Andy Please Read This

Andy, I love this game. I have been playing this for many years and I have lots of experience with PVP wars. I really feel like you are listening to the wrong people and are getting bad advice on what needs to be changed. Please take these ideas into consideration, and please listen to the players who play the game at the top level.

In order to solve the problem with the current state of the war game, we first need to identify the problems. In my opinion, the following are the major barriers to war:

1) War Levels - The majority of the players on peaceful worlds are below war level 3.

2) Too much micromanagement - In order to wage war, you need to have thousands of units deployed.

3) Too expensive - The cost to deploy and maintain armies is too expensive.

4) Too risky - Conquest is the only outcome of war. Most people do not want to play for keeps.

I would like to propose solutions that would address each of those problems.

1) It is my belief that war levels are bad for the game. They have created a situation on the peaceful worlds where the majority of players are able to maintain large empires with no risk by staying below WL3. On most worlds, there are only a few players that can actually be attacked, as a result, there is little to no interaction between players. The threat of war drives player interactions because it forces players to interact with their neighbours. To find out what their intentions are. To form alliances for mutual protection. Without war, this game is just a spreadsheet simulator. On peaceful worlds, players should only have their secure mode country and CEOs protected from war. This is enough. Empires should not have any protection whatsoever, unless war protection boosters are purchased with GC. This will be good for the game, and good for your pocketbooks as GC will have more value.

2) One of the biggest barriers to war is the amount of micromanagement it requires. It is extremely tedious and time consuming to wage war. To solve this problem, a multi-pronged approach is required. The first thing I would do here is unify the weapon systems. The distinction between offensive and defensive weapons is out of date, and needlessly complicates the war game. By unifying the weapons, it will reduce the amount of separate weapon and ammunition types that players will have to keep stock of. I understand wanting to have defense more powerful than offence. This can be solved very simply by giving defending units bonus damage in combat. So if your fighter planes attack my fighter planes, my planes will be 30% more effective than yours (or whatever percentage you decide). Similarly, if my planes attack your planes, then yours will receive this bonus instead. The second problem relating to micromanagement is the insane number of units that are required to wage war. Right now, unit sizes are so small that they can only do one attack before being completely ineffective due to lack of numbers. This makes long distance war with short range weapons extremely tedious because you literally have to airlift thousands of units so that they can only perform 1 attack each. In order to solve this problem we need to do 2 things. First is to make units bigger, and second is to make weapons more expensive to purchase. Unit sizes and weapon costs need to be massively increased. Units should be 10k-20k in size, and weapons should be increased in price by at least 100 times. This will serve several purposes: firstly, it will reduce the number of units required for war from thousands to likely less than 50. Second, it will hugely reduce the maintenance cost of deploying standing armies because fewer weapons will be required due to their increased cost. Having fewer units will make players value them more, and you may see named divisions with history being maintained by players. Military units that are deployed should gain professionalism points every game month that adds to their fighting level. This will incentivize players to maintain standing armies and attach value and history to their units. And finally, it will help bring some realism to weapon numbers. Deploying an aircraft carrier should be a big deal, but right now it is completely inconsequential because you need to deploy hundreds of them to be effective. Having an air defence of 1000 interceptors should be formidable, but right now it is nothing, and you actually need over 50k to be effective. In order for this change to be fair, existing arsenals need to be trimmed down by the exact proportion their prices are increased.

3) The cost of war is extremely prohibitive at the moment. The problem is not in weapon prices. I believe weapon prices are actually too low. The problem is in the price of ammunition and in the cost of maintaining the army. By decreasing the cost of ammunition and maintenance significantly, the cost of maintaining a standing army will be massively decreased. It will be decreased so much that increasing the cost of weapons will not be problematic for players, and it will allow the game to bring weapon numbers down in a meaningful way. By having fewer, but more expensive weapons, with cheap ammo and maintenance, players will see value in actually upgrading their equipment rather than just purchasing more.

