It's not fun. The game was already grindy enough and now it's really just lost all it's appeal for me. I just had a game where my enemy spent somewhere around 15M GM and still managed to lose to my coalition. The premium spies are kind of ruinous to the game. If someone is willing to spend enough money and remove all your buildings and lower all your morale to 0 in over 200 provinces there's really no game left at all. Like most players I'm not a big fan of excessive GM spending but I usually accept it as good for the overall game. That being said even though i still wound up winning the game with my coalition is was really no fun at all once I could no longer build any units. After being in first place for about 40 game days my last 10 games days were spent trying to keep as many provinces as possible from revolting. In the end I lost about half my land to revolts (maybe a little more than half) and ended with 125 provinces that only scored 5 points because I had no buildings and 0 morale.
I tried the new game but beyond a certain point S1 is almost totally about fighting the morale penalties that are ever increasing as you expand. I have one game here left to finish, should end with a 17 wins in 21 games record and then it's time for me to find something a little more fun or at least something where the design choices don't seem so awful.
Posts by psychlops
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Very old discussion even before Air units became default. Railguns if you move fast are jus tto slow to help you on the offensive, being outranged by bombers randered them totalyl useless.
Kind of makes my point, but I have to say if you're spending 3M GM on a game they're impressively powerful not much anyone can do to a stack of them with instant railroads and 70-90 fighters
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If you look I pointed out that they sometimes have their uses on islands in the second paragraph but in reality anyone building railguns or planning on being on defense bu the time railguns are available is not really playing to win.
There are definitely units with MUCH lower utility than other units. Railguns are some of the worst units in terms of opportunity cost. They don't help you win and almost invariably you would be better served to build something else instead for all those resources and factory time.
You might think that rail guns turned the tide of a battle you had but in reality they likely just helped you beat a bad player in a different way. Anyone losing to railguns is likely going to lose anyway. -
I know here's a temptation to build them, there's something intimidating in this game about being the player with more range and no one likes to take fire without returning fire so having railguns creates a situation where that almost never happens to you. But really they are awful. Fools gold at best. The people who build them are not playing to win they are trying not to lose. You can't use them on offense because it takes too long to build a railroad (3 days wait after every province) they move too slow, they can be immobilized trivially easily and faster units can always flank them. They don;t have so much firepower that running them over is out of the question either. People seem to love them but really they are mostly building a unit that won't help them win, it just helps them be annoying to kill. The resources and factory time are huge opportunity costs for a unit that basically will be left behind if you're winning and won;t change much about the outcome if you're already losing.
the almost all the time part is two fold. sometimes the geography of a certain part of the map lends itself favorably to rail guns, if you start on an island it can help to keep battleships away but the real answer there is to have your own battleships which can also go on the offensive. They can also sometimes change the dynamics at the suez canal on the 100 player map.
there's one more time where railguns are pretty strong. If you're spending 3M+ GM to try and win a game then building 50 railguns and instantly building a railroad in every province you take gets rid of much of the speed penalty for having railguns. I'm in a game now where one guy dropped $1400 on GM and even after we killed 20 of his fighters, 15 of his rail guns and 30 of his bombers he just built 150 more planes and 30 more rail guns. With enough GM rail guns are basically unstoppable. I don't know why he bothered to buy 40 heavy tanks no one can get near his stack. -
Btw, I love your #3 idea, but it is extremely difficult to do that...
polls are trivial. it's a solved problem and the code exists in a thousand different places on the internet. integrating the code to the existing login/user table is the only real hurdle here.
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Display MoreI agree that money is required to thrive in the business industry. Money is required to keep the Servers up and running.
But there surely must be a way to incorporate the format by not hurting the companies bottom line goal of people expending lot of money.
Maybe a game where there is No GM spending allowed you reduce the the reward to basic low or do not keep it at all.
Games with GM's could have a higher reward attracting everyone to play. I have seen people will do anything to win so I am sure people will spend ample amount of money to buy GM's.
You guys can always research upon the model to improve your visibility to much more audience.
This doesn't mirror reality. First if you had the server data and purchase data or had simply played a lot of games you should realize that people sometimes spend $100 or $200 on GM in a normal game with normal rewards. The reward has almost nothing to do with what prompts spending. It's more likely you run into a whale in the 60k GM reward events but I've run into players with 1M GM in a regular 100 player map. One guy burned 600k trying to keep his air force so large a coalition could not dig him out of north america.
Mostly spending is probably driven by 4-5 things
- ego
- anger
- impatience
- revenge
- alcohol
and most of them really can be wrapped up by 1-2 words. impulse and emotion.
