Posts by Joe B

Just a little pedantic aside: "Loose" is the opposite of "tight". The opposite of "win" is "lose" (with a single "o"). Cheers.

Okay - I've had very little experience on the 500 player maps, so I'll take your word for it

Beating up on absent players for five days sounds to me like a pretty unfair way to improve your stats. Absent players are the easiest to destroy for obvious reasons. The fact that the AI takes over after only two days also makes for a more realistic game and a (somewhat) greater challenge.

I don't want to play a game where I start with a big army and a bunch of mechs pre-built. I like the economic management side of the game, a lot, I just think the wait period for mechs is too long and makes for an early game hiatus of action and interest, that's all.

this is not one of those; there are other games like 'Candy Crush", for this mentality of player

Come on man, don't make patronizing comments. I've been a wargamer for many years, I love good strategy games, and this is one of them - although the chronic lack of sleep that comes from playing it is a major downside.

But if even grognards like me find the long delay boring and gamey, imagine how it must be for people who are used to the instant gratification of so many modern games. There just isn't enough to do to keep the average modern gamer engaged over the first couple of weeks. But many of those average gamers might become converts if they just had a little bit more to do in the early game.

And as I said, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I'd be willing to bet that if they did give players the option to get factories more quickly, almost nobody would choose the alternative. But for the people like you who like playing the "unique and great" classic version, you would still have that option, so nobody loses.

Bytro can't give only noob players the arty on day 6

I didn't say that only noobs should get artillery early, I said the day 8 restriction on building factories should be removed for everyone. And I said additionally that if day 6 is too early, make it so that workshops also take a day to build each level, pushing artillery acquisition to day 8. And make it so that you can't hasten them with GM until a certain day.

As for GM spammers, you don't encounter them all that often in my experience on the smaller maps. I've joined about 25 games in total and only ever encountered a spammer once. That was in a game where I got bottled up in the Middle East with no wood or iron and lost two armies at sea from a silly game mechanic that I think needs to be fixed. So I spent many days scrimping to build 4 puny cruisers to give myself a foothold in Italy, and when his ally - who'd already taken half the map - noticed, he insta-spammed a navy of battleships, cruisers and subs to sink my puny little force that I'd sweated blood and tears to build. I instantly quit the game after telling the spammer what I thought of him.

Spammers are the bane of this game, but most people do not spend money on browser games so, in my experience at least, you don't run into them that often on the smaller maps.

The arty IS BACK OF THE FORT

So, what about battles that are not in a fort? Can the artillery in a stack outside a fort that is being melee attacked still conduct ranged fire? Thanks.

And here's another thing you could do to increase interest in the early game a little for noobs. Let's assume you have also increased the time to build each level of workshop to one day as I suggested above. A level one workshop would allow you to build an AC as usual. But a level 2 workshop allows you to build balloons (without an airfield). That might have the advantage of increasing interest in balloon building, which nobody seems to do now, as well as giving noobs something else to look forward to trying out.

BTW, if you did make it a day to build each level of workshop, that would also slow the production of cav, which would remove the unfair advantage food-rich players in the early game currently have.

Quote from Hastings TNT

Yes, Multi account cheaters and Account Pushing is a HUGE problem in the 500 maps, maybe not so much in small maps, I do not find a 500 map with out one of the following

#1 Multi Accounts,

#2 sometimes combined with Account Pushing

#3 Huge Golden Whales

I suppose these are the things which make the game entertaining and challenging. Because you have not encountered some of these things may mean you have not yet travelled certain roads; these things do exist in this s1914 game

Hastings, I concede that removing the day 8 restriction from building factories on 500-player maps would be a gift to multis. But I've been playing this game (on and off) for years on the smaller maps and never encountered a multi (or if I have, they were incompetent).

Perhaps I should point out that even if the restriction on building factories was removed, you still wouldn't be able to build an artillery unit for roughly 6 days. Apart from which, the amount of resources you have available in the early game is very limited anyway. If one player manages to get a couple of artillery units earlier than another, it's hardly a world-shattering advantage. Also, as things stand, players who start out with a lot of food also have an early advantage in that they can churn out cav units when somebody else cannot.

If 6 days is still deemed too early to allow the production of artillery, which I still think is dubious, you could tweak things a little by, say, lengthening the time it takes to build workshops - say, one day to build each level of workshop. That would push the earliest date you can build artillery to 8 days, but it would have the additional advantage of giving noobs something to look forward to in the first couple of days - the curiosity of seeing what sort of advantage a workshop confers. As it is, you build workshops in literally the first five minutes and then have to wait 8 long days before you can upgrade them. It's an interest killer.

And talking about how many other interesting things there are to do in the first eight days is just wrong. I invariably have an extended period of thumb-twiddling over several days as I have nothing to do but drop in and tweak a few sliders and what-have-you and go away again. Noobs get killed by experienced players in the early game anyhow, with or without artillery, having the experience of being attacked by artillery early in the game would also be intriguing for a noob and make him interested in coming back to build his own next time.

Again, I think it's just a huge mistake to make noobs wait so long for mechs, and it's a bore for experienced players as well. At least give players the option to create games with no wait period for factories - I bet you'd never see anybody start a game with the 8-day wait period again.

