Why is A27 a broken version?

[king reza the great]

 

Unfortunately, there are serious issues with this version. For example, champions are broken units — they are extremely strong with very high HP. Some players, especially ecobot players, always play as pocket and spam champions nonstop, using the proGUI cheat or even without it. An army of 30–40 champions, especially with hero bonuses, can easily destroy a normal army.

Spearmen and pikemen are supposed to counter cavalry, but they are ineffective against cavalry champions, who are extremely fast and impossible to chase down. In addition, champions can capture a Civic Center (CC) in less than 10 seconds. Once a player loses their CC, all their buildings are lost within a few seconds, often before their allies even have a chance to support them.

Another major problem is that some players rush the enemy base together in phase 1 or 2, capturing the CC in seconds. Again, by the time allies can react, it’s already too late.

Also, the change to left-click attack feels terrible. Left-click capture was much better and more intuitive. Now, having to press C and then left-click to capture is really annoying and clunky.

In A26, a group of players created a community mod to balance the game. It was a good initiative, got a lot of positive feedback from many players, and improved over time. I had hoped the developers would use it to balance A27, but sadly they proved that player feedback isn’t important to them.

Edited Saturday at 10:12 by king reza the great

[Deicide4u]

34 minutes ago, king reza the great said:

For example, champions are broken units — they are extremely strong with very high HP.

Of course they are strong. They are also very expensive to train. Also, your civ has it's own champions.

The players that are left alone to boom will naturally dominate the late game. This booming tactic is also much more reliable in team games. Your team needs to figure out who is the boomer, then harras him. 

 

40 minutes ago, king reza the great said:

Also, the change to left-click attack feels terrible. Left-click capture was much better and more intuitive. Now, having to press C and then left-click to capture is really annoying and clunky.

On the contrary, capture should be restricted to few normal buildings. You first complain how capture is broken (which it is in vanilla), then you complain how it's not intuitive or default in this version. My opinion is that you shouldn't be able to capture certain key buildings like Fortresses and Civic Centers, but that is another discussion. 

 

44 minutes ago, king reza the great said:

In A26, a group of players created a community mod to balance the game.

The Community mod is now available for A27, and it addresses some points you mentioned. 

[Atrik]

23 minutes ago, Deicide4u said:

Of course they are strong. They are also very expensive to train

They are 4.8x as strong as their cs counterparts but only cost 2.2x. Champs are the cheapest units of the game, relative to their fighting efficiency. Even more so for some special champions, like Pers and Sele champ cavs.... For infantry, its the same ratio but they can't eco, so they don't feel as broken. Also one player in a team game can make them at the expense of letting an ally die but it's much easier for the other team to coordinate and engage a infantry champion army together; while champion cavalry can always pick fights, and ruin the economies of any player very fast.

I don't think it's totally bad to have champions being the most resource efficient (/cheapest) units of the game, as long as they get weaknesses. Currently, melee champ cavs counter everything but themselves have no (serious) counters.

[borg-]

Champions should not be trained in stables or barracks.

Champions should have the status equal to a fourth level, above elite, but cost less than the current cost.

[Deicide4u]

14 minutes ago, borg- said:

Champions should not be trained in stables or barracks.

Strongly agree. Champions should be available only in Fortresses and special civ-specific buildings. Either that or increase the cost of unlock techs.

 

[real_tabasco_sauce]

7 hours ago, king reza the great said:

In A26, a group of players created a community mod to balance the game. It was a good initiative, got a lot of positive feedback from many players, and improved over time. I had hoped the developers would use it to balance A27, but sadly they proved that player feedback isn’t important to them.

Hi @king reza the great we do have a community mod version live at the moment. Currently, the focus is on the capture situation and some changes to walls.

We can test changes to spearmen cavalry counter in future versions (which I do not recommend, as the speed difference is the real problem).

