Game Development Discussion: Perks

[Village]

Hiya!

Back again with new content the third, perks! 🙂

AI TLDR

Perks are researchable items in a game that provide benefits and are divided into two separate research trees: Economic and Military. Each perk is placed into a Tier, ranging from 1 to 6, with more powerful and expensive perks as the tier increases. Each player starts with zero Research Slots, but unlocks their first for free once they reach City 5. The time it takes to research a perk depends on its tier, and there are restrictions on how many perks can be researched within each tier. The deployment of perks will happen over the next few months, with an initial system and set of perks released first, followed by weekly releases of new perks.

The System

• Perks are essentially researchable items that provide, well, a perk.
• They are divided into two separate research trees: Economic and Military.
• Each individual perk is also placed into a Tier, ranging from 1 to 6, which perks getting more powerful and expensive as the tier increases.

Research Slots

Each player starts with zero Research Slots, but unlocks their first for free once they reach City 5. You cannot purchase a later slot without owning all the slots below it.

• First slot: free at City 5, or $500,000
• Second Slot: $5,000,000
• Third Slot: $50,000,000
• Fourth Slot: $500,000,000

Tiers

Each tier of perk comes with some restrictions on how many perks can be researched within that tier as well as the time it takes to research the perk. A perk may also have other requirements or dependencies that will prevent it from being researched, these will be detailed on the individual perk level but will typically be something along the lines of minimum city count or unit kills, specific lower tier perks, exclusivity with another perk in the same tier, a resource payment upfront, or a resource payment over the time the perk is being researched.

The approximate percentages refer to the percentage of perks within available trees. Percentages will also be floored (with a minimum of 1) when calculating in-game to determine the max number of perks

• Tier 1: 5 days (60 turns) per perk, no limit on researched.
• Tier 2: 10 days (120 turns) per perk, ~75% of all Tier 2 perks can be researched.
• Tier 3: 15 days (180 turns) per perk, ~50% of Tier 3 perks can be researched.
• Tier 4: 30 days (360 turns) per perk, perks are now limited to only one tree for all subsequent tiers, ~50% of perks can be researched.
• Tier 5: 60 days (720 turns) per perk, 3 perks can be researched.
• Tier 6: 120 days (1440 turns) per perk, 1 perk can be researched.

Researching a Perk

• One perk can be researched per Research Slot. In order to start researching a perk, you just meet all the other requirements for the perk, have a free Research Slot, and be within the tier requirements for the maximum number of perks that can be researched in a tier.
• Once researched, perks are immediately active. To change perks, one perk must be deactivated (with all progress reset) and the new perk must be researched.
• A Research Slot can change what perk is being researched at any time, however all progress towards the current perk will be reset.
• Once a perk has been completely researched once, any times it needs to be researched again it will be researched at double speed.

Researching with Credits

A single credit can be redeemed to progress one Research Slot by 5 days up to a maximum of 30 days per perk. Tier 6 perks are not eligible for progress through Credits.

Initial Perks List

• Below is a spreadsheet with the current list of planned perks. Please be aware that if community concerns are brought up or during development something is found to be incredibly unbalanced or infeasible then things may change before their final release.
• As well, as things are implemented, more perks might get added to flesh things out.
• EDIT: I'll clarify this here as well, there will be some regular attack/troop-based perks, these are just harder to balance and work with so didn't make it into this initial post or perk drop

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jB_cZtpr91008xz3TpsQFaIqEvKKthowLQE_ucNynAU/edit?usp=sharing

Deployment

• Due to the fact that perks will touch nearly every aspect of the game, and there’s also a lot of them, the deployment of perks will happen over the next few months. In the next short while, the initial system will be released that will come with an initial set of perks, then roughly every week thereafter a new batch of perks will be released. My plan is to theme these weekly releases and use the opportunity to release some quality of life changes and UI refreshes in that same theme as well (for example, one week might be military rebuys and that’ll come with all the military purchase perks as well as a redesigned military buy page).
• As well, to enable experimentation as new perks come out, the research speed for switching to an already researched perk will be increased by an additional factor of 2 for the duration of the deployment (for a total of a 4x speed boost to already researched perks).

