Call of War 1.5: Mechanics & New Balancing

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  • Another feedback from a player that started just 2 months ago playing.

    The things that for me are a big plus for the game are:

    -The new buildings and the new province system. Is easier to manage the different production of resources and units. Plus, I don't have to worry that my neighbor will spam armored car in a rural province near my border.
    -The distinction between light armored and heavy armored. So I don't have to worry about a army of 5 armored car and 1 medium tank against my army of medium tanks to be obliterated.
    -The new research tree is also a big update for me. The use of only money and manpower is perfect. No more enormous cost of food for improve my tanks or navy. But it has a issue. As someone else suggested, for the nuclear update is better to put also a cost in rare materials or we will have everyone spamming nuclear bombs and that is not even historically accurate).

    Regarding the things that for me are to be improved or changed right now, instead:

    -The use of every resource for produce the units and build the structures. I know you dev said that is more historically accurate and real. But this is still a game, so something that is suppose to be fun and that you do in your spare time to relax, and this new change is just useless. It is complex and difficult to organize your strategy with all these materials requirement. The old system was better, you know that for a antitank you don't need oil or food, you know that if you are without food and with few unit of materials is better to build tanks and not infantry. Same with the buildings.
    Plus, with just few different materials needed it is easier to individuate the most needed material for a specific unit or buildings (if I have few unit of oil I will not going to build infrastructures). This for me is the MAIN issue with the new update.
    -Same thing for the daily upkeep. Too complex to even stay there trying to base a strategy on that.
    -As I have already said before. Research tree fantastic and easy to manage, but necessary to have a more costly upgrade for the nuclear part.

    Also I like a lot that the unit will not automatically improve after the research is completed, but I would like an option to upgrade all the existing units to the last level (it can cost a lot of different resources and even have a parallel cost in gold). Because if someone as a big empire it will be very difficult to manage the units if you have a lot of mixed level units.

    Hope to see more improvement on the update the massive amount of feedback that you received. And thank you for still working on the game :thumbsup:

  • Hey guys,
    after I had a few days off last week and still catching up and working through all what you had and have to say, I would like to say that it is great to see the active discussion around the first test event for Call of War 1.5. When I prepared the communication arround this first event and the announcement of CoW 1.5 I tried to get exactly that point across, that we want to hear your feedback. That said...

    Thank you!

    ... and keep it coming. The first test event is yet just a few days old and there is still a lot of feedback you can give us about mid and late game, so please take the time to share your first hand experiences with us, the good and the bad! We are reviewing what you share with us and will work with it for the upcoming events and CoW 1.5 in general.

    I would also like to thank our great support staff who help to keep this and all the other threads in order and civilized. We are all dedicated Call of War players here and it is only natural that things can get emotional and somewhat heated. However, if we can manage to keep the discussion on this level I am a realy happy Community Manager. :)

    The team will continue to have an eye on this and the other threads and will answere your questions and engage with your feedback if it hasn't been adressed earlier already. If you feel like that was not the case for your specific feedback or issue, please don't get mad. Since these are all very active threads and all of us are busy to keep working on CoW 1.5 and working with your feedback it might take a bit longer for us to get back to it or it might happen that we indeed miss it, but not with bad intentions.

    Looking forward to more of this!
    Discord: Call of War
    Facebook: Call of War
    Twitter: Call of War

  • _Pontus_ wrote:

    On unit balancing of ACs:

    In the old CoW you only quite recently - was it a year? maybe 1,5 years ago? - made ACs cool again.
    The dimw... errrm.... vast majority of players ofc did not understand their usefulness before and still not after they finally got some buffs.
    But even without the buffs, their speed is what made them a mighty little weapon, if applied correctly. It is not for nothing I have far more casualties in ACs compared to other troops; I built them a lot and, yes, they perished a lot..after doing their job.

    Now, in 1.5... their fighting capabilities seem to have increased, but their speed is nothing very special compared to LT's. With that, their unique feature, the one thing that made them so useful and different from LTs, is gone.

    IMO another impoverishment of the game-play options.
    We did not change the relative speed values of units between this and the old version. The only thing we did was give +30% on top of the old speed values to ground units, and +15% to airplanes. Meaning the Armored Car still has the relative speed to the Light Tank as before.

    OneNutSquirrel wrote:

    Missing Building

    Infrastructure Increases land unit movement speed through the province where it is built. There is no building that provides the same benefit to CITY provinces.

    This movement bonus should be added to the Industry building available in City provinces, unless this was an intentional omission, normally roads would improve the closer they were to cities.
    For now it is intentional, because we assume that cities already have infrastructure present, that's why units don't get slowed down as much anymore when inside cities by default. Still units have to navigate inside a city, so it cannot give speed increases like an Autobahn in rural provinces.

