Developer Diary | Post-Release

Today we’ll be casting an analytical eye over the release of BBA, what players have been up to, and what the immediate plans are going forward.

It wouldn’t be a traditional post-release diary without looking at what the player-base at large have been getting up to since BBA was launched.

As you’d expect, Italy has been at the forefront of game sessions since BBA released. We were not expecting quite this level of interest however! 45% of 15+ hour accumulated game sessions were played on the Italian tree. By comparison, at the same period after launch, the Soviet Union accounted for 39% of similar length game sessions. Germany (purple) continues to be a popular choice.

Ethiopia has shot into the first place in terms of minor nations. As expected, Ethiopian game sessions tend to last a shorter time; a combination of losing, having reached player-set goals earlier, and a lot of restarts to maximize efficiency.

We’re seeing fewer players rolling back to previous versions in order to play TC mods than we usually expect during a post-release period.

Everyone’s favorite targets to nuke remain broadly unchanged from previous releases (major capitals). The one new target country in the list is… Mexico, for some reason. Turkey’s nuclear industry has seen an upswing, being responsible for 4% of nuclear weapons created and launched.

2% of games are using the newly released Japanese localization!

There’s been a noticeable increase in players using normal (64%) rather than easy (10%) or very easy (25% ) difficulty since BBA released. 0.74% of games are played on hard difficulty, and 1.10% on very hard. Prior to release, 28% of games used very easy, with 12% on easy.

BBA Launch and Reception

An enormous number of fans are playing the game and we’ve hit several new records compared to NSB and previous releases. This said, BBA has been an unusual release. In comparison to the points above, we’ve also seen some dissatisfaction and confusion over certain mechanics. Combined with the excellent and consistent player numbers, this contributes to some difficulty in interpreting the situation. This said, we clearly don’t intend to handwave away feedback simply because it does not appear wholly representative.g

Thus, it can be difficult to ‘read the room’ on the key pain points that an entire community defines - what may seem obvious to one player is not always the same for others, and the vocabulary users exercise to express themselves over an issue often differs. It is also worth noting that compared to previous releases, the number of reported issues is actually lower in BBA - we’re still working on how to interpret this dissonance.

Peace conferences have by far been the most frequent talking point amongst the community. After a deep dive, it is clear that there are three main narrative detractors:

• Genuine bugs (ie: behavior we consider not to be ‘working as designed’)

• Confusion over the rules in the new system

• Disagreement with the direction of the new implementation of peace conferences

The majority of legitimate bugs we’ve identified here are to do with AI behavior. This is something we consider a known issue, and are iterating on improving this. We’ve made some fixes in the last few patches, and we have some wider-ranging changes coming soon.

In terms of confusion over the new system, this is something we have some longer-term desire to improve. A lot of changes were made to core systems in BBA, for which players had already established a sense of