LetswaveaBook

That is at least which I would say. I don´t see any reason for a particular mercenary to be trainable in p1. If you could name a concrete example I could give my thoughts on it, but if you don´t specify (give the type of mercenary, its stats and its costs) the proposal, it will be impossible to discuss it in detail. We need to keep in mind that giving players an extra option is only impactful if there is good incentive to go for that option, on the other hand I would prefer to restrict the real goodies to p2. Those are two conflicting desires and without knowing the details, it is impossible to judge these desires against each other. Also I feel like if you are able to use the 300 starting metal for your rush, then your rush would be to difficult to stop if your opponent does not have access to his own mercenaries (especially if the rusher gets a free healer). Also we need to consider if mercenaries in p1 deliver continuous action to p1 or whether they just cause you to spend 300 metal at the start. I suspect it will only cause some action at the start where you spend 300 metal for mercenaries and after that do not bother with making more of them.

I think each civ should have it strengths in 1v1s and each civ should have a strategy they excel in. There always will be civs that a considered better than others, but each one should have its charms and a fair chance.

First I would like to share my view of capturable mercenary camps: In 1v1, there are two options. The first is that both players get access to different mercenary camps with different mercenaries, which seems unfair. If players have different civilizations and get the same mercenary camps with the same mercenaries, it is also unfair. In the second case it is because if both players get the same mercenaries, one civilization might get mercenaries that his civilization all ready has or does not have any use for, while the other might have great benefit of the type of mercenaries provided. This problem is exaggerated by mounted archers being imbalanced in p1 (especially if they are affected by archery tradition). I am thus not a big fan of capturable mercenary camps, but if it is optional there are no problems. I would like to ① make aggressive play more rewarding, also I would like to ② make going to p2 more rewarding. Moving mercenaries to p1 does not align well with ②. I think there are solution to making aggressive play more rewarding without moving mercenaries to p1. Also I would like to add that in current 1v1 balance it can be useful to make 2 or 3 extra cavalry super early and try to find exposed women before your opponent mass trains citizen soldiers. Similarly, I think advanced rank mercenaries are powerful, but it is mainly the lack of metal availability and the expense of expertise in war that stops them from being competitive. So I don´t think we are far away from a good balance, these strategies just need a tiny little extra. I would prefer a solution of the type that gives p2 good options to be aggressive. Good p2 mercenary balance would be a useful tool for that, so I would prefer to use our improved mercenary balance to enhance p2.

First of all, it is a very good way to dump excess food. Secondly, women should in some sense be the preferred booming units, as they are cheaper. Thirdly, building a barracks requires 150 seconds to build, which should be added to the cost. In P1, the metal cost can be disregarded as you start with 300 metal and there are few other options to use it anyway in p1(exceptions are Rome/Iberia). There is no reason to bank up that 100 metal till p2.

A CC needs 33 seconds or so to train 5 women. 5 houses need 30 seconds to train 5 women. So in that sense, the tech gives as much production as a CC if you have at least 5 houses.

I agree that booming with women from houses does give a significant better eco, however the lead in eco isn´t overly decisive if my memory serves me well. It is not like booming gives a huge advantage over turtling.

That is just a sign of a stable mind! I think this is a fair point.

This situation seems to be natural state of the citizen concept. If you attack your opponent, the opponent will tend to have more units at his base than those in your attacking force. Sometimes players make some cavalry very early and rush, hoping that you can find a group of women that are ill protected. However as the game progresses, there will be less unprotected women. However there is something we could do to help rushing and encouraging people to make more women. There are 3 strategies: -booming with women: Only food is needed for the units. -cavalry rush-- Mainly food is needed for the units. -turtling with citizen soldiers and sentry towers: requires as much wood as food for the units. So if we would want to make turtling less common, we could increase food gathering rates and reduce wood gathering rates. So I would be in favor of such changes.