    Rrred wrote:

    The game = the number of new players? The retention of new players? The overall number of players? The $ spent on the game?
    If it is new players, there has been enough said about Bytro's marketing. You could win a lot here.
    If it is the retention of new players, make a (much better) tutorial, which was already suggested > year ago.
    We don't just want to improve a single metric and we are working on multiple fronts here. The tutorial for example we improved this year. We also don't want to discuss business intelligence publically here. The info I gave should be enough for now. Please focus on giving dedicated feedback about the 1.5 version.


    ERICofOLLE wrote:

    Another feedback from a player that started just 2 months ago playing.

    The things that for me are a big plus for the game are:

    -The new buildings and the new province system. Is easier to manage the different production of resources and units. Plus, I don't have to worry that my neighbor will spam armored car in a rural province near my border.
    -The distinction between light armored and heavy armored. So I don't have to worry about a army of 5 armored car and 1 medium tank against my army of medium tanks to be obliterated.
    -The new research tree is also a big update for me. The use of only money and manpower is perfect. No more enormous cost of food for improve my tanks or navy. But it has a issue. As someone else suggested, for the nuclear update is better to put also a cost in rare materials or we will have everyone spamming nuclear bombs and that is not even historically accurate).

    Regarding the things that for me are to be improved or changed right now, instead:

    -The use of every resource for produce the units and build the structures. I know you dev said that is more historically accurate and real. But this is still a game, so something that is suppose to be fun and that you do in your spare time to relax, and this new change is just useless. It is complex and difficult to organize your strategy with all these materials requirement. The old system was better, you know that for a antitank you don't need oil or food, you know that if you are without food and with few unit of materials is better to build tanks and not infantry. Same with the buildings.
    Plus, with just few different materials needed it is easier to individuate the most needed material for a specific unit or buildings (if I have few unit of oil I will not going to build infrastructures). This for me is the MAIN issue with the new update.
    -Same thing for the daily upkeep. Too complex to even stay there trying to base a strategy on that.
    -As I have already said before. Research tree fantastic and easy to manage, but necessary to have a more costly upgrade for the nuclear part.

    Also I like a lot that the unit will not automatically improve after the research is completed, but I would like an option to upgrade all the existing units to the last level (it can cost a lot of different resources and even have a parallel cost in gold). Because if someone as a big empire it will be very difficult to manage the units if you have a lot of mixed level units.

    Hope to see more improvement on the update the massive amount of feedback that you received. And thank you for still working on the game :thumbsup:
    Thanks, good feedback. We will discuss the resource costs internally again, we will also review the costs of nuclear again and probably make it more expensive. An option to upgrade units manually on the field is planned for a later version.

  • My planes are getting shreed by 5 infranty and 2 ( i dunno the name in english ) armored car i guess? 5 lvl 2 strategic plane getting shreed by 7 units and its the same if i send tattics because tattics have more attack but way less HP so i would loose the same % of life.. are you really sure that air force is fine? because i can take out a world full of planes with just 1 stack of tanks and armored anti air.
    there is really no needs in making air units anymore if not scouting the enemy please delete the unit already ( this is quite funny because it was planes that were ruling the conflict on WW2.. they were few but very effective and still are on nowadaysthere are no very effective ground anti air artillery which cant really defend well versus bombers and thats why any nation in the world have those damn interceptors.. )
    SO again i advice to not make anymore air units and lets just be a tank game with some artillery on ok? you can also change the name of the game from ww2 and call it The bastiglia catch 1789 xD

  • So guys,

    we already summed up 12 pages of densed down feedback to already hide in our big bad cave and plot a bit to come up with a plan. Nevertheless still looking for more feedback.

    Now back to the serious matters:
    Firstly i´m so glad to see you all so engaged varying from furious outraged to cold blooded analytic. Its good to see so many different opinion which give us some nuts to crack and shows me that there is still much love for this good old game!

    Atm we already discuss the major cornerstones of the changes but will still need time to really judge everything from a qualitative standpoint and mix it up with the quantitive data, which will come up way later. Damn we are still only at day 5 or so of the event so really looking forward to the next days.

    (And yes we will share most of it with you once the point comes we will decide parts of it, but atm its just playing around so to early to tell. Although there is still something looming for the normal games pretty soon, which probably 87,45 % of you will like ;) )

    Already think that some changes probably need major changes while others only need minor adjustments. Nevertheless i still have to say that some of the major parts are still missing and i hope you also will be as engaged when the next tests come up in the future as you are now!

    One thing i already can say for now (as i read i several times over the course of all these pages) that CoW will always be a pretty much different game than the other Bytro games and that historical correctness will be one of the things i want to keep as much as possible. Already see that some changes we did do not really fit that scheme (unrealistic balancing of unit strength increases), which will be heavily discussed here.

    will try to include some more meat in the next postings!

    And don´t stop mocking marketing, they need this from time to time ;) (Don´t hate me on this @freezy)

  • As I started war on my neighbours, I personally think that the revised recruitment time is not too good to those don't login as much. Whoever login more, having enough land or manpower advantages over the other and press that recruitment unit button. Whenever we can spam the units as fast as it could. The turnaround chance is even lesser. So that mean once the war is on, it is either success or failed (died).

