Will continue answering the second page now
We will make sure that CoW1.5 will also have standalone features that you don't see in other games on this engine. We also don't want CoW to turn into one of our other games, but certainly some aspects are always shared. Nothing wrong with that imo if the game also has some exclusive features.
We will lower the upgrading cost in the next event.
Thanks for the bug report, will also be fixed in the next event.
We will discuss the addition of a naval port building, thanks for suggesting it.
We don't want to be inconsistent with our mechanics, that's why tanks behave the same like Inf in production. Yes in S1 you can continue to produce low level units, but S1 also doesnt have unit upgrading. What would happen in CoW is that players only spam T1 units and upgrade them to the highest level, thus saving all the building costs. We don't want that :). Also this way CoW has a unique production mechanic.
We talked about it already, but want to also explain the reasoning here for everyone else:
The reason why we went with a rather high upgrade cost is that a very low cost would be overpowered. Each level roughly grants a 30% strength increase, and you can skip levels with upgrading while only paying for the final level (e.g. upgrade from lvl1 to lvl4 and only pay for lvl4). The 30% would stack up on top of eachother, so you would already have a strength increase in that example of more than 100%. Additionally you also save the resources from upgrading the production building right away, plus you save alot of time: Upgrade time is only 50% or the production time and travel time from production site to front. You can pretty much increase your strength considerably in strategic locations. All in all upgrading is a very useful feature when used in the right circumstances. It may not be cost-efficient in all situations, but it will be in enough situations (maybe it is worth it to skip a level for example). And that's what we actually wanted to do: Create a new choice for the player, that is neither completely avoided nor the go-to option, but rather a strategic choice.
This said we agree that 100% of the resource cost may be too high and we think about lowering it in the next event.
We went with these single requirements to make it easier to get into. No need to check cross-references for all units, it is much more obvious what you need to build a unit. The 30min timer grants you production with lvl1 build speeds, yes, but as soon as you hit unit lvl3 or higher it is not really feasible anymore to stay with that building level. Take a lvl4 Light tank for example, needs 64h with lvl1 buildings, which you can cut down to 8h by upgrading the building to lvl4. Also you won't have enough resources to upgrade all buildings in all provinces, so it is very much about strategic planning ahead in my opinion.
We want to make the beginning of the game more exciting, as in the old version it is quite a snoozefest I must say. That's why build times are rather low on lower levels, but they of course increase as levels go up. That's a basic progression system used in most strategy games.
Thanks for the detailed feedback!
The reason for the lower requirements and lower costs for naval units is that naval in CoW is a rather unpopular tech branch, that also does not win you any games on its own. In order to buff naval gameplay we made it easier accessible to build a fleet. We don't really want you to have to make a huge trade-off for building naval units, as they are seldomly built compared to other units and are regarded more as support units. of course there is still a trade-off because they cost resources and time after all, and the build spot in that urban province also competes with other unit types, thus decisions still have to be made. Also, due to the rock-paper-scissors balancing you also cannot just produce one ship type, as they counter eachother. That's why it is also fine that their build requirements are similar, as they all have different roles and there isn't one that is an advanced version of another one.
Also keep in mind that those production times you mentioned are also only that low if you constantly keep upgrading your production building as well.
Strategic Bomber same thing, a unit that is rarely built, we don't want to lock it away behind extensive building requirements. In my opinion it would be awesome to see someone buold strat bombers on day 1 to bomb down enemy production sites. That would be a unique strategy that adds some spice and mind games, because potentially you would also have to prepare to counter that.
Then you raise a point that is rather contradictory, that it is actually not a big deal to bomb someones facilities away. To me this sounds like that it actually enables more choices. It is true that he can just build a new one in 30min and that is one reason why that strategy is not OP. On the other hand your enemy has to waste resources to build his facilities, so it still hampers his war efforts. Also if you bomb down higher building levels you also increase enemy production times of later unit levels. By the way, something players usually forget is that high anti building damage also translates to higher morale damage. So Strat bombers are also better suited to lower enemy province morale
Regarding the statements on production times: That is only true for the lvl1 build times, as higher unit levels have longer build times in general and much longer if they are produced with a lower building level.
