strong as level 1, has certain issues over time.

I think we will need someway to either retrain lower level troops or to be able to disband them. The lower troops will consume too many resources and the game alternative of sending them on suicide missions is poor design flavor for the period.

Nevermind....

NOTES TAKEN DURING DAY ONE of CoW V1.5

I will add to this thread throughout the testing period.


1. AA Lvl. defense strength against armor listed as 6.0

If this is truly the case it makes this unit stronger than an AT. Is this a typo or fact? Based upon a paragraph I read in the Bytro overviews of CoW V1.5, I believe it may be a typo, but am sharing anyway in case it hasn't been caught by devs yet.

2. Location of starting AB and Interceptor for Canada is dis-proportionally unfair compared with No. and So. USA.

At least three additional AB's have to be developed in order for the planes produced in Halifax at the starting location of the game to be able to perform much of any function defensively or offensively in comparison with the other two countries where no additional AB's are initially required in order to defend or fight.

3. Light armor vs. heavy armor

I cannot find where these two classifications are listed in any of the descriptions or statistics for any of the armored units.

A new player would get frustrated very easily not knowing if a unit was heavy or light.

Sure it says "Light Tank" and "Heavy Tank". But what about a "Medium Tank" ? How is it classified? A seasoned player would know that an AC is "Light Armor", but how would a newbie know how it is classified?

4. Double goods for Vilnuis is listed as 4,902 whereas all other double resources are listed as 4,948. Maybe I'm not looking at this correctly? My understanding was each country started off with same amount of resources?

Maybe the AI (non-player countries are set up differently?

5. From what I have learned it appears higher levels of Ordnance only increases morale and are not required for higher levels of infantry units to be researched or produced? Do I have this right?

6. I really do not understand what strategy is associated with having a single infantry unit worth 100 HP.

Does / will this make killing the enemy take 5x to 10x longer to achieve?

I suppose the units that can kill the infantry units efficiently (tanks / arty, etc.) increase proportionately as well? If so, then I fall back to the original question which is what is the strategy / purpose for increasing all the HP's to such large amounts?

How can infantry be used offensively against enemy infantry any longer when a defensive position is twice as strong as an offensive position PLUS the 15% home field advantage when in home provinces?

Yes, I've read that these infantry units have been redesigned to be a much stronger defensive weapon. But I yet to find a correspondingly stronger offensive weapon with which to attack with. Especially in an urban setting. Just need some help understanding how the new paper/ sissors /rock methodology works.

I realize I haven't dug deep enough yet, as I shouldn't be asking these sort of questions. Hoping someone is further along in their analysis of CoW V1.5 and might be able to provide some insights I've yet to reach.

PS - I've read all the current threads regarding CoW V1.5, before posting. I will add to this post as the days progress.

Well, it is not 4hrs of game play since the BAD CHANGES started.
And this complete overhaul of the game now, turning it into something completely else than it used to be... Really, can I be nice about changes that ruin a great Grand strategy game and turn it into Pokemon?

CoW was a RT-GS-MMO
a. MMO: Massive Multiplayer Online => such games tend to centre around player interaction = removed or at least severly stiffled by cutting out the diplomatic options. Why break what was GOOD?
b. GS: Grand Strategy => such games tend to centre around long term, well thought-out strategies, offering a multitude of options in turn allowing for various approaches to attain your goal (winning or at least surviving) = very much simplified, thus less of an attraction.
c. RT: Real Time => such games are somewhat slow by nature and tend to attract dedicated players, who care about their past-time, bc w/o dedication you simply lose. It is thus attracting the opposite of FPS action game players who want a 15 to 180 minute thrill (WOT, LOL etc) => Now we have a timer, fast research, fast production and all much simplified... but it still will not keep the action-gamers in. But you will lose the dedicated RT GS players.

So, can I be nice still? It truly is a rhetorical question...isn't it?