    I think the recruitment time should either very fast, or very long. So it makes those who do not login as much can either recruit or non recruit to the same/ similar pace as the more frequent login players like me :)

  • C88 wrote:

    My planes are getting shreed by 5 infranty and 2 ( i dunno the name in english ) armored car i guess? 5 lvl 2 strategic plane getting shreed by 7 units and its the same if i send tattics because tattics have more attack but way less HP so i would loose the same % of life.. are you really sure that air force is fine? because i can take out a world full of planes with just 1 stack of tanks and armored anti air.
    there is really no needs in making air units anymore if not scouting the enemy please delete the unit already ( this is quite funny because it was planes that were ruling the conflict on WW2.. they were few but very effective and still are on nowadaysthere are no very effective ground anti air artillery which cant really defend well versus bombers and thats why any nation in the world have those damn interceptors.. )
    SO again i advice to not make anymore air units and lets just be a tank game with some artillery on ok? you can also change the name of the game from ww2 and call it The bastiglia catch 1789 xD
    The difference is: You cannot take out someones planes with a stack of anti air, the other player can just choose to let you take out his planes with a stack of anti air. The plane user decides where and when to attack. He can completely ignore the anti air and bomb down everything else due to his mobility, and the AA will be unable to catch. Therefore the AA user has to build alot more AAs to cover all vital provinces and armies. That fact alone dictates that AA needs to be stronger than in the old version. So even if planes are weaker than AA; they are far from useless, they just have to be used with more caution and maybe you need additional units as well. In the end we try to enable alot of different strategies, without any strategy overshadowing all other strategies (as was the case often with airforce in the old balancing)
    This said the current balancing is still a rough version. We did not say that it is fine the way it is and we know it needs alot of tweaking. In every event round that we will try there will be balancing changes, so don't worry yet. That's why I would also kindly ask you to refrain from hyperbolic requests like patching out air units, we know balancing is not perfect yet. We will certainly review the airforce again as well and make it stronger if we feel that it is necessary :)


    coolgame2019 wrote:

    As I started war on my neighbours, I personally think that the revised recruitment time is not too good to those don't login as much. Whoever login more, having enough land or manpower advantages over the other and press that recruitment unit button. Whenever we can spam the units as fast as it could. The turnaround chance is even lesser. So that mean once the war is on, it is either success or failed (died).

    I think the recruitment time should either very fast, or very long. So it makes those who do not login as much can either recruit or non recruit to the same/ similar pace as the more frequent login players like me :)
    We will tweak recruiting times further, but both very fast and very long are not really an option, because they result in other problems. Players who login only once a day always will have a disadvantage over players logging in multiple times a day, there is not much we can do about it. Some stuff already favors the defender, like the home defense bonus and the defensive focus of most early units, this should at least ensure that you have time to react and recover when you login while someone already started attacking you. Will tweak this more in the coming events.

    Ibeses wrote:

    And don´t stop mocking marketing, they need this from time to time ;) (Don´t hate me on this @freezy)

    Ohh you naughty boy ;)

  • _Pontus_ wrote:

    Last Warrior wrote:

    _Pontus_ wrote:

    As long as it boils down to Micromanaging your troops better,
    We play RTS and not action klicker. Wasting real time is not taktik nor skill.
    Suddenly the slow CoW game turns into close quarters battle mode and now survival of your troops or victory in a battle is no longer determined by hour-long artillery barrages from a safe distance on an incapable or absent player or predictable AI... Suddenly it is your personal skill and effort, using all your gathered knowledge, that will make the difference...

    If that were never the case, why play?
    If everything in a battle is predictable, why play?
    Nono... Skill does factor in to tactics for sure, and those "close quarters battle mode" scenarios can be the best part of the game. Will he leave his artillery in the fort while my tanks crash in to it, or detach them and shoot from behind the fort's garrison? When he detaches will my besieging artillery get a chance to hit them without their meatshield? That's all great, but we could still have that without these counter-intuitive exploits.

    "Why play" is for fun, obviously. From a competitive play perspective (which I realize is more or less uncommon in the community at large), mainly because of the exploits, you can't be competitive and get decent sleep. Because the game stretches on so long (i.e. we aren't talking about a 6-hour LAN party, or one all-nighter, but two weeks straight of nothing but quick naps in between ticks), that is profoundly unhealthy. A game shouldn't be bad for your health!

    Fundamentally I believe most or all of these exploits should be closed off with twin goals:
    - Making the game more realistic and accessible (It makes total sense that you would want to defend against bombers with interceptors. It makes no sense that splitting them in to 10 tiny groups would work far better than 1 or 2 larger groups.)
    - Allowing a player to go on a defensive posture effectively, to give the troops (and more importantly the player) a chance to rest up. To be clear, if you sleep for 10 hours and transports invade while you are sleeping or something like that, that's your bad for not securing your coast. You could have seen those transports approaching with planes or subs before you went to bed. But the business of waking up and finding out that your enemy used some kind of magic death ray to kill all your elite artillery in a fort overnight without taking a single hit in return because you weren't online to click the button at the precise second necessary each hour... That makes no sense.

