I'm wondering what everyone else feels about the large number of unit types in the game. I personally don't think there needs to be so many. They can easily be compacted down to 3 basic types; Light, Medium, Heavy. Doing so could also clear up some balancing issues and make it easier to balance.

Well, I draw a distinction between "attack/defense types", and "degrees of strength".  I agree that there should be fewer degrees of strength; 3, as you suggest, sounds good enough to me.

On the other hand, I think there should be about 4-7 attack/defense types.  What those types could be, I'm not sure, but every unit would have some specific amount of defense (or vulnerability) against each type, and each unit would have one or more armaments, with an armament doing damage of one or more kinds.  For example, we might have:

• explosive (HE grenades, bombs, mortar),
• incendiary (flamethrowers, napalm)
• anti-personnel hard (rifle bullets, frag grenades, frag tank shells, shotgun ammo or tank shells)
• anti-armour (anti-tank rockets, anti-tank mines or human-deployed/attached ordnance, anti-armour bombs)
• chemical (acids, gases, poisons)
• anti-air (AA guns, AA rockets)
• anti-naval (torpedoes, anti-naval bombs, anti-naval ship weaponry)

The current game has soft, hard, air, speedboat, amphibic, sub, boat.  I'm not sure that categorization is as good as it could be.

The current unit type system is a confusing mishmash of simple (soft/hard) and complex (air/speedboat/sub/etc).  It's been an amusing progression from the early system of soft-vs.-hard to including family types such as air and boat and finally the 'outlier' unit-specific cases of speedboat and sub.

Honestly, I like the trend toward each unit having a specific armor type, or more accurately, that every unit has a full table of what it is and isn't effective against.  A compromise system like what Pistos mentions would also be superior to the current arrangement.

 

Everyone should take a look at Chris Eliot's game, Empire Master.  Even if you are not Macish look at the documentation and the way he has laid out the rules and unit specification in the editor.

Agreed, when all units are used it can be a confusing mix. The ability to exclude some units is a helpful addtion. I would love to see another unit type considered. Engineer - weak infantry type but with ability to change terrain, build structures or entrenchments, plant mines etc.

Though of little or no use in a fighting situation, they could change the  the static maps and make the maps we have more fluid.

My 2cents

I think I've played Empire.  Is that the one with the green land, blue sea, square terrain (non-hex), and transports and stuff?

Humphammer: Been suggested.  I think what we need is a centralized list of all the things the devs have not responded to...

Since we will revisit balancing eventually may I suggest a wiki page with all tweaks and changes to units as you see fit? That way we will have a single collaborative resource that can grow over time and reflect a shared understanding. Extrapolating certain measures from  an ongoing discussion is rather difficult and bound to under deliver to a great many expectations (we'll try anyway of course!)

There also is a page with suggestions and I think it would be great if that one would grow (with sub pages for more complex ideas) and a sections of all the things we have already answered, too.

We are as open as possible in our communication and committed to keeping it that way. With growing user numbers this will require improved processes.  The wiki strikes me as a great resource for that. It already did wonders for the tools section (http://www.weewar.info/weewar/show/Tools+and+Services)
 

Unless someone else really wants to, I will try to gather all the key spec suggestions into one place.  I may to non-spec feature requests as well, but we'll see.

Hey Pistos,

Instead of publishing all the data, can you setup polls on WWPA site. If you can it would be great to get a poll going on a specific attribute of a unit. Example: Heavy Trooper Cost? A.100 B.125 C.150

We can collaborate on what choices to put on the poll, and only a couple of polls a week. What you think?

 

have polls, but i wouldn't go altering the game based on poll results.

I think I'll start with a textual aggregation first, and maybe have polls for specific undecided variables.

^^ Ho, polls is democracy, sort of. It represents The People - or at least some people! How can devs implement measures if they have no idea of the populaarity of an idea? As long as polls is from unique members... Then there's the scary 'silent majority'... who'll come out to complain!

Anyhow we're only a handful (20?) to give long feedbacks here, and try to include reason as to why we suggest this, etc. I really like this game and try to substantiate why it should this or this way.

Wiki +1

Long live Pistorama!

I was thinking of taking all the text information, and then use the polls to narrow down the suggestions(which tend to be alot of them). So we can create a priority list of items for the devs. If we clean all the data and present the top 10 things, I believe the devs can provide an update sooner then trying to address all the suggestions.

I think that is the only thing I have not seen in Tangler are polls with discussions tied to them.

I will try my best to clearly and fairly represent all of the major opinions and sides, and perhaps hold polls on some of the issues.

I really hope more people use the wiki but of course standard wiki rules should apply if someone were to decide to contribute to it.

To be honest, I was intending to do it outside of the wiki.  I know that will raise some eyebrows, but my reasoning is that the text or list should be an edited document (edited as in magazine or newspaper).  It is meant to be an executive summary of the thoughts and feelings of the people, rather than a free-form change-as-you-will wiki page.  I have nothing against the wiki in general, but I think it may not be the best medium for this.

Yeah, I agree with that approach. Could get really messy otherwise

Ditto with pistos.

I like the wide variety of unit types.Personally, I think there should be even more.Also, I lik Pistos's idea that there would be different kinds of weapons.

I'm sort of toying with an idea in my head where there could be 4 "types", within each of which you get the various units (troopers, tanks, boats, planes etc.) but each type has an additional bonus against one other, and weakness against one other in an RPS-like way (the 4th being the standard type, which has no particular advantage or disadvantage to it.. maybe a small disadvantage to the typed units, but not so much as a mismatched type.

Oh, and each type gets some additional terrain bonuses.

So (for sake of argument I'll use rock/paper/scissor as types) rock trooper will beat scissor trooper, scissor trooper will beat paper trooper, and have an edge against sissor vehicles (even if not a full-on superiority). Meanwhile Player 1's put his rock troopers into rock-land to negate the effect of the disadvantage against Paper troopers, and the Paper-troopers have unwittingly strayed onto some scissor-land tiles, making them even more vulnerable than before to that scissor artillery.

(Replace rock paper and scissors with types that make sense and relate to some kind of terrain and that's what I'm talking about)