W3C - Game News 30.08.2017

Copied from another discussion:

We have published a list of features we intend to add/remove and change in the war game to increase the probability of PvP wars.
We intend to continue along this way.

C3 wars
We were criticized many times, and recently in these discussions, for making C3 wars that do not require any warring capabilities. These wars were used as a way to make money.

One possibility is to just fix it.
If you get to level 4, you might be ready for PvP wars.
Make money with a great economy. We are making it easier to make money.

It looks like some of the great empire, rich players, with large armies, do not want a change that might make the war game into a challenge or reduce their power to destroy.

No change will please everyone.
We will however make the game more fair and easier for beginners.

We assume that there will be those who will look to find ways to keep things as they were before. Some players where clear about it.
This is excellent, as it will challenge us and guide us through this process of improving the war game.

Andy, Wars start 12 game months after a declaration of war is made. How long does it take to reactivate deactivated weapons once automatic reactivation is turned on? If a player gets the war declaration notification (and lets hope this works) and logs in, say, 3 game months after the war declaration, do they have time to reactivate their weapons before the war starts?

Again, one thing to keep in mind. On another thread, there is a discussion how there is an intentional division of countries within a player empire. A reasonable player empire might have 8-10 countries. A paying premium member might have such an empire on multiple worlds. A smart attacker will declare war on an entire empire when they intend to actually launch attacks on one country. Is it reasonable that the attacked player will have all weapons necessary to mount an effective defense in each country? Is it not reasonable that the defender may have to shift weapons when they learn the actual intended attack target?

With this is mind, I ask again. How long does it take to reactivate weapons once automatic reactivation is turned on?

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On another issue. Again, I understand we are trying to draw this line for what defines a "new" war player. I think it is important for this to be discussed before this is determined. One factor I have not heard considered is that if there is concern that if nothing is required to "earn" the assistance that is being considered, is it possible a player using multiple accounts can cause some real damage to players who put some time and effort into their empires. It seems any time there is entitled stuff offered to an account, there is that risk. In the case of free military capability, this offers a unique challenge in that this can do real damage to other players before it is detected.

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"It looks like some of the great empire, rich players, with large armies, do not want a change that might make the war game into a challenge or reduce their power to destroy"


Nothing that has been suggested by any player or by you is going to offer up a challenge to a skilled war player. However, if the rules are complicated it makes it no easier to help new players into the war game.

The most likely thing that will create a competitive environment is creating reason to be out of game war protections. I still think the initial incentive direction went the wrong way. Don't reward battles, reward players who create, build, and maintain outside of artificial game protections. Destroying is easy. Look around the game and try to count how many players have meaningful assets outside of fake protections. It isn't many. Being able to pick and choose when you want to fight a battle just before you hide in protection again is easy. Keeping your things outside of fake protections is a higher challenge.

Reactivation starts automatically when war is declared on a country.
It takes 10 game months.

I need to go.
will continue tomorrow.

Does anyone else wonder what placing direct sales of weapons to a country into inactive reserves is going to do to promote the war game?

I can't even rebuild my EXISTING air defense unit with the 30 extra DH and 60 INTS they now require without waiting for those units to become active.

Country purchasing power was always a limiting factor on direct sales.

Now it seems you've got two choices:

Maintain a crippling load on your economy or get rolled up by whoever is willing to place a crippling load on their economy (probably because they NEED your assets to keep from going bankrupt).

I'm sorry but from what I can see this will have exactly the opposite effect.

Good lord, I already HAD enough DH's and INTS active in country to reactivate 30 DH and 60 INTS immediately before this so called improvement.