    ------------
    I know some people don't care about game realism, but let's face it, this is a WW2 simulation game, not Starship Troopers or something where units can be made up however the author likes for convenience. (Glowy flak from their bums shooting down starships from orbit??) So here's a very-incomplete list of departures from reality in v1.5 that I believe hurt the game as a simulation.
    1. Mobile infantry are an attack unit, and infantry are a defense unit? That might seem to make sense (because they are faster, right?) but it doesn't. Mobile infantry are just infantry that can get somewhere quickly when needed. They are great reserves to defend an imperiled city or plug a gap in the lines. They are not meant to be used as a hammer to break through the lines - That makes no sense!
    2. LTs are an attack unit, and ACs are a (better) defense unit? LTs actually do more damage on the attack than MTs do? Again makes no real-world intuitive sense, and how does it make the game any better? In the Staus Quo game, all those things very much have their uses. Now it just feels like a dog's breakfast to me. Might as well make them big colourful insects or dragons or something instead of Pz3s that we should know what to expect from!
    3. Commandos capturing a city by stealth, killing 2 infantry divisions garrisoned there. This isn't Troy. :P It would make sense for a small unit of commandos to sneak in and sabotage an airfield or something, but we already have spies for that kind of mission. WW2 armies didn't sneak up on cities full of troops. (But it looks like Naval Bombers can detect Commandos if you want to patrol around your inland cities with those? lol)
    4. Heavy tanks are a defensive specialist, weaker than MTs on the attack? They are the opposite, if anything! KVs and Tigers were called 'breakthrough tanks' because their armor allowed them to smash through enemy lines as AT shells bounced off their hulls. And Tank Destroyers have been flipped from defensive specialists (which made historical sense) to offensive specialists? Oh my head... :( Again, I wonder if someone has made a counter-factual assessment that speed = attack power and slowness = defensive power? Mobility, attack power and armour are all different important characteristics. Mobility just gets you into place faster - It doesn't make you do more damage. TDs traditionally had weak armor, just field guns on a tank chassis. They were meant to be dug in, and then race away to a secondary dug in position after their first blind was compromised. Mobility for defensive use. On the attack they tended to end up like this scene from Saving Private Ryan:
    5. Units can't be upgraded in the field, meaning your 20 starting inf will end up being trash conscripts by the middle game instead of veteran core troops. (Apparently devs are planning to address this.)
    6. Convoys are stronger than submarines. (Apparently devs are planning to address this.)
    7. Resource cost tuning. It makes no sense for infantry to cost rare materials or a significant amount of oil and steel. Sure, they have rifles that have steel barrels. But compared to a Battleship? A single 16" gun (i.e. 3 of those per turret) weighed about 120,000 kgs! And in general everything is far too expensive for the resources available in this beta map, resulting in production being far slower than in Status Quo CoW. (Apparently devs are planning to address this.)
    8. Destroyers are able to shockingly quickly destroy a coastal city's industry with bombardment (and those buildings are depressingly precious and irreplaceable!)
    9. AA seems to completely neutralize TBs, which again makes no sense. A WW2 column of Panthers racing around enemy territory with 1 mobile AA unit and no interceptor cover would have been absolutely savaged by Sturmoviks. In this game the TBs will be unable to attack without getting slaughtered. L1 mobile AA hits for 42??
    10. Strategic bombers have 30 building attack at L2? (And L1 buildings have 5hp) Does that mean that a single bomber can flatten every precious building in a city in a single pass??
    11. Faster combat resolution (combined with map movement that is still very slow) seems like a bad idea that again breaks the realistic and working implementation in the status quo version. So Germany and France have armies lined up staring at each other across the Maginot/Siegfried lines. Realistically Generals would ensure that enough troops are at each point along the line that if a concerted attack shows up there they can hold long enough for reinforcements/reserves to pour in. But because movement is slow while combat ends quickly, there is likely to be no time to reinforce, which is likely to make defending basically futile in general. Why bother building forts when it's too easy to overwhelm them, especially with their strength badly nerfed? (Forts were not too strong in status quo!)
    From reading the discussion, it sounds like the devs have gone way overboard in pursuit of 'rock/paper/scissors', and I don't get it. Status quo CoW has plenty of that already, and it makes sense there. If you need to cheaply counter ACs running around your underbelly, rush out some AT guns. LTs are a more mobile (but more costly with much longer build time) way, but they are weak against bombers. Bombers are weak against interceptors, cruisers and AA. LTs are owned by HTs. Destroyers kill subs but get mauled by Battleships. Anyone who has read anything about WW2 intuitively gets all that, and that's a huge benefit!

    It sounds like you are chasing notions like "How do we come up with a few 'meta' build strategies that will be best for most situations?" when history already teaches us what is best for most situations (i.e. the army compositions that were effective in WW2) and the game should be designed to encourage us to simulate good real-world strategic deployment as much as possible. I want to emphasize that status quo CoW was already quite good in that sense, and making a big shift to the 'various specialist insects that only look like Pz3s' unit types feels like a big step back.

