Some more words about centralization to cities: You wrote it's supposed to
1.: Make battles evolve around neuralgic spots. Doesn't really work out, in my observation. Even if it did: Why should that be better than battles along a front? I like battles along a front better, because that's more realistic for WW2 times.
2.: Prevent endless scrolling in province list if wanting to give production orders. This was hardly an issue in CoW1.0... partly because I'm sure most players don't give their production orders in the province list anyway. Secondly, if you do that, you'd sort it by the respective production facility anyway. That would work the same, also if barracks can be built in rural provinces. All in all I really don't find the province list better laid out or easier to handle than in CoW1.0. The centralization to cities helped nothing with that.
3.: Make maps less uninflected by highlighting some provinces. Maybe I can understand that a bit. I agree cities should be more important than rural provinces. But for that, it would be enough to give them higher money, manpower and (optionally) goods production. Also restricting ordnance, armour, planes, secret weapons and sea unit production to cities OK. But not so giving them higher food, oil and rares production and restricting infantry recruitment to cities. That's an unnecessary exaggeration. Sure, you don't want barracks outside cities so all six units branches are fully synchronous and thus easy to balance out. But do players also want that? I don't. I don't even want all unit branches to be equally important. Cause that's not realistic and not interesting.
Bottom line we've now tried the extreme, over-exaggerated centralization to cities. It feels just as bad as expected from the start. So now I'd say it's time to paddle back in that regard.
One more argument, although already mentioned by several concerned players after 1.5.2: The exorbitant importance of cities makes players more vulnerable to sneaky surprise attacks. One city lost for a minute and you won't recover. That's not positive at all!
Please at least reduce the gap between urban and rural resource production (except money and manpower). You can still keep it the way that industry in cities has a quicker return on investment than in rural provinces - which is a good feature, cause it creates a nice trade-off decision between either raising production buildings or industry in core cities... you want to do both, but can't do both at the same time. For that you don't need resource production 4 times as high in cities.
Following suggestion as easiest step in the right direction:
* Reduce cities food, goods, metal, oil and rares production to 66% of what it is now (12.000 to 8.000 if optimized).
* Reduce costs of industry in cities to about 70% of what it is now.
* Increase rural provinces food, goods, metal, oil and rares production to 150% of what it is now.
* Decrease money income of rural resource-provinces to 40% of what it is now.
* Increase money income of non-resource provinces to 200% of what it is now.
* Increase costs of local industry to about 133% of what it is now.
* Convert one non-resource province per country to a resource-province. Choose the resource this country so far doesn't have (otherwise resource differences between countries would become too big).
=> Result: Overall amount of resources and money in the game would remain as good as the same. But the terrible resource centralization would be softened very much.
1.: Make battles evolve around neuralgic spots. Doesn't really work out, in my observation. Even if it did: Why should that be better than battles along a front? I like battles along a front better, because that's more realistic for WW2 times.
2.: Prevent endless scrolling in province list if wanting to give production orders. This was hardly an issue in CoW1.0... partly because I'm sure most players don't give their production orders in the province list anyway. Secondly, if you do that, you'd sort it by the respective production facility anyway. That would work the same, also if barracks can be built in rural provinces. All in all I really don't find the province list better laid out or easier to handle than in CoW1.0. The centralization to cities helped nothing with that.
3.: Make maps less uninflected by highlighting some provinces. Maybe I can understand that a bit. I agree cities should be more important than rural provinces. But for that, it would be enough to give them higher money, manpower and (optionally) goods production. Also restricting ordnance, armour, planes, secret weapons and sea unit production to cities OK. But not so giving them higher food, oil and rares production and restricting infantry recruitment to cities. That's an unnecessary exaggeration. Sure, you don't want barracks outside cities so all six units branches are fully synchronous and thus easy to balance out. But do players also want that? I don't. I don't even want all unit branches to be equally important. Cause that's not realistic and not interesting.
Bottom line we've now tried the extreme, over-exaggerated centralization to cities. It feels just as bad as expected from the start. So now I'd say it's time to paddle back in that regard.
One more argument, although already mentioned by several concerned players after 1.5.2: The exorbitant importance of cities makes players more vulnerable to sneaky surprise attacks. One city lost for a minute and you won't recover. That's not positive at all!
Please at least reduce the gap between urban and rural resource production (except money and manpower). You can still keep it the way that industry in cities has a quicker return on investment than in rural provinces - which is a good feature, cause it creates a nice trade-off decision between either raising production buildings or industry in core cities... you want to do both, but can't do both at the same time. For that you don't need resource production 4 times as high in cities.
Following suggestion as easiest step in the right direction:
* Reduce cities food, goods, metal, oil and rares production to 66% of what it is now (12.000 to 8.000 if optimized).
* Reduce costs of industry in cities to about 70% of what it is now.
* Increase rural provinces food, goods, metal, oil and rares production to 150% of what it is now.
* Decrease money income of rural resource-provinces to 40% of what it is now.
* Increase money income of non-resource provinces to 200% of what it is now.
* Increase costs of local industry to about 133% of what it is now.
* Convert one non-resource province per country to a resource-province. Choose the resource this country so far doesn't have (otherwise resource differences between countries would become too big).
=> Result: Overall amount of resources and money in the game would remain as good as the same. But the terrible resource centralization would be softened very much.