Design Team Discussion, April 2022

[Prefontaine]

I've got some things going on IRL that will be taking my attention for a couple weeks, but I'll be checking in primarily on this thread during that period. Thus, my responses to posts will less frequent and timely than previous update threads.

With the recent update concluding and any final bugs hopefully being squashed. If you find any bugs that still remain, please create a ticket in the game discord under #support. I wanted to move forward to the next major update. I don't have a timeline yet, as that seems to be the most popular question.

To help assist feedback on this, I'm going to break this OP into sections to avoid someone disliking one part of one thing and downvoting the whole post. More targeted feedback is more helpful!

[Prefontaine]

Beige Redesign:

There will be a test server tournament coming for the new beige system. The changes will focus on these three mechanics:

1. All wars end in beige. If the war would expire, the nation with the most resistance win. If the resistance is tied, the win goes to the defending nation.
2. If no attacks happen by either party in 20 turns, the war ends.
3. Beige timers do not begin reducing until all defensive wars have ended.

Once the tournament is completed to ensure the system is functional and achieving the desired results.

[Prefontaine]

Tutorial Update

This is a long time coming, and still in its infancy. If you have interest in joining the tutorial team please let me know with either a DM on discord or here. The change should be self explanatory, to make a better tutorial but the focus is this:

-Design a system that guides the player from city 1-10
-Advise on ideal infra levels, land levels, resources to produce (or better yet ones to not), avoiding certain commerce, power plants, etc...
-A simulated NPC nation to declare a test war on to explain the war system.
-Suggest joining alliances based player desire (growth, raiding, war, learning, etc...)
-These may be tags alliances can utilize to attract new players they want. Arrgh may want raiders. eS may want growth, etc...

Just an overview.
 

[Prefontaine]

New Projects
 

-New level of City Cost Reduction Project, requirement will be C21 and the idea will be a 4-5 city ROI.
-Project that will refund some resources from units lost in war.

-Third TBD

[Prefontaine]

Event Nations

I've put my nation in VM for now as I plan on utilizing it for an Event sort of nation. The plan will be to invite several people to gain access to these NPC nations that will have unlimited defensive slots, and certain buffs to create community events from time to time of different scopes and scales. These nations will have short term passwords for use to the individual player, will not be able to trade, bank, or produce resources they can't share their stuff with others. We will rotate players and select them through the game forums and official discord. Prizes will be given from these events to both the players and the event nations. 

[Prefontaine]

Quality of Life

• When a nation deletes during a war, part of that nations resources goes to those fighting it. 
• Make Leader name and Nation name consistent. You can have different names but all interaction (like bank trades) will go through use names. 
• Alliance (and shared market) trades get merged into the global trade screen and include a special indicator or color.
• Nations in alliances that have a treaty to your alliance will appear with an indicator or color on the market to show "ally" trades
• For the bulk import feature, have the default be to all cities but give the option to select which cities to import to. Cities may have differing infra levels/improvement slots, especially during war, or people may want different builds for different cities - but still across multiple cities - so allowing them to choose which cities the import applies to would make things easier.
• Allow for the "$" and commas to be ignored when inputting values and/or allow for k,m,b to be used to send cash/resources (i.e. 1m instead of 1000000 to send 1 million food).
• Allow alliances to embargo other alliances (but give members the option to opt out of them).

 

Possible more TBD

Edited April 4, 2022 by Prefontaine

[Majima Goro]

I'll be honest, I was disappointed with the new Dark Theme given how Alex paid for a dark theme. If possible, I would want a dark mode that looks like this: 

I would post more pics in the official discord server 

[Sweeeeet Ronny D]

18 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

Allow for the "$" and commas to be ignored when inputting values and/or allow for k,m,b to be used to send cash/resources (i.e. 1m instead of 1000000 to send 1 million food).

Gold star to this improvement. Nice job.

