W3C - Game news June 12, 2012

1. Population transfers

The minimum limit for population transfers between countries in the empire was linked to the limit used when population is offered on the market. That limit increased in the past weeks and months and unintentionally raised the limit used when moving population between countries of the empire.

We have now separated these two functions.

When moving population between countries in the same empire, the country where the population is moving out of, must have 20M people remaining in the country after the transfer.
This is a reduction from 60M.

The limit for the sale of population is now increased to 80M. That limit has been raised several times and will be raised again. The population sale function is obsolete and will eventually be removed from the game.

2. Cashing Gold Coins

While the virtual assets function is not available right now, we would like to remind you of the cash out option in Simcountry that allows players with many gold coins, to cash out some of these gold coins and receive a cash payment of $ 25.

This function is in place for a long time and is being used all the time.

As in the game terms and conditions, the function is not part of the game and can be turned off at any time. It is now on for at least the last two years and will for now, remain in place.

3. Menus

The menus in Simcountry are now always on. In the past, we had the option to turn the menus off. Nearly all players have these menus always on and only a few countries turned them off.

The reason for this change is that some of the menu functions had to remain on the country and portal pages because they are needed in case the menus are turned off. This has cause confusion as many game functions are showing on the screen twice. They show once directly on the page and once in the menu.

This change will now allow us to restructure the portal and main country pages and make the most used functions available on both.

Please also check the site map link on the left frame. It allows you to navigate quickly across the site.

4. Invasions

Invading the enemy's country is part of every war and it requires you to conquer at least part of the area of the country you fight against.
There is an additional reason for using land units in war. That reason may not be known to everyone.
When you attack a land target, the destruction power of your weapons is higher if one of your land units is located close to the target you attack. The assumption is that with your forces being close to the target, you have more accurate information on the target which allows your forces to be more effective.

In the current round of improvements to the war game, we will consider a reduction in the need to conquer areas of the enemy's country or even eliminate it. On the other hand, attacking targets with no units close by will become even less effective and the level of destruction from the air will have to increase even further to replace the damage points you used to get by invading the country.

All in all, the war game will continue to offer the current functionality but will offer an alternative way of conducting war, especially when there is no common border. This way of waging war will require much more air power and missiles because they will need to destroy more targets and their efficiency of doing so will be reduced for the lack of land forces invading the country.

5. Space Industry products

Recent reductions in numbers in Simcountry allowed for significant reductions in the price of space industry products in recent months. The corporations that produce cargo shuttles and their parts have reduced their need for very large amounts of money for the purchase of their raw materials.

The products remain relatively expensive and their numbers are small but the corporations are now easier to manage.

Cargo shuttles too are now produced for a lower amount of money and although the corporations producing them remain capital thirsty, the amounts are significantly lower.

6. IPOs and P/E ratios

The required P/E ratio for a corporation to go public is recently (temporarily) increased to make it easier for more corporations to go public. However, this resulted in unattractive shares of companies that are economically not strong enough, to be offered on the market and the investment funds which are the primary buyers of such shares, refused to purchase them in some cases.

Recently, corporate market values have undergone a correction and also, profits increased. These two way movements caused P/E ratios to fall and it is time to start correcting the required P/E ratio level needed to an IPO.

We will decrease that value in several steps, following a further decline in the P/E ratios. We expect that IPOs will remain easier than in the past and that the shares offered will be more attractive to the investment funds.

Andy

I can say for the first time in AWHILE good job +1, Nice to see a few updates that are going to really benefit the players.

The only thing i want to bring to light is the topic of removing the points we get for occupying countries and removing occupation. That 30points is VERY important to warring. It not only helps us drop the index but already does what you want to accomplish by increasing ground wars. I think to further increase this maybe you should look into other possible addition. I know im not the only one who's stated this but even destoring "ALL" cities, town, and the cap you don't kill all the pop needed for the 30WI points it provides nor do you get all the asset damage. What about adding something in where occupation forces can provide this either though a lingering effect by them being in the nation or actually by using them in an attack. Sure they wouldn't be as strong and deal the damage a Long Range Division can but if they where able to cause more pop/assets damage in there attacks it would only help to achieve the effect that you are looking for without removing the points we get for occupying nations.

