Update Direction Thread

[Keegoz]

Hey all,

With the military update now basically done for the design team and awaiting for the development team to act on feedback from the test tournament, the design team is seeking some direction for the next update.

I thought the easiest way to do this was to do a poll.

If you have any specific update ideas, please comment below. I've said this on discord but any specific update ideas would be great, that means more than an idea or even a detailed idea but how it would mechanically work (formula's, costings etc.).

[Rawstalker]

How can I be a moderator?

Edited Tuesday at 04:38 AM by Rawstalker

[Naralianna Choza]

14 minutes ago, Keegoz said:

Hey all,

With the military update now basically done for the design team and awaiting for the development team to act on feedback from the test tournament, the design team is seeking some direction for the next update.

I thought the easiest way to do this was to do a poll.

If you have any specific update ideas, please comment below. I've said this on discord but any specific update ideas would be great, that means more than an idea or even a detailed idea but how it would mechanically work (formula's, costings etc.).

I think some sort of strategy minigame or something could help the game stop being just do numbers based as many times commanders have won without numbers advantages

[Chima]

Definitely the military update. Like on the test where navy actually is important other than blockading. You can remove air and ground control with navy. This would make wars a lot more close and test the better fighter. Definitely military update!!! While you're at that maybe throw in a new weapon. I dunno what it is but add a weapon. 

[Kosta]

At this point anything other than lazy additional projects or credit price changes would be appreciated. Community has been starved of actual content for a significant period of time. 

[Divios]

The economy definitely needs more depth—it’s way too plain right now. At the moment, the only real difference between players is whether they’re pirates or farming (or about to start farming). It’d be way more interesting if there were mechanics that actually made people split off based on the choices they make. Something that pushes players into different roles or paths, instead of everyone ending up doing the same thing.

Economic research perhaps?

Edited Tuesday at 06:24 AM by Divios

[Flaredragon]

It would be great if we could fully implement previous updates before moving on to the next one. The military update hasn't yet got a date planned for being added to the game, and the econ update had just the city cost changes rushed out - but two months on from that update, city costs still aren't being updated. Players were told they would be updated each month with the new city average. Is this just not going to happen?

 

 There were multiple other changes listed in that thread that seem to have just been dropped completely. Disregarding people's thoughts on the updates, having 5 different updates in various stages of implementation at once is surely not the best way to improve the game. It is entirely unclear whether these changes are still intended to be implemented, or forgotten about, or intentionally removed.

[Keegoz]

1 hour ago, Flaredragon said:

It would be great if we could fully implement previous updates before moving on to the next one. The military update hasn't yet got a date planned for being added to the game, and the econ update had just the city cost changes rushed out - but two months on from that update, city costs still aren't being updated. Players were told they would be updated each month with the new city average. Is this just not going to happen?

 

 There were multiple other changes listed in that thread that seem to have just been dropped completely. Disregarding people's thoughts on the updates, having 5 different updates in various stages of implementation at once is surely not the best way to improve the game. It is entirely unclear whether these changes are still intended to be implemented, or forgotten about, or intentionally removed.

I nor the design team control the development side of things. For our part, we are done with the design of the previous military update and we are just awaiting for the feedback from the test server to be implemented. I therefore cannot answer most of what you are asking, because I am not a developer. The developers are aware of the issues however and I believe are working towards addressing them this month.

Those econ changes are still slated to be released but it is a minor update at best.

It takes literal months to plan out in detail new ideas to be implemented like the military update, and it is my desire to see another large update implemented into the game. It is also tiresome to put a lot of effort into an update that the community turns around as insists they do not want, so we are trying to avoid this. To do this in a timely fashion, we need to have the updates fleshed out and ready to code if and when the development team have time to begin coding.

It's also why we ask that people become far more detailed in their suggestions because trying to pass basic ideas off does not really work too often and usually means others need to pick it up. We are all busy people who do this job voluntarily and if an idea hits a roadblock, it often fails to recover from that.

 

[zigbigadorlou]

I don't think there is much that can reverse the gradual death of pnw, but here's a list of ideas that you'll never implement that I think would make things more fun. 

