Infantry morale can't actually hit zero, it floors at 10%. Or was it 5%?
Anyway, I can't put together a logical explanation from what you're describing there. What I can say is that the only things that cause infantry to disappear are bombardments or combat or their owner losing track of them on a cluttered map. Really it must be either of those things.
There at least used to be an "overpower factor" that gave the larger army a bonus in close combat. I'm not really sure what happened to that, actually. It used to be all the talk back when I started playing, which was a good long time ago, and I think it has since been rendered ineffective somehow.
but we try to allow the team to focus on the cases where help is needed.
By making it much more cumbersome for them to assess whether help is needed or not and determine such cases.
Anything about "province order" yet, no? I know how I would feel about my coworkers if they gave me information to spread to customers on their behalf and then it turned out that information was faulty and I was left unable to answer glaring questions about it. I also know how my bosses would feel about that.
A good strategist knows that using the latest technology is key to victory and that maintaining outdated equipment can become a drawback for all of your troops.
Except if that "latest technology" happens to be nothing but a pile of hot garbage.
(Side note before what's next: You had your resources bound by fixing a bug every six months? Until the update two days ago when you actually did that, I was seriously under the impression legacy mode was considered unsupported ever since the new UI came out. Whatever "support" you did offer was not really notable to a player, at least to this one.)
This post is going to go down to you guys as "Salty 'cause things are changing", I know that, I know I can't change that fact no matter how I phrase this. I don't care. But I want the record to show that it's not the fact that the UI will change in general. I'm not even gonna disagree with the notion that it desperately needed at least a little modernization. I'd certainly love it if we had a new, more modern UI that retained the features that set the old one apart from the slew of free2play RTS games out there. It did not though and it failed doing so to a point where you have to wonder whether you wanted this game to become more generic and less of a uniquely enjoyable experience or you really spent not a single bit more of an effort on it than was absolutely required to have a "working" release at some point.
I don't think it's worth going into the details. When the new UI rolled out two years ago, near immediately pepole pointed out the ways in which it is inferiour from a gameplay perspective to the old one and have been doing so since. You did not care. You did not show any effort to improve the playability of the new UI since its launch by adressing any core issues and complaints. You've been putting out updates that nobody asked for ever since while players were either confining themselves to legacy or straight up leaving because their feedback on the new UI was being ignored. The actual act of playing the game and being able to do so with utmost possible ease has seemingly become a mere side notion to Bytro. The way it appears on the app store real edgy and modern so it gets kids hard over the gritty WW1 game is the main game now. You're free to make that business choice, I know. And as you did, Supremacy 1914 New UI is a worse game than Supremacy 1914 Legacy Design is. Easier to market maybe, but much worse to play.
You chose to have it this way by rolling out this behemoth of a UI and then ignoring the feedback you've even asked for on several occasions. The major ailments that plague playability are there still. If you want me to show you what I mean, I'll come back and post the kinds of screenshots that have been posted dozens of time. I can even throw in some more that quite clearly show how little "love" and attention to detail even went into the main driver of the new UI, the visuals. They are sloppily made, they overlap when they shouldn't, they clip when they shouldn't, they obscure information. All of this has been pointed out and no apparent effort was made by devs to change any of that. And quite honestly I haven't been keen of supporting this business decision with my playing the game for a while, but at least it was still in basic principle the game I grew to love over nine years of playing and supporting it, so the fun of playing it beat out the fact that I consider many doings of the company behind it to be extremely unprofessional, uninterested, uninspired and very loveless.
Of course this edges me more simply because I know of a time around here when it wasn't quite like that, when some of the people who had actually poured their blood and tears into making the game what it went on to become were still around and had a genuine relationship with their creation, and new players simply won't. They will just keep joining to find a now very generic game managed by a company that doesn't even care enough to document the updates they do to it properly. Nothing suprising in today's market so I'm afraid you might even get away with it. You've been getting away with it just fine recently from what I hear. Supposedly the game is in its most successful year ever with there being about 10 active members of the community left and everony else just kinda playing. Yeah I know, forum posts don't make you any money, players who want to get involved and help development with bug reports and suchlike don't either, they're just a hassle to you at this point. I get it, don't worry.
I know that fixing the new UI to be as efficient and convenient as Legacy while still looking modern would at this point be quite a bit more work than a spitshine, which is an amount of work nobody could realistically expect this particular company to invest into this game at this point. I know it would come with the damning implication that Bytro made mistakes when designing it the first place, which is a thing I don't think the company will have.
