Keegoz

If people want an easier way to view the changes proposed for the city costs then please check out this sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R0LJwAy6mJKIbOnsoSXy-vM3K5RVyuYVQNBchZQQ1ow/edit?gid=0#gid=0 Thanks to @AlexiosKomnenosfor creating it, it has also been added to the original post.

I do speak to players around the game, I did consult people on this. No I cannot consult everyone on every change. I actually didn't talk to the new players in my alliance to try and cut out any potential bias. You are correct that newer players usually do not come on the forums, but I have had quite a few DM me on discord and I will keep publicising this threads existance on there. Currently the new players asking me questions have a positive outlook on these changes.

If you have any other colour suggestions please let me know, but point taken.

? All cities under whatever the average is will be cheaper. Lower tiers won't be paying more.

The cap is basically the alternative option here, yeah. It's what Alex originally asked for. However, it isn't really a solution long-term, and I cannot guarantee that updates keep coming out for people who hit the end-game of c65. I am worried we'll see a nose-dive in retention on the upper end if things stall, like they have in the past.

Some discussion around issues with the current city formula: Introduction We are at a point in the game where the current city cost formula has proven to be ineffective at balancing the growth of the game. Even though city costs are exponential, so are the increases of revenue per each added city, and thus the added time it takes to purchase the next city remains linear forever, regardless of city size. This means that a city 32 nation and a city 49 nation will grow at almost the exact same rate in the following year, with the gap between them only shrinking by 1 city over all of 2025. Meaning for the average player, the game currently doesn’t support their catchup and we are at risk of playing two or three separate games, where a new player won’t even be able to become a part of the mid tier anymore, as the current mid tier will grow into the c35s and 40s over the next year and a half, way past a point where the current support systems (urban planning projects and new nation bonuses) will become too outdated to aid them. Growth keeps up with costs - which creates a problem Firstly, when covering the median revenue for a nation in each city tier, we will notice off the bat that each city doesn’t increase our revenue linearly, but exponentially. Now, this isn’t anything new and the result isn’t surprising at all. This is due to larger nations having projects which increase revenue, city age bonuses and having a higher concentration of land - which allows them to produce food, which is far more profitable per slot than raw or manufactured resources. However this also means that for each subsequent city bought, previous cities earn more revenue as well on average. We have seen that on average, nations will see larger and larger increases in their revenue for each subsequent city bought as they progress through the game. When a nation in the C21-C30 tier purchases a new city, their revenue will increase by about $1,800,000, whilst nations in the C41-C50 tier will see an increase of $3,700,000 for each new city bought due to the aforementioned factors. This difference in revenue earned for each subsequent city bought will keep growing forever, and thus create a reality where large nations will definitely not only reach city 70, and then city 80, and then city 90 etc, but they’ll do so relatively quickly, a lot quicker than people think. Fundamentally, their growth will slow down very gradually. In fact, the rate at which growth slows down in the upper tier actually goes down for each subsequent city bought. If you take the median amount each tier earns per day, and then (for the sake of fair evaluation) assume they won’t fight next year, you can quite easily estimate the amount of growth each nation can afford next year with just their revenue. The gap between C32 and C49 will only shrink by 1 city next year, as will the gap between C50 and C62. The result of this is that once the current support systems run out of road and the high tier moves closer to C50, the mid tier will follow suit, lagging behind at around C40. This will create a scenario where new players will create a new tiering altogether, and won’t be able to participate in mid tier fighting, or have any prospects of catching up for years and years to come. Another urban planning project would act as just a band aid fix, and we need a more thorough way to solve this issue for good.