[Artifex]

33 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

Quality of Life

• When a nation deletes during a war, part of that nations resources goes to those fighting it. 
• Make Leader name and Nation name consistent. You can have different names but all interaction (like bank trades) will go through use names. 
• Alliance (and shared market) trades get merged into the global trade screen and include a special indicator or color.
• Nations in alliances that have a treaty to your alliance will appear with an indicator or color on the market to show "ally" trades
• For the bulk import feature, have the default be to all cities but give the option to select which cities to import to. Cities may have differing infra levels/improvement slots, especially during war, or people may want different builds for different cities - but still across multiple cities - so allowing them to choose which cities the import applies to would make things easier.
• Allow for the "$" and commas to be ignored when inputting values and/or allow for k,m,b to be used to send cash/resources (i.e. 1m instead of 1000000 to send 1 million food).
• Allow alliances to embargo other alliances (but give members the option to opt out of them).

These are all great; therefore, will never be implemented

[Kosta]

6 hours ago, Malleator said:

These are all great; therefore, will never be implemented

Could not have said it better. It's all good and well to have all these good ideas, but you actually have to implement them. There is a list of great suggestions and ideas in the other subforum that have not been implemented. 

Edited April 4, 2022 by Kosta
Grammer

[Dullard]

I think 3rd tier UP should be raised in city requirement, perhaps 26? Also, any idea of costs/benefits?

[Ketya]

Any interest within the development team to introduce some rare and global RNG events (global drought that halves food production for three months, etc.)? Just curious… just a little bit of surprise element

[Johnson Boris]

All those changes certainly look interesting.

13 hours ago, Prefontaine said:

-Advise on ideal infra levels, land levels, resources to produce (or better yet ones to not), avoiding certain commerce, power plants, etc...

I am a little bit unsure about advising new players on infra levels, I would probably prefer it if you left that to the alliances to decide or just gave very broad suggestions.

 

The reason being that the best infra level depends on many of the alliance's decisions. One of them being the city count at which the alliance is going to (and should) recommend them to stay at to raid. Other factors such as mmr would also influence the infra level at which newbies should stay.

[LachlanPnW]

5 hours ago, Johnson Boris said:

All those changes certainly look interesting.

I am a little bit unsure about advising new players on infra levels, I would probably prefer it if you left that to the alliances to decide or just gave very broad suggestions.

 

The reason being that the best infra level depends on many of the alliance's decisions. One of them being the city count at which the alliance is going to (and should) recommend them to stay at to raid. Other factors such as mmr would also influence the infra level at which newbies should stay.

I think infra should be in the tutorial. Having suggested infrastructure levels may help, as the alliances and the tutorial should be somewhat aiming for the same thing. As said, you get to choose what style of alliance you what, which should cater for the infra.

Edited April 5, 2022 by LachlanPnW
Clarification

[Norse]

6 hours ago, Johnson Boris said:

I am a little bit unsure about advising new players on infra levels, I would probably prefer it if you left that to the alliances to decide or just gave very broad suggestions.

or just maybe make a tutorial for the different types of ways you can grow, like having a tutorial for pirates, one for pixelhuggers, and one for a mix 😛

[Raphael]

On 4/4/2022 at 11:26 AM, Prefontaine said:

Tutorial Update

This is a long time coming, and still in its infancy. If you have interest in joining the tutorial team please let me know with either a DM on discord or here. The change should be self explanatory, to make a better tutorial but the focus is this:

-Design a system that guides the player from city 1-10
-Advise on ideal infra levels, land levels, resources to produce (or better yet ones to not), avoiding certain commerce, power plants, etc...
-A simulated NPC nation to declare a test war on to explain the war system.
-Suggest joining alliances based player desire (growth, raiding, war, learning, etc...)
-These may be tags alliances can utilize to attract new players they want. Arrgh may want raiders. eS may want growth, etc...

Just an overview.
 

At this point in the game I personally think we should tack on all new nations starting with 10 cities.

[BelgiumFury]

3 hours ago, roberts said:

At this point in the game I personally think we should tack on all new nations starting with 10 cities.