Spy costs and unit speeds are a thing we can balance still.
1. I am sorry that you don't like the new urban province focus. It will most likely stay though and reasons have been discussed at length in Event 1 feedback threads.
2. We don't think that the purpose of Infra or Industry is destroyed, they now just have their unique benefits that are not mixed with other benefits. By giving each building its own benefits we allow for more strategic choices of what to build. At the same time we want to keep build requirements easily understandable, that's why each branch only requires one unique building to be produced.
2A. True, that may be added in a future Event.
3. We don't want to use a particular resource for research anymore, as it would result in most units which require that research not being built. This happened with Infantry-type units in CoW1.0, which are built less often because people need the food for researching. People still have to think about what is smartest to research simply because of the greater importance of rock-paper-scissors balancing between the units.
Thanks!
Sorry that the new philosophy falls short for you personally.
We want to keep the new mechanics and philosophies consistent though, and allowing certain troops to be produced in rural provinces would make it inconsistent. In future versions we will even remove production tabs and production buttons in rural provinces alltogether to make it even more clear to players.
Resource costs are still in the balancing phase.
Regarding terrain penalties: We went with bonuses instead because they are easier to compare. Units still have strong buffs in certain terrain, so it is still perfectly possible to beat other players by using terrain in smarter ways.
We will likely rebalance resources for the next event so that players can build some more units also when starting resources run out.
Global buffs like this are currently not possible, but we also had ideas of offering more general buffs or tactics that users can research. Thats more a proposal for the future though.
EmperorEmp wrote:
For me CoW is about Strategy and Planning.
While the aesthetics of 1.5 is well done I believe they are missing an opportunity to work on the existing settings.
We don't want a game that is like Conflict of Nations, Clash of Clans, etc.
Bytro should put their time and resources into things such as unit designation and invasion planning. The bread and butter of this game is the importance of late round planning and making quick yet wise moves on the map.
IMO the release of new maps and accelerated rounds are steps in the right direction; however and entire overhaul of the game play is not the way to go.
Tasmine wrote:
I upgrade the infantry techs to lv2, then upgrade a lv1 infantry require 90% manpower of lv2 infantry. Why I need to upgrade? Make a new one will be more economic.
I remembered in last test event, players have been report this issue. And I think this is a really stupid mistake?
And I click my allie's troops. There also has upgrade mark on the infantry icon bar. I think no need to display their status. They are not my units.
Thanks for the bug report, will also be fixed in the next event.
Tasmine wrote:
V1.5 Test report:
CoW 1.5 doesn't have dock, at least CoN has it. Which means you can't build Naval Base outside, need more board time.
Can't produce lv1 units after lv2 tech developed. In this point, I agreed infantry can't produce each level, how about Tanks? Armored Cars? I guess result is the same, Once our great nation developed T54, there is no chance to make a new T-34.
* Supremacy 1 can produce any level units.
We don't want to be inconsistent with our mechanics, that's why tanks behave the same like Inf in production. Yes in S1 you can continue to produce low level units, but S1 also doesnt have unit upgrading. What would happen in CoW is that players only spam T1 units and upgrade them to the highest level, thus saving all the building costs. We don't want that :). Also this way CoW has a unique production mechanic.
Torpedo28000 wrote:
Yes I agree 100%, this is quite terrible IMO. The allies/enemy troops showing upgrade is a bit odd but not terrible.
The fact that it now costs 100% of a lvl 1, and 100% of a lvl 2 troops to get 1 lvl 2 troop is INSANE!!! I have to pay 950 goods for a troop that should cost 490 goods? This gameplay wise is really bad, and doesn't even make sense! For manpower am I killing all those lvl 1 guys and training new dudes for lvl2? Otherwise why the increase in manpower? (same for all other rss, am I throwing them out in the trash to order new ones?)