/boomer rant
I hope I can finish at least a few of the games I'm still in and from then, it's just gonna be the memories for me. Memories of nine years of playing, admittedly on and off, seeing the game and the community evolve and devolve, playing with a HC membership while eating nothing but butter on pasta for a week during my college days. Memories of the single one free to play game that has ever captivated me, the single one RTS that had a UI so intuitive, readable, no-nonsensically efficient I actually bothered to become decent at using it. I've reported bugs and issues countless times, I've been a frontline pioneer, I've been among the five people actually helping newbies in the Help chat whenever I've been playing during the last two or three years, answering the same stupid questions over and over again that could have been answered in a tutorial or a manual that is more readily available to new players. Afterall there was absolutely no reason for me to help these guys play and thereby support a game that apparently did not manage to teach them even the most basic mechanics on how it works, which also ain't no failure of mine. But I felt for some reason invested in this game I love and for some reason still wanted it to be the same awesome experience it used to be for me for other players, wanted to help improve it. This is gonna sound pathetic but this game really meant something to me over those nine years. The way this new UI was designed with so little care for detail or gameplay in general actually kinda hurt me. It would have been nice to at least get the decade full but since clearly the new UI will not be overhauled to become attractive to me for the same reasons the old one was, that won't happen. It could probably already be as good if player feedback on it had been taken seriously.
But it remains a pile of hot garbage to this day. Unless a miracle happens and it becomes a gameplay experience like Legacy with the visual appeal of a more modern game before January for some reason, this is farewell. And I guess it was at least nice to have this thread here to get all of that in before it's over. Knowing I'll leave again soon, this time to not return like I always have before is actually hitting me in the feels.
I agree you'd have to be insane to read all of that.
Oh and by the way: Thanks for the super early heads up about this. It ain't like many games typically take longer than two and a half months. Thanks a whole bunch.
Several report buttons have been removed. You can still report content by creating a general support ticket and selecting "Player Report" as the ticket category.
That's the statement from the patch notes. I found that in addition to longer being able to report players from within a game, you also can no longer report messages you recieved or articles in the newspaper. Call me cynical yet again but I guess the message to take from Bytro here is "please don't bother". I like to see the good in people but reporting specific things in a game has become such a massive hassle with this change that I cannot possibly entertain the idea that this wasn't intentional to deter reports.
Bytro could give you (us) a description of the Report they are responding to without revealing the action taken
Agree with this in particular. Nobody's asking for the guy's email address or social security number. Just whether or not the report had actually been assessed rather than just acknowledged.
Well what prevents players from wolfpacking with reports now then? Just not knowing the outcome doesn't stop you from doing that at all. I mean this is a really minor thing to me but I'd honestly prefer if they just stated it's their policy and let that be the end of it instead of involving the term "privacy".
That is true and the privacy law excuse is really a very thin one. There is absolutely zero protected data being handled if you simply tell a player his report was valid and executed upon, including the game number for the report. Call me cynical but I believe this is just in place to make sure that nobody gets (whether rightfully or not) upset when their reports don't lead to consequences.
The way it is presented is really the biggest issue I think. You have tons of people in the help chat asking why they're getting 40 point morale boosts now because that's just what it looks like the way it's simply added to the morale factors list. It makes no sense for this to be there since it clearly doesn't mean what its placement in the morale factors list suggests it does, even when I don't yet even know what sense it makes for it to be anywhere. It's very confusing at first sight alright but it doesn't get much less so on second or third with very close to zero documentation existing of it.
I'd also like to open another front here about this:
"Several report buttons have been removed. You can still report content by creating a general support ticket and selecting "Player Report" as the ticket category."
What's the point of that? Discourage reports? That's how it scans. It's apparently no longer possible to report players, messages or DE articles directly. So if I wanted to report an article for instance, now I have to make a general support ticket, paste the game number, the date and timestamp and probably even the contents of the article that I consider in breach of the ToS or community guidelines as opposed to before where I could report a specific article directly and none of that was neccessary for GOs to see the cause of the report - at least that's how you'd assume a button labeled "Report post" would work. How does this help anyone? It's a major hassle for both players and, I have to imagine, GOs as well. That's not even to mention that removing these buttons will make it far less likely that newer players will report verbal abuse or cheating as they can no longer find the means to do so nearly as easily as before.
They removed some report buttons for some reason. It states so in the patch notes for the update they rolled out today.
Any GO could look at your ingame newspaper and see the same stuff...
The one that really gets me is the peace after it's done. Before that it's hard to call. People move their entire armies out to attack some freaking AI sometimes and get sweeped. I've expanded totally legitimately before in cases that wouldn't have looked much different from yours there in the paper. It happens a lot. Making peace right after the last province has fallen so there's no morale drop however is the giveaway here I think.
Dear god, that's atrocious. What a design choice to make.
The bugfixes for Legacy were quite honestly very unexpected and are very much appreciated.
In the new UI, notably not in Legacy, the province morale factors now include "Province order" and it reads absolutely insane boosts. The further away from the capital, the higher it is. I'm looking at numbers like +36, +38, +20... What the hell is going on here? Since nothing changed in legacy I am still fairly sure this is just an old number being presented in a new way and there is no actual change involving it to the morale calculations but the way it's presented would suggest that every single province in every single game will be at 100% morale after the next calculation because those +X lines normally mean "Plus X morale points" and they all get incredible numbers for "Province Order". So what gives? Why isn't this mentioned in the patch notes?
