Thorfinn the Shallow Minded
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Posts posted by Thorfinn the Shallow Minded
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17 minutes ago, Edwarf said:
I don't really like this idea, it will make the game slower. Barracks units are mainly used to boom during the first 10 min of the game and higher rank unit have lower gathering rates. Also higher rank unit is planned for mercenaries to differenciate them (D3699).
That is precisely why it is being proposed. A military structure used for economic purposes is an oxymoron.
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2 hours ago, hyperion said:
Comparing hunting vs foraging doesn't make much sense to me, having different sources produce at different speed is fine and even desirable. What should be questioned is the relative speed of hunting of cavalry vs citizen soldier and woman. I don't see a compelling reason why there should be a substantial difference for very short distances (~20m).
The reason I did so was to compare a task that cavalry tend to do with one that women do as well in the immediate early game. Fair points though.
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10 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:
The arrows and projectiles looks strangely cartoonish.
They definitely have that kind of feel, especially when it comes to the impact with units; that said, there are two things I appreciate about that design: they are easy to make out and they lack the weird trails seen in most Total War games.
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22 minutes ago, Player of 0AD said:
I think that the gather rates are fine. The cav is specialized in hunting, so it's much faster, but it can't do anything else.
This makes it also possible to replace in the late game the farming by corralling, which rewards skillful play!It's no problem neither that chicken are close to the CC.
Conclusion: Just don't change anything
The thing is that cavalry were not hunting specialists; I can live with them hunting faster than other units, but to me the current approach makes the unit completely one dimensional outside of combat in the early game. Do you ever scout with your cavalry unit at the beginning of the game? Most people don't and tend to only scout once they are attacking. Personally I would like to see there be a roughly 50% divide of preference of scouting versus hunting depending on build orders. Scouting could reward the player with knowing the locations of key resources and potentially allow them to grab treasures like in some maps while hunting would be a greedier yet riskier option since there would be a complete lack of intel regarding a potential rush.
The other issue that primarily sparked this analysis was the fact that in a different thread I proposed that Sparta should lack cavalry at the beginning of the game and be only able to train them in the Town Phase to represent their poor cavalry. This suggestion was shot down by borg for the good reason of cavalry being critical to the early economy. I'm okay with cavalry complementing the economy, but if the problem is that by nerfing their hunting skill they become much worse, maybe there could be another way of buffing them such as having the ability to build outposts, tying into a more reconnaissance approach.
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Cavalry gather rates are fast, and to quantify that, I ran a number of tests with Cavalry spawning on the two player Acropolis Bay Map. First I tested the cavalry unit collecting chickens. The result was that the cavalry unit gathered 200 food in roughly 1 minute and 19 seconds (I set it to gather the most efficient group.).
In comparison, I set one woman to gather from the nearest berry group (without constructing a dropsite nearby) and was able to collect 50 food in that same amount of time. Her collecting less, however, makes sense since a female unit costs one third the number of resources and has more economic flexibility than its cavalry counterpart at the cost of having next to useless stats for combat purposes.
Three women, the equivalent resource cost, only gathered 140 food in that same timeframe mostly due to the pathfinding causing them to bump into each other.
As some general comments, even if the women worked at peak efficiency, they still would take up three population which makes them at the immediate early game rather poor gatherers in comparison. Granted, hunting does grow much more inefficient after the few animals within each player's border dies, and building more dropsites is generally difficult. This does not change the fact that early on, there is an absolute no brainer to having the cavalry unit hunt instead of scouting the map. Personally I would like to see there be a validity of either approach if we discount the possibility of cavalry being unable to perform any economic role.
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I personally think this sounds fun. It would also be appropriate to potentially have Hamilcar be able to recruit mercenaries while we're at it.
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5 hours ago, LetswaveaBook said:
Helot should be mainly workers and having cheaper workers can have serious balance effects in a citizen soldier concept. I would like the idea, but we need a good clue how to keep balance in mind.
My proposal was a simple and conservative one: not ideal to my views, but a mere suggestion that some might like. The inclusion of Helots at all is problematic for the citizen soldier concept since they were not citizens and were only occasionally soldiers. The same of course goes for Perioikoi, leaving the ironic choice of the Spartan hoplite, both a citizen and a soldier not being a citizen-soldier.