Ibeses, you did a GREAT thing when you developed this game back then. It is was truly unique (or point me to any alternative that is just as good a RT-GS-MMO... I looked, but didn't find any)
Back then s1914 was GREAT, but CoW even greater.

My question about all this tinkering with the game lately ... well, NO; it is not tinkering!...it is profoundly RUINING the game ... is: what drugs are you on?

Darn'd...it seems I really can't be nice about all this...

Why is that? Because though I would desperately want you to revert your steps, I know how project development works and how companies work and thus ... that you cannot and will not.
This leaves me sad and angry about a company breaking a good thing for the purpose of renewal only. As usual resulting in things getting worse.

But, hey, if you achieve higher earnings and bigger profits (IF!! I doubt it though), I fully understand that my opinion is worth-less. And IF Bytro does achieve those goals with these changes, you are right!

I shall ask the Chamber of Commerce for the deposited yearly accounts for the next few years (yes, I am like that) and check it.
IF you were right, hey, I am simply wrong.

It doesn't change you ruined my favorite past-time.

Armored cars: useless!
Airplanes: why still build bombers?
Tanks: LT's OK, but MT or HT ... pffff; you are nuts of you go for them
Infantery: a definite no-go

So what to do?
Artillery + some def for it

Simple... TOO SIMPLE


where is the multi-layered game-play gone that allowed for a varied approach to attain your goals?
where is the intense player-interaction gone?
where are the G and the S of Grand Strategy gone?

This new game is a one-way street

These are terrible changes, the fact everything requires every resource gets rid of the distinctions between each resource. Also makes it harder to come back from one resource being short. Also all the new buildings aren't needed and make it all too complex, same with 2 new classes of armor, makes the game convoluted and less fun. Also eliminating province resource usage makes the game less realistic. Unless there's still at least an option to play on the old system, I will stop playing.

Supremacy 1 is right there for you to play.

Aside from the unit stats' being WHACKED and needing adjustment, I like the Idea of Specialized cities...

Building Infrastructure to move your landcrawlers to the front faster and it being a reasonable cost....

Being able to drop AirFields (without having to pay for a Factory attached to every single one of them)

It's a little more structured for Building placement... but no one built factories in the middle of nowhere.... they were in or near the cities where the workforce lived...

So far Changes makes sense, tho i think they need some adjusting. balance out the start buildings. make small increase to income by .5% right now income is just bit low to keep a flow from producing and building either seem. to focus on units or buildings, resheach near impossible if want to both build and produce units.

no way can can build, produce and discover new teach.which is ok should be able to at least build and produce. mix it up

- Unit stats not only whacked; they increase x2 with every level... the old system had a good logic to it; this not.
- Buildings have not become more logical. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with the logic in CoW. Those who didn't get it in old CoW, won't be able to get this either. What did happen on the building front, is that all variety in choices is gone.
- Airfields did not require a factory to be airfields in old CoW. You could drop them anywhere already. Producing airplanes w/o a factory is however illogical and luckily that is still not possible. But now you need to build a separate factory for them.

All this achieves is that resource constraints increase (possibly in the hope players will buy them with gold; a suspicion that already rose with the effects of the Market Overhaul), variety in economic choices is gone and a whole new set of building obligations is introduced..

Thanks Booklet, for your comments. I can't find your scores in the ranking, however. Can you tell me where i can find them? I ofc value the opinion of players with many finished games under their belt, even if they didn't win but at least tried and did not go inactive. You know what I mean: players that understood the old CoW. Ofc, players that never understood the old CoW will welcome the 'changes' or factually 'new game', because any change will be welcomed by them, in the vague hope they will be doing better now.

