Remove National Project Timer

[Sir Scarfalot]

Good grief, guys. You're making arguments about the feel of the game, and the sense of progression? That you want to savor your progress and feel accomplished?

In a single-player game you need the artificial limitations and obstacles to overcome in order to have a decent gameplay experience, but that concept doesn't apply here. This isn't Sim City, this isn't Fallout 4, this is a competitive multiplayer game! In such a game, your 'progression' is measured entirely by proportion to the progression of the other players, and thinking of it any other way is just a lack of self-awareness and awareness of the gameplay environment. Artificially limiting the rate of progress in a game like this makes plenty of sense early on, in order to prevent a runaway player or set of players from growing faster than everybody else and thus cause early imbalances, but once players have already grown unreasonably beyond others, then that purpose is lost. Waiting is no goal; this isn't a game of grinding but a game of player interaction.

Now, sure, it's possible to get into a tight war and then dump craploads of money onto your chosen side or onto a micro for quick reinforcements... ONCE. You get one round. At the cost of billions or trillions. That's not a sustainable strategy even if it were repeatable. Worse, it doesn't even WORK to do meaningful damage, as the side that didn't or couldn't do that now needs only to submarine properly and chew through that one rounds' damage deficit. Established modern warfare theory renders the tactic of sudden city dumping little more effective than just a well-planned blitz; at best it makes an obscenely expensive and ridiculous counter to what would otherwise have been a victorious blitz. I really cannot accept the argument that it's some kind of OP new exploit that removing the city timers would just now enable, either, since it is already possible and has been possible for as long as there has been the option to use credits to bypass the city timer!

[Mandystalin]

5 hours ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

Good grief, guys. You're making arguments about the feel of the game, and the sense of progression? That you want to savor your progress and feel accomplished?

In a single-player game you need the artificial limitations and obstacles to overcome in order to have a decent gameplay experience, but that concept doesn't apply here. This isn't Sim City, this isn't Fallout 4, this is a competitive multiplayer game! In such a game, your 'progression' is measured entirely by proportion to the progression of the other players, and thinking of it any other way is just a lack of self-awareness and awareness of the gameplay environment. Artificially limiting the rate of progress in a game like this makes plenty of sense early on, in order to prevent a runaway player or set of players from growing faster than everybody else and thus cause early imbalances, but once players have already grown unreasonably beyond others, then that purpose is lost. Waiting is no goal; this isn't a game of grinding but a game of player interaction.

 

Except that only really applies to people involved in FA. Most players of games such as this one simply manage their nation and hardly even interact with their alliance let alone the rest of the world. Wars,  the big source of interaction, get rarer as FA gets more sophisticated/complicated. To most players the game is a nation simulator with a political addition that interferes now and then, not a political game that happens to include nation building.

[Sir Scarfalot]

19 minutes ago, Mandystalin said:

Except that only really applies to people involved in FA. Most players of games such as this one simply manage their nation and hardly even interact with their alliance let alone the rest of the world. Wars,  the big source of interaction, get rarer as FA gets more sophisticated/complicated. To most players the game is a nation simulator with a political addition that interferes now and then, not a political game that happens to include nation building.

No mechanics need to or should exist that encourage or cater to such nonsense. Especially not if they come at the cost of actual gameplay. If you're not going to war, then you are missing out on the best parts of the game. If you're not interacting with the world, then you're missing out on the core gameplay. If you're not even interacting with your alliance, then what the hell are you doing at all?!

This isn't a singleplayer game; this is a game of player interaction to its core, with nation simulator mechanics supporting that core concept. Fundamentally, there are three components to the game: there's warfare, there's politics, and then there's watching numbers go up. If you think that the political "addition" is something that "interferes" with what you're looking for in your gameplay experience, then there's plenty of games where you can watch numbers go up. Like Cookie Clicker, or Farmville, or Sim City to name a few.

[Zei-Sakura Alsainn]

12 hours ago, Mandystalin said:

Building on the post above, I think it will make the game less interesting. There are quite a limited number of Projects, so being able to buy them all at once (infra cap allowing... maybe realistically a handful at a time) simply removes a goal. And then your whole game is reduced to 'save money, buy city, save money, buy city'

At least with a 10-day wait you can mix that up with Projects, and it forces you to plan which Projects to buy in what order to best suit your nation growth.

