Wall and Fortress strength increase

[WhiteTreePaladin]

I think non-crush units should not be able to attack walls. Either that, or walls need to be a lot stronger. Regular units can tear through them pretty quickly. I can't find a valid use case for walls currently. They just aren't worth the time to build them.

Fortresses should probably also have a technology that increases their HP / defense dramatically.

Just some observations.

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

I support this notion at least regarding stone walls.

[WhiteTreePaladin]

Right, wood walls shouldn't require siege.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Reduce attack of soldiers would help. A basic sword cavalry starts off with 18.5 hack! I laugh at 0.5 increments too. lol

Edited January 18, 2015 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[Lion.Kanzen]

Ok My suggestion the ranged organic units need reduce their attack( almost ineffective) vs walls but have actual status vs Fortress

The mace man and elephants need conserve the bonus because Mauryan haven't good siege units and the Infantry melee have very ineffective to walls ( but the walls can be easy to capture when the feature is implemented) but be more effective than ranged, cavalry sword have very effectiveness vs both, ships catalpult have too.

Can be nice implement capture.

[WhiteTreePaladin]

If someone took enough effort to build walls, I'd think it would be nice to require siege to take them down. We can make them expensive/slow to build as needed for balancing. I'd rather have expensive walls and/or slow build time than have walls that don't really offer any protection. If building conversion is implemented, it wouldn't apply to walls anyway.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

If someone took enough effort to build walls, I'd think it would be nice to require siege to take them down. We can make them expensive/slow to build as needed for balancing. I'd rather have expensive walls and/or slow build time than have walls that don't really offer any protection. If building conversion is implemented, it wouldn't apply to walls anyway.

As long as they can be attacked by men while they are being built, I see no problem with your proposal.

[Lion.Kanzen]

I prefere rebalancing with cost and time( to build) than gives invincibility ( except siege machines).

I like walls and I'm to favor gets some realism but in multiplayer I see people's doing really strongholds with walls, very difficult for rush.

I feel if we gives that characteristic the defense style becomes underpowered to overpower the good player can find the way to defeat that style but many can be frustrating.

I prefer set in like AoE series.

Other issue is the lag.

Other issue is not so easy to build them, some times is because the turrets, if you don't have enoght resources to build a turret , the wall can be incomplete and try to close it is not realistic when that issue happens.

I prefer reduces the attack to then than gives that Immunity.

[greenknight32]

Realistically, swords, spears, arrows and such should not damage walls - but then, you should have siege hooks and ladders available. Walls could be defeated without siege engines in the real world, they were effective only if actively defended.

Adding the ability to scale walls with ladders or pull them down with hooks would add a lot of complexity for a small increase in realism. Having the infantry's regular attacks do the job is a reasonable substitute, and much simpler. It's much too easy now, though - I agree with Lion, the effectiveness of such attacks against walls should be reduced.

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

The fundamental point of walls is to prevent rushing from being an effective form of harassment at the cost of limiting the potential for expansion and phasing up through the high stone cost. Players who choose to wall would not have fortresses as early to help and thereby would be deterred.

[iNcog]

buildings are already too strong, at least in the current build. if you have problems with your walls dying then just make 2 towers and some ranged units and your walls will never, ever fall.

[WhiteTreePaladin]

Buildings are too strong? I think they are about right. If they were weaker, then powerful non-siege units could tear them up in one second each.

Example: I was using Gaul against Britons and was able to mow down fortresses without using any siege units. Takes advanced swordsmen five seconds at most (actually, I think it was a bit less) to take down a full health fortress. Houses fell so fast that it looked like the troops were still moving. The enemy skirmishers (a good sized group) were upgraded and firing at my units the entire time, but it wasn't worth fighting them because they were not doing enough damage to be worth stopping to fight them. Towers fell faster than fortresses and I couldn't see that they had any effect. (These were upgraded towers too.) I've tried this with other advanced units with pretty much the same results.

