Grugnas

Hi there. today we played some multiplayer games and i must say that Kushites and Chinese actors are really amazing! Having champions able to switch from melee to ranged is really nice. Anyway there is something i can't figure out. Why do civic centers have a -40% gather rate aura for farms? Corrals simply double the food income and halve the number of workers required (perhaps farms just gather too slow?). Why does carthage have all those limits on units forcing players to phase up and train mercenaries after they reach the limit of40 soldiers only? Mercenaries (after all the effort in terms of time, resources and workers) cost metal only, resource required to phase up and expand in order to break the limit of 40 units previously imposed.

Some of the strings the history sections are misleading because outdated. Actually Skirmish Cavalry Champions are the only iberian units able to throw flaming javelins with no need to research any technology. Those champions are trainable from Fortress with no "fees" or from Barracks through the "Unlock Champions" technology.

thanks for relinking the graphs, i will have a look at them later as long as i have time for it. The fact that didn't convince me to tweak accuracy in my experiments is that actually an army of archers (and perhaps slingers) can give hard time to skirmishers (mostly because of the range) but the idea to increase accuracy as long as units are promoted is definitely a good idea and perhaps justified from the fact that skirmishers are prevalently used against melee units which actually struggle in many situations. The accuracy difference between ranks isn't really that noticeable actually (i recall that spread has been reworked and perhaps promotion technologies aren't updated yet to fit the latest changes). e.i. another idea is that the fortress technology affecting bolt shooters accuracy could affect all ranged units (available in the fortress in phase 3).

The complaining isn't about having victims but as only viable strategy (everything else you do makes you lose). Deadend Strategy. Ptolemies team bonus grants +1 food/sec to allies. as said on the first topic, none talked about changing accuracy. unit limits like limited cavalry or anything (perhaps only traders deserve a limit )else will totally kill the play styles. actually having corrals (or stable for persia) as prerequisite to train horses makes sense as stated in other topics and perhaps even to have mauryan worker elephants only after the elephant stable is built and thus to move it from phase 2 to phase 1. Anyway minimal changes help to keep more focus on things. Having corrals as prerequisite could even explain why you can research cavalry specific technologies from corrals and perhaps add even more (e.g. nerf cavalry meat gather speed nad increase it with tech in order to get a better food production with corrals).Perhaps having different type of corrals to train with different animals, training time and food capacity would make food production with corrals a bit deeper and perhaps would prevent "sheep walls"

I can't understand what do you mean with "depth". A game where training 1 unit only yield you the win is broken for sure and this is a feature in common with previous alpha because the games brings up all the difference between the civs (e.g. celtics an mauryans can train civs faster than others). As fan of the game and not modder, I think that adding more features doesn't make the game deeper as far as there is a valuable strategy that makes you totally ignore content of the game. That's what the balancing is about. It is like buying a car with full optional and not even using the air conditioning as long as your intent is just to reach home. e.g. in no cavalry games there is always a mix of units to train and towers become more valuable. Even if you mind to train champions only they won't give you the win as long as you don't have ranged units to use which can be skirmishers archers or slingers depending on the opponent strategy. So, training 1 unit only would make the game more interesting? watching replays of people training 1 unit only to win the game or to play the multiplayer game for the first time and to see own eco being killed by a bunch of skirmisher cavalry then resign after 5 min (this is happening quite often in this alpha)? What a game! I can't blame you to prefer single player games where you can play sandbox games. I can't understand why people can't get that tweaking units in respect of which features devs decided to implement in the game can simply bring more strategies or at least could let player use totally unused units like walls and sentry towers. This isn't even a hard or time spending thing to do, perhaps this is one of the main tasks of a game developer. ( i made a balance patch which took my minutes but months of online playing). Gathering should be the primary income of resources as far as it requires workers, incentive expansion in order to reach further resources, let you control the map which requires multitasking and makes the game more interesting and imho it is the peculiarity of an RTS game. You have to choose where and how units have on a determinate part on the map for a determinate purpose. Don't take this phrase like an insult, but one can notice that you don't play online as long as you don't complain for skirmish cavalry rushes. Even the danubius map, which is actually cool, is a frustrating map but it is really enjoyable to watch a game on that map. But sure, you can still use as balance measure playing single player AI petra which doesn't use the right strategies by keeping sending kamikaze soldiers every minute and gain multiplied resources in order to be harder to beat.

