Posts by LostRealist

    tbh I havent met a good player since 2017 so i guess all pro-players have already left. And even that single individual was the first instance of a good player since 2015. I see only HNR lvl 1 - the most basic strategy.


    Yeah that's true. The whole community basically died a slow death in the last five years. That's probably not all Bytro's fault but it's a symptom of something.


    Anyway, you're right about one thing, and that is that it all won't do any good. Bytro has commited themselves to marketing this game to a young, casual audience with low standards and loose money. They have spent the last few years gradually pulling out of the community, lowering their workload and any expectations they might otherwise be confronted with. None of us are going to change any of that. I just like to use my last couple of weeks around here to tell them how it sucks after spending plenty of time trying to help development and improving the game for a lukewarm "Thanks mate" at the very best. Afterall, does marketing to that new generation mean you have to make your UI harder to use and inferiour to the previous version? There was a time when I was sincerely convinced that the answer to this was obviously "No" and that Bytro would care about that and show a genuine interest in providing the best product they possibly could. That was about two years ago. What has happened in development since then makes it clear that either I was wrong or the company just can't do any better.


    And it sucks. I had a really good time here. This is a really good, unique game. There was no need to change that, new generation or not. But if I take a step back now and assess the "State of Supremacy1914" for lack of a less pathetic term, it's a generically presented, random RTS game on Steam and the App Store like hundreds of others, managed by a company like all the others on those markets as well, with no mentionable "community" or much less "fan base" surrounding it anymore. I mean, come on, we have a global forum and there's like ten people active here.

    If you throw me some of the links you mentioned, I'll sure check them out. Not so sure I'll get myself to look real deep, but I'll look for sure.

    Hmm, I guess one thing is that there was feedback given at the start of the revamp version, such as crowding of armies being hard to tell where their actual position is and the lack of colour contrast with the revamp's palette as well as armies being harder to read at a glance, and those issues still persist.


    So I'm not sure I'm seeing the convincing improvement that makes me want to use the new mode over legacy, quite frankly.


    Oh, but don't you see all the amazing changes they've made to Revamp recently? Just check out the most recent patch notes!


    Quote
    • The maximum number of units that can be displayed on a map was increased by 50% on desktop and 200% on mobile.
    • The likelihood of the AI declaring war on smaller nations was slightly decreased.
    • The likelihood of the AI declaring war on bigger nations was slightly increased.
    • The advisor popup was replaced by a mission list that displays the information to give a nice and clear overview about advisor missions as well as feedback on the player’s progress.
    • To allow players to avoid spending gold by mis-tapping on mobile, a confirmation popup can now be enabled in the game settings.

    (That last one actually is quite huge, unsarcastically speaking)


    I can see very clearly how serious they're taking our feedback here, yet again. Just as they did two years ago.


    Just forget it. Supremacy is becoming a generic, freemium mobile game with a developer that can lean back and count their income while we're in here yelling at him how lazy he is. He doesn't hear us. It doesn't matter.

    During the first three days of any game, mobilization is reduced for all players. Since you cannot see other player's mobilization, their units damage stat that is shown to you will not contain this mobilization penalty. You can rest assured it's there though.

    I would not have it any other way Hastings. I lament the loss, but understand the way of progress as well. A tight rope to walk, indeed, but the game dynamics remain, so a new paint job on an old house is worth the time to see if the furniture still works with it.

    Pretty good way of putting it I guess. Like a half-timbered building painted magenta, and inside some doorways were moved for no reason.

    I'm still a little on the fence about it but I would surely be interested in testing out a different implementation of the railway. Generally I'm always in favor of keeping things as simple as possible in this game because that's a main part of its appeal and I think the modifier instead of equalized speeds serves that purpose. But who knows. Improving a system like that and testing it out is what creative developers and beta testers exist for, right. Dot, dot, dot...