I guess I feel that strong upgraded units should not tear buildings down so fast. Certainly not any faster than they do currently. They should fight other units better. I remember in AoK that trebuchets were useful. I haven't bothered to use a ranged siege unit in a long time as troops are more versatile and ultimately more powerful even against structures. Rams generally aren't worth it, however, there are a few cases where rams can be useful. (Also, a group of rams is exceptionally good against archers as one ram alone can take out dozens of archers.)

I do agree about wall foundations; any unit should be able to destroy those.

Edited January 18, 2015 by WhiteTreePaladin

[Lion.Kanzen]

We need Onagers in the game, the onagers can take up the Catapult actual place and catapult/ ballistae have more range like Trebuchet in AoK.

[Panando]

I feel the current wooden walls are okay in terms of hitpoints and cost, but are strategically very nearly pointless. From a pure strategy game point of view, a wooden wall serves to buy some time when performing a risky strategy such as fast-teching, where you need to delay the enemy a little while to give your few ranged units a chance to weaken them or buy the time to produce more units. Or to give time to bring your army to bear. Or to make a weak harassing force turn around and go home. From a balance perspective the wall doesn't need to delay an attack for long. If the wall lets a player go without units, if an opponent effectively gets stone-walled by a stone wall, then the game balance is off.

In most cases, players will prefer to wall off their base using buildings, as this involves very nearly no additional cost. On maps and for civs where this is possible (obviously much easier with cheap houses) the only real use for a wooden wall is for a gate, although gates are not really needed for a component player as there is enough strategic value in having a chokepoint, or you can do a total walloff with a barracks which has it's exit on the outside, and later remove a house to make a hole.

Walls are not really practical when there aren't already natural chokepoints. The problem is that walling the enemy out is the same as walling yourself in. It is essentially giving your opponent an unopposed victory as they can either expand or tech more quickly and so will have an advantage in resources and/or technology. The expense of building the wall is never going to be recouped and early in the game wood is *the* limiting resource. That wood means a slower tech, fewer harassing units, or fewer soldiers which could be harvesting. It's just not viable to spend more than a hundred or so wood on walls.

One interesting idea would be if wooden walls could be built in neutral territory, suffering the same decay as scout posts. This would help to distinguish them from house wall-ins, and make them a more useful defence against rushes as choke points could be walled off on more maps. Note that wooden walls in neutral territory would be by no means a guaranteed defense even on maps with suitable chokepoints, as cavalry harassment can arrive very early, definitely early enough to kill or at least hamper the units building the walls.

There is a kind of exploit which you can do with walls, you can build the wall then delete the towers. The long wall spans are cheaper and build more quickly than the 'towers', and oddly enough deleting the towers doesn't leave any holes in the wall, if you do it right the wall still seals perfectly (wooden walls always seal perfectly even without towers, stone walls require some attention as if you use maximum length spans it doesn't work, but stone wall spans can overlap if they are less than maximum length, thus sealing the hole). For stone walls this permits building the wall at a cost of 30 stone per span which is way cheaper than the 130 stone for a span with a tower, and the build time is much quicker. Wooden walls do not enjoy such large benefits from deleting the towers, you still save about 1/2 the cost and build time. In some cases deleting towers is a no-brainer as they literally add nothing to the wall, in other cases terminal towers are helpful as they allow extending the wall, and may be required to seal the wall against terrain.

There is another kind of exploit, which is deleting (or ignoring) the spans and using the stone wall turrets as towers. Lets compare these wall turrets with normal towers.

Wall turrets cost 100 stone, which is 100 metal less than a tower, they build in around 130s, a bit quicker than the ~160s for a tower. They garrison 2 soldiers, vs 5 for a tower. They provide no free shots, while a tower provides 1 (the upgrade adds +1 to both, but it only works with the turret if there is already a unit garrisoned). They have slightly less range. They do not count as one of the 5 buildings for unlocking City Phase, while towers do.

At first glance a wall turret is just a cheaper, inferior tower. They cost about half as much, and have about 1/3rd the firepower when fully garrisoned. They DO enjoy all the upgrades which towers enjoy and benefit proportionately more than towers, more than doubling their firepower. But there are two really big advantages of wall turrets. First they have *way* more hitpoints. it depends on the civ, but normally about 3-5x as much hitpoints. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, there is no minimum distance restriction, you can build as many wall turrets as you like, as densely as you like, just like towers in nearly every other RTS game (yay!). They have to be built in pairs with a span, but you can delete the span and one of the turrets if you like.

