serveurix
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Posts posted by serveurix
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@iNcog : I agree with everything you say about pairs, *especially* the fact that some techs eventually gets ignored, but I'm doubtful about the last example you give of a pairing that would be, in your opinion, relevant.
You seem to know in advance how the player will make use of the strength and weaknesses of both his infantry and cavalry, and how he's going to combine those two types of units on the battlefield altogether.
I would be more in favor of simple choices, like :
ranged infantry move 5% faster but lose 5% health -OR- ranged infantry move 5% slower but gain 5% health
that basically make you choose one strength or the other.
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Iberians aura are not yet implemented I think. When it's written "TBD" next to it must mean someting like "To Be Defined", so there are a handful of heroes who don't have their aura yet, and Iberians heroes are part of them.
I suppose you can make proposals to define the "Tactica Guerilla" aura.
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Formations are almost broken for now. There is no formation bonus, auto-regrouping apply to every unit (female citizen, siege engines, ships...) in every case (even for economical tasks), and the buggy and slow pathfinder makes them more of a pain to use than an advantage.Your changes remove:
formations, which are a must, if only because battle is like a bunch of ants in this game and now even worse
I'm pretty sure formations will be reactivated when the pathfinder issues will be solved, don't worry.
I just miss the "scatter" formation for now, it was practical to scan the map at the end of a match.
The concept was good but the implementation was weird. Basically a tech is already something that gives you an advantage at the cost of a small disadvantage (you have to pay for it). So you have to make a choice between developing the tech now, or later because your resources would be more useful in something else right now. Then there are techs that add a technological disadvantage to the technological advantage. So you have to make a choice between developing them and not developing them. Fine. But later came the pairs of technologies where a technology which has both an advantage and a disadvantage competes with an other tech that has both an advantage and a disadvantage. This is fine when one tech is the opposite of the other, like for the walls (resistance vs build time) because you just have to make one choice, and you're going to develop one of the two techs anyway. But when the other tech of the pair has advantages and disadvantages that have nothing to do with the advantages and the disadvantages of the other tech of the pair, that's very confusing. It looks like a choice within a choice within a choice. You have to make a choice between developing the first tech, right now or later, the second tech, right now or later, and none of them, and you don't really know where you're heading to. There are some tech that are mandatory to develop some others later and this is even more confusing, giving a false impression of choice when in fact you barely have it. And I don't speak about pairs with techs that are so useless for some civs that there is only one reasonable choice on the two.technology choices (chose one or the other), which were cool amd unique and added a layer of strategy that is now gone
If at least all the pairs were like the wall tech pair, the paired tech system would be more interesting and less confusing. But techs that have nothing to do with each other shouldn't be in pairs. So I agree with the new changes on the tech tree.
The game is not in its definitive state, there will still be a lot of big changes in the gameplay that will require us to tune balance changes again and again. And of course, that impacts the historic realism of the game each time. But I'm confident in the developers finding the good values between cool, well balanced gameplay and historicity on the long term.historicity, which is important in a game about history
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So the balancing branch went through to SVN in A17? That's nice to hear.
So, can some of the testers talk a bit about how the game now plays out?
I've tested a bit yesterday. Of course I haven't completely gotten used to the new changes (I think it will take me some time before I can beat Petra on hard now ^^' ).
I like the new economy paradigm, with a rich tech tree, fast gatherers and very expensive war technologies. It makes the game much more challenging (the gaming experience is now closer to what I used to see in Warzone).
I also like the effectiveness of female citizen, their short training time makes them much more interesting in the early game (before this change you had almost no interest in training female citizen, except if you were out of anything but food).
Surprisingly, Petra is doing very well with those complete balance changes. Perhaps even better than before. Walls are more necessary than ever to protect my trade roads. The fact that they are slower to build makes them even more crucial, that's good.
I also love the new technology in the wonder that gives a +50 pop bonus. I'm surprised it's a technology though, I would have imagined a bonus given by the wonder, that disappear when the wonder is destroyed.
