tau
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Posts posted by tau
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I think the game is already quite universal and you are going to overcomplicate it with two modes. Currently MP is indeed mostly about micromanagement and competition but the reason is not that competitive people 'took over' it; just citybuilder people face two technical issues:
- lag on bigger maps
- no possibility to save an mp game
Afaiu these issues will be solved in the near future and i believe that after this MP will become diverse in a natural way (those who prefer quick fun won't join 2-players games on giant maps, and vice versa).
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Fair enough then. But what if you destroy your building yourself before they start capturing?
Probably voluntary destruction of a building should take some time.
Also, cavalry/fast units/ranged should capture slower than regular infantry
Ranged inf units normally have less armor and arent optimal choice for capturing since they die easier from buildings which have arrow attack. For buildings left unprotected, imo, a unit type shouldnt make much difference.
That said, presentation of capture ability in form of Capture Attack parameter seems quite artificial to me. Unlike other parameters in the game, it hasn't a clear real world 'prototype'. Maybe it would be better to calculate it from attack parameters. (Cause, doesn't a capture ability mostly depend on a level of threat a unit can pose?)
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@iNcog:
Generally, i try to restrain myself from stats discussions and wait for the balancing plan to be available. While it is not yet, everyone argues based on his own assumptions about intended roles of units, and this is mostly in vain.
But since i have mentioned ranged vs melee thing already, my thoughts are the following:- Generally, i agree that melee now got the support role, which may be the result of longer ranges for ranged and melee made not effective vs buildings
- Long ranges are in theory balanced by less damage and less health. This is a complex change, i think that only after the release and many MP games we will see if this is balanced in practice. Still 72m archer range looks scary to me
- With wider vision ranges, it is upsetting when melee run to auto-attack, making themselves vulnerable, and you just dont notice this
- Would be nice if melee were more effective against wooden buildings (smth in between a17 and current svn stats). Since there is no capturing feature yet, damage used to be a good 'metaphor' for it and bring some dynamic.
@Pithawk (some random thoughts on skirm cav)
From the unit balance perspective:- As of now, skirm inf indeed has weaker stats than skirm cav in svn and is likely to lose vs them. (I personally have no strong opinion on if this should be kept or not.) Archer and slinger inf has at least the advantage of range.
- If you don't want to give a symmetric answer, you also might want to use newly available wooden towers.
- Cav indeed has to be microed to keep the range/speed advantage. So before stats adjustments, later game should also be taken into account, when there is less microing possibilities and cav is more likely to die from spears/pikes.
From the strategy perspective:
- You are not necessarily supposed to kill all rusher's cav to turn the situation in your favour.
- If to change cav stats looking only at what Tango does, we may end up in a17 situation where rush barely exists. This is like to complain that wesono expands too fast.
To sum up, i think that some adjustment to skirm cav/skirm inf balance can be considered, but with caution.
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@iNcog:
are you talking about a17 or svn when you say that ranged are superior vs melee? I would agree with you to some extent for both cases, still it is important for further discussion.
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.The "deathmatch feeling" comes from several things IMO:
- Civil Soldiers can gather (even gather some resources best, especially wood). So building an economic basis and training an army is the same at the early age.
Possible solution: Make woman better and citizen soldiers worse at gathering wood. That would also make woman better (ATM I only use them for farming/foraging)
- There is no real possibility for defense early on other than soldiers.
Possible solution: Add defensive structures to the starting age (AFAIK palisades can be build now right away). This also should include weaker, low range high view range towers (I never used the scout tower so not sure if it works for defensive purpose early on).
- Games are often decided before City Age is reached by all players. This is not bad in general but means that e.g. champion units are much less used in average.
Possible solution: Make Champion units stronger (already as is AFAIK) and make sure siege weapons in the last age can out-range defenses or take quite some punch
I agree with you that the deathmatch feeling has to do with the fact that citizen soldiers can gather (and generally, with other points you have stated). Benifits in one resource type can be 'converted' to benefits in another one quite easily by training gatherers that cost first type of resource. But because of this i'm also afraid that the proposed solution will have undesired consequences: we'll get better wood gatherers that cost only food and train faster, so again, more resources and more possibilities for the same time.