I was under the impression it would cos 30 goods for 1 unit to go to lvl 2. 460 for lvl 1, 490 for lvl 2 so 30 makes sense. A it more equipment so bit more cost...
This for me is a real shame as so far the game play aspects ive quite been enjoying from 1.5, I still think rss production may be low, im really struggling for cash (after spending the amount I got ive been not able to get over 7k of it). But I feel these can be changed and given it was increased from 1.5v2 I think if others experience the same thing it will be.
I really am hoping this upgrading cost has been a mistake/will be fixed.
Sorry for the somewhat aggressive tone of this post but this I think is really not well done and I don't really have anything good to say about the cost of this. Ill rather build an extra inf than pay for one and lose the other one I paid for.
I will be writing of my day 2 experience later... which was going pretty well until I upgraded my troops...
The reason why we went with a rather high upgrade cost is that a very low cost would be overpowered. Each level roughly grants a 30% strength increase, and you can skip levels with upgrading while only paying for the final level (e.g. upgrade from lvl1 to lvl4 and only pay for lvl4). The 30% would stack up on top of eachother, so you would already have a strength increase in that example of more than 100%. Additionally you also save the resources from upgrading the production building right away, plus you save alot of time: Upgrade time is only 50% or the production time and travel time from production site to front. You can pretty much increase your strength considerably in strategic locations. All in all upgrading is a very useful feature when used in the right circumstances. It may not be cost-efficient in all situations, but it will be in enough situations (maybe it is worth it to skip a level for example). And that's what we actually wanted to do: Create a new choice for the player, that is neither completely avoided nor the go-to option, but rather a strategic choice.
This said we agree that 100% of the resource cost may be too high and we think about lowering it in the next event.
Silent_Hastati wrote:
The part that is baffling me is the changes to unit production into discreet buildings. People are bringing up CoN as a comparison, but CoN shares the old CoW method of needing a combination of certain types of building to produce a unit, which when combined with only being able to build production buildings in urban centers, means you have to put significant investment to build tougher units compared to simply specializing cities into onl ever pumping out one class of unit ad infinitum.
For comparison, let's take the CoW Heavy Tank vs the CoN Main Battle Tank, which could be considered rough analogues.
For CoN's MBT, you need a level 2 Army Base AND a level 1 Factory (Called Arms Industry in CoN) to build the tank. That is 3 buildings essentially, with a combined build time of around 1 day 19 hours, not to mention the significant resource investment required.
For the Heavy Tank, you just need a lvl 1 tank plant. With a 30 min timer.
Now, I might not have a long history with either game,, but to me, that feels like it takes away from any sort of need for long term planning as far as city construction. If you need to switch to building tanks, yeah you'll be a little slow as lvl 1 buildings aren't great at build times, but you can at least go right to it fairly quickly.
Teburu wrote:
Well the major difference to old COW is that IC + infra no longer is access to basically 90% of ground unitsi also think mobilization time is waaaay to low; tho might just them trying to appeal to a wider audience/making more ppl consider HC
Mc_Johnsen wrote:
I agree with the others that this new building requirement system feels a bit off.
I do appreciate the system of "higher levels of units have longer production times, unless you construct higher levels of the appropriate building". It adds more meaning to higher levels of units, more than a mere stat improvement.
However, it feels really off, mostly because I am used to CoW 1, CoN, S1914, that all units are produced so quickly using lv1 requirements:
A destroyer and a battleship both have the same requirement: harbor lv1. In 30 minutes you can contruct all building requirements for the entire navy. Somehow, you don't need an improved dockyard to construct gigantic battleships.
The production time is very interesting as well, 4-11h for a battleship? Lets compare it: S1914: 3 days; CoW 1.0: 2d16hrs; CoN: 1d6hrs; Hoi4: 1yr minimum; reallife: 4-6years.
Battleships should feel like a huge project, not something built in 4-11hrs. Though this maybe something we have to get used to, since all units get produced so quickly.
