Release Notes - 2022-02-22

Arcorian · Feb 16th 2022, 11:15am

Attention, Generals!

Today's release lowers the chance of provinces revolting in newly created game rounds.

It hurts to see a province change ownership after a revolt due to low morale. Especially when you fought viciously to conquer it. Although the mechanic will stay to make sure that you, as the reign of those provinces, take care of your citizens, we acknowledge your feedback that this happens a bit too often. We therefore raised the threshold when a revolt can happen, and we lowered the needed army strength to suppress a revolt in a province.

Today's update also brings a few bug fixes, among other things. For example, we fixed an issue that prevented the Fire Control setting to automatically change back from the Offensive setting of AI controlled units, after a player returned from being inactive. We also added a few missing images in the Beta Client.

For a detailed overview of all changes and bug fixes, please check our Release Notes and share your feedback with us here on the forums and our Discord server.

Best of luck on the battlefield, and hopefully your new citizens are a bit more loyal now, after today's update.

Your Bytro Team

BMfox · Feb 23rd 2022, 12:44am

What an honour, I'm the first to comment.
Anyway that being said, surprise surprise, I've made a video about the release notes.
My comment in short would be: "revolts finally nerfed, about time, praise the Lord" :thumbup:

Call of War | Release Notes February 22nd: Revolts nerfed. - YouTube :thumbsup:

NoobNoobTrain · Feb 27th 2022, 11:04am

Nice to see a continued flow of updates to this game. It really is key to keep long term interest in the game. At least for myself it is.

As for the tweak of the rebellion mechanism, I appreciate that the issue is looked into, but I think this is not a real solution. It will be easier to handle the rebellion risk now for sure, but I don't think that is the real issue here.

The real issue is that certain actions have been connected to unrelated effects. I'm thinking of strategic damage that reduces morale AND triggers a risk of rebellion. And this is the mix up of 2 different things: of course economic damage to where people live will lower morale, but will it motivate them to rebel? No! This is mostly two different things. Wealthy and safe people may rebel as well.

So the real solution IMO would be to split this mechanism into two. Let's call it 'morale' and 'stability':

- Morale is most of all an economic effect. Productivity will be lowered by low morale, but low morale will not decide if a province rebels or not. Morale cannot be increased by military power, but by propaganda and infrastructure. Morale is lowered by bombing and fighting (as already in the game)

- Stability is a political factor decided by things like occupation by a foreign power (non-core), distance to capital, duration of the occupation (assimilation). Stability will decide the risk of a rebellion, but does not affect productivity. Stability can be increased by military and partly by propaganda offices. Stability is not lowered by bombing and fighting.

Making this split would stop the non-sensical situations where your provinces rebel because the enemy is bombing/shelling them (WW2: Imagine occupied Germany rebelling to Norway due to low morale? Not really, no). It would also give propaganda offices a stronger purpose (tbh: I almost never build them. They are not necessary).

freezy · Feb 28th 2022, 5:02pm

Thanks for the suggestion. This would require coding a new mechanic and changing the current mechanic. The priority for this would be rated rather low, so it is unlikely that it would come any time soon.

So instead we changed the rebellion chances as that is an easy change that can be done on the side. If we can achieve something just with balancing changes we rather go for that as it won't require programming, even if it is not the most perfect solution.

Nojcreator · Mar 4th 2022, 4:59am

What amount of military presence is needed to suppress a rebellion?

I used to just use 2 infantry per area captured to reduce rebellion, but then I lost two full health infantry units in a rebellion of a province with just 25% morale. It sucked because I had to send an actual force back down to recapture it and fight my two soldiers that were now theirs...very upsetting.

For those interested, currently, 3 infantry seems to do the job 100% of the time, but I would really like to know how to avoid the problem with certainty before I learn again through trial and error.

BMfox · Mar 4th 2022, 10:23pm

Nojcreator wrote:

What amount of military presence is needed to suppress a rebellion?

I used to just use 2 infantry per area captured to reduce rebellion, but then I lost two full health infantry units in a rebellion of a province with just 25% morale. It sucked because I had to send an actual force back down to recapture it and fight my two soldiers that were now theirs...very upsetting.

