Game Development Discussion - Econ Update Part 1 (Treasures/Colours, City Import Tools & City Cost Changes)

[Fulcrum]

6 hours ago, Keegoz said:

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

I think teal and lavender are pretty distinct, maybe magenta and tan instead of bronze and gold?

Alternatively:

Spoiler

this could be a chance for a slight change in how colors are displayed so the first letter of the color name is displayed with the color itself (e.g. R for Red). I've posted the logos used by Tokyo's subway system as reference of what I mean, though I'm happy to design something specific. This would allow for more similar colors to be added in the future without much confusion.

 

[EpimetheusTalks]

7 hours ago, Keegoz said:

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

Love the whole update. Could we make one of the new colors Crimson? I suggested that to Alex a bit ago.

[Totally Hatebi]

9 hours ago, Vein said:

I wouldn't mind a city cap, for instance the max city as of now being 65 and as the game progress we could move it up to 70 in the future depending on how many c65s we'd have in the game, however, I don't like the idea of making lower cities cheaper than what they'd usually be, same for the higher up cities being more expensive that what it should be, I understand the idea of wanting to make it more friendly to the new players joining the game, but i think thats the least of our concern atm, the biggest concern is the lack of new players itself and i don't believe that would fix that problem.

Maybe for some preparation for the future it could be 100? I always wanted to see the max cap at 100 because triple digits seemed to be the biggest achievement anyone could make in the game. When I first joined the game I always wanted to reach 100 cities (tbh I didn’t even know there was a city cap) and I though 100 would be a achievement in the game (basically how did we get here vibes) …

[naTia]

Definitely in favor of seeing the city changes implemented. Very curious how this will impact the variety of playstyles for new players.

 

Similar deal with the increased colors and treasures, including the new categories. All seem to be conducive to meta variety.

 

I agree with what others have said about the treasure spawning rules though. I don’t like the 30-day or color-matching requirement.

[Sol]

Addittional Treasures aimed at different kinds of alliances and playstyles is a very cool addittion and colour blocs likewise seem a good adittion, (although given the current bonus formula I doubt it will do anything to disincentivise piggybacking off succesful macros). The changes to treasure spawning seem very clearly aimed at lowering the skill ceiling, which given the addittion of newer and more specific/easier to acqurie treasures seems like an uneccesary devolution of play.

Edited because keegoz can't explain the city changes properly

Edited February 8 by Sol

[Themonia]

Color Bloc Changes:

Discussion of added mechanics to Color Blocs (like the councils) has been nonexistent for a while. The new treasure additions are nice in my opinion (especially the specialization), but this seems like the perfect time to focus on the previously voted councils, and it doesn't look like we're getting any of that. Overall would have liked more, but this is good as well.

City Changes:

I think you're fundamentally making a big mistake here because of your misunderstanding of a new player's mindset. It's been a while since most of the playerbase has gone through that, so it's completely understandable.

I believe a lack of city catch-up does not cause retention to go down.
At least, not as much as the number of players you're going to lose by capping the upper end while buffing the lower.

This game is not played in cities, the gameplay loop is the exact same past the raiding stage, which most players don't even do. I have yet to hear of an example of someone quitting because c60 is, realistically, not attainable for them. If quitting happens, it's either because of the time-consuming aspect of the game, or the lack of in-game content when the community stops entertaining that player enough to warrant the time spent. 

New players do not quit this game because they are @Leftbehind the rest of the playerbase, because regardless of their political irrelevance, alliances don't just leave their c5s hanging. They fight in the wars, albeit to a lower extent of quality. They still have the same content in-game. It is also widely understood that being an upper city count does not mean more enjoyment in the game. In the case of raiding, you actually lose content by going up. 

If you restrict the upper end in order to make the lower end catch up faster, you're going to lose the core playerbase at the top to fix a non-issue for the newcomers. 

[Stanko1987]

This is one of the best updates of all times, if not the best one ever. There is a massive gap between the lower tier and the upper tier, whales have for a long time been dictating the game and newer players who sign up to play politics and war, unless they are inside the top 25 alliances, they don't stand a chance at surviving and catching up to the rest of the game. By soft capping the high-end tier of cities and slowing down the high tier city growth, it gives everyone else a chance to catch up in the game. 