This might be a better idea; or at least more than one. If 10 is too radical 5 might be it. 

 

[Chad]

10 minutes ago, BelgiumFury said:

This might be a better idea; or at least more than one. If 10 is too radical 5 might be it. 

 

I would like the c5 better since that is prime raiding tier although if we do c10 the meme of the bad c10 will become even more real.

[Prefontaine]

While it’s not confirmed yet, I’m going to be lobbying for some tutorial rewards to be a city. 

8 hours ago, Norse said:

or just maybe make a tutorial for the different types of ways you can grow, like having a tutorial for pirates, one for pixelhuggers, and one for a mix 😛

The tutorial will not force anyone to play a certain way, simply give this suggestions of standard ways of playing what what they look like. Additionally, hopefully help nations pair with like minded alliances for play style. 

[Sphinx]

On 4/5/2022 at 1:26 AM, Prefontaine said:

snip

Most players who join an alliance tend to already have pretty in-depth academies, mentoring systems, etc to guide them through the mechanics of the game. I do feel that improvements to the in game tutorial would be good, though I'm sceptical of the impartiality of suggesting alliances based on tags or suggesting Infra builds etc by the game itself. Since what could be considered a responsible Infra level can vary between alliances. The practice NPC nation seems like a good idea though.

On 4/5/2022 at 1:27 AM, Prefontaine said:

snip

Would the 3rd tier of UP/AUP have a scaling cost reduction/project cost as well? Not really sure I like the refunding resources during war project. There's already a glut of resources in the game... reducing war as the one major way to cull resource totals seems like a mistake and will only increase the effects of resources flooding the market. 

On 4/5/2022 at 1:40 AM, Prefontaine said:

snip

This 100%. Happened to me hundreds of times when a pesky comma has messed up a bank transaction. Bonus points for the alliance trade colouring, deleted nation resource distribution to attackers and bulk import improvements all sorely needed.

Wouldn't giving the option for members to opt out of embargoes just lessen the impact of the feature?

Edited April 6, 2022 by Sphinx

[BelgiumFury]

7 hours ago, Sphinx said:

Wouldn't giving the option for members to opt out of embargoes just lessen the impact of the feature?

It would and I think that's the whole point; we want to give normal people more of a say in what they do and give them some autonomy.
That being said; if an alliance really wants to be an absolute wussy alliance that puts embargoes on its own members, you can enforce it like you enforce nation color or any other metric.

[Galerion]

On 4/4/2022 at 4:40 PM, Prefontaine said:

Allow for the "$" and commas to be ignored when inputting values and/or allow for k,m,b to be used to send cash/resources (i.e. 1m instead of 1000000 to send 1 million food).

This also needs applying to in game calculators as commas currently mess them up.

Edited April 7, 2022 by Galerion

[Johnson Boris]

On 4/5/2022 at 9:38 PM, Prefontaine said:

While it’s not confirmed yet, I’m going to be lobbying for some tutorial rewards to be a city.

I think that would be a shame and I'll give a few reasons:

 

1. The most addictive city count is the super low city count. Allowing player to grow quickly early helps the game's overall engagement and gets them addicted.

 

2. It also takes no time to reach c5 in comparison to the crazy lengths of the game and having this growth period helps somewhat mitigate the crazy slope in the city growth curve.

 

3. TKR tiers at c3 to raid and with the new city score changes c2 may be even better to stay at to raid. Cities=bad for mones.

 

4. I think it would be a design flaw to start giving cities or projects are rewards, it is better to follow an uniform dynamic by which the player gets resources and then has to decide what to use them for, trying to figure out what is most efficient. I think it would be a much better mechanic to give them almost the exact amount it takes to buy c3 instead of just giving them the city so as to carry on with the process described above.

[Mahakall]

I'm sure I will be c70 when you launch 3 up😉

Edited April 10, 2022 by Mahakall

[Dullard]

Any eta on any of this?