Game Balance: Battering Rams, the 0 A.D. tanks?...

[krt0143]

I'm new to this game, started playing it a couple days ago.
(But I've clocked many years in various Age of Empires, starting with the first one...)

In my first skirmish game against the AI (normal difficulty), at some point, without warning, I saw a group of rams heading my way, and no matter what I threw at them (actually everything I had), impossible to do more than scratch their paint... One minute later they had leveled my town...

In subsequent games I lowered the difficulty to "very easy", and discovered that actually you only need rams to win! If it weren't for resources, there would be no need to build anything else. Send half a dozen rams towards the enemy camp (no need to protect them), and watch the onslaught. By the time the enemy has managed to whittle down one or two of them, they have leveled his town. Then just send some troops to mop up the survivors, and that's that.

 

My point is, aren't 0 A.D. rams a little too overpowered? In AoE rams were vulnerable to infantry, you had to protect them, and make sure they were able to reach their targets and finish their work unmolested. Here they are largely invulnerable. They really make me think of tanks...

So, what am I doing wrong? What's the (apparently non-obvious) way to counter a ram-rush?
(Starting a ram-rush before the opponent isn't a solution. Else this becomes a simple race of "who will build rams first" never mind civilizations and other irrelevant eye candy.)

Now I agree that javelins and slings (or even spears) shouldn't be of much help against a heavy wooden contraption, but still, shouldn't there be a unit which has a special bonus against them, like axemen or some such? Something to slightly bother them while they level your towns?...

Please advise.

[Vantha]

Swordsmen, especially cavalry swordsmen are really good against rams. Just 20 cavalry swordsmen can destroy almost any number of unprotected rams, before they do any significant amount of damage.

[krt0143]

Thanks, I will try that!

Not very intuitive though, why would you use cavalry against tanks, err, rams? Infantry would be more logical (except that apparently most civilizations don't have infantry swordsmen I guess?).

 

[Gurken Khan]

The main counter against rams is: blades. If you have access to them build swordsmen; I've seen players garrison them in strategic locations just to counter rams. Ofc sword cav has advantages over pedestrians.

But here comes a special counter tactic: women! With their daggers they actually damage rams significantly, and if you swarm them rams will have difficulties reaching their targets.

[krt0143]

1 hour ago, Gurken Khan said:

The main counter against rams is: blades. If you have access to them build swordsmen

Britons only have cavalry swords...

Given all civilizations have and thus face rams, there should be an universal remedy to them, something they all have at the same level. I think I'll introduce axemen. Axes were actually the first elaborate tool/weapon humanity had (just a sharp stone splinter on a haft), everybody had them, and everybody used them to split wood and heads.

Now I don't know if they actually used them in reality against rams back then (I doubt it), but it's something players might intuitively think of.

Need to find a fitting model though, that would be the biggest hurdle.

 

1 hour ago, Gurken Khan said:

But here comes a special counter tactic: women!

[Vantha]

Axemen are already in the game, both infantry and cavalry. But only two or three units in the entire game. And they are also good in countering rams, because they have very similar stats as swordsmen.

Elephants are another good (more intuitive) way of stopping rams, but its true, not every civ has a good way of destroying rams. Last possibility always is to build rams yourself and let your rams fight the attacking rams.

[krt0143]

16 minutes ago, Vantha said:

Axemen are already in the game, both infantry and cavalry.

Are they? The Britons don't have any. Nor do they have elephants... 

My point was axemen should exist in all civilizations, right from the first age, maybe give them a bonus to wood collection too...

Slow, big damage, cheaper than sword, more expensive than spear, very bad against cavalry, bonus against rams and buildings.

 

16 minutes ago, Vantha said:

Last possibility always is to build rams yourself and let your rams fight the attacking rams.

And here we have -- tank battles!...

Edited September 7, 2023 by krt0143

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

spearmen can also do ok if you have a good number of them in the right place at the right time.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

women are also good vs rams because they do a little hack damage.

[krt0143]

Didn't work for me, and spearmen was all I had...