I would also like to buff up the Activity Center Project 



- By increasing the daily login bonus from $1,000,000 to $2.500,000 million on the first day and $5,000,000 on subsequent days in a streak C1-10
- Daily Login Bonus decreases from C11-20 to $1,500,000 on the first day and subsequent days in a streak to $3,000,000 a day
- Additional Daily Revenue of Cities from C1 to C20 $250,000 on top of the revenue generated from each city. This project will not function in nations with more than 20 cities. 

This can accelerate the process of growth from new players even quicker and allowing more player retention, players to remain in the game since they will have that additional buff on top of the buffed-up update that is soon going to be implemented into the game. I also believe this will greatly benefit players who want to play solo or remain in a nano-micro alliance outside the top 25 alliances. Especially for those who are on 5-20% tax rate. 

[Sketchy]

31 minutes ago, Themonia said:

I believe a lack of city catch-up does not cause retention to go down.
At least, not as much as the number of players you're going to lose by capping the upper end while buffing the lower.

This game is not played in cities, the gameplay loop is the exact same past the raiding stage, which most players don't even do. I have yet to hear of an example of someone quitting because c60 is, realistically, not attainable for them. If quitting happens, it's either because of the time-consuming aspect of the game, or the lack of in-game content when the community stops entertaining that player enough to warrant the time spent. 

 

There are many different reasons for drop off. The idea that people have to spend over a year in many cases just to reach the low tier (which is continuously moving up), and that the current economic structure incentivizes all the majors to send new players to raid, filtering out a portion of players who don't enjoy that type of play, is going to play a role in retention going down.

Still seems like the game will need more updates to fix the issues, but this is part 1 so I guess we'll see what else we get.

[leonissenbaum]

P&W absolutely needs catchup mechanics for new players if it wants to survive into the long-term. However, this isn't it.

The removal of UP, AUP, and MP makes these changes net neutral to negative for the new player. Ignoring domestic policies and other modifiers and just looking at city cost, the cost to go from city 1 to city 40 is currently ~20.8B, ignoring the project costs. With these changes, the price actually goes up to ~21.8B. In fact, every single city in the game becomes more expensive (using the shifted c40 values), except for these three exact ranges: C6-11, C13-16, and C18-21. This doesn't tell the full story, of course, because nations having 3 more project slots does help, and having to buy UP/AUP/MP isn't free, but this certainly won't really help new players catch up. 

You can see the quick sheet I created with these calculations here, but this isn't a lowering of cost for new players and a raising of the cost for experienced players - this is just raising the cost for everyone.

Helping people catch up to where the experienced alliances are really is a big deal for the health of the game - alliances of new players can grow to compete with older ones, and even old alliances that've fallen behind tiering might have a chance to catch up - but this solution doesn't do that. A proper solution to do this would focus on significantly reducing city cost below a specific percentage of the playerbase (for example, the top 20% as used here, though I'm not sure why that specific percentage was used), as well as reducing/removing city timers below that point (which admittedly may be unrealistic, because credits), which would allow alliances to boost up members to a base "relevant" tier, and new players making money on their own able to catch up a lot better regardless.

While this specific implementation can't work regardless because it just.. doesn't really help new players, making cities more expensive in general has a major problem: it threatens the identity of many alliances. Grumpy, for example, would be crippled a year or two into a change like this. Letting unique alliances that focus on whales like grumpy exist is interesting! It blocks the game from just being mass member blob vs mass member blob, it lets a small group of powerful players exert that influence far further than otherwise possible, and it makes the politics of the game a lot more interesting. A city cap, hard or soft, kills this kinds of gameplay, which makes the game worse. What the game needs is the ability for new players to catch up - players having more cities than other players isn't an issue, but new players being unable to affect wars is, and that's solved by making new player cities cheaper, not by capping cities.

There's also one specific point made that I think misses some context:

14 hours ago, Keegoz said:

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.

In general, there are three things that increase the income per city: Infra, land, and projects.

Projects absolutely are super whale-favored, and the current implementation of projects helps whales snowball massively - each economic project increases the income you get per city, and the more cities you have, the more those projects impact you - if a project increases your income by 50k per city, that's 2.5m total for a c50! Additionally, the more cities you have, the more projects you can get, which makes these compound. Every single project added is a whale buff, and if we want to slow down whales, a project rework would be good. However, that's not what's accounting for most of the numbers here.