1. Implement nuclear meltdowns: ~1/20000 chance for nuclear power plants to melt down and destroy the city (currently coded to the test server)

2. Roguelike month long tournaments where banks are looted with every ground attack and attacking a city at zero infra destroys it.

3. Add water

4. Create a comically expensive indestructible project Tsar Bomba that, usable once, destroys a single targeted city. 

5. Improve asymmetric warfare by buffing money and infra spy attacks by 10x

6. Delete the game and make us touch grass 

[LachlanPnW]

Make spies more useful. Currently, it takes about a month to build spies, yet they can be wiped out in less than 24 hours—which is completely unbalanced. Spies should follow the same recruiting distributions as other units, allowing them to be trained in just a few days. Additionally, give spies more strategic utility, such as the ability to gather intel on alliance banks or sabotage specific stockpiles. For example, spies could reduce a resource by a fixed amount or percentage, creating new tactical opportunities.

My last point on alliance banks flows to my next point. To make them more dynamic, remove offshoring, while also decreasing the amount of loot that can be taken per raid. This would create a balance- making alliance banks vulnerable, but not overwhelmingly so. It would also incentivize pirates by offering more consistent, higher-value targets, and make winning these pirate raids more important. Right now, with only around two alliances in the top 50 as dedicated raiding alliances, it's clear that raiding has become an obsolete strategy. Improving profitability and strategic options would give the game more depth and revive raiding as a viable playstyle past the extremely early stages.

[Rowald]

Personally voted for option 1 because politics is half the game's name so it'd only make sense that politics are made relevant on the national scale

Last year (I remember of June but might be earlier even) were announced, or at least discussed, an update regarding generals which would fit in both military and research; that could be another way to spend resources if the upcoming military research isn't enough

IIrc there was also some plans about a space update or "DLC" unlockable with credits - though I think the space update was not as seriously considered as generals were

[Sketchy]

9 minutes ago, LachlanPnW said:

My last point on alliance banks flows to my next point. To make them more dynamic, remove offshoring, while also decreasing the amount of loot that can be taken per raid. This would create a balance- making alliance banks vulnerable, but not overwhelmingly so. It would also incentivize pirates by offering more consistent, higher-value targets, and make winning these pirate raids more important. Right now, with only around two alliances in the top 50 as dedicated raiding alliances, it's clear that raiding has become an obsolete strategy. Improving profitability and strategic options would give the game more depth and revive raiding as a viable playstyle past the extremely early stages.

How would one accomplish the removal of offshoring? Offshoring isn't an established mechanic, it's just using existing mechanics (alliance creation, bank to bank transfers) to work around a poorly designed system.

Dedicated raiding alliances have always been a minority. It's typically not a viable strategy vs farming at higher city counts. And it shouldn't be.

Far better to remove bank looting entirely and simply increase the base rate of loot, and introduce mechanics specifically to improve/diverge raiding from the primary war mechanics. But raiders won't want change typically, unless the change is basic like "my loot number go up"

[LachlanPnW]

6 minutes ago, Sketchy said:

How would one accomplish the removal of offshoring? Offshoring isn't an established mechanic, it's just using existing mechanics (alliance creation, bank to bank transfers) to work around a poorly designed system.

Dedicated raiding alliances have always been a minority. It's typically not a viable strategy vs farming at higher city counts. And it shouldn't be.

Far better to remove bank looting entirely and simply increase the base rate of loot, and introduce mechanics specifically to improve/diverge raiding from the primary war mechanics. But raiders won't want change typically, unless the change is basic like "my loot number go up"

This works too. I'm just trying to come up with ideas to add more ways to play the game other than waiting for revenue to build.

[Sketchy]

3 minutes ago, LachlanPnW said:

This works too. I'm just trying to come up with ideas to add more ways to play the game other than waiting for revenue to build.

Unfortunately, raiding isn't a mechanic that can be developed/built upon because as we've seen repeatedly whenever anyone suggests tinkering with it a bunch of raiders come out of the woodwork and oppose any changes before they've even been outlined.