Your lack of knowledge on this subject, and of self awareness betrays you.

Aside from IA and PB, there are no other projects that are MUST HAVE. Sure, if you produce munitions and alum like i do, you should have projects for those, but it's not a requirement. You makes less over time, and you use less raws over time, its just a slower version of what i do. 

Things like ID, ITC and VDS are bottom tier crap, the only people you'll see with ID or VDS are raiders who encounter missiles alot or high tier nations with a spare improvement slot who figure"Eh, screw every 5th nuke." and the only people you'll see with ITC are whales.

Same for NRF and MLP, mostly high tier nations with the spare slot or raiders who use them alot (sir scarfalot as a magnificent example of MLP in a smaller nation), literally every project aside from 2 is either utter garbage, is 'eh, i guess, might as well' or 'it'd be nice, speed things up a bit i suppose, nothing major'. 

They just aren't very important, honestly. So i, frankly, don't care if some whale decides to build every project in the game at once. So what? Only 2 of them are super useful, and after he's got those, he'll have irrgation thats useful, maybe one or two manu projects that are useful depending how much pollution they're OK with, and then the rest are of little use either period or only slightly useful at all in a war, which they are winning, because missiles and nukes are Vengeance weapons for your opponent to still clap you upside the head as he goes down.

What exactly is there to be concerned about in that?

[Radoje]

8 minutes ago, Komiko said:

Your lack of knowledge on this subject, and of self awareness betrays you.

Aside from IA and PB, there are no other projects that are MUST HAVE. Sure, if you produce munitions and alum like i do, you should have projects for those, but it's not a requirement. You makes less over time, and you use less raws over time, its just a slower version of what i do. 

Things like ID, ITC and VDS are bottom tier crap, the only people you'll see with ID or VDS are raiders who encounter missiles alot or high tier nations with a spare improvement slot who figure"Eh, screw every 5th nuke." and the only people you'll see with ITC are whales.

Same for NRF and MLP, mostly high tier nations with the spare slot or raiders who use them alot (sir scarfalot as a magnificent example of MLP in a smaller nation), literally every project aside from 2 is either utter garbage, is 'eh, i guess, might as well' or 'it'd be nice, speed things up a bit i suppose, nothing major'. 

They just aren't very important, honestly. So i, frankly, don't care if some whale decides to build every project in the game at once. So what? Only 2 of them are super useful, and after he's got those, he'll have irrgation thats useful, maybe one or two manu projects that are useful depending how much pollution they're OK with, and then the rest are of little use either period or only slightly useful at all in a war, which they are winning, because missiles and nukes are Vengeance weapons for your opponent to still clap you upside the head as he goes down.

What exactly is there to be concerned about in that?

He was talking about the city timers being removed and so was sir scarfalot, that's what his response was about, not the project timers being removed.

(Not agreeing or disagreeing with him though)

Edited August 11, 2018 by Radoje

[Sir Scarfalot]

22 minutes ago, Komiko said:

(sir scarfalot as a magnificent example of MLP in a smaller nation)

(Broke 250 missile launches a couple days ago btw)

Edited August 11, 2018 by Sir Scarfalot

[Radoje]

9 hours ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

Good grief, guys. You're making arguments about the feel of the game, and the sense of progression? That you want to savor your progress and feel accomplished?

In a single-player game you need the artificial limitations and obstacles to overcome in order to have a decent gameplay experience, but that concept doesn't apply here. This isn't Sim City, this isn't Fallout 4, this is a competitive multiplayer game! In such a game, your 'progression' is measured entirely by proportion to the progression of the other players, and thinking of it any other way is just a lack of self-awareness and awareness of the gameplay environment. Artificially limiting the rate of progress in a game like this makes plenty of sense early on, in order to prevent a runaway player or set of players from growing faster than everybody else and thus cause early imbalances, but once players have already grown unreasonably beyond others, then that purpose is lost. Waiting is no goal; this isn't a game of grinding but a game of player interaction.