Edit: So thanks to some helpful people in the chat I managed to narrow down that the number for "Province order" is always that province morale's difference to 102% for whatever reason or especially for whatever benefit, as if I couldn't do that math myself. Apparently the mobile version and only the mobile versoin, for whatever reason, is nice enough to tell you that at 102% a province is considered "stable", which is an unachievable number, making this apparently new gameplay dynamic all the more intricate.
What is "stability"?
Why is the difference of a province's morale from a seemingly arbitrary, fixed number output with the name "Province order"?
Why is this "province order" displayed as if it was a factor that influences the province's morale trend?
Why isn't any of this mentioned in the patch notes?
Nice. I went looking far and wide for it and couldn't find it. Eating my words as of right now.
Hey, just wanted to chime in again to clear up some misconceptions. Our game is actually not for children. Our Terms of Service clearly state that you have to be 16 years old to play this game. Of course children can disregard that and still register and still spend, but then it is up to the parents to monitor that and to not hand their children their credit cards. That's the same everywhere in the internet. We definitely do not market the game to children, we have clearly defined audiences our marketing campaigns are running for. The spending playerbase is also mature, with a rather high average age. So we are totally unreliant on any child spending in this game, and we also don't want them to.
That is interesting! I honestly didn't know the cutoff age was 16 per ToS and not 13, but I mean you know as well as I, in fact you surely know better than I, what the spread looks like. As far as who's making the majority of purchases here I will not deny that I wonder how you could ever be so sure about that as it's not like you're actually checking someone's age before you sell them something (that's potentially addictive) but I will take you word here and I will say that's good on you and on us as a society.
It's also a little werid how the community is supposed to be moderated in a "family friendly" way then. The chat filter bans words like "bollocks". Who exactly are we worried we might offend there? Whatever. The ToS mandating 16 years of age is interesting to me.
Much, much more important I think is what I happened upon when looking that up:
Why on earth is there no english version of the ToS? You guys care about your product and then this? This partially paid service is advertised internationally but the only official documentation is in German? That's a massive, inexcusable, unprofessional oversight guys, seriously. How long has this game been running? Oh, what's that, eleven years? It is not any significant amount of work to translate that thing. Hell, I'll do it for five bucks.
The rest of your reply pretty much spams the "It works financially, we can't touch it" argument over and over again the way I see it. It's fine if you feel that way but I just don't get it. We're not talking about an overhaul here, a removal of the core features or a complete removal of GM. We're talking about possibly small, gradual, testable and undoable changes. Don't worry, I have absolutely understood that that doesn't matter to you at all, just not why.
And nemuritor... dead-on, man, thanks for that reply and the comparison with some other services. I'll be honest enough to tell you I couldn't be bothered to put them side-by-side comprehensively anymore as no amount of convincing will ever change anything here, clearly. But thanks for that post. Nice to see that kinda thought put in.
I would help but I have the button.
Same here, it does work for me however. Adding or removing "&legacy=1" loads the game in legacy or current respectively. I have a feeling though that the lockout is coded into the account system and if your account is locked out because it's too young, it will always redirect you if you try that. Can't test without making a new account.
An "inactive player" already is AI. As admin you can remove those players from the game entirely. Their country will then no longer be considered an "Inactive Player" by the game, but as a "Large AI": a country that is controlled by AI but can be chosen by a new player to play if he joins the game. An "Inactive Player" is allowed to return at any time and take his country back over from the AI, so his slot in the game round remains occupied by him. To prevent this you can kick them if you want new players to be able to join and replace the inactives which is not a thing that typically happens.
If we're already talking about this, since from my observations this isn't a very well-known mechanic anymore, this doesn't just work on infantry, it works on any target if it's destroyed in that tick and also if the target had been fired at for several ticks before. You can spend five ticks wearing down a battleship to breaking point and will get another tick 60 seconds after you finally destroyed it instead of 60 minutes. If you choose your targets deliberately and call it right on the occasional gamble (is that gonna kill it or is it gonna take me an hour?), this is a much more powerful mechanic to use to your advantage than it might already appear. It's also something to be wary of when bringing units into the range of an enemy's mechs that's already firing at low-number infantry or a low-condition mech. It can turn on you quicker than expected then.
If a ranged unit destroys its target entirely, it gets another firing tick a few seconds later instead of an hour. So his ranged units can pick off your tiny groups right after one another, getting a new tick right away after each kill, and then get another tick on the large stack, not destroying it, thereby finally meeting a 60 minute timer.
Well, you seem to like pulling my comments out. Considering I just added to the OP i don't see why you felt the need to quote what I had to say. Seemed like you're trying to give me a lecture on the game as it stands, which I know. OP proposed a new feature and I even agreed with you by questioning how it would work. Only added to the conversation, didn't start it.
I'm going to show something to you right here, bear with me for a second.
You see what that was? I'll do it again.
Those are "newlines", they separate "paragraphs". That's what I put under my direct reply to your post, in which I actually agreed with you and added a minor thing, to seperate it from the other part that was not directly aimed at you. I see it's not such a clear one thanks to the formatting, but come on. It ain't my fault there's like four active members in this forum and not much else to quote. I didn't even look at your username when I quoted that, or anything else of you for that matter. No need to take stuff personal.