On the down side, I would say that infantry has become ridiculously resistant to slingers and javelinists, and that farms are a bit too strong. I'm also afraid that there's not enough diversity in the costs of the units now (they all require a lot of food, most of them require a lot of wood), but I've only played romans and iberians so far.
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Spearmen do have a bonus against elephants so they should be deployed at the front. The skirmishers should be positioned behind them. Cavalry are not effective in elephant warfare, yet swordsmen could be useful as reserves if the spearman line breaks.
Hoplites are cheaper than swordsmen and would probably do better against elephants, provided they are all at elite rank. Nevertheless, a good group of spartan champions, blocking a narrow entrance, eventually assisted by Leonidas' aura, should hold very long against an all-elephant rush.
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A bearer bearing a boar O.o
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Important nuance to see, cause i'm talking about the rush, not about harassment.
The only argument for rush in your previous comment was :
The fact you cant prevent or disturb the evolution of your opponent economy is huge mistakeAnd this argument is valid for both rush and harassment. If you want to advocate rush and nothing else, use an argument specific to it.
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By the way, a RTS game where you cant rush, is in my opinion a bad RTS game. The fact you cant prevent or disturb the evolution of your opponent economy is huge mistake, cause rush is , to be short, the most important strategy in RTS game.
You can always harass its traders and destroy its fields. There is a new farmland paradigm planned, which should make the farmland economy much harder to defend (fields taking a lot more space, and farming bonus/malus depending on the terrain) in the future.
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I've tested again on the Maurya Sandbox scenario and I was indeed able to reproduce it. I think there are several problems here :Hmm, that shouldn't happen. Probably a messed up visibility check.
Can you confirm this behaviour in certain cases? You can open the developer overlay (ALT+D) and switch the perspective to the enemy to force such a case.
- Firing range upgrades do not cause vision range upgrades. A mauryan archer that has a firing range of 50 will get a firing range of 60 after tech upgrade, then 64 and 68 after rank upgrades, but will keep his vision range of 50 all the time. This makes the firing range upgrade pointless, unless you play without a fog of war.
- I went in the firing range of a persian archer, then moved the unit out of one or two meters back, the persian archer kept firing on it, even though the two units were out of each other's vision range.
- I attacked a persian archer (range of 50) with a maurya archer (range of 60). When the arrow hit him, he moved ten meters to the target, then stopped. He waited to be hit by a second arrow to fire back.
This, in my opinion, is probably related to an other bug I've encountered, units suddently stopping in the middle of their task, even if it's a task automatically given by UnitAI.
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I'm a little bit uncomfortable with the roof on the parts where the lateral walls are extended to the front, where the roof makes a "T" shape. Maybe those parts could be a little bit taller or shorter in height, so the roof is not on the same plan as the main roof. This is just because the intersation of the tiles textures look weird to me, but it's not a big deal.
And maybe the building could look a bit more majestic. It is supposed to be a wonder, with alleged religious and military purposes, and from the picture it looks a bit like a giant granary.
Apart from that the building is good, and suits the iberians perfectly.
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attacked units either go to their attacker
I'm surprised, because I've seen units remaining idle when attacked by a unit out of their range. When I'm playing against Persians and Mauryas, it happens quite often, giving those civs a significant advantage.
But maybe it is some sort of delay in the code asking the unit to move for a counter-attack ?
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As for using melee infantry to protect ranged units, I think that would work much better if we implemented some form of battalions, otherwise it might be too much effort to manage effectively. Generally I don't see anything that radical in those changes. I thought that was how it was already supposed to work based on previous discussions (unless I'm missing something)?
You can use the "square" formation, while selecting all your group, with the melee infantry outside and ranged units inside. Then use the stance "standground" so they don't fight if the enemy unit is not in their range. Now you have basically a moving fortress.
