N3rull

I think open market is necessary, both from a gameplay and reality point of view. The world is huge and even if there are dozensof factions involved and unwilling to trade, there's always a buyer for things like iron, food or oil. It could be wealthy citizens who want to drive their cars freely regardless of war and shortages. It could be rebels or some separatist guerilla parties hidden somewhere in enemy territory. There's always a buyer . And seller... I guess corruption can crop up anywhere. From a gameplay point of view, you need the open market because the game might be almost unplayable in many situations. Besides you're not exchanging resources freely now that I checked it out. You have to give away 3 units of something to get one unit of another resource, so you either have enough of it or you have to have three times more of something else to make up for the shortage. Fair price I would say. That said, I think: - food should be fixed in one of mentioned ways: -- research to reduce consumption -- increase the value of food nodes or make food show up more often compared to other resources. -- etc. - Cash should be fixed (gold mines are least important of all, cause you can exchange 1 unit of any resource for one cash unit, but you can't do it the other way and at the same time gold mines don't yield more than any other) in one of those ways: -- make gold mines rare but very profitable (15-20 units/turn, so they are really strategically important) -- increase gold mine generated income slightly whilst not changing how often they show up (bump to about 8-12 per turn) -- change open market so that selling one resource unit gives you not 1 but 0.9 or 0.8 cash.

I have come to realize that it quickly becomes extremely complex to manage all your units. Up to maybe turn 40-50 when you have a list of 10-15 idle units per turn it is somewhat manageable, but when the list begins to span over 30+ units and there are paratroopers (or other units that you have to load on other units and then bring them somewhere), controlling this all becomes a b.... . For example, when you have a tactical bomber idle, you click its name. The view centers on it. You see its location and you immediately know where you need to send the plane. However, when you have an idle unit of paratroopers, you have to find him an idle transport plane. Now you either have to click on every city on the map (starting from the closest cities to where the paratrooper squad is, so you find the closest transport) to check if there's an idle airplane; or you have to click all transports on the idle list, memorize their location and after scrolling them all decide which one is closest. Sam with subs/battleships and missiles, docked transports and troops, and so on. My idea for a solution would be: add a new view, something like the city view, that would show idle units. We have the standard view where you see cities, resource nodes and units. You can turn on city view to see only cities, what is built there and what is being produced. My idea would be to have another view type, just like the city view, but one which would show all units on the map that "need orders". Units that have orders would not be shown. Units out of cities that don't have orders would be visible. Cities would be shown just like in city view, but it would be idle unit icons instead of buildings drawn in a ring around the city icon. This would be really helpful.

I think without resources this game wouldn't make sense. There would be no need to control the sea. There would be zero use for paratroopers which can take over a whole island of resource nodes in on turn - but are relatively week in combat. I dunno. Anyway back to resources - after another few dozen turns I agree that food supply is not balanced. MAYBE it is as it should be, I don't know, but I am still floating in oil and Iron while my food is at -10/turn. Either increase the spawn rate of food compared to other resources or give some tech that can lower the food consumption or reduce food consumption on units. I'm not saying Food is going away too fast, maybe it is going in the correct rate. But if food is leaving me as it should, then Oil and Iron should too. By the way, now that I really checked how the Market works - I came to realize that gold is the least valuable resource on the map. This is because: - you can trade 1 unit of Oil/Food/Iron for 1 unit of cash, so one O/F/I is 'equal to' one cash unit if you need the latter most. - you have to give three units of cash for one O/F/I . So cash is not exchangeable to other resources with so much ease. THIS is imbalanced in my opinion, because gold is the most scarce resource on the map (the nodes are not higher than any other resource; they're only on land unlike food and oil; Iron is more common I think)

Well, I played some more and my food increment indeed went into negatives when I actually started to spam units (15 Paratroopers, 6 infantry, 3 tanks, 3 SAMs, 5 tac bombers, 4 fighters, 5 transports, 6 aiplane transports and some miscellaneous junk like 5 spy planes). Still, my food is like -6 while my Oil and Iron are both at +30. I dunno, I'm not sure what the devs want this game to be. Will it be about hundreds of units or just a selected few. Will it be about invading the enemy island with 3 tanks or 15 of them. As for the exchange rates I am 100% sure you can sell one unit of Oil/Food/Iron for one unit of cash. That's how my economy's been functioning for at least 70 turns so I am sure. edit. Ok I got it. It's 1 Oil/Food/Iron for 3 cash. The other are 1-1.

My experience is quite the opposite. I have a game in its 85th-ish turn on the demo map, 1v1 against an AI. I have about 2/3 of the map and I'm FLOATING in resources. I am selling food, oil and iron in hundreds to fund my imbalol research bills (I have about 15 research points per turn, check how much cash goes to fund that). I still have over a thousand cash most of the time. Try moving your ground units into cities, disband whatever you don't need. That said, I have played this AWESOME GAME!!! (couldn't help it) only a few days so I may yet see what's troubling you. As it is though, I think you've simply faced what many did in history. As Napoleon said - An army marches on its stomach. I believe you made too big an army By the way, what bothers me most about resources is that they are traded on a 1-1 basis. It kinda defeats the purpose of having different resources when a player can freely sell 1 unit of Oil and get 1 unit of Food or whatever, just like that. Don't you think?