is there a non woman unit which is countered by spear cavalry with more effectiveness than a sword cavalry? I try to separates phases in order to see things under stretegies point of views. e.g. : is there a strategy in phase 1 that allows me to defend from skirmish cavalry (same for spear cavalry) without stay too much behind my opponent? expanding is possible from phase 2 only, but is it worth the effort and resources or is it better to wait phase 3 and use market traders + bartering for an instant resources income? is there a strategy that allows me to train champions fast enough to not risk to lose my fortress (in case of champions trained from fortress) without being able to defend myself from rams? (e.g. Seleucid, ptolemies, macedonians, perhaps britons).

i'm afraid that the aura actually works EDIT: actually it is true that the catapult doesn't befit from the aura unless the player doesn't press H to halt the unit while the catapult is still unpacked. (the catapult continues to benefit from the hero aura despite it is away from the hero aura range.

I don't like to criticize devs work but It is quite obvious that in the last 3 alphas the best strategies were all based on the race to train the most OP units of the moment. f.e. Alpha 20 was about training champions as fast as possible, in particular Britons since they build faster and save wood with slingers. the other units weren't even used in depth since buildings arrows were lethal against citizen soldiers and prevented any kind of rush. Alpha 21 was about spamming slingers because they are cheap and incredible fast workers in any case. Matter of fact having the stone near the cc facilitate their training and keep workers safe from any kind of rush. The overall buildings arrows damage was nerfed by 20% and this allowed people to rush. Rushes that brought up the strength of the spear cavalry since they can ruin food production and totally block a player and their weakness since thats the only situation where they are worth to train. What does it means? that the buildings are effective against infantry but cavalry, thats why cavalry needs an hp nerf instead of tweaking buildings. Alpha 22 is all about cavalry rush and keep women safe from the raiders which is really hard since they die fast and there is no space to garrison them all, plus any kind of building is useless against 10+ cavalry because the more units the building hits the less chance it has to kill an unit and low the attacker DPS (this has been the issue with slingers able to totally absorb the damage of a fortress with cunobelin hero). Indeed I can't know what boil under the pot but i assume that the various balancing tweaks over the alpha versions have been done to make more valuable some unused units and keep people interest at least in multiplayer games since it looks like AI, despite its complexity, is easy to beat once a player plays a couple of multiplayer games where the mechanics are pushed to their limit (like a pilot on a racing car). Since the bases are been given already, the easiest and perhaps the most coherent way to move would be to use the bases and make them deeper through new technologies and perhaps tweaks to units and formations (which would make the game even deeper with their strengths and weaknesses). F.e. since infantry skirmishers are really strong into hunt, wouldn't make sense to have them to be able to hunt and make closer the gap with civs using skirmish cavalry? you have a new way to use them. The difference between civs is already on their buildings build time and perhaps it could kept deeper from the economy growth point of view while the role of units are already defined in the game.

the number are indicative ( i simply swapped spear cavalry walk speed and swords cavalry walk speed) in order to define the role of the 2 type of cavalry and give to the countered one (swords cavalry in this case) a chance to escape / bait. I guess that having a type of unit being able to counter another one and being better under any aspect would kinda be an about-turn. this is the intent. Managing the resources is as important as choosing the type of unit. Actually cavalry role is to raid for a sure advantage more than scouting which could lead to later advantage (f.e. knowing that the enemy is training the unit X, i will train and eventually upgrade the unit Y which beats the unit X as long as the enemy doesn't know. Otherwise, by scouting, he could train the unit Z which counters my units Y).

