How about a Barracks?

Those were the ideas I meant to express; perhaps I was unclear the first time. That is why I rephrased.

I'm not really seeing any abuses popping up if units can be transferred for free.

"But Serdak, someone could transfer the starter units from a new company to the tavern!"

So? It's not like they magically stop costing AP.

"But then you wouldn't have to buy them!"

You mean ... I wouldn't have to spend hours of my life grinding away for the ducats necessary to buy the army I want? I'd get to have fun right now instead of next week?? How awful! How unfair! How exploitative!

Nothing about the game prevents me from getting any combination of units, aside from the maximum number of each (no more than 5 Fangs, no more than 3 POB, etc). If two POBs in one list is "unbalanced" somehow, it will be unbalanced if I have it after playing for five minutes or five days, and it should be rectified by other means.

I've already addressed how I feel about adding a fee.

Not sure why everyone seems to think that everything in this game should require payments of dollars or time. The first is distasteful and the second is annoying. The fact that I can access nearly everything in the game in exchange for a certain amount of time just makes me hate "playing" until I have invested enough time to buy what I want.

Cyanide needs to make money. Fine. Make everything cosmetic/aesthetic available only for RMT. Make each faction available for $10 each. Create a single-player PVE campaign, tournament modes, and 2v2 or 3v3, and put them all behind paywalls. Do the same to the ranked play available right now. Dispense with F2P; charge me money. Give me content for cost. But the core gameplay (i.e. building a list within stipulated parameters such as AP, and then fighting other people's lists) should be free and immediate. Anything else is a barrier to fun.

If you take away the grind, and I mean all forms of grind, you lose the goal of the game. the reason for F2P game to have grind is simple: They want people to be hooked to the game so they keep playing it, while at the same time advertising the expense of real money. Without that, a game dies, and DoWO would die if you removed any grind from it: It would just be a kleenex game.

This is why I want reasons to spend Ducats: Grinding to earn enough money to buy specialist, elite and legendary units, names for them, etc... Things that keep me willing to play the game, as well as casuals. A feel of progression.


You can't make everything free, and going from Company to barracks, especially with a cost, would make a lot of sense: You save your best guys there to use them later, when you'll restart an other company.
I made an other thread so that regulars (basically warriors and archers) become free to help the initial grind, and allow flexibility.

See, this sort of thinking makes no sense to me.

The reason F2P games have grind is to encourage me to spend money. Okay, let me spend some money. And skip the grind. All of it. Forever.

Starcraft doesn't require that I play 20 hours before I can build Banelings or whatever. I give Blizzard my money, and they give me a game. They don't ask for more money each time I want to play a different race or try a new build order.

And Starcraft isn't a "kleenex game", whatever that means. Lots of people play it and continue to play it. Because it's fun. No need for a "sense of progression" aside from seeing your skills improve, trying new things and learning more about the game.

"Sense of progression" is great in single-player campaigns or RPG games. It's pretty crap for everything else. In DOW, I don't get a "sense of progression", I get a "sense of I can't do things that I want to do, not because my skill is lacking or because the game doesn't support them, but because I haven't spent enough hours working."

So. "Sense of grind."

DOW has this painful, artificial gating that serves no purpose other than to keep me on a grind/microtransaction treadmill. And that's dreadful. I want no part of it. A barracks/tavern would alleviate it somewhat, but wouldn't fix the core problem: this is a game for which F2P doesn't make much sense.

The reason F2P games have grind is to encourage me to spend money. Okay, let me spend some money. And skip the grind. All of it. Forever.

I can agree with that, and that's what they count on: Buy your units with real money, go on.

Taverns/barracks aren't in yet, and I really hope they will be in later on. But you need to have a continuous incentive (NOT a need) to spend real money. You should also realise that if you bought all your units with real money, you will amass colossal amounts of silvers that you should be able to spend for all those facilities.

Starcraft doesn't require that I play 20 hours before I can build Banelings or whatever. I give Blizzard my money, and they give me a game. They don't ask for more money each time I want to play a different race or try a new build order.

Blizzard got the money from every player, even the ones that will only play 10 minutes, the ones that won't like it, etc... A free to play is the opposite: Everyone has it for free, but a few "whales" to use a casino term keep the boat afloat by spending money they could save. And they aren't even giving you all the units! See the expansions!

Kleenex is a brand of Handkerchiefs, use them for a period of time and dispose of it, because it's pretty fast to do all you have to do with it and that's it. Dogs of War rules are pretty simple, the current content is poor (3 factions with only 8 units each, offers very little variety) and if everything is unlocked you will miss the feel of need to keep playing that F2P generally provide you. If you ever played world of tanks, you'll know what I mean. The game itself is quite OK, but not that great. But there's that OCD part of my brain that tells me "You Must Finish Grinding This Tank". That's the progression.