[real_tabasco_sauce]

6 hours ago, Atrik said:

For infantry, its the same ratio but they can't eco, so they don't feel as broken.

speed. You can always outnumber infantry champions, surround them, outrun them, or attack somewhere else. You simply cannot do this versus cavalry champions because they can choose the fight in 90% of cases.

I'd like to test some extensive speed rebalancing at some point, but since more people call for spear damage counter changes, I'll do that first.

[TheCJ]

11 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

I'd like to test some extensive speed rebalancing at some point, but since more people call for spear damage counter changes, I'll do that first.

@Emacz and I added very significant speed changes to the historical mod, as it seemed somewhat silly/unrealistic how fast cav is compared to infantry.

I know our mod does many other things aswell and any "data" we get might not be useful for the base game, but we are aiming to test those changes a bit over the course of the next month, after which I'm hoping we can release the first mod.io version of our mod (and maybe get even more players to test it out and give some feedback).

[king reza the great]

3 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Hi @king reza the great we do have a community mod version live at the moment. Currently, the focus is on the capture situation and some changes to walls.

We can test changes to spearmen cavalry counter in future versions (which I do not recommend, as the speed difference is the real problem).

Hi What the point when at the end devs dont set it for new version?

Edited Saturday at 21:09 by king reza the great

[real_tabasco_sauce]

Hi @king reza the great some of the changes were not tested in the community mod. Some were made before I made any contributions.

its my own shortcoming that I didn’t look back to try and test some of this, but also community mod players at the time expected near perfection out of the mod, so I suppose my hands were a bit tied.

however, going forward, I would like for the community mod to be treated like a community test environment (CTE) where devs can submit gameplay oriented changes to get some quick feedback from players.

so I encourage players to try it out, give feedback, and then we can try other changes out afterwards.

[Atrik]

	Power	Cost	Res Efficiency	Example
Melee Champ cav	4.50	2.20	2.05	Mace spear cav
Ranged Champ cav	5.52	2.20	2.51	Pers cav archer
Melee Champ inf	4.80	2.20	2.18	Iber sword
Melee Merc inf	1.51	0.60	2.52	Carth
Melee Merc cav	1.51	0.67	2.27	Carth
Ranged Immortal	4.68	1.30	3.60	Pers
Melee Immortal	2.55	1.30	1.96	Pers
Melee Champ cav Pers/Sele	4.84	2.27	2.14	Pers/Sele
I've calculated the resource efficiency out of curiosity for a few more units that i share above. Note that the power number:  Is a multiplier of relative power to CS equivalent of a unit. In theory it should predict/indicate how much CS unit (fighting them one after the other) it can defeat before dying. In practice, damage dealing isn't continuous, the CS unit might die at 50% of it's attack animation vs the champ, so it end up being more. Doesn't take into account accuracy for ranged units. Doesn't include any techs at all. Costs also consider all resources as valuable.

Edited Sunday at 10:56 by Atrik

[Stan`]

11 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Hi @king reza the great some of the changes were not tested in the community mod. Some were made before I made any contributions.

its my own shortcoming that I didn’t look back to try and test some of this, but also community mod players at the time expected near perfection out of the mod, so I suppose my hands were a bit tied.

however, going forward, I would like for the community mod to be treated like a community test environment (CTE) where devs can submit gameplay oriented changes to get some quick feedback from players.

so I encourage players to try it out, give feedback, and then we can try other changes out afterwards.

But we integrated the community mod right ? I remember it being merged.

[Deicide4u]

3 hours ago, Atrik said:

Costs also consider all resources as valuable.

Which is not the case as almost all champions cost a hefty amount of metal. If you include resource rarity as factor, your "Cost" column goes up considerably.
If you deny metal to your enemy, he can't train a lot of champions. While you can spam CS ad infinitum to harass him.

We can also nerf barter at the Market, to make it more of a utility you'd use sparingly. It mustn't serve as a substitute for not gathering a certain resource.
Maybe boost the resource gain from traders a bit, to balance it out. A really good buff would be reducing or removing the metal cost for traders. I shouldn't need to pay 80 metal for a single trader.