Let's start with saying that i was reluctant to open another balance discussion because that topic is basically discussed daily by lobby players and forum readers (and mostly because my english isn't that great), but who cares, it is always fun to talk with / complain at people about the game content. Personally speaking, despite the game is still in alpha state, having a clear idea of how effective are the units and what are the strengths and weaknesses of a civ is crucial for further features implementation and strategies available, thus simply comparing units each other and introducing a counter system with multipliers in order to be more effective against other units is quite odd. A player shouldn't be forced to counter a strategy with 1 and only 1 strategy (basically imitating enemy strategy). Summary: I'll explain the key points of units (mostly imbalanced op peculiarities). Those wants only to be suggestions in order to improve the game experience with the low effort from the development point of view. N.B: my considerations are based on starting LOW resources game and Mainland map, anyway the starting resources shouldn't influence the available strategies. Phase I: It is a matter of fact that training skirmisher cavalry at start is the best strategy in terms of cost / effectiveness in order to get advantage in the game. Melee Cavalry: both swords and spear cavalry lose on a direct fight with skirmish cavalry. Spear Cavalry has hard times while hunting elephants which are the best food source in the game. Spear Cavalry move too fast considering that a spear is more cumbersome than a sword. Spear Cavalry haven't a specific role if not killing women. Blocking them with palisades or houses wall is really hard Issue: Spear cavalry is harmless against skirmish cavalry Sword cavalry works better in ANY situation Solution: decrease melee cavalry hp from 160 to 150 spear cavalry gains 1.25x bonus against cavalry units decrease spear cavalry walk speed from 22 to 20 increase sword cavalry walk speed from 20 to 21 increase cavalry train time from 12 to 15 Ranged Cavalry: is a better version of the infantry skirmishers, other type of cavalry, spearmen and sentry towers should be the way to defend own economy from raids (since skirmishers are meant to be effective against spearmen, it is reasonable that spearmen represent a mediocre defense against Skirmish cavalry as far as the latter are skirmshers). They mainly cost food which is really easy to obtain with women gathering berries bushes (especially with the tech) and from chickens considering the 5x food gathering bonus cavalry has. Their hunting performance is outstanding. 20 units can make a mess on the wood gather spot because they are able to kill more than 10 citizen soldiers + 10 or more women while under the fire of 2 fully garrisoned sentry towers upgraded with the Sentinel tech which is ridiculously overpriced (usually it is even hard to have 2 sentry towers hitting the same group of enemies at same time since trees prevent a proper towers placement) and barely have loses (we talk about 1 or 2 dead cavalry). Issue: Cavalry has way too many healthpoints. A ranged cavalry has 120 hp for 100 food + 40 wood vs ranged infantry 50 hp for 50 food + 50 wood (more than double hp for less than double cost). Solution: decrease ranged cavalry hp from 120 to 100 Sentry Tower: They require wood which is essential at starting phase of the game, matter of fact having more than 8 women gathering berries bushes is pointless since the max gatherers limit per bush is 8 and surplus units risk to be idle thus it is immediate that all the remaining trained units have to go gather different resources (wood in particular in order to increase own population). They require soldiers garrisoned in order to deal more damage which means economy lose and uncovered women. Garrisoning soldiers whenever the enemy comes to raid would be the best strategy, sadly skirmish cavalry can kill soldiers while they move to such sentry tower (the damage dealt by the tower isn't be worth the effort anyway). They can be destroyed with ease by 20 ranged units (especially cavalry) and that shouldn't be allowed. Personal opinion: since defense tower has a minimum attack range, i find interesting that sentry towers would follow the same logic thus being weak to melee attacks. Issue: the economy sacrifice by garrisoning soldiers + investing wood isn't worth the effort since they are easy to destroy and don't deal much damage. Solution: +5 pierce armor. Considering the cavalry hp reduction, there isn't any damage increase needed. Palisades: building palisades means sacrifice wood for houses and soldiers they are hard to place around the civic center because the metal and stone mines are too close to the civic center (at least on most of the random maps) they aren't worth to be built in late game. Houses are supposed to be built around grainfields as replacement of palisades in order to protect women and this reduces the usage of palisades. Issue: palisades can't be built without sacrificing economy. They are even less valuable in late game. Solution: reduce build time from 7 seconds to 5 seconds reduce wood cost from 5 wood to 3 wood Experience gain compromises match ups: (this may need more testing) if swordsmen beat spearmen, the battle compposed by 40 spearmen + 40 skirmishers vs 40 swordsmen + 40 skirmishers is won by spearmen team because their skirmishers gain promtion faster. Phase II: Building the market as first structure is the most valuable strategy because, unless few workers on stone in case of slingers (which training cost let the player save wood anyway), there is possible to barter any resource for another one. f.e. desert biome, where the wood is more harsh to gather, usually comes with huntable animals, elephants in particular which provides insane amount of food (even too much to spend in units training), which can be bartered with wood erasing in that way the biome particularity. In terms to be clear, some games with groups of elephants can provide (8000 food which can be used to barter more than needed wood). Market: bartering ruins the particularity of desert biome which is supposed to be "Expand if you want wood" and perhaps incentive the surplus gathering of faster gathered resources in order to barter them with rare ones. Traders, when all the traders affecting technologies are researched, can yield up to almost 2 resources per second with a linear route (the most recent measure was 89 resources in 67 seconds with a NON linear route and 105 resources in 69 seconds with a linear route excluding the extra resources the player gains from the international trading whenever allied traders use such a market). it is too easy to defend and replace considering walls. issue: trading is too convenient and outnumbering enemies in a fight doesn't give the expected advantage thus having a solid trade route is always more beneficial solution: include bartering fees even when the player barters resources in batches reduce trade income by 1/3 of the current gain remove the international trade bonus whenever the allied traders use your market as destination/origin and keep only own traders benefit from such a feature. Phase III: One of the most valuable tactics is to unlock all the economy technologies (wood has the top priority) then build structures able to train sieges and attack the enemy with most of own units. Champions: they train too slowly when compared to sieges. While a couple of sieges can destroy buildings while being covered by other units, a couple of champions aren't enough to influence a game. Perhaps having civs able to train champions from barrack and ones from fortress only is quite unfair. solution: reduce infantry Champion training time from 30 to 20 and Champion cavalry from 40 to 30

