Proposed changes for game balance

[gudo]

As we all know, development of 0 AD has focused more on features than on balance. Features are much more interesting and challenging to implement after all. However, after playing many games, I've come up with a list of balance changes that I think will improve gameplay. Below is all my propsed changes and the reasoning behind them. I've also included a .patch as an attachment so they can easily be incorporated.

Reduce the cost of Houses

Houses are way to expensive. For most of the Civs, houses cost 150 wood. This really slows down the early stages of the game.

Make Docks a Village phase structure

Having the Dock be a town phase structure slows down the village phase of the game and reduces possible opening strategies. To boot, on Island maps, where there's only so much wood to go around, the sheer cost of building your first dock means you'll be stuck on your starting island for a long, long time. Depending on the civ you play, it costs 1300 or 1550 wood just to build the structure. (Carthage gets it slightly better.) The sheer cost means you'll have to be frugal with making units that cost wood and farms to get food meaning island maps progress at a snails pace.

With Docks as village age structures, it increases the number of possible opening strategies. For instance, instead of building farmstead and farms, you could instead build docks and fishing ships. This is especially appealing on island maps in terms of space required. Naturally, the patch makes warships and merchant ships into town and city phase units.

Improve the accuracy of Basic Ranged units

Basic ranged units are are painfully inaccurate. Watch a Javelinist try to hunt a stationary animal and you'll see what I mean. "Spread" is a variable that determines how accurate a unit is. The difference in spread between basic (no promotions) and advanced (1 promotion) is HUGE while the difference between advanced and elite is much smaller. The patch improves the accuracy of basic ranged units without changing the accuracy of advanced, elite, champion, or hero ranged units.

A detailed list of changes is below.

•Cost of House reduced from 150 wood to 100 wood for: Athens, Carthage, Helenes, Macedonia, Persia, Rome, Sparta

•Cost of House reduced from 100 wood to 65 wood for all other civs

•Dock is now a Village phase structure

•Fishing Ship remains a Village phase unit

•Fire ships, Biremes, Triremes, and Merchant Ships changed Town phase units

•Quinqueremes are City phase units.

•Cost of Dock reduced from 200 wood to 165 wood for all Carthage

•Cost of Dock reduced from 300 wood to 250 wood for all other civs

•Spread for basic ranged units (infantry and cavalry) improved to 1.6 -> 1.3 -> 1.0 from 2.0 -> 1.3 -> 1.0.

Edited July 30, 2012 by gudo

[Mythos_Ruler]

Let's go ahead and try it your way. I've applied the patch. I'll take a look and if it's all good then I will commit the changes. Things are easily changed back if we don't like the changes.

[Mythos_Ruler]

On 2nd thought, I agree with everything except the houses part. The game advances to Town Phase plenty fast enough with the houses as expensive as they are now. However, I agree that the Dock should be Village Phase, with the warships becoming available at later phases and the ranged unit accuracy should be adjusted.

[wraitii]

I think citizens are recruited too quickly in the early game. This presses the players to build houses all the time, which makes it a bit boring and makes wood really really important (with Marilyn, I had found that in the early game, optimal resource collecting was about 60%wood/40% food or more for wood depending on the civ). If citizens were recruited slightly slower, the player would have more time to do other stuff than simply building houses.

In the late game, technologies could be use to change that.

[Spahbod]

I think the main problem of the game is that buildings have too much hitpoint. AOE2/3,AOM had much better building hitpoints. Currently the only way to defeat an enemy is to make siege weapons while I think siege weapons should only ease the attack, not enable it.

[wraitii]

I think that was intended as buildings will be made capturable.

[Spahbod]

I think that was intended as buildings will be made capturable.

But I don't think normal houses, mills and farmsteads will worth capturing and they are very tough.

[Pureon]

Capturing will help stop structures being OP.

I thought the general feeling was that ranged infantry units were too over-powered already, so improving their aim will make them even stronger?

[wraitii]

I figure houses would take basically no time to capture, and capturing doesn't really have a cost (free buildings, yay). So even if they're hard to destroy without siege buildings, I don't think it would be a hassle to take them down by capturing them.

[fabio]

I also noticed that wall towers are more powerful than standard towers, yet they are cheaper to build.

[Pureon]

I also noticed that wall towers are more powerful than standard towers, yet they are cheaper to build.

What's the best way to balance that - without making defense towers too strong or walls too expensive? To build a wall tower, a wall segment and end wall tower must also be built, so the stone cost is a lot higher than just 1 defense tower.

[Spahbod]

I think the best solution is to make the wall tower weaker.

Ah something else although it isn't related to balance issue. One of the most annoying things is the game is the high speed of the running units when they are rearranging in a formation. This is a major issue as the game currently looks like "poor" despite the good graphic engine. I reduced the running speed (still more than walking) and changed the actor file to show the walking animation instead of running. The result was much better. Perhaps we should define a third speed (formation arrangement) for this case and reserve that high speed for running (I think it still needs to be reduced). Try the thing I explained above to see the difference.

[Pureon]

I think the best solution is to make the wall tower weaker.

By making the arrow attack weaker? The attack distance can also be reduced.

[Spahbod]

Those are good solutions. We can also make them shoot arrows only if there are infantry garrisoned in them.

[Sonarpulse]

I'd hate to deprecate perfectly good models, but do we really need separate wall towers and stand alone towers? Maybe just like with gates we can make it so a wall tower is upgradable to a standard tower (for added range or something).

[Mythos_Ruler]

I'd hate to deprecate perfectly good models, but do we really need separate wall towers and stand alone towers? Maybe just like with gates we can make it so a wall tower is upgradable to a standard tower (for added range or something).

Please no. I like it the way it is. The game is not even finished, so let's can the nerfing talk for now. We don't have capturing and siege weapons are not balanced yet.