Alrighty, it's time to get ready for our next update. The military update is well underway, with ship changes already live on the test server and military research not far away. The tournament to test out the mechanics should happen fairly soon (if Alex is around to do it). I've elected to split the econ update into two parts, as I do want to add another new mechanic to the game but I need more time to flesh a few ideas out. Alex was also very keen to have city costs sorted for the on-going health of the game. Treasures & Colours Adjustments: Remove continent requirements on all treasures that have them. Require alliance colour and nation colour to match to spawn treasures. Require nations to have been on a colour for 30 days to be able to spawn treasures. Add four new colours to the game (Bronze, Gold, Lavendar and Teal) New Treasures: Add 2 new treasures each for the 4 new colors. Gold: The Ark of the Covenant Mask of Tutankhamun Teal: Hope Diamond Atlantis Lavender: Crown Jewels Dead Sea Scrolls Bronze: Topaz Nebra Sky Disk Add new specialized treasures. For Raiding AAs: 2 “Pirate” treasures. 2% Bonus to raid loot for the alliance that holds it. Doesn’t spawn, can only be taken in conflict. Nations who do not declare war for 10 days (120 turns) will lose the treasure to whoever declares war on them immediately. Queen Anne’s Revenge Royal Fortune For non-majors: 2 new treasures that can spawn on any nation, Provides a 1% bonus but only add bonus to alliances outside of the top 10. Lance of Longinus Lost Library of Alexandria For Mass Member/Micros:2 new treasures that can spawn on any nation, but only add a flat bonus of 150k per turn to nations under c20. Excalibur Shroud of Turin For Small/Elite Alliances: 2 new treasures that can spawn on any nation. Provides a 1% bonus, only usable if an alliance has less than 50 members. Tyrannosaurus Rex Fossil The Last Supper Easier City Imports Currently, city builds can only be changed individually or all at once. The whole system to determine builds is incredibly awkward and dated. The following suggestions can help improve this. Templates The solution is to allow players to save city builds as templates. This would ideally be done by allowing players to save an existing city build as a template, and then apply it in a drop down menu to cities. A new tab in the sidebar would exist allowing you to view your templates. Mass Import Tool A mass import tool that functions similar to the mass infra/land tools, allowing you to change a dropbox next to the list cities and import across all cities. Credit to @Sketchy for this idea City Cost Changes Alright, this is going to be contentious for some of you. I am going to say, an update to city costs or caps is going to happen so if your stance is 'Leave it alone', I apologise because that is not happening. Alex had a conversation with the design team about the massive creep in cities and the issues this was creating for the game, after discussion around a hard cap we more or less agreed to instead aim for a moving soft cap. I will detail some of the issues with the current cost model in a response below as to not make this intial post too overwhelming. Firstly, the city planning projects will be retired (and refunded as a cash amount) for all nations. This allows the following changes to occur without issue. Moving Average City Count The game will implement a moving city cost that will adapt to the games growth over time. Simply put, as the top 20% of the games city count average goes up, the costs of cities shifts upwards, making earlier cities cheaper as the game expands. A new city cost formula will replace the old one, that is steeper at the top end, acting as a soft cap to cities, until the average has caught up. Cities far ahead of the average will cost more, meaning it will be more expensive to push far far ahead of the top 20% average. To see a more detailed cost analysis please see here. The current average is ~c40 right now, which has been highlighted in green detailing the new city costs. Columns to the right project future costs as the game grows. If you wish to see the changes a little more easily then click here The formula for the changes are: =MAX(100000(CityToBuy-(Top20Average/4))^3 + 150000(CityToBuy-(Top20Average/4)) + 75000,CityToBuy^2*100000) Please remember that you can upvote and downvote these threads as much as you want. The design team will only focus on feedback from people who post and explain their reasoning.

I'm getting to it, dw

Ngl, if you asked me 10 years ago if this would be one of the alliances to survive a decade down the line. My answer would have been a hard 'no'. I do admire the way TFP has managed to defy expectations, re-imagine themselves and continued to produce high quality individuals to this community. So congrats on 10 years and proving me wrong!

I do think Rose is going through growing pains with quite a number of government changes. Let's be real though, Rose has never been a massive military alliance and has always struggled on the back foot. I think enough combinations of things going on has caused kinda the perfect storm, I wouldn't write them off entirely but they definately have some work to do. They still have a better hand than anyone who had the lead them from 2013-2019 had. I appreciate the use of the forums btw

They don't require you to be in Antartica in-game afaik

Antartica Alliance seems to be the largest one that doesn't require discord. That said, most decent alliances do use discord.

I'll keep some of these ideas in mind when the next update presents itself. I agree with a lot of the points presented.

Hey all, I thought I would make this public in the interest of transparency in what the development team will be coding for the next game update, which is a military one. Given the limited formatting options on this forum, it is in a google doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z2jPtbMLOuFZR6ZQlu3qwr5cySfwLsh_Cvq9U6RGReo/edit?usp=sharing This is a consolidation of a few threads and discussions around the place. Please note, there is a lot here and we're aware people have voiced some scepticism at certain aspects but we are keen to push through and have this tested. If we find things need changing from that testing, then we'll take feedback and tweak from there. Going forward, I am keen to get some QoL updates going and a econ update. This will likely go a similar way as our military one, with an update/change to a current mechanic and ideally a new mechanic. I know I want to personally see a few more community event type things in the game, such as what we saw with arrgh's recent bidding thread.

It's something I am open to do, and I do think is logical. However people will see it as nerfing spies further, as the benefit of winning the spy battle becomes even less important. I agree spies need a rework but it's a difficult topic when so many vested interests exist. I'll put it onto my list for the next milcom update, but that might be a way off for now.

Would this not make dragging whales down as smaller nations incredibly difficult?

They'll be on everyones nation page and API

The current proposal is that you get a buff whilst in beige with 0 wars. Your proposal seems to be around wars in which you're still engaged with.