It's going to be interesting to see if I have to wait 10 months to reactivate 90 pieces of equipment

I have always wondered this; why aren't we allowed to reactivate all of our weapons at once whenever we decide?

isn't reactivation 10%? this leaves allot of play with space transport. you can truck in a bunch of weapons, reactivate the equivalent of what woulda been 50%, create units, re-load your space center, and hop, skip and jump over a few countries, over 2 days.

the automatic space transport thing, will assign up to 20 shuttles per request. and you can set the same request several times. so if you have 1350 ints in your CEO Space center, you can make 5 auto-requests for 1350 ints to be transported, and each will have up to 20 shuttles assigned to it. and each will keep going until it transports 1350 ints, or the SC is empty. its my trick for multiplying the transport speed.

with a little imagination you can make things work, and as always, the hyper-active players have an advantage.

one good question for a player to know the answer to, roughly what time during the Game Month, are weapons reactivated. you can do this, just by paying attention, I don't invest myself into the game that much any more to know when cities/bases repair, the effect of stocked up construction, timing of re-activation, and such.

knowing this, would make anticipating space transport more efficient. you truck in your weapons, empty your SC, having a rough idea of when they will actualy be activated, you'll be online at the right time to re-load your SC and move them to the next country, if thats what you want to do,

Well I disbanded my units and was able to reactivate all 90 units the next game month.

Not much use if those units are hard hit so I would assume you can still reactivate 10% of your active weapons not in units which is not much help IMHO.

I gotta test some more.

This discussion here hits on my concern. I am not that worried in my own defense. Like Yankee and Josias, I am sure I can figure it out. But if the solution is tricky/complicated, it will be a burden to the new players we want to get into the war game that the GM was trying to help in the first place.

The GM always assumes a player post is intended to be self-serving. Mine are not. Nothing even considered is going to challenge my power in the slightest. I will still be okay. More than okay. I look at these changes as a challenge to help new players. I see future chats where I am trying to make explaining how to defend their empire easier. Adding a few units to their defense, or whatever, is beans compared to what they will need if they have more than a few countries to defend.

We know how it used to be before mobile units and before space reinforcements were figured out. From Wildeye's guide, "Defense does not win wars. All defense is is a speedbump.". Exactly. All that was counted on was that defenses could slow down an attack. Make an attack on you take longer, and hoping that it gave you enough time for your own attacks to succeed. But, if the game is moving in the direction passed artificial protections, players cannot always be online. Attackers set a schedule that is convenient for them. A defender might have to contend with multiple attacking countries. A defense capable of stopping an attack must be possible, and all the necessary weapons can't be kept at every country in a player empire when the attacker can focus all their weapons where they wish.

Veteran players will figure this out. Will new players stand a chance? This is where my questions are going.

Simple fact is if it's confusing to someone that's been playing for sometime, what chance does an actual "new player" have?.

ironically, this "confusion," has always been to the advantage of long term players. but every attempt to equal the scales, results in more vets leaving than new players staying.

seriously, if the over all problem is game enthusiasm/competition, y'all should really try thinking outside the box. the last ten years of rule changes that I've witnessed, all had the intent to make the game more competitive, and always had the opposite effect.

as far as weapons from space being unloaded as inactive, thats probably a good thing. when a player has enough weapons to vomit a war mammoth any where, inside of 2 days, it kinda makes an experience mismatch. if you want to do that, you should have to work harder, and figure out how, and it should require allot of shuttles.

further, i also know that one of wendy's favorite tactics, was to dec a player, watch their weapons re-active, then deactivate do to manpower issues. then nuke the crap out the newb, for their failure to notice their nuke defense de-activated. being able to just shuttle in tons of weapons already had more hidden challenges than have been mentioned here. while your shuttles where transporting in weapons, you'd also need to buy a couple mill pop, jack up your MLM priority, demote professinals to LLWs, take over a couple of C3s, and do worker trades for LLW and MLM to fill your army.

the process was already complicated. this new challenge does favor newbs that don't have all the knowledge.

but personally, i'm over all neutral, i don't think this will make the war game more attractive. it will balance things for players that don't really want to put in the effort to figure out the finer details of a very sophisticated game. in the end, it is a lose/lose move.

About the reactivating after a space transport; even after shuttling weapons to a country's space center, they won't reactivate until after logging on and transferring whatever made it to the space center to the country's stock for the auto reactivation to begin. The immediate deactivation of weapons after a direct sale, shuttle transport or country to country transfer can only be translated as punitive.

