W3C - Game News February 28, 2020

Cost of Defense and defensive weapons

The cost of many defensive weapons is reduced again. Also defensive ammunition is reduced in price.

Offensive weapons remained largely at the same level; some are slightly more expensive.

also some nuclear weapons are now more expensive, this was discussed here several weeks ago.

Some defensive weapons are more effective.
The changes are aimed at improving the balance between the defensive and offensive armies.

Military units

Some military units increased in size.
A small number decreased in size.
The setup process of military units allows you to make wide range choices of the weapons you want in the unit.

as a result, some units can be smaller and in fact, some units are obsolete.

Corporations

Corporations keep increasing their sizes.
Several types of corporations now employ more workers and managers to continue trying to limits the number of corporations game wide.

Natural Resources Corporations

Natural resources corporations cannot be moved from one country to another.
Before, you could for example, move an oil company to another country and all underground deposits of oil, were supposed to move along with the corporation.

This is of course an error and it is now fixed.

New Players on the Forum

New players had to wait for 48 hours before they could join the forum.
we have now reduced the waiting time to 1 hour.

In the past, we had reasons for the delay. We will now observe how it works and hope to leave it at one hour.

Notifications of Sneak Attacks

The notifications of sneak attacks used to mention the country name of the attacker.
The name is now removed.

Sneak Attacks in the newspaper

The country newspaper used to show the name of the attacking military unit.
The name is now removed.

Air Transport Units

Air transport units are only resupplied when they are called for action. This resulted in many error messages about the shortage of materials in these units.
The messages are now removed.
The supplies are delivered as before, when the unit is called for a transport.

Sales price setting limits

A bug is resolved, allowing the sales price to be set at two different max levels on two different pages.
It is now the same on both pages.

More weapon types in sneak attacks

The feature was requested and it was done.
it did not make it into this upgrade. It will be included in the next one.

The upgrade is now installed on KB.
It will be installed on all other worlds after the current month run is completed.

Wow, amazing list of changes! I like them all!

What weapons will be included for sneak attacks?

I looked at the military unit changes, and it seems like all of the units that people use have been decreased in size. Was this the intention? Divisions are down from 1510 to 1400, navies dropped from 1412 to 1162.

Strangely interceptor wings bumped to 400 but not helicopters.

Garrisons increased from 1200ish to 1600ish.

I like that mobile interceptor wings were bumped to 300. Helicopter wings slightly bumped, but still only at 180.

Very much agree - this is nice pack of updates in general

The part i don't really like is reduction of most popular offensive units sizes, this will just require to have more of them which adds more complexity to control them all..

Smaller units could work but changes need to be made to make it work. The changes would have to come all in one swoop and not gradual over time. The way the game is right now encourages larger armies. Having smaller units within the current framework makes it tedious and complex as Mndz pointed out. The driving force behind small units is realism. I can get behind that. The biggest obstacle to achieving small units is the existing arsenals. Increasing the price of weapons does not make units smaller. It just makes me richer. You need to increase the prices, but at the same time trim down the stockpiles proportionally to the price increases so it is revenue neutral. In the past all you guys were doing was increasing the price and shrinking unit sizes. That on its own is not enough. You have to deal with the arsenals. You also have to reduce production numbers proportionally.

Example: Lets say I have 1 million bombers in stock. If you increase the price 100 times, you would need to cut my bomber numbers by 100 times also, bringing it down to 10,000 bombers. This way I lose nothing value wise, but we achieve the goal of having smaller units.

Smaller units in a framework where weapons are scarce would be great. It reduces the complexity, increases realism, and maybe players will actually value their weapons. I think ammo needs to remain cheap, manpower use should be unchanged, and maintenance should be unchanged. This would allow people to deploy EFFECTIVE and powerful standing armies in peacetime without going bankrupt

As long as I dont lose money and everyone is being trimmed proportionally I wouldnt have an issue with it. What are your thoughts Mndz?

Andy,

Any idea when the next resource spawn is going to be? A lot of resource Corporations have been closing lately, and there doesn't seem to be enough deposits in premium countries, to replace them all.