Of course it depends on what you mean by "good number". The 10-20 I had weren't nearly enough to stop (or even delay) the onslaught.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

6 minutes ago, krt0143 said:

Didn't work for me, and spearmen was all I had...

Of course it depends on what you mean by "good number". The 10-20 I had weren't nearly enough to stop (or even delay) the onslaught.

Well the rams are designed to be used later in the game when players often have full population. In that case, you would have a lot of melee units to work with, as well as some melee damage upgrades. With some practice in your economy and some familiarity with the units that can beat rams, I am sure you will be able to put a stop to them!

[krt0143]

10 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Well the rams are designed to be used later in the game when players often have full population. In that case, you would have a lot of melee units to work with, as well as some melee damage upgrades. With some practice in your economy and some familiarity with the units that can beat rams, I am sure you will be able to put a stop to them!

Well, I had a "full population", except the bulk of my units were too far from the town center, those were the reserves.

Besides the AI isn't able to put a stop to them either: If I ram-rush it, it's toast, and it sure always has a "full population"...

[krt0143]

I've discovered even worse: You can cram 40 rams in a single ship. That's about the double of what you'd need to totally annihilate an adversary, and there is nothing at all he can do to avoid that ship of doom, short of totally walling off all beaches... Towers don't affect neither ships nor rams, so you would simply sail to the beach nearest to his town center, unload, destroy his town center, and then mop up the few buildings that don't switch to Gaia, and any attempt at a new town center. Then send in the army to eliminate the survivors.

I discovered it and tried it out on the "Mediterranean Coves" map. I sent a single ship, unloaded 15 rams, took care of the town center and towers, then sent in just 20 spearmen (with 4 druids) to mop up all those enemies desperately trying to destroy my tanks rams.

And I didn't even try to load any infantry into the rams. IIRC each ram can contain 10 units, so (population limits allowing) you could send 40 rams with 400 units of infantry in a single ship! There is really nothing the adversary could do against such an onslaught.

 

Seriously, I think ships should be limited to carrying 2 rams at most. First and foremost rams are big and cumbersome, you can't stock them below deck. Also 40 rams would be heavier than the ship itself... Besides, unlike infantry which simply jumps off the ship using its own two legs, unloading such a heavy contraption would take hours for each of them.

[alre]

2 hours ago, krt0143 said:

I've discovered even worse: You can cram 40 rams in a single ship. That's about the double of what you'd need to totally annihilate an adversary, and there is nothing at all he can do to avoid that ship of doom, short of totally walling off all beaches... Towers don't affect neither ships nor rams, so you would simply sail to the beach nearest to his town center, unload, destroy his town center, and then mop up the few buildings that don't switch to Gaia, and any attempt at a new town center. Then send in the army to eliminate the survivors.

I discovered it and tried it out on the "Mediterranean Coves" map. I sent a single ship, unloaded 15 rams, took care of the town center and towers, then sent in just 20 spearmen (with 4 druids) to mop up all those enemies desperately trying to destroy my tanks rams.

And I didn't even try to load any infantry into the rams. IIRC each ram can contain 10 units, so (population limits allowing) you could send 40 rams with 400 units of infantry in a single ship! There is really nothing the adversary could do against such an onslaught.

 

Seriously, I think ships should be limited to carrying 2 rams at most. First and foremost rams are big and cumbersome, you can't stock them below deck. Also 40 rams would be heavier than the ship itself... Besides, unlike infantry which simply jumps off the ship using its own two legs, unloading such a heavy contraption would take hours for each of them.

realistically speaking, a ship could carry maybe one ram, but that wouldn't be mobile and should be used from the ship itself, as in some historical accounts. Rams were built on location, not transported over sea.

I hope there will be important changes with how siege works in 0ad, there has been a lot of talk about this over the years. Things will also changes with the melee rebalance soon to be tested at wide.

But until next and future patching initiatives, rams are currently pretty balanced in a competitive setting.

Edited September 9, 2023 by alre

[krt0143]

1 hour ago, alre said:

Rams were built on location

True, and I don't see why they couldn't be in 0 A.D. too. 

