As a player who has been away since 2017 and has considered returning I am very interested in the feedback to the above posts by Lost Realist.
Well, if you're still curious, it got diddly squat. I don't know, I guess my ideas were just that terrible.
Oh yeah man, this is the one that'll keep me away for good. Thanks, I needed this.
Other people's mobilization is not truly actually shown to you and not factored into the calculation that outputs the strength that is shown to you either. The other guy has the handicap as well, it just doesn't show to you, because it's none of your business. It's a bit misleading that it just assumes perfect mobilization for those units then, but that's how it is.
Hmm i do understand your point LostRealist the problem is they need a good working version you can play mobil too on nearly any device. with legacy thats rather hard. Besides the fact some new things and units they are working on are rather difficult to put into legacy.
Basicaly its has become a oneypit. I do understand that. I dont have to like it lol.
If they want to keep this game free to play for most players as it is now they have to comeup with a solution that works and unfortunatly legacy does not fit in that solution.
I don't give a jack about legacy and how unprofitable it apparently was, steering everyone involved with its maintainment and development into unavoidable poverty.
My point was that there was never a need for its successor to be the way it is. And that it could have been improved since the day it rolled upon us. But it is, and then it wasn't. At least not in meaningful ways. Saying how bad Legacy was doesn't make the new client any better at all.
put them in double resource provinces for more efficiency
24h/50% = 12h of time saved
12h/50% = 6h of time saved
Total time saved on recruitment is 100% more in a single province than in a double. It's not more efficient to place them in doubles but it allows for the higher output frequency.
And ah I'm already at it, let's get nitpicky some more:
2. When taking a new territory make sure you have at least 7 troops on the province until the moral goes up at day change. That will prevent the province from revolting and any troops on there going to another country.
3. Keep an eye on your resources. If any of them drop to 0 you're going to start losing moral and troops [if it's food you have 0 of] and your provinces will start revolting.
2. What you need in a new territory at 25% morale is a garrison strength of 6.0. Low morale infantry is low strength, so you might need seven dudes, maybe more, but in more usual circumstances you'll get away fine with six. Mechs are not impacted by this, making them very useful for riot control in the later game.
3. You will not lose any troops due to resource shortages, that's bunk. You will however already suffer the province morale penalty sooner than hitting 0. If you have negative production of a resource, you must have a stockpile of it at time of day change that will last for another full in-game day, so usually 24 hours to avoid the deficiency penalty.
Is there provision for when the player that becomes inactive is the coalition leader? How does any of this impact the popularity ratings of the players involved with that AI, since it forces a diplomatic status on the AI? I'm honestly very indifferent to this change, I just don't see how it was neccessary. I see it even less thanks to your final point, in how it leads to fewer surprises and makes the game more linear and predictable. I cannot see how, as a developer, that's what you want your game to be.
Why does the player icon still not reflect on a player's inactivity status?
lost realist.. you forget something... they kept legacy going till now.. so no need to implement them..
as its gone now there is a new and totaly diffrent sitiuatiuon dont you agree
I do agree, but don't you agree that that's a little sad? For all we know they had oh so many players playing the new UI, but implementing things that experienced players consider improvements to it being put off until now instead of spending the time with both clients running to bring the new one up to the previous standard? I think it's sad. And to then come up with things like "well there hadn't been any actionable feedback the past few months" for excuses is flagrant. And to then now come out with update after update on game mechanics literally nobody had asked for while our suggestions collect more dust without even acknowledgement is insulting.
It says if I speed it up that it will cut my time in half but it never did that once. Most of the time not even close. I am not sure what the formula is but it should be easy to take the amount of time it takes and divide by 2. This gives half.
Speed up what? What times? I cannot tell what you're referring to here.
here were times I lost all my troops to a province that the question mark never went away so I never saw how many troops I was attacking. I am not sure if it is supposed to do that.
Yes it is supposed to do that, fortresses above level 1.5 will hide their garrison. The manual and the build guide also mention this.
I figured once I engage it would show this seemed reasonable.
I disagree - attacking a completely unknown force seems very unreasonable to me if only from a common sense point of view.
I also notice that the stats are not updating properly or quickly. I am not sure how quick they are supposed to update but when my game ended it gave me one set up stats while the stats in the awards area, the place that shows my medals, never updated with the same stats.
Yeah, they do that. Stats updating infrequently has good tradition in this game. They are supposedly working on a fix at the moment, but eh. Don't hold your breath if you want my opinion.
Here is another question I have. I won 1st place in the game but I was in a coalition and the coalition took first place. I did get that reward. My individual score was the highest and well over the 1000 for solo win. Are we not able to win in both categories?
No. Either solo or coalition.
I am curious about the response from the company on my points.
Do NOT hold your breath on this either. You will perish if you do.