    Please don't throw away the realism of unit roles! Seek instead to find ways for us to effectively use the units in realistic ways!

    The post was edited 8 times, last by CityOfAngels ().

  • freezy wrote:

    C88 wrote:

    My planes are getting shreed by 5 infranty and 2 ( i dunno the name in english ) armored car i guess? 5 lvl 2 strategic plane getting shreed by 7 units and its the same if i send tattics because tattics have more attack but way less HP so i would loose the same % of life.. are you really sure that air force is fine? because i can take out a world full of planes with just 1 stack of tanks and armored anti air.
    there is really no needs in making air units anymore if not scouting the enemy please delete the unit already ( this is quite funny because it was planes that were ruling the conflict on WW2.. they were few but very effective and still are on nowadaysthere are no very effective ground anti air artillery which cant really defend well versus bombers and thats why any nation in the world have those damn interceptors.. )
    SO again i advice to not make anymore air units and lets just be a tank game with some artillery on ok? you can also change the name of the game from ww2 and call it The bastiglia catch 1789 xD
    The difference is: You cannot take out someones planes with a stack of anti air, the other player can just choose to let you take out his planes with a stack of anti air. The plane user decides where and when to attack. He can completely ignore the anti air and bomb down everything else due to his mobility, and the AA will be unable to catch. Therefore the AA user has to build alot more AAs to cover all vital provinces and armies. That fact alone dictates that AA needs to be stronger than in the old version. So even if planes are weaker than AA; they are far from useless, they just have to be used with more caution and maybe you need additional units as well. In the end we try to enable alot of different strategies, without any strategy overshadowing all other strategies (as was the case often with airforce in the old balancing)This said the current balancing is still a rough version. We did not say that it is fine the way it is and we know it needs alot of tweaking. In every event round that we will try there will be balancing changes, so don't worry yet. That's why I would also kindly ask you to refrain from hyperbolic requests like patching out air units, we know balancing is not perfect yet. We will certainly review the airforce again as well and make it stronger if we feel that it is necessary :)


    coolgame2019 wrote:

    As I started war on my neighbours, I personally think that the revised recruitment time is not too good to those don't login as much. Whoever login more, having enough land or manpower advantages over the other and press that recruitment unit button. Whenever we can spam the units as fast as it could. The turnaround chance is even lesser. So that mean once the war is on, it is either success or failed (died).

    I think the recruitment time should either very fast, or very long. So it makes those who do not login as much can either recruit or non recruit to the same/ similar pace as the more frequent login players like me :)
    We will tweak recruiting times further, but both very fast and very long are not really an option, because they result in other problems. Players who login only once a day always will have a disadvantage over players logging in multiple times a day, there is not much we can do about it. Some stuff already favors the defender, like the home defense bonus and the defensive focus of most early units, this should at least ensure that you have time to react and recover when you login while someone already started attacking you. Will tweak this more in the coming events.

    Ibeses wrote:

    And don´t stop mocking marketing, they need this from time to time ;) (Don´t hate me on this @freezy)
    Ohh you naughty boy ;)
    I totally agree with Freezy!! Because just the previous version, ppl spam tact bomber against anything. I sometimes felt sad for ppl (just log-off), and when they come back. BAM, their units and cities is gone. For me, i always prepare a few SP anti-air, so not as much problem. The previous version, only SP AA can kind of suppress, but not stopped because too powerful. AA is still too weak at that time, i found out only the stupid A.I (elite) will recruit them. HAHA.


    Home base defense do help abit, but we all know that majority of our land is not our homeland. So we are still vulnerable to spam attack. Unless, non-core land can turn to my homeland, and add more non core land into the map.

  • CityOfAngels wrote:

    Destroyers are able to shockingly quickly destroy a coastal city's industry with bombardment (and those buildings are depressingly precious and irreplaceable!)
    Indeed, Destroyers went from NO capability against any ground target,
    to the super power of shore bombardment.

    Even just level one artillery can devastate buildings:
    +2 damage (less X-factor) vs a Tank Factory with only 5 hit points?

  • freezy wrote:

    C88 wrote:

