Game Development Discussion: Superiorities Feedback

[Zei-Sakura Alsainn]

6 hours ago, Unlimited said:

I dont really understand this point? Can you enlighten me?
We arent adding any RNG at all - and we are just changing the chances - so in half of cases it'll benefit you and in half of cases it wont - so what's the issue?

That's...

That's literally what RNG is. You're just expanding it to add even more unpredictability, particularly to updeclares, which is stupid as already pointed out.

 

If you don't even understand how that's RNG I think maybe the team needs to be reshuffled, honestly.

[Ketya]

The whole superiority change seems like a complicated solution. Not sure if it is even a problem (bigger nations having larger military power). 

You guys (development team) seem to have lots of good energy. Would have been great to apply that to net new additions to the game versus all these edits that do not relate to 90%+ of players.

[MBaku]

@Village Now that we’ve seen large scale wars on the test server, I think we can all agree that a beige cap hinders strategic gameplay. 
 

@Roberts I agree that fortify should be reworked. It’s horribly useless and the description doesn’t even accurately describe what it does because from what I understand, it only works on ground attacks anyway. 
 

if the goal is to prolong the initial phase of the war, then an effective fortify would go a long way to achieve that. It would also add another tactical level to war mechanics game play. IMO Fortify should be most effective before the war is decided. I think the big problem with it is that 3 MAPs is a hell of a lot to use on crappy defense when the opportunity cost is losing the ability to use those maps offensively. You want hunker down and wait for counters, but you also want maps to use when those counters arrive. 

[MBaku]

5 hours ago, Roberts said:

The main problems with whales are their disproportionate economic advantage and the domino-effect they cause in large wars. Economics Prefontaine started to address with the food consumption changes and power plant upkeeps. The domino effect actually used to be reversed back in the earlygame of PnW, where large nations would get knocked down into lower tiers when they lost and be able to make a second-round comeback. This was mainly nerfed into the ground with score changes though.

• Constructive feedback: look into infra score changes, more upkeep adjustments, maybe even nerf the nuclear power plants (reduce the amount of infra each one powers), also look into reverting/reworking city score back to 50 or keep it at 75 (I think raising it back to 100 is proposed rn), buffing military score, and completely zeroing project score imo.

The problem folks are trying to address now is max mil nations with no infra doing 20 city downdecs. Basically, they wanna nerf @Dryad. An increased city score relative to military is one way. But as you said, it decreases the ability for ppl to make a comeback.
 

I agree that the big unaddressed variable is infra. But we need a way to punish people for building outrageous amounts of infra without giving an incredible advantage to people that have no infra. 

there’s a few options to address infra disparity and downdecs:

1.) decrease infra score. But this will change the meta of the economy and cause inflation imo as there is less danger of building high. 
 

2.) increase population requirements for military. It’s hard to go max ships on low infra. If it gets harder to get max mil across the board on low infra, we’ll see it less.

3.) find an floor for infra score. What if infra below 1500 in a city just doesn’t go toward score at all? Then there is no military advantage to shaving infra past a certain amount. This could also change the Econ meta but you could increase the value of infra that does get counted to compensate for the score drop that would occur by no longer counting infra below 1500. 

if we address infra, then we can keep military score high relative to city score because the nations can no longer amplify that disparity by running low infra. 

[Village]

9 minutes ago, MBaku said:

@Village Now that we’ve seen large scale wars on the test server, I think we can all agree that a beige cap hinders strategic gameplay. 

We’re gonna make a post about beige stuff in a day or two, trying to take it one thing at a time so things don’t get lost.

 

Also sorry for not replying to everything here, I’m not home today so haven’t been on my computer to do replies (doing this from my phone). I’m reading everything and will hopefully be able to post something later tonight. 🙂

[Danzek]

When up declaring you need superiorities to get enemy ground/air under control. 
And you rely on gaining one superiority to protect you from the other type (e.g. Air superiority helps you gain GC and protects you from enemy tanks)

Delaying or nerfing only ground superiority would be more balanced I suppose because when you blitz, you could focus on solely air. 
Delaying both makes updeclares more difficult. 

It's unrewarding to have setbacks, especially given how short a time you have in a war (~2 days).
If partial superiorities provided *some* benefit that could mitigate delayed superiorities being "not fun".

Option #2 and #3 are counterproductive for similar reasons. 
#1 has the intended effect, and is seems easy to implement.