Hi John,

My thoughts:

• Unit sizes: I don't care how big is the unit. What I don't like is that now every unit serves for few attacks only and then you need to use another unit. This is because when attacking you want to use optimal number of offensive weapons so after the first attack and the losses suffered your unit cannot have max number of weapons allowed to be used per attack. This is so silly. If number of weapons are reduced why not to reduce the max weapons allowed to participate in attack and defense??? After the last update each unit will only be used for a single attack.
• Military spending budget: If we supposed to use less and less weapons why spending budgets are not changing with all decreases in weapon prices? I can only image that new players see how much they can buy with a single military budget and they have no clue that they will not be able to support these weapons. Just look here..this is not normal and totally misleading the players of how much weapons are needed
• Weapon prices: I would like to see expensive weapons and cheap ammunition, if weapons are cheap how you can stop buying them? I think with the current unit sizes weapons need to be 10 times more expensive and number of weapons participating in attacks reduced 5 times. Price of ammunition can be decreased even more to 5 or more times. this will allow to have active armies, which are equipped with precious weapons, then also upgrading that unit to max 450 quality will not be problem because they will be active all the time.
• Ammunition upgrades: must be cheaper, currently it is only worth to upgrade weapons. The cost of ammo upgrades needs to be reduced tens of times. Prices of ammunition, especially defense have been decreasing but upgrade costs remained the same, so it turns out there is no balance.
• Air superiority: I think it is very wrong that the wars are decided when you win the air. After that moment it is basically the matter of time when you destroy the rest. I think the trend would be to increase fighting capabilities of garrisons and also offensive land weapons, prevent garrisons to be destroyed with the targets, have war index to depend on active land military units defending the country and not on destruction of cities, factories, forts. Increase war index for occupation, while decreasing the rest. Force to occupy more areas than now to get these war index points.
• Cost of war:With the current set up active armies are too much expensive, just look how much Andy used to spend on his army maintenance only to be engaged into single country vs country fight. Can you imagine what is the cost to maintain active wars between federations?? This is insane amount of money..

I also think that cost of usage of Military supplies, Gasoline and Aircraft Fuel are not included into the calculation for total cost of defense therefore not included into the Profit/Loss calculation. Probably these numbers are not collected from active military units. This gives wrong understanding of how much your military is actually eating. E.g. Andy had been losing about 3T cash per month to maintain his army, but profit/loss only shows 700B

Andy, can you please check this, it is very important.

The 3T in losses may have been bulk purchases of supplies due to the sudden surge in demand. The profit/loss would only reflect the actual monthly cost of those supplies, not the entire bulk purchase. I do think they are factored in because they show up in the government spending list, but it doesn't hurt to check.

Mndz I am glad we are mostly on the same page on expensive weapons, cheap ammo, small units, and smaller attack sizes. I think that in conjunction with trimming the arsenals down proportionally, and hopefully someday merging offensive weapons with defensive weapons into unified dual-purpose weapons would go a long way to fixing huge problems in the current war engine. The framework is there and it is great. It just needs some tweaking to make it better.

I think the best thing about doing it this way is that it will be possible for players to maintain standing armies without going bankrupt. I deploy a few thousand interceptors and helicopters in every country during peacetime to defend against sneak attacks mostly. It is super cheap for a deployment of that size. But in a real war, that defense size is a drop in the bucket and completely ineffective. In the war engine I would like to see, that deployment should be extremely powerful, but cost the same as it does now.

I had been watching the cashflow of Andy for few days, it dropped from 25T. When I took the country it had extreme negative resources of military supplies, gasoline and Aircraft fuel, this is why I think it has not been included into the calculation of financial index.

I think we are both agree also that changing some numbers like price of weapons or unit sizes doesn't improve situation much, the entire dynamics needs to be changed, including military spending, army costs, solders need, weapon strength, durability, unit sizes, weapon limitations per units, war index calculation logic, speed of weapons deactivation/reactivation and many more.

One thing that I don't understand is why we need to have the type of inactive weapons, when most of the weapons are useless without units. For me there are only 2 statuses of them I have weapon(active) or weapon is in unit. I think it is super complex for people to understand how to move weapons, how to get units populated with them in time. Maybe very fast decision would be to allow units to be formed from all kinds of weapons, not just active..

I think weapons that are not in units should always be considered reserves (inactive), and thus have the benefit of reduced manpower and consumption. Then when you put them into units, they become active. Weapons in units should gain 1 fighting level per month up to a max of 100, as a bonus for active service/unit cohesion. That would be the trade off from keeping weapons in inactive/reserve status or paying more to have them in units so that they gain stronger fighting ability. Then we can remove the whole deactivate/reactivate weapons garbage.

Edit: I just want to add that if you dismantle the unit, the bonuses should be lost. They would not be considered upgrades to the weapons/ammo, but another temporary parameter that contributes to the total fighting level.

this is very good idea! would make things much better and easier.

The changes in units are aimed at improving the balance between offensive and defensive armies.