With the last version the situation with resources has developed from 'in 0AD, you normally don't severely lack any kind of resource' to 'you have lots of everything, a dead army is np just train another'. I am convinced that this is caused by techs changes which give higher gathering speeds eventually. So it would be good to try to lower techs' effects first (increasing cost of units/buildings will have the same effect just with some multiplier, and the default pop cap, which people hurry to reach, obviously has to stay the same).
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@Tau: I'm not sure if I understood your alternative method correctly. Can you rephrase it for me?
Sure, here's some clarification:
1) i didn't suggest a method to make tech choices more risky
2) i warned against cost increase + reward increase as it doesn't add risk but makes the game 'faster' and more deathmatch-style
3) to slower the pace, i suggested the following:
for example, currently we have 3 techs for stone mining: Servants +15%, Serfs +15%, Slaves +50%.
We could have 1 or 2 techs instead of 3, or lower coeffs for them to, say, 10%, 10% and 35% (just an example).
In the latter case, costs should be lowered accordingly, so that it doesn't become totally useless to research.
However before considering this it is better to observe for a while how a18 will be played. People are expected to train more champions now so maybe this will balance things a bit. Though the deathmatch feeling appears earlier than in City phase.
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I agree with you that technologies choices should provoke strategical thinking. However cost increase and reward increase seems not to be a solution. This is what was done in a17 (cost increase; + techs for each resources available in each phase with comparable coefficients --> reward increase). This sounded good in theory but in practice this is exactly what contributes to the race feel. See what happens: after a player manages to research a couple of resource techs he will use theirs benefits to research another ones. Eventually there is just more stuff built/trained/gathered for the same time span.
So, to slower the pace (if there is such a goal), i'd suggest, on the contrary, lowering coeffs/decreasing the number of upgrades, maybe combined with some cost decrease. To make it risky... not sure yet what could be done.
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Indeed nice to see wooden towers available, this can make phase I gameplay more interesting (if powerful enough early attacks are possible too).
Btw they have class 'Town' for some reason, allowing to phase to III with 4 wooden towers and enough resources, intended or bug?
Romans who can't build palisade walls still can build these towers, looks a bit inconsistent.
Cavalry has insane vision range now, can't see a reason for this.
(Edit: to phase to III, not to II)
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Another note about stats screen: at Units tab, Mauryan worker elephants and archer elephants are only included in Total column, probably should be counted also in Worker and Cavalry categories, respectively.
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The patch does the same thing but i tried to make it more consistent in terms of coding.
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My idea is to create a penalty for ranged units when they are close attack for melee units, I think it would change things a bit.
I think this is early to do fine tuning for ranged vs melee before formations are back (if this is planned for the next version). Currently, if a group of melee is to approach a group of ranged from far away, a melee group strings out and can't attack 'simultaneously' while ranged can. This problem is more visible with bigger numbers of troops and larger distances, so may be irrelevant to the situation described in the original post. However my point is that weakening ranged now may result in op melee after formations are brought back.
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What is Broken
- Units trained in batches and rally-pointed to a resource or foundation will go to the rally point and will not begin gathering or building. They will just stand there instead. This is an old bug reintroduced somehow.
Doesn't happen with building for now; and gathering can be quickfixed within the mod by changing the line 5070 in UnitAI.js :
if (!Engine.QueryInterface(this.entity, IID_ResourceGatherer))
to
if (!Engine.QueryInterface(this.entity, IID_ResourceGatherer) && !this.IsFormationController())
Also attaching a bit extended patch for svn here UnitAI.js.patch
* Most units which are not able to gather will still walk to a nearest dropsite after reaching a resource rally point, as before 15812 revision.
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@niektb: saw nothing new in that table, and again, i don't think this change would significantly alter the results; on the contrary, i believe that spear cav would do as well as sword cav in your test with all other things being equal. Just accurate conditions is what makes a test a test, leaving less room for speculations.
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Because Peregriino said he had about 10 melee cavs against about 10 ranged infantry
Well this was my first guess but later i noticed Incog's post about sword cav and thought you replied to him. Anyway then, i guess Peregrino told about (Roman) spear cav which has somewhat different stats. Not that i think it would alter testing results very much, but for the sake of integrity.
