BreakfastBurrito_007
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Posts posted by BreakfastBurrito_007
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Ok I got the svn version and tried it with my brother, it seems the fighting is much faster paced which I like.
Who wants to setup some kind of TG on the svn version?
I think we could do a TG using as many different civs as possible, to get a feel for the balance.
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3 minutes ago, Gurken Khan said:
Wasn't there a limit of 1 palace?
From what I remember, this was to allow mauryas to more easily train that archer champion. Sparta has an identically functioning building called "mess hall" that can be built as much as needed as well.
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Awesome news @wraitii, I will try it out tonight after work!
I have heard only good things so far and can't wait to try it out.
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I suppose you guys are right that archers are indeed counterable, its just that it takes much more effort and skill to beat archers than it takes to win with them as @alre said.
6 hours ago, LetswaveaBook said:Disappointingly, one medium sized maps, the groups of trees are so large that one group of them is enough for the entire game.
This especially true on 4v4s, it can be impossible to get around them (*the groups of archers that develop at the borders of a 4v4). I was hoping to introduce a graduated penalty for mobile accuracy for longer ranged units so that shorter ranged units were more maneuverable. I feel that forests could be a bit smaller in area, and with better pathfinding as I have heard exists in a25, it will be easier to move in general.
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8 hours ago, alre said:
You seem to be overly impressed by archers potential for hit and run, but that's a counterable tactic that fits pretty well in the balance of the game IMO.
How is this counterable without cavalry?
8 hours ago, LetswaveaBook said:Also your idea feels to me as trying to prevent people from managing their archers, which I find peculiar.
This encourages not continuous micro of archers, yes, but it does encourage and reward proper positioning.
8 hours ago, LetswaveaBook said:How about using the follow command and then not touching the archers but rather move the unit that is being followed?
This is true, that would need to be accounted for if this was to be implemented. I am not sure if people actually use the "follow" mechanic but it could be adjusted to affect the equations differently.
8 hours ago, LetswaveaBook said:If the hero retreats, then the archer player has to prevent his archers from following the hero and hence accuracy ruined
This is a problem already in the game: units tend to automatically focus particular things, like heros, palisades, farms, eles. This is frustrating even without the mechanic and would certainly need to be fixed before this is implemented. I talked about this earlier but forgot to mention heros.
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In a24 archers are the most mobile non-horse unit.
I feel the equations are pretty simple to be honest. But then I don't really know how much math is too much to be doing per unit in game lag-wise and code-wise. Do you think archers should be slower than slings and slower yet than skirms?
24 minutes ago, alre said:that's not the problem
What is the problem with archers in a24?
25 minutes ago, alre said:prepare time before first shot is way more reasonable way to achieve the same goal
hmm, this is a lot simpler and probably does the same thing. Do you mean prepare time for first shot after order or after movement?
What is the problem with the idea that causes it not to have a positive effect on gameplay? can you explain with example scenarios?
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@Dizaka Kush were "super nub" for a long time haha, so perhaps it is because fewer people frequently encountered it. I am still bad at them even though they are one of the best civs.
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16 hours ago, LetswaveaBook said:
basically means that if you do one missclick and move the archers, you ruin your accuracy.
This is why I decided to use n=number of shots since last order.
This means that rather than tediously trying to keep ur archers from moving, you just need to pay attention to whether or not a new attack order is worth it.
16 hours ago, LetswaveaBook said:Also it seems to be a fairly buggy and abusable concept
If "n" can be reliably counted with code, then there are no bugs that would come from these equations. I also don't see how you could abuse this. The only thing I could think of would be turning your units to violent mode and letting them run free. The only problem with this abuse technique is that it usually means all of your units get spread out, won't retreat, and die. Please tell me how a player could retain accuracy while moving.
16 hours ago, LetswaveaBook said:If units lose accuracy after moving, you have difficulty to chase an escaping unit and hit it reliably.
Again, n is counted as shots since the last order. If you tell your archer to attack a cavalry unit running in a circle around it , each shot will get more accurate until it approaches the asymptote. Ranged units will still definitely be able to chase down other units if they are faster.