    Railgun is slower when moving on rails than it is on water, this seems like a flawed game mechanic

    I don't quite agree with this, if you're talking logically here. Since the railgun is also unable to fire while at sea, I think it's fair to imagine it's disassembled when embarked and thus I don't really see why cargo vessels carrying the railgun parts shouldn't be able to be faster than the gun itself when it is put together to the hundreds of tons behemoth that it is, bound to rails with heavy friction. On land, the railgun pays for its massive range by only being able to shift it elsewhere very slowly, while on water it has neither the use nor the disadvantage - doesn't seem like such a flawed mechanic to me either actually.


    I tend to agree with your main point, in that a railway should concievably be able to carry "regular" units as in Infantry, ACs, Cav, Artillery, Tanks and maybe heavy tanks at the same speed. This was probably just overlooked when the mechanic was placed in the game originally as a result of making the speed bonus a modifier of the original value, although I actually don't want to completely discard the idea that it might have been a balancing tool as well. Afterall, the base movement speeds are. And if the artillery is "embarked" on the train in such a way as to give it the same movement speed as infantry, should it still be able to use its ranged attack? Realistically it would probably have to deboard the train completely to get into firing positions next to the tracks. That would create quite a new situational element to combat. And if it could fire while aboard the train, balancing questions would have to arise. At the end of the day the modifier we have now is consistent and straightforward with all the unit's speeds maintaining the same relations to one another.

    Giving this one yet another bump because: Province order, anyone? Did Bytro not program this feature or why do they apparently find it so hard to give anyone information about it? If it's the broken shell of something you wanted to do but didn't, just say so, if it's supposed to be filled with some actual functionality in the future, just say so, jeez.

    Not sure I understand what it is that you want to be able to color? I absolutely agree this game needs that kind of stuff as premium features - customization options that do not impact gameplay itself. It's never gonna happen because Bytro has grown so contempt with their current monetization system that any amount of effort on it is obviously considered wasteful within the company, but it can't hurt to dream, can it.


    But still, I'm not so sure what exactly you're envisioning - and if it has to do with the "3"-D sprites for the units, count me out. Those are hideous enough and should go out the window completely. Other than that, you're onto something.

    If Bytro keeps this up, they will lose a lot of support from their loyal player base.

    I am sure they know that. It isn't without precedent either: The switch from original design to what is now Legacy drove away a lot of people, the switch from Java to HTML did as well. I would argue this time it's a little more extreme with such drastic changes after ten years of "Legacy" Design, but they do not care about this at all. Why would they? Our loyalty isn't paying their bus fare. That's done by a myriad of new users before they grow frustrated with the game for whatever reason and leave after a week. Before they've been around long enough to cast doubt whether this game and especially the practices of the company behind it are really something they want to reward with their spending. That's how mobile gaming works. Well, that, and gambling for children. That also works really well on that market. At least we're not witness to that yet in the case of Bytro.

    Yeah that's even mentioned specifically in the survey, isn't it?


    The problem, to me, just is that it's Bytro who originally made the awful, uncalled for decision to get rid of those army displays among many others. I don't quite see why I should be very hopeful that now, all of a sudden, that very same Bytro has magically regained an understanding of what was good and worth keeping in Legacy, or of how people actually play their game and what features and conveniences they're looking for. Yeah I know, new players ain't complaining, which is a very amazing accomplishment considering they don't even have a clue how much convenience they are being robbed of by being forced into Revamp.

    They removed that army display for some reason, just like they decided for some reason to make naval waypoints nearly invisible, decided for some reason that we would care about people's usernames when zooming out real far and not the names of their freaking countries, that it didn't need to be quick and simple to see if someone's inactive or not, they decided for some reason that performance was a neglectible topic entirely. And let's not forget that nobody from the community had ever asked for any of those things. These guys went in and made a ton of very odd, unprovoced choices when designing Revamp. Thinkin that they'll now suddenly realize all of that and start making much improved decisions all across the board seems a little silly to me, quite honestly. It's like sure, I think it would be good if the New York Jets got a new Quarterback, but then you realize it'll be the New York Jets who will pick that new Quarterback, so what good could it possibly do?

