How to retain New Players

It could be better, we know but not easily.

We are now completing the competition world.
after that, we will move to more issues and improvements.

no one probably remembers this but when we started,
it was all for free and we paid cash awards to winners each month.

It was very busy.
only one problem remained.

Yeah, I know that it is much more harder for you to implement and weight all the risks than for us to dream still pretty often I find myself dreaming about some nice features to add to this game and hope they will be added some day if you like them.

I remember many things about this game from 2003/4, it was free for all but you had limited options what weapons you can buy and so on e.g. fleets were restricted to premium members only. we had so big activity of players back then, nobody was afraid to lose a country as to rebuild and start over was very easy, and that was even without cash market as it was opened many years later. My entire federation was destroyed by old strong federation "Knights who say kneel" and few months after that we were ready to fight again.

I agree.
players too more risks.

I believe we need to boost war incentives.

I do not mean that everybody should fight.

I like what you did with C3 wars and war levels increases after each win, it is now impossible to be protected by war level and have empire. Still

I feel bounty from wars should be bigger and war itself should be less complex, game assets should be less protected.

At last but not the least the army cost should be much smaller, ammunition is now much more important than weapons themselves.. all that due to high level of ammunition usage.

War is ok and most fun feature of the game with only one condition - players need a chance to rebuild.

Regarding chance to rebuild - you currently have new boosters to add population and cash to a country. After defeat player only needs to be given some package of boosters to restore a part of ex population and his war level should be also restored to allow to expand empire without fighting high level C3s. Every lost country would mean minus 1 war level.

I agree.
some of it is easy, some more complex.

We have reduced the cost of war already but I will discuss here and we will probably reduce the cost of ammo although, as you know, we can reduce the nominal price.
The actual price depends on the market.

good to hear

Have nuclear defense batterys in garrisons been fixed yet??? Newspaper button does not work.

As a new player, I can testify. The main problem are all of the caps and limits on new players. What you can do is extremely limited, and what you are able to do often has little actual impact. You are locked out of even basic game mechanics such as war, and honestly just feels like being trapped in an iron cage.

What bothers me too is the fact its a monthly sub plan. I would be much more willing (and others too) to buy Premium if it was a one time purchase (even if expensive). I just dont like the idea of paying every month


TLDR - Fix the caps on what you can do, give free players more to do generally and make premium a more expensive one time purchase (or have both)

I think an interesting way to solve revenue problems is to allow subscriptions to be purchased with GCs, and allow 'free' players to receive GC awards.

Unlike the old cash awards model, this is sustainable because your worst case is giving out free subscriptions - the marginal cost of which is not greater than the free players already existing.

Also, allowing GCs to be traded regardless of account status allows for 'free' players' subscriptions to be financed by interested players with disposable income. EVE Online does this, as does Puzzle Pirates, neither suffers overly much from the cost-shifting option.

Very good suggestions

giving more feats for free players will not retain new players, it will just increase the amount of multi account abusing. it's already a big problem. honestly if someone thinks this game is not worth 4 usd per month then it will never be a "retained" player.

what will retain new players is :

1. most important : reducing the numbers of repeating actions that can be done in 1 click (not automatically) when working on countries and corps. there are plenty of suggestions for this

this will allow people to manage bigger empires with same time spent on game

2. make wars requiring less manual repeating input, more macro automation

3. make wars on war worlds easier to do

Actually I think this can be right, all the best memories i have are from great or bad wars