Most importantly, there is no economic trade off to go for battleships. In CoW 1.0, the deicision to go for battleships is very significant: Do I really want to commit to a lv3 harbor and let the world know I am producing battleships/carriers? A lv3 harbor takes 4d total to construct, do I have that much time to commit? How many production centres for battleships can I afford? In how many cities can I afford to produce battleships non stop? Am I aware that the earliest I can get battleships is by day 6?
In CoW 1.5 there is no such decision. The decision to go for battleships, or other "supposedly expensive / non-early" naval units is made more easily. Economically speaking, the difference between battleships and destroyers is merely the increased cost in the production itself. There is no difference in the cost of building requirements. You don't think of battleships as "early game" unit, yet they are, you can get them in day 2 already because the building requirements are almost non-existant.
This is only an example for naval units that is translatable for others such as interceptors <-> strategic bombers.
"Hey, why don't I start harassing my neighbours cities with strategic bombers on day 1!"
You can get an interceptor produced earliest: research 2h30min + production 2h45min = 5h15min
Anti Air: research 30min + production 2h45min = 3h15min
Strategic bomber: research 5h+ production 3h15min = 8h15min.
At least you can get interceptors or anti air before the enemy gets strategic bombers, but lets be real, who goes for anti air/interceptors first? When you see the enemy build a lv1 airfield, do you think of strategic bombers? Unlikely.
Can you imagine getting your cities bombed on day 1? Your buildings destroyed from air by day 1? You have barely finished the 2nd round of light tank production when strategic bombers are raining death from above. The city morale didn't even have time to change from 70%. Your spies didn't even get to work yet to see if there are any speical threats from your enemies to be concerned about.
On the other hand, why even bother disrupting the production of the enemy? You destroyed my tank factory? Jokes on you, in 30mins I got a new tank factory and can resume production. The strategic bombers probably didn't even return to their airfields for refuel when my tank factory already resumed production. I need to stop you from producing carriers? Unlucky because the building requirements of a battleship are fairly cheap and built in 30 mins. Even further levels of naval dockyards are constructed rather fast. Can you imagine flying 15 strategic bombers on an enemy harbor, completely destroying it, grounding an entire city, while having disrupted the carrier production for a mere 30mins before the production is resumed?
You want to use military sabotage spies to stop my carriers from being produced? Tough luck because I can produce 5 carriers minimum between each spy action. Even if you disrupt my carrier production, you invested so much money into the spies. 15.000$ per spy one time cost, 4.000$ per day change. I won't even bother placing counter espionage spies in my carrier production city. Reparing my dockyards is probably cheaper (and faster) than your usage of spies. Once every 24 hours you disrupt my carrier production for 30 minutes. Absolutely worth it!
Reduced time in production and construction feels really weird. I am playing a mixture of 4x speed and 1x speed. During the time I need to conquer a rather large province, I can produce a new unit. My spies have uncovered the entire enemy army? By the next day change my enemy might have an entirely different army because he produced so much so fast. I scouted his homeland with airplanes, determined its empty, launch a surprise invasion with light tanks spear head, by the time they reach a city, the enemy already produced anti tanks. The enemy didn't even need the building requirement beforehand, it is construced in 30mins anyways.
Lets say Germany is conquering Poland, his armies are on the gates of Warsaw. I, France, decide to attack Germany because he is distracted. Germany has very few units at my border. I attack. Germans manage to buy quite a few hours because of homeland bonus and a fortress. I breakthrough but I see the German army advancing into Russia, ignoring me? No. Germany built an entire new army. Why bother taking the German army from Warsaw to France when you can produce a new army, faster than the old army can arrive from the east. The time it takes me to reach Berlin is more than enough for Germany to produce half a dozen of units. (This is a drastic example based on theory crafting, might be a bit overexaggerated)
If its hard to imagine, imagine this: In CoW 1.0 you reduce all unit production times by a lot, so that units only take 2-4hrs to produce. You also cut the building requirements to level 1, and their construction time to 30minutes. Imagine what kind of chaos it would be.
