Capture rebalance poll

[Thalatta]

4 hours ago, guerringuerrin said:

there are additional variables to consider. Capture time will always depend on the size and composition of the army. Are we talking about basic or elite units? Melee or ranged? Are heroes involved?

We would need to evaluate only the best case (all techs, best units, etc) to work back from a minimum capture time. Other reference cases can be used for better calibration, like, if all are archers, how much time should it take, and so on, but just a very few cases should suffice to have some control on capture time, I just don't know the formulas.
 

4 hours ago, guerringuerrin said:

I think a certain degree of overlapping is actually beneficial for battles (though not for capturing), otherwise unit behavior can become somewhat clunky. It’s probably a matter of fine-tuning the parameters under specific circumstances.

And can't the number of units capturing a building be just fixed? Same as the number of units working a field.

 

[Atrik]

13 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Also, I don't get how adding 1000 points would help that much in the cases you bring up. 5 seconds to maybe 5.5 or 6 seconds?

Glad you're not thinking +1000 capture points isn't too much.
We can go over some calculations for the CC that has a base of 2500 pts, we are increasing it to 3500. So a 40% buff. Without accounting for any regeneration, a 5 second capture would be increased by 2 second or 10 turns.

In comparison the existing buff you provided of +25pts/sec would provide on the same scenario ~125 pts. So a 5% buff. On the same scenario this would provide 0.25sec so about 1 turn.

So this +1000 pts addition is 10x more effective on fast capture scenarios then regeneration, and the break even point happens after 40sec. A minimum of +2 sec in worse case still gives a bit more room for the defender to react.

 

 

 

I see a lot of ideas. But most of them increase the difficulty of capturing across all scenarios. Ideally, we would mostly impact the "worse" scenarios where capture happens just too fast.

A suggestion that I'll be willing to implement is to have diminishing effectiveness of capturing over a certain rate. For example, if you are capturing a CC with a total of 500 pts per sec (~125 Romans with Marian reform), the CC lose the first 200 pts normally, but the last 300 pts strength are nerfed by exponential decay. Seems like a solution that could makes minimal changes, introduce little new technicalities and impact precisely the "worse" cases. Basically you could define in the template that capturing faster then Xsecs get exponentially harder.

Edited 5 hours ago by Atrik

[Thalatta]

1 hour ago, Atrik said:

A suggestion that I'll be willing to implement is to have diminishing effectiveness of capturing over a certain rate. For example, if you are capturing a CC with a total of 500 pts per sec (~125 Romans with Marian reform), the CC lose the first 200 pts normally, but the last 300 pts strength are nerfed by exponential decay.

But what would be the effect of this? What's the difference of having a linear decay followed by an exponential decay, with a slower linear decay that results in the same capture time? There would be a difference only if actual (not total) capture points have an effect on some other stat. If the idea is that it would be noticeable on structures with a lot of capture points, then just give them more capture points (for the linear decay to catch up with the linear+exponential decay), unless I'm missing something.

Something else I don’t know how it works is the effect of siege engines on capture points, which they should have to make their use make some sense besides destroying things. Since an army made only of soldiers or only or engines should have a very difficult time taking on a Fortress, I’d say that engines should increase the soldiers’ effect on capture points (not by proximity, but when actually taking part of capture), that way a mixed army would be more efficient.

[Atrik]

3 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

But what would be the effect of this? What's the difference of having a linear decay followed by an exponential decay, with a slower linear decay that results in the same capture time? There would be a difference only if actual (not total) capture points have an effect on some other stat. If the idea is that it would be noticeable on structures with a lot of capture points, then just give them more capture points (for the linear decay to catch up with the linear+exponential decay), unless I'm missing something.

Every turn, a structure losing over 200 pts would resist better to the remaining capture pts it is meant to lose.
This would be clearly aiming at making capturing faster less then a certain amount of time, much harder, without making any changes to normal capture difficulty.

In other words, nerf fast capturing, without impacting at all normal capturing.
And without introducing a complicated technicality players would need to be aware of.

 

10 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

Something else I don’t know how it works is the effect of siege engines on capture points, which they should have to make their use make some sense besides destroying things

Already indirectly the case, since capture speed is increased by how much a structure has lowered hp.

[guerringuerrin]

52 minutes ago, Atrik said:

In other words, nerf fast capturing, without impacting at all normal capturing.

As a starting point, it seems fine to me. Still, I think that in some normal circumstances, capturing is still a bit too quick/easy. Maybe 1000 points are enough. We’d need to test it.

[Atrik]

Just now, guerringuerrin said:

As a starting point, it seems fine to me. Still, I think that in some normal circumstances, capturing is still a bit too quick/easy. Maybe 1000 points are enough. We’d need to test it.

In any case, I would PR for what this poll gets us. There haven't been any reason given for the poll proposals to be rendered invalid. The result of 1. would make capturing more difficult then my own taste but whatever...

[Thalatta]

1 hour ago, Atrik said:

In other words, nerf fast capturing, without impacting at all normal capturing.
And without introducing a complicated technicality players would need to be aware of

Yes, I understood you the first time, I think. What you say is, given a Fortress, you would call normal capture the time an appropriate army would take to capture it, and fast capture the time a huge army would take to capture it... that is, after a certain army size (or quality of troops, or Fortress HP, whatever), you want to cap capture time. That's why in your example you trigger exponential decay after some point because the decay rate is too large. It would work, it’s somewhat equivalent to a capture slots cap, but I think it'd be confusing and frustrating for players to be confronted with a capture slowdown midway the process. That’s why I said, instead of doing that, just cap the rate, and enjoy a linear behavior all along. In your example, “if you are capturing a CC with a total of 500 pts per sec”, just cap that to, say, 300 pts per sec, or whatever that results in a capture time similar to the linear+exponential decay case. Setting a maximum capture rate is a less complicated technicality than combining linear and exponential decay, and it’s a nice and simple way of fixing a minimum capture time. That’s what I meant with a slower linear decay being able to do what you want: nerf fast capturing, leaving alone normal capturing.
 

2 hours ago, Atrik said:

Already indirectly the case, since capture speed is increased by how much a structure has lowered hp.

Good to know!

 

[Atrik]

4 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

That's why in your example you trigger exponential decay after some point because the decay rate is too large. It would work, it’s somewhat equivalent to a capture slots cap, but I think it'd be confusing and frustrating for players to be confronted with a capture slowdown midway the process.

I agree that it introduce a technicality and that's something to avoid. But it's much less so confusing then a full hard cap on capture rate. Especially given that the regeneration would be applied afterward so a hard cap on the rate would just create a artificial point where defenses are strong enough to defend whatever. The exponential decay is, in that regard, far less likely to introduce counter-intuitive behavior. Still a technicality, but one subtle enough for players to never encounter any confusion moment even if they don't know about it.

I also agree that generally you want linear rates wherever you can fit them, instead of exponential one, because exponential effects are so hard for humans to comprehend. But here "exponential decay" doesn't result in a "exponential" visible effect. Instead it aims at making capture rates more intuitive by making the faster captures actually slower, therefore likely more intuitive for the defender, and barely less intuitive, for the attacker.

[Atrik]

Here are the results of applying a exponential decay of 1.5 above 100 capture/turn.

Before :

 

After:

 

Maybe the current decay is too sever or the threshold too low. But here the fort with 20 champs do resist a bit longer to theses 150 legionaries as the defender would probably expect.