    My planes are getting shreed by 5 infranty and 2 ( i dunno the name in english ) armored car i guess? 5 lvl 2 strategic plane getting shreed by 7 units and its the same if i send tattics because tattics have more attack but way less HP so i would loose the same % of life.. are you really sure that air force is fine? because i can take out a world full of planes with just 1 stack of tanks and armored anti air.
    there is really no needs in making air units anymore if not scouting the enemy please delete the unit already ( this is quite funny because it was planes that were ruling the conflict on WW2.. they were few but very effective and still are on nowadaysthere are no very effective ground anti air artillery which cant really defend well versus bombers and thats why any nation in the world have those damn interceptors.. )
    SO again i advice to not make anymore air units and lets just be a tank game with some artillery on ok? you can also change the name of the game from ww2 and call it The bastiglia catch 1789 xD
    The difference is: You cannot take out someones planes with a stack of anti air, the other player can just choose to let you take out his planes with a stack of anti air. The plane user decides where and when to attack. He can completely ignore the anti air and bomb down everything else due to his mobility, and the AA will be unable to catch. Therefore the AA user has to build alot more AAs to cover all vital provinces and armies. That fact alone dictates that AA needs to be stronger than in the old version. So even if planes are weaker than AA; they are far from useless, they just have to be used with more caution and maybe you need additional units as well. In the end we try to enable alot of different strategies, without any strategy overshadowing all other strategies (as was the case often with airforce in the old balancing)This said the current balancing is still a rough version. We did not say that it is fine the way it is and we know it needs alot of tweaking. In every event round that we will try there will be balancing changes, so don't worry yet. That's why I would also kindly ask you to refrain from hyperbolic requests like patching out air units, we know balancing is not perfect yet. We will certainly review the airforce again as well and make it stronger if we feel that it is necessary :)
    im sick to repeat myself but you completly miss the point here.. versus a decent player u will never find a stack without AA protection and right now you need 2 or 3 aa units to avoid any attack from planes because planes are expensive and loosing them for nothing is a NO GO .
    The only worth plane to use is strategic one which can destroy the structures from far in order to block the producing of high lvl troops for the enemy. But there is no space for actually any fight for the others planes in this version of the game .
    My comments are not hyperbolic request im just testing the game that you asked for .

    P.S. Its your game and u are free to make it as you want but dont ever think to know the game better then ppl that been playing it for years and at least 8 hours per day.. you know that and thats why you made this test because developing and playing are 2 different things.

    P.S.S. you have been talking about AA but i said that my planes are getting smashed from simply high stack of infranty 5 and +2 AC lvl 1 vs 5 lvl 2 planes ( which are expensive ) so how in the hell i should not be upset that my expensive planes are getting smashed by cheap lvl 1 infranty with guns and 9mm ammo? XD lol come on you cant be serius

    The post was edited 3 times, last by C88 ().

  • coolgame2019 wrote:

    I totally agree with Freezy!! Because just the previous version, ppl spam tact bomber against anything. I sometimes felt sad for ppl (just log-off), and when they come back. BAM, their units and cities is gone. For me, i always prepare a few SP anti-air, so not as much problem. The previous version, only SP AA can kind of suppress, but not stopped because too powerful. AA is still too weak at that time, i found out only the stupid A.I (elite) will recruit them. HAHA.

    Home base defense do help abit, but we all know that majority of our land is not our homeland. So we are still vulnerable to spam attack. Unless, non-core land can turn to my homeland, and add more non core land into the map.
    you sound like a weak player.. do you want to kill a bigger stack of air bombers? make those intercpetors lol ! bombers alone are very weak and if they come with interceptors bring anti air stacked with other units and covered by your interceptors.. its not that you must bring only 1 unit of AA to kill 50 planes but you need both sky and ground cover just like IN real wars. You all are missing the whole point and crying about planes been too strong when you never ever done a proper stack with anti air and never ever done a decent ammount of interceptors..
    All this come from inexperience and bad strategy. I never won a single match without having heavy AA and a decent ammount of intercpetors but ofc there are some maps full of noobs were having light tank and tactis is enough!
    Im wondering why im loosing my time explaining the game to random ppl.. just a waste of my time

    this post has been edited.

  • In day 5, as me or my dying neighbour, most of his stack are without AA. And some other player on newspaper also most of them are infantry, no AA causalities.
    Corn Good Manpower Iron Oil Rare Mat. Cost
    Anti-AIr 440 660 660 220 40 40 $660
    T. Bomber 330 660 990 70 660 1320 $1980

    Difference +110 0 -330 -150 -620 -1280 $1320

    How is that unrealistic? Isn't plane should be more expensive? The only thing maybe a little off is manpower.
    If AA can't stop plane, what else can? But I realize now most units have air defense which I like that (but unrealistic) :)

  • I'm playing my first game of COW 1.5 and have yet to figure out the tactics. There is a heavy emphasis on manpower to build anything. I'm "rich" in all the other resources except perhaps money. So, manpower becomes the limiting factor.

    You say that units do not upgrade automatically as one researches higher levels. I have yet to see how that is going to play out if I have a mix of 3 different levels of artillery, or tactical bombers, or light tanks. What I can say is that I keep hesitating to build units, because I want them to be the highest quality.

    The manpower resource is certainly going to change game tactics. I feel compelled to attack and gain territory in order to gain more manpower resources, in order to improve my factories and do ore research to have access to higher quality (levels of) units and to be able to build more and better factories.

