Devs should create a tech tree uncoupled from Campaign progression

[Raf1307]

I’d like to recommend a decomposition of the Upgrade tree and changing it around with the Campaign concept.

What could this look like? We can use any campaign as an exemplar, but ultimately it wouldn’t matter where you start the key point would be that you wouldn’t have to grind some things too many times:

So firstly lets make a tech tree for soldiers and weapons - separate from Campaign, we’ll come back to it later.

Soldier/Weapon/Equipment/Vehicle Tree
So the soldier tech tree has Rifleman with appropriate classes I, II, III, unlocking Rifleman I gives you access to Assault I, and then Engineer I, Fighter Pilot I, Radio Operator I etc… You can scroll the Moscow Axis campaign to see the order of unlocks, I’m not worried about whether the order is right at this point, its just a concept.
For each soldier type we cut out the red rank tree out of the campaign and glue it into this core soldier tree. It is upgraded with XP exactly in the same way.
So in the end you end up with a Soldier type and their associated rank available in any other campaign after your initial grind, that includes perks etc…

Along the side of the soldiers are the weapon/vehicle unlocks and more importantly respective upgrades. Same thing, you start off with a weapon suitable for riflemen, or the base vehicles, an XP unlock all the subsequent options in some semblance of progression.
You can spend your “points” earnt in battles as you see fit - so focus rifles > SMG, or tanks > planes etc… however, the ability to equip the weapons remains extant.
In the end you will have an unlocked and upgraded set of weapons available for any campaign.

Gear equipment is a bit more random right now and not entirely rational, but it could similarly be cobbled into an independent tree with some semblance of thought that orders the available equipment a bit more logically than currently available.

New Campaign Progression

Now for the campaign itself, the progression goes with what can you bring to the game.

So in most base campaigns we automatically get the Rifleman squad, and Sniper squad from memory, but remember we still have the “blue” part of the upgrade tree, which is a bit of a balancer in its own right so you have to unlock this part for each campaign, yeah your soldiers are leveled up and have good gear but you still need to open up the squad as normal. The weapon/equipment levels now just become access barriers rather than having to re-grind the weapons from that point.

Now in terms of equipping your soldier/weapon we go to the current Stalingrad “cost” system, with a slight change, in that you have a range of costed soldiers/weapons/equipment/vehicles from basic to fully upgraded. Correspondingly you have to spend bronze and silver orders to buy the level of the weapon that you have available via unlocks for different costs - what those are will need to be playtested. You can chose to spend less orders to get a lower quality soldier/weapon and “trade” them in later much like the current system of selling weapons.

So each campaign still allows you to access different classes of soldier as per current squad concept, you still need to “build” out each squad, but once that its done you can go back to the “soldier/tech” tree and buy the appropriate soldier in accordance with accumulated orders.

You can throw gold at the soldiers and weapons, or even the Campaign progression to unlock squads as per current Campaign progression, however, what you can’t do is throw gold at upgrading the squad slots within the campaign, populating them - ie you have to buy the appropriate soldier for a given cost, or equip them with a quality of weapon for which you have sufficient orders.

This system will also allow for an overhaul of the squads themselves, which can be adjusted a bit more historically and potentially adjusted for all sorts of things from size to new abilities depending on the squad type and the respective campaigns. It can also be used to regulate the number and type of weapon more sensibly from both a historical and game balance view - ie no more full FG42 squads - you might get 1 - 2 per FJ squad only…

[Brrady]

I think the problem with this conceptionally is that you’re pissing in their rice bowl.

What I mean by that is that there’s money associated with those tech trees for them and if you were pruning those tech trees you’re pruning their profits

[robihr]

i will just quote myself from different topic

@robihr

well enlisted has toxic grinding model that wants whales to spend money to skip that boring process. you want to play another campaign with almost same weapons? grind them again or spend money to skip/accelerate it. you are getting pummeled by high level weapons. spend money on premium squads and extra vehicle slots.

and now you are proposing to remove the toxicity from that model… are you sane???

from player perspective i am all for it. i dont want to for the n-th time grind same squad or same weapon just cause it is in different campaign. but overall you are removing toxicity that people pay money to skip/accelerate it.

[Papucslama]

Bruh, I’d not pick anything from the weapons category in Tunisia after like lvl 12.

[Curst]

There’s nothing to stop them from keeping grind at the same level while making sure that players at least don’t need to unlock and upgrade the same things again and again. Keep the same total amount of experience required to unlock everything, but consolidate the unlocks. That alone would have made progression a lot more rewarding, or at least a lot less draining.

The real problem lies in how the hell do we add new campaigns then. Especially campaigns where one side is completely new and the other isn’t. It would take a lot of effort to make it truly work (instead of only making it seem that it works like they did with almost everything else).

That’s why I personally stopped bringing up this change. Not because I no longer think it’s necessary, but because it would take a lot of time and effort to properly formulate it and account for everything. I could do it, but I’m not about to put more work into it than developers themselves.

[doshskia]

Progression tree rework?

a redesigned progression tree would greatly benefit the game, my idea for this would be as follows stage 1 1.1 splitting squads, vehicles and weapons apart so now they are two different unlocks (so you can unlock a AT squad but you will also have to unlock the AT weapon separately) 1.2 adding the ammo bags and bags as well as mines to this new tree satge 2 2.1 dividing all the equipment in the game into three tiers, low-medium-high tier 2.2 dividing all the weapons in the game into three …

review

[Raf1307]

So the only progression tree that I’m potentially inhibiting is the blue squad progression, and ofcourse the ability to just buy extra weapons/equipent, which already exists in Stalingrad - so not much of a deviation from their wallet.
However, based on my WT experience ppl, esp new players to the game are likely to throw money at the Tech tree to ensure that they have the highest rank of soldier and the best weapons available to insert into their squads once they are available.
So who knows, they may actually make money on this.

[Raf1307]

This is the hard bit, because as you rightly point out with every new campaign there may potentially be a new nation. Although, having lower rank soldiers than your opponent is not as big a deal as having fully upgraded weapons. Given the limited number of arms manufacturers in WWII, I can only see this as an issue for the Japanese. Everyone else had weapons that pretty much exist in the tree already.
Irrespective of that though, any new faction with unique weapons will be at a 15-20% qualitative disadvantage for however long it takes to grind out their red and yellow trees.