Let us know below what you guys think! 🙂

[AlexiosKomnenos]

I LOVE TALL WINDMILLS 

[iAlrea]

These tier 6 perks seem a tad too OP. 15% extra commerce is massive and industralization tier 6 perk will flood the market with cheap manu. might need a rethink on that one

[im317]

oh great, i have dreaded this since it was first announced. it was delayed for a long time but i see it is inevitable. i hate resources err perks.

[Dusty]

Changes to like 7 year old mechanics is nice, looking forward to it

[Ketya]

Cool idea to add to the game! Thanks for putting those together.

[Deraj]

…is there a decline option? Or no.

I thought we’d let 🤬dns🤬 keep the convoluted nation sim title…but no.

Edited August 24, 2023 by Deraj

[Lord Tyrion]

Would like to see bigger enhancement to missile and nuke defense. Plenty of perks for offense, very few for defense.

[-Nero-]

Industrial specialization and commercial enterprise seem too strong for what little drawbacks/unlock requirements they have. As for the military side seems like a heavy focus on missiles and nukes which makes choosing to invest in that tree far less rewarding for raiding or actual warfare. 

[Emperor Metalicraft]

Just now, Lord Tyrion said:

Would like to see bigger enhancement to missile and nuke defense. Plenty of perks for offense, very few for defense.

i feel like the military perks are too much focused on missiles and nukes in general, thus boosting them a lot more than other military stuff

i think it would be a better idea to do more military perks focused on normal attacks/troops, since otherwise too much would be blocked for players that don't have neither nukes nor missiles, or useless for players that don't really use them in general

[Village]

As a note to a number of comments, there will be more normal attack/troop based perks, they're just harder to balance and sort out so haven't made it far enough along in the process to be included in this initial post.

[Danzek]

Nukes are able to target military units (destroy 10% of the targeted units)
> Probably needs to be less than daily rebuy, cause OP

> Increases the effectiveness of police stations by +0.25%, all units receive a 0.67% army value bonus from each (average per city) police station 
Seems unnecessary to have perks that directly buff military (this is essentialy a straight ~3.35% buff to military). These kind of buffs add up to be quite significant when you keep in mind that you will have a large % of the 100 perks. 

> Each improvement requires only 45 infrastructure instead of 50
Will result in more resource production. Monetary penalty does not affect rss

> Nations can build up to 10 of the selected manufacturing improvement, the production bonus goes up to 100% with 10 improvements (last 5 increase the bonus by 10% instead of by 12.5%) 
Resource inflation.

> Missiles cannot be blocked by ID
Should be reduced but not gone completely

> Commerce cap increased by 15%
is somewhat significant

> The limit of every type of non-military improvement is increased by 1 in your capital city
> Your capital city can construct an additional improvement 
Seems duplicate. 

>  Wind power plants provide power for up to 1000 infrastructure
seems op now. 

> You get 10 votes for color bloc names instead of 1
Pointless when its in competition with other perks. All the cosmetic ones need to be teir one (where there isnt a perk limit)
(e.g. the baseball ones too)

> Doubles your contribution to your color block
> Your nation's impact on your color bloc is halved
Seems redundant

> perks getting more powerful and expensive as the tier increases
Forces you to create increasingly powerful perks, and forces new perks to be disruptive because you can't append them to the tech tree, and have to insert them to tiers players have already researched. 
Also means players will be "overwhelmed" when you are forced to put all the insignificant or cosmetic perks on tier 1

> Nations can construct an additional nuke each day for every 100 nuclear power plants they have
Reworking nuke production imo should be a core mechanic, not locked behind an OP perk

> Gather intelligence also reveals a nation's selected perks.
Given how big some of the buffs are, perks being private will make decision making difficult for things like war