This is no way to respond to an attack in time, especially after Aries' point about multiple declarations. Iv'e be declared on by an attacker a long time ago, who selected about 5 countries for me to guess. Needless to say, after the wait period was over, I found myself having to log on constantly throughout the day, at work, even setting alarms at night to check since I wasn't even sure what time zone the attacker was from. Fortunately I was able to take them out once their forces were revealed to be far less than mine; (at the time I didn't think to check account profiles to see what amount of military assets one would have on each world/county). Before the end of the war, they casually said that they just wanted to just stop playing and decided to attack to go out with a bang for the hell of it. The attacker had no vested interest in this, yet it was ok to cause alarm for another. Basically, it was meaningless. And what if the "new" player was, hypothetically, a returning player who knows how to play the game by restarting a new account. What would stop this "new player" from decided to dump trillions into brand new weapons and ammo and then declare on another player who is languishing in unmanageable defense costs for "what if" while the attacker never had to worry about these long term expenses?

Again, the changes just invite carelessness and benefits the casual player who thinks they just got into clash of clans. If anyone ever read the reviews on the Google play store for the SC App game, you can clearly see that the vast majority of these almost "new players" didn't even get the basic concept. They complained about not being able to declare war immediately. My favorite complaint for the game was "hey, I have nukes; why can't I nuke anyone? this is stupid..." etc. etc... or "this game is just a bunch of numbers, too confusing, can't even start a war"...

Clearly they didn't get the concept that this game is not just a glorified game of "Risk, the board game" or some high paced app game where you can dive in and start attacking after listening to an instructional avatar congratulating you for building your first barracks; now go build an army.

Making endless amounts of "trip wires" for current players who had invested years (real years) into SC is disheartening. Unintended consequences. The changes of deactivating weapons after just moving them, the confusing rules behind war levels/protections and their implications on federations will not protect the new players. There aren't any predatory giants, not anymore. Perhaps that is because they were defeated by the good giants who came to the aid of those being preyed upon; the defenders engaged in collaborative defending. In that process, the defended learned from the experienced, while the aggressor was vanquished even with their overwhelming military hardware. This is true fed activity, or just plain old game communication and diplomacy. The attacked player did not survive due to game "protections" or other nanny laws, they survived and later thrived out of collaboration.

Ease up on the rules and the artificial conditions; let us play the game. Trust us; we got this. There are "good guys" here willing to help and guide others. They would actually learn something then; not become dependent on the welfare of the GM.

Maybe others see it this way, or at least in part. But this is just how I see it.

Thanks

I answered the question about reactivation. it takes 10 game months and after the next upgrade, you will be able to turn automatic reactivation on and 10 game months later, the entire army will be reactivated.

If you add weapons during the process, 10% of the total weapons you have of each type, (active and not active), will be reactivated.

I think that the problem of all assets always hiding behind war protection, will change when the number of countries that can have war protection is reduced.

Khome,
If you want to have everything active, do not deactivate. If you want to cut the cost, use it. It is either one or the other.
if you turn auto reactivation on, everything will be there before the war starts.

again, If anyone has a better idea on how to protect small players against a sudden surge in the army of their neighbors, please explain.

From what I read here, it seems that countries will probably keep more weapons activated. Everyone is used to deactivate or to moving out all weapons to cut cost.

Is this a good feature?
If you have a huge army, why not pay and maintain it.
It might convince some who have huge armies to reduce, or not use part of it and I think that this will be a good change.

We are looking at fed wars.
We do not think that a group of countries should be able to attack a single country player. Fed wars are great but 10 to 1 is not.

A new player, with multiple countries?
multiple premium accounts? I do not think that this will happen.
We do not intend to pour huge assets into every new account and then wait to see what happens to the country and what they do with these assets.
Maybe delay any support until they are attacked? Premium only?

We are not out of the bush yet.