[Shuayb]

How are people voting for Military improvements when the last update hasn't even been implemented yet. Have we already decided we don't like it? 

[Keegoz]

14 minutes ago, Shuayb said:

How are people voting for Military improvements when the last update hasn't even been implemented yet. Have we already decided we don't like it? 

I suspect they're asking for further military updates.

[Flaredragon]

3 hours ago, Keegoz said:

I nor the design team control the development side of things. For our part, we are done with the design of the previous military update and we are just awaiting for the feedback from the test server to be implemented. I therefore cannot answer most of what you are asking, because I am not a developer. The developers are aware of the issues however and I believe are working towards addressing them this month.

Those econ changes are still slated to be released but it is a minor update at best.

It takes literal months to plan out in detail new ideas to be implemented like the military update, and it is my desire to see another large update implemented into the game. It is also tiresome to put a lot of effort into an update that the community turns around as insists they do not want, so we are trying to avoid this. To do this in a timely fashion, we need to have the updates fleshed out and ready to code if and when the development team have time to begin coding.

It's also why we ask that people become far more detailed in their suggestions because trying to pass basic ideas off does not really work too often and usually means others need to pick it up. We are all busy people who do this job voluntarily and if an idea hits a roadblock, it often fails to recover from that.

 

I'm not saying the development team has to push things out faster, but I do think the communication on that side could be a little better. As I said, it's unclear to players whether the updates are still planned to be implemented or not, when design has moved on to different ideas. Particularly for the smaller ideas like adding colours which would be easy to overlook compared to city cost changes, and when parts of the same update are coded into the game at different times. 

[Keegoz]

26 minutes ago, Flaredragon said:

I'm not saying the development team has to push things out faster, but I do think the communication on that side could be a little better. As I said, it's unclear to players whether the updates are still planned to be implemented or not, when design has moved on to different ideas. Particularly for the smaller ideas like adding colours which would be easy to overlook compared to city cost changes, and when parts of the same update are coded into the game at different times. 

Both the previous military and econ updates that have been announced will be pushed through at some stage in full, with only minor tweaks based on feedback. As stated in the thread, we're more or less done with the design of these previous updates and we're ready to begin exploring for the next batch.

This thread is to help future development begin on a new mechanic which as mentioned can take months to actually do.

I think you're nitpicking a bit for me basically wanting to keep on top of having updates readily available to code into the game if/when the dev team has time to do so.

[Brumlebjorn]

I'd say the #1 thing to focus on should be reworking beige-mechanics. Right now it's some times optimal to intentionally lose wars in order to win in the big picture. This is a huge problem and makes the game boring both for the winning and losing sides of a war. Whats the point in having a wars won leaderboard if it only shows how bad you are at beige-cycling. Fix please. Games are supposed to be fun and this mechanic is anything but.

I dont really have a solution to this problem, but this should be the #1 priority IMO.

[Szgwuere Ceegzuuhuuk]

Ngl new units would be op

like

I wanna conquer the Moon and Mars:D

[Pericles II]

I think the idea of elections is cool. It would be totally cosmetic but if you have a democratic system, it would be cool to set term limits. Could even mimic a campaign trail type thing for build up. Also if approval rating gets too low, the nation should purge their leader, asking you to pick from few other politicians that could be listed if elections were a thing. 

[Majima Goro]

7 hours ago, zigbigadorlou said:

I don't think there is much that can reverse the gradual death of pnw, but here's a list of ideas that you'll never implement that I think would make things more fun. 

1. Implement nuclear meltdowns: ~1/20000 chance for nuclear power plants to melt down and destroy the city (currently coded to the test server)

2. Roguelike month long tournaments where banks are looted with every ground attack and attacking a city at zero infra destroys it.

3. Add water

4. Create a comically expensive indestructible project Tsar Bomba that, usable once, destroys a single targeted city. 

5. Improve asymmetric warfare by buffing money and infra spy attacks by 10x

6. Delete the game and make us touch grass 

I agree. 