So at second glance it can be summarized like this:

Early in the game towers are probably a better choice, as they offer much more firepower, and more protection for units, at this point raiding forces will have trouble tearing down a tower even with it's modest ~1000 HP.

Later though, upgrades improve wall turrets more, and enemy units become powerful enough to cut down towers quickly, at this point wall turrets are a much better choice as they can offer up to 10x the hitpoints per resource invested, and can be spammed much more densely. Wall turrets would be the natural choice for offensive towering where the enemy has some serious incentive to kill your towers, and where you want/need to creep forward with the towers (turrets do extend influence, so you can creep into enemy territory). Because wall turrets have so much hitpoints and build fairly quickly it is quite practical to build one even under enemy fire, making them good for offensive towering, or for building them when being attacked. Their damage is lackluster without upgrades, but with upgrades they are quite good. In fact late game it would seem there is very little reason to build towers when wall turrets have so much more hitpoints.

When balancing stone walls, these exploits or unconventional uses must be taken into consideration too, namely turretless spans, and spanless turrets. I am not certain what the fixes to these exploits would be, although it might work in such a way that a span without a tower is unstable and is destroyed, and a tower without a span is unstable and destroyed, or if not destroyed, at least suffer some kind of penalty to it's effective hitpoints. This would do nothing to address the fact that 'dumbbell' walls could still be used as uber-tough towers with no minimum distance restriction.

Edited January 20, 2015 by Panando

[av93]

Nice analysis

[Lion.Kanzen]

I want palisade out of territory limit too. Can be nice do it into a pool.

Edited January 21, 2015 by Lion.Kanzen

[agentx]

> Nice analysis

Indeed. That's probably all you need to know about towers. Is there a best of forum category?

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I address some of Panando's analysis a little bit in my mod. I make it so walls are strong (and availabel to the player a phase before civic center), but wall towers cannot shoot at all unless they are garrison. At least this way you must plant a lot of your pop into your line of exploit wall towers to get firepower, which would be stationary and not responsive to flankings. You can only put 3 units in the towers too, so it would be best to have a mix of towers and long sections of wall so you can put archers on the long sections of walls (ranged infantry's bonuses on walls are also beefed and different). An interesting experiment would be for Civic Centers Fortresses to have an aura that prevents enemies from building towers (like a line of exploit towers for instance or defense towrers).

Edited January 21, 2015 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[chaosislife13]

Either way yall go about it, i think palisades and walls should be arrow-proof. True, palisades are made out of wood, so it would seem logical to conclude that a flaming arrow could harm them, but despite how they might look in-game, a palisade is not a simple four foot high wooden fence, they're like 12 or more foot high and made out of entire trees. the only way a flaming arrow should be able to take down a palisade is if they somehow managed to soak the entire thing in oil, otherwise the arrows would just burn themselves out before they could take unless they fired hundreds of thousands of arrows at them at once, which is unrealistic. Also, being that they're (hopefully, some people are absurdly stupid after all) made of untreated wood due to the simple fact that treating them would involve soaking them in oil given the tech level then, and the fact that they're outside, they'll absorb moisture making it even harder to light them on fire. The balance factor to that tho is that since they're untreated, they'll eventually rot away, but regular maintenance would take care of that if they weren't intended to be temporary anyhow. That can be handled by setting them to a very slow decay rate no matter where they are which isn't a bad idea for other wooden objects either as the way we presently have the decay set up doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would something magickally fall apart just cuz it's a foot outside my present territory boundaries?