>  Wind turbines within a city decrease the effectiveness of enemy airstrikes on non-aircraft units/infrastructure by 1% each (up to 20%)
op unit kills

> All the commerce improvements buffs

Mean you need less commerce buildings to cap out, and will thus have to fill up with more resource buildings. Thus inflating resources. 

probs a bunch of other concerns

general thoughts
A lot of perks are overpowered
Will create inbalance between players, esp when some people can unlock faster (credits / research slots)
Research unlock speed should be consistent if you dont want inbalance.
Several perks that will affect the market, which is arguably already very inflated
Perks aren't repeatable, the content will exhaust in a year (or much sooner with credits or extra research slots)
Due to the variety, this will create confusion for game mechanics if its not communicated clearly to other nations
 - Which is probably difficult enough if perks weren't private. 

Edited August 24, 2023 by Borg

[whiskerz]

Not much help for spies or defense of nukes and missiles. I can take 3 spy attacks but can only perform 2 spy attacks. I would like spies that don't commit mass suicide every time a war starts 

[Sketchy]

Genuine suggestion @Village. Can you not lay out the entire list of perks, one tier at a time, and have us go through and discuss?

Decide a number, say 10 perks per tier, and then go through the process of finding the least broken/controversial for each tier.

This whole system is incredibly large and it's not feasible for most people to go through 50 perks at once and determine the impact they'll have on the game collectively.

As I understand it, this isn't the full list either. Only having a partial list, we can't determine what possible perks you can even have at each tier.

The general structure of the system seems fine, but many of the perks seem broken, or unbalanced, and in some cases useless.

I don't see how you'll ever balance this system rolling it out this way.

[KiWilliam]

Could we have tracking for how many people choose which perks, and then have a regular discussion about balance if we see 80% of the players using one or two perks and ignoring the rest. A system for changing your perk if your chosen perk is nerfed or another is buffed, could we discuss a policy or attitude to take so in the future we don't have belly aching because a perk was changed and people "Just invested" in level x. We need one policy for everyone that's known ahead of time, else it will be an endless headache.

EDIT: I want to note I like that the perks you have already researched are "remembered" and you get the double speed bonus. More changes like that are good imo.

Edited August 24, 2023 by KiWilliam

[im317]

wait is this yet another change where i will miss being eligible for things because i did all my serious fighting from before you guys bothered to keep stats?

[Village]

5 minutes ago, Sketchy said:

Genuine suggestion @Village. Can you not lay out the entire list of perks, one tier at a time, and have us go through and discuss?

Likely what I'm going to do is lay out the upcoming perks one batch at a time for final balancing feedback after the team's already done their feedback side at the start of the week before they go live, I don't have a final form for how I'm going to plot out that deployment yet.

Just now, KiWilliam said:

Could we have tracking for how many people choose which perks, and then have a regular discussion about balance if we see 80% of the players using one or two perks and ignoring the rest. A system for changing your perk if your chosen perk is nerfed or another is buffed, could we discuss a policy or attitude to take so in the future we don't have belly aching because a perk was changed and people "Just invested" in level x. We need one policy for everyone that's known ahead of time, else it will be an endless headache.

My current thought is if a perk you choose gets nerfed then folks will get some research credit for that, but given that none of it's even in the game yet I don't know what the final state for any changes once things are implemented will look like, there will likely be compensation of some kind for any changes though.

Just now, im317 said:

wait is this yet another change where i will miss being eligible for things because i did all my serious fighting from before you guys bothered to keep stats?

If you did before Alex did whatever stat stuff he did years ago, then yes you wouldn't qualify for any of the ones that require stats, but there's nothing I can do about that sorry.

[The Titan]

1 hour ago, Lord Tyrion said:

Would like to see bigger enhancement to missile and nuke defense. Plenty of perks for offense, very few for defense.

