Please consider doing the following before focussing fully on CoW1.5. Because otherwise when CoW1.5 is ready, you won't be able to properly assess whether you want to keep CoW1.0 or not. CoW1.0 is wasting some of its potential as long as the following changes are not done.
I restrain myself to tweaks that don't require any coding, since it's logical you don't want to invest implementation effort in CoW1.0 as long as CoW1.5 is in the making:
* Reduce food costs of infantry clearly while increasing its manpower costs slightly - see --> this post <--. Sorry for annoying you often with that one - it's just so very important.
* Make fighters offensive and strats defensive in air combat. See --> this thread <--.
* Increase gold costs of rare materials from 0.5 to 1.0 gold per unit rare materials. Since the resource balancing update and the earlier availability of higher technologies, a big research advantage can be bought with gold. Which is OK, but that should be costly. And this flaw of too cheap rare materials makes doing so all too easy / makes other gold options unattractive. Put it this way: Who should ever buy 5000 food, goods, steel or oil for 2500 gold, if you can also get 5000 rares for the same price?
This flaw is corrupting the otherwise very good balancing from the research balancing update.
Please at least give these three changes a chance in front-pioneer games.
I restrain myself to tweaks that don't require any coding, since it's logical you don't want to invest implementation effort in CoW1.0 as long as CoW1.5 is in the making:
* Reduce food costs of infantry clearly while increasing its manpower costs slightly - see --> this post <--. Sorry for annoying you often with that one - it's just so very important.
* Make fighters offensive and strats defensive in air combat. See --> this thread <--.
* Increase gold costs of rare materials from 0.5 to 1.0 gold per unit rare materials. Since the resource balancing update and the earlier availability of higher technologies, a big research advantage can be bought with gold. Which is OK, but that should be costly. And this flaw of too cheap rare materials makes doing so all too easy / makes other gold options unattractive. Put it this way: Who should ever buy 5000 food, goods, steel or oil for 2500 gold, if you can also get 5000 rares for the same price?
This flaw is corrupting the otherwise very good balancing from the research balancing update.
Please at least give these three changes a chance in front-pioneer games.