One cool scenario to try this is the "We are legion" demo scenario (using Thebans).
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Boarding will also be added at some time. It's just too important in my opinion or how should your melee units garrisoned in the ship involve in a battle?
1) Pull the enemy ship next to yours. (needs pulling animations but could go without for the beginning)
2) Once the ships are close enough, i.e. e.g. obstructions are next to each other then the units should be able to move / walk / jump from one ship to the other.
For the romans we could use the corvus. It's the device that made them win the first naval battles of the first punic war, by allowing them to use on the sea the tactical superiority they had on the land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_%28boarding_device%29
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Increasing vision range by altitude was partly outruled by our lead programmer lately. Increased range by altitude is what we already have and is already quite nice + realistic.
Personally I think it's unrealistic when a building has a firing range that's bigger than his vision range.
I also find it very frustrating to manage to put a tower/outpost on top of a mountain and have no vision bonus.
I made a ticket about this and the answer that was given to me is that vision should depend on obstruction, not just altitude. But couldn't the same reasoning be applied to firing range ? Firing range should depend on obstruction too, yet it has a bonus altitude. Units and buildings are able to shoot through walls, it's not realistic but it's not a big deal in my opinion. It's better to have inaccurate physics on something than no physics at all, right ?
I think being able to exploit the advantages of the terrain for intelligence are very important. Sadly, intelligence and terrain use are given too few importance in most real-time strategy games, despite it should be crucial, in my opinion.
Technically it's possible, essentially it's only setting the boat's velocity to 0, such that it's unmanoevrable. It fits nicely with stamina + health: The lower health + stamina are the less quick a unit (soldier, ship, ..) can move. In my opinion soldiers + ships even get unmanoevrable when severely wounded (less than 10% health). Soldiers would sink to ground, for ships the same could happen.How would it happen on the graphical side ? What I think about is the player putting his biggest ships at the entrance of his port, killing them, then they quicky sink until they reach the ground, and once they have reached the ground they sink into it slowly (or just stay there and disappear after a while). During the time they rest on the ground, if the water is shallow enough, ships can't pass above them (maybe it could depend on the size of the ship).
It's then up to you to take a prisoner / lift the wrack at some point and repair the ship or to finish off the poor soldier or ship.This would also mean that past battle fields would be fought for as you might save your wounded soldiers / recover your + enemy's damaged ships.
This is good, it would allow to implement capturing without implementing boarding. (capturing is important for historical accuracy : the naval battles were more focused on capturing enemy's expensive ships that destroying them)
Later we could even add more loot like weapons + armour (for resources as loot this basically already exists but is not visible).+1. I think it should be very beneficial to attack traders and merchant ships
Great idea for a formation for ships. The vulnerability to be rammed + sinked instantly by other ships (because of the flanks of a ship being very vulnerable) makes it a very interesting formation with a certain risk.
The main idea is to slow down or stop ships to prevent landing in an invasion-by-sea scenario, because now with just ships, towers and fortresses it's not enough (walls are the only option).
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I've made a few naval map matches against Petra now that I have a good graphic card.
My first match was on Corsica and Sardinia (very good map !), I played with the persians on one island and three Petra AIs (Maurya, Iberian and Macedonian, IIRC) were controlling the other island. At this time Petra wasn't very good at naval invasions, so I wasn't very disturbed on my land, but I can't tell you how much I struggled to invade the other island ! Imagine 220 persians trying to disembark on a small piece of land that's full of towers, and controlled by a 620-units strong force, rushing to you at each landing. I had to trick the AI by splitting my army and make my units land on different points at the same time.
Then I played on Cycladic archipelago (2) (skirmish) with the Carthaginians against the Britons. It was a lot less interesting, except for trade. Carthaginians are excellent for naval trade : if you control the two most distants islands, and the naval route between them, then you don't have to care about economy anymore. When I destroyed the last briton civ center all my resources stocks had an order of magnitude of hundreds of thousands.
