Quality of Life Recommendations for Future Updates

Hello!

Here's a list of relatively small proposals that could help the game play better, be less tedious, or more accessible. Other players in the simcountry chat seemed receptive to these ideas as well. The goal of the post is to propose ideas that could be considered for future development. Thanks to all the players who assisted with this.

1. Change new accounts to have "peaceful" game levels instead of "including defense." The defense indices are mostly based off the game from long ago, and new players often go bankrupt. "Including defense" requires new players to buy an unclear amount of weapons - and a decent amount of them, in order to level up.

Allowing them to get to level 3 easily without buying more weapons is probably a better way for them to stay engaged and have a healthy country state. Defaulting starter countries to be "peaceful" game levels is a great way to do this. Most new players never find the option to switch between the two from what I see in chat.

2. Allow multiple items to be selected and shipped at once in space. This in particular would help TA become more fun and less tedious. At some point, this may even be necessary for TA to be viable. You should be able to look at your list of products in a space center and select them all at once for shipment to a different location. Currently, you have to select *one* and then select its destination, qty, etc, and then select the next *one.* When you're shipping dozens of products, this becomes extremely time-consuming.

3. Empire-wide or account-wide settings changes. Players with multiple countries should have access to "account settings" for their "settings" page in their countries, their "automation" page in their countries, their "garrison blueprints" page in their countries, as well as "settings for new corporations." It'd make the game significantly easier to manage for anyone with more than just a country or two, while not interfering with a player's ability to get into detail.

4. Adjust thresholds for Security Council. Currently aid can only be given to new countries with under 2T in net cash. Virtually every new country *starts* with more than that.

As the game has evolved, new country population has shifted from roughly 7 million to roughly 25 million. There are now many more corporations in starter countries, and this results in starter countries having much more "net cash." We need to update the security council threshold to reflect this. Perhaps instead of 2T, we should move it to 5T or 10T. It hasn't been awarded to anyone in a very long time.

The council giving money to new players is a great way to create interaction with our newest members and for the new players to meet others.

5. Do not create messages for your inbox or countries from yourself.

If I send myself a CEO corporation to one of my countries, I get a message in my country and in my inbox. If I create a trade proposal from one of my countries to another I get messages. If I invite myself to my own federation, I get messages. This isn't a huge priority but it'd be a nice quality of life update if was fixed.

Thanks for your consideration!

Love everything brought up here. The overall 'health' of the game would absolutely be improved by implementing any or every one of these. A couple comments and addons on each that hopefully aren't seen as trying to detract from the main points made on each, as I completely and absolutely would be onboard with all of them as presented.

1. I know different countries start with different situations within certain parameters, some with ~ 25m population, some around 30m, etc. A constant is those initial military units and their associated cost that really does put pressure on the player from the start. Just randomly going through some newer countries, defense costs appear to be accounting for roughly half of the country expenses, and as the beginners income booster depreciates it puts a lot of urgency on the player to essentially 'use it or lose it'. It would take a lot more doing, but in addition to the easy to implement initial suggestion here of setting game levels by default to peaceful, I feel like a newer player would be better suited early on in their experience if they didn't have to make immediate decisions regarding military maintenance or border expansion. The cost of the units that players start with now, I would just give them roughly the cash value of in starting cash. Keep the war tutorial with suggestions, but let military growth happen organically and be a conscious decision by the player rather than a choice they're forced to contend with instantly.

2. Every player utilizing the space game would do backflips for this. We've all been in the situation where we have 10 things to ship and halfway through when selecting the next product we essentially lose our place. "Which one did I just send? Which one am I supposed to send now?" My only addition here to hope for is that when we're streamlining space transport we reconsider the ability to change the names of CEO owned Space Centers. Players with multiple countries/enterprises like myself often have a sizeable list of space centers to scroll through so name the country owned ones in a way that makes it easier to scroll through the list to get to our desired products to transfer. CEO space centers throw a wrench in this organization especially on worlds where you have multiple CEOs with space centers with the way space shipping currently operates.

3. I have personally gone multiple weeks with new countries before realizing I forgot to go through all of their settings (government salary seems to be the one I forget the most) and would love to see this. In an ideal world I'd love to be able to set index targets even on an empire-wide basis to allow assets like schools and roads to be ordered by countries with specific index targets in mind, as I personally maintain a spreadsheet of information on my countries and update it each time I log into one and order a new set or government buildings to maintain indexes for my game level. Something like that could flirt with the line of making management too easy so understandable to not want. But EO's baseline idea of empire wide automation / country control settings is absolutely on point.

4. Security Council could absolutely use a revamp. A player just posted the other day that they are now a part of it and they didn't even know what it was. The SC has the capability of playing a significant role in the interactivity of other players in game and interactivity is what keeps people logging in. Being able to give an actually meaningful amount of funding aid is a great start. I personally believe the SC should play a bigger role and be more readily visible to the player, perhaps with a little widget section on a country's main screen. Make the SC involved in disaster relief. Give the SC, which for the most part has the more experienced players on a world, the tools to essentially serve as game ambassadors with active outreach to newer players so they don't feel like they're essentially on their own surrounded by computers.

5. Agreed that it's very minor, but a solid QOL improvement to only have messages delivered to your inbox when the origin of the message is from an account other than your own. No real additional input there, that's as straight forward as it gets.

These are all awesome suggestions, number 1 and 4 would be huge for retaining new players, many get distraught when the income booster run out and they run out of money.

Also to Auditor, good job only going weeks, I recently found a country I've had 6 months plus with some settings never updated. I found one I've had 4+ years with a setting different than I normally play, always wondered why that countries profits were lower than the rest.