Land is just free money, but takes a lot of time to do. Whales are more likely to have land - after all, they're big and normally old, so an economic decision that takes 5 years to pay off may have very well paid off and got them more cities by now. However, this changes the additional profit of a new city by quite a bit: if you're dropping 250m or 500m on land for a new city for it to pay off years later, that city is net negative in terms of land investment for a long, long time!

Infra is the primary factor for these numbers - the higher your city count, the safer people tend to feel going to high infra counts. However, this of course isn't free money - infra costs a huge amount of money, and it's temporary! Looking at the income from some lunatic who went to 5k infra without also looking at the cost of the 5k infra won't get you an accurate point of view, after all.

It's rough to run numbers right now since, well, there's a massive global going on, but generally if you compare the amount of time it takes for gigawhales to get new cities compared to c30s or c40s, the gigawhales do end up taking quite a lot longer to make cities.

 

Finally, unrelated to all of this:

14 hours ago, Keegoz said:

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)

The first thee changes here are listed, but not justified. Why? They're quite obviously to stop treasure hunts, but are treasure hunts actually bad for the game? I don't see why they are: They encourage player engagement, can cause political friction, is one of the few things you can do in this game at peace time that isn't just log in and check if you have the money to build a city, and so on. What's the reason to stop treasure hunts?

The final change is justified:

"Just for some reasoning behind this. Colours are currently dominated by the major powers, with middle powers having to more or less exist on a colour with that majors consent. Adding more colours allows middle powers or rising major powers to be able to carve out their own colour."

However, adding more colors like this seems more likely to just trivialize the entire color mechanic. To my understanding, the entire point of colors is to cause friction - if the color blocs are limited, and two alliances want one, but the color can't support two alliances, that causes friction and drama! It's no surprise that medium sized powers can't sit on a good color block on their own: that's the entire points of colors! If we add enough colors for everyone to get their own good colors, then what's the point of the mechanic when nobody has a reason to do politics over it?

 

Also, for the sake of positivity, I should also add that the new treasures seem quite cool! More variety in the mechanics there is absolutely an improvement, and in this case, it leads to more cases where political friction can take place, which is great! QOL features like the template thing are also good!

Edited February 9 by leonissenbaum

[Sketchy]

34 minutes ago, leonissenbaum said:

P&W absolutely needs catchup mechanics for new players if it wants to survive into the long-term. However, this isn't it.

The removal of UP, AUP, and MP makes these changes net neutral to negative for the new player. Ignoring domestic policies and other modifiers and just looking at city cost, the cost to go from city 1 to city 40 is currently ~20.8B, ignoring the project costs. With these changes, the price actually goes up to ~21.8B. In fact, every single city in the game becomes more expensive (using the shifted c40 values), except for these three exact ranges: C6-11, C13-16, and C18-21. This doesn't tell the full story, of course, because nations having 3 more project slots does help, and having to buy UP/AUP/MP isn't free, but this certainly won't really help new players catch up. 

Choosing 1-40 as the example range seems a bit off. 40 cities is not a new player. It's basically where the average of the highest nations are right now.

Based on current market prices for the planning projects:

1-11 cities goes from ~$110m to $50m

1-16 cities + UP goes from ~$504m to $149m

1-21 cities + UP/AUP goes from ~$1.4bn to $548m

1-30 cities + UP/AUP/MP goes from ~$5.7bn to $4.5bn

The idea that won't help new players catch up is silly.

EDIT:

Upon further inspection, your example is even more off. The total current value of the 3 planning projects is about 1.1bn. The difference between the old and new values for c40 in your own example is 1bn. That means, at least under current prices, it's actually 100m cheaper to go from 1-40 than it was before, all it in all.

Edited February 9 by Sketchy

[Keegoz]

9 hours ago, Hoffy said:

I notice you mention the New Player Expirence, Perspective and Retention. Can I ask, have you actually spoken to new players, outside of your own alliance or coalition, to see what the vast majority of them would like?

I understand the desire to make changes, but the vast amount of new players are not on the forums and won’t see these discussions. Asking only those within a single or coalition alliance, may provide the answers you are looking for because of your position. 
 