But pure naval fights are a bit disappointing for now. I can't wait to have ramming and eventually boarding (but I know that's not an easy task).
Carthaginians are not that strong on the sea, actually. You need to fill up the triremes with archers if you want them to be efficient against celtic barges. And the naval shipyard (available late, big and hard to place, very slow to build) gives the carthaginians a too big malus on sea, in my opinion. The only option for celts should be piracy (harass naval trade routes), they shouldn't be that strong in naval battles.
But what make the archipelago maps less interesting than the big island maps is probably the difficulty to load and unload ships efficiently. The code that handles units moves when loading isn't efficient (the land units move to the place the boat is, the boat move to the place the units are, so units arrive on the place the boat was previously, and the boat arrives at the place the units were previously, and when they realise they don't meet, they start the process again), so when your boat reaches the shore you have to order it to stay in place while the land units are coming). Also there's no "go and unload there" order (but I realise I haven't tried to chain the orders, so maybe it's possible to do this Edit: it's not.).
Also, it's easy to protect a shore, but it's a lot harder to protect a handful of islands. You need to place a lot of outposts to control your territory, and a lot of towers and fortresses (provided you have a civ center in the place, fortunately the archipelago maps are sufficiently well designed so you can put a cc on every island), and this task is made difficult by the minimum distance between towers and fortresses.
I've also played with the egyptians on Aegan sea (random) against some celt civ (britons I guess). Controlling the waters with the egyptians is a lot easier than with other civs, because they have lighthouses, which are kinds of "super outposts" for shores. The AI protected its shores with towers quite efficiently, I protected mine with fortresses and walls. Landing on enemy's shores was still difficult, but it was a lot easier than on Corsica and Sardinia, as you can guess : there was only one AI and the coast was very long and straight. I just unloaded a handful of troops as a bait on one side, made the whole enemy army rush to it (while taking the arrows of all my biremes stationed on the shores), and unload my elephants and pikemen of the other side.
My suggestions to improve naval warfare :
- make warships a bit faster to increase the pace of the action
- give a "lighthouse" building to everyone, that will work like an outpost, but on the sea. The building should be buildable on the shore (neutral or friendly), have a small life and small obstruction size, like the outpost, so you can build it on a tiny rock if you manage to put a builder on it, and should be easy to destroy. But it should have a bigger vision range than outposts (becase ships go fast and straight). The egyptian lighthouse should be a special building that reveals all waters of the map. It should be strong and have a big obtruction size, like now.
An alternative would be to give a "lighthouse" capacity to ports which give them a bigger vision range on water than they have now.
Also, give outposts and towers a bigger vision range when built on cliffs. Sometimes it should be worth building an outpost in altitude rather than a lighthouse.
- give naval trade a bonus over land trade to everyone, not just the carthaginians. Carthaginians should just have a bigger bonus. Players should be strongly incited to choose naval trade routes over land trade routes when they can, and defend them with navy and/or towers on the surrounding islands.
- Remove the naval shipyard malus for the carthaginians. Carthaginians should be able to train biremes and tririemes without a ridiculously big and slow to build building. Maybe the naval shipyard could be a unique building that gives a certain bonus to the carthaginians on sea, like increasing the strength and decreasing the training time of the ships significantly, or allow to develop technologies that give bonuses to warships.
- make siege ships stronger against buildings. The quinquiremes equipped with ballistas should be able to fire at a fortress without suffering backfire (unless there's an altitude bonus), like the land ballistas do.
- make the AI clever enough to protect the shore with fortresses too (and not just towers). When the AI will be able to build walls, it should be able to build them on the shore to prevent landing.