Here is an example from my curret map:
I want to shell the enemy position. I want to use artillery to attack the province Schachty. I have an artillery production in KRASNODAR, my artillery in this picture still needs 5h until it is in range. You know what is faster? Construct the appropriate building and produce a new artillery in ROSTOW. This is even a tiny distance. Can you imagine this for larger countries? Why even bother constructing units in the backyard, by the time these units arrive at the frontline, the frontline cities already produced multiple.
The reason for the lower requirements and lower costs for naval units is that naval in CoW is a rather unpopular tech branch, that also does not win you any games on its own. In order to buff naval gameplay we made it easier accessible to build a fleet. We don't really want you to have to make a huge trade-off for building naval units, as they are seldomly built compared to other units and are regarded more as support units. of course there is still a trade-off because they cost resources and time after all, and the build spot in that urban province also competes with other unit types, thus decisions still have to be made. Also, due to the rock-paper-scissors balancing you also cannot just produce one ship type, as they counter eachother. That's why it is also fine that their build requirements are similar, as they all have different roles and there isn't one that is an advanced version of another one.
Also keep in mind that those production times you mentioned are also only that low if you constantly keep upgrading your production building as well.
Strategic Bomber same thing, a unit that is rarely built, we don't want to lock it away behind extensive building requirements. In my opinion it would be awesome to see someone buold strat bombers on day 1 to bomb down enemy production sites. That would be a unique strategy that adds some spice and mind games, because potentially you would also have to prepare to counter that.
Then you raise a point that is rather contradictory, that it is actually not a big deal to bomb someones facilities away. To me this sounds like that it actually enables more choices. It is true that he can just build a new one in 30min and that is one reason why that strategy is not OP. On the other hand your enemy has to waste resources to build his facilities, so it still hampers his war efforts. Also if you bomb down higher building levels you also increase enemy production times of later unit levels. By the way, something players usually forget is that high anti building damage also translates to higher morale damage. So Strat bombers are also better suited to lower enemy province morale
Regarding the statements on production times: That is only true for the lvl1 build times, as higher unit levels have longer build times in general and much longer if they are produced with a lower building level.
Spy costs and unit speeds are a thing we can balance still.
TheOrangePhilosopher wrote:
Okay I'm going to try to write down as many of my thoughts as possible.
1. Production: We should be able to produce units in non-urban provinces. I want to be able to make use of as much of my land as possible. Why have 5 places making troops and an area 10 times larger doing absolutely nothing. This is my biggest issue with 1.5
2. New Buildings: I like the new buildings, but some units should need multiple buildings. These new buildings also defeat the entire purpose of Industrial Complexes (or whatever their new name is), and Infrastructure. Before, you needed them both, for most things. Now, I'm just wondering when I'm going to use them.
2A. These new buildings should have some sort of visible icon on the province, like Industrial Complexes, Airbases, Naval Bases, Fortifications, and so on. Barracks should get this too.
3. Rare Materials & Research: Some people probably agree with me, but rare materials should be used for research. Sure, they mean it's harder to research more things, but I like the challenge of planning how to spend my rare materials and what things are smartest to research
I have more opinions, but these are the main ones
2. We don't think that the purpose of Infra or Industry is destroyed, they now just have their unique benefits that are not mixed with other benefits. By giving each building its own benefits we allow for more strategic choices of what to build. At the same time we want to keep build requirements easily understandable, that's why each branch only requires one unique building to be produced.
2A. True, that may be added in a future Event.
3. We don't want to use a particular resource for research anymore, as it would result in most units which require that research not being built. This happened with Infantry-type units in CoW1.0, which are built less often because people need the food for researching. People still have to think about what is smartest to research simply because of the greater importance of rock-paper-scissors balancing between the units.
Citizenkane wrote:
I would like to congratulate the development team on all the improvements to this second attempt. It is obvious you took the time to work thru the feedback the players provided.
I still do not like the philosophy that you can not build troops outside cities.I understand you changed build times to compensate for less core provinces being able to build units but it falls short for me personally.
