chrstgtr
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Posts posted by chrstgtr
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14 hours ago, alre said:
what's the biggest change from a23 in this regard? is it training times? I think training women has become too convenient, and loosing some of them, even in early game, is not much of a trouble.
Two main things.
First, longer training times mean that rushes come much later. This means the defensive player is more likely to have a barrack to produce from, which makes it easier to defend against rushes.
I think this should be fixed by reverting training times to previous levels.
And second, increased turn times makes it harder to do hit and flee attacks.
This is particularly troubling for cav rushes. I think this should be fixed by lowering turn times, especially for non-hero units. The whole reason why turn times changed was to reduce dancing except almost no danced before with regular units, so the increased turn times are unnecessary.
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9 hours ago, ValihrAnt said:
Upon having thought about this more, I think the better way to solve this problem is to offer more military options in P2. Things like the now gone Athenian P2 champs or the Spartan Skiritai, or the now very weak Gaul Naked fanatics. In combination with more accessible military upgrades it should combine to make aggression in P2 more viable and reward good scouting, but obviously would require a lot of effort and change to get there.
This.
But there should also be some incentive to rush in P1. Everyone making all women at the start isn’t good.
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1 hour ago, maroder said:
@chrstgtr since you wrote about two of your mentioned options, that you don't believe they will change anything (so booming is still = turteling), I didn't include them.
Even increasing loot would be a huge meta change--especially late game when you are near constant fight. I honestly don't know if it would work. It's a tricky problem to solve.
Separately, I talked to Vali in the lobby and he agreed that he didn't think his proposal would work because it did not consider barracks like I pointed out.
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5 hours ago, ValihrAnt said:
The solution I've got is to increase the gather rate of female citizens to be equal or greater than that of citizen soldiers. This should offer a dilemma between picking a safe approach with citizen soldiers or taking it risky with a women boom to have better economy. Similar in lategame, do you opt to have all women on economy to be able to field a larger army or have soldiers on economy and be safer from raids, or do a mix of units?
Good assessment of the problem as always.
But I don't think this proposal will work. The reason why players boom the way they do is because small rushes aren't effective enough or quick enough. Players can boom women until they make a barrack to make men. If a rush comes at that point they can fend it off with production from the CC/barrack. And if a rush comes before a barrack is up then the rush is so few men that it doesn't do enough damage and can easily be fended off with just a few men being produced from the CC. The difference in men and women training times also make women much more effective since they are both cheaper and quicker produce, so rushes have to kill a lot of women to be effective.
I also think this proposal would actually backfire because most players will do the boom and reach late game earlier (because of better women) at which point they can punish players that slowed themselves by rushing.
I think a better solution is to make rushing less economically costly, so rushing players aren't so far behind booming players. I think this can be done in three main ways:
- Increase loot for kills: this will make good rushes much more effective since you will have a better eco because you rushed. It will also punish bad rushes, which is the way it should be. Most importantly, this won't change the incentives for players to make more men early just to fight off rushes (i.e. this means rushes are still possible because players' won't turtle from the start without any penalty). This is my preferred change.
- Increase men's gather rates and/or decrease women's gathering rates: The change in rates would need to mostly occur with wood. This means that rushers would have a better eco because they had more men than women early. But, as I said above, this will also result in some people making men for the sole purpose of fighting off rushes, which means booming will still equal turtling.
- Make women and men's training times the same: This will mean women are less effective at booming, so rushing won't be as costly from a unit production time. But again, this will also result in some people making men for the sole purpose of fighting off rushes, which means booming will still equal turtling.
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5 hours ago, Dakara said:
more pop= more lag
In my experience, wonders actually get built when a game effectively becomes 3v4 because one player either resigns too early or can't sustain full pop ( because border/at a new base or they're just not very skilled). The extra pop from a wonder allows one of the three remaining players to get extra pop and break the stalemate (Sometimes it works. Sometimes the player invests too much, ignores his allies too much, is unable to adjust to the new eco, and loses.) So the "extra" pop isn't actually more than the game is set up to sustain.
