I dont understand this thread. You want more income? Thats wargame. The whole point of SD was to cure Wargame's problems including the overabundant income and spammy gameplay. Real time strategy should have a balance between speed and ability of players to control whatever they have on their hands at all times.
Again, the objective of the thread isn't to push for more income, more micro, or any specific mechanic.
The point is to chart the
experience of playing a match especially in terms of its emotional highs and lows; especially from the perspective of people who just want to have fun (e.g. casuals) rather than competitive players (e.g. tourney players). The core issue here is that a game that new players don't find fun won't find a consistent audience and there won't be a hardcore player base without enough casuals.
Steel Division can very well be a game with much fewer units than Wargame or Starcraft. However, if it regularly devolves to a lot of
unfun waiting because you have to wait to build up again or because there is really not much chance of making headway against an opponent getting equal units and equivalent counter then it's a
problem that has to be addressed.
And again there are many, many ways to "fix" the issues. For instance as mentioned timing attacks could simply change the time when each Division gets their Phase B/C (e.g. one gets it at 8 minutes, another at 12 minutes), which retains the current "economy" and unit count (and micro). People need to stop assuming it's automatically meant to kill the current "feel" of the game.
Put it another way: I would argue that most of the best fun in Steel Division is in the first few minute. Why not find ways to extend this experience to the rest of the match, or to condense the match into a shorter time frame so that a larger proportion of the time spent playing SD is "fun" rather than "waiting for fun".
Indeed, I'd note that more than one player has already noted that 10 v 10s
were fun for them precisely because it's such a hectic mess for a good portion of the match, and that reducing the time limit in fact
detracted from this experience because it abruptly ended their fun just as they got their nice units.
Others however have expressed that they don't want a match to be wholly hectic for 40 minutes straight, which is understandable because micro
is tiring if done too much.
But in that case the solution might not be to make the game less "active" - but instead to condense the experience to a shorter match. Very intense game experiences like FPS matches often don't last more than 15 minutes for a reason, and it wouldn't be good to assume that condensing SD matches into that short of a time period will automatically make it less deep. Indeed, all it might mean is that you only have to wait 10 minutes to get your King Tigers instead of waiting 20.
In short, before
judging that this will require so-and-so mechanic and this new mechanic will ruin the game, the community needs to take a deep breath and
step back to understand what really makes the game fun or unfun in the first place; and that any changes to the design should
maximize the fun moments and put far fewer obstacles/waiting time to get there.
A game, as I noted in the intro, is not just a collection of mechanics and arguing over mechanic has frankly been done to the death for this game (it has more forum posts than Tyranny) with very little
observing how the experience is fun or or not. Indeed, I get the sense that a lot of issues with the last patch stemmed from the mechanic-centric mindset of the community, which thought that tweaking mechanics would automatically result in a fun game. Mechanics by themselves simply aren't fun. They are simply one component to the overall game experience.
