BALANCING UPDATE 170803

I have another idea. I dont know if other nations have a weapon like this, but the Todaro class (european hunter submarine tier 3 has it) :IDAS (missile)
With this missle the submarine has a little power against ASW units
Or make also one navy unit of each doctrin specific: western doctrin with a carrier with 1 aircraft more
eastern doctrin with missle submarines with more HP
european doctrin with a hunter submarine with air defense

IDAS (Interactive Defence and Attack System for Submarines) is a short-range missile currently being developed for the new Type 212 submarine class of the German Navy.
IDAS (based on the IRIS-T air-to-air missile) is primarily targeted against air threats, such as ASW helicopters, but also against small or medium-sized surface vessels or coastal land targets. It is currently being developed by Diehl BGT Defence and HDW, which is a part of Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems (TKMS), to be fired from Type 212's torpedo tubes. IDAS will be fibre-optic guided and officially has a range of approx. 20 km.^[2] Four missiles will fit in one torpedo tube, stored in a magazine. First deliveries of IDAS for the German Navy and operational service were planned from 2014 on.^[3]
The IDAS system is also the world's first missile which gives submarines the capability to engage air threats whilst submerged, and the first tube-launched missile that does not emerge in a capsule, but is fired directly from the torpedo tubes.
Alternatively, IDAS could be in theory fired from the Gabler Maschinenbau TRIPLE-M mast system, but, at least in the new Type 216 submarine currently under development, IDAS will be fired as normal from the torpedo tubes, while the Muraena will be the primary weapons option for its TRIPLE-M system.

Those systems are already essentially attack submarines @Seele
They fire cruise missiles, most attack submarines fire cruise missiles

After the "easy money" rockets cost like that,i'm moving to nukes.
the reducing-great (easy marketing and you can sell to AI's)
th 250 rare materials cost for conventionals: -they don't use chemicals for producing(in real life).
the 1000 RM for subs: -costs more even tha a ballistic one.
other:
Or:Mostly good balancing but has things who can make you cry.

I cant with cruise missles defend against ASW units.

Mistake on my side - copy and paste error. Mea Culpa. Indeed the RM cost for Subs should have been the other way around...

Also I slightly tuned them accordingly while fixing this on live as I type:

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Ok, missle subs are the biggest subs. But this subs must also have a sonar.

agreed

Shhh.. don't let brussels hear you say that! They are convinced all of Europe is united in their europiness, and have forgotten all aspects of national identities. You don't want them to think you are a bourgeoisie, or a kulak. You must be a proud member of the proletariat, i mean bolsheviks, dang it, ok the people, united in socialist joy and sharing. They long for you to embrace the bliss and happiness that their fortunate eastern european brothers and sisters had in the 50's and 60's.

no politics please. I am one of your Europeans... so better stop right here.

//G

Okay G, if you are western tech before you go to the washroom, and eastern tech when you get back from the washroom, what are you when you are IN the washroom?

European!.. get it ? your a' peein'! lol i kill me.

I'm not sure what to say about the last balancing update.
On one hand, I'm pleased to see nuclear weapons treated as the huge investment they are in the real world. They are prohibitively expensive for all but the most determined players. Good.
I'm glad that the balancing updates will become less frequent. It has been a challenge to know what should be built, and what our operating costs will be in existing games.
I understand this is still a "BETA" game, but your players are buying memberships and gold with REAL money. It is always nice to know what we are buying.

My recent observations lead me to believe that game-play is being slowed down?
Research times have blossomed from 9 hours for level 1 buildings to 24 or more. Will that not scare away new players? Kids used to 1st person shooting games won't have the patience for CON.

There is a conflict between the desire for a war game played over the course of weeks, and the reality of just how rapid and brutal 21st century warfare is. Add in that CON nations are run by one person in their leisure time (not a 7/24 general staff) and we realize that in-game there will inevitably be large blocks of time when there is nobody at the helm of each nation. A game of CON can last longer than a real world invasion of one nation by another! CON nations are going to be attacked when nobody is on-line to respond. ?Should the fastest and most deadly units be declawed so a nation can't be overrun? Should Blitzkrieg be a forbidden battle strategy? I hope not.

At the moment:
- Airborne and Special Ops transport helicopters are slower than ships at sea. (3.0 vs 4.0) This is a significant slowdown from previous releases. Combined with the extended boarding times, we lose the elements of speed and surprise which make those units so deadly. If they are too fast, remove the "add target" feature for them, or just remove them from the game, replace them with horse mounted cavalry. I think gutting the airborne and special operations forces diminishes one of the fun elements of a game about modern warfare.

