Expensive annexation of cities

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    • Expensive annexation of cities

      I like a lot of the new updates and the 60 player map. I like the idea of non-city buildings, air fields and naval bases giving resource bonus, the national guard unit and the stat changes with some units. However the new price for annexing a city in my opinion is ridiculous. I do agree that annexing a city should be expensive but 2000 rare materials is ridiculously expensive, annexing a city for the price of 2 carriers or a cruise missile research is way too expensive and a lot of people might not ever do it. In many cases all of the important buildings in the city would have been destroyed and the point of spending 2000 rare materials just to increase the moral of a city above 50% is gone. Also it doesn't make sense an annexation of a city to cost rare materials not mentioning 2000 of them. I found myself in situation where after I conquer a city I don't bother annexing and even demolishing existing army bases, also I've seen a lot of other players to do the same thing. Simply put I see this particular feature (2000 rare materials to annex) of the game as a greedy move to force people to spend more money for gold. My suggestion and I think a lot of players would agree with me is to substantially lower or completely remove the rare materials price for annexing a city.

    • Alright, haven't used the forums in awhile so i'm surprised to see this.

      Annexation doesn't effect morale, it moves the resource production up to 50 percent from 25 percent and allows you to mobilize units on that city (now).

      So, they moved the purpose of annexation from normalizing your city, to being able to mobilize on that city. Now you have to use arms industries (that are multitudes cheaper) and some other buildings to increase res production effectively, but maintain your unit producing cities to a certain hand-held number.

      Is that bad? Well, before you scream out "YES NOW I CAN'T SPAM 30 UNITS A DAY" hold on for a second. So, they made the demand for resources far higher in every aspect, made it easier (sort of) to increase resource production (you can easily increase the res production of an occupied city to 75 percent within the budget of annexation), and made province-based buildings to increase the res production of some now res-producing provinces.

      Do you see a trend here?

      They moved the shift of gameplay from steamroll everything with trash infantry and strikes and MBTs to build infrastructure, defend borders, and reserve your units. So they did not ruin annexation, they did not ruin mobilization, they are simply moving the general focus of players from steamrolling, to building and preparing. As it was in the first months of CoN's beta.

      imo, they should probably the half the price of annexation because while I see why they did it and fully understand, the current price is ridiculous.

      and no, this isn't a "greedy move to force people to spend more money for gold". Frankly, that's far more ridiculous. Just because they changed it so things are not as easy to build in the game (this was how it was before, it only got easier to build units..) does not mean they want you to spend more money. This is an even playing field. Everyone else has to deal with this too. The only reason people say something as mind numbingly STUPID as this is because they're mad, they want to keep what they're doing and not adapt to the update at all...

      well too bad, this game's beta. Deal with the updates

    • While obviously disagreement can happen on details, you explained very well some experiments on the meta.


      Myself, instead of reducing annexation cost, i would instead raise their impact. (i do like the principle that you need to pay an arm to annex, but i would like to yield results in my lifetime, ha !)


      As for the "element" of "It's to make people spend more", please consider that trying to establish a business model doesn't rely on a simple (yet comforting... i suppose) paradigm "less money/more money".It's much more complicated. Business-value isa parameter, in the middle of a hundred others.

      And if i would go leaning toward your thinking path, i would say that before, Annexation was a forced step to do anything, so when prices were modified, it had a direct (and potentially coercitive) impact on what you could plan to spend on the game. Now ? You don't have too. If anything related to the good ol' "they are money grabbers" (aka : This company tries to grow and get high revenues. They are evil), this SPECIFIC example goes against the idea that it will generate more revenues (because you're not forced anymore.)
      Running an online alliance is pretty much like running a small company, except you need to find other way than money to keep your employees productive. May they play or work, they are humans.

    • expensive annexation make almoast all field buildings more attraktive. If anexation is too cheap there are almoast no need in field buildings like airfield, hospital and port.

      I would glad to see cost of annexation would be flexible: more days under control --> more cheaper. But starting price should be high enough to make other buildings attraktive. most imortant thing: developing own provinces, instead of locust strategie: killing and annekting without developing of homeland.

      Starting price could be a very little bit cheaper, and after may be two weeks of control it should be half price of starting price.

    • I do agree with all of your points and thanks for the clarification on the moral mistake. But the mention price of 2000 is simple impossible even in the late game 2000 rare materials are a lot. If you lower only the rare materials require, 500-750 or even 1000 for example, the annexation will remain expensive but doable feature. Building infrastructure in the cities will remain attractive as no one would spend such an amount of resources for annex in the early game.

    • Shtukaa wrote:

      I do agree with all of your points and thanks for the clarification on the moral mistake. But the mention price of 2000 is simple impossible even in the late game 2000 rare materials are a lot. If you lower only the rare materials require, 500-750 or even 1000 for example, the annexation will remain expensive but doable feature. Building infrastructure in the cities will remain attractive as no one would spend such an amount of resources for annex in the early game.
      I agree that there are problems with "how much things you can do with rares" and "how much rare you can get".
      Running an online alliance is pretty much like running a small company, except you need to find other way than money to keep your employees productive. May they play or work, they are humans.

