Ideas and suggestions

Got ideas how to make the game better? We're interested to hear them!

It would be quite neat if you could disband troops.

Currently it's only possible to send troops the direct way, so you have to click several times when your troops are supposed to go past some obstacles. This makes it very tedious if you want to move your battleships from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. I guess it's hard to do, but it would be awesome if troops could find the way themselves.

Is there any way to cancel a movement/attack you've ordered? If not, that definitely needs to be included.

An overview of all the countries and cities and who they belong to might be nice. Last time I've conquered the world I didn't notice that you've included Fiji in the game.

Skrivet av Promonex, 16.10.2010 at 16:59

It would be quite neat if you could disband troops.

Currently it's only possible to send troops the direct way, so you have to click several times when your troops are supposed to go past some obstacles. This makes it very tedious if you want to move your battleships from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. I guess it's hard to do, but it would be awesome if troops could find the way themselves.

You can also drag n' drop units, which makes moving them very simple, even in a highly curved path. Real-time pathfinding would slow down everything to a dead stop, since we're dealing with huge amount of points/paths. Unfortunately, Silverlight cannot handle that.

Citera:

Is there any way to cancel a movement/attack you've ordered? If not, that definitely needs to be included.

Right after you move/attack, there's a small red x icon - click it to cancel. Once it's gone, however, it's not possible to cancel the move anymore.

Skrivet av Ivan, 17.10.2010 at 13:26

Citera:

Is there any way to cancel a movement/attack you've ordered? If not, that definitely needs to be included.

Right after you move/attack, there's a small red x icon - click it to cancel. Once it's gone, however, it's not possible to cancel the move anymore.

How come? What's wrong with changing orders before you start the new round?

Actually, it would be quite easy to add the one move undo feature, as long as you haven't done anything with the troop after moving it. I'll need to think about this...

I mentioned some of this to Ivan in some test games today, I figured I'd make a post to explain things a bit more clearly/for others to see.

I'd suggest something be changed with the combat mechanics. While it's extreme, in theory a single infantry defending could roll a 5, against 4 attacking tanks who got an unlucky 1, and all the tanks will be taken out by one guy with a gun.

One thing you could do would be to roll multiple dice for each side:

Let's say the infantry rolls 3 die from 1 to 5, gets a 2, 4, 1 = 7/3 = 2.3
The tanks roll 3 die from 1 to 6: 3, 6, 2 = 11/3 = 3.7

Presumably you'd take the 1.4 lost unit and round it down to just 1 unit lost. If you want 1.7 to round to 2 or just always round down to 1 is up to you.

You'll end up with more 'average' results. It's still possible that the infantry pulls off an incredible 5, 5, 5; but it will be less likely to get the extreme cases. How you want to handle decimals is up to you; you could keep it to one decimal place, round it entirely, etc. Maybe keep the accuracy but only show whole numbers?

As a separate issue, it seems odd that attacking with 4 unit has the same offensive power as attacking with one unit, but this may not really need to be changed. It is that way in risk also, although there is a lower limit on how many units can be lost in one round; two in risk, six here (battleship rolls a 7, defender rolls 1). That's without bonuses, I don't know what causes bonuses on rolls, I just played two test games so far

After playing a little, my one suggestion would be that aircraft can't hold cities. It seems a little silly, and most games of this kind require you to use ground troops to actually capture an enemy city.

Here's my small list

• Keyboad shortcut to select particular type of unit to move when dragging armies around. Something like press "A" while clicking on an army to only select air units, or "G" for ground, "N" for naval.
  
• Ability to move the map around with arrow keys or WSAD
  
• Visual cue on map to distinguish between high and low income cities
  
• Subtle background music
  
• Add other statistics to bottom of screen by the week # and cash or up top by the turn counter. Things like number of available reinforcements, current military, and number countries/cities owned.
  
• Toggle visibility range is useless when there are a lot of troops on the map
  
• When changing cities with the city window up, a visual cue or highlighting of current city selected would be helpful.
  

I'll post more as the come to me.

Another big one to add to the list is the ability to select multiple cities to build units and move troops from multiple cities. After you have several countries it gets pretty tedious to buy and move 1 unit from each city.

Skrivet av jarekb84, 01.11.2010 at 00:00

Another big one to add to the list is the ability to select multiple cities to build units and move troops from multiple cities. After you have several countries it gets pretty tedious to buy and move 1 unit from each city.

Ugh. This one would be almost impossible to arrange, sorry...