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39 minutes ago, borg- said:
This is totally unviable. Without horses, cant hunt, very slow compared to other civilizations.
That was my concern as well, but perhaps there is a way around this. First of all, should horsemen gather food at warp speed when it comes to hunting? Personally I find the current rate a bit much. Second, Sparta could compensate by having women gather hunt resources more efficiently.
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14 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:
What about slaves (helot) as ubique support unit (for now)?
Ah yes. That is a thing that has been mentioned a fair amount. It's definitely valid. Personally I could see the helot unit being available instead of the skirmisher variant from the Civic Centre. Constructing a barracks would allow for the research of a technology that would allow the player to emancipate a helot unit into a νεοδαμώδεις instead, a skirmisher if we go with that route that would no longer gather but would fight reasonably well.
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Since other civilisations have been getting their fair share of recognition, it seems fair to represent Sparta as well. Here are a few ideas I have for further differentiation:
Remove the Theatron as it is not representative of Sparta.
Make palisade walls only accessible once the Town Phase has been reached to further emphasise their lack of reliance on walls.
Make the Syssition available in the Town Phase to allow them to produce Spartans earlier.
Have them start with a Skiritae unit instead of a horseman to demonstrate their abysmal cavalry capabilities. Also they should perhaps not be able to train cavalry in the Village Phase.
Have them begin with a Spartan hoplite since Sparta had Spartans.
Make their helot units cheaper yet weaker.
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It's fairly redundant to have druids provide just an attack aura for both cases. If the emphasis of the Britons is on mobility, I would instead make it so that there is a mounted version of the druid.
The deer bit seems fantastical at best honestly. A different way to possibly represent it in another manner would be to have it possible to build a 'wicker man.' This would burn and slowly lose hitpoints, but while it is around, it could provide a global attack bonus. Probably there would be a hard limit to having one present at a time.
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I like a lot of the thoughts behind this. One thing which does seem impractical, however, is the way that you sketched out specifically how chariots could function. Don't get me wrong. I like the idea behind it; implementation is the issue. Garrisoning one infantry into each individual chariot would take a fair amount of apm that would be impractical in most cases. Instead I would propose one of two options:
Make chariots like the Konniks in Age of Empires 2. When the unit dies, an infantry unit spawns in its place. This would have the similar general effect.
The alternative might be to have chariots be automatically trained with a single infantry unit garrisoned inside it. Whenever that unit is ungarrisoned, the player would have the option to garrison that unit or a new one in its place or could have the option of training a unit inside the chariot (probably it would take a bit longer than usual). I personally prefer this compared to the other.
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1 hour ago, maroder said:
because if not, there is still the logic inconsistency that soilders/men are able to see further than women (when they are just standing in the field or walking). Otherwise I like @chrstgtr idea.
Simply speaking, men tend to see better in the dark than women at the cost of having a harder time differentiating colours. Thus, since the fog of war is dark, men should have more line of sight.
In seriousness, the issue is not that women can't see that far; there are a few female units that have better line of sight. The problem is that at the moment only women for the most part are dedicated economic units. Introducing non-gender specific workers such as slaves would generally fix this issue.
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21 minutes ago, borg- said:
Must be lethal when reaching your enemy, but more vulnerable to projectiles. Increase Hack Attack 5.5 > 6.5, decrease Pierce Attack 5 > 3.
Honestly I could see the swordsman being purposed as an all-rounder, having a lot of pierce armour but lacking some of the ability to properly chase.
Another change I would like to see is reducing line of sight, making it lower than even the maximum range of archers or slingers so that having a screen of units in front would be necessary to maximise the potential of the ranged units.
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I think one variable that could seriously affect the dynamic between ranged and melee units is considering the frame delay, the amount of time between the unit being ordered to attack and it executing that order. As far as I saw, the change making turning around take time makes microing the units a lot more awkward. I guess the two questions I have is how long does it take for a unit to do a 180 turn, and how long does it take for most ranged units to actually perform their attacks after ordered (assuming that they are facing the right direction)?
