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LetswaveaBook

Balancing Advisors
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Posts posted by LetswaveaBook

  2. Differentiating Civilizations: Persian

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    3 hours ago, chrstgtr said:

    For reference, a simple test shows that the proposal will result cause to already being 20 seconds slower at 20 pop (and that one extra cav unit will be a drag on the boom). With the proposal, I suspect no one would ever play Persia in team games because they would be too slow. 

    @chrstgtr, I have an inconvenient truth for you:

    Either there is no such simple test to show the time difference at which the Persian player reaches 20 population, or you are incapable to perform this simple test.

  3. Differentiating Civilizations: Persian

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    @Stan`@borg- It would be nice to add some features to Persians for the first release candidate. So I would like to get some indication on when and what is happening.

    I think @real_tabasco_sauce has put forward a bold approach on differentiating the axe cavalry. My suggestion would be that @borg- creates a patch that does not conflict with @real_tabasco_sauce axe cavalry. I think it is fair to accept the proposal of @real_tabasco_sauce as an essential part of a community project is respecting the proposals of other people. I would like to ask borg- what his plans are for his patch on RC1.

    Finally: Stan` can you give a deadline for patches to be shaped and accepted for the first release candidate?

    • Like 4

  4. ranged infantry move speed

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Sevda said:

    I find archers very useful, although I wouldn't spam them as my staple ranged output. 

    I agree with this. They are useful, but not ideal for being the main force of ranged output. The main issue is that 3 out of 4 archer factions don't get a CS slinger or skirmisher and thus are nearly forced to use archers as the main force of ranged output..

     

  6. ranged infantry move speed

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted · Edited by LetswaveaBook

    Currently the archer is the ranged unit with the least damage and it moves 1.5 m/s slower than the javelineer. This means that the archer can't fight a charging mob of javelineers and their slow speed means they receive a lot of damage on the retreat or get completely annihilated.

    Currently the speed for the Ranged units are 11.4, 10.8 and 9.9 m/s. I would consider it an improvement if the weaker unit has a better chance to escape. So I would suggest 11.1 m/s speed for the skirmisher and 10.5 m/s speed for the archer.

  8. Looking back on the balancing strategy

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    On 02/06/2022 at 3:19 AM, chrstgtr said:

    For this particular feature, no one has expressed interest or support. It's a waste of time for the balancing team to weigh in on every proposal because half of the tickets basically only receive support from the patch's author.  

    I would consider this attitude on the impolite side of things. If you can't be bothered to give your opinion on a proposal, you might be in the balancing team, but not in an advisor role.

    At least you can say that you disagree with the fact and for an advisor it wouldn't be bad to express what you think of a certain feature that is currently in the game, which is in this case axe cavalry. I hope you have an opinion worth sharing on axe cav yourself.

    On 02/06/2022 at 3:19 AM, chrstgtr said:

    With that said, three people besides the patch's creator have substantively commented on the patch. Two of those three, including myself, are part of the balancing team. All three have expressed skepticism about the proposal.

    Rather than the negatives, we should look for the positives. If there are negatives, we should look for ways to address for the negatives or argue that how the positives can outweigh the negatives. Also in all the posts on the tread, I see some positive things mentioned about the patch. So I don't agree with your view about the skepticism the patch received.

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1

  9. Differentiating Civilizations: Persian

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    12 hours ago, berhudar said:

    Cavalry health upgrade should be researchable in p1.

    Quote

    - All Persian cavalry are available in the CC, except champions.

    - All Persian cavalry, except champions, can be trained in phase 1.

     

    I wouldn't be a fan of moving all good stuff from p2 to p1. I would like it if p2 offered useful and unique advantages instead of being the roadblock on your way to p3 that it currently seems to be.

    • Like 2

  10. Differentiating Civilizations: Persian

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    5 hours ago, borg- said:

    I'm going to remove

    I see that you removed some of your ideas that you posted. I would have preferred that you didn't delete them those ideas from your post. Not neccesary because they are good, but rather to encourage people to think about all possibilities and inspire creativity.