[Omar Bin Laden]

It will be good if you guys can do something on the MAPs. e.g add more points or make it add two points every two hours, waiting for 24hrs to get 12maps is killing me 

[Corvidae]

This post is my personal try-hard roadmap if I were Alex:

 

It's time to re-analyze the design philosophy of the team. By the end of April, devs need to agree on a few things:

1. Wars will no longer prevent rollouts. If that looks like rolling out mid-war, so be it. If that looks like a global forced period of peace, so be it. If you can find another solution, great. The development cycle should not lean on player wars as an excuse. Ideally this would mean establishing a release date for updates so the players can plan around it.

2. Establish and stick to a pipeline: Pick an idea, work on it, send it on the coders, test it, implement it. Get a pipeline flowing. Every quarter should have an update which includes bug fixes, UI improvements, and new content for players both old and new. It doesn't have to be a massive World-of-Warcraft-esque expansion pack, but every quarter should have those three things as a minimum and never miss a release. Reliability and accountability are key pieces to growing your game instead of watching it wither away.

 

Thirdly, utilize your resources on-hand:

 

 The QoL improvements threads is still pinned to the top of the suggestions subforum. Start going through and picking some for each quarter.

 

Fourth, even though the numbers are controversial, the city cost change was long coming. It modernizes and future-proofs the game in a way that we haven't yet seen with any other mechanic. Take that philosophy forward with the bones of the game. Referral bonuses on a sliding scale, credit redemption amount on a sliding scale, get the foundations of the game all on the same page.

 

Now after that work is done, start skimming for new content ideas. Someone complained in Discord that suggestions aren't detailed enough anymore. Here are a handful of examples just from me in the past few months that got ignored. You don't need to pull them directly but perhaps they could give some inspiration:

 

 

There are a lot more in the suggestions subforum, you just have to skim through titles and see what strikes your fancy.

 

 

Again: I don't care what we do next. What we need is a reliable development cycle that can generate interest in the game, like every other modern multiplayer game does.

Edited Tuesday at 06:10 PM by Corvidae

[KiWilliam]

The options presented are vague. So I had to vote for "Improved community engagement, tutorials, and alliance recruitment mechanics to help new players find alliances". Emphasis mine. Improving the pipeline from idea to implementation I think is the most important thing. Right now development is a black box of sporadic lunges and jerks. Between what is discussed and comes out, your average player is shut out from the process and then has virtually zero recourse afterwards. The process should be transparent, consistent, and to scale for the proposed change. The most recent game change, the marketplace popup warning for listing a PPU 10% outside the market price. Unless there are niche technical errors with this change, I don't see in any way this harms, or would even be noticed by a normal player unless it was actively improving the game play experience for them. This change has no downsides. Seeing the idea go from conversation, solicitation of details, coding, and implementation, did more to improve my opinion on game development than anything else in the last half decade.

I want to see a process where there is a public timeline of changes rolling out in advance. Including a test (not a tournament) on the test server, tweaks made during or rerunning the test (if it's truly a test, it should not matter if you end it early or change things in the middle), and then announcement of when it's coming to main.

@Corvidae
1. Wars will no longer prevent rollouts.

Couldn't agree more. Set a week for peace/rollout 3 months in advance. Do it twice a year, stop holding up development and making things uncertain. People can't plan around uncertainties. If you change the exact time for any reason give at least 48 hours, including an in-game notification.

2. Establish and stick to a pipeline.

Couldn't agree more. Needs to be at least 3 months in advance, and there should never be a chance for people with inside information to make beneficial trades or plans to their nation or alliance member's builds.

3. Utilize your resources on-hand

Couldn't agree more. I would stress QoL changes first, and then some cosmetic/non major game play changes, done in between or instead of major game changes if they're not ready. Things like finally fixing approval rating to being a run role play mechanic rather than useless. But make it the new normal for changes to happen to the game and for feedback to matter. No one wants to speak when you're speaking into a void.

4. Take the sliding scale philosophy forward with the bones of the game (referral bonuses, credit redemption, etc).

Couldn't agree more. I'll add the time when the price changes happen should be made public as well and listed in-game. The current average city count, or any other metrics used should be public and listed in-game if they're used for formula's as well.