There's basically less than zero incentive at all for bytro to offer any "no GM games". Some of the people playing those games would otherwise be in regular games and might get their feelings hurt enough to break out their wallet. this is a huge opportunity cost for Bytro. Effectively you're telling a bar operator that you would like to tie up half his tables with your book-club and those people will not only juts be drinking water but they are going to lure some of the drinkers to sit with them and just drink water.
You're not stepping back far enough and thinking about how your suggestions would actually impact Bytro. You're fixated on a desire to have the setting you want 'completely free game with no chance of other players having a GM advantage' but the only way this would be possible is if you all agreed to some form of subscription service where people who had the "all things even" monthly pass could play in games that were just for them. The worst part about some of your suggestions is if you got your way the game would probably go offline when they could not pay their bills. -
READ BEFORE POSTING: Biglist and Guide
Pretty sure it has been suggested before, millions of times but the reason Fleming gives is the reason Bytro gives. Despite the abilities to turn that off. They Don't want to introduce a feature that would annoy heavy GM users.If that's the case you could have the default setting to "off". It's a sad reality but I think the real reason it's so easy to make a mistake and GM is because someone came to the conclusion this would help increase revenue. I'm not sure how others feel but me personally, I don't like the feeling of being cheated when it comes to money so it makes it hard for me to put any money into this game. That's just me, your mileage may vary.
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best put your capital in the middle of your empire
This is a nonsensical answer. EVERYONE who has played for a bit understand the morale impacts of moving your capital. The problem is corruption has nothing to do with your capital my corruption is 15% everywhere. regardless of distance or buildings. If you're the guy pushing the team to a win you're going to have a lot of land and potentially a lot of wars. this is debilitating to keeping your economy going in conjunction with distance and war penalties it makes the game shockingly grindy when in fact it's already over.
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I had the exact same problem with the interface. the - button to remove a military espionage spy from a province jumps the screen right to the reveal all armies button. I had 200 spies on the player and 10 of them were in one province, I clicked the - button 10 times and got reveal all armies on a player my silver spies had already given me reveal all armies on. Even though I already had reveal all armies they still charged me for one use. It's the only premium spy I've ever used and I got zero benefit. I've seen wallet warrior burn down entire provinces before just not a single resource with no upgrades.
I'm no fan of the burn down but I wonder if it's worse than the parachuting battleships maneuver. guy takes one province, builds a 2 workshops, harbor, airfield, level 5 fortress, 3 battleships, 2 bombers and 2 fighters right in the middle of my provinces. The funny thing is he was so bad he still lost the game. -
So we have to wait 3 days? That's really bad. He's completely gone, no men, no land.
I would assume the new leader would be the oldest member (meaning the member who joined first) because there's a log that shows when people joined. -
I wrote a very similar guide that I give to a newbie or 3 every game. It overlaps this one about 80%. Considering English is not his first language it's crazy how close some of our descriptions are.
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does the game give the leadership to someone else or are we relying on the leader to login again and assign someone the spot?
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I've got a recruiting office in a remote province that keeps turning off and then it disappeared. I thought maybe someone was using spies on me, though this province would be a very low priority target it's got a single gas or coal and no upgrades. Every time I see the recruiting office shut off I look in the paper to see if I'm getting hit by spies but I have not had any reports and the game is pretty early for significant spying (the first instance was around turn 8-9 and it's only turn 14)
I thought it might be a bug or maybe they changed how spy attacks are reported (but I checked in other games where I'm unleashing lots of spies they all show up in the paper). I don't understand why anyone would be spending GM to target a single resource oil (I just checked) with no upgrades besides a recruiting office when right next to it I have a double metal with a railroad and factory and a double wood with a railroad and factory. Am i missing something? is someone spending thousands of Gm to mess with me to no effect other than make me wonder if the game is buggy?
anyone seen anything like this before? do the premium spies just disappear buildings with no report in the paper? can the premium spies be so ineffective that for 2000 GM they just turn off the recruiting office? -
You? A problem? Surely you jest.
I tend to be a bit 'forceful' when I think I'm correct or least have a salient point. My life has revolved around a lot "paths" that did not coddle feelings. Most of my life has been spent in very male dominated pursuits where directness and championing your ideas was valued at the expense of soft skills quite frequently. The internet makes being direct without being an ass-hat more difficult but I am who I am and being aware of the problem is half the battle.
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Yes, you are right. I love the word you chose, "jerk". Good choice of words. haha, I'm a jerk sometimes. But probably you should use arrogant instead.
I have a dose of both at times.