As for countries with no common border what about allowing use to airdrop occupation units(much like SF) with a air wing of 50planes they should be able to airdrop 200jeeps easily into enemy territory. Also make sure that they give the provided bonus to air force attack units and BAM! your long range warring fixed.

(maybe allowing bombers/cruise missiles to be sold on the world market again might help to

Good post Super.

I do wish that the mentioned weaponry could be traded on all worlds on the world market.

we will not drop the points you can win by an invasion.
In fact, despite the possibility a war could be won without an invasion, it will be harder because you will have to win more points in other ways and your attacks will be less effective if your units are not close to the targets.

It will be easier to win if you invade and conquer large areas.

If occupation forces are needed to win, we will miss our point. The idea was to recreate a possibility to win without land forces although not so easy. we will have to see where and how these missing points will come from.
It might be from increased damage and death numbers.

I agree with Andy wars should be able to be won without landing forces, but like Andy says this way of winning is less affective. Becuase when you have troops stationed near objects your airfoce is trying to destory, it is easier and when no ground units are present its harder.

Also Andy i think a good war feature that super mentioned was war damage brought on by units staying in a country for a period of time.

So lets say you have 5,000 units in a country for every month that goes by it does 1 damage to a country, if you have 50,000 thats 10 if you have 150,000 than thats 30. Just look at the U.S the U.S had close to 150,000 troops in iraq at some points and with time the enemy warn down until they lost. It not uncommon in real life for 150T+ soldiers to be in a country so 30 war damage per month for 150T troops in an enemy coutnry would make the enemy want to create units and defend themselves in war.

I think you ment "K"(thousand) there's not even(i dout) there has every been 1T humans in existence. Its possible to win a war without land units. There's 170WI points total and only 30 of them come from painting. What the GM needs to do is not change the # of damage each index provides but more options to do more population or assets damage.

Just sheer force should do something having 10LRDS in a nation = no effect. Your telling me 100,000 men in 1month dont do any extra damage. Surely instead of killing pop add something in where the soldiers do so much economic damage, SOMETHING to help us lower the assest index, as for pop missiles and higher Q units should = more kills.

Example
Population 1,466,696
22252 casualties and 44058 civilians were wounded

I destoryed the CAPITAL of 1.4M people and all i did was 22,00 kills?

i'm against it, no painting that is. but thats just because it weakens my strat, so don't take me to seriously. but i like that part of the game

As we see it, you will be able to continue to paint areas and gain many damage points. nothing will change in that part of the war game.
winning without it will require some tuning to allow you to win damage points.
occupation is not a bad idea but then you need to invade and we were trying to find damage points without an invasion.
The number of dead and wounded used to go in the millions, also because wars involved very large numbers of weapons. now that the number of weapons is much smaller, we could increase the number of dead and wounded.
this is not the last word on that issue.

is there a specific value to each person killed?

just kindda weird that only 22k died in a population of 1.4 million?
that's less than 2% of the population, so how did these people escape the total destruction of their homes? or is that you don't have to totally destroy a city to conquer it. according to the game, when you click on a destroyed city, it said it's destroyed.

to make sense, should at least 50%, 80% or a certain % of the population be killed when you bombed the city to nothing?

I always liked painting, Orbiter. Seeing the orange always made me smile.

ya, i didn't mean that painting would be taken away, i meant that if some one wanted to take my country, if they HAD to paint it, it'd be a different plan, that requires more weapons, than if they didn't have to...

but i can point out, that this isn't really a huge change, or a change at all, but a rewind of the war rules. its nothing to air drop an sf unit (or several dozen,) for spotting and painting.

taking us back to having to be online to shoot the spotters... that can come in the hundreds. ok, i guess. so i guess the important first step would be to make it possible to select targets for auto-responce units. so that we could set them to auto-shoot sf units. so as an attacker destroys targets, the off line defense automatically shoots the painters that are causing problems.

hey, as an alternate solution.

how about making RDUs set up faster

or making an emergency construction unit, that can only be manned with professional soldiers? that can build an airport faster.

i think that both of those solutions can allow for easier remote wars, with out removing the painting requirement.