@BreakfastBurrito_007 This might be off topic, but did you try to make a mod where stone piles contain less stone and maps are bigger? Because it is unclear to me if endless 4v4s are caused by a result of wrong settings or whether they are caused by unit/structure imbalance. If you wanted to, I could try to make a mod where stone piles contains less stone and try if I can make the map bigger.

I would like to give some results on the balance and it seems like ranged units still have a major role. I played a game against warfaze(persians) as Spartans. It showed that ranged units can still do good damage. The deciding factor did not seem military might of either archers or skiritai but rather that my boom was more efficient almost from the start. With equal economies, I think Spartans vs. Persians will be a very fun match under these conditions. Archers have the range advantage, but a vulnerable to being overrun. I think that gives a fun balance. Also here is the game so you can see it yourself. 2021-05-23_0006.zip

The amount of damage take seems to be 0.9^A, where A is the armor value. If it is indeed that exact formula, then negative values won´t be a problem.

Champion Cavalry can be trained in p2. The upgrade is in p3, but the upgrade is no requirement for training the units.

I played in the game mention by StarAtt and I did get errors too. As macedonians, I was unable to create siege. There is a more generic issue with the mod. Even though you can train some champions in p2, I am not entirely convinced you would actually want to do so. Also there seems to be an unlock champion cavalry upgrade for macedonians in p3, even though you do not need the upgrade. 2021-05-23_0002.zip

I think this is a fair statement. Buffing melee DPS could help making a comeback after outflanking an opponent. However I think the high DPS of archers is a problem. Often they cause significant casualties before the fight begins. That gives in my opinion an unfair advantage to the archers. I also feel cavalry archers are too strong and they are not affected as much by increased melee damage as they run anyway. So I think we need to do a bit of both of them. Also I think it would be nice if we had a triangle swordsmen>spearmen>melee cavalry>swordsmen. I attempted something like that in

can you elaborate on this? because I would like to try some tricks to make it less expensive.

Is this absolutely necessary? I am led to believe that the cost of aura´s should not be performance heavy. @Stan`, can you exactly explain what makes aura´s performance heavy?

I think that slowing archer infantry could work this way, but I think it could also suffer from effects as I meantioned. The catapult splash damage might not be enough and we just don´t know what the effects will be. I think it will have both positive and negative effects and I am not sure if they cancel out or which one will be dominant. So betting on that would be a risky move, in my opinion. Also there is still the snowball effect in 1v1s: if archers get a good fight, you can just mass more of them and you can snipe the inferior numbers of your opponent from range, which I dislike from a balance perspective. If all ranged units were weakened, then it seems logical to me that the differences between them are less impactful and melee units come to prevalence.

reduce the attack of all ranged units. That way melee units become more important and the difference between ranged units becomes less important. Also it make people think in reverse: how can ranged units support the melee army instead of how melee units can support the ranged army. 1. historical accuracy. 2. To give them equal value as economic units. 3. making them slower might lead to more defensive play, which might only stabilizes the game more. 4. I don´t think it solves some real issues, among them that they are too good at defending a fortified spot and the snowball effect. I think they should be, but they should be nerfed in other ways.

Suppose we have a sandbox fight in which a number N pikemen supported by N ranged units face of against N infantry swordsmen supported by N ranged units of the same type that supports the pikemen. In this assumption the pikemen march to the swordsmen and fight in the middle while the ranged units do damage from behind. In my view, the fight would be balanced if the swordsmen die as fast as the pikemen do. In a simplistic model we could say that the damage the pikemen receives per second is (5.5/0.75+P)(1-0.65), where P is the DPS(damage per second) of the ranged unit before taking armor into account. The damage the swordsmen receives is given by (5/2+P)(1-0.41). If we demand that each unit dies equally fast, they should receive the same amount of damage since their HP is equal. Solving this for P gives a value of P=4.55. This model does not include misses, but I can say that archers are fairly accurate if the melee units meet in the middle and slingers would in such a sandbox fight miss about 20% to 10% of their shots. You might argue that this is just an oversimplified model, but it goes to show that the value of ranged damage would be far lower than the current ones, if you want these fights to be balanced. This calculation is what I think describes the current situation of pikemen vs swordsmen (+ranged support on both sides) fairly accurate. Once again, I argue that ranged units deal too much damage. Let me discuss another sandbox fight in which a number N pikemen supported by N ranged units face of against 2N infantry swordsmen. Once the N pikemen are killed, the ranged units run away. This time we say that the fight is ballanced if both sides deal equal damage. The damage received by the pikemen is 2*5.5/0.75*35 and the damage received by the swordsmen is (5/2+P)(1-0.41). Solving this for P gives a value of 6.15. This calculation has is limits as the ranged units will be able to get a few kills before the fight starts. On the other hand, if the damage is distributed over the swordsmen, it might mean that less than 10 swordsmen die. Again, the P value should be significantly lower than we see in game. I realize that these calculations have their limitations, but I think it is a decent example where it shows that ranged units have to much DPS.