I was just trying to point out that one player won't make or break an alliance 99% of the time and almost everyone who is interested enough in the game to post on the forums is probably pretty good at strategy. That's mostly who is attracted to the forums, strong players who want more information and like to crunch the numbers and malcontents are always the most common posters.
It's a well known fact from the game development/community management side of things that less than 10% of the players will make 90% of all the posts and less than 1% will cause 90% of the problems. I've been involved with games for a very long time. A designer, developer, coder, play/beta tester, balance analysis, security analysis, mod, admin, superuser, community manager, exploit detection, multi account detection and a problem in the forums at various times in my life
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I guess I'm good at strategy. People say if I ever join an alliance, that alliance is going to win (not all time, but increase the possibility to win). I've seen many people said that. So the best way is to not join any of them, otherwise the unbalanced power or smart minds would appear, and maybe create a unnecessary fight between alliances.
Not to be a jerk (which I sometimes excel at), but you've won 2 games in 24 starts. I wouldn't worry too much about unbalancing things and tipping the scales of power.
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So I'm watching more closely the corruption values. They are continuously going up across my entire empire. 15% now in EVERY province including the ones I started the game with. Currently the break even point for a single resource province to actually produce any revenue is 87 morale. A railroad on a single province with 100 morale costs just about the same amount of coal as I'm turning a profit in the other resource. If the province is below 95 and has a railroad it costs more coal than the railroad gives in increased revenue.
I've been thinking about the motivation for doing this and my best guesses are it's either someone not paying attention to the math or someone came up with the idea to throttle the "snowball effect" of being out in front in this game. meaning the person with the most provinces was accelerating faster than others could hope to catch up. The massive downside of this rationale is that you're making the end game which is already horribly grindy (I've had allies on the 500 player map quit the game entirely because the grind was so awful at the end) even more grindy. It's nice when a game has a mechanic for catching up so players don't feel completely 'out of it' but we're not playing chutes and ladders. This is more like chess and when you've fallen behind the game becomes harder.
The real mechanic for making a comeback or taking down the front runner in this game is diplomacy. The corruption mechanic is massively unfun. It's also redundant with the distance penalty to morale. At least we can work on 'fixing' morale and there are clearly defined rules around morale but I have no idea what causes corruption and there does not appear to be any method of rolling it back. My economy runs slower and slower the bigger I get despite dozens of harbors and railroads and morale in the 90's. You're making the worst parts of the game even more painful.
Can someone from Bytro please weigh in on this and give us even the slightest bit of insight? I'm invariably in the corner of mechanics that help make the bottom line stronger but I would really like to hear how this is good for the game/community/retention. It's even more egregious because it's not transparent. -
It's a bad fix to an old problem. The old problem was that if you were defending an allies fort the enemy could attack the fort and take it out from under you and then you would be attacking him from outside the fort. They fixed this by making forts stay with the owner until all enemy or potential enemy units were gone. The correct fix would be to check the status of the attacking units against everyone inside a fort. If you're at peace or embargo with someone inside the fort then you must kill them to take it but if you have right of way or shared map with everyone left in the fort then you should capture the fort from the player you're at war with. This allows coalitions to defend their allies land against enemies (if you're not giving them right of way then you're forces will fight if the fort is attacked by a 3rd party) but does not allow an inactive former ally to block a fort indefinitely.
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It would probably be an issue that big spenders, who spend GM multiple times in a row to boost troops/buildings, would have to click dozens of confirmation windows to spend their currency.
This is extremely easy to code into the settings to have a "flag" set/unset if you would prefer to turn the confirmation off. You just default the confirmation screen to on and let anyone who finds it a hassle turn it off. It's a trivial bit of code for both the confirmation screen and the on/off flag, though I suppose you have to do it on multiple code bases (mobile vs web) and it also requires an additional field in the profile/client/user table of the database. Anyway it's an easy fix, there are probably countless examples of this code available in free repositories.
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This will never happen, the free games would be heavily populated and the GM games would be nearly empty and the GM players would then only be facing other GM players. This devalues GM, if everyone is spending these players lose the advantage they got from GM THEY PAID FOR. If everyone on the map is spending real money you're effectively being forced to spend money in order to just keep up instead of gain an advantage. If you're not getting an advantage why not just play the free games? You might get some very high ROI games once in a while but generally speaking this would most likely slice a massive chunk (maybe all of it) from the revenue of Bytro and probably end the game as a viable business.
It's a non starter to pitch any ideas that adversely impacts the company's bottom line. GM is a necessary evil because this game is not a hobby for some programmer it's a full time gig for more than 1 person so unless you're proposing a method to increase revenue at the same time you're proposing something that definitely decreases revenue there's less than zero chance anyone will listen.