- implement all the cool stuff (these are already on the todo-list I guess) : ramming, fire propagation, perhaps boarding (I don't see a necessity for this now, but it could bring something on the historical or tactical side), perhaps the possibility to sink ships in shallow water to temporarily prevent other ships to pass (again, not necessary and I don't even know if it's technically possible, but it could be interesting for strategy or history)
- make a "line" formation for ships, where all the ships would place themselves in single file, all the obstruction boxes sticking to each other, and not rotate. This would prevent a transportation ship to pass, but would make the ships very vulnerable to ramming
- when ramming and fire propagation/delayed damage will be implemented, balance the civs so the celts and iberians are better at guerilla/piracy/harassing vessels and put them on fire, and the greek/romans/carthaginans are better at naval battles, ramming and destroying everything when charging at full speed
Just throwing ideas there
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- Bridge sections can be built from ships with units garrisoned aboard, or from adjacent sections or land
I'd leave the ship part out. That's going to look weird, and why would you do that???
I think he refers to the pontoon bridge the persians built across the Dardanelles (Hellespont) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerxes%27_Pontoon_Bridges
Romans are known to have used such bridges too : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontoon_bridge#Greco-Roman_era
And maybe it could be worth considering the carthaginian system too : rafts linked to the shores by ropes which quickly allow to make the elephants cross a river.
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Don't forget that the egyptian mahout still uses a carthaginian model (with carthaginian emblem on the shield).
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I like the part when it's mentioned that soldiers of the front line were replaced by soldiers of the back when wounded. I don't know if it's technically feasible to put such mechanism in the game, but if it is, that would be really really cool.
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The two pathfinders solution is also a drawback though. The long range pathfinder has to be faster, as it needs to calculate long paths (possibly to the other side of the map). So it's tile based, with quite big tiles. Every tile is marked as passable or not-passable. And it finds it way like that. But that also means the pathfinder doesn't take the obstruction size of the unit it wants to move into account. So sometimes, a tile is marked as passable, but a unit (like a siege ram or ship) can't get there because it's too big.
Don't you use a different grid for siege units ? (Sorry I'm not a coder, I'm just trying to understand the problem.)
Also, do you plan to do something for the problem of two units being stuck as they synchronise when they try to bypass each other ?
It should also be made in a way that units "communicate". I.e. friendly units should let each other pass by going out of the way. As such, the short range pathfinder shouldn't get stuck again.
I hope this won't make it more difficult to align troops in order to make beautiful screenshots
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I think we won't really be able to use many Non-Roman names. I don't think Greek has "Q" at all. So it'd be quite hard to find a Seleucid related name that starts with "Q".
Maybe we could use a Latin word that designates something related to the Seleucid empire.
Like "quadriga" (chariots drawn by four horses), or "quadrifidus" ("split in four parts", like the Macedonian empire).
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Can't listen to the voices so not criticizing you guys here, but here is proper Latin pronunciation in "Classical Latin" according to my Latin Teacher with a PHD in Roman culture.
v - pronounced like a w (So Flavius is pronunced Flawius)
a - pronounced like "ah"
e - pronounced like the Fonz ("Eh!")
ae - pronounced like the word "I"
u - pronnounced like a double O (So Flawioos)
i - pronounced like the long way (like the word "I")
ii - pronounced like the letter E (So Gladii is Glad-eey-eey)
c - pronounced like a K
o - pronounced normally, just depends on the letter usage
y - pronounced like in the word "I" "So Lekythos is Lek - aye - thos)
My latin teacher pronounced the same way, except "ae" (pronounced like e - "Eh!") and "i" and "y" (pronounced like the letter "E" in English).
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It would be certainly relevant to put it on the Art_source repository, now that it's been set up.
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Alpha 17 Balancing Branch
in General Discussion
Posted
Their new balance proposal is quite extreme on some points, but it's a good move. Of course the tech tree needs to be polished and diversified. Like you, I would enjoy some more diverse military techs, tiers and branches (by branches I mean technologies unlocked by other technologies, which doesn't happen currently except for techs of a different phase and of the same type). But I'm sure the tech tree will still be enriched by new techs as the development advances (and we need some new icons, too).