Well that's disappointing, and pretty silly IMO, if you are a member of a coalition ANY coalition member should be able to garrison your conquests.

Bummer on the meatshield answer too, but it is what it is. Thanks for the response.

So arty can attack even when being meleed now? Well, IIRC that's not how it used to work, but I guess in some respects it's more realistic.

As to "the situation", well I destroyed the fort and killed the enemy but lost too many of my own troops in the process, and couldn't continue the offensive. He managed to get more troops into the fort just before my attack so I didn't quite have enough to do the job, but I decided to go ahead as he is a much bigger country and killing the rest of his troops while he was relatively weak was IMO the best strategy before he got to build up again.

If I'd had just a little bit of support from my useless coalition it would have been a very different outcome, but trying to get them to do anything is like poking a stranded whale with a stick.

If I am in a coalition and I capture a province, can my coalition partners garrison it for the purpose of preventing rebellions at the dawn of the new day? I'm asking because I have very few inf in my current game and can't really afford to leave units behind on garrison duty if I can avoid it. Quick reply appreciated, thank you!

Bonus question: if I stack my artillery units with a coalition member, will his army act as a meatshield for my artillery units if they come under artillery fire? Thanks.

I never cease to be amazed at some of the apparent anomalies in this game.

Whenever someone has melee attacked a stack of mine that has artillery units in it, my arty units can no longer conduct ranged fire as they are engaged in the melee. So today I melee attacked a fort which has an artillery unit among the defenders, and moved my own artillery units in range to bombard the fort, confident that the enemy would not be able to fire back since they would be engaged in the melee combat.

But instead, I find the artillery unit is still successfully bombarding my own artillery stack, and has already killed one unit.

Is this how the game is supposed to work? Because I've never encountered this before.

What is account pushing?

Are multis such a huge problem? I wouldn't have thought they were all that numerous. Personally, I don't think I've ever encountered one, and I've been playing for years.

I couldn't agree more ortz3, it's baffling that the devs have retained this restriction, I can't see any sense in it at all, because all it does is make the game very boring for the first couple of weeks, leaving players with little to do. They must lose absolutely heaps of noobs who try out the game for a day or two and then quit because they can't build anything.

I'd love to know the reasoning behind the decision to prevent people building factories earlier than day 8, because it's extremely difficult to fathom. And no, playing a faster map is not the answer, because not everybody wants to play on those.

I decided for a change to try a 500-player map as I usually play the smaller maps.

I made an early decision to join an alliance as I didn't see much hope of survival without one. So I joined an alliance nearby, we currently have six members.

A couple of days ago, we got attacked by another (larger) alliance. And I cannot believe the stupidity of players on both sides!

Firstly, in my alliance, numerous members have left many border provinces - some of them fortified - completely undefended and let them get taken for free - even though they have substantial armies nearby. Secondly, one member has somehow run out of both oil and food, and stayed that way for days, in spite of the fact that he has more than enough provinces to cover his needs. And now, instead of moving his armies up to the front where they are needed, he is sending them to "reinforce" very low morale provinces of his own that are way behind the front line and already have garrisons - ensuring that his new troops' morale will also be dragged right down for no benefit.

Meanwhile, our most powerful member WON'T move his armies to the front line because he wants to wait for a couple of artillery units, by which time it will be too late to save our allies. He's got the most powerful army, basically, because he hasn't done a thing since the start of the game. But now, in response to my pleas for him to attack the enemy, he's finally decided to attack - not the invaders, but a powerful neutral country next door to him. In the middle of a major invasion by another alliance!

On the other side, in the meantime, two of its members have decided, instead of joining the attack on us, to go on long overseas jaunts attacking far off neutrals. One of the players doing this is adjacent to our own territory and has left his own country virtually undefended as a result!

I was annoyed as hell at first over all this, but now, I am just sitting there in awe waiting to see what spectacularly stupid thing one or more of these guys is going to do next. Are the 500-player maps always like this? It's a freaking riot!

Mods could you move this thread to the Supremacy 1914 forum please? I started this thread in the wrong forum, thanks.

Thank you for that Golden Buddha. I had a feeling there had been changes to morale in combat and to combat against small units because I noticed that small units seemed to be hanging on more tenaciously than they used to.

I can't say I'm a fan of either of these changes though. The morale drop during combat was a fun addition that I thought worked well, it just doesn't make sense that units hardly lose morale even though they are taking losses round after round. And IMO small units were already hanging on a little too tenaciously before these changes.

But Bytro seems to make a lot of changes I'm not keen on. I actually quit playing several years ago because I thought the cav and AC bonuses were ridiculously ahistorical - coming back to the game now, I think they definitely add extra flavour - if you ignore the ahistorical element.

Where is this Supremacy 1 game? Is it a beta or something? Because none of those features are apparent in the game I'm playing, which is basically Supremacy 1914 with a new skin.

Edit: Oh wait, I see there are two forums now, one for Supremacy 1 and one for Supremacy 1914 - looks like I've posted this in the wrong forum, sorry.