    The more ideas we toss in the tread, the more combinations of applicable patches we could make. So I would like to toss in some ideas:

    1) The Persians have a truly unique technology and it is named after them. Sadly, this technology does little to define their identity. My suggestion would be to give the Persian architecture tech the additional bonus of providing buildings with +20% territory control. Achaemenid Persia was a big state, so allowing them to gain more territory seems fair.

    2) The Achaemenid empire had lots of inhabitants. An population bonus wouldn't be bad, even though they allready have one. An interesting bonus could be that Persians start with +10 population space, which allows some interesting openings for rushes. Since it is a one time bonus, its late game effects would tend to slowly fade away. This would make Persia a good faction for an early rush, but it wouldn't change it (infantry) weaknesses in the late game (for 1v1s). I think this could add to the identity of the faction. Assuming that advancements in phases means advancement through the ages, this bonus suits Achaemenid history: powerful in classical times but overpowered in the Hellenistic age.

    Also I posted some ideas on Persians a while ago that I wanted to repeat in case anyone is interested:

    On 14/02/2022 at 8:58 PM, LetswaveaBook said:

    Persian cavalry should now carry 40 resources. Their skirmishers cost -20 wood and have -20% attack. Having access to the skirmisher is an now a bigger advantage for the boom, encouraging Persians to reach p2 earlier. It also creates a quantity of quality approach for Persian infantry.

    I also discussed created a differential a while back which can be found in this post:

     

    • Like 1

  11. Looking back on the balancing strategy

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    3 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

    people seem very eager to discuss hypothetical balance changes and debate what to do, but not so eager to discuss the balance of actual changes.

    i have had 2 balancing advisor feedback on this (quite significant) change for hyrcanian cavalry:

    I think this represents the core problem of the balancing team.

    • Like 3

  12. [Gameplay A26] Hyrcanian Cavalry balancing - patch and mod (balancing advisors)

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    22 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

    I was talking about the mod/patch being balanced. What I envisioned in the above was sort of a glass cannon raiding unit. It is as unique as skiritai are for sparta.

    I would suppose that it would be fairly balanced. Against (ranged) units it deals about 55% more damage than sword cavalry, but it has -2 pierce armor. So that would mean it would deal about 1,55*-0.9^2=1.26 times as much damage before dying (or losing a set amount of HP) against range units while it costs +25 metal. Using that same method, we would expect mercenary swordsmen to deal 1.2*1.25/0.9=1.67 times as much damage before dying (compared to a CS sword cav). The proposed axe cav moves faster than the sword cavalry and is better at eliminating buildings, but it has the disadvantage that it can't serve that well as a meat shield and it can't promote. Furthermore, since it is a rank 3 cavalry unit, your opponents units will promote fairly quickly when they are fighting against it.

    So I would suppose it is balanced better than A25 sword merc cav.

    • Like 2

  13. [Gameplay A26] Hyrcanian Cavalry balancing - patch and mod (balancing advisors)

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted · Edited by LetswaveaBook

    1 hour ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

    Thoughts on balance?

    My idea would be to reduce the experience to promote to rank 2 to 50. That means that if you put the unit in a barracks/stable for 50 seconds, you have a unit that is better than the sword cavalry in combat and has the crush damage to take out buildings.

    That would also give people a chance to think about the experience gain that barracks and stable provide. So it introduces a new way of thinking.

    Also I think they could benefit from having +1 hack armor

    • Like 1

  14. [Gameplay A26] Hyrcanian Cavalry balancing - patch and mod (balancing advisors)

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    3 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

    ok made a patch just like the mod above.

    https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4674

    Congratulations on making your first differential. I think it is reasonable to change Hyrcanian cavalry.

    However I see a disadvantage of the proposed patch. The unit in game currently uses 3 different art models for rank 1, rank 2 and rank 3. In your patch only 1 art model will be used in game. So regardless of whether it is a balance improvement, for me it seems a downgrade from an artistic point of view.

