Opulon wrote:
This isn't true. Supremacy managed to live for 12 years with an early game where you develop your FIRST unit, the artillery, day 12.
And in comparison, CoW, where you can spam infantries in 30 minutes, have the exact same drop rates and really doesn't do better than CoN or Supremacy.
Good hypothesis (and i thought as much), but it's proven wrong by 5 years of data
Call of War does allow the player to build and use a decent combined arms unit mix within a couple of days of the start; in Conflict of Nations it's more like a week to ten days. And that's if you know that you're doing - if you don't, and you waste resources at the start by researching things you can't build yet, it can take even longer. I would be really surprised if that isn't a major factor in putting people off.
People see the tech tree with helicopters, tanks, fast jets, stealths, cruise missiles, aircraft carriers, etc. and they think, "Wow, this looks cool!" And then they start playing and they realise that all they're actually going to be using for a week or more is infantry and they're probably never going to reach a point where they're utilizing all of it, and they lose interest. I really believe that the game would be much more appealing to a wider audience if a much greater variety of level 1 units could be got up and running and into battle much, much faster.
For people to learn the game, they don't necessarily need a tutorial; they just need to be given access to the damn units so they can try them out!