Also, wonders are generally built late game after a lot of game features (i.e. lots and lots of trees) are removed from the map, which decreases lag.
What often actually causes lag late game is players building a ton of walls, which increases lag a lot. Corrals can do it too, but there is a ticket to limit the number of animals and fix this.
10 hours ago, Lion.Kanzen said:That is why we talked about technologies that would break an even situation, and that would give an imbalance in the balance of power.
This is removing something that already works and replacing with something that we do not know whether it will or will not work. Extra population works. I see no reason to remove something that works.
Adding extra techs is fine. But we shouldn't remove good features just for the sake of replacing good features with new features.
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10 hours ago, ValihrAnt said:
The biggest advantage of the elephant is being able to reach resources you otherwise couldn't and keep efficiency constantly high. Skip out on a farmstead when hunting, take neutral berries or metal. In these tests you limit yourself from using any of the elephants strengths.
The big advantage of the Mauryans is their early boom plays into great early late game. Removing the pop bonus and having it be unique to Persians is a better solution than messing with a unique gameplay quirk of the Mauryas.
All of this.
Also, the worker ele is now worse than previous alphas and almost never trained by the most skilled players. So then how is that when the worker ele was made worse Maurya suddenly became better? It's because the worker ele isn't what makes Maurya good. Maurya is good for other reasons--the main two being that Maurya has archers, which were buffed too much this alpha and hence the reason why Maurya is suddenly very good, and because Maurya's bonus pop cap allows them to have more archers than anyone else. There is already a ticket to nerf archers that will surely nerf Maurya.
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8 hours ago, wraitii said:
There is D3736 for archer spread.
I would like a diff for reverting unit training time, I'm not sure what to do.
I've made D3898 for the outpost.
Great.
On the training time piece, but do you mean? I would make a ticket that literally just changes training for women, citizen-inf, and citizen-cav back to their a23 value (e.g., 8s for women, 10s for spears, etc.). I know healer train time almost doubled in a24 but I don't really care about that nor do I think it is a problem. If people have problems (which I expect at most will be fine-tuning) they can discuss it on the ticket. I would do this, but I just don't know how to create tickets.
Edit: here is some discussion on how it needs to move back to old values. I know it has been discussed elsewhere too and offline, as well.
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2 hours ago, Stan` said:
As some of you may know since it's been here since A25 was released the next feature freeze is on the 1st of June. Alpha25 ReleaseProcessDraft
Feature Freeze means no big changes, eg changing the gameplay paradigm of brits
As you know we're trying to go back to normal alpha cycles, and that means releasing more often.
Because of this it would be nice if we could get a list of things that needs to be changed for the next alpha.
By far the biggest thing is that there was discussion and agreement about reverting train times to what they were in a23 but I don’t think any ticket exists for that.
A slight nerf to archers is also needed. There are lots of ideas on this, but I think decreasing accuracy very slightly makes most sense so individual raiders/scouts can’t easily be picked off.
Another personal pet peeve of mine (that everyone also seems to agree on) is that outposts need to become useful again. Specifically, they need to have more vision like the tech in a23.-
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7 minutes ago, wraitii said:
Mostly I wonder if the "300 of everything" is the best choice. I'd probably prefer to have 300/300/100/100 settings or some such.
That being said, this is tangential, but same as we balance for maps, we must balance for the usual game settings (300 pop, standard res, ...)
I think it would be great if there was a game setting option that let players chose the amount of starting resources for each res. That would fix all problems by letting players decide what type of game they play. Doing anything else restricts player choice and assumes we know best for all people and all possible circumstances, which of course is impossible.
EDIT: more to the point. This is a bandaid and doesn’t fix the thread’s topic of how the game design is currently flawed because at some (early) point stone becomes useless for many civs
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10 minutes ago, wraitii said:
I think it might help to reduce the starting stone & metal, too. 300 stone covers a lot of ground.
There are game setting options that already do that. There are also options that provide more res at the start. We shouldn’t restrict player choice when it is not necessary. I see no reason to do that here.
If you want to create a new starting setting (or better yet make a starting setting that allows players to input the number of starting res), I would have zero objections.
