Lets talk customization: career points, brigade upgrades, reputation

[drewww]

Seems like most folks here are interested in battle balance + historical accuracy, but I don't know much about that. Most of my feedback has to do with the game's meta-systems between battles, usability, and learnability for new players since those the areas I know a little more about.  I'll use this thread for a series of commentaries about the different customization systems in UG:CW and where I think they could be improved. 

The core goal I'm navigating towards is that a customization system has the following features:

• No single optimal path. A choice between optimal and non-optimal play isn't worth having a game system around.
• Customization choices should support (and encourage, by their very presence!) different play styles. Getting a new upgrade should feel like it lets you play the game in a different way after you get that upgrade. 
• Customization choices should feel significant and you should see their influence in the game systems so that choices feel substantial, impactful, and rewarding.

The most fundamental customization experience is working pretty well. Customizing your army makeup, assigning corps to different roles in major battles, matching equipment to different brigades, etc. is a solid core. But I think the systems adjacent to that are in a pretty poor state right now.

Career points are in the worst state. Everything except recon and army organization are money equivalents - they give you more money for missions, reduce the cost of different purchases,  or get you benefits that you would otherwise pay for for free. This makes points invested in any of the non-recon/ao paths directly comparable in terms of dollars. To make it worse, it's not obvious to me exactly what the conversion factors are, except that they are knowable. For example, you should be able to precisely value decreasing the cost of recruiting veterans against the getting those veterans back for free from better medics. As a player I could probably back those numbers out of the army management UI, but because it's not immediately obvious, spending career points instead just feels frustrating because I know I COULD optimize and that some skills are almost certainly strictly better than others, but the game is making me do a bunch of manual math to work out whether training is more efficient than politics. 

I see three paths forward with career points:

• The simple tweak is to rebalance the values. My sense (and correct me if you've done the math; my intuition could be wrong) is that politics is nearly strictly better (unless your supplies are really unbalanced and you ONLY need gold OR recruits, not both) than anything else because it doesn't limit where you use those resources. The other skills are specializations in particular sub-areas, but their benefits aren't larger than the politics benefit to reward you for limiting where you get the benefit. For example, one point in economy is a 2.5% discount to equipment purchases, and one point in politics gets you 2.5% more money per battle. This is a bad choice; politics is just better here. Similarly for training (saves you money per battle, worth more if you're losing lots of troops), medicine (awfully similar to training in its valuation), and logistics (dollar-convertable to buying supply, assuming it's not captured + is in range). If the specialized options were significantly more valuable than politics, it would help quite a bit. If "attrition" was your overall war strategy, investments in AO for big brigades and medicine and equipment would be better than training and politics provided those specialized trees were dramatically more valuable than politics as a benefit for specializing and facing higher relative costs to buying veterans and officers. The other option here is to curve the benefits differently. AFAICT (not having gone all the way up any tree and not having visibility into the benefits at every level), the numeric benefits seem to be linear. If earlier upgrades were worth less than later ones, it would create investment opportunities. A tree not be great now, but once you get to 6 points it's super valuable. That might line up with a late-war strategy versus an early-war strategy. You can't end the campaign early through decisive successes so maybe those aren't meaningful distinctions, but it could still give you different gameplay experiences to feel stronger early on and relatively weaker later or vice-versa. You can also flip this and have high value points early in the tree. 
• Army organization is a promising template, but not yet well executed. It's not money-convertable (which relieves the min-maxing feeling) but don't really support meaningfully different play styles right now. AO conflates both bigger brigades AND more brigades per corps AND more divs per corps AND more corps per army. This is a shame because each of those is actually an interestingly different play style. For example, having larger brigades but not simultaneously increasing the brigade cap sets you up well for the side battles where there are low brigade limits. It lets you project more focused force on the battle field. Splitting these out would be really interesting because it would force you to choose which of those you actually wanted. (It might also require some changes to corps to make them more valuable; right now having another corp versus more brigades per corp is more expensive in terms of hiring officer overhead EXCEPT that you occasionally need more corps to split your army into different components for some major battles). So this path would be basically keep the existing skill model of points in attributes, but split out AO into men/brigade, brigade/div, and div/corps, and potentially remove all the money equivalent skills and replace with one that boosts gold income and one that boosts people income. Those feel like a complete and disjoint set of choices that are easily understandable. We could do this either with changing the benefit curves to be non-linear or not, but I think slight non-linearity in favor of later in the trees is basically a strictly good thing here. 
• The last approach is a little more radical. Investing in points doesn't provide meaningful choices because they're not exclusive. You're mostly just choosing WHEN you want an upgrade, which is a pretty subtle thing for most players to balance. Exclusive choices that feel more substantial could be more fun. Brigade customization is like this already (though I think those options are not well balanced or satisfying, either... more on that later) but I think army customization could benefit from the same model. Customization trees have lots of benefits: we would have fewer (more substantial) upgrades, you can see what investment in a tree will get you later, and you can enforce mutually exclusive customization paths that make you want to try other choices in future campaigns. They can also differ between USA + CSA. Perhaps the in-game differences to their training + equipment could be representable in these upgrades so non-historical variants that shift some of the basic assumptions of the war are possible with different choices in this tree. Some of these can be similar to the existing upgrades, but be more chunky than a 2.5% improvement to something. Some potential upgrade ideas: upgraded couriers (accurate timers to friendly reinforcements), artillery mobility (+25% artillery movement speed when out of combat), triggerable general abilities (rally nearby troops, temporary artillery accuracy bonuses to nearby batteries, temporarily faster move speeds, etc.), research tracks that reward you with more equipment later (e.g. put points in this tree to shift money to harpers ferry; benefit appears after next major battle), or get you special equipment that money actually CAN'T buy, unlock special mercenary brigades, alternate formations (no idea if historically accurate, but cool to see on the battlefield perhaps!), lower condition cost to running, bigger morale benefits to fighting near members of your division, etc. These examples are all upgrades, but we could also consider side-grades that have sharper costs to them, like the "+ accuracy, +reload time" brigade upgrades as a way of balancing powerful benefits. The goal with each of these should be to support a different sort of play, and when the player goes into the next battle they should feel like "oh, I have more options for winning this!" or "I feel more powerful this time!"

