Making Conquest Better

Airships: Conquer the Skies

28 Sep 2018, 1:57 p.m.

It's been a few weeks since the release. I've squashed the immediate bugs, and while I'm generally very happy with the state of the game, it's clear that the conquest mode needs improvement.

I've gone through hundreds of recent reviews and forum threads and collected all your feedback about the conquest mode. Reading through everything that's wrong with my game was a bit... emotionally draining, but I got through it and have put together a list of the biggest issues that I think I need to address:

Conquest starts out hard, with lots of opponents to fight, and then becomes very easy once you have a big enough fleet to steamroll everyone.
Some enemy ship designs are very weak, and once you do have a big enough fleet, your ship designs don't matter very much.
The mechanics around attacking, intercepting, and fleeing cause a lot of back and forth with little progress for either side in a war.
Town defenses and counter-espionage are both expensive and not very fun.
It doesn't really matter where you attack because all cities just give you extra income.

I have a whole bunch of ideas for how to improve all this, but I want to avoid just making a pile of additional features that buries the underlying game design flaws. So I'm now going through these ideas and figuring out how they can fit together to address the points above. I'll be making another post soon detailing my plan.

In the meantime, do give me additional feedback and suggestions. Do note that there's a lot of different things I need to balance, and that your game experience may be different from others'. :)

Please take a gander at this28 Sep 2018, 5:12 p.m.could you work on hosting private multiplayer ,because every time my friend types my ip in it says lost connection and vise versa. I know its not actually my connection ,because we play open multiplayer fine. could you please look into this? thanks if you read this. (ps yes I copy pasted this from the last dev blog sorry for the repetition)
also28 Sep 2018, 5:29 p.m.if you have fixed it since I posted last time ignore this and that
Mr. Anonymous29 Sep 2018, 3:18 p.m.Here are some solutions to those problems. 1. Well if its only hard with lots of cities keep there be lots of cities. Make pirates more like the empires. When they raid cities they take that income to build bigger and better ships and tanks. If they have enough tanks and ships they can take a city and become an opponent. Making revolts harder to stop by giving them some starting airships. You could also add features were the person who started the revolt can buy then airships as to make there revolt harder to quench. This would also give a drawback, if you give this revolt too many weapons they will pose a threat to you to. 2. make the weather conditions severely affect ship performance. This is true for tanks and planes in the real world. If its to raining and there’s a hole in the wall your gunpowder wont light, so ramming and boarding vehicles would be a better option. A rainstorm causes the ground to turn to mud. this means tanks need to work extra hard to move, using extra coal, and eventually turning them into sitting ducks. This was an actual problem. Artillery shells would disrupt natural drainage systems, turning the ground to mud that made the tanks useless. Lightning should sometimes hit the airships during stormy conditions, making having them airborne risky. High winds could make sail bases ships useless. There could even be storms that move, areas that are more prone to winds or mud. The people in this area would make there ships more accustomed to the conditions, making there ships not specialize in areas that are affected by these conditions. 3. Make artillery. A massive, expensive, heavy, high recoil gun that can attack cities near it, weakening there defenses and ships. This would be very expensive. It would cause recoil that would do light damage to everything that it stood on every time you fired it. When it is captured the enemy could use it against you. It would also be very heavy. So heavy that if you didn’t make the base properly it will sink into the ground. The big reason you would add it is it would force the enemy to come out, or you get to take there stuff. 4. Make them more real. You can have a special crew man that you can control. You can make him explode ammo, empty water supplies and set mines. He would look slightly different and the player could notice that. The guards would have a chance to notice something every time he passes. It would be risky to use your expensive man on the inside, but sometimes it would be worth it. 5. I think weather would also solve this problem. Boy is this comment is long. I hope you get to read it. Email me if you do. Handyarmstrong@gmail.com

Please take a gander at this28 Sep 2018, 5:12 p.m.could you work on hosting private multiplayer ,because every time my friend types my ip in it says lost connection and vise versa. I know its not actually my connection ,because we play open multiplayer fine. could you please look into this? thanks if you read this. (ps yes I copy pasted this from the last dev blog sorry for the repetition)

also28 Sep 2018, 5:29 p.m.if you have fixed it since I posted last time ignore this and that

Mr. Anonymous29 Sep 2018, 3:18 p.m.Here are some solutions to those problems. 1. Well if its only hard with lots of cities keep there be lots of cities. Make pirates more like the empires. When they raid cities they take that income to build bigger and better ships and tanks. If they have enough tanks and ships they can take a city and become an opponent. Making revolts harder to stop by giving them some starting airships. You could also add features were the person who started the revolt can buy then airships as to make there revolt harder to quench. This would also give a drawback, if you give this revolt too many weapons they will pose a threat to you to. 2. make the weather conditions severely affect ship performance. This is true for tanks and planes in the real world. If its to raining and there’s a hole in the wall your gunpowder wont light, so ramming and boarding vehicles would be a better option. A rainstorm causes the ground to turn to mud. this means tanks need to work extra hard to move, using extra coal, and eventually turning them into sitting ducks. This was an actual problem. Artillery shells would disrupt natural drainage systems, turning the ground to mud that made the tanks useless. Lightning should sometimes hit the airships during stormy conditions, making having them airborne risky. High winds could make sail bases ships useless. There could even be storms that move, areas that are more prone to winds or mud. The people in this area would make there ships more accustomed to the conditions, making there ships not specialize in areas that are affected by these conditions. 3. Make artillery. A massive, expensive, heavy, high recoil gun that can attack cities near it, weakening there defenses and ships. This would be very expensive. It would cause recoil that would do light damage to everything that it stood on every time you fired it. When it is captured the enemy could use it against you. It would also be very heavy. So heavy that if you didn’t make the base properly it will sink into the ground. The big reason you would add it is it would force the enemy to come out, or you get to take there stuff. 4. Make them more real. You can have a special crew man that you can control. You can make him explode ammo, empty water supplies and set mines. He would look slightly different and the player could notice that. The guards would have a chance to notice something every time he passes. It would be risky to use your expensive man on the inside, but sometimes it would be worth it. 5. I think weather would also solve this problem. Boy is this comment is long. I hope you get to read it. Email me if you do. Handyarmstrong@gmail.com