4) War is risky. Not every player is comfortable with the amount of risk involved in war. What is the risk in war? The risk is in losing your country. Right now in sim country, every conflict must end in conquest. This is wrong. Conquest should be the exception not the norm, as it is in the real world today. Conquest should only be allowed with a security council vote. If a vote is passed, any country that brings the enemy War Index to 0 will have the option to conquer. Without a security council vote, the only available option should be terms of surrender. These terms would include some form of reparations payment and tribute payment for a fixed period of time. Possibly other humiliating factors like changing the flag and president picture for the length of the term. We want people to fight each other and cause each other economic damage without having to lose the countries they love.

In addition to these changes, I truly believe you should consider consolidation of the worlds. A new world needs to be created, and give players a period of 6 months to migrate their countries to the new world. Country migration should be possible as they would move as a self contained unit. CEOs should not migrate, but should be exchanged for GC or game cash value as I can see the difficulty in moving a CEO to another world as there would be no way to move the corporations with it since they are in many different countries. Once the migration period is complete, the other worlds should all be shut down, and everyone will play on the same world. If the world becomes too crowded, simply create more continents and keep everyone on the same planet. This will completely eliminate space travel, which is a feature that is completely abused by players to move military weapons around with impunity. Without space travel, CEO storage of weapons effectively becomes pointless as the only way to move the weapons will be through direct trades, which use spending space at 3 times the rate of market orders. Problem solved.

I think these are great suggestions and I endorse every one of them. Number 2 and 3 are my biggest ones I think but you really need most of these together for things to work. I suppose we could keep more than one world but we definitely have too many. If I have time over the next several days, I will move a modest defense into one country and fully deploy garrisons across the country to report the cost. I will show the garrisons I use and the units I deploy so we can see how much an actual defense costs in the budget. Maybe then the GM will see what we mean we say it is not a reasonable figure. Or maybe we will decide the defense I am building is bigger than anything I would ever actually need.

i very much agree on problems and solutions.

This may be a controversial opinion, so I dont want to attach it to my main point but I will share it here anyways. I think there should be limits on the number of attacks that can be performed per day for each country. Maybe 100-200 attacks per day. Once the limit is reached from both sides, each country will be given 10 additional attacks. If both countries use these extra attacks they will get 10 more each. That way if both players are online the war can continue in a tit for tat fashion. The purpose of this change is to slow down warfare so that people with busy schedules (most of the player base IMO) can still participate fairly in war. Wars should last much longer but require much less daily commitment in my opinion. Thoughts?

A player with a moderately sized standing army with high fighting level due to upgrades and professionalism points should be able to hold their own against a much larger conscript army. Fighting level should be of equal importance to numbers in my opinion. Players should feel safe with a strong peacetime army.

Also please eliminate mobile units. Just allow professional soldiers to be part of regular units. Then offer a bonus to fighting level based on the percentage of professional troops in the unit. Fighting level will be determined by weapon/ammo quality, professional troop percentage, and unit professionalism score (increases for every month a unit is deployed). Units with 100% professional troops should immediately get max professionalism score also to give even more advantage to the premium troops.

Thank you very much for these suggestions.

Some of the changes we talked about recently and started making will be addressing these issues.

I suggest we keep it in mind and check the suggestions against the developing situation.

we do not intend to pull the rug under any players who have based their strategy on the current situation.

Simcountry will evolve. It will make it easier for these players.
adapting to new situations will be gradual and will not destroy anyone.

Until very recently, the main point in all suggestions was the problem of war levels.

Now, that we have made suggestions as how to improve on war levels, other issues pop up as the most important.

fine and we read everything.

So we will make gradual changes as was discussed and explained before and I think many of these issues will be resolved.

