Building capturing needs refinement

[DuckmanDM]

I am glad I am not the only one who has issues with the new capturing system.  It's far too easy to capture, vs destroy.  Attacking should be the primary function, not secondary to capturing.  Fully garrisoned Iberian towers with 10 soldiers easily get swarmed and captured.  In fact, I dislike the entire capture feature altogether and would like to see the ability to turn it off completely.  Defending against siege weapons with units that I previously could easily defend with, is now next to impossible as they try and capture the siege weapons instead of simply destorying them.  The entire game has just turned into a huge capture-fest.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

14 hours ago, DuckmanDM said:

I am glad I am not the only one who has issues with the new capturing system.  It's far too easy to capture, vs destroy.  Attacking should be the primary function, not secondary to capturing.  Fully garrisoned Iberian towers with 10 soldiers easily get swarmed and captured.  In fact, I dislike the entire capture feature altogether and would like to see the ability to turn it off completely.  Defending against siege weapons with units that I previously could easily defend with, is now next to impossible as they try and capture the siege weapons instead of simply destorying them.  The entire game has just turned into a huge capture-fest.

A positive change would be to just make capturing the secondary attack instead of primay. And then focus the capturing to only Civic Centers (and maybe houses and Temples; I make this happen in Delenda Est mod).

[AtlasMapper]

I love the capturing system, it makes the game much more strategic, fun, and even realistic in a way. I love stuffs like Persian can have an upgrade that boost by +25% the capturing time. It makes bigger strategic differences and choices for factions. Having capture option by default is not a problem for me. Surely, some balancing could make more people happy, but it is not at all confusing for me.

I disagree: no buildings should be immune to capture. But some should be harder to capture. Eg. a barracks is supposed to be generating units.. So when fully garrisoned, it should be much more hard to capture (so longer than the destroying time). But tower should still be captured easily. It is a mandatory in the A19 strategy, in my opinion. Also, I think when a building become captured, the garnison shouldn't be captured too, but moved out from the building.

[sanderd17]

1 hour ago, AtlasMapper said:

Also, I think when a building become captured, the garnison shouldn't be captured too, but moved out from the building.

That's what happens now, they get expelled from the structure, or killed if there is no valid space where the units can be placed. But killing shouldn't happen often on land, but it would happen if ships could be captured in plain sea, and also happens when ships are sunk. In any case, as the game is now, the units never convert to the enemy.

---

Now about the thread in general

In my original patch, I even disabled attacking buildings for units. I found it very unrealistic that a few units would just be able to destroy a structure like they do. But anyway, players can now chose to either capture or attack, and the choice ultimately depends on the defence of your opponent. If he garrisons his important structures, it will probably be easier to destroy them, otherwise, capturing would give you more advantage. So it is a strategically important choice you need to make, and we're making a strategy game after all.

I do understand that there are some problems with it, and there are some nice suggestions offered here (I particularly like the aura to protect siege engines). But I'm not very good at balancing the micro game, so I won't (f.e.) make a decision on what buildings should be capturable.

---

Though I do still have something l don't like about capturing:

That's when players use the capture-and-delete tactic. They don't want to take over the base, but they want to deal economical damage to the opponent. And because the opponent can't defend all buildings, first capturing the undefended buildings, and deleting them when you own them becomes faster than destroying them through the attack command. Another problem with delete is when players delete their buildings just before they lose control over it.

Removing the "delete" option isn't possible either. When you've gathered all trees or mines in an area, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to delete that storehouse, and use the space to build something else. Certainly in dense maps this is often necessary.

So my choice is now leaning towards a "slow delete" or "deconstruction" model. Where the player can choose to delete any building he owns (even if he lost almost all his capture points), but where it takes time to delete the structure. Adding yet another unit command to "deconstruct" buildings sounded like it was very bloated (another hotkey taken, other units occupied with certain tasks you don't want, ...). So I opted to keep the delete button, but just make it slower. In the mod below, when you press delete, a timer will start that will continuously take health from the structure, until it's destroyed. But if the structure gets captured or reconverts to the territory owner, the timer stops. It's still very early and unbalanced, but it should give you an idea.

I think that this will make the capture vs. attack choice even more strategically, and I hope you like this change.

To install the mod, unpack it in your mods directory ( http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameDataPaths ), so you have the path mods/structureDestroy/... And then enable the mod in the game by going to "Tools & Options"->"Mod Selector" (don't forget to save your changes).

structureDestroy.zip

[AtlasMapper]

19 minutes ago, sanderd17 said:

the capture-and-delete tactic.

Well that's my most efficient tactic too beat the AI, because Petra continuously kicks my a** since its upgrade from Aegis

I was more thinking about a kind of destruction "cooldown time" (ie. can't destroy a recently captured building until a few minutes) to balance this problem, but what you suggest is even more realistic : no explosives in 500 BC.. So after a capture, it should take some time before destroying it. Amazing idea (even if I'll need to switch to a lower difficulty mode to beat Petra.. ).