Finally, whatever path we take, the visibility of each choice needs to be imrpvoed. Right now, you can only see clearly the impacts of AO + recon. That's part of what makes them the most interesting upgrades right now. The others are just multipliers in a formula somewhere. Even if nothing else is changed, showing the money/people available after a fight with your politics + medicine upgrades visible as green "Politics: +12,500$, Medicine: 750 recovered" would be a big improvement that would make these choices feel more valuable. 

Next up: the reputation system + brigade upgrade systems! This is pretty far off from normal board content so I totally understand if it's not up folks' alley. But I really want to see UG:CW succeed, and the meta-game layer is the main difference from the last game so I think it deserves a lot more attention than it has gotten in our discussions so far. Stay tuned!

Edited December 27, 2016 by drewww

[Aetius]

3 hours ago, drewww said:

medicine (awfully similar to training in its valuation)

I believe Medicine is much more valuable than Training. As far as I can tell, Medicine saves the entire cost of both the man and his weapon, which is a double effect like Politics. Its value is further increased because that man is an experienced veteran, not a "veteran" trained recruit - he adds to the unit skill levels, rather than leaving them unchanged. The only downside to Medicine is that its effect is lower when you take light casualties.

Let's say, for example, that you are recovering 10% of your casualties via Medicine. If you take 200 casualties, that's 20 men returned. Making up some numbers, you'd have to pay $250 for a new "veteran" recruit, and then another $30 for his rifle. That means your Medicine saved you $5600. If you had taken 10% Training instead, you'd get a discount of $25 on each soldier. To gain a savings equivalent to Medicine, you'd have to recruit 224 men - more than you lost in the first place, and the dollar numbers don't take into account the man's experienced status. And that's just for infantry, with cheap weapons - for cavalry and snipers, the benefits of Medicine increase drastically because their men and equipment are so expensive (and in some cases, irreplaceable - like LeMats and Whitworths).

Edited December 26, 2016 by Aetius

[Hitorishizuka]

Yes, correct. Medicine is actually directly comparable to Politics and is probably the 2nd best overall skill, assuming necessary minimums in Recon and AO.