Generally, I am in favor of rewarding action, and not shifting balance to the inaction of a defending party.
Delayed superiorities seem detrimental to that even if they were macgyvered to be serviceable balance wise. 

I am sympathetic to making wars more fair between different city counts. The meta shift from ground control killing planes has been especially harsh on the viability of updeclares.

I hope game mechanic changes going forward no longer waste dev time implementing both unpopular and poorly thought-out mechanics. 
It would be useful to preface design posts with the intended goal of such a change, so we are aware what the considerations were. 

Edited July 2, 2023 by Borg

[Keegoz]

Before I see more concern about time management of the design team, we're not all dedicated to war changes.

I personally have had very little involvement and am instead working on a new feature. We have quite a few people now, just because one thing is posted/suggested does not mean that's all the design team has focused on.

[KindaEpicMoah]

Quick preface:

I’d just like to say this first so the people who only care about a score rework can skip the rest of this comment: yes, we will look at a potential score rework soon. I know it’s like 3 years overdue at this point since the old 2020 score update completely torpedoed most score compression tactics and mostly just made it easier for whales to dominate in their tier uncontested (which is pretty ironic considering the intent of the changes was to reduce the severity of down declares), but it is something that is on the design team’s radar, and it has been discussed many times before. However, before we did so, we wanted first to rework the war mechanics to address the disparity between large and small players so we didn’t have to go back and rebalance score should the mechanics change something about how cities/units/projects/infra should be weighted. 

I’d also like to add that while score does impact the ability for whales to downdeclare, it does not address the problem of the current updeclare meta which is much weaker today compared to the pre-2020 war system, which is in large part due to tanks being given additional utility. While tanks were extremely useless in the pre-2020 war system, and each unit should have some importance in deciding the military outcome of a war, making tanks a necessary part of warfare gave additional weight to each city (since before, planes were the only military unit that mattered), which (either intentionally or unintentionally) made whales much much stronger. The same would happen if ships were given a buff which made them necessary for winning wars militarily, which is why buffing ships is a very tricky issue. 

This is why we believe it is necessary to introduce a mechanic to address this disparity. 

Also, I had a really long response to everyone’s feedback written up, then I made a quote to a comment on a new page which deleted everything I had, so now I only have enough energy for a short response. 

Sorry to whoever feels like they weren’t sufficiently responded to; you probably were in the old response. 

 

Regarding idea one:

I do think there are legitimate concerns about the new army value formula potentially increasing the size of the luck-based element of war, but I also think that some concerns are either misplaced or overblown. Luck already plays a pretty significant role in warfare whether we like it or not. Battles are quite literally decided by random dice rolls. You can UF against someone with the same amount of military as you if you’re unlucky, and you can also IT against that same person if you’re lucky. None of that changes under either of the value formulas because it is a product of the 40 to 100% random army value modifier you get on each diceroll. The new formula may slightly exacerbate that issue by introducing uncertainty at the fringe military ratios but for the majority of military interactions, the “amount of RNG” will remain fairly consistent. Additionally, it is simultaneously easier to break superiorities and harder to obtain superiorities under the new system, so if someone does get a lucky roll on you, you have a larger window of time to break their superiority.

Skill is still important under the new system, and I’d argue that it plays an even more important role since coordination with your allies matters more due to the buffs to suicide attacks. While the buff isn’t a huge one (think around a 40% attacker kills buff for a dogfight airstrike on someone with 2.5x your planes), it does have more of an impact on dragging people who are overextended and gives more of a role to people who could previously do very little after they had been zeroed. 

And to those worried about updeclares being buffed too much, for that one extreme example of a c33 dogfighting a c40, the chance for an IT goes from 2.6% to a whopping 4.4%, and the number of planes the attacker kills would increase by around 2.5%. It’s definitely not something that will immediately negate a large military's advantage. 

TL;DR - it's not that huge of a buff/nerf, and if you're on the RNG hater bandwagon, then direct your hate towards the random value modifier instead. 

 

Regarding replacement two:

I think that replacement two would address many of the complaints from replacement one regarding superiorities being too important for something dependent on change, and it would prolong the deciding portion of a war. I’m not against nerfing superiorities, but I think the trickiest part is trying to avoid nerfing either GC or AS too much to the point where the other one becomes too strong. This is especially true if we were to remove superiorities outright since aircraft would benefit enormously from ground being no longer able to kill planes. 
 

[Village]

Apologies for the long delay, I've been super busy with family the whole weekend and don't have much time right now so I'm going to keep this brief.