Same way you build buildings: Select a couple workers,  select "ram" as a project, and point to a location. It would take some time to be built, couldn't move before that, and during that time the opponent obviously would try to use to stop it from finishing.

Give them an even slower speed, making traveling over any distance almost impossible: Given the difficulty of successfully finishing building one near enough to its target, they could indeed be shamelessly overpowered, players would probably only manage to finish building one or two.

 

1 hour ago, alre said:

I hope there will be important changes with how siege works in 0ad

I second that. Siege has always been tricky and kind of overpowered in those games (even in specialized games like "Stronghold"). Trebuchets were the bane of AoE, to a point I always banned them in my scenarios: They made any fortification useless and could even bother ships... Here it is rams.

I didn't try any of the civilizations having ballistas and siege towers, but I'm skeptical.

Besides, the combat AI needs some overhaul: While better than anything I'm used to in AoE, it still falls for the classic kill zone (place a couple forts and towers somewhere the AI has to or likes to pass through, and leave them unattended while they decimate your opponents' units as fast as it can build them... Every now and then send a worker to put a fresh coat of paint over any scratches, that's all. 

AI should avoid obvious traps like that. Take a detour, something, instead of throwing endless rows of units against that small group of forts, leaving me the time to prepare the final strike.

 

2 hours ago, alre said:

rams are currently pretty balanced in a competitive setting

I can understand this might be important (or even the only thing important) to some, but for all those standard stand-alone players like me it's kind of unimportant...

The thing would be to find a balance. From what I see some people want a stronger accent on simulation, other apparently more competition-adapted mechanisms.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

On 09/09/2023 at 4:30 AM, krt0143 said:

you could send 40 rams with 400 units of infantry in a single ship!

Imagine that ship getting attacked and sunk by the enemy navy tho.

[krt0143]

2 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Imagine that ship getting attacked and sunk by the enemy navy tho

I'd really like to! But given the AI's (lack of) capacity to handle ships, they don't risk anything.

The AI builds towers along its coastlines, but given ships' and rams' resistance to arrows they could as well build houses, it would be just as threatening.

 

That been said, I tried it, and discovered that units inside a unit count towards the ships capacity, so a ram with 10 infantry soldiers counts as 11 units. That's fortunate, although it doesn't change the "40 rams on a dead man's chest" issue...

[Freagarach]

Feel free to create a patch for increasing the garrisoning size of rams.

[krt0143]

5 minutes ago, Freagarach said:

Feel free to create a patch for increasing the garrisoning size of rams.

Definitely not!

If I was able to change the game, I would make rams an absolute pain to build and use. Probably in the way detailed above (i.e. they hardly move, so you have to build them very close to the structure you want to attack). And ships wouldn't be able to carry them at all.

I wouldn't have arsenals at all, I would have a very expensive unit ("siege engineer"), who is the only one able to build those weapons (with the help of standard workers, but you need a siege engineer for the building to progress).

So the enemy would try to kill your siege engineer, and you would need to protect him, despite him needing to be on the front lines to build those siege weapons close enough to their target. This would make ram rushes impossible, or at least totally impractical.

 

[Joe-Lay]

Rams may be OP, (I love sending a few in a Blitz to destroy a Civ Center), I still think they're balanced. If you have a player near equal to you in 0 AD prowess, They can typically fend off attacks. It's rather simple. (I had a few close calls when learning 0ad against the Persians.) Send siege and melee units against them, including rams! Before all factions had them, yes, they were a sight to induce panic. With a good army though, you can successfully destroy them. (Maybe even commit a counter attack.) Also, they stink at navigating crowds. They are always the last the enter the fray and sometimes the building is captured before the destroy it! Still, as I said before, rams pratical usage is much more nerfed than you think. 

P.S. What does garrisoning units in a ram do? The in-game documentation doesn't say anything about this.

[Joe-Lay]

On 11/09/2023 at 4:55 AM, krt0143 said:

I wouldn't have arsenals at all, I would have a very expensive unit ("siege engineer"), who is the only one able to build those weapons (with the help of standard workers, but you need a siege engineer for the building to progress).