Hey guys,
we really appreciate the feedback you gave so far. It has been ages since the last time, the forum was as active as in the last few days. Thank you for that.
It is nice to see, that the some of the drastical changes were percieved quite well. We designed them because we thought they would be a nice addition and bring more variety to the gameplay but also keep up the spirit of Call of War. Though some changes worked not as good as we hoped for.
A lot of criticism that I take comes from the overall balance of the units as they are in this state. I will try to explain how we got there and why we rolled with them, the way we did.
First of, we had many different ideas on how the progression and expansion should develop. We wanted - and still want - to bring more tactical depth into the battles, which should be from our understanding a core mechanic in Call of War. There are other features in development to improve battles and enhance the general understanding of them. With these these upcoming features in mind we also decided to try something different with our unit stats while perserving the historical accuracy (which many of you arleady stated didn't go well). As mentioned in the first post, the unit stats and resource cost are still a hugh subject to change, somthing that will be touched multiple times before there will be something that can be called kind of final.
The idea, of every unit costing some of each resource originated from the historically accurate thing. When defining "well, what was used to created [insert unit here] ?" We came to the point that all units kind of need money, manpower, goods, and grain. Everything motorized would obviously also ned oil and steel. And as we, inside the design team, already defined for ourselves that "rare material" would include things like ammunition, minerals and aluminium, it made sense to include it in the production cost aswell. So now, we ended up with units costing 5-7 different resources - the UI was a mess. Much worse that it is now. So we said "why not include this cost in every unit? That way you can at least compare them properly. And this is why units and building ended up costing every resource.
But we do have other approaches and will present them in the upcoming events.
So now for the question, why we released the event in the current state. Many of you claimed, that you could not do much in the beginning of the game. So how could we possibly release it like that? Did we not test in before?
Well, we did. But on the same page: we know much more about how to play the new event. We know how to use which units in which cases better than you do, as we obviously put much effort into changing it. Of course we would know where to put most attention in the early stages of the game. And we did not realize, that you do not have this insight. Because you simply can't have. So while for us, that were testing in a different environment, this balancing felt good. But on a much larger scale, which is why we roll this whole event, those issues are getting much more visible.
Again, we will continue to develope more features and rethink the current state of the balancing. And in the future, I hope we will meet your and our vision of Call of War.
Thank you again, and have a good night

Firstly, without playing much into the game yet (early days) I really like some of these new changes, a few of them are:
The concept of highly differences in resource costs for different units. I think this will enable a larger variety in strategies with certain resources being focused for certain branches of troops.

I like how early units take little time to build, not played late game to determine whether I like the longer times of more advanced troops.

Troops not upgrading is something that I will need to play around with more to determine how I feel about this change. Again, I really like the concept of it, it adds a lot more realism into the game and I think there are some further additions to it that would really spice up and add further strategic decisions into it. However, I believe there is a significant issue or two with it, I will need to play around with it more before I make a conclusion with recommendations about this (so know that, that is coming :P).

Manpower seems to have more uses but there are less methods in which to increase it, I think is something that should be changed with barracks supplying additional manpower.

Overall, without having played much of this new update, I like the direction it is going. I think there will be many small tweaks that will be needed but that is to be expected so I am grateful that we get this time now to iron out all the kinks.

I have joined 2 event maps now.

The first oneI ran out of cash and pretty much every resource too but did not have enough cash to be able to purchase any of my three initial market trades. I build about 6 troops (3 LT, 3 arty), 3 troop researches (AC, LT and arty) and builtan Ordnance factory in 4 cities, 2 barracks and 4 ICs. After I was completely unable to do anything else for the next 12 hours and was only just able to get the cash for lvl 2 arty. However, after realising that troops no longer upgradeI believe this start was not a very effective one. I believe the 74k cash was not enough to start with, given you are wanting the early game to be more exciting, only building a limited amount of buildings and troops that will soon become outdated due to initial resource restrictions is not that enjoyable. So far other amounts of resources does seem a little low, but an increase in cash would also enable us to purchase some more from the market.
For my second game which I joined more recently I researched more, (AT, AC, LT, art, tacs, ints) And built a lot more carefully with 2x lvl 2 ordinance factories, 1Air factory, and 1x lvl 2 Tank Plant. I am also building 6 ICs. However I am not building ANY troops nor do I plan to until day 2. I am doing this for two reasons:

1) Because I do not have enough resources to get buildings and troops and I want to priorities my economy given its current minimal output.