For those interested, currently, 3 infantry seems to do the job 100% of the time, but I would really like to know how to avoid the problem with certainty before I learn again through trial and error.

A garrison unit needs to have 7 hitpoints to prevent a rebellion.

NoobNoobTrain · Mar 5th 2022, 1:18pm

freezy wrote:

Thanks for the suggestion. This would require coding a new mechanic and changing the current mechanic. The priority for this would be rated rather low, so it is unlikely that it would come any time soon.

So instead we changed the rebellion chances as that is an easy change that can be done on the side. If we can achieve something just with balancing changes we rather go for that as it won't require programming, even if it is not the most perfect solution.

That is understandable. I OTOH was free of any resource constraints to think of a full solution to the present quirks in the game concerning morale

I don't think my suggestion would require a complete rewamp of the game, but I realise that some substantial coding would be required.

I guess your decision on whether this kind of change would be worth it, also depends on your strategy for the future of the game. If it is to stay a mostly military game, then it would probably be a deviation to elaborate on economy and politics. OTOH if you want more emphasis on economic warfare, this part should be considered. After all WW2 was won by economic warfare - not military.

Paradox tried to go down this route with the Hearts of Iron series, that I also played a lot. But I think they got lost on the way and ended up creating a game with more complexity than was actually needed for players to enjoy a combination of military and economic strategy (that Paradox also release their games with cripling bugs and never patch them, only adds to the failure of those games).

The merit of CoW is that the player gets the chance to win through a good combination of strategy and tactics, but without having to go into a massive complexity of choices. There are, however, some subtle mechanisms in this game that gives an advantage to the player who wants to pay a bit more attention to detail. This allows grognards to play with casual players and that is a big advantage over most other, comparable games.

I think some more depth could be added to the economic and political part without it changing the appeal to a mix of players. Ofc I do not know your plans, so maybe all this belongs better in a future release than to CoW1942.

Donk2.0 · Mar 6th 2022, 1:51am

Nice update! Those rebellion changes are certainly appreciated. As for @NoobNoobTrains suggestion, I think it's really good. The separation of both mechanics would definitely improve the realism of the game. Another suggestion of mine that would add onto theirs is to make it so that province revolts can only go back to the core nation, or one of its allies, except when it borders some other nation's cores, in which case it may be able to revolt to that as the population is probably at least half of both ethnicities, making the new mechanics more realistic. Anyway, thanks for the update!

freezy · Mar 8th 2022, 6:32pm

Nojcreator wrote:

What amount of military presence is needed to suppress a rebellion?

I used to just use 2 infantry per area captured to reduce rebellion, but then I lost two full health infantry units in a rebellion of a province with just 25% morale. It sucked because I had to send an actual force back down to recapture it and fight my two soldiers that were now theirs...very upsetting.

For those interested, currently, 3 infantry seems to do the job 100% of the time, but I would really like to know how to avoid the problem with certainty before I learn again through trial and error.

BMfox wrote:

A garrison unit needs to have 7 hitpoints to prevent a rebellion.

You now actually need an army with 6 strength (=damage) to suppress a rebellion in a provine with 25% morale. So an army that deals 6 damage is sufficient.
Amount of HP has nothing to do with it.

BMfox · Mar 9th 2022, 1:27am

freezy wrote:

BMfox wrote:

A garrison unit needs to have 7 hitpoints to prevent a rebellion.

You now actually need an army with 6 strength (=damage) to suppress a rebellion in a provine with 25% morale. So an army that deals 6 damage is sufficient.Amount of HP has nothing to do with it.

I think I might have been using the wrong terminoligy then?
I thought that damage output was called hitpoints.
HP however I understood was Health Points which is the health bar of the unit.

freezy · Mar 9th 2022, 5:13pm

BMfox wrote:

I think I might have been using the wrong terminoligy then?I thought that damage output was called hitpoints.
HP however I understood was Health Points which is the health bar of the unit.

Seems like it. With hitpoints we mean the health a unit has, and the abbreviation is HP. And damage is the damage output of a unit.

These terms are industry standard and used in many games. I think the word hitpoints stems from how many hits a player could take before dying.

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