Andy, i suggest to take few hours online call with few most experienced players as forum is wrong place to solve such issues. we could present our ideas in proper way. if you agree I will organize and send you details in private message.

i think after playing this game for decades we deserved some time of yours and we will not waste it i promise.

mndz

I also generally agree with what John said, and would be interested in a call like Mndz suggested if you think I meet the criteria. This is a great game with massive potential. There is a reason why (as Mndz said) players have played for decades. We'd love to help the game grow. Who knows, maybe we'll be here playing for another couple decades.

We have many things on our hands at this moment that need to be done and we will move forward with these issues.

We will continue to look at open issues remaining and discuss further, open for all players on this forum.

A better and stronger defense for smaller players is one of the main issues.

We should discuss at a place where large and many small players can express their opinions.
The forum seems like a good place for it.

I will get back to other issues brought up here.

Andy, this is fair point still please have in mind that we would make an extra step if needed to better support you.

We would also appreciate if you could point biggest issues you see from your end as well. this is open dialogue.

war is most exciting element in this game that makes you wake up late at night like you did yourself in our war, and it needs to be more of this, much more.

i will try to find some time in my busy calendar to post few more ideas regarding the pointed problems as well.

I agree with most what John says and appreciate the effort it takes to write out such a long post. Most us guys who've been around all these years just wanna help. The proposed war level changes is a good start. After that I think the GM's should look at the cost of standing armies.

I'd get rid of the monthly ammo usage altogether, like it used to be. Tie ammo usage into weapons training, like experience for example and give that a number to replace Weapons quality. Nobody understands quality it seems, I've conquered several player nations lately and not 1 of them has high quality weapons.

Changing the war engine to 1 units fits all kinda thing would be a great update but it's a complete overhaul of the current system by sounds of things and it would take alot of work, probably.

You could add all sorts of modifiers in that case though, like weather, terrain, range that sort of thing. defence plus 30% but bad weather an extra 10% buff.

Would be great to make more of the weapons systems relevant to.

I to agree with some of all the points mentioned. I really do not like the monthly ammo usage especially with the larger offensive missiles. The amounts used are just insane. There not worth deploying. Moving units a long distances is a heavy burden on resources and time. Keeping them supplied is a skill all on its own. I would like to see the navies more involved in troop / units deployments. (Navy Transport Fleet) each transport ship 2000 weapons. 100000 ammo. Max 20 transport ships per fleet. You would need to defend them or loose them or a high percentage if attacked and lost during transport. I look forward to the game changes and improvements that will come in time.

Rob

The next upgrade, don't know exactly when, will include a further decline of cost, also in the maintenance cost of the offensive army.

and I will repeat what we always say:
It will not damage the profitability of any type of corporation.

On the four worlds (not FB) everyone can choose to be peaceful and never involved in war.
The fact that there are not many you can fight is not keeping them awake.

They just want to play the peaceful game, this is what they subscribed to, and they will always be able to do so. The war game is an option.

however, if the war game becomes more attractive, and if the situation will be such that they stand a chance in a PvP war, they might dare one day to participate in one.

That will be really nice.
but it is up to them and it is not relevant in the current situation.

I think it is a great idea to have a session with long time experienced players. What keeps us here? Why do we keep coming back (for players like me who have come back 3 or 4 or 5 times over the years?) It may also be helpful to talk with newer players too. What makes them stay? What would they like to see different? This has never been the game that everyone will be interested in and that is part of the appeal. It takes long term planning and strategy.

Hi @Andy, @All,

posting another round of ideas to improve war game. Many of them are easy fixes I think.

Merging weapons

This has been discussed for a long time. Current system confuses new players as you can see your army units in the list, but you cannot use them to defend your country, they only acting when attacked. Merging main weapons into both defensive/offensive has many many benefits. I suggest to start from the below and over time add the rest. You don't need to merge them all, variety of weapons is ok, but weapons should be all useful.