I love these suggestions, Eo! They are excellent ideas that would certainly enhance the overall gameplay experience, particularly the inclusion of a space center and empire-wide settings. It seems like players have been requesting these features for quite some time, and I hope the game developers seriously consider adding them, especially for those of us with expansive empires.

One common complaint among players has been the excessive number of clicks required to play the game. It would be fantastic if the developers could find a way to streamline and reduce the number of clicks needed, as it would greatly improve the gameplay flow. Additionally, I believe increasing the amount of money available for the space center should be a simple request, considering its current state of obsolescence.

I hope the gms take them into serious consideration and implement them soon. They have the potential to significantly enhance the gameplay experience, particularly for players managing large empires.

Also, and absolutely not to detract from any of the suggestions here because each and every one has strong benefits for players at all levels, I personally would like to see some brainstorming into tangible ways to promote interactivity between players that extends beyond federations for defense and discord for roleplaying. There are many reasons for players to essentially keep to themselves and not enough tangible reasons for players to branch out and interact with others.

Any improvements or incentives in player to player interaction would have to be coupled with implementing a more vigilant system to prevent multiple accounts than we currently have, but most of the players would support tighter protections against cheating and the players that wouldn't support that, obviously should be the first accounts checked.

I don't know the finer details of what computer systems there are for checking suspect accounts or what data they produce, etc, but I know even just as another player I can log into GR and say 'hm... player named Charlie Wilbanks. Player named matthewwilbanks88. Same icons, same federation, same login times when checking 'Who is Online?' Can't possibly be the same player. And one of the accounts has run for 136 in game years. But this hasn't been picked up on by GMs, so absolutely any concepts to loosen restrictions on player to player interaction would have to be coupled with improved account violation monitoring and action.

The proposal above to expand the security council functionality is a great start. At the same time I think its worth brainstorming additional ways to tangibly increase interactivity. The center of most interactivity right now, WG, still has ~ 85% of its countries sitting empty operated by C3s. Players having fun with other players get their friends to play who get their friends to play and on and on. Right now you could build a 10 country empire without ever having a reason to interact with another player. Whether its considering improving common market functionality, allowing direct loans at reduced rates, turning events like the olympics that Amalie put a good amount of effort into roleplaying into an actual game mini-event that players can interact with, the worst thing to do is nothing as game population continues to decline.

Unfortunately, The type of player that is attracted to this game is introverted. Nothing we can do about that, but let's all think about what gets introverts to talking, this is a good thought area.

Eliminating war protections and going back to a free for all would bring interaction. But would result in a turnover of players, potentially. But, collective defense strategies that are needed in that paradigm stimulate people to collaborate for survival.

I've noticed, that in the last decade of the game, that collaboration around understanding the game algorithms for the purposes of setting trade strategies, and salaries and education priorities is non existent. This is an area that should appeal to many who are attracted. But with war not a serious factor, people seem to just enjoy the easy money that comes from not having to maximize financial efficiency in order to support a military.

Another thing, to think about is we live in a world with lots of other ways to socialize. This game competes with these options. Worse yet this game is klunky and requires a lot of time to play. Streamlining the interface and adding some use configuration of automation would help a lot. This free up time spent trying to figure out how many hospitals to buy, for social stuff.

I would start with adding the ability to specify for each country, the target road/train/water, Hospital, School/Highschool/Uni, indexes for the game to auto maintain for us. Add, auto management of the education indexes, and you would free of a lot of time for people to discuss things. It would be way easier to experiment.

Anyway, if anything else comes to me I'll post it.

EO,

Thanks for the suggestions.
after a first reading, it seems to me that some are very easy to implement.

I will discuss here and see when we could implement.

Damnit, I knew learning the "new to me" war engine was key. What I didn't realize was it's also the answer to this.

We need a "No Risk"|"No Reward" war simulator wherein we can run scenarios and learn the damn thing. The only way anybody ever really learned was by doing. But most players want have the resources to do that for awhile. And apparently, for awhile now, raiding of C3s is one way to get established. But many are locked out of that because of the catch 22 of getting the cycle going. This should be an easy thing to make. Same War engine, just with monopoly money. It could even be a real internal game. Setup it with start parameters and let people compete to beat it.

I suspect it would really engage a lot players.

James im stealing your idea to bring up a suggestion I made a while ago regarding this sort of thing.

To incorporate it into a gameplay type of system (instead of just fully fake numbers), you could setup your military units as needed, so you still need somewhat of an investment to get your military up and running.

However, once you have at least 2 units, they could "train" against each other. akin to countries or units doing wargames irl.

As this is a training exercise, you lose a significantly lower amount of equipment (things break during training im sure) and a lower, but not as reduced amount of ammo).

You could be able to build different types of units and test how they compare against other units.

Perhaps a future iteration of this could expand to allow units from different countries to train against each other.

This could also be a way to level up a units fighting level without just purchasing upgrades which isn't a very stimulating process.

the overall goal here is to still require an investment to start out, but not force players to spend trillions of dollars bashing their heads against a c3 just to figure out what to do in the first place

This doesn't take into consideration things like air and missile defenses from forts or supporting units, but you can never really train for every single type of scenario I suppose.

hope that made sense at least

cheers

Hey Nathan, I agree, will add It turned out I didn't come of with it either. Some form of this has been advocated for others over the last decade.

I've been tempted to just set up another account so that I can stage war games against it.

War games between federation members could be a great opportunity to expand cooperative gameplay.