    • Thanks 1

  18. Thread for posting suggestions for Alpha 27.

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    On 22/05/2022 at 11:30 PM, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

    The suggestions here are not to make walls/palisades stronger overall, but to allow them to better fill their purpose.

    • increase ease of placement of stone walls/palisades. This could be done by tolerating some overlap of structures or resources. Since stone walls can't be placed out of territory, perhaps they could be built through forests deleting the trees upon wall completion.
    • decreasing hp of stone walls by around 500-1000. The changes would probably make stone walls more common, and the hp decrease is to prevent this from slowing down gameplay
    • giving melee cavalry .5x counter versus palisades. This gives a defending player more time to bring in infantry, but does not make palisades stronger versus infantry and rams; units that don't have the same raiding capability that palisades are intended to protect against.
    • increase turret positions of stone walls to 16. This is a more practical amount that might make a difference in a battle.

    tell me what you think please. :D

     

    18 hours ago, vinme said:

    Id like if they were moderately tankier, and moderately harder to build(buildtime)

    Some want walls to be easier to build, while others like strong but expensive walls. We don´t need to compromise as we can have both.

    However we can do both and allready have both. Celts build them 20% faster and have 20% less HP, Mauryas have the wooden walls faction bonus. While Carthaginians have the triple walls civ bonus. If opinions differ on how walls should function, we could differentiate factions by walls.

     

    Similar as we have big house and small house factions, for the next alpha I would suggest that some factions get cheaper but weaker walls(-50% HP, cost and build time) and other have stronger walls (+50% HP).

  19. Looking back on the balancing strategy

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    1 hour ago, alre said:

    I think you should try to accelerate the development of the game

    I think you should try to accelerate the development of the game, because that means we need more developers. More developers mean more cool features.

    Some people have a practical mindset, some people are geniuses. Though be wary: Some people are just trolls.

    • Like 1

  21. [Document] The core problems of 0AD and mitigation solutions

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Sevda said:

    He has played many RTS games before and his expert analysis of 0ad did impress me. I myself am not a RTS expert so I don't know how knowledgeable he is compared to others on the forum.

    7 hours ago, Sevda said:

    citizen soldiers cost mostly wood and food, which not only banished the classification of units based on demands for rare metal prevalent in other RTS games (in AoE, javlineers and spearmen who cost only food and wood are separate from their swordsman and cavalry units which cost metal), but also resulted in players floating spare metal.

    No expert RTS player will say that the cost of CS soldiers is the cause for players floating spare metal. Because any expert player will not waste energy to collect any resources that are not being spent.

    What age of empires 2 does better than 0ad is the following: When a player reaches the next age, the timing difference between you and your opponent is hugely important. important crucial timing difference is not a single moment in the game, but it happens when players reach both castle age and imperial age. Only after these important timings have passed away, players are able to think about unlocking their full arsenal. So age of empires has 2 very important moments in the game  before you can start working on unlocking your full arsenal (getting all the relevant technologies of the so called post imperial age).

    In 0ad for comparison often see the following: there are 0 import stages of the game before unlocking your full arsenal and players cruise nearly mindlessly the position to unlock their full arsenal (p3 with all relevant forge technologies).

     

    • Like 1

  22. Looking back on the balancing strategy

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    11 hours ago, Freagarach said:

    Again: C++ changes offsetting balance?

    We have autobuilds for M$ W[7,8,10] so I would encourage players to try SVN, that is the most "progressive mod" you'll get. (We've also got some pretty clear documentation about how to compile on *nix and moreover there is a Snap that gets updated to trunk quite often.)

    I was referring to balance update, not engine updates.

    If balancing is meant to be a thing that helps to define more dynamic gameplay, then we need to dare to make more changes. If the game is supposed to have a better engine in 2025, then leave engine development to the developers.

    The balancing team should create a balance such that there is enough strategical diversity, regardless of the engine.