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16 hours ago, chrstgtr said:
Just played 2.5 games with @ValihrAnt and I just want to say that this is going to be a really nice alpha.
Nice. This is good to hear.
Are the release candidates easier for people who are not so good at computer stuff to test? I might try one out if that is the case.
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Do you see any benefit to the accuracy calculations?
They would simply be a modifier to existing accuracy values as they exist in 0ad currently. I suppose the only way to abuse the concept is to let your units do whatever and let them shoot things, however, when ranged units are not ordered to chase something, they tend to lose interest and go idle after some chasing.
People seemed to dislike the changes that made skirmishers .6 m/s faster than slings, and slings .6 faster than archers. If this is implemented it brings mobility to be more nuanced than simply how fast the ranged units are. This makes the problems associated with camel archers from a23 or plain archers from a24 reduced without making them slower.
@LetswaveaBookThere are no exploits or bugs in this beyond what is in the equations I wrote. I am not sure how the accuracy system works, but I have heard numbers given out in the balancing discussions such as "2.5". These equations would just take a base accuracy value and make a temporary new one for the current shot.
I think the only way this would become frustrating besides the numbers being off, is when ranged units suddenly start attacking a different target like farms, elephants, heros, palisades. This is already a frustrating problem from a24, but it would be worse if every time you tried to keep ur units from disobeying rules there was a loss of accuracy.
Remember the purpose of this is to 1. make battles more strategic and nuanced 2. reduce the reward of dancing a group of units.
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Just now, Yekaterina said:
Is there any justification for divding 4 by the number of shots? I am not sure how that works probabilitisticly.
The effect this will have is that ranged units will have the highest starting inaccuracy but after some shots approach their maximum accuracy. Equation-wise this slows the rate at which archers gain accuracy. It will take 3-4 shots as I wrote it (could be changed).
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Well I am thinking that ranged units would choose the next closest target in a battle, just from my observations. And we want the effects of this mechanic to be influenced by player input, so if players know about this, they can choose whether or not to avoid moving to keep high accuracy. They can't avoid the accuracy loss from units changing targets which I would expect if shots are counted as number of shots on same target.
My guess is that there is not already some function in 0ad coding history that tracks numbers of shots since last player input, but I may be surprised.
What do you guys think of the scaling of the ranged infantry? do you think my values are reasonable?
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1 hour ago, alre said:
wait... 25 spear cav cost more than 5 cataphracts
metal is different from other resources. 50 metal is not worth 50 wood in a game of 0ad. The mining rates are slower than wood and food. And most importantly, metal is a limited resource, which is ok, but it means the things you buy with it must be consequential. This is why I don't like mercs costing metal (a side note).
so 25 spear cav are cheaper than 5 cataphracts
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Hi everyone,
I was recently thinking about ranged unit accuracy in the "future alphas" topic. I came up for some accuracy equations for different ranged units. I am trying to account for target speed (maybe this is already factored into the current accuracy system) as well as the number of shots taken since the start of a battle.
n=number of shots since an order is given to the units. ACC# is the accuracy number as it stands currently (could be tweaked) Vtarget is the speed of the unit the ranged unit is firing upon. All values are integers greater than 0.
I can foresee this having a number a number of good effects on gameplay:
- dancing whole armies could be less beneficial as the player who dances between each shot would never build accuracy like a stationary group. Although I think right now changing direction is also hard for ranged units to deal with. If changing direction didn't matter, then dancing would be reduced because .1*Vtarget or .05*vtarget is the most inaccuracy you can generate by moving your units around in front of the enemy.
- It makes battle tactics, positioning, and movement more important as you would want your slingers and in particular archers to stay stationary more, but skirmishers are the more mobile ranged unit so they regain accuracy faster after moving.
- It is a way to make some ranged units be more mobile in battle without making them physically faster in m/s.
example: archer (example ACC#=1) shooting at 10m/s unit after being told to attack it: shot 1=6, shot 2=4, shot 3=3.3, shot 4=3, shot 5=2.8 and so on until -> 2 at n=infinity
slingers and skirmishers would have progressively larger ACC#s.