Cruise Missiles fly at the same speed as the planes launching them? (8.0 vs. 8.0) It would be nice to have a bit of variance, if only so that planes don't fly in their own cloud of missiles making it hard to bring the plane forward for orders.
The in game, help reference material needs to be stepped up significantly. New players just don't grasp the complexities and nuances of CON, and this forum is a chat tool, not a teaching environment or even a set of rules and guidelines. The talking head doesn't cover much at all. It appears that many new players don't grasp that the newspaper provides intelligence information, or that there are messages on the diplomatic screen.

- There is no good explanation about the advantages of buying a security council membership. Not only do we not know for certain what we might be buying, but it is not clear what advantage those extra features impart on those who buy them. I suspect a better explanation of why security council membership is an advantage would result in more sales.

- Finally, a wonderful enhancement for V 1.1 would be an "Order Of Battle" screen which gives a run down of a player's unit types and locations. It is easy to lose units in middle and end games, once they get spread over the world and there are many dozens to deal with.

This is my long winded way of saying I'm enjoying many aspects of the game, but I don't understand what the designer's "vision" of an ideal CON game is.
At the end of the day, CON is competing for our leisure time and entertainment spending. Let's keep the fun parts in.

Thanks Again,
I appreciate how difficult it is to even consider all suggestions, much less respond or incorporate them into a game.
Being a programmer/analyst can feel like being pecked to death by ducks. Hang in there!

Blast Radius.

Yes the transport helicopters are too slow. the gunship and the attack helicopters are 2-3 times faster thats not real.

But the cruise missles are also in real slower than jets. Often I have this written here, but many player have no idea of the speed from cruise missles.
Tomahawk:

Actually we made the ships much faster than in reality to shorten sea voyages which otherwise could take weeks. Community answer to this is: Helis are to slow in comparison.... unrealistic.

@Blastradius: this game is now actually about one year in development. Half of which it has been in open beta. We have a very good idea of where we are aiming but if we find players abusing the system to the detriment of a majority of users then we will fix it - such was the case with the Airborne and its speeds.

The modern speed of combat is well understood in our team and it took about one month for coalition forces to militarily conquer Iraq. Now please show me one player who needs a month to do this in game... actually we had many players reporting conquests in mere hours.

A unit list or order of battle is already planned and taking longer due to the many balancing and update improvements we had to provide in the meantime.
For us having a first cooperative mode such as the coalitions clearly outweighed the unit list. And as we don't have dozens of dev's but a mere handful we have to weigh our choices carefully.

For the next update in about two weeks I would like to see the market price restriction to be lifted. With the additional money output from arms industries there is no reason anymore to restrict it. It also makes resources purchases with gold less efficient.
Furthermore I would like to suggest to increase homeland provinces resources output to 100% like the homeland cities. Moreover, increase the resources produced by occupied provinces to 50% to be in alignment with the resources production logic.

One aspect that seems not to be used much, that i used extensively in CoW is espionage. I feel it isn't used because at 10k per spy, and with the oft times challenging balance of money, we find ourselves with no money to pay spies we do hire, so we lose them. In truth more warfare is likely conducted by spies than military forces these days, so I was wondering if you could test out dropping the espionage costs? 10k is a LOT of money especially in the early to mid game. For me at least it was a really fun part of the game, where before i invaded someone i would find out his military might, locations, i would cripple his economy by destroying key resource production areas, and then when i invaded, i needed a much smaller force, which i think is more along the lines of your vision. We don't field armies of 3000 tanks, and 400 000 troops anymore very often any more.

Along these lines, it would be really interesting, and a fun twist i think to have spec ops be able to target specific buildings. For example if you send them into a country on a stealth mission, have them be able to target a war factory or airfield in a city, and then they do their attack on that facility.

and lastly, i think it might be a really handy feature if planes could be given an alternate landing field after their mission. along the lines of next target, but more of a land here button and allow you to select an airfield within range. It can be very frustrating having to move a plane to a nearby airfield first, then issue the order the attack so the following attacks the plane doesn't waste time going back to it's home field every mission.

May be a new function: Technological espionage. a part of economy sabotage, with the change to get a research from other countries. The Chineese I think they are the worldchampions of this .
Or a new function for military sabotage. researching sabotage for researching all thing with missles.