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3 minutes ago, wraitii said:
- Making some techs cost stone ("which" is the question).
I have said in a few places that eco techs shouldn't be all wood/metal. It might make sense that you have to invest more of a res to collect more of it. So, for example, replace metal with stone for stone eco techs, replace metal with food for farming techs, etc. Alternatively, it may make sense to replace force players to spend time gathering more than just one resource, so the opposite should be done. For example, metal gathering techs should cost wood/stone and stone gathers techs should cost metal and wood. I personally prefer the second option that forces a more varied gameplay.
It also makes sense to reintroduce stone into the military techs like it used to be. For this I would divide the current metal costs between stone and metal.
9 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:The game needs structure and construction techs. Cost, build time, health, etc. These can cost stone and wood.
The building and construction techs also make sense, but few players ever use those techs as is. And, if you are an aggressive attacking player then you will never use those techs. In short this proposal is insufficient to make stone useful again because a winning strategy (i.e., a strategy that requires you to attack) still won't require stone.
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5 hours ago, Dakara said:
I don't know if just increasing the cost of buildings would be a good thing though. Going back to the stone cost of technology would be okay, but the stone dependent civ would be a nerf.
I don't think this should be a concern. Why should we treat civs that are stone dependent differently? There are civs that are metal dependent. And, there are civs that are wood dependent. Wood and metal are the two primary resources for techs right now. Every civ should have its advantages and disadvantages that vary from map to map and game to game.
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6 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:
You might as well merge stone and metal into one resource or something. Or Wood and Stone.
6 hours ago, wraitii said:I mean, it's been done. I don't really have a strong handle on how our different resources play together and whether having one more or one less would make a huge difference.
Let's not just eliminate an entire resource group...One of the biggest complaints is that the game is becoming too standardized. So yes, eliminating literally 25% of the entire economy will have a huge difference because now instead of balancing 4 resources you will only have to balance 3 resources.
Again, this was not a problem before this alpha. In a23 (and several alpha before that), stone was the 2nd most scarce resource for all civs. Several changes in a24 have since changed this (e.g., techs no longer cost as much stone, forts no longer cost as much much, catapults and slingers are no longer as good, etc.). The way we fix our new problem shouldn't be to make another change that assumes the current problem must exist when it didn't exist just last alpha. We also shouldn't take the lazy approach and say "this isn't necessary right now, let's eliminate 1/4 of the entire economy." Instead, we should revisit which changes brought us to the current situation, examine whether those changes are actually necessary, and make the appropriate changes. In part, this is already being done (e.g., there is a ticket to buff catapult, which will make stone more valuable). But there are other places where it can be done too (i.e., do we really need to make forts cost 600s/300w instead of 1000s?, do techs have to cost only wood/metal or should techs cost some mixture of more/other res, which includes stone).
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6 hours ago, Stan` said:
When you say this alpha, do you mean A25, or do you mean A24, I thought the changes were unpopular?
I'm just speaking generally about the propensity to eliminate differentiating factors and to make these standardized. I understand why many of these things were done. But I think there are other, better ways to fix balancing issues than making everything the same except for a few bonuses or techs (i.e., if Maurya has difficulty killing buildings in a23 then maybe the solution for a24 should've been to make ele stronger instead of giving them rams). I know I am not alone when I say a24 is a lot less fun because civs are less unique than in previous alphas.
With respect to the one specific thing I did reference in the text you quoted, I am referring to the unit balancing done for a24. A24 units are much better balanced than in a23. It's still a work in progress, but things are better now than before.
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8 hours ago, Stan` said:
I agree what patches do we currently have to bring back the differentiation?