    Things I don't like:
    a) Building industry or local industry increases resource production and manpower production, but doesn't seem to increase road speed like infrastructure did in the original COW.
    b) Militia now seems like a useless unit.
    c) There is no chart that shows the overall relation between level of factory needed to build what level of unit. I am having to go through each level of unit research and construct my own to help figure out my building construction strategy

    Things I like:
    a) I like that you need different factories to build different units. That seems more realistic to me.
    b) I like (so far) that every unit needs a little bit of some resource for maintenance. That also seems more realistic. The levels (amounts) of resources needed I think will need further balancing.
    c) I like how you have redistributed the research, and the grouping of units. Commandos and Paratroopers did not need to be "secret" but part of infantry.

    I am only in Day 4, so I'm sure I will have more gripes and praises and observations as I progress.

    Lastly, I hope you preserve some games as the original COW.

  • CityOfAngels wrote:

    @Potus

    Some of these are general thoughts to the above as well as replies to you Potus.

    - It is virtually nearly impossible to have a healthy work/life balance and be a competitive player. Granted, competitive play as it once was is virtually dead in SP1914 and in this game, and competitive play is neither this games target audience nor intended - It was just a happy fun accident. But in actually playing either game at the most optimal levels, and especially in Alliance matches, extreme activity is virtually a requirement. It was so much that many players would regularly set timers to wake up at certain times in the night to check up on stuff. For people that had active jobs and couldn't do hacky things to get the game working on their phones (Before the mobile clients), virtually nearly all the top alliances in the past in some shape or form used teamviewer to ensure 24/7 activity. Just regularly logging in isn't usually always enough - You need to consistently keep the screen up to watch for micro movements, unit splits, delays, and a whole bunch of other things. Check every 30M to at the very minimum a hour with other teammates covering. People would regularly Text/Kik/Skype each other. It's a lot more viable now with the mobile clients, but still. Major time sink.

    The twin problems is that Call of War doesn't replicate larger scale tactical and strategic gameplay as well as other games as lets say, Hearts of Iron III or IV. You have the Micro and the Macro, and these games haven't had a healthy balance of the area between or a good large level of depth on the Macro level - Just on a generalized level. On the inverse side, as long as you are able to do a few tricks and be a bit more active, not much of what your opponent does matters. If they can be, things change a bit. Call of War and Supremacy 1914 were marketed as slow time strategy games where you did not have to be "Extremely active", "login every now and then but not constantly keep a game window up and watch the game like in other video games". Which from a "Play the game at a more optimal level", it virtually became that. It's a major time sink. So a major discussion players have is trying to expand the depth of the game, in combination with both keeping a "Competitive" and "Casual" audience in mind - And on top of that try to ensure the game is just more than being more active than the other person with a basic level of knowledge and you are good.

    From my personal perspective these games have always been a bit unbalanced, flawed always, a bit of the charm really, and I have been more or less fine with "Numerous exploits" to various degrees as they have helped add at times a bit of depth to the game - Which in very competitive alliance matches with heavy amounts of micro, it's been pretty fun. And considering reworking some of these exploits would require a massive, massive amount of investment from the Devs to rework core game features or nerf patches on top of things (As in V1.5), I've been of the opinion to treat them as more or less regular game mechanics and try to balance some things out to make all parties happy.

    On the other hand, I don't believe Realism = a better game. I believe in fundamentally focusing on having solid gameplay, even if some elements are unrealistic - In combination with pop up notices about historical events, vary detailed unit descriptions, themes and the like would be a better approach. It keeps solid gameplay while at the same time teaching a little bit of history. I think on a few other things, looking at more detailed and broken down provinces, being able to have more units on the field at once, and reworking naval combat would make things a bit more interesting. It's a bit like some Esport games I have played in the past in that respect, Realism does not equal solid game play. And to try to get more realistic play involves adding a lot, lot of new mechanics and reworking existing mechanics.

    - I'm just vaguely throwing something out their, but how would weather/weather effects sound that could affect combat?

    - Traditionally in base Call of War, you wouldn't only build infantry as the first combat round until you got your infrastructure up the next day and your LT's coming out. You'd only replace them at minimal levels for when you needed to send them into Urbans you Mountains - And then usually you'd just be Tac bombing those areas and sending in the LT's afterwards.

    - LT/AC always felt funny to me. Even in regular Call of War is made very little sense to build AC. LT's were practically better in every way. And within the existing framework of how the game works, their is little sense for me to try to build AC and LTs when I could just go for LTs.

    If I'm thinking about "Scouting", one would usually just use Planes or LTs. Even a lone infantry unit. And considering you can usually predict build times pretty good and where people will keep stuff at - At a certain level this becomes expected once you break the game down, consistently scouting isn't something you do a lot besides just to keep tabs on some things or to cover coastal.

    - I've always taken Commandos to be more akin to "Elite Infantry" in Call of War. Very rarely have I used them though. In the original game before some nerfs, they were effectively very effective AA/and Anti-Everything that could be thrown into a stack to buff it. As it stands, I don't see them in the new game being particular effective. If I want to stealth hit provinces, I have Light tanks. Even one lone infantry unit on Force March.