Edited Sunday at 12:30 by Deicide4u
Added the part about market

[Atrik]

38 minutes ago, Deicide4u said:

If you include resource rarity as factor, your "Cost" column goes up considerably.

Idk what you think of as "resource rarity". If you consider that minerals are slower to gather then wood, then consider this :
Champ cavs and CS Slingers have in common that they have ~30% of their cost in minerals. Yet it's rarely the case that the stone cost of slinger are viewed to be costly, or scarce. Stone and metal have the same gather rate, so you see now that thinking that metal is making champs so much costlier isn't true at all.

[Deicide4u]

34 minutes ago, Atrik said:

Stone and metal have the same gather rate, so you see now that thinking that metal is making champs so much costlier isn't true at all.

Metal is used in a lot of very important, expensive technologies. Stone is used mostly in siege weapons, production buildings and defensive techs. Slingers are exception to the rule, as they are one of the only "regular" ways to spend your excess of stone (unless you're a turtling player).

Metal is also used for traders. If you want to generate resources via trade, you need a lot of metal.

[Atrik]

Anyways... Just me thinking now how a framework for balancing unit could be better then using solely gut feelings. Obviously unit relative powers don't define alone, if a unit is broken or not, as utility stats (movement, attack range, attack delay, counter...) aren't taken into account. Melee cavs are considered the most broken over ranged ones even if they aren't as over powered because melee cavs counter everything for example. It does help however describe one component  of why one unit feel "broken".

In a27 mercs seems very op if you know how to optimize eco for them you can easily have a great army min 11, immortals are extremely op, and champ cavs are out of this world. Which could be predicted comparing stats and thinking of counters.

Edited Sunday at 14:41 by Atrik

[real_tabasco_sauce]

7 hours ago, Stan` said:

But we integrated the community mod right ? I remember it being merged.

We merged, but we didn't outright replace existing changes.

[Stan`]

1 minute ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

We merged, but we didn't outright replace existing changes.

I see. We'll do better next time  Maybe we could improve the release process to better account for this.

[Dakara]

18 hours ago, Atrik said:

Anyways... Just me thinking now how a framework for balancing unit could be better then using solely gut feelings. Obviously unit relative powers don't define alone, if a unit is broken or not, as utility stats (movement, attack range, attack delay, counter...) aren't taken into account. Melee cavs are considered the most broken over ranged ones even if they aren't as over powered because melee cavs counter everything for example. It does help however describe one component  of why one unit feel "broken".

In a27 mercs seems very op if you know how to optimize eco for them you can easily have a great army min 11, immortals are extremely op, and champ cavs are out of this world. Which could be predicted comparing stats and thinking of counters.

Hi, do you think immortel op ? in melee they have only 120 hp, seems bad no?

 

 

we already have a topic about melee champ cav ! 

About A27, for me capture is broken and umbalance.

Let's try communuty mod but please don't use it a lot of month and don't divide the lobby  i still think wall and bunker are not the solution. In the mod the wall are so cheap and easy to build. In my opinion they are good in vanilla. i use often and their cost seems already good, the building time no matter with ALT keybind. 

Edited Monday at 09:34 by Dakara

[Atrik]

36 minutes ago, Dakara said:

Hi, do you think immortel op ? in melee they have only 120 hp, seems bad no?

If you compare resource efficiency of archer immortals relative to CS archers, they are the single most OP champ of the game. However, they are still archers, so they take a little more time (you need a lot of them) to really be a problem.

From my calculations : immortals archers are way OP, but spears are only slightly weak.
Now, because they can switch from one mode to the other, this make them extremely op, because they are archers... that can counter archer's counters : cavs. It's a fun mechanic, and I wish they were more dual weapon units. However their balancing is failed, as they should have instead of being strongest archer of the game (in resource efficiency therm, once again) be weaker, to balance dual weapon.

