Champion cavalry improvements

[Dakara]

Hello, 

Please don't insert more counter and don't up the counter statistic of spear infantery.

Increasing the ability to build walls, etc., is not desirable. It's fine as it is, and it's not a way to balance things. Bunkering shouldn't become a game meta. The pace of the games is important.

Spear infantry costs nothing compared to a cav champ spear. They are expensive and it normal they destroy a simple citizen troop. 

Their speed is normal and realistic. Champion Cavalry should be one of the best units in the game. It's normal, historical, and fun, but we need to give non-spammers of the unit a chance to compete. In full combat without escape they are not unkillable with armies including a few infantry champions.

Here are the proposed changes to reduce the unit's strength.

• Nerf piercing armor -1 armor
• Delete tech 10% HP and tech persians/selucid 20% hp champ
• Reduce movement speed from 18 to 16.2. As heavy units, they shouldn't be faster than light cavalry
• Make units stack less during movement and combat. They should lose time repositioning when attacking to reflect more realistic spacing.
• Rethinking the capture :  Increase the bonus point capture phase 3 for garnison unit. It too much frustrating currently. You loose easy easy building even with full garnison against not a big army. 
• Range of champ cav persians et selucid is op too, 7 meters! Back to 4. They only cost 10 metal more and they have MORE RANGE and ARMOR, Isn't this a source of imbalance?

I think it enough like that.

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Spoiler

gentler solutions as mentioned can be tried. 

If not enough just change the metal cost. But actually the purpose is not to ruin this unit 

Why increase metal cost? it makes you a little more dependent on a citizen-troop economy and it busy a quantity of population. After test up metal mine to 6K. 

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Spoiler

If not enough, delete all theses idea and go for 2 population unit. I don't like a lot but elefant archer maurya have 200 hp for 2 population. Of course it long range so hard to compare.

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Spoiler

What do balance experts think about the cost (in time and resources) of buildings that are solely dedicated to training champion units?

Personally, I like the concept — for example with the Han — but it's clear that it puts them at a disadvantage compared to other civilizations.

Other civs can always fall back on training regular units if they run out of resources. The Han can’t. Once they commit to champions, they're locked in.

 

[TheCJ]

3 hours ago, Dakara said:

Increasing the ability to build walls, etc., is not desirable. It's fine as it is, and it's not a way to balance things. Bunkering shouldn't become a game meta. The pace of the games is important.

Is it fine as it is? Walls are currently so irrelevant, most people wouldn't even notice if we removed them.

Of course, nobody likes it if "Bunkering"/Turtling becomes "meta", but making walls atleast useable in some situations would not have that effect.

 

Otherwise you make good points!

[Seleucids]

1 hour ago, TheCJ said:

Walls are currently so irrelevant, most people wouldn't even notice if we removed them.

Of course, nobody likes it if "Bunkering"/Turtling becomes "meta", but making walls atleast useable in some situations would not have that effect.

A24 PTSD 

[real_tabasco_sauce]

1 hour ago, TheCJ said:

Is it fine as it is? Walls are currently so irrelevant, most people wouldn't even notice if we removed them.

Of course, nobody likes it if "Bunkering"/Turtling becomes "meta", but making walls atleast useable in some situations would not have that effect.

 

Otherwise you make good points!

Check out the community mod. Walls are cheaper/faster to build but weaker. Weaker as in you can destroy stone walls with infantry, but it just takes a while.

by making walls and palisades cheaper but weaker, they are more useful early on and less useful in the late game.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

44 minutes ago, Seleucids said:

A24 PTSD 

walls weren't even really necessary in a24. Just forts and archers.

[chrstgtr]

2 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

walls weren't even really necessary in a24. Just forts and archers.

I think he meant the turtling meta isn’t desirable. 

Also, walls aren’t useless. They do a good job of slowing an invading army and are regularly built for that purpose. Making them more easily destroyed helps eliminate that “build to only frustrate” meta that walls are in. 

Edited 15 hours ago by chrstgtr

[TheCJ]

4 minutes ago, chrstgtr said:

are regularly built for that purpose

Hm, are they? Not in the games I play in, but I'll take your word for it. Then the wall situation maybe isnt as bad as it looked to me, sorry.

[chrstgtr]

36 minutes ago, TheCJ said:

Hm, are they? Not in the games I play in, but I'll take your word for it. Then the wall situation maybe isnt as bad as it looked to me, sorry.

Yeah, they’re used. But the way that with eyes used kind of elicits an eye roll, so the situation might actually be worse than you realize. 

99% of time they’re used to just frustrate the attacking player. Walls confuse pathing and give an extra object for siege to attack before moving onto a more useful building. So they have an entirely passive existence

Wall typically don’t serve any active purpose of making defenses stronger, which is what you probably want them to do. 

the proposal might make them less likely to be used in the annoying passive way since they’ll be easier to destroy (but they’ll also be easier to spam, so maybe not). To be determined if the proposal does anything to make them better for building active defenses 

Edited 14 hours ago by chrstgtr

[Deicide4u]

37 minutes ago, chrstgtr said:

give an extra object for siege to attack before moving onto a more useful building. So they have an entirely passive existence

That's the purpose of walls. Also, you wall off the most vulnerable positions to force the attacker into a more favorable position for your army. 

I rarely build walls in any RTS, but I would be very frustrated if my opponent walled off his base. That means I have no viable entry until siege weapons become available.

Walls are not built frequently in 0 A. D., and that means they need some changes to make them more affordable. The recent changes to building armor by @real_tabasco_sauce in the Community mod will also make them more desirable. 

[Dakara]

Believe me, we shouldn't make walls easy. Palisades are quite cheap. Walls are generally built fairly quickly and provide quite good protection.There have already been some interesting changes. Like doubling the garrison capacity on walls.

Change bunker system it is not the solution 

 

Spoiler

This is a bit off topic, but I find siege weapons a bit too durable compared to their resource and population costs. They have a huge amount of health for very good resistance.

Bolt : 200 HP

Cata HP : 375 HP 25 Sec

Ram : 400 HP 30 sec

Tower siege : 500 hp 40 Sec

In 0AD, ranged units have less health. But not siege units. That's strange. Nerf them to :

Bolt HP : 200 HP  - No change

Cata HP : 200 HP 30 Sec

Tower siege : 300 HP 40 Sec Remove crush damage

Ram : 300 HP 25 Sec

In a fight between two equal armies, if you decide to attack the sieges with a few units, you have little chance of winning your fight. And even if you are lucky enough to destroy the siege unit, you will have spent more resources than your opponent on the lost units. And I'm even talking about units that are supposed to be good against sieges (slashing damage)..

By the way, the Macedonian bonus is completely broken. Most of the time it's useless, but when you spam sieges it's really OP. It's a source of imbalance. Stack training timle and ressource is abuse.

 

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

In my opinion the biggest hindrance for walls being effective for their intended use (apart from annoying wall spam that turtle players do) is ease of placement and sealing. Snapping to/from buildings and obstructions such as cliffs would be awesome but I recognize its a complicated thing to accomplish. There have been games where I was able to get a lot of value out of palisade walls, trapping cav in my base or stopping raids, but usually the amount of attention and planning required is as prohibitively expensive as their cost and build time. Real tabasco's comm mod changes for palisades and walls should be a good step in the right direction, and hopefully we get enough comm mod games to make sure of that.