Even in a competitive and multiplayer game, regardless of what it may be, like world of warcraft, league of legends, dota 2, tera etc etc, your character (or in this game nations) has to have a slow skill tree, a level up system, city system or some kind of way to make your experience last a long time and give you a sense of scale and achievement in the game, something that incentivizes you to play it for a long time and get good at it. Every player has an imaginary ticking time bomb where they stop enjoying the game and getting bored, and the best strategy in a nation sim is to drag that out as long as you possibly can. I agree that your progression is also measured by proportion to your progress compared to other players, but there can't be a sense of progression if we're all incentivized to grow as fast as possible and catch eachother up. I don't know of any people that are being angry that the city timer is restricting them from reaching their desired goal, like growing to 20 cities. The city timer is not there for that singular reason, it's also there to balance the game like I mentioned previously, to create a disparity in old and news players, and to give somebody a reason to want to be like somebody larger than them.
 

9 hours ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

Now sure, it's possible to get into a tight war and then dump craploads of money onto your chosen side or onto a micro for quick reinforcements... ONCE. You get one round. At the cost of billions or trillions. That's not a sustainable strategy even if it were repeatable. Worse, it doesn't even WORK to do meaningful damage, as the side that didn't or couldn't do that now needs only to submarine properly and chew through that one rounds' damage deficit. Established modern warfare theory renders the tactic of sudden city dumping little more effective than just a well-planned blitz; at best it makes an obscenely expensive and ridiculous counter to what would otherwise have been a victorious blitz. I really cannot accept the argument that it's some kind of OP new exploit that removing the city timers would just now enable, either, since it is already possible and has been possible for as long as there has been the option to use credits to bypass the city timer!

You don't, because you don't need to buy a 100 cities at once, quite the opposite from it. Even boosting 1 person by 2-3 cities at once in one specific tier can improve the tide of the war, and alliances would be more than happy to spend money on that so they can save a lot of money from not having to fight and lose infrastructure in that tier from their other nations.

The problem is not damage dealt, people wouldn't do it for damage, it's the balance of aircraft in that tier. Having an aircraft advantage doesn't necessarily mean you're doing more damage all the time, but it does mean that you've won the war. When an alliance has no more aircraft to tap and they're being sieged down, it doesn't matter how much damage they'll take, because they lost the war.

They wouldn't need to use it as a counter at all, simply planning ahead and dumping money on specific tiers before the blitz can basically guarantee that you win the first few rounds of the war if the other side can't adapt to your tiers fast enough.


 

[Zei-Sakura Alsainn]

20 minutes ago, Radoje said:

He was talking about the city timers being removed and so was sir scarfalot, that's what his response was about, not the project timers being removed.

(Not agreeing or disagreeing with him though)

No, he wasn't, if you read the post i responded to, he was talking about project timers, not cities. I even address points directly that he made in it.

8 minutes ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

(Broke 250 missile launches a couple days ago btw)

Congratulations!

[Sketchy]

Id settle for it being an independent timer from cities to avoid people hotswapping out projects at a whim, given the on the fly strategic benefits they can sometimes grant. 

[Azaghul]

14 hours ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

Good grief, guys. You're making arguments about the feel of the game, and the sense of progression? That you want to savor your progress and feel accomplished?

In a single-player game you need the artificial limitations and obstacles to overcome in order to have a decent gameplay experience, but that concept doesn't apply here. This isn't Sim City, this isn't Fallout 4, this is a competitive multiplayer game! In such a game, your 'progression' is measured entirely by proportion to the progression of the other players, and thinking of it any other way is just a lack of self-awareness and awareness of the gameplay environment. Artificially limiting the rate of progress in a game like this makes plenty of sense early on, in order to prevent a runaway player or set of players from growing faster than everybody else and thus cause early imbalances, but once players have already grown unreasonably beyond others, then that purpose is lost. Waiting is no goal; this isn't a game of grinding but a game of player interaction.

1) Having a sense of gameplay progression and a multiplayer competitive element are not mutually exclusive things.  People can have goals relative to both.  It can be fun to reach milestones like building to a certain city level, buying a project, buying all the projects, etc without much or even any consideration of how many other people have reached that milestone.

It can be competitive but it doesn't have to be.

2) When you make something easier to do you cheapen its value for everyone.  Both players going for it and thosr who already have it.  Sometimes what makes a goal rewarding is that it is hard or time consuming to do.

[Sweeeeet Ronny D]

I think getting rid of the project timer is a good idea, it just needlessly slows things down.

[Sir Scarfalot]

3 hours ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

I think getting rid of the project timer is a good idea, it just needlessly slows things down.