Also idk why archer and melee stance have the same hp, probably transform.js bug or lag if you rescale hp too often but pretty sure it's supposed to handle hp rescales. @real_tabasco_sauce

[Deicide4u]

I've installed Alpha 23b and it's what I recommend to anyone who has issue with this version. The game still looks great, uses around 50% less resources and plays better overall. I also don't have weird mouse cursor lags when moving it to edges of the screen. This is wrong, see further replies.

This will be my harshest critic of the game so far, seeing how it looked and felt to play before. LOL at this. I'm all for improvements, but the development needs to be streamlined and focused on gameplay. Not eye-candy. Eye candy art in a strategy game can often be bad. Sometimes, it can even alienate the players. I'm speaking as someone who played RTS games since childhood, and knows which features are good, and which are bad for the player.

Why were resource icons replaced? They look perfectly fine to me in alpha 23. Why did we add worker counters below the resources? Now the player's attention is always on those counters, affecting the gameplay and fun. I want to play a RTS, not look at my worker counters all the time. Who cares, they are fine for quickly checking farms.

Why were great hero models removed from unit portraits and replaced with lame images? We don't know, but we have lame hero images as portraits now. Also, we removed a bunch of tech from blacksmiths and replaced some good-looking unit portraits with lame ones. Irrelevant.

Why females build everything now? It's just visual clutter, especially in the early game. It also lessened the distinction between pure economy units and CS.

Why were champions and siege removed from Fortresses? Among other bad gameplay changes, it broke single-player AI. Now it doesn't train champions in newer versions, except for elephants. Not a single champion unit trained in most games on Alpha 27, even on Hard. My guess is because it doesn't know how to research the unlock tech at Barracks and Stables. It doesn't have to research anything to train the elephants, so it can train them. Nope, it trains champion units just fine.

I won't bore you with more details, you get the picture. The game stayed at alpha 23 for nearly 2 and a half years. There was no reason to change the core gameplay and break everything just for "better multiplayer" or whatever.

Hopefully you stop with the eye candy and focus more on the gameplay. Cheers.

Edited 15 hours ago by Deicide4u
Striketrough everything

[real_tabasco_sauce]

16 minutes ago, Deicide4u said:

I've installed Alpha 23b and it's what I recommend to anyone who has issue with this version. The game still looks great, uses around 50% less resources and plays better overall. I also don't have weird mouse cursor lags when moving it to edges of the screen.

Do you have these lags when moving the screen with the arrow keys? Which operating system do you use?

[Deicide4u]

4 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Do you have these lags when moving the screen with the arrow keys? Which operating system do you use?

No, no lags with the arrow keys. Just when moving the mouse cursor to the edge of the screen.

I'm using Windows 11. Intel UHD card.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

5 hours ago, Atrik said:

Also idk why archer and melee stance have the same hp, probably transform.js bug or lag if you rescale hp too often but pretty sure it's supposed to handle hp rescales. @real_tabasco_sauce

the intent there is to make them "still the same unit", it also helps to possibly avoid issues with health scaling, but as far as I know this works fine for CS promotion.

I think the ranged version is a bit too good still, as it should be on par with the melee version. Probably some armor change would be good for the ranged version.

5 minutes ago, Deicide4u said:

No, no lags with the arrow keys. Just when moving the mouse cursor to the edge of the screen.

I'm using Windows 11. Intel UHD card.

yeah this has been an ongoing problem for plenty of windows players including myself, so I mostly use keys to pan the camera. There is an issue written for it: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/7673#issuecomment-115591

[TheCJ]

2 hours ago, Deicide4u said:

Not eye-candy.

 

2 hours ago, Deicide4u said:

Why were great hero models removed from unit portraits and replaced with lame images?

...Im confused, do you want eye-candy or not?

2 hours ago, Deicide4u said:

Now the player's attention is always on those counters, affecting the gameplay and fun

I can assure you, most players do not pay attention to those counters. They are helpful to spot not-optimally used farms and get an indicator when you could/should start sending cs to gather metal/stone, but they are not affecting the gameplay to any detriment and they especially do not affect the fun (its really easy to ignore them if you dont like em).