• Fighters, Interceptors, Navy fighters, Navy Interceptors and their ammo -> Fighters & fighter missiles
• Navy Helicopters, Helicopters, Attack Helicopters and their ammo -> Helicopters & helicopter missiles
• Off Anti Aircraft Missile Batteries, Anti Aircraft Missile Batteries and their ammo -> SAM batteries & Anti air missiles
• Defensive Missile Batteries, Mid Range Missile Batteries, Land To Sea Missile Batteries, Anti Tank Missile Batteries, Navy Missile Batteries and their ammo - > Mid Range Missile Batteries & Mid Range missiles
• Heavy Tanks, Heavy Armored Vehicles, Light Tanks, Armored Vehicles and their ammo -> Tanks and tank shells

This would be more than enough for the first round.


Country take over

Take over of the country should be rare. I propose a very simple change - when war drops to 0, winner of war is offered 2 options

• Just end war - works as of now
• Take over country and pay 50% of its value in cash as compensation. - cash would be taken from winner account and transferred to defeated player's account. this way player who lost his country should not start from 0 rebuilding the country. No exploits are possible as you can only transfer cash which you already have and no new money are created.

I think this would be very easy fix which would reduce the risk of war. Value of country could be calculated using different logic that it on "Total of all Assets"

WAR index

It is very wrong that you can take the country with most of its army still standing. That never happens in the real life. To solve this situation you need to merge weapons as per #1 suggestion and also change logic of war index calculations.

New war index should have 3 main sectors:

• Damage to country - contains current indexes of damage to cities, corporations, fortifications etc and population killed
• Resistance of Army(* * *NEW * * *) - each army units and garrisons get points into war index. In order to win players would need to destroy most of the defending army. This would give good chances of defending party to apply different defending strategies, protecting this piece of war index.
• Occupation of country - works as of now

This change sounds simple to implement, still it would be clever to merge weapons first and also reduce number of units in general before.

Purpose of war

Wars should be attractive & rewarding - but they are not right now. Why:

• Player realizes that war is lost long before country is taken so he can move cash out of the country to the account, destroy weapons & ammo do other harm
• Corporations are usually all destroyed
• Population if transferred to developed country drops - so this is very temporary
• Additional country in full empire causes rebellions so additional country is dropped soon

Solutions:

• Prevent from transferring all money from the countries. Implement the rule that money transfer to the account is only possible when Empire has more funds than the amount in the account.(E.g. If account has 100T, while Empire has 110T then Empire can only transfer 10T). Moving funds back and forth doesn't break this logic - checked.
• Prevent destruction of army assets during war - it could also be below some WAR index points.
• Prevent corporations to be destroyed completely. Only allow them to be destroyed to 99%. This will ensure that next game month more war index points will be restored and defending party will be able to defend them. Also this guarantees that valuable corporations are not destroyed and can be restored after taking over the country.
• Every X wars won empire can be larger. Currently safe number of countries in the empire with no rebellion is 10, so after winning x wars it could increase to 11,12,13..

These are the functionality changes needed. I am not even talking about insane army costs, but costs can be reduced at any time if W3C feels players are protected.

Andy, please respond to the suggestions made as I feel many of them are low hanging fruits.

thanks

The ideas around different options for winning a war are great. I would be much more likely to engage in pvp war if I knew that I did not have to take their country. It isn't even that I would not want the country but do I really want an enemy who will build for however long necessary to get revenge and take out my countries? The idea that I could wage a pvp war and demand payment as victor is appealing. Perhaps a monthly payment for 120 months or a lump sum payment or a transfer of weapons or population. Built in protection should mean I could not declare war against them again for a fixed amount time (at least until the payments are ended and perhaps even longer than that, maybe 240 months).

I looked around and not many players have huge numbers of military units.

The cost of such huge numbers will remain too high to sustain.

Most players have smaller numbers. If these units become more powerful and usable in war, I hope that smaller numbers will be sufficient.

possibly, larger units will convince players to reduce numbers.
cost too.

We will continue to read and react to suggestions.
It can take some time as there are so many things to do.