I meant to put it in the spoiler, ships are a little cheaper but that was outlined in the previous thread. I rounded their upkeep a bit as well. Nukes are becoming slightly more expensive based on feedback. Aluminium is an issue, we barely see much get consumed even during wars. To the extent where major alliances could fund an entire coalitions worth of Aluminium for an entire global. Planes simply are too cheap for their power level, which becomes problematic with upgrade paths like this as well.

Planes are having a price increase.

One other thing to note, although you can increase your cap it does not increase your rebuy. That remains linked to your normal unit amount from your cities.

This is the second major part of the military update we intend to push early next year subject to testing. Both the ship changes and the following I intend to be fully tested in a test server tournament and adjust proposals according to further balancing feedback. Military Research As promised, the design team is looking towards adding a new feature to the game in our next full update. This new feature is Military Research, which will act as a mid to late game feature, allowing for those larger nations to have different investment opportunities to increase their military power or economic power. The research will be split between 3 areas; ground, air and navy. Each area will have two investment paths, one that will increase the cap on buying units and the other allowing for the reduction in cost of purchasing and maintaining military units. You will have a total of 20 upgrade levels to invest into these paths per area. Each level can get you one of the following benefits: Capacity Upgrades: Planes Capacity - Flat increase to plane cap. 15 planes per level. (Maximum of 300) Ground Capacity - Flat increase to tanks and soldiers cap. 250 tanks per level and 3000 per upgrade. (Maximum of 5000 tanks and 60k soldiers) Naval Capacity - Flat increases to increase ships cap. 5 ships per level. (Maximum of 100 ships) Cost Reduction Upgrades: Plane Cost - Reduce plane purchase cost by $50 per unit & 0.2 aluminum per level (Maximum of $1000 & 4 aluminum per plane) Reduce plane upkeep cost per unit by $15 at peace & $10 at war per level (Maximum of $300 peace & $200 at war per plane) Ground Cost - Reduce soldier purchase cost by $0.1 per unit (Maximum $2 per soldier) Reduce tank purchase cost by $1 per unit & 0.01 steel (Maximum of $20 & 0.2 per tank) Reduce soldier upkeep cost per unit by $0.02 at peace & $0.03 at war (Maximum of $0.4 at peace & $0.6 at war per soldier) Reduce soldier food upkeep making it 1 food + 10 per unit at peace, e.g. 1 food per 750>760 soldiers (Maximum of 1 food per 950 soldiers) Reduce soldier food upkeep making it 1 food + 15 per unit at war, e.g. 1 food per 500>515 (Maximum of 1 food per 800 soldiers) Reduce tank upkeep cost per unit by $1 at peace & $1.5 at war (Maximum of $20 at peace & $30 at war per tank) Naval Cost - Reduce ship purchase cost by $500 per unit & 0.5 steel per level (Maximum of $10000 & 10 steel per ship) Reduce ship upkeep cost per unit by $30 at peace & $50 at war per level (Maximum of $600 peace & $1000 at war per ship) Upgrade costs Costs to these upgrades will have a money & resources cost that will increase per upgrade level. A cash cost for each individual research purchased across all upgrade paths. A manu cost for each group of upgrades (Ground/Planes/Ships) A food cost for each specific upgrade path. All of these would scale, incentivizing diversifying and making focused specialization more costly. This will disincentivize a clear “meta” forming around the upgrades, making certain upgrades redundant. You may reset your upgrades for 1 credit, that will reimburse your cash costs but not resources. Policy & Project A base project will be needed to unlock Military Research, called the Military Research Center. It requires the Propaganda Bureau to be unlocked. It will increase your project slots by 2. It costs $50,000,000 and 10,000 gas, munitions, aluminum & steel. A new policy called ‘Military Doctrine’ will be created that can reduce the upgrade costs by 5%. For further details on costings and more please see the sheet below: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZEF-mhTONSIJ8wu6cICzIh0ckNhOWFAMQajM1yA2ao8/edit?gid=0#gid=0 Reasons for update Beige Buff So this one I have discussed for a while, both publicly and in private. Please note that although I personally believe this buff is underpowered that I am going to reveal, I am open to further buffing it going forward. I am just currently apprehensive of changing too much at once and creating an unforeseen issue. Beige will now grant people (with no wars) an increase in the number of Soldiers, Tanks, Aircraft, and Ships you can recruit per day by 15% This will allow people in beige to more easily get back into the fight, should they wish to do so. Yes, this stacks with PB which would translate to 25% from the base buy rate.

Feel free to walk away and touch grass if it impacts you this much.

Quite frankly, I am tired of you electing yourself the one and only voice of the community. You are not the only person in the room believe it or not. If you have an opinion voice it but stop trying to act as the communities unelected voice. These discussions exist for people to voice their own opinions and ideas.

Fixing resources isn't a one change fix all thing. I will increase costs in multiple areas. My next proposal will also be introducing another resource sink.