I’ve not seen cross alliance new player consultation, or consultation with those without an alliance, so I can only assume that this hasn’t been conducted

 

Finally, what exactly are you classing as new player? 1 weeks, 1 months, 1 year?

 

I don’t know the best way for you to gather this information, but posting a forum discussion and not informing new players of said discussion but stating it’s in their best interests, seems a little sketchy, pardon the pun

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.

[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.

[leonissenbaum]

36 minutes ago, Sketchy said:

Choosing 1-40 as the example range seems a bit off. 40 cities is not a new player. It's basically where the average of the highest nations are right now.

Based on current market prices for the planning projects:

1-11 cities goes from ~$110m to $50m

1-16 cities + UP goes from ~$504m to $149m

1-21 cities + UP/AUP goes from ~$1.4bn to $548m

1-30 cities + UP/AUP/MP goes from ~$5.7bn to $4.5bn

The idea that won't help new players catch up is silly.

EDIT:

Upon further inspection, your example is even more off. The total current value of the 3 planning projects is about 1.1bn. The difference between the old and new values for c40 in your own example is 1bn. That means, at least under current prices, it's actually 100m cheaper to go from 1-40 than it was before, all it in all.

The issue with calculating the cost with the projects right now specifically is that prices are very abnormal - 300+ ppu food on projects that require a million food is going to change things a lot, after all. UP/AUP/MP normally don't cost nearly as much as they do right now!

The main point here, though, is that this doesn't really change the difficulty of getting to city 40. It's nearly impossible for players to get there now without either doing something unique or spending years, and it's nearly impossible after the changes, so there's no difference. The values after UP/AUP/MP costs, with regular costs, will likely have it so the new system is slightly more expensive, but it doesn't really matter if it's a bit off, for there to be catchup possible it needs to be FAR cheaper, not slightly cheaper or slightly more expensive.

40 cities is not a new player right now, yes, but if we want to make catchup meaningful, then we need to be able to make it so new players can realistically get there. The game is currently in a place where a city 30 barely has any impact on wars, making it a bit easier to get to city 30 won't resolve the issue of new players feeling like they aren't really able to contribute militarily, since after all, they'll be right! Without the ability for new players to get caught up to older players, all of the issues that these changes are for will persist - more and more consolidation, new players feeling less interested in the game and having less impact, and new players just not being able to contribute militarily for years at a time.

I chose city 40 specifically because that's the point where, using the city 40 target, these changes reduce the price of the cities before projects (of course, no cities are ever reduced in price after projects). This is at some level an arbitrary point, of course, and other cities in the range could work as well, but it's certainly a city count with military impact, whereas something much lower like city 30 barely does. If we're making it easier for new players to get to city 30, but harder to get to city 40, I don't see how we're really helping them catch up at all. The moment they get close to being somewhat relevant, this system no longer benefits them.

If we want to fix this issue without letting all of the new players get to city 40, then what we need is a war rework so that you can contribute a lot more meaningfully at lower cities. While this would likely result in a better game, it's my understanding that this isn't currently in the cards, sadly.

Edited February 9 by leonissenbaum

[Ketya]

You are simply dictating all the players to tier to the same city count. It will only make the game more boring (less retention).

Instead, you guys should introduce NEW features (perk, generals, etc.) to give people something to do.

[Sketchy]

11 minutes ago, leonissenbaum said:

The issue with calculating the cost with the projects right now specifically is that prices are very abnormal - 300+ ppu food on projects that require a million food is going to change things a lot, after all. UP/AUP/MP normally don't cost nearly as much as they do right now!

The main point here, though, is that this doesn't really change the difficulty of getting to city 40. It's nearly impossible for players to get there now without either doing something unique or spending years, and it's nearly impossible after the changes, so there's no difference. The values after UP/AUP/MP costs, with regular costs, will likely have it so the new system is slightly more expensive, but it doesn't really matter if it's a bit off, for there to be catchup possible it needs to be FAR cheaper, not slightly cheaper or slightly more expensive.

40 cities is not a new player right now, yes, but if we want to make catchup meaningful, then we need to be able to make it so new players can realistically get there. The game is currently in a place where a city 30 barely has any impact on wars, making it a bit easier to get to city 30 won't resolve the issue of new players feeling like they aren't really able to contribute militarily, since after all, they'll be right! Without the ability for new players to get caught up to older players, all of the issues that these changes are for will persist - more and more consolidation, new players feeling less interested in the game and having less impact, and new players just not being able to contribute militarily for years at a time.