It would work better with more units per faction.


I agree the gating system is bad, and I'd be happy to see it removed. "Reach level X before buying Y" is a terrible system when you can afford to buy Y with silvers already. It mostly punishes new players, not giving them an incentive to continue, since everything seems out of reach. By comparison, tradition F2P games have you go step by step to reach the next level, continuously providing a bit of reward, a small reward to get to the big one (new unit). here you don't have that.

F2P for this game doesn't make much sense? Well, coming from a tabletop game, I think it makes an awful lot of sense. THe only problem is the way F2P is implemented, and the risk of destroying units you bought with gold without being refunded. That's a terrible system.

The reason F2P games have grind is to encourage me to spend money. Okay, let me spend some money. And skip the grind. All of it. Forever.

I can agree with that, and that's what they count on: Buy your units with real money, go on.

Taverns/barracks aren't in yet, and I really hope they will be in later on. But you need to have a continuous incentive (NOT a need) to spend real money. You should also realise that if you bought all your units with real money, you will amass colossal amounts of silvers that you should be able to spend for all those facilities.

Buying units with RMT is not skipping "all of it" or "forever"; it's skipping the grind for a single unit. A single unit which I may later want to delete, so I can have more room for new units. The idea of destroying something I've bought is hard to stomach. Thus, this thread.

Ducats (silvers) would not be relevant if the game moved to a traditional payment model, and would have a much more niche use (if they were used at all). That's fine.

(Playing the game, after all, should be its own reward; I shouldn't need to be incentivized with money. If you gotta do that, clearly you didn't make a very good game; giving out money is how people convince other people to do work. One generally does not have to pay people to have fun.)

Blizzard got the money from every player, even the ones that will only play 10 minutes, the ones that won't like it, etc... A free to play is the opposite: Everyone has it for free, but a few "whales" to use a casino term keep the boat afloat by spending money they could save. And they aren't even giving you all the units! See the expansions!

Blizzard makes more content (new units, styles of gameplay, and 1p campaigns) and then offers it for money. That's fine.

If Cyanide later makes more units or new factions or new game modes, HEY! That's new content! They can charge me more for it and I won't cry foul! (They probably will.)

What bothers me is that building up my army - having those options, making those decisions and tweaks - is part of the core gameplay experience. It's not additional content. It's necessary to play the game. And in order to play the game, I have to pay for it with small but indefinitely numerous microtransactions.

Forcing me to pay for core gameplay once (the ~$20-$60 price tag on traditional video games) is fine; forcing me to continue to pay for it is absurd. You're not giving me any additional content, just access to what's already there.

Dogs of War rules are pretty simple, the current content is poor (3 factions with only 8 units each, offers very little variety) and if everything is unlocked you will miss the feel of need to keep playing that F2P generally provide you. If you ever played world of tanks, you'll know what I mean. The game itself is quite OK, but not that great. But there's that OCD part of my brain that tells me "You Must Finish Grinding This Tank". That's the progression.

To paraphase: "this game isn't likely to be very good, so it'll need to prey on human psychological foibles to survive financially." Well. If the game's not much good (owing to lack of depth, or anything else), I won't be playing it.

I rather like the game though. I think it's an excellent start and that there's lots of potential for relatively easy expansion. The payment model is really the only beef I have with it, and its logic is so fundamentally flawed that it seems like a decision made by some bigwig with a business degree, not a game designer.

I guess I'm pretty resistant to OCD. I feel no need to keep playing. In fact, if I'm not having fun, I stop playing. Because I play games to have fun, not so I can get Stockholm syndrome.

F2P for this game doesn't make much sense? Well, coming from a tabletop game, I think it makes an awful lot of sense. THe only problem is the way F2P is implemented, and the risk of destroying units you bought with gold without being refunded. That's a terrible system.

I'm not sure why you think it's sensible. Yeah, on the tabletop, you get the thrill of opening a new blister and trying out a new unit. But I much more often remember the soul-crushing sadness of hearing that Seventh Edition has been released, with New Improved Balance Changes, the upshot of which is that half my models are either crap on the tabletop or no longer legal, and now I need to buy another $200 of models.

This is part of why I loved CONF. Rackham never really did that. This is part of why I think DOW can succeed. In the computer world, balance changes don't HAVE to be soul-crushing or obviate a great deal of my previous purchases.

F2P is a popular buzzword in the industry right now, but frankly, a $10 game that's ready to go "out of the box" is going to get much more attention from me than a game that looks awesome but requires me to run the Indefinite Microtransaction Treadmill.

I suspect this is because I can tell, from Internet research or a demo, how much I'm likely to enjoy a game. If I like a game, I want to play it RIGHT NOW - not in 20 hours, not after running the Treadmill.

Let's live it at that: We're repeating our discussion that was in an other thread and will never agree. The end.