Are you guys meeting your financial goals?

As someone already said, what this game is also lacking is some sort of Co-Op or simply the ability to play with a friend other than vs each other. This would of course require a different game mode and you would need to implement some sort of "ally vs enemy" factions as in the original confrontation as it would be a bit weird acheron allied with lions .

Probably to make it work you might need at least 1 more race for each path ^^

Probably to make it work you might need at least 1 more race for each path

BTW
...game need something to spend ducats/cyans
at the time i have all factions with 800-1200ap partialy painted and named (i have no inspiration for more names )
and still 40k ducats

barracks maybe ?
not even a one texture/model is needed for that
also additional Avatars for factions would be nice

[Jigoku]

Thanks for the leads, guys.

We did think a lot about all of them.

Coop play was always a very real question, but it is such a huge task that we can't take care of it right now.

A more selective matchmaking for newcomers might be nice, but it's not possible right now for a number of reasons.
Also, we did try this for a while, and a lot of people complained about the waiting times... and that was in a time when the raw number of players was not an issue.

The sense of involvement... Faction-wise, it's a great idea that we discussed a lot here in the past months, but here again it is a considerable amount of work to make it work fine. As for the coop, it's still a very valid lead, just not one we can take right now.
On the unit scale, investment just doesn't work the way we wanted it to work.
Admitedly there were some mistakes made from our side that didn't help, but from what we understand, it looks like it's not units names or colors that keeps players involved past the 20th game or so.

There are other leads, but at this point, everything that we need to do to fix our problems takes a lot of time, and a lot of work.

I'll be honest that i know very little about confrontation, dogs of war is pretty much the first thing i've seen relating to it and i've only read the Wolfen side of the story. The only tabletop experience i've really had before this game has been Warhammer/40k and even then i think i've probably only had 4-5 games in my life ^^';; My brother has huge armies (undead and blood angels) which is probbably what got me interested; but i never really was able to paint all that well.

Having probably spent more time daydreaming than actually playing tabletop games or painting for that matter i think being able to follow a theme would help. Just say for example we had a unit that was the polar opposite of the guardian of the runes, a unit that can't be used in conjuncture with the guardian of the runes (not even allowed on the same roster) because the two units have completely opposing values. Which unit you choose can be a tactical thing but also it says something about the group you are using. Wether they are followers of yllia or outcasts. That sort of choice allows for players to place an identity on their army; like how which god any given Chaos Spacemarine worships can change their backgrounds drastically. Especially for those chapters that are usually not affiliated with any one god. For some that will mean they run Followers of Yllia/Outcasts. For others that would mean they'd run both, but as two seperate companies. Thats a win/win situation in my book.

Also; it wouldn't hurt to have some talents that actually altered the appearance of the unit your using. Like a unit that has flight on it's level tree and sprouts wings when you add it to your unit. I'm not sure how all this would translate to the other armies lore wise because i know little to nothing about them; but i think choices like that would help affirm the identity of a player's army.

Having probbably spent more time daydreaming that actually playing tabletop games or painting for that matter i think being able to follow a theme would help. Just say for example we had a unit that was the polar opposite of the guardian of the runes, a unit that can't be used in conjuncture with the guardian of the runes (not even allowed on the same roster) because the two units have completely opposing values. Which unit you choose can be a tactical thing but also it says something about the group you are using. Wether they are followers of yllia or outcasts. That sort of choice allows for players to place an idendity on their army; like how which god any given Chaos Spacemarine worships can change their backgrounds drastically. Especially for those chapters that are usually not affiliated with any one god. For some that will mean they run Followers of Yllia/Outcasts. For others that would mean they'd run both, but as two seperate companies. Thats a win/win situation in my book.

Faction packs was working slightly in that way (additional units but limited to ONE sub-faction that can be recruted only when whole company buy sum-faction main skill for its ap cost) and i think that they can be implemented exacly as they were in C3 but definetly latter on when 9 or even 12-15 factions will be already ingame.

I'd actually suggest not going with co-op to start with but rather co-operative goals for a factions. The below system is something every successful table top company I can think off runs at least once a year. Even the Pen and Paper community does this.

1. As a development team decide on a story line.
- You could run a best story competition on the forum which means you don't even need to do anything but read or let us vote for a winner.

2. Set goals each faction are aiming to achieve through the storyline.
-Both minor and major over all ones.

3. Set a time frame for this campaign ( At least across a month maybe 2. No longer)

4. Post the story somewhere in game or even the website.
- Update the story each week based on what each faction achieves.(5)

5. Now track each faction.
- Maybe only the first game of each player in the top 50-100.
- Maybe a different game mode is tracked every week.

Now you don't actually have to modify the game in anyway you are just giving value to the games already played. You are also giving more pathos to our mercs since they now contribute to something. You are creating a living world for us to play in.

If you need examples of what I am talking about look at the Privateer Press Mk1 rule books Escalation and Apotheosis. (I hope its ok to name another company so clearly if not please delete this.)