May I suggest allowing barracks to be built in non industrial provinces. This would allow people to attempt to stay alive even if lets say two of their cities got captured. Also lower the manpower for infantry and militia, with the 1.5 set-up it needs to be much lower.
I also don't like all the cities being the same point value at, some cities should should rank and have additonal bonuses. No country in the world has every city being equal value to the nation. The loss of terrain penalties is kind of a bummer, it allowed seasoned players the beat countries that had larger armies and now that plan of attack would not be available.
The game mechanics are better and I believe the unit rebalance will require players to learn new tactics and find the best stack combo's for given situations. I don't think any of the rebalance has destroyed the current essence of game strategy.
This round two is a leap forward from how I felt about the first event. There are still improvements needed as others have pointed out and I don't want to beleaguer any of these points so ill just stop here... for now.
Sorry that the new philosophy falls short for you personally.
We want to keep the new mechanics and philosophies consistent though, and allowing certain troops to be produced in rural provinces would make it inconsistent. In future versions we will even remove production tabs and production buttons in rural provinces alltogether to make it even more clear to players.
Resource costs are still in the balancing phase.
Regarding terrain penalties: We went with bonuses instead because they are easier to compare. Units still have strong buffs in certain terrain, so it is still perfectly possible to beat other players by using terrain in smarter ways.
Torpedo28000 wrote:
Alrighty, day 2 review time:
3h until day 3.
I have been focusing on my economy during day 2 for two reasons:
1.My economy is feeling too low and im unable to produce many troops, all productions are feeling really low.
2.After realising the upgrading cost of troops I wont be upgrading troops, therefore building troops on day 2 I feel is a foolish idea. (I have gone into why I think the upgrading cost is terrible so wont do so here… but pls pls pls change that!)
So I have done the following today:
3x lvl 2 IC in metal, goods and oil urban provinces
1x lvl 3 IC in goods province
1x Ordinance factory lvl 2
Researched inf lvl 2 and motorised inf.
Only been able to build 5 buildings in one day, 2 researches and 0 troops I think is not enough, this is also with rss taken from the nation I am beating. Therefore think rss production should be boosted. Compared to how much I could do and build on day 1, day 2 does feel a heck of a lot slower. Day 1 was exciting building a bunch of troops and a few buildings, this day has felt slow and ive felt really starved for rss.
Rss wise, I am struggling for cash the most, not been above 10k since the start and even selling my other rss to get it, despite also being low on these. Manpower so far has not been an issue so this is a very nice improvement. My allies have run out of manpower and it is an issue for them however, possibly not building any AT or AA and building 2 LT was the reason for this. I am doing super great on rares as I have not yet built any planes and due to upgrading troops (pls change!) I wont be building any until day 6 as in a similar fashion to old 1.5 upgrading troops (although this was not possible) how I would save, spam troops on that day then use them quickly is how I plan to play. Not something I enjoy as I love focusing on the future, building troops that will also be used in the future rather than just for a few days.
So to wrap up day 2:
- War with Poland almost over, took a little but longer as I lost 7 troops as I upgraded them in the middle of Polands land and then they couldn't move as I didn’t read the little warning saying that would happen… I prefer to learn as im going… and I did!
- Focused solely on the economy. (I am really liking the IC progression, whether costs are too high idk yet, maybe
- I do feel a bit rss starved, It is better than 1.5v1 but still feels like a large bottleneck, but again it depends whether building 5 buildings in a day is what is I desired. As an active player I feel this is not enough as 1 thing every 4.8 hours isnt fast paced or more exciting, which I believe is a desired outcome of 1.5 in the early game?
However, so far for all of 1.5 pretty good IMO. Def like 200% better than 1.5v1 that is for certain! I do feel a little too rss restricted but perhaps it is due to be spending all my starting rss on day 1 and not saving any (I would have done the same thing again)
Thanks for keeping up the updates on your game round!
Torpedo28000 wrote:
For this reason, perhaps there could be one research in the secret section around day 8-16 that halves the construction time of only factories.