Most units became larger, including air units, mobile units etc.

several units became a bit smaller.

the feature that makes it possible for the player to change numbers of weapons in units, makes it possible to create units that are more powerful than before or more powerful than intended.

It means that such units can be smaller.
some units are obsolete but cannot be removed because they exist in many countries.

FB being a war world, makes such tuning more urgent.

The same applies to the cost.

we have reduced the cost of the defense in the last upgrade and more reductions will follow in the next upgrade.

The cost of the offensive and strategic armies will increase a bit.
strategic weapons increase in price and become more powerful.

This was discussed/requested here and we have promised to make the changes.

Andy I think you will never be able to achieve balance with the current framework. I think a complete overhaul of the war game is required. The war engine itself is great. We have a solid foundation to build on. The areas that need to be changed are the unit sizes, cost of weapons, existing player arsenals, removing the distinction between offensive and defensive weapons, and reworking the damage dealt and received by various weapons.

I think this is an area of the game that Mndz and I can offer a lot of help with if you are willing to accept it. We both want the war game to thrive and there are some big issues getting in the way of that. These issues are not immediately apparent until you really get into the war game. My suspicion is that the developers do not participate much in the war game and may not see the issues that the players do.

Hi Andy,

I do agree with what John is saying, I want game to bring best possible gaming experience which is actually in war, in the moments when war can go in any way and people take risks, enjoy and want to do it again and again - economy part cannot bring anything near that. I was very lucky to feel that exciting moment in the war we had the last week, and these moments are making worth the money to pay you to keep this game alive, problem is that these moments are too rare unfortunately.

John and I are both wiling to destroy our arsenals if this is needed for the better balance in the game, that would be 3-4000T worth of weapons if you are afraid that John or me are can become showstoppers. We both love this game and we will do everything to make it great again, even if it means encouraging you to make necessary changes for years.

Andy, I know the latest changes were reactionary to your war with Mndz. You didnt like his use of NFP to clear your air defense so you boosted defense interceptor wing sizes. What you are not realizing is that your air defense failure was due to the fact you were not in a federation with yourself. With only one country you only get one air defense wing. With 2 countries you get 3 wings. It used to be 990 interceptors vs 1000 NFP which was fair, now it is 1200 interceptors vs 1000 NFP. Dont even think about using ground based aircraft. You will now have 1200 interceptors vs 710 fighter planes. You have essentially made air power completely useless because you lost a war to Mndz. Changes to the war game should not be reactionary like this. You also wasted many of your conventional batteries targeting army bases when you should have been firing on his cruise missile ship fleets. Then deploy some Offensive AA or Fighter planes to take down his NFP fleets.

I think all development needs to be directed to overhauling the war game. Pause everything else for now. The economy is functioning. In the areas where it is not (mining) just create resources for us for now. That can be fixed later.

What would I do?
Merge offensive and defense weapons. All weapons can attack and defend. Weapons in defend get bonus damage and defense to keep the balance in defenders favour. All existing arsenals and corps will be changed to their new combined version.

Increase weapon cost 100 times and decrease all weapon numbers in game by 100 times to keep revenue neutral. Decrease weapon production 100 times also.

Keep ammo cheap and no change to consumption of ammo and supplies.

Increase unit sizes. Bigger units with fewer and more expensive weapons will significantly reduce micromanagement.

Remove active/inactive designation. Weapons in units are active. Weapons outside units are inactive and use less manpower and supplies. Weapons in units gain fighting bonus every month up to a set maximum. Bonus is lost if unit is disbanded.

Attacks should not be resolved immediately. They should take a few game days. This will slow the pace down of war. Units and garrisons involved in an attack will be locked in combat. Nearby units can also join in the attack and tilt the balance. The way war happens now is 16 simultaneous mini battles. Perhaps each mini battle takes a game day and the results are updated in real-time. Units can break from the battle at a cost anytime if they are not surrounded.

And of course. Remove war levels.


What is the hope?
Standing armies that do not bankrupt you. Named units that players care about and that have a history. Wars won by skill not by arsenal size. Reducing the micromanagement of war and the time commitment significantly.

I agree with all what John mentioned only 1 addition make land fights more significant, more war index points to occupation and killing units, but not for destroying targets. I enjoy painting maps with army units, any resistance and ground fights would be amazing.

I agree about painting. I personally would like to see close to 100% painting required for victory. The purpose of combat should be to clear space on the map for painting. Nothing else should factor in.

Andy realistically what would it cost in terms of dollars to really overhaul the war game? Maybe the community as a whole can do some bulk gold coin purchases to get us there.

Yes, if Andy tells the price we can collect the money

Bump!