Forum

Game Critiques

First off I like the direction of the game and the basic game play. The interface it fine and your tweaking it to make it better/smoother so no need to talk about that. There are a couple of fatal flaws in the game play that need to be fixed if you want this game to become popular.

First is easy, people create a game and are the only ones there until people trickle in by ones and two’s with half being inactive. The game shouldn’t start until it is full. The game creator sets the number of players (4, 6, 8 whatever) and people don’t get set in their countries and able to make moves until it is full. That way everyone starts at the same time with a level playing field.

The second major thing is the time scale of the game. You built a game that takes a quarter to a third of a day to play but you have to be on every 15 minutes (and more likely constantly) to be able to win against another good player. You either need to change the system so a normal game will end in 1-2 hours (so people can sit down play a game and get on with life…or play a couple more) or make it last longer 3-4 days and not have to be on constantly but check it every few hours and still be able to be competitive.

I think the game set up is currently better suited for making it a longer game but a few things need to happen for that. First people’s ability to run over others needs to be lowed. This could easily be done by balancing out military losses. When battles happen the loser of the battle currently loses an extremely larger portion of their military then the winner does. This leads to the case where as long as you send significantly enough to over run someone you can keep moving across their lands with minimal losses thus setting 500 or 1k troops or 100- 500 tanks for defense is completely worthless as they will die while only killing 20 or 50 of the attackers units in return. It is even more extreme against the non conquered territories. Loses should be made more balance, may be winner loses a minimum of 1/3 or 1/2 of what the loser loses but can go as high as 150% of what the loser loses (i.e. the case when some ones guys defending are holding out to the last man and taking down everything they can along the way). It would slow down the quick conquests b/c unit loses would catch up with your expansion. If you combine that with making people not have to be on every 15 minutes (get rid of air drops) to play effectively then it goes from taking 1/4 or 1/3 a day non stop to logging on every couple of hours for a few days to play out a game and vastly improves player retention and enjoyment.

Some good insight! After I solidify everything that's currently on here, I'll take a look at tweaking the balance.

I've only played one round so far, but thought I'd throw in my thoughts around the idea of game length here as it's something Armadillo has brought up.

How about adding some options into the game creation that would affect the length of a game, for example:
Short game (1-2hrs), all your build times, replenishment etc are sped up 400%, it would be more of a all hands on deck faster paced game.
Medium game (6-24hrs), pretty much as it is now.
Long game (3 days - a week), remove the air drops (or make them once every 4-6 hours and bigger). Maybe add in a delay (travel time) for attacks.

With experience gain adjusted so you would get less for a shorter game, and more for a longer one.

Just a few ideas anyway, I'm sure a lot more thought would have to go into it first though (assuming you like it). It would open the game up to more people though as they could join a game that fits their routine/play style.

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out the best way to structure different game speeds in the code. This is an interesting feature I'd really like to build in.