This is a hand waving argument if you never say what you mean with ideal. This is no logic reasoning. This only holds if there are no other changes that impact the meta, which seems unlikely. Having a higher DPS than achers is a strong point. This is not impactful in current meta, but it is a strong point. The thing what we should do in my opinion, is shape balance in such a way that is can be impactful.

Do you have any non-hand-waving arguments those support this idea? Even if we could, players could instead of sending out archers to the fortress send them to a nearby resource, such that they would move faster. So that would be a nice ¨feature¨.

Ah, nice lets make it personal. I did indeed not play a lot of A23. However I have played other well-balanced strategy games instead. Also I can say that I played a fair amount of 1v1s at 1600+ level. I am not an expert on team games, but I have some observations. On team games the largest map is being selected and once player reach city phase, the borders of flanking players touch each other. If there is so little space between players, you would never get the same gameplay as in 1v1s. Therefore I think the settings are close to ridiculous. This problem does not occur in 1v1s. In my view the problem lies with the settings in the team games. 1. historical accuracy. 2. To give them equal value as economic units. It is not crazy. However I feel the same thing could be done better by decreasing their combat effectiveness. If they were less effective, you needed to retreat more often. This would also imply that you are overextended more often. I think you are wrong on the fact that it would result in a nice balance. It does not solve the problem that archer cavalry create, which are from my experience as OP as infantry archers. At best only means that players soon learn to be a little more careful with their infantry archers and defensive. I also made a mod for reducing combat effectiveness of ranged citizen soldiers and these units still have a very good role in this mod. I just think ranged units need a nerf in offensive power. @BreakfastBurrito_007, can you please explain why the current pierce attack values for ranged units are justified?

That´s very true, but we don´t see that in any aspect of the game.

I am a fan of youtube channels as scola gladiatoria and metatron and they say that armor or weapons don´t slow you down considerably. I think the main reason why light/heavy infantry is understood to be more/less mobile is their role. A javelineer could run freely and does not require to keep an exact formation. For heavy infantry it is the other way around and I think it is especially this coordination that make the unit seemingly immobile as these soldiers can not act on their own. Armor slows you down, but the tactical part about coordinating a formation should not be ignored. I agree. The problem is that in current meta is seems like hit and kill everything from large range. Occasionally you need to run. Once the archers reached a safe fortress, there is hardly a way of combating them.

When I made the title of this tread, I purposely made it bi-ambiguous. It could mean ¨What would happen if pikemen had their attack rate halved?¨ and then the video would be the answer: They would still be excellent target dummies and that is the problem with the meta. It was not meant to be a serious question of ¨What do you think about if pikemen had their attack rate halved?¨. I just wanted to say that their current gameplay role seems ludicrous to me. I think the art team makes the models based on history. As a community I think we could all help out by shaping the balance such that the units serve a historically accurate role. If people want target dummies, they probably need to give that role to a unit with a big shield. Also I feel like the game should be shaped such that being a target dummy is not a thing. The problem does not lie with the art team, it lies with the people that decided pikemen needed to have huge armor stats.