[Aetius]

3 hours ago, drewww said:

Army organization is a promising template, but not yet well executed. It's not money-convertable (which relieves the min-maxing feeling) but don't really support meaningfully different play styles right now.

What messes with this is not so much Army Organization, but the complete disconnect between what you configure in the Army screen and what actually shows up on the battlefield. To a certain extent, the Army screen lets you build wide (more corps) instead of tall (larger brigades), but there are numerous scenarios where the hard cap on corps and brigades means those extra units cannot be used. And more confusingly, the number of brigades the battle setup map says you can deploy is often not the number of brigades you can initially deploy - and the rest of your units may or may not even show up, depending apparently on the whims of the scenario.

It goes the other way, too - Gaines' Mill, for example, just won't start unless you have two corps to deploy. Then, the initial deployment is only 8 brigades, so if you don't build right and select the right corps you may be forced to twiddle your thumbs through half the battle with a force that can't accomplish anything. Worse, your "right flank" corps arrives in three groups, none of which you control and only the first of which has time to actually reach the battle - two thirds of the map appears dedicated simply to making sure that your second two "right flank" groups have too far to walk before they can get into the fight.

Honestly, I think they should ditch AO entirely and the corps/brigade limits and give you the freedom to design your force as you see fit. If a cap has to be implemented on scenarios to keep them from being too imbalanced, it should simply be on the number of men. You should also have control over what units appear in what order, not just the initial deployment. This is even realistic - screwing up who to send where and when is one of the things that cost McDowell the battle at First Manassas. You could also implement stronger penalties for units that are too large for inexperienced commanders, and include the corps / division level in those penalties - this would provide more incentive to purchase higher ranked and/or more experienced officers.

Edited December 27, 2016 by Aetius

[Aetius]

3 hours ago, drewww said:

Next up: the reputation system + brigade upgrade systems!

The Reputation system is ... not working well at the moment. The sole benefit of accumulating high Reputation is a small Morale bonus to all of your units. Since Morale increases quickly with experience, the bonus is essentially ignorable, and in some cases can actually have a negative effect (ultra-high morale units with relatively low skills who stand and die instead of sensibly running away).

Since there's little point in having high Reputation, you're spending it all to get additional equipment, men, money, and officers. This part works, more or less, though contrary to the description there's no apparent impact on the rest of the war. The downside is that the options are always the same, and you can base your army-building strategy on when certain weapons are going to appear. This is probably more important for the Confederates, because they desperately need decent rifles early in the campaign and there are none in the store to buy.

[HughMyronbrough]

I posted similar comments on the Steam forums, and I agree with everything in the OP. Politics/Economy/Training/Medicine needs to be revamped, right now they are too similar, and Politics is just so much better.

Many people also think Logistics is underpowered. I kind of agree, but I think Logistics can be good in 2 situations.

1) As Rebels, where you spend many battles entrenched and blasting away at people (2nd Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg), and can run out of ammo.

 

2) As Union, if you want to try a strategy with extra Artillery (more than 1 per division), and would otherwise have issues supplying them.

Edited December 27, 2016 by HughMyronbrough

[waldopbarnstormer]

I think that politics should be changed to reduce the reputation loss from a defeat and boost rep gain from a victory as well as provide boosts to recruit numbers. Historically a well connected general could avoid being removed from command because of their political connections.

I think training should be changed to give a boost to the starting stats of new recruits rather than reduce the cost of veterans. It is immersion breaking for me at the moment how easy it is to recruit veteran troops at the start of the war when historically both sides were full of volunteers and recruits who had very little training. Veterans should be made available as a separate resource from basic recruit manpower and given boost through medicine skill as well as boosting the numbers of returned casualties.

I think that the logistics skill is currently one of the most important because of the hard cap on supply. In my current play through I have +20% supplies in logistics and I have yet to run out of supply in battle which suits my tactics of taking lots of artillery.

[drewww]

10 hours ago, Aetius said:

I believe Medicine is much more valuable than Training. As far as I can tell, Medicine saves the entire cost of both the man and his weapon, which is a double effect like Politics. Its value is further increased because that man is an experienced veteran, not a "veteran" trained recruit - he adds to the unit skill levels, rather than leaving them unchanged. The only downside to Medicine is that its effect is lower when you take light casualties.