We also disabled the function for AI to leave coalitions when you are going inactive for a long time
This sentence makes only very shaky sense and as a customer I would have found more value in it had it been composed by a person actually familiar with the game. AI never really "leaves" a coalition, it is (or was, I guess) just physically unable to be in one. It literally "leaving" implies that there is capability for it to also do the opposite and "join" one, which there is not. "Going inactive for a long time" is just confusing - there is no such thing as "long time". There is the inactivity limit, after which AI will take over from me immediately and then nothing else happens after that, whether I'm inactive for another two days or a "long time". So what, "AI will remain in coalitions after taking over from a player who becomes inactive", is that the takeaway? You put it in such a way that it is honestly hard to be sure.
What a great feature, too, what's not to love about a useless chunk of AI dangling in a coalition for days before everyone has even realized that it's AI now.
I really prefered when this game was intended to be played by able-minded adults rather than players who are apparently overwhelmed when a member of their coalition becomes inactive. Please let go of my hand, game, I'm a big boy.
Yes, I see the advantage: Got counted as inactive for like half an hour, come back to the game and have to re-apply to the coalition and deal with the (this is ridiculous handholding as well by the way, but everbody got used to it by now) cooldown timers and stuff. If this was enough to make this a primary concern in game development, kudos. That's creative.
*Sigh*
And now you added that tooltip for other nations when hovering over the player icon. You got THIS close do doing something that by all accounts should have been done years ago and then still stopped just short of doing it:
Why does the player's icon not change when he goes inactive so it's immediately apparent.
This would be so easy. Especially since I'm almost convinced this was present in the original builds of the UI, ported from Legacy. Now you add a tooltip to the completely useless icon and it still doesn't strike any of you how you're basically not using that icon for actual icon-ing purposes, is that what I'm supposed to believe here? You think someone's position in the victory points score is more important information to redundantly deliver in that tooltip than the activity status? How do you come up with these, in a different game?
Make a list of things better in legacy then this version that really really are importent to you and send them to the gamedevelopers/programmers and see what they can come up with.
Basically the thing I did with some further thoughts thrown in. I'd love to see additions to my list by other players.
But the "give them time, it isn't a quick fix" thing... it's been four years. Most of the feedback that's coming in right now is just reiterations.
I'm also very curious to see what else is going to happen to this game, but I've withdrawn myself from actual playing at the moment. Still chugging along in a mostly empty 500p map as a re-learning game, but that's the most I can handle at this point.
I see some placements of the sprites diverging to give room, but it seems very subtle and passive. Cannot be compared to what was possible in the past.
These guys had been split for days. I don't see any effort to seperate them in this instance at all. The difference might be that they're at sea? But even still, that shouldn't mean you'd have to be fine with it there.
CHAPTER SIX - THE REALLY LITTLE THINGS
Why not, right? It's my feedback thread so I felt like also throwing in the little things that I feel aren't ideal or whatever. Maybe someone agrees and maybe someone agrees with them then and maybe, one day, someone in Hamburg agrees as well. It doesn't feel like much longer of a shot than the other stuff above, even though here's where some highly taste-related items are probably going to show up.
6.1 - Flags are not round
They are rectangular. I disagree with this Eurovision Song Contest-looking decision to the fullest extent. Please make them rectangular again, like, you know, a flag.
6.2 - "Declare war and start fighting"
I venture the guess that even someone well below the age requirement of the ToS has enough of a concept of what a war is to not need the super redundant "and start fighting" bit at the end of that. It happens in the popup that asks you to confirm a war when changing your diplomacy setting to declare one. If it said this in response to an actual attack command I'd give you the benefit. But not right there.
6.3 - Snapping to orders
Unless my memory of it is already so tarnished, Legacy also didn't do this. Letting you snap a new move order to the target of an existing move order when it's not in a city or at a fork, but just at open path. I realize the same effect can be accomplished by selecting both stacks or units you wish to give the order to and then just give one order, but I've always wished for the convenience of not having to do that and instead having the target of the other order provide snapping. Now that the target is always displayed in the form of that huge arrowhead I feel like it's almost too apparent not to have it that way.
6.4 - Middle mouse button
As far as I can tell the "middle" mouse button, a.k.a. scrollwheel click, works exactly the same way as a left click. Unless this is an accessibility thing that I am too confined to see, I don't understand why this would be a benefit to anyone. It gets odd sometimes when scrolling around violently and accidentally selecting stuff. I'd say get rid of that and if you have no other way to utilize that button, just leave it out.
6.5 - "X Provinces selected"
I could swear there used to be a hint somewhere on the screen when you selected multiple provinces that said how many you had currently selected. This is very convenient when selecting them to issue multiple build orders so that doing the math is easier - now I gotta manually count how many I have selected like a caveman. And yes, this is an issue sometimes, because sometimes, you're doing this with upwards of a dozen provinces.
Please add a line that says how many provinces I have currently selected when selecting multiple. Just put it anywhere, I don't even care. I just need it.
