General Balance Updates in CS:M

Hey folks, it’s time for another CS:M update article, today we’re going to be talking about resources and balance in the game and the recent changes we have been working on.

Before we jump right into some of the issues and how we addressed them, we would like to preface that we have taken all player feedback on board and studied it meticulously. Quite often, it is common that feedback or suggestions might target a specific feature in the game and while this feature might be under or over preforming, there are times where the solution may not be with the aforementioned mechanic directly, but with something else. For this reason, if you made a suggestion that made a lot of sense but isn’t directly featured here, it’s most likely because we addressed it through bringing other features up to par with it.

So once again, buckle in because much like our last development update article, this is a big one.

Economy

Right now, it’s very clear that players are able to stockpile key resources once they reach somewhere around castle level 6–8 depending on how they play. While it initially feels great living in a somewhat perpetual golden age, this greatly hampers a player’s ability to play to earn - a key feature of the game. The fact of the matter is that if everyone has too many resources then there’s no buyers at market.

Fixing this isn’t as simple as just nerfing resource income, it’s something we had to approach on multiple levels which of course we will go into more detail below.

Player income scaling

So when we say “income scaling” in CS:M, we’re referencing how many resources a high level player can earn in the game compared to a lower level player and how much progress they can supply to these lower level players on a daily basis via the resources they put up on the market.

Currently, this snowballs far too quickly. While a level 10 player should (and still will) produce more resources than a level 6 player, we want to reign in the building power their daily market sales provide other players.

Although we have addressed this on many levels, one of the core fixes was to introduce a base system of diminishing returns when upgrading your production buildings. This means that while upgrading a resource building will still give you more resources per level, the increase will also diminish each level.

Forester Example (simplified values)

Current Scaling:
Level 1: 100 Wood
Level 2: 110 Wood
Level 3: 125 Wood
Level 4: 145 Wood

New Scaling with diminishing returns:
Level 1: 100 Wood
Level 2: 110 Wood
Level 3: 119 Wood
Level 4: 127 Wood

Right away from this simplified example, you can see that this alone greatly reduces the power (income) creep. This means we were able to adjust building and upgrade costs across the board meaning that although your income will be reduced, so will your building costs.

POPS/Housing:

Next up on the list is POPS. The team had developed a great system where assigning more POPS to a building increased its productivity which makes sense as well as giving players agency over how their city is run.

While on paper, this was a really unique feature our game offered, the reality is that players currently don’t really have to interact with this mechanic as housing and POPs are too easy to access right now. You would be hard pushed to find players in the test server who don’t have all their production buildings maxed out with workers.

With this in mind, we have reduced the amount of houses that can be built as well as the amount of POPs each house level up grants.

This now puts all players in a position where they must make decisions as to which resources they want to focus on, this should also help stimulate market activity.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that players will need to pay money in order to sustain their city, but rather encourage market trading while giving attentive players more earning potential.

Research and Specialization

Previously we had to be very careful with what we added to the research tree in terms of giving a player more power. This mechanic was only recently developed, meaning we were quite restricted in terms of what we could add to it.

Due to going back to square one in terms of production, POPS, etc, we were able to keep the research tree in mind and now have a lot more freedom to make it more diverse and most importantly of all, give players more agency.

One big change we made to resources in general is that wood and stone now have the same value in terms of what they build. This allows us to create specialization in the research tree allowing players to take a one or the other research option. For example, a player may choose a 10% increase to wood production while another player would choose the 10% to stone production.

This change means that while a player can still develop and maintain their city by themselves, it will be much faster to sell off the excess resource you have specialized in and buy resources your city is producing at a lower rate.

This should create a bit of a market minigame where attentive and patient players can profit off the wood and stone trading difference on a day to day basis as the value changes.

Due to the nerfs to housing and POPS we can also give some of this power back to players through the research tree at certain levels.

These are just a couple of examples, but the bottom line is we are making research more exciting and rewarding.

Land and Bandit Camps

Another issue that currently exists is the amount of land players have access to. We have covered some of our ideas here before in terms of slowing down progression on this front.

The previously proposed idea was to make the fights very difficult meaning a player would have to learn the fights, fail a number of times, and inevitably sink a lot of resources into making squads to retry the encounter.

We got some very mixed feedback on this, some player loved the idea of the challenge while others raised concern that this may be too oppressive.

Feedback like this is fantastic because it allows us to go back to the drawing board and study the situation and come up with a solution that meets somewhere in the middle ground.

So while we will still buff bandit camp difficulty and introduce the reinforcements mechanic, we won’t make it overwhelmingly difficult to beat and will instead gate bandit progression behind castle level — something that had also been suggested by multiple players.

Personally, I (Fruitguru) really do like the idea of extremely difficult fights but I agree that mainline progression shouldn’t be gated by this, however it’s something to consider for a later update as optional content.

Castle Upgrading and Pacing

Previously, upgrading a castle was far too cheap and quick to preform. We are greatly increasing the amount of resources and time it takes to upgrade the castle.

In return for the increased cost and build time, we have changed up the pacing of the game, right now, castle levels 5 is a massive spike in terms of what a player can do in the game while other levels at times feel lacklustre.

With our pacing changes, we have made it so each castle level offers a player more than just an extra level to their buildings, be it in the form of new research, mechanics, buildings or bandit camp progression on a level by level basis.

In Closing

There’s a lot more to cover in terms of the Global Map, however this has multiple features and will require an article of its own so stay tuned.

Once again, a huge thanks to the community for the feedback provided, which really is invaluable. We’re looking forward to introducing these changes and seeing how they play out. As always if you have any questions or suggestions please send them our way on Discord.