sorry, i should have mentioned it in the previous post. it is from the Damage.js component

cmpPromotion.IncreaseXp(cmpLoot.GetXp() * -targetState.change / cmpHealth.GetMaxHitpoints()); an unit gains experience equal to the damage it deals and not equal to its attack strength ( pierce damage + hack damage + crush damage) thus the experience gained is equal to the damage filtrated by the target armor

ranged cavalry hp reduced by 15% in order to let tower be more effective at least in the initial phase. stone and metal mines placed a bit further in order grant a player to fully cover the civic center with walls. faster attack speed for spear cavalry and perhaps counter bonus against other cav in order to give it a specific role and let it win against sword champion infantry. being able to choose between traditional and romanized army per fortress and not only 1 time in order to have a wider units choice while playing for Seleucids (champions only train from fortresses). champions reduced training time from 30 to 20-25 for infantry and from 40 to 30 - 35 for cavalry. compute units experience gain on the attacker strength and not on the damage dealt because higher armor units give less experience per hit and this compromise the result in mixed units battle mostly because f.e. skirmishers get promotion faster thus they have increased stats.

As far as i understandd this new feature would/could introduce a deeper "build tree" that probably the game isn't actually ready yet to embrace. Is that devotion choice 1 time only per game (perhaps in order to prevent exploits)? if so, isn't it implementable as upgrade?