Oh, or here, here would be just perfect:
Right where it says "Multi-selection" - yeah, thanks, I know that, I was hoping the computer could provide me with a number instead of a mere description of a circumstance. Just drop (x5) for example, right behind that line, boom.
True, I guess the while lines are still there but they very often run right on the paths underneath so they sort of fade a little and they still connect the most irrelevant aspect of the unit icon to the location though, which I have stated my issues with. It's the thing I try to glance past as I'm reading a unit icon.
The mechanic that moves unit sprites away from one another I cannot see at all anymore though, regardless of the number of sprites. In my own thread I have an example of just three individual stacks overlapping each other in such a way that only one of them has a readable unit tag at all.
I agree on the colors and general graphics though. As far as I recall, the reduced graphics mode was introduced later, which in my opinion looks much more readable and pleasing at least as far as the backdrop, the map itself is concerned.
There are apparently issues with the wraparound parts of the large, world-scale maps. At least that's where people seem to typically encounter this glitch.
Nope. You can see your own global popularity only when looking at your own nation. When looking at other players it's specific popularity of their nation toward yours (which may start to matter once that nation goes AI).
Yeah, turns out I was misled myself. Either way, it doesn't tell you the other guy's popularity, that was the main thing.
who generally have that "Customers' always in the right" philosophy.
I generally agree with your sentiment, of course it's daring to tell people off, but I think it's not much less daring albeit on another level to ignore them when they actively try to help you improve your product.
And I quoted you there, because that's far from the mentality that I personally have, but in this situation we have here, it's the customers who are the ones using the product, not the company itself. So sure, they're not always in the right, but on questions about how you play the game and how this should be accomodated by its interfacce design, they are more proficient and maybe a little more likely to be right in this particular setting.
and my popularity is much lower than them !
You do not know another player's popularity unless he tells you. The number it gives you when selecting a human player's profile is your own global popularity, the average you have among all the AI. It's a little misleading, but that's what it is.
Also the fact that there are no precise numbers anywhere and nobody really cares about it all that much is your hint that it's not nearly that important to gameplay. Popularity will do things here and then and over the course of a game it deteriorates, usually, anyway. I think there is reason to doubt that knowing the exact numbers would provide any gameplay benefit to you. Come to think of it it's not even such a bad thing that you don't have the exact equation for your own Excel sheets - should it really be that predictable how a random nation's leader comes to form his opinion on you?
So, summarizing, these "diplomatic" words still holds to the truth: "Thanks for your patience. We're working to give you a better service".
This point is surely a valid one and believe me, my personal image of Bytro is not that of a highly-efficient company with more resources than work to do.
But then it all gets murky when you take a look at what they did get done over the past four years. How many changes were made to the game that nobody ever asked for, while items of feedback that have been emphasized time and time again sit idly in the forums, collecting digital dust and not even recieving an acknowledgement. If someone had ever replied to any of that with an honest "Sorry, I don't think we can pull it off" or "Sorry, the development team disagrees on your opinion that this is an important matter" when presented with specific feedback, the point that they're not game development gods with tons of excess resources would have been perfeclty palatable. But like this...
A creator could set a daily GM spending cap that players couldn't exceed as a fairness standard, but wouldn't interfere with Bytro's revenue generation because it would be reset each day.
Any spending limit, no matter the implementation, will interfere with revenue more than having no spending limit does. "More" = "Better".
I remain in favor of a "Win game round immediately" button fo 250k Goldmark in every game. Save everone some time and anger, you know.
CHAPTER FIVE --- SO WHAT
I am not a programmer or a graphic designer, I am writing this from a long-time player's perspective who considers himself fairly proficient in how the game works and is operated by players. I can't tell you how to make it so that unit icons will go out of the way of one another like they did, or how to make it so that multi-tabbing several games is more available again. I can only tell you that these things are issues from my perspective and point to how they were possible for programmers in the past to accomplish. Right here.
There are many more things about the new UI which I personally find grotesque, but I have tried to limit this list to the more objective and more general issues that can be explained more or less argumentatively rather than by taste and also the ones that are primary concerns to me.
These concerns have also been voiced by indisputably top-level players of the game. Some of the quite literally and measurably best players in the world, the people who are the best on this planet at operating this game engine, dislike the new client to a point where some find it "unplayable". This hurts marketability. I cannot demand the company to see this as a grave concern the way I do, I can only emphasize my very strong opinion that it is, and that I consider it phlegmatic business practice to not take into account the opinions of the people who are the quantifiably best and most proficient at using the company's product.
We all want this game to be successful and good. For all we know, it's successful already. But for the points mentioned here, it can be better as a game.
I just leave this here. Make of it what you will. I will very likely continue to try and claw my way back into enjoying my experience with this game. I'm still not sure whether I will make it or not, but whether I do or don't, here are my suggestions. Thank you for your time.