Skrivet av RaptorShadow, 31.10.2010 at 19:11

After playing a little, my one suggestion would be that aircraft can't hold cities. It seems a little silly, and most games of this kind require you to use ground troops to actually capture an enemy city.

Thanks, we're now working to implement this!

Cool!

Also; I'd suggest that you should probably keep a changelog so that we all know what's being done between versions, so that we don't log in and find something's completely changed with no details about it.

Skrivet av RaptorShadow, 01.11.2010 at 07:13

Cool!

Also; I'd suggest that you should probably keep a changelog so that we all know what's being done between versions, so that we don't log in and find something's completely changed with no details about it.

We'll do that.

Since the 'official launch' and i've been getting disconnected, and the game is incredibly slow
i'm ware it surely won't be as fast as in beta, but you should definitely do something about the servers, they cant handle a few games and they just collapse and keep disconnecting.

i even get disconnected while i'm in the lobby !

Skrivet av Zombie, 01.11.2010 at 20:22

Since the 'official launch' and i've been getting disconnected, and the game is incredibly slow
i'm ware it surely won't be as fast as in beta, but you should definitely do something about the servers, they cant handle a few games and they just collapse and keep disconnecting.

i even get disconnected while i'm in the lobby !

We've actually just upgraded our hosting account, we seem to have some crappy neighbours on our server and they were really abusing the resources (hence the yesterday's outages). We talked to the support and hopefully things will be better - if not, we'll try to find a better place for Afterwind.

Scuttle/Disband option would be nice. (Mentioned before I'm sure)

Singapore can be difficult to select as your starting country as you always clip the city. I know you can click city then country, but maybe make it a little wide on the S.W. side for ease of clicking. (maybe just a personal grievance)

Could we get N->S S-> N movement? So I can attack Canada from Russia and vice versa (or S. Africa to Australia/S. America by plane of course)

Can you give battleships a larger range of attack. Would make them more worthwhile in naval battles. Also, maybe a coastal barrage? Can't take coastal cities, but could reduce population.

+++++Background music+++++++

maybe a terrain modifier? Mountains slow troops? (would make Nepal an interesting choice)


non military aspects? Like culture, media etc. Can reduce defense of a city or increase attrition?

Also, one city in Greenland that goes to denmark?
Falkland islands city for U.K.?
French island in indian ocean and/or on S. America.


Some more maps with historical options? WWI WWII 100 years Colonial America
(with bombers) Cold War map w/ U.S., NATO, USSR, China, OPEC with cost increases decreases? Have non allied sides have super cheap militia or guerrillas.

Whoa, big post here

Skrivet av codetornado, 02.11.2010 at 04:06

Scuttle/Disband option would be nice. (Mentioned before I'm sure)

Coming soon, in one of the upcoming updates.

Citera:

Singapore can be difficult to select as your starting country as you always clip the city. I know you can click city then country, but maybe make it a little wide on the S.W. side for ease of clicking. (maybe just a personal grievance)

Can't promise anything, but I'll see what I can do next time I'm revising the map.

Citera:

Could we get N->S S-> N movement? So I can attack Canada from Russia and vice versa (or S. Africa to Australia/S. America by plane of course)

Pretty much impossible with the current engine and map, sorry. You can't imagine the hurdles we had to overcome just to be able to slide the map continuously horizontally... This was probably the single most complicated thing during game development.

Citera:

Can you give battleships a larger range of attack. Would make them more worthwhile in naval battles. Also, maybe a coastal barrage? Can't take coastal cities, but could reduce population.

Done. Also, added 1 attack and reduced defence by 1. Coastal barrage sounds good, will keep that in mind.

Citera:

+++++Background music+++++++

I'd love to, but that would either increase the installation package or would have to stream from the server, creating additional resource drain. Perhaps later.

Citera:

maybe a terrain modifier? Mountains slow troops? (would make Nepal an interesting choice)

Would've been logical, but too technically complicated to think about it at the moment.

Citera:

non military aspects? Like culture, media etc. Can reduce defense of a city or increase attrition?

That's my idea for the future development direction. Amok is not yet convinced though - he prefers to keep things simple.

Citera:

Also, one city in Greenland that goes to denmark?
Falkland islands city for U.K.?
French island in indian ocean and/or on S. America.

The biggest Greenland 'city' has the population of 15000. Same goes for other places you mentioned. Normally we only tried to include cities with over 500000, although sometimes we even had to omit 1mln+ cities, when they were too close to each other (China!).