Most of the work seems to be focused on making things standardized and then adding "special" techs/bonuses to each civ. See athens threads on forum and the associated tickets for an example. I think that these techs/bonuses are great. But I don't think those need to be the only differentiators, and if you peruse the proposals for long enough you will begin to notice that the same ideas keep popping up (e.g., give a slinger tech to slinger civs like how there is an archery tradition, give a spear tech to certain civs like how there is a archery tech, cheaper techs for Athens like how some civs are universities that provide cheaper tech, heros that provide similar bonuses such as an attach buff of x% or healing rate of x, etc.) These aren't bad features, but they are repetitive features. Having some basic differentiating features like Iber starting with walls (which many now want to get rid of), celts getting a pop bonus for each building (which was eliminated this alpha), some civs not having rams (which was eliminated in this alpha), or ptol having free houses (which was eliminated this alpha) are all nice differentiators. There are still some things that are totally unique (e.g., Brennus giving metal for every kill) but these are less common than before. Making all buildings cost the same for every civ will only make the game more and more uniform with less and less differentiation. I question why this is necessary.
To answer your question with another question: why do we keep eliminating differentiators and then racking our brains to come up with "new" ideas to differentiate civs in order to "fix" problems that didn't exist before the latest "improvements?" It makes a lot more sense to work within the current structure to balance what already exists and add differentiators as appropriate and as necessary. This is what was done to balance units this alpha, which is one of the most popular changes (and while still not perfect it is much closer than before).
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1 hour ago, wraitii said:
It seems to me that we could just make all civilisations use stone for their buildings.
I'd prefer we introduce more differentiating factors between civs rather than making them all more uniform. All civs already feel too similar. As it stands, it feels like there are 2 or 3 civs right now that are dressed differently to make the whole roster
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Great post. I think one of the underlying issues is that techs have become almost singularly dependent on wood/metal.
With respect to D3703 (i think you have the wrong ticket number for D307), I think it makes sense when paired with D3704. The % increase/res will go back to something closer to a23 (although still no where close to where it was), which provided more benefit to researching these techs. I agree, this ticket still isn't perfect, though. In my opinion, I would like to see food/stone involved in tech costs. Food/stone requirements in tech costs would invite more choice and allow players to focus their ecos in more than just two areas like the current alpha requires (current alpha is essentially just "get as much wood/metal as possible and then spend it where you want").
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45 minutes ago, faction02 said:
I agree there too, I mentioned that I am not sure I wanted to see them used more simply because I am not sure they fit this thread. Wonders aren't really used frequently simply because if you can win with it, you might have won without it in most cases. This part refers more to the thread mentioned by maroder. I don't think changing the function of the wonders should make it more used by itself.
I think we agree. My point is wonders should be more useful than they currently are (which is not useful unless eco is zero difficulty and you can wait several minutes to see any benefit, if at all). The delay for any benefit is unnecessarily long. But that does not mean that these buildings buildings (which are almost by definition rare in their excellence) should be built in most games.
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17 hours ago, faction02 said:
I am not sure I would like to see wonders being frequently used in general. Once a player manage to get his wonder, the game is often over if he has time to use it. But I would agree that changing the repartition of the cost between how much is spent on the building and how much is spent on the tech makes sense. Civilization that have advantage on technology cost or research time might benefits a bit too much of their bonus there.
Wonders aren't used frequently. But it is helpful as a tiebreaker for those long games that otherwise never seem to end. My point is that right now there are a lot of games that last very long and yet still no one builds wonders.
I see no reason to make a building that doesn't serve a purpose. Or to delete any building that does (or used to) have a purpose. Instead costs, usefulness, and research times should be adjusted.
Agree on your last point that the research aspect provides an unfair advantage for what should otherwise be a "final upgrade" building.
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15 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:
Outpost
This is one of my most disliked changes. Vision tech needs to be restored. Otherwise, it is not worth bothering with.
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The lighthouse and the wonder changes were two bad changes from last alpha.
Lighthouses went from being a critical building to being a virtually useless one. I honestly don't think making ships 20% fast will make it much more useful (and certainly not enough to ever make me want to build one). It also doesn't make sense why it is limited to just one construction but that is a different topic. Anyways, a revision to the old function of the lighthouse (or at least something much, much closer to it than its current vision range) would be useful.
