Resources Reforged - Test it now on Beta!

That's what I want to know.

I just made a thread, hopefully I can get an answer.

If I do, I will tell you.

What is the intention behind such a useless update?

Why all these changes keep coming out the blue? Crazy. If Henry Ford kept changing the design of his pioneer cars we'd still be buying horses. It is bonkers.

I think that any update should ask the following:

• What is something about the game we could do better? Could it be more fun or more fair?
  
• How could we go about making it better?
  
• Would these actually make the game more fun or more fair or otherwise better? Hence:
  
• (Why) was this feature actually needed? Did it work?
  

Apparently, Bytro believes this game would be improved by removing resources. Call me naive but they presumably aren't actually lying to us about their motives: viz. to improve the game. What I'd like to know is—stripping away the unabashedly optimistic marketing lingo—how?

This guy has is a better idea

Of all the updates so far this is the only one I can actually call pointless. Call of War 2.0? In retrospect, a good move. Pan-Asian Russian Empire? At least it makes things interesting. Rivers? I actually like this one, it's creative and affects the experience for the better. War bonds? Understandable.

While the move to 1.5 was contentious, at least removing those 1.0 features generally did help make the game easier for players to understand (e.g. simplifying the convoluted nuclear reactor tree, buildings given distinct purposes instead of multiple functions, reforms to combat, etc.). At the same time, it introduced massive changes which have made the game more complex and more engaging and thus were positively recieved, e.g. functional doctrines. Nobody is confused by the concept of having 5 resources.

While sometimes contentious, all of these were at least creative rather than destructive and made the game more complex and more interesting, and hence more rewarding and for at least some, more fun. Still other updates aim to boost purchases. Bottom line is, Bytro is a company, so fair enough. QED that there are some pointful updates.


But this update? Nah.

Frankly I think this idea is pointless and uninspired and will only dumb down Call of War. Changing the resources is possibly the most fundamental change ever in the game—arguably bigger than the transition from 1.0 to 1.5—and all it does is simplify an already simple concept to no apparent benefit, while needlessly complicating another (resources' relation to the tech tree).

That's why all the big YouTubers—to many, the face of Call of War—seem to dislike this. Everyone on the Forum dislikes this. Discord, Reddit, and the chat seem to dislike this. If my dog played Call of War, he would dislike this. And when the Beta players come back with their feedback, they will probably be disliking this too.

This is bound to make a lot of people angry and will be widely regarded as a bad move. If Bytro want to kill this game, go ahead.

Seriously?

The resource balancing aspect, especially in Historic World War, already plays a massive role. Netherlands for example has few rares but lots of oil and food, some other ones have lots of rares but not so much food, and so on. Even in WaW, players covet preferred countries for having extra rural provinces of a reason they like.
Removing resources will eliminate or considerably diminish this aspect. This will not lead to a "deeper, more rewarding strategic experience", even if Bytro chooses the unbalanced 2-2-2 approach, because, simply, a disparity in any resource would be too crippling and having all of them would be too easy.

My suggestion: If you wanted to spice up the economic situation on the "balanced" maps by making one more plentiful, you could do what you did in 1.0 and have four cities with one deficit per country. Possibly make there be more oil in the Middle East, more food in Eastern Europe or N. America, more rares in Central Asia, etc. From what little I remember, that was actually fun.

The logical extreme of this would be having ONE resource, "money" or something vague like that (and with the update, having no apparent relation to the unit class or type, resources will already be pretty vague). In this extreme no trade could exist. No shortage could be alleviated, players would have no reason to trade and no specific resource goals. This is unlikely to lead to "more meaningful economic choices" or stimulate trade.

With the reductio ad absurdum looking distinctly unappealing, do we have any reason to believe removing three resources lead to the desired benefits? And what's wrong with five resources?