As you can see, I chose skirmishers to have much faster accuracy buildup, only taking 1 shots before maximum accuracy, and having less moving target penalty. It is expected that skirmishers have a very high base inaccuracy (ACC#) so they would want to run to closer range and get a few powerful volleys in. Also, I think skirmishers should not have a minimum accuracy for 2 reasons: they fought closest to their enemies than other ranged units, in game they are useful to assist heavy melee units.
There is one remaining question that I am not sure about with this mechanic. And it is how should we count n shots. My best guess would be when ranged units are given an order by the player, and count n to be number of shots since last order. I thought about choosing n starts whenever the unit stops moving, however sometimes ranged units decide to move on their own to get in range and this is beyond player control.
Let me know what you guys think! I think it could be a great thing to heighten the vulnerabilities and strengths of different ranged units as well as reduce dancing and improve the strategic depth of battles. Combined with good pathfinding, the good gameplay effects of this are multiplied.
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7 minutes ago, LetswaveaBook said:
Does this rout effect also exist if the archers are put on 'stand ground' mode? Or are they just firing all when on stand ground?
Oh yea that effect probably did depend on what "order" they were on, they probably would not move then. The reason the ranged units move I think is to try to get within range boundaries again. It is quite rough and would need to be more developed if it were to be implemented.
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39 minutes ago, LetswaveaBook said:
What I would like to see for gameplay is that units unlocked in later phases should be more efficient.
When you reach p2, you should get feeling "amazing, now I can use naked fanatics/mercenaries/mounted archers/elephant archers and can use these to deal heavy damage to my opponent". When you reach p3 you should be able to make effective use of melee infantry/cavalry which is currently hardly the case.
Currently you make citizen soldiers in p1 and you keep centering your army around these in later phases. I would like to see that the game encourages you to actually use the champion melee infantry/cavalry that the game provides you. I hardly have used champion melee infantry/cavalry in A24 and I think that is not just me. Champion melee infantry/cavalry should be awesome.
Currently BreakfastBurrito_007 want seleucids have CS spear cavalry, because in his views the champions die to fast. The CS spear cavalry has 160*1.1 HP while champion cataphract with nisean war horses has 360*1.1 HP and +4 armour levels, so that is 3.3 times the durability. I think players get the idea that cataphracts die to fast comes from the fact that ranged units deal excessive amounts of damage and if the cataphracts die, they are hard to replace(because of training time and metal cost).
What I would suggest is all infantry/cavalry champions +1 hack&pierce armour, move 25% of their metal cost to food cost and reduce their training times, such that it would be really cool to use these infantry/cavalry champions.
That way if the opponent lingers to long in a lower phase, you can punish him with the units that you have all-ready unlocked after phasing up. In the current A24 meta if the opponents civilization does not have siege towers or elephants (as athens, britions, gauls, romans or spartans, Iberians are a special case with Indibil ) and is in p3, a defending p1 player won't really bother about it as long as the p1 player has superior numbers. Like what are those p3 factions gonna send at you? An outnumbered force of citizen soldiers and a some siege that you can demolish...
I am not sure how I feel about buffing champions more. Seleucid spearcav are very good units and I don't think they die too fast, they are strong and do high damage, their main weakness is players correctly choosing to kill them first with their ranged units. If you have 15 sele cataphracts, and you attack 50 archers with them, the champions will all die. If you have 10 persian cataphracts (same unit) and 25 spearcav, you will have much more success at a lower cost. Buffing each champion does not help this problem.
For nearer to future alphas I would advocate for adding a suitable minimum range for slingers and archers. Some skilled mod folk demonstrated the effects of this earlier in the year, and I thought it produced a nice melee versus ranged unit "rout" effect.
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Seles are basically not a cav civ what on earth. Iber cavalry is way better than seles. If it is true that antiochus does not effect ranged cav then there is no excuse not to give seles a spearcav unit for a25.
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3 minutes ago, PyrrhicVictoryGuy said:
Can someone confirm if antiochus iii's bonus applies to ranged cav (seleucids), because i don't think it does.
It better, because seles hardly have cavalry besides ranged cavalry.
