Long time lurker, first time poster. Great game, lots of potential, but some issues.
I didn't want to add this to the what would you like to see thread, its already too long. My first suggestion is to add a suggestions sub category to the forums, instead of cramming it all in general. That way each topic could be discussed in an on topic thread. Now onto the rest.
I've been playing the game against the AI, and on a LAN for a while now, and one thing stands out to me. The game seems to be suffering from a lack of balance regarding two issues needed in any RTS. Typically these are called, the slippery slope, and perpetual comeback. An excellent article on this topic is available here. http://www.gamereplays.org/companyofheroes/portals.php?show=page&name=slippery_slope
Right now games that are long over, last much longer than they should, and players and AI caught behind the 8 ball, seem to be able to linger, though never make any progress. This is a problem with that type of balance.
Slippery slope mechanic: (From the link) "This term is used to define a game mechanic where the closer a player is to victory the greater his advantage and the more likely he is to win."
An example of a slippery slope mechanic would be taking over an opposing players planet, giving you access to the resources, and position on the map that was previously controlled by your opponent, and allowing you to press forward against other planets.
Perpetual comeback mechanic: (From the link) "This is a mechanic that is intended to counter-balance the slippery slope mechanic. A Perpetual Comeback Mechanic is a system that ensures that as you get closer to victory it becomes harder to win."
An example of perpetual comeback, is the fleet upkeep costs. If you manage to survive with a smaller fleet footprint because of early losses, you don't have to pay the upkeep and therefore have more resources available to use in re-building.
The trick with good RTS games is to keep the slippery slopes from being too steep so that a seemingly small loss puts you on a path from which there is no recovery, while making the perpetual comebacks not so ridiculous as to make winning impossible. Right now there are complaints about both mechanics. So with the idea of fun and victory in mind, here is where I feel the game could use some work, and some suggestions as to how to go about it.
Pirates. Everyone hates them, but likes the idea or them. The problem is, they are very much a slippery slope mechanic of the worst kind. Once a player has a dominate enough position, provided these things are still around, it is a trivial matter to push surplus funds towards the pirates, and create fleets of attackers, essentially additional fleets semi controlled by you, out of all proportions to the money spent. Late game pirate fleets have tens of thousands of credits, and hundreds of metal and crystal tied up in them. If they do take out a planet, or meet little resistance, the next wave comes out causing more trouble without any added expense as the first wave didn't claim enough bounty to force more investment to keep them harassing. They make making any gains once your behind near impossible and giving what I think is an unfair advantage to the player with the most funds to spend on them, especially in the early game.
They could be fixed by giving them a higher tendency to attack the richest target, not just the highest bounty. Between waves they could send out scouts to look at systems, and if they find a weakly defended system owned by a more powerful player, bump that system up on the priority. Prioritize systems with trade centers, low defense, no military factories, and the like. Hurt players will be stuck in their own system already, in a strong defensive stance, so the pirates would start to gravitate to those that have more to loose.
Another fix could be salvage, where wreckage from destroyed ships in a player controlled gravity well is automatically "harvested" adding those recourses to the economy of those attacked, to offset somewhat the expense of fighting off pirates and others. This could be set up for all battles, to add another perpetual comeback mechanic and make raiding or suicide runs a less effective tactic.
Ship Blobs. Right now the complaint is the frigates that are simply too numerous to stop from blowing out your planet and structures. If that type of blob doesn't work, then a new blob model will form with the next best type. To keep the game from becoming a battle of the blobs, some penalty for creating them needs to be introduced.
One solution could be escalating cost for each ship after about 5. An additional cumulative 2% cost in credits and resources for each ship. This would slow down, but not stop entirely the blob mentality, and would make fielding diverse fleets with multiple ship types more economical than one big fleet all made up of a single ship type. Additional penalties related to upkeep could also be applied after a second critical mass point was reached in the blob.
The second penalty has already been discussed many times, reduce the upkeep of fleets based on current size, not maximum researched. It could be balanced for so that you have a fixed upkeep of say 25% of the penalty representing the core infrastructure needed to field a fleet of that size, with the other 75% applied as you build the ships representing the direct maintenance costs. This would also act as a perpetual comeback mechanic, in that re-fielding a fleet would be cheaper than bolstering an already large one.
From the above you would think that more perpetual comeback devices is all I was looking at, that I thought these games were too short, and should always be tipping back and forth until the end of time. Nope. There are at least one or two comeback things that need to be looked at that seem to drag out already finished games to ridiculous levels.
First and foremost is the "I can run but I can't hide" thing that AI's do. You can plow your fleet through all their systems, and the second you leave to move onto the next, they just re-build behind you, blowing up anything you built, or forcing you to camp that spot and chase them around the universe. You have them beat, but the bloody things just don't give up. There have been many calls to bring back the old PJI from the pre-nerf state, or add in a surrender option for the AI. What to do?
Well one thing to add would be no repair or shield recharge during phase jumps. There is no way to attack in phase, so this period is a free time that gives a big advantage to the weaker fleet, in that they are able to run, repair, and run again, simply because they ran first. This would enable pincer moves where a sizable mop up fleet camps both sides of the pig in the middle chase, and gradually wears out the jumpers.
Another thing I would add in is a moral factor for ships, that is similar to the culture thing. The more often a ship runs, the further from its home cultures influence it is, the more likely it is to do a retreat that takes them toward an area with positive cultural influences. The only ships that have an exception to this effect would be scouts, colonizers and capital ships. Capital ships add moral, and their loss reduces it. The decision to run from a fight also reduces it, as well as travel in heavily cultured enemy territory. Abandoning a planet absolutely destroys it, and in the event that there is no home world to run to, ships with no moral would stage a last stand battle, hopefully ending the game. Players would loose control of zero moral ships until they re-entered controlled territory with positive cultural influence. If the loose control mechanic is not possible, then have those ships no longer able to attack or repair until moral is raised by return to positive culture space.
What this would do, is force AI and players towards their home world as the game nears it's end, preventing them from hopping around the universe staying either one step ahead or behind your fleet. You could still attempt to send out colonizers and scouts, and use capital ship backed fleets to stage major attacks, but the fleets without capital ships running around all over the place would quickly congregate towards their main systems. This would add even more importance to keeping a capital ship alive with the fleet at all times, and make taking them out an even higher priority than just the resource and XP loss they represent.
The second is the black market resource exchange. This allows players to, at a cost, operate without any access to one or another type of resource. I would restrict access to this feature to those nations with a trade center, and adjust the prices based on the number of these centers in their nation space. I would also put limits on the amount of any resource available, based on both amounts sold to the market, an a constant growing pool based on totals mined in the entire universe.
This would make taking out a players trade centers more crippling, and put loosing players further on the slippery slope. It would also prevent the AI for using access to it for re-building purposes, when it is clear that it will not be coming back, and would allow players with vast resources to starve enemies even if they did have access to the black market.
Well that's it. Hope that some of this sparks some thinking, or is in some way helpful.