    • One problem i might add here is, if you play an island nation like Japan and want to control lets say, the Philipines, then you have no choice but to create a very risky supply line across the ocean, espceially whe China is your enemy. Or every single Coba playthrough every. maybe we should make annexations start out cheaply and then increase with each subsequent annexation. This would prevent the steamroll-empires that alot of people here are afraid of and would allow players to strategically place their few cheap annexations to built up a foundation upon which to work

    • I might suggest that annexation should be a matter of time and not resources. The longer a nation controls a recently occupied territory the more accustomed the people of that territory are to the new government authority. A system of provincial/city claims and counter claims could also be coded to make ownership and population sentiment alot more interesting. Shtukaa's hypothesis is probably correct in that annexation is meant to be a cash out 'feature'.

      The post was edited 1 time, last by mccarty.geoff: *system typo ().

    • Nobody really likes how annexation works anyway, and it's just a "tedious" mechanism in mid-late to boost the productions of conquering empires that begin to be big and needs a "speed-up" in production. I agree that long timer would be, in this case, far more simpler an easier to understand.

      Annexation as a cash feature ? lol. For some beginners maybe, but it's a waste. Annexation becomes relevant at the very precise time where your economy hits the "comfortable" sport of "i can research as much as i want, but i need moare to have moare troops"... So... usually you don't "pay for it". In fact, i don't see a situation where it would be relevant to pay for it.

      If in Early : just gold the resources
      if in mid : do you really want to spend 20 bucks to improve your output by 5% ?
      In late : lol. Don't you have something better to do, like winning the game, at this point ?
      Running an online alliance is pretty much like running a small company, except you need to find other way than money to keep your employees productive. May they play or work, they are humans.

    • Well, not to drag on the totally infallible and consumer freindly gold features (like that sarcasm?)... Conquest of territory and development of that conquered land should be a game staple. In overall design to expect a player to remain with his original cities and provinces as the only means of upgrading economically detracts from the overall expansion strategy experience. If the in-game buildings were patterned on general socio-economic and military doctrines and institution than realistically capturing opposing cities would incure a cost in resources if they were not rebuilt and developed to their potential. So, simply if all 'population points' required supply resources in order to survive for isntance than outright expansion and ignorance of the captured cities welfare would quickly check the foolish players tactics. Annexation per se should be the total incorporation of that cities populace into the nation state with 100% output after a lengthy period of turmoil. Not that paying for administrator upgrades like in NWE is wrong but, length of time seems like the better factor in mullifying the annexed subjects. ;]

    • 100% output was often advocated (by myself included) in order to make the economical growth curves as dynamic as possibles, but it doesn't fit with their business approach, and i guess they don't want to go too far from the successful formula of CoW. This said, where CoW had a 25% flat rate on conquered provinces without any possibility to raise it, at least CoN brings this mid-late opportunity. NWE has the most interesting developpment system, overall. But as we know, it failed as a product so badly they stopped working on it beyond basic server maintenance.

      It would be an interesting anti-rush feature, but i can anticipate that on this, Dorado and I have different point of views ^^. I love my long end games with 600+ units per side, but it's not their goal to have too long games.
      Running an online alliance is pretty much like running a small company, except you need to find other way than money to keep your employees productive. May they play or work, they are humans.

    • newworldempires.com


      Opulon wrote:

      It would be an interesting anti-rush feature, but i can anticipate that on this, Dorado and I have different point of views ^^. I love my long end games with 600+ units per side, but it's not their goal to have too long games.
      There are simple methods to limit server resource usage. In CoN there are limits to round generation which I fully support. It should always have been an automatically generated round infrastructure for the free to play members. They could also cut standard games off after # days. Packing more players into maps is worse than having more maps with less players due to bottlenecking transfer to/from the databse (I'm guessing thats correct). Basing units on real brigade elements instead of detailed battalions would give a greater sense of army organization and be more realistic for hypothetical WW3 force sizes. Players should only be allowed to participate in so many rounds. Just allowing players to freely archive, join, and be inactive day after day is a needless waste. Realistically, in the corporate internet world there are super scripts created to waste server resources and null populate competitor's gameworlds. While very little to nothing is done to stop it. Last I can think of is the necessity to include the gamemaster player kicking module or an auto-kicking feature. Recycling positions of rounds in progress should be encouraged/enforced some way.

    • Not a question of technical limitations, even if indeed when there are 2 000 units on the map, it gets laggy at max dezoom. More a question of "late game don't generate income"

      "Packing more players into maps is worse than having more maps with less players due to bottlenecking transfer to/from the databse (I'm guessing thats correct)" ---> Correct. There's an ajax call every few seconds/actions, to retrieve Army states and such.

      "Basing units on real brigade elements instead of detailed battalions would give a greater sense of army organization and be more realistic for hypothetical WW3 force sizes. Players should only be allowed to participate in so many rounds. Just allowing players to freely archive, join, and be inactive day after day is a needless waste."

      Agree. And the situation has been improved by comparison to before. This said, there is no ultimate solution. Even in a fast paced game where you can only play a game at a time (like HoI 4), it's nore rare, in multiplayer, to see someone rage quit in 1938 because he thinks that another player is too strong. And nobody hot-joins that. I agree with recycling, but i don't know (code limitatio, maybe) if they can make a scaled inactivity timer, like 24 hours the first week, 48 hours after ,etc.
      Running an online alliance is pretty much like running a small company, except you need to find other way than money to keep your employees productive. May they play or work, they are humans.