W3C - Game Update March 12

Andy,

My loses were minimal because your weapons quality was 150-170 when my attacking forces had 330. Please don't forget to take this into the account as quality is very important factor in calculation.

I very much agree with John, making weapons cheaper you need to increase unit sizes, otherwise you are forcing players to have hundreds of units and they are all used only for single attack.

Much better direction would be to make weapons more expensive. Just imagine if you make weapons 100 times more expensive, you will make people think about defending the units, so they will use both of offensive and defensive weapons as losing unit formed from only offensive weapons will be very costly. Today there is no point to protect units as weapons are too cheap so losing doesn't hurt.

John has posted his idea to make weapons 100 times more expensive and I think this is by far most brilliant idea. This would make everything what we have now work just fine, lower maintenance, decrease complexity, have units of mixed weapons, active armies, quality upgrades and many more things that are not working right now. Implementation would be straight forward.

If you want to help new players by making weapons cheaper, just give them few units to start with equipped with high quality weapons. Currently new players are being given with low quality weapons and a single attack wing can end the war in 5 minutes. I don't believe the current trend is helping new players in any way.

Sorry to be sad with this, but this is how I feel about the current trend in changes I see.

Mndz

It sounds like it's the automatic federation air support, that is breaking the Attack/Defense balance.

The big imbalance between offence and defence is caused by the simple fact that there is a distinction between offence and defence. They need to be merged. Then give defending units a defending bonus when they are attacked that way the attacker will always need to have more forces to win. The way it is now ruins the war game. That needs to be the first thing to change before anything else.

Andy what would it take to have this change done?

Many units have a mix of weapons, that is if you do not change their original setup.

what if we go back to the original structures of military units.
It will reduce the max number of weapons of each type and will allow us to reduce the number of interceptors in a wing.

some tests we have done now, show a better balance.
we are not there yet.

Andy, mix of weapons only makes sence if weapons are expensive and you need to protect them. If weapons are cheap like now it causes players to form hundreds of units and micromanage them all.

P.S. i like larger air wings, problem is not because the size of them. Problem is dynamic and micromanagement.

Andy mixing weapons does not make strategic sense with the current framework because every defensive weapon that you put into a military unit takes the place of an offensive weapon. Then it requires players to make even more units, which adds to the micromanagement hell. Also, you always need to have 1000 weapons for an attack to even be worth it, so putting defensive weapons into your units makes your attacks very ineffective as it will reduce the number of strikes you can do before going below 1000 offensive weapons.

Andy, I just want to clarify that you understand what I mean when I talk about merging offensive and defensive weapons. I am not talking about mixing them into units. I am talking about actually merging the products. For example: Defensive Helicopters and Attack Helicopters would just become helicopters. They would be able to attack enemy units and also respond as part of the air defense. Similarly, Fighter planes and Interceptors would just become Fighter/Interceptors. They would also be able to attack enemy air units and participate as part of the automatic air defense.

If you guys are absolutely unwilling to merge defensive weapons and offensive weapons into unified dual purpose weapons, one possible workaround would be to have separate limits for offensive and defensive weapons in a military unit. Adding a defensive weapon should not subtract from the number of offensive weapons you can add. If you allow players to incorporate defensive weapons in a unit without penalizing the attack ability of the unit, I think more players would do that. Also, weapons need to be 10-100 times more expensive, ammunition and maintenance should remain the same, if not cheaper. Military units also need to be increased massively to get rid of this micromanagement hell. Perhaps a good start would be to have 5000 offensive + 5000 defensive weapons per division. Keep the interceptor/helicopter wings at 500 for now. Increase air attack wings to 3000 + 3000 defensive (allow AA batteries to defend grounded attack aircraft). Increase fleets to 3000 offensive + 3000 defensive. With that said, I still think the best solution is to merge weapons so that there is no distinction between offensive and defensive. It will be so much easier to balance things if you were to do this, and it would greatly simplify the logistics of fielding an army, and also make weapons production simpler and more efficient.