Says a guy with literally all the projects. So I think we can trust him on this one.

Better question: SRD, can we get an actual whale to weigh in on the debate about removing city timers?

[Sweeeeet Ronny D]

Back in my day, we had to balance out the city/project purchasing, I remember buying a city 8 or 9, then waiting 10 days buying a project (missiles maybe?) and then waiting another 10 days to buy my next city.  Now that the game is 1500 days old, I don't really see the point of making the noobs wait.  Everyone cries about not being able to catch up to us big dogs, but really with the stupid crazy taxes you guys all run and the cash wasted on people that don't stick around,  There isn't enough sheepy can do to give you guys a shot at catching up, but every bit counts.

As for city timers, that isnt what this thread is about but, I personally don't really care one way or the other, I just picked up city 32 a few days ago, which took me just under 2 months to save the 1.3 billion I needed to buy it, I am well past the point of dealing with the timer.   I see in here people talking about mass buying cities during a war, but that is both a terrible idea, and a complete waste of money, that really would be better saved for post war rebuilding.

[James II]

The timer was good at the beginning, hindered growth a little bit. But now it's irrelevant to hte big folks and only slows down lowbies from catching up or being competitive with the rest. I think it'd help the smaller nations if the project timer were kicked. ?

Edited August 12, 2018 by James II

[Sir Scarfalot]

6 hours ago, James II said:

The timer was good at the beginning, hindered growth a little bit. But now it's irrelevant to hte big folks and only slows down lowbies from catching up or being competitive with the rest. I think it'd help the smaller nations if the project timer were kicked. ?

eyyy, something you guys and I can agree on ?

On 8/11/2018 at 3:11 AM, Sketchy said:

Id settle for it being an independent timer from cities to avoid people hotswapping out projects at a whim, given the on the fly strategic benefits they can sometimes grant. 

Honestly, isn't the lack of a refund enough of a deterrent for that?

Edited August 12, 2018 by Sir Scarfalot
doublepost... in the same post? Also damn is it hard to remove emotes

[Mandystalin]

On 8/11/2018 at 7:29 AM, Sir Scarfalot said:

No mechanics need to or should exist that encourage or cater to such nonsense. Especially not if they come at the cost of actual gameplay. If you're not going to war, then you are missing out on the best parts of the game. If you're not interacting with the world, then you're missing out on the core gameplay. If you're not even interacting with your alliance, then what the hell are you doing at all?!

This isn't a singleplayer game; this is a game of player interaction to its core, with nation simulator mechanics supporting that core concept. Fundamentally, there are three components to the game: there's warfare, there's politics, and then there's watching numbers go up. If you think that the political "addition" is something that "interferes" with what you're looking for in your gameplay experience, then there's plenty of games where you can watch numbers go up. Like Cookie Clicker, or Farmville, or Sim City to name a few.

Regardless of whether that is true (for the record that isn't the point I'm arguing), it does seem to be how a lot of people play. For example, roughly 45% of nations are not in alliances (16% if you filter out the grays, which is still a sizeable chunk). Or you could compare the number of live nations to the number of regular posters on here. Or even to the number of members on here (that is tricky as you can't tell if a member here is historic or a live nation, but as about 6% of nations created ever signed up...). Or even what % of your alliance interact on your Discord / forum / [insert platform of choice here]

 

So the issue is, do you configure the game for how you think it should be played or do you think about how it is actually being played? 

 

[Mandystalin]

23 hours ago, Komiko said:

Your lack of knowledge on this subject, and of self awareness betrays you.

Aside from IA and PB, there are no other projects that are MUST HAVE. Sure, if you produce munitions and alum like i do, you should have projects for those, but it's not a requirement. You makes less over time, and you use less raws over time, its just a slower version of what i do. 

Things like ID, ITC and VDS are bottom tier crap, the only people you'll see with ID or VDS are raiders who encounter missiles alot or high tier nations with a spare improvement slot who figure"Eh, screw every 5th nuke." and the only people you'll see with ITC are whales.

Same for NRF and MLP, mostly high tier nations with the spare slot or raiders who use them alot (sir scarfalot as a magnificent example of MLP in a smaller nation), literally every project aside from 2 is either utter garbage, is 'eh, i guess, might as well' or 'it'd be nice, speed things up a bit i suppose, nothing major'. 