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7 minutes ago, LetswaveaBook said:
What I would suggest is that there would be a counter to going solely for ranged units in p1. An example would be (buffed) mellee cavalry in p1 that will be able to punish players going solely for ranged units. The question I would like to ask if all of us agree that there should be a counter.
I completely agree that situations such as the Battle of Marathon should be viable.
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One of the few games that attempts to model social class in history is Imperator Rome, which has the following:
slaves, tribesmen, freemen, citizens, and nobles.
Obviously that is a grand strategy game and can make use of more nuanced mechanics, but it does lead to the thought of not only introducing slaves but also freemen to the mix in representing social class.
Slaves are straightforward enough. They would serve practically exclusively as economic units. The more nuanced exception could be Sparta.
Citizens could just function as per usual, as citizen-soldiers.
Freemen are a bit more tricky to depict. In Rome ‘freedmen’ were former slaves that enjoyed a few benefits of a citizen without some of the rights but could not vote. On the other hand there were socii, who according to Polybius made up roughly half of the military. Sparta of course has perioikoi. Athens had a group called metics, that also had to serve in the military. How would these be represented? Freemen could more or less be citizen soldiers with a reduced cost that can only promote once and might not fight as well in general. Technologies could potentially remove that cap or allow for the individual promotion of units. Perhaps mostly freemen would be trained from the Civic Centre while Citizen-Soldiers would be trained from barracks. The one frustration this might cause is that in game it could be difficult to differentiate Freemen from Citizens.
Finally come nobles, most of which served as cavalry. Obviously not all cavalry were nobles, but I think that the best way to represent this would be to have most if not all cavalry cost 2 population and be stronger as a result.
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6 hours ago, chrstgtr said:
I would like to see this tech applied to some civ (even if it isn't Athens, which already has some nice features being added for next a25).
The Celts could be a reasonable alternative. Authors such as Polybius were impressed by the dignity by which many Celtic women carried themselves.
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1 hour ago, LetswaveaBook said:
I would like to suggest the following bonus for Athenians: Fertility Festival is 50% cheaper. I would like to strengthen this idea with the following points:
I'm against this for a number of reasons:
Women in Athenian society had little to no rights. Actually having them have an active role in the workforce outside of potentially trading is generally an exception of the norm. Honestly I would just have them be represented as props inside houses.
Athens already has a bonus to researching technologies. Introducing this would be redundancy.
If we want to represent Athens in an interesting light, I would look to the fact that in Athens slaves and metics were treated much better than the average place at least according to the Constitution of the Athenians (by Pseudo-Xenophon).
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There could be the option of introducing technologies that make their infantry better at destroying and/or capturing structures.
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Giving them crush damage does sound gimmicky to me (See Obsidian Arrows Technology). I would prefer something along the lines of them having longer range; that was a key advantage that Xenophon mentioned. Throw in some extra pierce damage and you have a reasonable upgrade in my mind.
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29 minutes ago, borg- said:
Some changes in the patch, please look.
I think that has some good potential.
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30 minutes ago, borg- said:
Tnx!!!
Any aura suggestion?
The structure was also primarily used by the nine Archons, who primarily worked in ceremonial and judicial functions. If I were to give an aura suggestion, it would be that whenever a hero unit is nearby, a global ability of said unit would be increased by a marginal amount. This could be offset by, if we go along with the idea of there being two heroes simultaneously, having only one ability be buffed at a time.
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9 hours ago, alre said:
ok, sorry. However, I don't think we have evidence of such military engineers in any civilization predating romans anyway. Soldiers did build houses and rams alike.
We actually do. Diodorus writes on the Siege of Rhodes and specifically mentions specialists for the construction of the siege weapons. Also Xerxes relied on engineers as well when he had a pontoon bridge constructed to transport his army from Asia into Greece.
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What are your thoughts on Cavalry Gather Rates?
in General Discussion
Posted
So given the fact that some people like the current gather rates of cavalry, instead perhaps the other gather rates of citizen-soldiers and women could be adjusted to be almost or just as fast. In that way there would not be a massive opportunity cost in using the initial cavalry unit to scout.