I agree with this one

Could make perks a good way to better set up a real defense ig

56 minutes ago, Borg said:

Doubles your contribution to your color block
> Your nation's impact on your color bloc is halved
Seems redundant

I think the point here is switching between them, so like a small nation with a low income on green for example, would want their impact halved, but all of Grumpy might want their contribution doubled, etc.

Could be used both to help tank a bloc if that's your goal, or boost a bloc if that's your goal.
Though I feel, while we're on the topic of updates, it might be worth raising the cap on max color bloc bonus? Especially considering that more than one color is at the limit now.

[Kosta]

@VillageThese ideas that you have been bringing out are awesome and well thought out. I admire that you are working hard with these and honestly your ideas are great.

However I wish to mention that Politics and War does not lack good ideas and suggestions made by the community, it lacks legit implementation. Please implement some of these ideas into the game, the lack of content added to this game over the past 5 years is deafening. 

[Village]

55 minutes ago, Kosta said:

However I wish to mention that Politics and War does not lack good ideas and suggestions made by the community, it lacks legit implementation. Please implement some of these ideas into the game, the lack of content added to this game over the past 5 years is deafening. 

That's why I've been pushing the team to get ideas out on the forums, so I can implement them.

[Kosta]

2 minutes ago, Village said:

That's why I've been pushing the team to get ideas out on the forums, so I can implement them.

I appreciate it. But I won't hold my breath. 

[Adam II]

The idea is cool and I like it, but some of these perks are just not very good. 

1. Nations can construct an additional nuke each day for every 100 nuclear power plants they have

Although this would be OP, barely anyone has 100 npps. That's 2 npps in 50 cities.

 

2. Commerce cap increased by 15% 

 

Basically makes telecommunications satellite (a 300m and 40k rss project) worthless, unless you have some of the other projects that let you build more commerce buildings which is a slot. 

 

3. Nations can build up to 10 of the selected manufacturing improvement, the production bonus goes up to 100% with 10 improvements (last 5 increase the bonus by 10% instead of by 12.5%)

Definitely OP and will cause mass inflation

 

 

Some of these are also in the wrong tiers as they're way too OP

Edited August 24, 2023 by Adam II

[Dwight k Schrute]

8 hours ago, Lord Tyrion said:

Would like to see bigger enhancement to missile and nuke defense. Plenty of perks for offense, very few for defense.

Bro's obsessed with these loser weapons 🤣 We don't need more defence for them, we need even more offense. Have a day off @Lord Tyrion

Edited August 24, 2023 by Dwight k Schrute

[Paralaxus]

This is a great idea, I'm looking forward to the diversity between economic and military strategy. It will be interesting to see how nations pursue different perks, how that affects alliance strategies, and beyond. 

Also to the people complaining about nukes and missiles, keep in mind that both of those units are essentially useless when fighting a war to win. There isn't much more strategy to it. By making them selectively more destructive we are opening a new avenue of warfare, one that may deserve withholding MAPs for, rather than merely conducting an airstrike, etc. It may allow for a nation to recover in the same war, ultimately making it a skill/perk issue. This can help alleviate the "down-declare" gang-bangs during global wars.

Tl;dr: I hoard nukes and missiles for fun.

[Diocletian]

2 hours ago, Paralaxus said:

This is a great idea, I'm looking forward to the diversity between economic and military strategy. It will be interesting to see how nations pursue different perks, how that affects alliance strategies, and beyond. 

Also to the people complaining about nukes and missiles, keep in mind that both of those units are essentially useless when fighting a war to win. There isn't much more strategy to it. By making them selectively more destructive we are opening a new avenue of warfare, one that may deserve withholding MAPs for, rather than merely conducting an airstrike, etc. It may allow for a nation to recover in the same war, ultimately making it a skill/perk issue. This can help alleviate the "down-declare" gang-bangs during global wars.

Tl;dr: I hoard nukes and missiles for fun.

Tl;dr: Everyone direct sustained spy ops at this weirdo