I am waiting for this game since months, there are some interesting mechanics like exploring areas with heroes before expanding

Honestly i think that "spamming unit" is an abused term because some civs like Romans don't have a wide choice of infantry units in phase 1 and i am quite sure that using 1 type of unit only always results on a lost fight even if the units in question are champions. A citizen soldier oriented game incentive you to train any kind of soldiers, and there are soldiers which can give a higher contribute to the economy growth thanks to their movement speed. The main issue is that there is a strategies limit described by the choices a player can do that may give you advantage over the opponent: Training women and send them to gather wood is always better for the first 6-7 min than training soldiers which require wood needed for houses, in order to constantly grow your population, and eventually palisades which basically should grant you a decent defense for the food production. The women working of grainfield are basically NEVER protected by house walls or palisades because the stone and metal mines distance from civic center is too low, preventing a player from placing 8 grainfields near the civic center and making the defense way harder (the gridless buildings placement system let cavalry move among houses and palisades more than often). The wood invested into palisades isn't worth the effort. Sentry tower are a tricky defense building because they require soldiers garrisoned in it to be more effective, letting the women chopping wood harmless and the amount of damage dealt by the garrisoned tower isn't enough to force the enemy raiders to retreat when the raiders are too many. Plus a player has to secure his territory while changing wood gathering spot by building more towers, keeping the previously built ungarrisoned and easy to capture by enemy cavalry. A mere waste of wood and eventually food (the 500 food costly Sentinel tech for sentry towers is too expensive). Skirmish cavalry have a huge advantage against spear cavalry into hunting because of their hunting efficiency and their price (animals give tons of food and skirmisher cavalry cost more food and less wood than spear cavalry). Sometimes expanding isn't worth the effort because phasing up grants hp bonus to all the soldiers resulting in a easy capture with a couple of rams for the enemy. Perhaps bolt shooters don't need so high crush damage because they are meant to be used against units. Personally i have the feeling that phasing up isn't oriented to the research of new technologies but economical technologies

What do you mean with "op siege units"? Which unit in particular?

this is a good inspiration to work on the question, considering also the economical contribute they can give. I agree on the usage of features like trample and run to achieve victories in a complex and intriguing strategical way, still there is the need to achieve almost the same result without those. Indeed slingers were strong against units too, resulting in a dead end strategy. I am not against the idea of having them as hybrid between a building crushing oriented unit and a medium range unit as far as they are counterable (for example while skirmisher infantry fail against slingers, skirmisher cavalry may win thanks to their high hp.)

What mainly concerns me about a counter system is that every unit would need new attributes in order to best fit the new bonuses resulting in a time consuming work and a deep testing. There is already a good base to work on, thus a focused tweak would make the job. What could come in hand? an explicit explanation of which units are supposed to be good against. Selecting a building then placing the cursor over the icon of an unit in the production menu may show the pros and cons of such unit (f.e. for swordsmen: strong against spearmen, weak against skirmishers, for skirmishers: strong against melee infantry, weak against sword cavalry) or at least a supposed usage of the unit instead of the historical description (thing that could be interesting to read while observing a game thus showed in the structure tree). There is a too high gap between melee cavalry and ranged cavalry and this is noticeable especially on the hunt. 6 skirmisher cavalry can hunt down animals and defend with too much ease thereby the amount of food provided by hunt is so much profitable that civs relying on other type of cavalry in early game would be too behind in their food production. Perhaps all the skirmishers (thus including skirmisher infantry) could have a hunting bonus (slaughter bonus) in order to allow other civs to have a decent hunting potential by hunting with a bunch of infantry skirmishers then using spear cavalry to gather the food. Spear cavalry would also be a decent counter hunting/cavalry unit with a bonus against cavalry (1.25x bonus would be good enough) and a slightly lower attack rate (3.5 sec it definitely too much since they potentially lose against infantry swordsmen). Sword Cavalry perhaps could have a slightly bonus against ranged infantry units since more than often they are outnumbered by ranged units and poked with ease. In the current state sword cavalry are just a better version of spear cavalry units in any situation.