Next upgrade will also allow deactivated weapons to be delivered to corporations (no extra clicking, just deliver what is there and start with the deactivated weapons).

We will also block the possibility to contracts bases and fortifications to yourself and keep the numbers of bases and forts under the max. number allowed.

Those who have too many, will see some disappear from time to time and will be compensated. Then, the numbers everywhere will go under the max and stay there.

we are looking into other groups of large numbers of items on the maps and will reduce.
Cities continue to grow and their numbers decline more.

Numbers in general are declining.
Government cost is declining and health will follow after the next upgrade.

its just sad since its wanted to make something but there current formula for activation(not sure the real equation/algorithm as this is just for example purpose) atleast iterative speaking:

T= Total weapon count
r= 10% of total weapon count
i = deactivation count
a = active count

start
if i not = 0 then

T*.1 = r

if i (lesser then or equal to) r then

i+a = f (Final activation - equal to T)
i-i = g(0 remaining deactive)
end


else:

r - i = i(iterative count)
r + a = a(iterative count)
If i not 0 - If End
Restart

To see; if we take/give a percent to T it will effect the ration r and its ability to raactivate simply enough, for players who can give more to T (richer more experienced) can simply fill to for its efforts and remove it/desize when needed, little more hassle for the big boi. Little guy? cant give to T, then they will spend lets say 1% reactivating total of there forced(with each month being 0.1%) compared to the big bois 100%; inwhich there force is a massive whopping 10%; shocking since its still the show of 100 times more force, that even if little man can do something big man can still power up and crush the shit out of little man.

I tried to tell you in a comment you bois called "unconstructive crap" and you dident like my language, well love my criticism them! it takes time out of my life to care about this shit(yeah because of stuff like this!!!) game that it doesent matter if you manage to fix and polish the floors you take away the damn ease/reason of players for the sake of experiment, you will have a problem. I mean, andy if you are talking about someone who needs 100% force active(aka all assets weapon total), the gimmick of reactivating works. But to someone massive, nope. and you think that its big players the problem, yet you say countrys that have been around for 2 years should have more force and there it is, not to mention in all the wrong ways as its still the most expereinced player; doesent matter its a mountain or a new stone its like gangous khan said; a great wall only good as he who defends it. Same with the game and reality. There is ways to limit the flux, just give us time and yourselves, still feel the rush for things that arent really going anyway. Just keep the game clean and buffed, i got ideas but really i dont know behind the scenes so theres not all i can say. I just have to speculate and do the best to figure this things out, as i regret being rude to you guys as it cost a very important point to say dont you dare put that in the game i dident think you would but i dont think it was even acknowledged to the extend it should have been. Its part of what drove me to be so rude to you guys. Its a good way to constipate us really, but as to start up war, lean advantage toward not experience but rather country age/population and index.

At best i would say with the weapon limits/activation limits ofcourse its likely a load of too much but i would say needs to detemine these things not a raito of the total number that effects the total output as if some is given its all good, you take some thats deep waters!!

Im sorry for the bottem pats and such, i love you lady but really i just have to say i do appricate you being here andy thats helped the game i personally believe 1000% over all else. Being here caring is atleast for the most a good thing, lets us all know your there and atleast possibly acknowledging somethings. I do regret being rude i should have said more about this, its really just a thorn, hard to even notice anything else like said with this sore.

A suggestion if needed and not to much excess in reguiding the massive heap of build up that is this game i assume but reactivation/weapons goes more with military base power and miltiary bases are variously based on country situations, like employment needed for bases other then just soliders, possible index minimal, even population minimal. Even in excess when a country gets a new president, change its presidency date to the current takeover date and make it have purpose to buff/advantage such as more bases/population. A bit much but atleast vector is set to say no just a constant for reactivation but something more generated also make it happen automatically regardless of war or not, that is a lame feature. sure before war starts its nice but really thats not helpful to someone in a c3 war(especially higher level one).


Point being, population/age/index/ could be a better factor ability for activation, particaular with bases as more means more activation but also better of such requirements.