 

First off, thank you guys so so much for your feedback, it's been super amazing to read and I'm sorry I can't respond to everyone individually right now, I promise I'll do my best to do so in the future.

 

On a different note, we're going to move forward with the first idea (army value modifier) on the test server for the rest of the tournament as it a very large majority of yes votes, the nerfed superiorities will be put on the backburner as, with modifications, a potential idea should we need something else in the future, and the partial superiorities thing will be dropped entirely for the foreseeable future.

 

On yet another different note, I'd like to briefly touch on a few comments I saw about the design team doing lots of wars tweaks. At the moment, our attention is focused on fixing the upcoming war changes since we're in the middle of a tournament about them and they're due to be deployed to the live server in the very near future. However, new content is not forgotten and we're going to be working on finalizing perks and coming up with new pieces of content over the next few weeks. My goal is to be implementing new content at a rate where we can have a new update every month, and I'm very confident the design team, with the help of the community, will be able to dream up and refine more than enough ideas to make that a reality.

 

Have a great night everyone!

[Village]

As another update, this should be on the test server now

[Raphael]

On 7/2/2023 at 11:18 PM, Village said:

On yet another different note, I'd like to briefly touch on a few comments I saw about the design team doing lots of wars tweaks. At the moment, our attention is focused on fixing the upcoming war changes since we're in the middle of a tournament about them and they're due to be deployed to the live server in the very near future. However, new content is not forgotten and we're going to be working on finalizing perks and coming up with new pieces of content over the next few weeks. My goal is to be implementing new content at a rate where we can have a new update every month, and I'm very confident the design team, with the help of the community, will be able to dream up and refine more than enough ideas to make that a reality.

I think I speak for a lot of "silent majority" people here that say the minority complaining about time-taken on a literal new war meta is not a bad thing at all.

I hope you guys are single-mindedly focused on getting this right and making sure it's perfect, as this will impact the entire game from raiders to farmers / minnows to whales.

 

I'm perfectly fine with you guys spending all your time on this and not at all worried about the next 3 random projects that a few people want to see pumped out.

[Ketya]

The idea to “get this right” is equivalent to “winning PnW.” The mechanics will never be right; always be biased by who is on the dev team. 

90%+ of the game won’t notice the differences; no new players will notice either.

New content eats all these tweaks for breakfast, every single day.

[KindaEpicMoah]

8 minutes ago, Ketya said:

The idea to “get this right” is equivalent to “winning PnW.” The mechanics will never be right; always be biased by who is on the dev team. 

90%+ of the game won’t notice the differences; no new players will notice either.

New content eats all these tweaks for breakfast, every single day.

And yet the people who are the most vocal about the state of the game care the most about these small tweaks, even if they are in the minority. 

You can never please everyone unfortunately, but I think it is important to balance out new content with fixing pre-existing content. 

Edited July 4, 2023 by KindaEpicMoah

[Insert Name Here]

I'm gonna reserve my judgement for after the 1st global in this new meta. I have 1 huge concern though.

This will make blitzes considerably less effective, which imo can only lead to coalitions being even more reluctant to launch offensive wars, unless they have an even bigger advantage than most tend to do when they go on the offensive.

Therefore I'm concerned this will make wars less frequent and even more lopsided than usual, so hopefully I'm wrong.

[George Clooney]

On 7/5/2023 at 7:45 AM, Insert Name Here said:

I'm gonna reserve my judgement for after the 1st global in this new meta. I have 1 huge concern though.

This will make blitzes considerably less effective, which imo can only lead to coalitions being even more reluctant to launch offensive wars, unless they have an even bigger advantage than most tend to do when they go on the offensive.

Therefore I'm concerned this will make wars less frequent and even more lopsided than usual, so hopefully I'm wrong.

If a war is won in the opening blitz, that war was probably a duck roll and lopsided from the first war dec.  I will admit I had some serious concerns about the changes.  But having fought some wars under them on Test, it does mean that you'll see more Moderate successes than you have in the past all other numbers of units being the same, but that's ok.  We all could benefit from having additional wars that are a bit more competitive.

[Anarchist Empire]

If they have no fuel/ammo, can disable 100% of their tanks and air starting with a blockade. So blockades are most powerful still if other person is an idiot. Maybe things are suppose to be easy and people make stuff hard pointless. Sure it'd be beneficial if down declares did 20% less damage to air with their ground attacks; as I naval beige or something. lol