1) onestamente anche io ho avuto difficoltà le prime volte contro l'IA ma una volta intuito che il bot manda ondate di soldati ad intervallli di tempo ben definiti, diventa più naturale preparare una difesa inziale per poi e contrattaccare. Avere una buona build order e non addestrare troppe donne ti aiuta ad avere una difesa decente investendo legno nell'addestramento di soldati senza ricorrere alle caserme. 2) Anche l'IA ha bisogno di trovarsi nella seconda fase per poter costruire centri civici e quant'altro. Essenziale è ricercare le tecnologie economiche disponibili nei depositi e nelle fattorie in maniera tale da boostare la propria economia e poter affrontare le spese per soldati e case (incrementare costantemente la popolazione è importante per la tua economia) 3) Che i nemici entrino nella città mentre i portoni sono aperti è normale poichè le unità bloccano la chiusura di questi e sono sicuro che sia intenzionale. 4) Gli edifici conquistati possono essere mantenuti sotto il proprio controllo semplicemente presediando la struttura con almeno 1 soldato in modo tale da tenerne il controllo. Ovviamente più soldati presediono una struttura più difficile diventa per l'attaccante riuscire a conquistarla, inoltre gli edifici con poca vita sono di solito più facili da catturare e probabilmente dover ricorrere alle macchine d'assedio per poter espugnare una fortezza è più realistico che tirare giù un edificio in pietra a colpi di spada.

i guess that you are missing execution rights. you can try to go on terminal and type something like chmod +x "path/downloadedfile"

wow that "seletolemian" tower looks amazing

I guess you can take as reference point the stats from any already existing civ. Notice that Celtic tribes and hellenic civs have a particular bonus/malus on buildings healthpoint, so i'd rather look at the other civs. Any unit has the same stats independently from the civ and any civ has access to the same technologies unless some technologies which are a civ peculiarity (f.e. sword master for iberians and mauryans only, colonization for carthage, another technology i can't remember the name for Persians, and from alpha 22 rank upgrade for mercenary units )

I am not sure that wood placement takes account of iberian walls, if they do, iberian walls should take into account woods footprint which is usually bigger than the simulation obstruction. Matter of fact if there is no rush going on, usually one could even delete walls. Still there are many ways to gain wood in desert maps. Example, those 4 are the civs which have access to the market earlier than any other civ in such biome: Play britons with their slingers available in phase 1 which are darn fast. Play ptols with their free houses. Play athene with their slingers available in phase 1. Play mauryans and use worker elephants (they are storehouses with paws) Pray for no rush Most of the times there are always animals on such 1biome and one wants to get corrals working in order to have a significant amount of food to invest into the market. Probably there are only 2 starting strategies working: 1) you can train skirmish cavalry and invest all the yelt wood in making corrals for a solid food production. You can use that food income to use/abuse of the market barter or to train cavalry. Cons: if attacked by cavalry, you have to stop the food production and defend. This may slow you down. 2) you can make grainfields and invest the wood yelt into soldiers. At this point you could simply wait to reach phase 2 and move part of your soldiers from wood to metal and start a trade route. Cons: you are quite vulnerable to cavalry raids. Some one even invest wood into wicker basket technology for more carrying capacity which helps on long distances

The advantage in capturing structures like barracks, fortresses, civic centers and towers is quite obvious. You can expand your territory influence or simply train units directly from enemy barracks. You could even use the "converted" territory influence to build a civic center or a military colony which builds even faster than a cc and start to invade enemy territory . By the way when you capture enemy barracks, you know where enemy units can be trained from, thus 1 unit garrisoned per barrack will keep them captured with no risk. I must agree that capturing without suiciding houses makes no sense unless you bring women into fight and garrison them into houses (still the pop gained from a single isn't worth the effort). Indeed capturing is much faster than destroying them with sieges or elephants, matter of fact most of the times units just clear out stuff like storehouses and houses and clear the path for sieges. Still one can't pretend rams to one shot buildings (perhaps they could have slightly more damage) and most of times the buildings loot is not reclaimed, especially the really low wood loot that houses and such provide or the exp bonus that basically makes no sense since rams can't get promotion. On the other hand, having units able to capture buildings makes the life of a catapult much easier, otherwise a catapult has to destroy any single house in order to reach the "main" building which is actually bad due catapult accuracy.