I'm sad in reading that you are finding many problems in keeping new players to leave, since I think that this game is one of the best in its genre that you can find on the market at the moment. However, its basic complexity that makes it so nice to play is a double-faced coin, since many new players don't even start to learn how to play the game before rage-quitting after few matches lost (try reading the comment on Steam... some people just quit and commented negatively just after like 30-40 min of play... or others found the game "unbalanced" and it is a bit fun to read which are the compositions they think are OP and that for a expert player they are very weak ones!).

One problem already highlighted is effectively that new players are tossed among the PvP a bit too early, before they even comprehend well how to use stances for example. The tutorials are good, but the player, like in every tutorial, follows all the instruction more or less automatically without effectively learn all the possibilities. A short campaign (based on something like the practice matches and strongly suggested for newcomers) with some "Achievement" at the end may be a good way to make the new players stick around a bit more and discover better the game before evaluating it. This won't change the game from a PvP in a PvE, but will allow the players to win some matches (and grow a bit more confident in themselves) before hitting the wall of PvP.

Skydragon said in another post a couple of suggestions that I'd like to report also here since I think they are good ideas that merit some ulterior light:

Skydragon: "a) Weekly rankings are very anonymous, you can reach first position in one week and after that everything you do is deleted from history! Nothing remain other than just a few anonymous cyans in your bank.
Players generally play to challenge themselves in something that made them feel good, important, that feed their ambitious and of course they must have fun doing that.

We need different and multiple goals in this game and some kind of reward to those goals.

Montly ranking would work great to improve challenge. It would be great if there is some kind of hall of fame that keep record of every season. Also you could add medals to the player|army profile. Some like olimpic medal, who reach first position get a gold medal, bronze and silver that will be permanent and showed in the player profile and in some hall of fame. This would make permanent every effort someone spent in the game and set it in the stone of history."


Almanro: Creating "Incremental Goals" may be indeed very useful to keep player playing and it should be easy to achieve (e.g. "Win against 10 Undead Companies - 100 Gold reward", after that "Win against 25 Undead Companies - 1000 Gold reward", and finally "Win against 50 Undead Companies - 5 Cyan reward") other goals may be related to achieve something like "Lvl your PoB till lvl5 - 500 Gold" or "Do over 100 damage with a single unit in a match - 100 Gold", etc.
The reward amount is not so important, it is more the fact to have the goals completed in your profile (e.g. think about Diablo III or many other games with completely useless goals but many people loose a lot of time to complete them all!)
Monthly Ranking is also a nice idea, but more than a "Hall of Fame" of all the past seasons I would give medals (or achievements!) to the first 3 players to be able to show their results in their profile.
If you want you can use Steam like in the other two Cyanide games to keep tracks of the achievements.


Skydragon: c) Statistic : PLAYER LOVE STATISTICS!
How many game i've player? How many game i've played with my undead vs other army? How many win? How many game on each map, on what mission etc...? Have some kind of player statistic will stick ppl to the game and give them the will of improve them, and also the feeling that all the game they played had some impact on something and this would keep them to the game i think, better than have they're score deleted after a week.

Almanro: I agree that having more complete statistics of the various victories/losses and so on may be a nice addition that won't require too much work. You can create it in the profile page with some charts that show the players progression.

Have a nice evening,

Almanro

I agree that there needs to be more hand-holding before new players are tossed into PvP. The new player needs to build up some confidence, work out how the game really works before they can enjoy the PvP.

I've played a lot of PvP games so when I started DoW, I probably played at least 20 games of Training before I played my first PvP game. This is because I know in PvP games, the competition gets step quick and I hate losing (it ruins the fun for me). So I knew that I wanted to play against an easy opponent for awhile, while I worked out my strategy and how the game worked and even leveled some of my troops before I jumped into PvP. After I got so good at beating the Easy Training Missions, I even tried the Medium Training Missions with my 200AP Company. When I realized there was no way I was going to beat the 400AP AI Companies in the Medium Training Missions, that's when I finally jumped into PvP (because that's all I had left, since the Easy Training wasn't fun anymore. But if I could have won in the Medium Training, I probably would have played through all of that before going into PvP because I want to be as good as possible before I jump into PvP with all the other good players).

Maybe the devs could make some puzzles ala Duels of the planeswalker, rig them so they can only be completed if done in a specific way. Like defensive stance running past a number of enemies to reach a destination, combining offensive stance and mighty blow to take an enemy down in 1 turn (i had someone who didn't know you could do this lol). One for correctly using herassment; like needing to kill a target but also the crossbowman needs to survive the turn so you need to use the extra movement to move him to safety.

Maybe the devs could make some puzzles ala Duels of the planeswalker, rig them so they can only be completed if done in a specific way. Like defensive stance running past a number of enemies to reach a destination, combining offensive stance and mighty blow to take an enemy down in 1 turn (i had someone who didn't know you could do this lol). One for correctly using herassment; like needing to kill a target but also the crossbowman needs to survive the turn so you need to use the extra movement to move him to safety.

this would be nice but only with fixed 100% chances to hit all targets... other way luck based puzzles would be werid

but a puzzle like - you have X units and X activations to kill Y healthy units would need some calculation and knowedge about mechanics