Citera:

Some more maps with historical options? WWI WWII 100 years Colonial America
(with bombers) Cold War map w/ U.S., NATO, USSR, China, OPEC with cost increases decreases? Have non allied sides have super cheap militia or guerrillas.

That's another thing we'd love to do for the future. It's too early to talk about it though...

Skrivet av jarekb84, 31.10.2010 at 20:22

Toggle visibility range is useless when there are a lot of troops on the map

Indeed. How about just displaying the combined visibility range instead of for every single unit?

Skrivet av Promonex, 02.11.2010 at 15:36

Skrivet av jarekb84, 31.10.2010 at 20:22

Toggle visibility range is useless when there are a lot of troops on the map

Indeed. How about just displaying the combined visibility range instead of for every single unit?

We tried to do that, but it's too difficult technically, and didn't work very well. What you get now is the combined visibility range anyway - the purpose is just to show how far you can see.

Please add some more information on current games in the lobby-screen.
i.e. the map that is being used.

Skrivet av cdb, 03.11.2010 at 08:13

Please add some more information on current games in the lobby-screen.
i.e. the map that is being used.

Already done. Will be online with the next update

Perhaps I missed this on the site or if it was already asked but a "Who's Online" now thing would be pretty neat. Especially since the game is new, it would cool to see how many people are online at the moment.

It would be great if one could see what a strategy is about before you buy it. I've just bought Blitzkrieg for 17k SPs and when I saw what it's good for, I was hella annoyed that I didn't unlock Stealth for 20k instead

Skrivet av codetornado, 02.11.2010 at 04:06

Can you give battleships a larger range of attack. Would make them more worthwhile in naval battles. Also, maybe a coastal barrage? Can't take coastal cities, but could reduce population.

This would be nice... I was shocked when I sent 3 battleships to attack a city with only 1 militia defending, and then all 3 of my battleships died instead of the militia.

Skrivet av Promonex, 03.11.2010 at 19:58

It would be great if one could see what a strategy is about before you buy it. I've just bought Blitzkrieg for 17k SPs and when I saw what it's good for, I was hella annoyed that I didn't unlock Stealth for 20k instead

I'll add more descriptions.

Skrivet av Trufire, 03.11.2010 at 17:40

Perhaps I missed this on the site or if it was already asked but a "Who's Online" now thing would be pretty neat. Especially since the game is new, it would cool to see how many people are online at the moment.

Would be up very soon

Skrivet av Promonex, 30.10.2010 at 19:12

Momo and I were just getting a whole lot of "invalid hash for: units" errors. World map, loads a money and units and five players.

And speaking of loads a money: players who have stealth bombers are pretty undefeatable in such a scenario.

After kicking out three players in the first 10 rounds, I'd like to stress this point again. Started in Turkey with 50k cash, built 20 stealth bombers and took the first opponent out in the second round. Now if you think that stealth bombers are not imbalanced, how about this idea: make it visible which upgrades the other players have unlocked. Don't necessarily show which strategy they are using, a simple list of upgrades should reveal all the possibilities, so that one knows what one can expect and adapt to it accordingly.

Another solution would be malus points for attacking players of lower rank. This should lower the effectivity of stealth surprise attacks of level 3 players on bloody beginners, who might lose interest in this game after such a swift defeat.

Enough of dubious offensive tactics, here's a dubious defensive tactic: I had 5 infantrists in Panama City, Guest14502 had 4 battle ships outside which would conquer my capital in the next round. Now what I did was building 1 air transporter (in order to take the weakest offensive unit there is) and attack the 4 battle ships. Instead of invading my capital, the armada of ships got occupied by one pesky mosquito. While this feature might be nice to avoid hit-and-run tactics, it's rather unrealistic when abused as defensive tactic. How high are the chances that it's transporters versus ships instead of ships versus city? If it's something like 50:50, I'd suggest to take the offensive/defensive values of interceptor and attacker respectively into account.

And stealth units should also form defensive lines.

You should just get rid of the little fullscreen option or at least change it to just say "press f11" since that makes the browser fullscreen (at least in firefox and chrome on windows) and it actually allows you to type since, again, the browser is fullscreen and not just silverlight.

as for gameplay suggestions, i've probably told you this in game before, or amok, but alliances need to place a more significant role. things such as lending money/troops should be options. or maybe speedier movements through allied countries. you know, perks and whatnot. (of course these should be agreed upon options beforehand).