With five, the stock market is actually useful. Also it's more likely that a player will be rich in one resource while lacking another (thus stimulating trade). Four or five "varied-use" resources (not money and manpower, which are used universally) is probably the minimum for this to work well (cf. Settlers of Catan) so CoW has already reached elegant simplicity. To take more away would cause problems and solve none.

It doesn't seem like status quo stifles competition or conflict, dumbs down economic choices, or leads to a shallower strategic experience. If anything the opposite. In other words, the stated problems with the current system don't seem to exist, and by fixing it, you run the risk of creating problems. Si non confectus, non reficiat.


Unit-wise, from the beginning Call of War we've had five resources: food, goods, metal, oil, and rare. Since at least 1.5, the various units from each armour classes have used the same resources (mostly). Planes use oil, goods, and rare, tanks use oil and metal, ordnance and infantry use goods and usually food, motorised units use oil, and so on.

So if you wanted to (e.g.) kill infantry when you had a resource imbalance, you would choose a unit which killed infantry and cost certain resources. If you had a lot of a resource, the tech trees could, between them, cover any combination of target and resource.

By divorcing resources from armour class, this update would trivialise the economic distinctions between (for example) ACs, mech, and mot. infantry, or RA and tacs, making them effectively redundant and the distinctions pointless. This makes the game less engaging and less fun for the discerning strategist.
It's also a divorce from realism, as planes of different roles all use essentially the same resources as each other, as do ships or tanks, while secret units of course would use rare materials. The current system, with heavy bombers simply being more expensive than fighters, is a lot more realistic.

This will dumb down build order planning too. Early on one might choose to spend oil, metal, and rare on industrialising and build mostly infantry and artillery at the start (something the units available on Day 1 incentivise). Without rares or goods, we don't have that opportunity.

We don't need a shake-up for the sake of a shake-up, we need bugs ironed out, and creative updates which enhance the game! It's 2024 and computers can handle games with 5 resources. Games should get more complex over time, not less, especially if serving practically no purpose! If we wanted to play a simple game why not just play Risk? Because at this rate this won't really be Call of War anymore.

Thanks for asking for our feedback, thank you very much as this wasn't done for some past decisions. We love this game and I personally believe it is in Bytro's interest to respond to its players' opinions.
After Reddit's API protests, EA's SimCity13 fiasco, and Bytro's history of doing this, I'm a bit jaded as to whether any company listens to its users. But I hope the overwhelmingly negative response to this will make our benevolent dictatorship at Bytro reconsider its decision.

In short, all I can say is:



Sincerely if candidly,

Lord Crayfish



Feed

"We, the inventors of chess, have made an important change. From now on, we will be removing the bishops and knights from all games! (who ever uses them late game anyway?) Instead, we have decided to give everyone two extra rooks and two extra queens, or one extra rook or three queens.

To maintain overall balance, from now rooks and queens move in the opposite patterns to before!


With a smaller choice of pieces, this will shake up the game. Your strategies are sure to become more intense, leading to more meaningful decisions for the discerning strategist. This will surely make the game more engaging and more fun!"

What a terrible idea.
I had been thinking of getting back in over December, maybe organise an RP or a playthrough something, but I'm having second thoughts. I came back from the dead specifically to protest this, because I love this game. I wish it could at least wait until Christmas. Too many updates too soon.

Bytro, please don’t go forward with this change. Don’t you realize this would make all existing strategies and gameplay tactics useless?

Have you tried it yet?

Why was this update released? What’s the point of it? I don’t see why we need this. Doesn’t the game work fine as it is?

I know. There doesn’t even seem to be a reason for it.

I tried it and I don’t like it.

I have been on hiatus for a while but still try to stay up on news, so figured I'd log in for this one. I am also skeptical of this change. There were some problems with the old resource balancing (e.g. artillery requiring the protection of AA, but with a near perfect overlap in resources required) but I would have preferred that be fixed through cost adjustments rather than removal of complexity.

Well said.

Well, I guess we’ll have to enter a new era of the game.

@Geden. Should we call this Call of War 3.0?