I chose city 40 specifically because that's the point where, using the city 40 target, these changes reduce the price of the cities before projects (of course, no cities are ever reduced in price after projects). This is at some level an arbitrary point, of course, and other cities in the range could work as well, but it's certainly a city count with military impact, whereas something much lower like city 30 barely does. If we're making it easier for new players to get to city 30, but harder to get to city 40, I don't see how we're really helping them catch up at all. The moment they get close to being somewhat relevant, this system no longer benefits them.

If we want to fix this issue without letting all of the new players get to city 40, then what we need is a war rework so that you can contribute a lot more meaningfully at lower cities. While this would likely result in a better game, it's my understanding that this isn't currently in the cards, sadly.

I think you are underestimating the impact of being able to reach c20/c30 faster, and how that will impact people reaching c40.

Again, I don't necessarily agree that c40 is the goal here, a c30 is still relevant to tiering in conflicts, at least for now, and as that changes, the costs get cheaper, and people move up anyway. It will get easier over time for people to catch up to the main grouping as it moves up. This will naturally create a range of about 20-30 ish cities where people sit.

But what you are ignoring is income. If I reach c30 much faster than I would before, I'll reach c40 much faster if the costs remain the same, which as you've shown, they are. Again, I don't see how anyone can possible argue this doesn't help new players catch up. 

[Keegoz]

28 minutes ago, Ketya said:

You are simply dictating all the players to tier to the same city count. It will only make the game more boring (less retention).

Instead, you guys should introduce NEW features (perk, generals, etc.) to give people something to do.

1) No we're not, the costs change as people grow and they only change a lot as you move away from the average

2) We are adding more content, as is outlined in the last update and mentioned in this thread that the second part of the update will add a new feature

[Ketya]

Be candid, majority of the game will rapidly tier around the average (as the average moves, the tiering will move). Instead of having more differentiation across players, we will have less… we already all have similar projects, similar city builds and now will have similar city counts

[Keegoz]

6 minutes ago, Ketya said:

Be candid, majority of the game will rapidly tier around the average (as the average moves, the tiering will move). Instead of having more differentiation across players, we will have less… we already all have similar projects, similar city builds and now will have similar city counts

Hence the need to have further options like the Military Research to help diversify nations a little, which is being actively worked on and you'll see more in the upcoming second part of this update.

[hidude45454]

On 2/5/2025 at 3:45 AM, Keegoz said:

I'm getting to it, dw

Uh, isn't this something that makes this problem worse and not better? Like Themonia and Ketya said, this obsoletes "elite" alliances that rely on maintaining a city edge over mass member alliances and however you put it, it means you're trying to push for an easier unified tiering of mass members toward this mean. I forsee tiering becoming even more intense as a result, which does nothing to improve what tiering has already ruined in the game. I also 100% agree with Themonia that at this late stage in the game, making the older playerbase feel even more useless or that their time has been wasted is not the way to go. New player retention is not any worse than it was a few years ago, the only thing that's changed is that overall most everyone is less engaged in the game, and subsequently, it's become far harder for new players to break out in gov because there is both a less diverse and interesting climate to do so and a less engaged senior gov or membership interested in passing the torch or mentoring these groups of players.

I also think that in general, this change could be very dangerous for the game economy itself. City projects were made to be resource sinks and suddenly refunding every single one is going to flood the market and devalue a lot of things very badly. Furthermore, we are going to have an accumulation of wealth in the higher tiered alliances, who are going to be both less willing and able to build cities and uninterested in spending on very much else. Just food for thought.

[KiWilliam]

Treasures & Colors

More colors allow alliances to dominate more colors as they have room to chase off players to secondary colors. This helps, but still helps those already in power and pushes down other alliances. We should define what the cutoff for middling alliances is, or I can't make meaningful commentary. This could be functioning as intended.

 

Treasure stats: of the 30 treasures, they are held by 14 alliances. The average city size of nations with treasures is 43. The average alliance with treasures is 108 members, average score of their members being 6459 (average score of those 14 alliances being 703k). Two of those alliances have less than 50 members (Grumpy & KT). Of the alliances with only 1 treasure, their average score is 381k. Without understanding the intended purposes of treasures, any criticism I could levy would be pointless. I think the change would make things "less bad" but misses the point.