[Lion.Kanzen]

I thought the same, that have a name, is like razing buildings concept from Rise of Nations

http://riseofnations.wikia.com/wiki/Razing_buildings

Quote

Raze is an option that destroys an owned building. This option removes a specific structure within a set time and some resources are given back to the owner. The default key to raze a building is "delete". To undo a raze in progress, press "\" with the building highlighted.

The time needed to raze a building is half of the time it takes for a Citizen to construct the building. 

 

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Good comments Sandnerd. Another thing I don't like is how AI deletes all its building so quick after I capture its Civilication Centre. It's not very human-like. It's something I wish the AI did less of, or maybe had a cool time before it did it. Can this be tweak? Mimo is doing a great job with the AI. It is very challenging, even if I have some critique (like, the AI goes absolute NUTS when you try to capture one of its buildings, it will send EVERYTHING in a berzerker move yto stop you; I could see an exploit being used here against AI, using a few units to initiate a capture on one side of the AI base, then attacking the other side of the AI base with the bulk of army after the AI sends all his units to go stop the building from being capture on other side, gg).

[grendel]

I really like the capture feature and I don't think it needs a radical overhaul. I strongly disagree with any notion that some buildings should be impossible to capture, or should take so long as to render it functionally impossible.

I very much like how the current system makes it harder and harder to capture a building based on how many soldiers are in it. This makes perfect sense. I think the original situation in this thread involved a building with only 3 soldiers in it. If such a building were attacked by a mass of enemy troops, I think it should 

CAPTURE SPEED vs. DESTROY SPEED

I think this is really a game balance issue and I'll leave it to others to figure it out.

From a realism perspective, you could argue either way that one should be faster. If changes are made, I would suggest they be conservative... I think the current balance is within the general range of appropriateness.

I might suggest that, instead of simply making capture go slower than it does now, we just (modestly) increase the capture-resistance of each garrisoned unit.

DEFAULT CAPTURE vs. DEFAULT DESTROY

I like having the default capture now, but it was a frustrating transition before I learned about ctrl+Rclick.

One nice thing is, if you meant to destroy it but it defaulted to capture, you can still destroy it. If you meant to capture it but it defaulted to destroy, you're out of luck.

SPEED of DESTRUCTION

I like the idea above of slowing down owner-initiated destruction of buildings. I don't want to slow it too much... I think like 5 or 10 seconds might be enough.

I think it makes sense to be able to quickly destroy siege engines. If they get slowed down, I think it should only be by a second or 2.

I prefer a general slowdown of owner-initiated destruction to a cooldown period when you can't destroy something you just captured. This feels more realistic and evenly applied.

BUILDINGS FLIPPING ALLEGIANCE QUICKLY AND REPEATEDLY

Why not? In numerous actual battles and skirmishes the same farmhouse gets captured and recaptured again, then gets ignored by soldiers and reverts to the owners, who are loyal to one side, then it is captured again... I don't have a problem with this.

ALL THE BUILDINGS COLLAPSING WHEN YOU CAPTURE THE CC

This would be fixed by slowing down the timing for owner-initiated destruction, mentioned above. Presumably all or most of the buildings would flip ownership before they could actually be destroyed. Or, if the enemy really does want to destroy all their buildings before you get them (which makes sense, and has plenty of basis in reality) they would have to get started destroying them much earlier, _before_ you had captured the CC, instead of waiting until the last possible second before instantly destroying their empire.

----------------------

A footnote: I love this game, I haven't been involved in development so I defer to all you longtime heros of 0 A.D. who have managed to create this awesomeness. And honestly, the first time I heard about the capture feature I thought it would be ridiculously unworkable and resisted upgrading for that reason, and now I think it is an awesome, awesome and fundamental part of the game. So what do I know?

[svott]

What about a hot-key solution which allows you to attack your own building? It makes destroying of captured enemy buildings very costly (probably too costly) and you still can get rid of your own drop sides or whatever.

And it's more realistic (I know that more realism does not mean better gameplay and more fun always)

[DuckmanDM]

Personally, I'd like to see the default swapped from capture to attack across the board, but perhaps at least the ability to toggle would suffice.  Seems that setting your troops to aggressive for example should cause them to attack rather than capture. 

[fatherbushido]

Quote

but perhaps at least the ability to toggle would suffice

You can toggle with the ctrl key.

[roofridder]

@fatherbushido i think what he means is like a toggle option in the settings menu so that you can set it to whatever you prefer. At least i think that is a good idea not sure if it is a hard thing to implement.

Edited April 14, 2016 by roofridder

[DuckmanDM]

Yes, I know you can individually use the ctrl to force an attack, I've been using that since the update. However, the user who replied after was correct, being able to toggle a group let's say to attack and not capture would allow you to let them go on a rampage, switch to another group or do something else while that group attacks.  As it stands now, since the update, you cannot set a group off to attack and destroy without manually controlling their every move, unless you want them to try and capture everything.

[Lion.Kanzen]

I prefer switch than toggle.