Capture rebalance poll

[Atrik]

I'm making this poll without knowing how relevant/appreciated it will be or if the proposed changes will be merged, but could still be interesting.

The problem :

In R28, the capture has been rebalanced to make harder to capture, especially for key buildings (civic center and forts). This was done by increasing drastically the base capture point regeneration of buildings.

The resulting effects vary across scenarios so let's take 2 examples.

1. A large army with high tier units capturing will still capture the building just as fast, the capture regeneration doesn't add resistance or delay in that case. So still rarely giving the defender the opportunity to react.
2. Smaller armies that seems to be able to capture the building have a hard time estimating how close they are to actually capturing a building, because capture point regeneration have a exponential effect on the time/difficulty to capture... Humans are not very good with exponential effects so it generally result in frustrations.

A gimmicky play is for example to get Marian reform with Romans and start capturing everything in a few second even if a whole army is attacking you, you can perfectly capture a fort in less then 5 secs.... Example bellow I had 3 secs before the fort full of champs had below 50% capture points vs 150 romans.

Proposed change :

Increase base capture point of key buildings instead (cc, fort), making it longer to capture across all scenarios instead of only when it was already the hardest.

Make towers Sentry tech, and Professional Garrison add capture points, making the tech more interesting.

 

[Deicide4u]

Or, and hear me out on this, we can actually fix the collision so that those 150 Marian Romans have to surround the building (thus exposing them to fire from multiple angles) in order to capture it? In the picture, I see that all units are on one side, and many are literally inside one another.

The collision system was annoying and buggy in A23, but it worked. If you sent 35 cavalry against enemy's 3 archers, the cavalry would still have to surround the archers, so they got in the way of each other.

In R28, those 35 cavalry would blend into each other, instantly vaporizing the poor archers with 1000% overkill rate.

Current system is:

- Physically impossible,
- Historically inaccurate,
- Looks terrible, especially with massed cavalry.

I know that this is a separate problem, but you aren't exactly supposed to keep those champions inside the Fortress. They should be outside fighting. Losing one Fortress while 150 enemy units are exposed to fire won't hurt you as much if the collision worked.

I voted for adding to base capture regeneration and for both added tech, btw.

Edited 2 hours ago by Deicide4u
Grammar

[Thalatta]

7 minutes ago, Deicide4u said:

you aren't exactly supposed to keep those champions inside the Fortress. They should be outside fighting.

I agree with everything you say up to here, since, for making better use of fortifications (and historical accuracy), they should be inside and make capture more difficult. Can capture points increase with garrison, same as ram speed increases with it?

[guerringuerrin]

Nice poll, @Atrik.
Additionally, it would be good to address the exploit that allows capturing buildings in tight spaces using formations.

[Deicide4u]

5 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

for making better use of fortifications (and historical accuracy), they should be inside and make capture more difficult

They should, if you have other units that are to engage the enemy.

But, the issue here is that currently there is no soft cap on amount of units that can capture one building. That soft cap should be the size of the building, and when the enemy surrounds it completely, that's it. How many units can realistically surround the Fortress? Surely not 150.

[Thalatta]

1 minute ago, Deicide4u said:

They should, if you have other units that are to engage the enemy.

But, the issue here is that currently there is no soft cap on amount of units that can capture one building. That soft cap should be the size of the building, and when the enemy surrounds it completely, that's it. How many units can realistically surround the Fortress? Surely not 150.

Indeed, collisions solve that and other things. Cheaply massing troops becomes harder, as it should be, because the entry points to a fortification are limited.

Still, capture points increasing with garrison could help. Another question to understand everything better: when saying tower range 10 to 60 (+8), what does the +8 mean? A change because of garrisons, or possible techs?

[Deicide4u]

Here's another idea.

Capture attack -> Siege attack.
Buildings can be captured only if they have less than 50% of total HP (some techs could bring this percent down further).
Default action for units is now siege attack. Capture is possible as before, but only after a structure is below 50% of HP. Otherwise, the capture attack is disabled (has red X across the capture icon, to indicate it's disabled).
Siege attack animation is the same as the capture animation, but units are holding the torches up instead of their weapons.

Edited 1 hour ago by Deicide4u

[Atrik]

39 minutes ago, Deicide4u said:

Or, and hear me out on this, we can actually fix the collision so that those 150 Marian Romans have to surround the building

20 minutes ago, guerringuerrin said:

Additionally, it would be good to address the exploit that allows capturing buildings in tight spaces using formations

There are quite a few ways to do this but ideally first fix the limitations that this behavior tries to compensate for..

21 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

Another question to understand everything better: when saying tower range 10 to 60 (+8), what does the +8 mean

+8 is generally elevation bonus to range, aka the height of the turret itself.
If you look into the selection tooltip it will show you total elevation bonus, which include how high on terrain the tower is (on a hill for example), however I found out recently that this wasn't correctly applied (see proposed fix for it).
With arrow shooter tech it become 60base +8tech +9elevation total bonus (IIRC vanilla show them merged so +17). Stone towers also have higher base elevation bonus..

[real_tabasco_sauce]

1 hour ago, guerringuerrin said:

Nice poll, @Atrik.
Additionally, it would be good to address the exploit that allows capturing buildings in tight spaces using formations.

totally, there needs to be some pushing. Or just remove the option that stops formations from being disbanded as it is pretty much only useful for the exploit.