They just aren't very important, honestly. So i, frankly, don't care if some whale decides to build every project in the game at once. So what? Only 2 of them are super useful, and after he's got those, he'll have irrgation thats useful, maybe one or two manu projects that are useful depending how much pollution they're OK with, and then the rest are of little use either period or only slightly useful at all in a war, which they are winning, because missiles and nukes are Vengeance weapons for your opponent to still clap you upside the head as he goes down.

What exactly is there to be concerned about in that?

I sat down to make a point-by-point counter-argument, but realised that it all stemmed from the same root. How you choose to play the game is not necessarily how everybody chooses to play the game. 

 

Some players want the most efficient nation - it's all about maximising income for their size

Some players want the biggest nation - be that cities, infra, land, whatever

Some players want to achieve goals - the next city, a certain landmark of resources, a full set of projects, the striving is important

Some players want to politic - the nation is an afterthought

Some players just want to fight - all about the raiding

the list can carry on, but you get the idea. Many of those iterations would cause people to purchase more than the 'must have' Projects. A game where you do not have to work to achieve your aims is hardly a game at all.

 

[Sir Scarfalot]

1 hour ago, Mandystalin said:

Regardless of whether that is true (for the record that isn't the point I'm arguing), it does seem to be how a lot of people play. For example, roughly 45% of nations are not in alliances (16% if you filter out the grays, which is still a sizeable chunk). Or you could compare the number of live nations to the number of regular posters on here. Or even to the number of members on here (that is tricky as you can't tell if a member here is historic or a live nation, but as about 6% of nations created ever signed up...). Or even what % of your alliance interact on your Discord / forum / [insert platform of choice here]

 

So the issue is, do you configure the game for how you think it should be played or do you think about how it is actually being played?

You absolutely configure your game to encourage the exploration of its' core content; that's one of the most basic, most fundamental principles of game design. Anything else risks the players playing wrong. And if your players are playing the game wrong then you as a developer have failed to give the player the intended gameplay experience. When that happens, you've got a serious problem that needs to be corrected, not tolerated.

1 hour ago, Mandystalin said:

I sat down to make a point-by-point counter-argument, but realised that it all stemmed from the same root. How you choose to play the game is not necessarily how everybody chooses to play the game. 

 

Some players want the most efficient nation - it's all about maximising income for their size

Some players want the biggest nation - be that cities, infra, land, whatever

Some players want to achieve goals - the next city, a certain landmark of resources, a full set of projects, the striving is important

Some players want to politic - the nation is an afterthought

Some players just want to fight - all about the raiding

the list can carry on, but you get the idea. Many of those iterations would cause people to purchase more than the 'must have' Projects. A game where you do not have to work to achieve your aims is hardly a game at all.

 

And in this game, you absolutely must work to achieve your aims. Period. There's nothing about the timers that changes that. The only thing the timer changes is how fast one is allowed to apply the resources and work that has already been put into the game. Be it by the easy path of selling yourself into serfdom within a superscalar alliance, the hard path of raiding or the boring path of trading, you still have to gather the resources to afford your cities, project slots and projects.

Removing the timers isn't even close to removing the work; you're talking like we're suggesting making projects and cities free ?

Edited August 12, 2018 by Sir Scarfalot

[MonkeyDLegend]

On 8/6/2018 at 11:43 PM, Alex said:

This suggestion is to remove the (10 day) timer to build a national project.

I'm of the opinion at this point that it doesn't really add anything useful to the game. All it effectively does is slow down the growth of smaller nations, which isn't something that I think is necessary at this point.

But, I'd like to gauge the community's thoughts. Feel free to react to this post (upvote/downvote) as an indicator of your feelings, and reply with your comments.

Thanks!

Remove the timer for the first 10 cities, that way you can build 8-9 cities and 1-2 projects without waiting those 10-20 days.
It's fustrating, we have no option on cost reduction. either you build 10 cities or 5 cities and a project and have to wait 20 days.

When i talk about the cost reduction i'm mostly thinking of CCE in a very early stage of the nations lifespan.

Maybe just make sure they can't hotswap projects, like, if you build a project you need to have it for atleast 120 turns.

Edited August 24, 2018 by MonkeyDLegend
CCE

[Guest Epi]

761

Edited February 16, 2021 by Epi