2) And the much more important one is that lvl 2 troops far exceed lvl 1 troop sand given troops do not upgrade I think it is a waste to produce any lvl 1troops for them to become outdated a day later.
For this reason I do not believe players should build troops day 1. Give or take 1 lvl 2 troop is 2x stronger than a lvl 1. So saving the rss and getting the stronger lvl 2 ones just seems like a better decision given when I went hard on troops in my first game, I was only able to build 6 units. This really makes early game not as exciting as day 1 I shouldn’t build troops, and half of day 2 is researching lvl 2. So really day 3-4 I can now utilise these troops to attack which I don’t believe is what you intended given the 3-4 hour productions of the lvl 1 troops. The start of this game has been quite dull, Idid some research, built some buildings and send troops to defend my provinces for the next few days.

For this reason I suggest making it that troops that unlock further upgrades on day 2 from day 1 should not have two levels in two days and should either have lvl 1 for day 1,2,3 with lvl 2 being able to be researched on day 4, or lvl 1for day 1,2,3,4,5 with lvl 2 being able to be researched on day 6. Either methods I believe would ensure that you could build troops on day 1 that will be able to be utilised in that first war, ensuring the early game is enjoyable.(assuming there was in increase in the amount of cash we start with) Ofc I believe further testing with these new values is required to ensure this would actually solve this.

How does everyone else think about this?

<p>Well, my opinion regarding all the changes regarding the units, buildings, provinces and the course of the strategies is as follows:</p><div><br></div><div>The different types of buildings used in the production of different types of units should be simplified as the specific type of unit that each factory building makes things a bit confusing, the changes in resource types in urban and rural provinces are absurd, Realistically, rural areas should always have the role of producing resources, not just money and labor, but urban provinces have been compensated with double resources.</div><div><br></div><div>Now for units, it's like:</div><div>-Tank light: "He's coming ..."</div><div>Armored Car: "He who boy?"</div><div>-Light tank: "The infantry."</div><div>Armored Car: "Oh shit ..."</div><div>-Infantaria: I arrived ... (killed the two, nor sweat)</div><div><br></div><div>Man, how can infantry defeat a light tank ?, she lvl.3 is more OP than nv.1 commands; Now it's another thing for interceptors, nor is it worth producing tactical bombers because even from escort, they have a chance of getting seriously evaluated, even an army with some Anti-Aircraft is enough to quietly chase a squad; Another thing is the naval bombers that will become much more useful for fighting ships, I get excited when I think of a fleet of aircraft carriers full of them.</div><div><br></div><div>The fact that it has eliminated nuclear reactors simplifies the search for nuclear bombers and missiles, even though it has taken nuclear units, I think it was worth it.</div><div><br></div><div>The strategy of all players on the map will follow very limited tactics, especially around labor, wheat and money, where their production has declined greatly. However, at the beginning of the game it is worth defending yourself in a war rather than attacking, since the infantry was much more op in defense.</div><div>Personally I think the most OP unit in defense is the heavy armor, the defense and the HP of the heavy tank will come, if you join 3 of them and some artillery, my friend ... they will be relentless. Now in attack I see no one capable perhaps the artillery, however in close combat it takes at least an average of 3 units to attack and win one.</div><div>And finally, the production of units like controls and parachutists, which will no longer depend on the capitol to produce them, can make the mechanics of the game and the strategies of the players freer with respect to those units.</div><div><br></div><div>The changes have been many and overall interesting, I know there will be more balances to be made but I hope this makes the game better and keeps the classic and realistic look of the game as usual.</div>