Feedback on Diplomacy Beta

[Tssha]

Alright, I've taken the game for a quick jaunt around the block, here's how it runs.

First off, it's nice to be able to trade in an interesting way with your neighbours. Though my neighbours seem oddly interested in my Italian Foot. Not sure why, I can only guess it's better than what they have on offer...

Second, I'm guessing the change to demanding the ceding of territories was to avoid having total annihilation wars. If that's the case, it's supremely backfired. I have to utterly annihilate my opponent or I'm not keeping a single province. The AI rarely agrees to cede any territory, and the warscore for even a single region is astronomical! 72 warscore for a region that's my objective but not his, when my opponent is losing badly...I mean, does my opponent want to live? Just give me my objective and I'll leave you alive...

Third, occupied territory being treated like all your other territory just...doesn't work with ceding mechanics. It's good to be able to reassign everyone to food, since they'll certainly be starving with the Just Conquered malus (-50% food and Infra) on top of the occupied territory malus (-25% food and infra). Granted, if you wanted occupied regions to have five turns of famine, this'll certainly do it...but it's giving you both too much and not enough power over the region, and it feels like a dirty compromise made while overhauling mechanics that were never designed to work with ceding mechanics.

Fourth, objective mechanics still don't feel right. A nearby objective disappears, only to reappear somewhere in the NW of modern day France, when I don't even have Cisalpine Gaul. I don't know what you changed about objectives, else I could give more useful feedback. All I can say is, it still doesn't feel right.



Ultimately, I'd say this needs a lot of balancing work. Drop the region warscore costs by 2/3rds, remembering that peace deals take awhile and are probability based. Figure out why you want people to have control over temporarily occupied provinces (building defences, maybe?), or consider having them output only food and infra while occupied. If you don't change how occupied provinces work mechanically, maybe let the truly negative consequences kick in once they're ceded to the conquering party. And maybe make commerce and culture impossible while a territory is occupied and not owned. I mean, it's occupied territory, it shouldn't be a net benefit to the occupying power.

If you're interested in my save file, here it is: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ugvbmwjynuo68fw/6.LSF?dl=0

[Pocus]

Thanks for the feedback. You are not the first saying regions cost too much and so it results in wars behind wars of annihilation.