Andy if you remove the possibility of contracting forts to yourself you better make sure they are a profitable corp. Right now they are a money pit.

I have no reason to have them in a ceo if I can't use them and it's very obvious C3 corps are nowhere near capable of dealing with the demand.

I wouldn't care if you limited the number to 25 forts if you made them worth having in the first place.

All you need to do is make them block a region requiring land forces to deal with them and their garrison before they can paint that part of the map.

"Khome,
If you want to have everything active, do not deactivate. If you want to cut the cost, use it. It is either one or the other.
if you turn auto reactivation on, everything will be there before the war starts."

This does not address the issues I clearly stated above. I'M not the one deactivating; the new game "features" are automatically deactivating my weapons whenever I transport them from shuttle bay to country stock. I assure you, what you have said is very very clear; however, the deactivating is not MY doing. Te deactivation is, as stated, a result of the game process. That is the problem.
To be clear;
-I know that there will be an auto reactivation system
-I'm not choosing to deactivate; it's an automatic response after transferring weapons
-If auto reactivation promises to have all weapons ready before war, why not just let us activate when we want? (this question was not answered).
-Auto reactivation would not work for weapons in shuttle bays, so why should they be deactivated prior to moving into the country stock?
-Hypothetically, if I have weapons that are deactivated, why would they suddenly become active if I sell them to another player? That doesn't seem realistic, nor does not make any sense.



"A new player, with multiple countries?
multiple premium accounts? I do not think that this will happen.
We do not intend to pour huge assets into every new account and then wait to see what happens to the country and what they do with these assets.
Maybe delay any support until they are attacked? Premium only?"

If this is in response to my hypothetical scenarios, may I suggest rereading what I have posted.
-I didn't say anything about multiple premium accounts
-I didn't suggest that the "new" player would have the multiple countries (if this is what confused you); the suggestion is that the "new" player would be ATTACKING multiple countries. Big difference.
-In relation to what I just said, this hypothetical "new" player could be just a returning player who knows how to set up a quick army and knows how to wreck havoc


"Next upgrade will also allow deactivated weapons to be delivered to corporations (no extra clicking, just deliver what is there and start with the deactivated weapons)."

Please elaborate.

Sheepman,
Thank you. I appreciate your response and your care for the game.
I am very good in forgetting past issues. just looking to keep going and improve if possible.

There are many issues in the text you refer to and it is not really clear.
If you want to make a point, please explain precisely what you meant.
and not too many points in one message please.

On the reactivation:

It is far from a solution, I agree but I do not have a better one.

Making it depend on more parameters will make it hard to explain. the game is too complicated as is.

for the warring parties, it causes a delay but they can have it as they wait for the war to start.
Very big armies will indeed have a huge surge after each reactivation round.

we will always have unbalanced wars but the question is: will they win with little damage or will there be destruction on both sides, even more damage to the attacker because offensive is more expensive.

we remain open for improvements and ideas.
We prefer to remove features rather than add more. make things simpler and work better.

Yankee,
I answered on the other discussion.

Khome,

The deactivation is slowing down the build up process. We think that Information on weapons transport from space should be available and hope that countries will have more info about a possible war.

Sudden transports, after the war started, and immediate availability of activated weapons make it possible to fight and win a war even before the shortage of officers and soldiers is noticed and causes part of the army to deactivate.
This will hopefully not happen any more.

Answering your question about delivering weapons to corporations:

Countries could until now, sell only activated weapons to corporation.
Starting in a couple of days, they will be able to also sell the deactivated weapons.

This deactivation feature does not do everything we would like it to do but we think that the main problems with it are being resolved and its effect on your ability to setup your army is also very limited.

Multiple countries

This is not intended as a direct response to what you wrote.

There are issues here about all kinds of situations that might occur and the definition of a "new player" or one we would like to support.

What I am saying is that it is not clear, undecided and we will have to find solutions to many open issues.

One of the big problems was, many countries attacking one.
If we resolve this, the entire problem of "sudden elimination" might shrink.