 

Easier City Imports

Old idea. It’s good. More changes should be QoL.

 

City Cost Changes

You already voiced my concern. This would entrench current high end whales, and I fear lock the political meta down more than it already is. I also worry this could be abused by higher end nations to buy some last minute cities before this goes into effect, leveraging their stronger ability to utilize or borrow funds.

I believe any change to prices on this scale should have the cost of cities be refunded (at pre-change costs), and then depending on post-change adjust city counts down. With or without a hard cap. I would prefer a hard cap to finally nip this problem in the butt and more changes be done to make cities less samey, but that’s another conversation. The extra revenue and political power (i.e. avoiding wars or having won wars because of those extra cities) is already the reward for higher end whales for having bought them first. If their cities are converted and translated into a re-balanced system, then everyone would be on the same playing field with the same path towards the top (soft or hard cap).
 

 

As a general comment, I believe changes should be done on the first server first; with the test server reset first, and ideally populated with players of various sizes to mirror the current landscape in pnw. And the date changes go into effect should be advertised well in advance, so no one is taken by surprise or taken advantage of in the market. The same way credit trades are reset when the price of redeeming a credit is changed so players who are offering credits at the old price aren’t bought out by players who happen to be online.

Edited February 9 by KiWilliam

[Keegoz]

28 minutes ago, hidude45454 said:

Uh, isn't this something that makes this problem worse and not better? Like Themonia and Ketya said, this obsoletes "elite" alliances that rely on maintaining a city edge over mass member alliances and however you put it, it means you're trying to push for an easier unified tiering of mass members toward this mean. I forsee tiering becoming even more intense as a result, which does nothing to improve what tiering has already ruined in the game. I also 100% agree with Themonia that at this late stage in the game, making the older playerbase feel even more useless or that their time has been wasted is not the way to go. New player retention is not any worse than it was a few years ago, the only thing that's changed is that overall most everyone is less engaged in the game, and subsequently, it's become far harder for new players to break out in gov because there is both a less diverse and interesting climate to do so and a less engaged senior gov or membership interested in passing the torch or mentoring these groups of players.

I also think that in general, this change could be very dangerous for the game economy itself. City projects were made to be resource sinks and suddenly refunding every single one is going to flood the market and devalue a lot of things very badly. Furthermore, we are going to have an accumulation of wealth in the higher tiered alliances, who are going to be both less willing and able to build cities and uninterested in spending on very much else. Just food for thought.

I think we'll see older players invest into Military Research Center and any new features fairly heavily so they maintain their edge over anyone new reaching them. They may be closer in cities, but I don't think they'll be equals in any sense. Plus depending on how large they are, some of the increase costs are sort of neglible until you get towards the very top. Allowing them to invest in other things is kinda where I want to go overall.

Military Research is also a considerable resources sink, and the city planners would only be refunded as a cash value aka no resources will be pumped back into the game. 

[Uncle Iroh]

32 minutes ago, KiWilliam said:

Treasures & Colors

More colors allow alliances to dominate more colors as they have room to chase off players to secondary colors. This helps, but still helps those already in power and pushes down other alliances. We should define what the cutoff for middling alliances is, or I can't make meaningful commentary. This could be functioning as intended.

 

Treasure stats: of the 30 treasures, they are held by 14 alliances. The average city size of nations with treasures is 43. The average alliance with treasures is 108 members, average score of their members being 6459 (average score of those 14 alliances being 703k). Two of those alliances have less than 50 members (Grumpy & KT). Of the alliances with only 1 treasure, their average score is 381k. Without understanding the intended purposes of treasures, any criticism I could levy would be pointless. I think the change would make things "less bad" but misses the point.

 

Easier City Imports

Old idea. It’s good. More changes should be QoL.

 

City Cost Changes

You already voiced my concern. This would entrench current high end whales, and I fear lock the political meta down more than it already is. I also worry this could be abused by higher end nations to buy some last minute cities before this goes into effect, leveraging their stronger ability to utilize or borrow funds.