Wonders are still useful. The problem is that they cost way, way too much to much and take way, way too long to build. The cost is troublesome in this alpha because metal is so scarce with how expensive techs are (this will be improved in the next alpha, so I am not worried about that part). The build time is troublesome because (1) it just takes a long to build, so any benefits are delayed and (2) a lot of units will be off eco for awhile, so you won't be able to immediately research the tech. Even after building the wonder you still have to pay for a very, very expensive tech that takes a very, very long time to research. All this means is that you have you have a couple minutes of resources gathered just to build it, spend a couple minutes building it, spend a couple more minutes of resources to research the tech, then spend a couple more minutes actually researching the tech, then after the tech resource is completed you have to spending several minutes of resources and training (maybe also build) time to actually get the extra pop. In other words, wonders are just too time intensive and in most games you'll lost before you ever get the chance to actually use the benefits of all your res and time.
I don't think making units/building cheaper would be helpful because if you can afford to build a wonder/research the tech then resources obviously aren't an issue for you. Similarly, making building times quicker doesn't make sense because you will have already made all your buildings by the late-stage of the game when wonders are built, so it provides little to no benefit.
Before at least you could get an immediate +10 pop bonus, which still wasn't very good to be honest.
I would take away the tech research time and provide that benefit immediately upon the wonder being built, make the wonder correspondingly more expensive (so 2K food, 3K wood, 500 stone/metal more expensive), and add whatever fun extra techs you want from that point on (i.e. maybe a super will to fight of an extra 15% or a super super defensive, which gives your units 15% more armour).
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11 hours ago, Yekaterina said:
I have spotted a pattern, not sure if you have also observed this:
When I host a game with mostly pro players (>1400), DDOS is very frequent (about half or a third of the time).
When I play 1v1 DDOS rarely occurs, although it did happen a few times when I challenged pros.
When I play a TG with all nubs (<1300) I have never experienced anything like DDOS, even if it is 4v4.
Therefore the DDOSer could be targeting the good players only or games that contain many good players.
The DDOSer uses fake IP addresses to flood routers with packets. When I tracked them down with Wireshark I found packets from many countries at the same time. Perhaps the DDOSer knows the IP of some unfortunate players and attack them whenever they are online. When I inspected the contents of the packet I found maths questions like calculating large numbers and Fourier Transform.
Some people think that the IPs have been recorded from some previous time and are just being attacked. Some people have avoided this by getting new IPs. This makes sense why it would only happen to "good" players because those are typically the ones who have been playing since the problem began ~9ish months ago.
Some other people think it is someone with an axe to grind against certain known players. Maybe theories are abound about who that someone actually is.
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33 minutes ago, alre said:
maybe I'm saying nonsense, but would it be possible to have an open game protected from dos by switching it to a password protected game automatically, before the match starts? I hope the game itself could do this automatically (but if the game crashes it should be possible to rejoin without ever having to know the password).
The theory, as I understand it, is that someone is using a program to scan the games in the lobby, which provides the DDOSer with the host's IP. Once the DDOSer has a host's IP, he/she can make DDOS attacks. By protecting the game with a password, the scanning program cannot obtain the host's IP. So no what you propose is not possible.
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1 minute ago, Stan` said:
Point is, not every dev has the knowledge or the skills to do the balancing. Just putting everyone in the same basket is not productive. There are a lot of types of developpers. And we don't have the kind genius that can do everything. So let's help each other instead of tearing each other apart. PLEASE.
Not my intention at all. See below from my original post. I 100% agree with you and is, in large part, what I actually say.
Also, glad to see you are back, Stan.
20 minutes ago, chrstgtr said:Again, I'm not trying to indict the entire development team as there is obviously a lot of great work that is done and this isn't a pervasive opinion held by all the devs.
Goals for A25
in Balancing Discussions
Posted · Edited by chrstgtr
It worked before. It does not work now. If you want something changed then you should make a proposal that modifies what did work instead of keeping what clearly does not. Bad changes shouldn't be kept just because they are new.
Players, including those who proposed the current train times, believe the current alpha’s changes are a step back. Moreover, the current alpha still allows spamming—just make more barracks—so it doesn’t to even address the problem you wanted to solve