As for defending a wall with defense towers, ummm, it's not really possible with the way the game is set up right now, two fully garrisoned towers even with all their techs done, can't defend a wall from an attacking force because they can't be built close enough to each other to cover the entire area. Also towers don't divide their attacks over a range of enemies, they just fire all arrows at one unit at a time. I also don't know just how they choose their targets, it could be random, it could be that they go in order of who is nearest, they might go by order of attack, but they don't seem to be targeting units with the lowest hp, nor are they targeting ones with the highest threat to them and certainly not to the walls. if they concentrated on the low HP units they might be able to take out enough units fast enough to prevent complete destruction, and if they targeted the highest threats then they'd be able to hopefully be left with a group of units that can't really damage much. I'd suggest one or the other, cuz trying to have every tower and every unit constantly reprioritizing units would prolly brick the game.

[Panando]

I make it so walls are strong (and availabel to the player a phase before civic center), but wall towers cannot shoot at all unless they are garrison.

But that's how it currently works in Alpha 17, wall towers don't fire any shots unless you garison a unit. Only 2 units can be garrisoned. All tower upgrades apply to the wall tower too, but the upgrade which gives one 'free garrison' does not allow an unmanned tower to fire shots, but it does increase the firepower of a wall tower with at least one garrisoned soldier.

I don't think needing garrisons is a big deal though. The thing is the damage rate of an unmanned tower is pretty abysmal anyway, that one shot isn't going to do anything, stuffing five units in it is essential to get some real firepower.

Now wall towers damage is equally abysmal, but the thing is that, with upgrades, wall towers actually provide more firepower than towers, because you can pack them more densely. With upgrades, 2 wall towers is very nearly as much damage as 1 tower (7 shots, vs 6 for the 2 wall towers), and has so much more health.

How you garrison your towers is up to you, but I think most players just garrison on demand. In this case, there is much more likelihood that a wall tower will survive long enough to receive it's garrison.

As for defending a wall with defense towers, ummm, it's not really possible with the way the game is set up right now, two fully garrisoned towers even with all their techs done, can't defend a wall from an attacking force because they can't be built close enough to each other to cover the entire area.

This is absolutely correct. Whether using default wall towers, or building standalone towers behind a wall, either way you don't get enough firepower to meaningfully protect a wall if you 'play it straight'. But if you exploit the ability to build stone walls as short 'dumbbells', getting 2 wall towers in a short space, you can pack in much more firepower. You could of course make a wall of dumbbells, a wall entirely of wall towers, which would offer some impressive firepower and have a horrendous amount of hitpoints, and be virtually immune to melee as only a few melee units could attack each tower, they really do take forever to go down when attacked by only a half dozen units. It'd be expensive though, but might be entertaining to wall off narrow chokepoints with wall towers. A civ which only has elephants at city phase would have enormous difficulty breaking down a wall composed entirely of wall towers, assuming the wall is properly backed by archers and deployed catapults.

Edited January 21, 2015 by Panando

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I don't think needing garrisons is a big deal though. The thing is the damage rate of an unmanned tower is pretty abysmal anyway, that one shot isn't going to do anything, stuffing five units in it is essential to get some real firepower.

Now wall towers damage is equally abysmal, but the thing is that, with upgrades, wall towers actually provide more firepower than towers, because you can pack them more densely. With upgrades, 2 wall towers is very nearly as much damage as 1 tower (7 shots, vs 6 for the 2 wall towers), and has so much more health.

How you garrison your towers is up to you, but I think most players just garrison on demand. In this case, there is much more likelihood that a wall tower will survive long enough to receive it's garrison.

Well, I am ok for the Defense Tower techs to only affect Defense Towers (as is with my mod). Wall Towers would have their own techs for whatever. Adjusting the wall garrison aura affects also makes it better to have the long wall sections mixed with the walltowers. Can also experiment with making walls (and wall towers) more expensive, but build faster; and then do reverse.

[agentx]

wgoyc: How do you deal with TerritoryInfluence of towers in your mod?

[agentx]

Bots too can apply Panando's no-wall-span exploit:

Is this cheating?

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

wgoyc: How do you deal with TerritoryInfluence of towers in your mod?

Has there been a problem found? Being used for tower push?

Edited January 21, 2015 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[agentx]

Has there been a problem found? Being used for tower push?

No, I'm interested in your thoughts whether area expansion can be somehow balanced against health points and shooting power.