    Bombing them with anything will lower morale. Depends on the firepower I reckon. The point is that you can't win a war with a navy alone. You can win battles with it, you can win major battles with it, it can turn the tide of a war for you - but your navy will never gain any points for you.

    Then just do your report.

    That's a bad way to put it. You will also additionally have to make sure now there is no way for the GO who recieves your report to miss the infringing content - something that the system automatically did for you previously. I recommend when reporting a player and his specific posts, make sure you put enough "evidence" in there so that it would be inconcievable for anyone to say "Well that's not easy enough to work out, I'll leave it.". That is important because you want your report to be taken care of and it's especially important because in many cases you will not be informed if it isn't.

    Guys, seriously, the removal of the report buttons I have a hard time finding a word for that you're not gonna at least warn me for. It smacks of clearly subpar intellect, let's say it that way.

    If I have to read "How do u report a message" one more time in Help chat, I swear to god. So clearly, you didn't just remove those buttons to the main effect that making justified reports is now much harder both on me but also on the GO who picks them up, you also did an amazingly awful job at communicating this to players and more importantly communicating to them what the procedure is to report content now. Yeah, I know, there's a thread explaining it on the Forums here that nobody uses anymore - extremely helpful. Clearly it's not helping a lot of players. What you did is take a feature that was very accessible, obvious, hard to miss and easy to understand and you hid it within menues or at the bottom of the homepage and added several steps of work to it, then you're not showing any credible effort (no, a single forum thread by a volunteer is not a credible effort by a company with six-digit revenues) to explain to your customers how to at least be able to still use the feature at all, albeit in a much worse way than before anyway. If anyone thought it wasn't exceedingly transparent where you're headed with that, they're very wrong. At this point I seriously have to wonder why there still is a report function at all after this kind of change and this kind of handling of it. You very obviously don't wanna bother with it.


    There at least would have to be a prominent note about it to every player, a prominent mention of how to access the feature in the tutorial probably wouldn't hurt either. I'm not gonna let you guys try to tell me you have no idea what kind of people post what kind of content in what kind of numbers around here. You know full well that the likelihood that any random player will encounter fascist imagery, racist remarks, excessive verbal abuse, antisemitic content, multi-account cheaters, wolfpackers and other fun things while playing this game approaches 100% over time. Hell, even the oh-so-dreaded denunciation of Goldmark players is at a drastically increased risk of going unreported now. Maybe a sign that it's indeed less sinister motives and more good old incompetence at work here. The point is that making it harder to report those things is a decision that is inherently going to lead to an increase in that kind of content by a drop in reports and thus measures taken against it. It is in stark contrast to the actual reality of how needed the feature is. Does having fewer baseless reports really mean that much to you? Or is this just a decision mimicking what the other Big Players on the mobile gaming market are doing? Not bothering with a "community"?


    If there was a way to still report content directly, for example by linking DE articles or private messages in that report, I certainly wouldn't be so mad about the button being moved into a menue. It would just go down as one more of those features that were made worse along the way or just straight up disappeared altogether for no acceptable reason at all. At least then one could give Bytro the benefit of the doubt here about "Most reports are baseless, we need to add another layer of involvment to deter those". But you didn't only make it a little more demanding on players to file them, you shafted your own volunteers who are going through those reports now that the content that is being reported isn't filed along with the report automatically anymore. This is the other, no less problematic side to this change: You made life harder on your own guys. That's not what somebody would do who wants reports to be handled well and efficiently. I'm going to venture the guess here that while completely unreasonable reports have probably been going down, the number of reports with basis in fact that were not or could not be investigated because details were lacking from the report (that the player would not have had to add themselves a few weeks ago) rises. Is that good for anyone now?