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I don't have any strong opinion on melee cav stats yet, but:
A while ago wriatti wrote a template analyzing tool, here are the results of the current svn:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/goida2xwceajdos/unit_summary_table.html?dl=0
It shows that melee cav are actually OP (they're the unit type that often is countered the least).
Does this tool take into account the initial distance between troops, when ranged are involved, and how?
Also I just tested and I see that 10 Sword Cavs make quick work of 10 infantry archers.Why test this 10 vs 10? Sword cav is available in phase2 and costs metal, while archers can be massed since phase1 and are likely to have range improvement by phase2.
I make some cav melee, 11, and try to attack my enemy. Probably he had 10 ranged infantary units, no towers or upgrades or CC, we are in early game. And my cav melee were annihilated in seconds.
Could you provide more details? (because real game battles are always more than a number of this vs a number of that.) Didn't you give them an order to attack a most distant troop or smth like this? Did any of you micro? When enemy troops noticed you and started to shoot? Wasn't this a situation when your cav moves to an end point in a form of a long row, being killed one by one?
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Press Enter key after changing a value and it will be saved
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I downloaded it on Nov 17 and didn't update since then. Was indeed unsure if it is time to discuss balance stuff already.
Thanks that you care about the tavern
However i googled for taverns, only to find that they were originally Roman buildings, and dk now why Gauls faction got them. But this will belong to Celts thread. -
Played your mod a little bit vs Petra, got an impression that decrease of units cost and train times, combined with A17 powerful resource techs, allows to spam troops even easier than in current alpha. Is this intentional?
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Ships should decay with time if all docks are destroyed
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Played A17 MP for a couple of weeks or so and can confirm that pers chariots are popular indeed and hard to counter. Maybe they are indeed 'new skirm cav' to some extent.
Also can confirm that in a test (see zzippy's post above) melee cav counters chariots (both sides no micro). Now needs to be tested in a real game. Probably with micro chariots will again do better.
However before considering any changes for chariots it should be decided if automicro will be kept for (some) ranged units. Chariots have it, and i think that it is a significant part of their strength.
Also i find it important to figure out which changes encouraged people to use chariots so much (in A16 they were almost never used). As far as i can see there were two:
1) population decreased from 3 to 1
Removes some indirect costs of chariots production, but unlikely to be the reason
2) hardcounters gone
Chariots lost skirmishers as a hard counter and didn't get them as a 'natural' counter, should be countered by melee cav now. Maybe players just aren't used to counters change? (Sorry, no idea if this counter is realistic or not.) -
Iberians:
- First of all the starting wall they have is a palisade.
- Less health and less damage but faster and cheaper houses 60 wood
- Gathering rates increase the higher level they are
I agree that something has to be done to iberian starting bonus. As for the houses stats change suggested, i think it would make Iberians less different from other non-hellenic civs. Celts and Mauryans have cheap 5-pop houses too, and this fits them as more or less 'booming' civs. Iberians are a 'defensive' civ, so their structures should stay slow to built and robust.
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4th Phase:
Not sure if this discussion belongs to the techs thread, but tempted to ask: what is the (conceptual) difference between 1st and 2nd phases in this system?
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Not arguing pro or against PVE itself (which is not going to be included into the game anyway afaiu), i would like to say that some 'probs' mentioned in this thread can have simpler solutions:
Building a CC with women:
women could be made less effective in construction
Not really useful walls/palisades:
would be nice if they could prevent ranged from shooting through or affect accuracy
Too strong rams:
i've read not once that their ability to attack people is temporary, let's see how balanced they will be after it is taken out?
Early attacks:
the game allows both early and late attack scenarios, that i personally consider a good design; a design forcing to choose one over another would be worse. However there is a 'natural' parameter which decreases effectiveness of early attacks: distance. In other words, if you dislike early attacks, you might want to try bigger maps.
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Hi Igor, i think it could be a good idea to add the text from the vid to your post so that it could be easily quoted in discussion.
Improving the trading mechanic.
in Gameplay Discussion
Posted
Generally agree that trading can be improved, especially on the fact that a market shouldnt have "infinite stock".
Killing citizen soldiers, however, is a complex issue and trading flaws arent the only or primary reason for this: those who dont trade would kill them too to make more champions instead. Garrisoning idea in itself looks interesting, but the useless citizens problem should be considered in the first place in other aspects which are offtopic.