joergdw

But that's a hard counter – the developers said that they are in favour for soft counters. Btw. it shouldn't be that much work. Add two parameters and include them in the damage formula. If the developers like the idea, we can start talking about the how. (If not, we can stop discussion here.)

I think you misunderstood me. I didn't meant to talk about introducing units with stealth abilities.

Currently before the release of a new version of 0ad players are asked for balancing. After the last two releases I had the impression that perhaps there were not sufficient time for the test players to do a real good balancing, perhaps also under the pressure of the next release. In my opinion – at least as long as this game is in alpha stage – it would beneficial to be able to do balancing all the time, as done for example by the game http://zero-k.info/. A possible variant is: Every time you log in into the lobby the game search if there is a more recent version for unit stats (only unit stats – graphics or other things should remain unchanged between two versions).

Introduction Currently we have three types of damage Pierce: done mainly by archers, spearmen, skirmishers, … Hack: done mainly by swordsmen Crush: done mainly by siege units, such as catapults, battering rams, … That leads to some problems when designing the counter-unit-relation. For example we want (generally spoken) swordsmen to effective against skirmishers, skirmishers to be effective against bowman and bowman to be effective against swordsmen. Because skirmishers and bowmen do the same damage (pierce) giving swordsmen a good armour against skirmishers will also improve them equally against bowmen which we don't want. Proposal 1 Introducing another type of damage for skirmishers/bowmen could of course solve the problem. But what should that be? Both deal ranged pierce damage. I think an idea of resolving this could be found in the real world. The difference between a thrown spear and an arrow is the kinetic energy. You can read in several articles (e.g. in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_and_arrow) that bows had the advantage that shot arrows have/had a higher kinetic energy than a spear thrown by an arm. An arrow with high kinetic energy was able to destroy an armour, as demonstrated for example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCE40J93m5c. A thrown spear didn't have sufficient energy to do that damage. In the game 0ad that can be used like this. Let every unit have a kinetic-energy-value for an attack, and an armour a value determining the absorption of kinetic energy. Swordsmen the can have an armour which can deal well with the less kinetic energy of the thrown spears of skirmishers. They can reach them and – because skirmishers have a very low armour on everything – kill them easily. On the other side the swordsman's armour wouldn't perform well against the high-kinetic-energy pierce damage of bowmen and would be weakened to much before a swordsman can reach the bowman. Skirmishers on the other side don't need to reach the bowmen because they have range themselves (and move quicker than swordsmen with heavy armour). The just throw their spears and the bowmen should be vulnerable to high-kinetic-energy pierce damage as well as low-kinetic-energy pierce damage performed by the skirmishers (which themselves could have a better armour against high-kinetic-energy pierce damage). So the situation described above is resolved. Of course the concept with kinetic energy is also of use in other situations. For example the crush damage of a battering ram comes with less kinetic energy than the one of a catapult. And a two-handed sword also performs damage with more kinetic energy than a longsword. Proposal 2 Another idea would be to introduce – instead of the kinetic energy – a probability to avoid a hit, as done for example by a game like http://wesnoth.org. They describe it here: http://www.wesnoth.org/manual/stable/manual.en_GB.html#_fighting; We can use it, to give skirmishers a high probability to avoid arrows (because they are more agile than swordsmen with their heavy armour). What do you think? Any other ideas? Any objections and proposals to improve that?