    - Heavy Tanks were always akin to "Mobile Fortresses" in Call of War. It's sort of hard to figure out how to make them viable without either slowing down the game to the point where having mobile forts are viable, or nerfing other things/Speeding things up so you can get them out early for those heavy penetrations. In which case you'd just be practically replacing LTs with HTs? I suppose in the larger 100+ Map games where things can take a little bit longer, it may be viable-ishness to build these extra fun units to various degrees. Or just optimize and overwhelm with spam.

    - Yeah. Non-Upgradable units are just to be stacked to add a Tac/Arty shield to other units.

    - Never saw much use in building lots of A.A. It was always counterproductive.

    - Destroyers being able to attack coastal reminds me of BBs in SP1914 if that gives you any vibes.

    - On your Rock-Paper-Scissor, per what I said above, it feels as if they speed certain things up and slow certain things down, it just redevelops into building the same few units. Which isn't by itself bad, but can be a inferior gameplay experience with more resource sinks, more expensive units, less options to obtain resources, and longer times to get these units.

    "I want to emphasize that status quo CoW was already quite good in that sense" Pretty Much in a few ways.

    From a game play perspective, they could just regularly throw out event maps where they change unit statistics and other things around so that for those specific games, a different Meta develops before moving on. I'm taking ideas from card games like MTG/Hearthstone/Stuff, where things are consistently changed around every now and then. So you would look at

    - Traditional CoW + Special Events with Meta changes. Trad CoW as a backup with new CoWV1.5 with special event maps.

  • I broke this issue out of the list because the list got too long, and this one is really important.

    • Late-game produced infantry is 42x as strong as the 20 you started with? (7x AP and 6x HP) Why?? It would actually make more sense for the last infantry you produced to be weaker than the 4-year veteran survivors, as you're scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of recruits by that point. You seem to have abandoned the general principle that an L4 AT gun would be significantly better than L1, but not 'plate-wearing Knights vs peasants' better. Having the L4 units be 6x or more as strong (factoring in HP) and thus the L1 units being worthless in mid-game seems like it will be very bad for game-play. (Status quo CoW production allows for L1 ATs to be spammed out from any city in desperation as a counter to breakthrough ACs/LTs ravaging. Now teching to high-level ATs at a given city is far too hard to be viable, and L1s have no hope of stopping more advanced units. An L4 LT has 50% more attack but 11x the hp of a L1 AT! In this case that's not terrible from an intuition standpoint, but it is way too exaggerated in terms of realism, and it hurts game-play.

    The post was edited 1 time, last by CityOfAngels ().

  • coolgame2019 wrote:

    In day 5, as me or my dying neighbour, most of his stack are without AA. And some other player on newspaper also most of them are infantry, no AA causalities.
    Corn Good Manpower Iron Oil Rare Mat. Cost
    Anti-AIr 440 660 660 220 40 40 $660
    T. Bomber 330 660 990 70 660 1320 $1980

    Difference +110 0 -330 -150 -620 -1280 $1320

    How is that unrealistic? Isn't plane should be more expensive? The only thing maybe a little off is manpower.
    If AA can't stop plane, what else can? But I realize now most units have air defense which I like that (but unrealistic) :)
    in this version of the game even infranty and armored cars can stop planes... and again a good player will make AA in day 6 and will mix it with tanks so in the end you will have armored aa and tank destroyers in the same stack so you are cover from infranty ( cuz infranty sucks vs armored ) from tanks ( cuz tank destroyer u know ) and from bombers ( cuz 3 or 4 aa units in a stack can kill like 10 planes with a level higher of researchs ) and thats what im doing in a map where im smashed anything is crossing me.. its not that smart and strategistic hard what im doing and thats the whole problem in this version because in cow you fear planes and you have to adapt your strategy in here you just need tanks and AA armored to litteraly conquer anything! so a noob like you can win vs a smarter player because there is no strategy at all it all ends in who has more troops or more gold.. not even artillery can do much because units are faster now so they will get cloose before actualy get bombed enough from artillery!
    So an artillery man must build AA to cover his artillery from planes ( but what im saying xD no one will ever make anymore planes ) and then makes anti tank in front to stop the tanks and let the artillery bomb the stack.. but since the lack of resources you cant make enough anti tank and artillery because both use the same resources so u are fucked up :D and tanks wins !
    P.S. lets not forget the crazy defense bonus that armored AA got xD thats some crazy shit because it was not enough to rule on the sky but even to rule on the ground xD

  • freezy wrote:

    We will still tweak costs, so there is a change airstrips will get cheaper. We needed to split aircraft factories and airstrips because units are supposed to only be buildable in urbans, and aircraft factories serve both as an airstrip and a production facility.
    Tank plants at the start are not intended, will be fixed in future versions.
    I was more commenting on the large time difference between an actual factory & just an airstrip. My suggestion is to make it 3 hours. As to the cities, well maybe I just don't want to build aircraft in a particular city & frankly every city should have an airstrip, like you know every *actual* city does even in 1943.

    Still liking 1.5 test though.