For the next update in about two weeks I would like to see the market price restriction to be lifted. With the additional money output from arms industries there is no reason anymore to restrict it. It also makes resources purchases with gold less efficient.
Furthermore I would like to suggest to increase homeland provinces resources output to 100% like the homeland cities. Moreover, increase the resources produced by occupied provinces to 50% to be in alignment with the resources production logic.

Hi DPRK, not sure why it would make resource purchases for gold less efficient? Pls explain.

Concerning the provinces - they do not have resources besides money and manpower and occupation is 25% production with annexation ramping this value up to 50%

Good evening Germancio,

thank you for your reply.
It makes it less effcient because there is much more value in investing Gold into increasing building speed or - even better- into direct intelligenc actions. You have so much money that you can buy on market alle the time what resources you need. But this is also a effect of far less active players within the mid or late game. Most people quit games after 7 to 14 days in game, thus allowing to get market domination and leading to snow-balling the game heavily in your favour.
Furthermore there is a kind of an "invisible efficeny rating"; meaning resources value depend much on the current balancing, thus leading to a so called META(=Most Effective Tactic Available). So, the current META makes resource purchase with Gold a less viable option.

Yes, you are right. But all the provinces together farm a decnt amount of your steady income. All I want is more value and rewards when Iam conquering other countries; a reward for playing correctly.
Well, unfortunatly you will only get 25% with occupied provinces since you can't annex them. The annexion resource ouput in a annexd city is capped by 75%. However, it says in the description only 47%. I already reported this bug several weeks ago but it wasn't fixed yet.
It can be a description error as well, but I don't know about it.

But will you lift the market price restrictions? You didn't mention it.

PS: Why is the word "snow-balling" censored (I can't write it properly)?

Wow, an actual UI feature to list and understand better where our troops are or what they are doing ? This will prove of an immense value over the time (as the scale of the game grows larger in army size). Ok, i don't expect to see it anytime soon, but will be great.

About speed, putting imaginary value with "acceptable time for journey from A to B" is necessary, especially between sea/air transit, as Germanico explained. To be honest, i do find ships a bit too quickly, it's really easy to hit&run with them, but overall it's fine


@DPRK Gaming : Resource scaling was a wall made to forbid push between players, especially on rare. With the expanding Coalition feature, i feel they will be gradually reduced or changed, because ultimately, the goal isn't to limit market, but protect legitimate users.

Very interesting explanation about resources, could you get deeper with the example of your games ? i think i understand vaguely what you mean, but i would like to see it "in action", or the points that you feeled were bottleneck on the matter.

"My recent observations lead me to believe that game-play is being slowed down?
Research times have blossomed from 9 hours for level 1 buildings to 24 or more. Will that not scare away new players? Kids used to 1st person shooting games won't have the patience for CON."

@Blastradius Indeed : More resources, slightly extended times. ~25% for research and mobilisation, buildings have been extended much more, but their bonus have been doubled or tripled (and considering the bonus are stacking HP after HP while the building is constructed, you gain the bonus actually a bit quicker than before, which is funny to imagine). It slows down the game only from a "starting day" perspective : as you have more production, less upkeep, more resources, you end, compared with the old model, with bigger armies and more buildings in the same time frame. I do agree, however, that research now ask more patience.

About the speed of conquest, Most game theories suggest that between the attack and the complete defeat, the opponent should have had a reasonable time to react. The "minimum ideal time" is generally put at ~12 hours (more than a night, more than a work day, less than a day). However, this doesn't mean the designers are against rush, and actually, a lot of units allow it, as well as shock tactics ... It's true, though, we need more planification and coordinated actions in order to be proud of killing a country quickly, instead of just making sure we are connected to launch the next conquest.

About the ingame reference, i agree, and Germanico has anticipated this need. Volunteers, like the dedicated NightWulf, are working on it. Ultimately, experienced players will have the opportunity to give a bit of their "know-how" to young players.

About the premium account, i do not know either. It has been duplicated from other bytro games "as it is" because it exists, so why not, but it lacks refinement and special features to be really incentive. Here, I won't lie : For "comfort" feature like rally point, automated build order, and agressive fire mod, i find it's a bit light :p. For example, this OOB idea would be a marvelous premium feature. It's not critical for one to play, while someone dedicated will definitely plays more comfortably with it.

To my knowledge the security council feature button lists the main benefits - we actually added value to it so please at least have look at it before complaining