Let's say, for example, that you are recovering 10% of your casualties via Medicine. If you take 200 casualties, that's 20 men returned. Making up some numbers, you'd have to pay $250 for a new "veteran" recruit, and then another $30 for his rifle. That means your Medicine saved you $5600. If you had taken 10% Training instead, you'd get a discount of $25 on each soldier. To gain a savings equivalent to Medicine, you'd have to recruit 224 men - more than you lost in the first place, and the dollar numbers don't take into account the man's experienced status. And that's just for infantry, with cheap weapons - for cavalry and snipers, the benefits of Medicine increase drastically because their men and equipment are so expensive (and in some cases, irreplaceable - like LeMats and Whitworths).

Ah, interesting. If that's true, it's an awfully subtle reason to prefer Medicine over something else. It makes sense mechanically that it sort of prevents a death, but in terms of the theme you would expect wounded or "killed" (but saved) soldiers to probably not be saving their weapons reliably. But as you say whether or not they keep the weapons makes a really big difference in how to value the skill.

I think my point is the same, though; there's no meaningful choice here. It's either better or it's not and if you had perfect knowledge of the game systems you would know. It's doubly bad that depending on interpretation (and without a way to directly observe it) the skill is pretty good or pretty bad. 

[drewww]

3 hours ago, HughMyronbrough said:

I posted similar comments on the Steam forums, and I agree with everything in the OP. Politics/Economy/Training/Medicine needs to be revamped, right now they are too similar, and Politics is just so much better.

Many people also think Logistics is underpowered. I kind of agree, but I think Logistics can be good in 2 situations.

1) As Rebels, where you spend many battles entrenched and blasting away at people (2nd Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg), and can run out of ammo.

 

2) As Union, if you want to try a strategy with extra Artillery (more than 1 per division), and would otherwise have issues supplying them.

Not saying +supply isn't valuable (it totally is), just that there's not really a meaningful choice to be made. It's a little tricky to value supply since (I think?) as long as it doesn't get captured you don't use it up in any given battle, but if you think about it as paying to increase your max available supply you can still compare it with investing in the skill points (or brigade upgrades, for that matter) and figure out which is the more cost efficient path.

[drewww]

Do folks have reactions to the suggestions to address these issues? Do any of them strike you as interesting from a gameplay perspective? It seems like there's some agreement that the system as-is doesn't feel as good as it could be, but we've gotten a little mired in untangling what the skills actually do and why you might care about them at all. I think that illustrates the weakness of the current system, but doesn't necessarily suggest a path forward. I'm partial to switching to a tree model myself with meaty, mutually exclusive upgrades, but understand that it's a more dramatic design change that might be out of scope at this point. 

[waldopbarnstormer]

I was just re-reading the opportunity to help me understand the points you made. I think so should remain a single branch and let the player have flexibility on whether to invest in many small brigades or to put all troops in to a few brigades and leave slots empty. Just because each battle limits what you can bring to the fight so you can have one corps optimised for small battles and one optimised for major battles.

I had a new suggestion, how about remove money completely and rework each attribute just for bonuses that are non financial. As example my previous post so politics boosts recruits and reputation, economy increases availability of weapons to equip troops, medicine restores veterans as currently, training boosts new recruit stats, ao stays the same, logistics boosts supply to get around hard cap.

By removing money your army size is now limited by number of recruits and the weapons to equip them with. If you want a small professional army invest points in training and economy and medicine, and if you go for attrition go for politics logistics and /or medicine.

[Jamesk2]

I would wait until more balancing was made before making an assessment. It's true that most of the choice is as straightforward as possible, but I can think of a list of changes that could make other career choices more interesting:
- Economy now reduces weapon cost by 5% per points, and increase the number of weapons in the shop. It could be very tempting if weapons are more limited from battles - right now what you can get from the shop (mostly Lorenz, Enfield or Mississipi) can't be compared to the M1855 you will get from the Union.

- Training now reduces EXP loss by using green reinforcements, or increase the % of veterans you get in the recruits. I'm proposing that for every 1000 recruits, you will have a pool of X veterans, and the "reinforce with veterans" option will only use from that pool. The current system of "money = veterancy" is bad.