I have a list of suggestions that will take many hours to read.
I can make suggestions in 15 minutes that will take 6 months to make.

so this will be a process of gradual changes and gradual processing of ideas and of selecting the ones that we think should be added.

We will prevent errors like the "War world" and listen to players, small and large as each group has its interests and points of views that match these interests.

There are however many things that are clear and should be dome.

we have said many times in the past, and did it too, that the cost of war must decline. we all agree.
we said that the defense must become more powerful and such changes should continue.

we are not sitting on our hands.

I am one of the largest players in the game, in terms of military assets, and I honestly want the war game to improve. The suggestions I am giving are not for my benefit, and if it is in the interest of balance, I will happily give up my entire arsenal if I am fairly compensated with game cash.

I think the quickest changes that can be made without reworking the entire war game at this point would be to increase unit size, increase weapon cost, decrease ammunition and maintenance costs, and allow offensive weapons to defend themselves when they are attacked.

Merging weapons, giving alternative options to conquest, and removing war levels would likely take significantly longer to incorporate, but I think they are worthwhile long term goals.

As was discussed before, we have reduced the cost of maintaining the army.
there were several rounds of changes, the latest was today, but it takes time to show up in the countries.

more will follow.

we are reading and processing many proposals.
it takes longer to create an option than to type an idea.

we have a plan before us and will integrate new ideas.

cool, that makes me happy. maybe we are over-expecting things to come but i really enjoy this process. finally this is happening.

Same here.

we are determined to improve the war game.

I am happy that the forum these days is largely a very constructive place with serious opinions and great ideas.

Going back to the first post here about the complexity of waging war.

I have a different opinion on weapons and ammo combinations.
maybe in time some will happen. we will now use the (updated) hand held missiles, as ammo for jeeps of both types.

but the other arguments are surprising:

make units with 20.000 weapons?
make weapons 100 times more expensive?

a strike by a huge unit like this will destroy so many very expensive weapons and use so much ammo, war will be very expensive.
If weapons are not destroyed, you will need to click for ever.

There are good elements here but I invite more reactions on this item.

1. Size of the units
2. Cost of weapons
3. Losses, soldiers and weapons.
4. Ammo use? cost and the rate of destruction.

A comment about "units with 20,000 weapons." I think large units (but not changing how many fire at once) would be beneficial - in particular, in offensive units. John commented "Right now, unit sizes are so small that they can only do one attack before being completely ineffective due to lack of numbers," which I'd like to talk about.

If you're fighting against an air defense, you currently need to make maximum size air force wings with fighters and probably bombers or drones in order to effectively fight interceptor wings. What happens is you fire ONCE, lose plenty of weapons, and now your unit is at, say 60% strength. Shooting with a low strength unit is a TERRIBLE idea - your losses are worse than if you shoot at full strength and you do less damage. What you need to do is disband your unit and make a new one with the full amount of weapons to shoot with. I just did this repeatedly in the last week. I probably had to disband and remake between 30-40 wings in half an hour, and if there was more defense, that number would have been much higher - in the 100s. I had the weapons on hand, but I had to deploy them one shot per unit before disbanding each unit. It's tedious. You should always try to be shooting with the max number of weapons if possible.

I think what's being proposed here (John can correct me and add more to this if needed) is that the amount of weapons shooting at once remains the same. However, you should be allowed to have a very large reserve of weapons within the unit. For example, say you can shoot with 500 fighters at once, but have 2000 fighters in reserve in the unit. If you lose 300 fighters with your first shot, fighters from reserve would fill in for the next shot. Your next shot would still have the maximum number of weapons attacking (500 in this example - you'd just have 1700 in reserve in the unit now). This way, you don't have to constantly make units, disband them, make units, disband them to keep shooting with the maximum number of weapons.

Land based cruise batteries work like this already, for example. If you have more than 1,000, you're limited to shooting 1,000 at once. If you lose some batteries, your reserves fill in and you shoot with 1,000 on your next shot.