Or RDUs set up immediately for c3 wars... That would be a good idea.

I like the idea of the occupation units affecting population damage. As Super said, even destroying all population centers, etc. doesn't come close to the damage possible.

Or if you want to amp up the damage - have those missing numbers migrate out in a random fashion.

And I like Orbiter's idea. Have units fire on anything that comes into their Zone of Control. There shouldn't be any real reason to massively favor waiting for someone to log off to attack them. As it now sits, the majority of defensive units don't do anything if you're offline. Only air units, and garrisons really have any material impact. (and of course, supply units - but that's only repainting.)

I don't know enough about the RDU's to make any suggestion there, But I do have 2 questions. How easily are they taken out in the deployment phase, by both the computer and other players? And taking them down after deployed - I'm assuming that's comparable to taking out an offensive airport that was constructed in the normal process?

Great discussion here.
the immediate setup of remote bases in C3 countries is already accepted.
but there is much more here that makes sense.
please keep going.

also keep in mind that we will have mobile units, manned by professionals that will be able to cross all borders, war or no war.
they will include land forces, small but effective, intelligence units, auto response and stealth units.

mobile units will transport on cargo shuttles, will be traded on a space station as a product.
shuttles will be able to land in remote bases and deliver such units.
we also plan the transportation of such units by boat.

We think that a military unit that is positioned very closed to a target under attack, should participate in the defense and indeed, that defense units should not just stand there when an enemy unit is passing by.

Currently, testing is continuing of the war game played on the large maps.
the first stage will be a transition of functions from the current maps to the new ones, but we will continue to move to a map centric war game and add easier to use features.
having multiple maps on the screen at the same time will improve the visibility of the warring countries and make it easier to fight on multiple fronts.

Immediate set up of RDU's in c3s. Going to make pvp a lot more acessible. Just drop one computer controlled target within range, take it out, airlift in, and head on to the real enemy. No more long waits to attack a target half way around the world, as long as you can chart a path to it.

Phoenix Hawk has stated in another thread of the possibility of someone using multiple accounts for "blocking" purposes. Hopefully these cretins will be caught and nipped in the bud, before this change encourages them to proliferate.

In regards to the Enterprise controlled units - are those going to be on a leased basis, with control going to the country hiring them, or will they remain under Enterprise control for the duration of that war, necessitating a war page in the Enterprise menus? Either way, looks like there is going to be a command and control problem.

a word of concern about mobile units, considering the cost of professional soldiers, they seem more expensive than practical. maybe if i understood better the expected man power usage of a basic mobile unit, it'd make it more clear.

Will the immediate set up of rdu's be tied in release time to some of the other suggestions? Looks to be a blood bath if not. Time was put in to delay the attack, giving the defender time to prepare/get online. If that's removed before other protections are in place, looks to defeat the purpose.

Shuttles landing - will that be at an RDU or a different base in the FEBA? And can those shuttles be armed? Make a great strategic weapons platform. Instead of nukes, they could use space rocks and junk.

The cost of mobile units is a concern. When the final setup for these units is decided, we will compute the cost.

Don't forget that mobile units can be moved from one country to another and will reduce the number of units you need in your empire.

Also weapons and ammunition are now coming at a lower price. Soldiers and officers are the main issue and we will shortly know how many are needed.

Taking a C3 far away and close to a country you want to attack will become quicker but the war declaration against that enemy has a delay.

The time it took for an RDU to build an airport was needed to allow the country time to try and prevent it. A C3 is not trying to prevent the set up of a remote base, this is why the setup can be immediate.