Rams are rather simple machines really, at the minimum, a tree trunk, at maximum, an armored carriage with a capped tree trunk. They weren't that complicated, I think. I'm not a history geek or even someone who studies it outside of school. As for ballistea and lithobolos and similar, such a unit wouldn't be bad.

[Gurken Khan]

1 hour ago, Joe-Lay said:

P.S. What does garrisoning units in a ram do? The in-game documentation doesn't say anything about this.

Armored Personnel Carrier. Hide your precious swordsmen inside, if enemy rams try to stop yours pop out, cut'em up & on ya go.

[krt0143]

10 hours ago, Joe-Lay said:

I love sending a few in a Blitz to destroy a Civ Center

That's specifically how I hate to play!...
I don't like the "duel" games, where you have to build x of this and y of that, in the shortest time possible, so you can rush your opponent who was 0.1 seconds slower. I prefer taking my time, building my civilization and just fend off the nasty neighbor... That's why I play against the AI.

Well, there is no accounting for tastes.

 

10 hours ago, Joe-Lay said:

Rams are rather simple machines really

Yes, well, normally it's just a big heavy tree trunk with a lot of people to lift and carry it, and then they had to put a roof over it, because the defenders up the walls took to throwing things at the people handling that tree trunk, and once you have a roof, why not suspend the tree trunk on that roof structure, so the whole contraption was put on wheels. After all it weighed close to a ton, maybe more.

Simple, but beyond the capabilities of a village carpenter. For instance, once in front of the door to knock upon (rams are useless against walls), you'd need to remove the wheels, else the ram will just balance back and forth instead of pounding the door (Newton's 3rd law). It's a little more sophisticated than just a chariot with a tree trunk suspended under it...

And in real life it was more often than not impossible to use, because the causeway up to the castle's door was too steep or too curvy or there was no room to maneuver something as bulky and heavy as a ram, or simply because the castle door was protected by a drawbridge!... Because obviously people building fortifications thought about those things, and purposely built their entrances (a fortification's weak point) in a way that made use of rams impossible.

And no, fortification walls were a minimum of 2 (up to 20+!) meters thick, solid stone, so attacking them with a ram was pretty much pointless, it would take you months to make any serious damage. That's why most sieges were passive, the attacker just waiting for the besieged to run out of food...

 

[Joe-Lay]

On 15/09/2023 at 6:11 AM, krt0143 said:

I don't like the "duel" games, where you have to build x of this and y of that, in the shortest time possible, so you can rush your opponent who was 0.1 seconds slower. I prefer taking my time, building my civilization and just fend off the nasty neighbor... That's why I play against the AI.

Agreed. I just also like obliterating the AI at the end.

The rest of your post is right I should think. After reading this thread and posting, I did start thinking that you were right and rams are a bit OP compared to history. After all, they were not amphibous vehichles with gasoline engines and catapillar treads. Maybe they should be regulated more towards weakening the capture points. Something like how a gate gets smashed open and then soldiers can pour in, which could be translated into a reduction of total capture points.

[krt0143]

17 hours ago, Joe-Lay said:

Maybe they should be regulated more towards weakening the capture points

If we want to be realistic, the one and only use of rams is battering down gates (or civilian buildings, but what's the point in that?).

Also, stone fortifications should be neigh invulnerable, but also cost so much and take so long to build (10 years...), you couldn't possibly build one during a game. Either the scenario hands one out, or you're limited to small wooden structures (palisades, wooden block houses). 

Small, individual fortifications only appeared in (northern) Europe after the 10th century anyway, before that there were lots of hillforts and other types of walled towns, but near to no stand-alone "small" castles (Roman camps were the exception).

As for towers, they were mostly watch towers for alert purposes, not for actually fighting. Problem is, there is almost no space inside a tower with 4 m thick walls, which means almost no reserves (no food, no water). No matter how formidable it might be, just wait a couple days and it will have to surrender...

The towers and castles in 0 A.D are just 1:1 copies of AoE's Hollywood vision of early history...