I believe any change to prices on this scale should have the cost of cities be refunded (at pre-change costs), and then depending on post-change adjust city counts down. With or without a hard cap. I would prefer a hard cap to finally nip this problem in the butt and more changes be done to make cities less samey, but that’s another conversation. The extra revenue and political power (i.e. avoiding wars or having won wars because of those extra cities) is already the reward for higher end whales for having bought them first. If their cities are converted and translated into a re-balanced system, then everyone would be on the same playing field with the same path towards the top (soft or hard cap).
 

 

As a general comment, I believe changes should be done on the first server first; with the test server reset first, and ideally populated with players of various sizes to mirror the current landscape in pnw. And the date changes go into effect should be advertised well in advance, so no one is taken by surprise or taken advantage of in the market. The same way credit trades are reset when the price of redeeming a credit is changed so players who are offering credits at the old price aren’t bought out by players who happen to be online.

Ditto
(Endorsement totally not paid for by Big Kiwi Corporation)

[Sketchy]

I love this game. In this thread we've seen:

"This change won't help new players grow."

"This change will help new players grow too fast and leave older players feeling useless."

"This change only benefits whales."

"This change hurts whales."

"This change will entrench the upper tier."

"This change will cause everyone to rapidly grow into the same city count."

Gotta love this game.

[ToxicPepper]

Why I Disagree with the City Cost Change:

Firstly, I think you’re vastly over representing how much new players care about getting to the mid/high tier. I hardly ever hear new players talking about getting to the high tier or low tier or mid tier. The reason why? Because they don’t know what the !@#$ tiers even are. New players aren’t leaving due to tiering issues but rather due to the very limited engagement with PNW after a while. 
 

Raiding gets repetitive very quickly but at least they log in and have something to do. The biggest drop in activity comes when they transition from raiding to farming after going up in city count. The engagement with PNW while farming during peace time is just log in once a day and the sudden change of gameplay style puts off a lot of new players and they get bored because of it thus leading to them eventually going inactive. 
 

It’s a hard issue to tackle and I don’t know of a possible solution to remedy that other than somehow figuring out more in-game activities to keep players coming back and logging in but regardless, the city cost change does NOT fix player retention.

My other reason is I don’t see why there needs to be such a massive change like this for catch up when more catch up mechanics like projects can be introduced instead? I don’t think we should punish the oldest members of our community who chose to remain active and continue playing the game but rather make it easier for newer players to catch up. I don’t think the goal should be to slowly bring our ENTIRE mid tier to eventually reach and match the current high tier. The high tier is vastly smaller in numbers compared to the mid tier and so you can with the current model get folks up there by focusing funds on specific players to move them up.

I do agree with the sentiment that newer players should be able to catch up but disagree with the solution provided here. 

[Stanko1987]

I kind of understand where Toxic Pepper is coming from, but i strongly agree and support the decision of the Dev Team and Alex in regard to these changes as this is only the first part of fixing the problem but the problem of engagement still remains therefore i would like to propose the following,

- Update the Tutorial

- Bring back Quests where players who login are given up to 5-10 quests a day that they have to complete and in return win cash rewards anywhere from $200,000 to $5,000,000 depending on the quest that the player must complete. Even Resource rewards such as Raws, War chest, Food, Uranium etc., or perhaps rewards that award players anywhere between $1,000,000 to $10,000,000 in city discounts, or a temporary revenue boost for several turns anywhere from 2 turns to 8 turns or production temporary increases anywhere from 2%-5% for several turns before reverting back. New Daily quests that players can do each lasting anywhere from a minute to 5 minutes per quest. It least it gives players something more to do besides raiding, countering or just logging in once a day to receive the $2,000,000 day turn bonus.

Again, it is kind of a buff for new players but also for existing players, but it least it gives players who are farming something to do other than just farming and logging in once a day for several seconds. 

- Add another form of small-scale gambling like Keno, introduce roulette, pokie slots, blackjack etc...

- Revamp the baseball league
- Add Soccer, Basketball and other sporting leagues that players can start utilizing whilst during peace times
- Add a few fancy features and special effects for nation page and factbooks.

- Add a inbuilt chat room for non-discord players who they can engage with outside of discord.

Yeh i understand there is a fair bit of work involved and probably need larger bandwidths to support these extra added features, also it will definitely take time to develop and probably won't happen for it least 6-12 months from now but if it least half of the list is being taken into consideration, new players who sign up and even existing players who are not raiding or stopped raiding have things to do and they will not get bored.