    In my view it is important to see both how they are related, but also to acknowledge that they are very much their own thing (e.g. multiplying food gathering rate by 1.5 and wood gathering rate by 0.67 would do way more for balance that any reasonable engine upgrade could do).

    • Like 2

  23. Looking back on the balancing strategy

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    7 hours ago, wraitii said:

    Make a mod that basically the whole lobby uses, and it'll be straightforward to argue that it should be replace the 0 A.D. public mod.

    4 hours ago, Sevda said:

    We can allow 2 main mods instead of 1: 0ad-relaxed and 0ad-hardcore. 

    Both Vali and I (and possibly some others) have created some mods to change the flow of the game, But it is difficult to convince players to try these modification. Even if you get players to play the mod, then it did not have a lasting effect: It still takes considerable effort to find players to join a game with modded settings. 95% of the players in the lobby are unlikely to try any mods. Vali and I have tried to pushed to try some lobby games with mods, but both of us had trouble to find enough people that wanted to try something different. As long as that mentality doesn´t change offering lobby players the option to download a mod won´t result in anything.

    I uploaded a mod on mod.io that allows you to research tier 2 forge upgrades in phase 2. Since it is on mod.io, it is super easy to install and can be done when you go to setting>mod selection>download mods in the game menu. As easy as that. No need to go to the forum, download the correct file and unpack it in the right folder. However I failed to get more than a few responses on the mod.

    In the end I think it is a bad thing: we don´t know if something is an improvement or not and we don´t get any experiences about what changes would improve the dynamic of the game.

     

    If you want the lobby to try changes to the game as @wraitii suggested, then I would say that you would need to create a ¨(semi) progressive mod¨ for A26 that features changes and make it the standard. Then players that do nothing use and test the new changes. Then also give players the option to use a conservative mod that allows people to play A26 in a way that is closer to A25. I think even some minor changes to technologies and templates could improve the flow of the game significantly.

    • Like 2

  24. Resistance calculations

    in Game Development & Technical Discussion

    Posted · Edited by LetswaveaBook
    Changed image.

    On 08/05/2022 at 7:42 PM, wraitii said:

    There are three approaches for resistance, broadly:

    • Raw numbers (AoE 2) -> has the drawback of being very prone to unexpected big changes from small deltas (e.g. a +1 tech can be anywhere from 0% to -50% damage in practice)
    • Percentage points -> Add 10 percentage points of resistance. So if you had 80%, you now have 90%. The problem is likewise that a tech can have very different effects, but you sort of avoid the thresholding problem. AoM used a system like that IIRC.
    • An exponential system like 0 A.D. uses, where + 1 armour is always +10% armour, no matter what the base armour level is. This is easy to reason about for techs, and easy to reason about for users. But it means you technically cannot have 100% resistance to some damage, though in practice the difference is limited.
      The main drawback is that the math is kind of unintuitive & raw points don't tell the whole picture.

    Any of these suggestions has math that might be intuitive in some situations.

    Any sentence used to describe the system does not provide a good intuitive way to judge statistics. When it is impossible to explain the entire story in one sentence, the best might be to use a few extra ones.

    What I would suggest is that if you look is to give more information in the structure tree when selecting the armor upgrades. Example:

     

    Screenshot_2022-05-10_18-21-45.png

    • Thanks 1

  25. AI will destroy the world, we are all fuced.

    in Introductions & Off-Topic Discussion

    Posted

    6 hours ago, Sevda said:

    That's because misogynistic data was fed into the system. As hard as we try to deny it, many countries ( especially the ones researcing AIs) have misogynistic societies and gender inequality, and this will be reflected in the customer information of shopping websites. The AI will subsequently learn male superiority and become misogynistic.

    I might not be entirely up to date about the woke movement, but calling data misogynistic seems on the woke side of things IMHO. Women make different decisions as men. That is reflected in some data. I would say it is a difficult philosophical question such a recruitment engine should be considered misogynistic.

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