All other cav civs besides seles can pair a more expensive melee cavalry (champions, or mercenaries if they were ever worth getting) with CS melee cavalry to extend their lives and make the metal investment worth it. With a melee cavalry sele army, you would be relegated to never using champions or mercenaries in open combat since they are too expensive to lose. People recognize how much metal champions and mercenaries cost and will simply focus them down. Even if they lose 100 units to 40 units, economically it is a win for the non-cav player.
Melee champions are most useful when they are embedded with large numbers of citizen soldiers so that an enemy has a harder time killing your most expensive units first, seles do not have this option and I really think they should if their mercenary or champion melee cavalry are ever to be used for anything other than killing traders or killing women (a task CS cavalry can do just fine).
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I think civ differentiation, balancing, and mercenary rework (depending on how good they are in a25) should be a focus during life-cycle of a25.
In the long term I think it would be cool to add new mechanics that deepen gameplay and could contribute to historical accuracy/physics realism. These things are undestandably quite challenging and I am ignorant of how hard they will be to code. Also some of these are divisive and will need long discussions to get right.
- Cavalry acceleration and momentum system
- more realistic system for ranged units, volleys, walls blocking projectiles in different circumstances
- unit differentiation: examples seleucid champ spear cav different from persians spear cav champ, advantages/disadvantages to both.
- extended debate on blacksmith upgrades.
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Personally I have never seen a player use autotrain to any winnable effect. I feel that if it were to be the ideal unit production method that it would be very bad and boring.
It can be like AoE2 Auto-scout. Lazy players or players who are going afk for beer or coffee or both can use auto-train and accept the losses in exchange for comfort and concentration elsewhere. Sometimes it may be a good way to top-off the population during a battle, but it should not be comparable in results to a player putting focus and effort into eco.
I would be in favor of making it slightly inefficient. The one I saw seems quite inefficient, but I have not seen many players use this.
I think it is important to note that @chrstgtr's point about APM works the other way too: unit training and timing is APM that serves a purpose to the game, and it is skill based. Much of the frustration in the game comes from Actions that have a probability of being translated into the game, like moving an ele past a house. We need to reduce necessary APM in the right areas: like how many clicks it should take to get an ele past the godforsaken house, or how many clicks you need to make to keep all of your units from bleeding to an enemy tower, or how many times you must click "unpack" or "pack" on catapults.
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I was thinking a very unique way to have lancer cavalry would be to have a very low attack repeat rate like once every 4 seconds, but a high pierce damage and very low prepare time. This way, the best way to use them would be to attack with smaller groups and then run away to charge back and attack again. My thinking is that this would be worse versus ranged units, since it would be harder for them to get out of range in time before losing quite a few of them, but actually be very good vs swords and acceptable vs spears and still bad vs pikes. I think ideal micro for them could be like trying to get melee inf to pursue, but then doubling back and sniping individuals before too many of the enemy melee inf get into attack range.
I could see this being a CS soldier for some civs that were famous for using long pointy things with their horses, maybe it should be a unit for civs that have a strange/underpowered/not persians cavalry selection. Perhaps a champion version could be made for the civ with the most historical tendency for pikes.
I think if it is balanced right as a CS unit, then it should not need any price or train time changes.
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It is a good thing that auto-training is quite slower than manual, at least for eco growth. We have batch training to thank for that.
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People in the topic were trying to figure out separating lancer cavalry versus spear cavalry. I was confused and wondered how far they got in making a gameplay distinction.
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On 07/06/2021 at 1:54 PM, Yekaterina said:
Or, even better, soldiers can swim
maybe she could train marines capable of swimming? so it would not affect a huge number of units.
if they swim, what stroke should they do as an animation?
- Butterfly
- backstroke
- breastroke
- freestyle
People may be joking, but I think it could be a fun feature
Unit could be like naked fanatic. Little armor but strong bod from swimming.
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Should Camel Archers be Mercenaries?
in Balancing Discussions
Posted
@alre I like this idea, but I don't like making camels a mercenary. Mercenaries are very bad right now, and camel rush is OP and frustrating, but also unique and diverse.
I know ptols are already the less wood intensive, and I think a 80 wood farm rather than 100 wood farm would be an interesting bonus. When balancing, however, you should keep in mind that in a25, ptols will get their own food trickle bonus applied to themselves.