- Logistics mean you can have higher limit from number of troops in a battle (and by having a hard cap on number of troops, we can finally get rid of the annoying AI scale up), reflecting the fact that a well-run logistical system is needed to provide for a bigger army.

[RobWheat61]

58 minutes ago, Jamesk2 said:

- Economy now reduces weapon cost by 5% per points, and increase the number of weapons in the shop. It could be very tempting if weapons are more limited from battles - right now what you can get from the shop (mostly Lorenz, Enfield or Mississipi) can't be compared to the M1855 you will get from the Union.

Economy increases the number of weapons in the shop now? Didn't know that. Since when? I thought it only decreases the price for buying weapons and increases the price for selling weapons?

The weapons argument is not a very good one. The Enfield and the Springfiled M1855 have almost similar values in the game and the Lorenz only differs significantly in its fire rate. Picking up longarms was a common practice in both armies to replace older weapon designs, for example the Springfield M1861 would have been a common sight in the ANV by 1863/1864 or Grant troops, which replaced a good number of their older weapons with captured Enfields after their victory at Vicksburg. It was probably not before somewhere in 1863 till the Union War department could equip all their troops with modern rifles.

Edited December 27, 2016 by RobWheat61

[Jamesk2]

1 minute ago, RobWheat61 said:

Economy increases the number of weapons in the shop now? Didn't know that. Since when? I thought it only decreases the price for buying weapons and increases the price for selling weapons?

The weapons argument is not a very good one. The Enfield and the Springfiled M1855 have almost similar values in the game and the Lorenz only differs significantly in its fire rate. Picking up longarms was a common practice in both armies to replace older weapon designs, for example the Springfield M1861 would have been a common sight in the ANV by 1863/1864 or Grant troops, which replaced a good number of their older weapons with captured Enfields after their victory at Vicksburg.

You know, I was suggesting changes, so "Economy increases number of weapon in shop" is what I WANT to see, not what it is right now.

I do  not look at the values too much, I only know that the M1855 is listed as more expensive than the Enfield so it should be better, no? And even if they're almost similar in quality, the fact that the amount of M1855 you pick up from battles is even higher than the amount of Enfield you can buy from the shop make the argument moot.

[Perkon]

How I see it:

Politics: Beside ammo, and recruits, It should also affect what we can spend our reputation for, I mean... being a MAN in political world, we would know a lot of people, and these people, would know other people, that leads to more opportunities. 

Economy: more money, and a discount, on all purchase.

Training: I always though that training affects new recruits, since if you move your mouse over them, you see numbers. To me, its obvious that investing in training would mean, that new recruits are of better quality.

Medicine: limits fatal casulties from battles.

Logistics: more supply wagons, not just more supplies, but more of them, in general.

Reconnaissance: leave it as it.

I didnt include anywhere discount for veterans, because I dont think it fits anywhere. There should be a new factor, called legacy, or something like that. Winning battles, inflicting high casulties, sustaining low, etc., should make us famous, then people would want to join ranks of our army.

Edited December 27, 2016 by Perkon

[RobWheat61]

51 minutes ago, Jamesk2 said:

You know, I was suggesting changes, so "Economy increases number of weapon in shop" is what I WANT to see, not what it is right now.

I do  not look at the values too much, I only know that the M1855 is listed as more expensive than the Enfield so it should be better, no? And even if they're almost similar in quality, the fact that the amount of M1855 you pick up from battles is even higher than the amount of Enfield you can buy from the shop make the argument moot.

Thanks for clarifying your point, didn't get that before, sorry. Lowering the number of captured weapons in the grand battles would probably be a good thing, due to the fact that you can destroy the AI army completely right now. But I wouldn't like to see an increase of weapons in the shop neither generally or by putting points into Economics.

 

Edited December 27, 2016 by RobWheat61

[RobWheat61]

I would keep the career point categories and their attributes as they are for now. They fullfill all a certain function and are plausible in a historical context.

I have only small issues with Logistics and Reconnaissance.

It's just not necessary to put points into Logistics. Even with bigger armies (75000+) there is more than enough ammuntion in the battles, which becomes even less of an issue with the perks for officers and artillery units.

Same goes for reconnaissance. it is nice to have but just not necessary to invest points there. I put only points into Reconaissance for immersion and out of curiosity how numbers and casualty rates develope during a battle.