My ideas for priests

[borg-]

One of the less usable units at the moment, and rarely used.

Basically it is: high cost and very slow cure.

My proposal would be two changes.

1°: Now priests can healing in area, every 30 seconds, you can choose the area in which heals. Little area but fast heal, maybe 50 or 100 of life in 2 seconds. (Cant individual healing now, only aoe)

2°: You can build small medical centers in neutral territories. Healing works for all units near the center like church. Healing only works if you have priests inside. (max 5 priests, 0,5 hp per sec for one priests)

These are my ideas, I would like the opinion, tnx 

[Feldfeld]

1°

Interesting proposition but have to be balanced wisely, with a group of priests maybe you can make a group of champions invicible for seconds. But at a certain point it can be useful even without being broken. Also, with this fast heal, you can consider that some can, in let's say 300 pop game, mass healers enough to constantly area heal army, because some priests would still heal while the cooldown has passed for others, so infinite heal. also, keep in mind that in fight infantry champions takes not that much place to fight so easy to heal.

Healing wisely would maybe counter massed ranged units.

 

2°I think medical center as you described it would be not that much used, pretty slow healing rate, if you don't have 5 healers in you better go back to nearest temple but i might be wrong.

 

Priests definitely need a change.

[sphyrth]

I find that difficult on the auto-healing side. Which units should they auto-heal? They don't automatically choose the one in the middle. But your idea seems better applied to Hero Healers... just to make them more unique or something.

Well, since we're talking about it: it's a pet peeve seeing units that "pray to treat wounds". It even got me asking, "How DID people treat wounds back then?". But I just brushed it off since classical RTS just uses priests instead of real medics or something.

But, yeah. Make (non-Wololo) priests more useful in-game.

[borg-]

30 minutes ago, Feldfeld said:

1°

Interesting proposition but have to be balanced wisely, with a group of priests maybe you can make a group of champions invicible for seconds. But at a certain point it can be useful even without being broken. Also, with this fast heal, you can consider that some can, in let's say 300 pop game, mass healers enough to constantly area heal army, because some priests would still heal while the cooldown has passed for others, so infinite heal. also, keep in mind that in fight infantry champions takes not that much place to fight so easy to heal.

Healing wisely would maybe counter massed ranged units.

 

2°I think medical center as you described it would be not that much used, pretty slow healing rate, if you don't have 5 healers in you better go back to nearest temple but i might be wrong.

 

Priests definitely need a change.

1° It would really be a small area, maybe 3 - 5 max units.

2° I think it would be good with some tactics such as rush, or horses rush, this technology should be open at p2

[LordGood]

If they had area of effect ranged healing, that would be pretty neat, although priests acting as healers is a tad odd to begin with. I dont even think the engine can support that

[Feldfeld]

7 hours ago, borg- said:

1° It would really be a small area, maybe 3 - 5 max units.

2° I think it would be good with some tactics such as rush, or horses rush, this technology should be open at p2

1° That can work

2° But the issue is that not only you need to build that medical center, you also need your temple up and 1250 food for priests which is quite expensive at this stage of the game, it prevents you from growing economy.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Why do priests cost so much anyway? Try reducing their price and see if they are use more.

Edited February 16, 2017 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[Feldfeld]

3 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Why do priests cost so much anyway? Try reducing their price and see if they are use more.

Only reducing their price won't change anything, because their influence is minimal, you can make them cost 50 food, even 1 food, I, and I think many other lobby players still won't make them because they just do nothing, it's a waste of micromanaging and a waste of population, most lobby players have more important thing to do.

Edited February 16, 2017 by Feldfeld

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Priests basically manage themselves, but I think it folly to talk balance at this point. So much time wasted on balance when gameplay features like formation fighting and charging and running all not even implemented yet.

[Feldfeld]

1 minute ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Priests basically manage themselves, but I think it folly to talk balance at this point. So much time wasted on balance when gameplay features like formation fighting and charging and running all not even implemented yet.

Yes, I guess that the changes proposed by borg need some time programming.

But some other balances like mauryan archer on elephant don't need nothing but a change in unit fighting statistics (sry don't have the word).

[fatherbushido]

48 minutes ago, Feldfeld said:

But some other balances like mauryan archer on elephant don't need nothing but a change in unit fighting statistics (sry don't have the word).

Who knows what this unit is? (same for chariots). Starting from that, perhaps something could be done.

[Lion.Kanzen]

 The priest between factions must have differences between them

I the Celt priests can attack.

Egyptian (and may be Mauryan) can convert.

[borg-]

33 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

 The priest between factions must have differences between them

I the Celt priests can attack.

Egyptian (and may be Mauryan) can convert.

It would be great, i would like to see someday.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

10 hours ago, Feldfeld said:

But some other balances like mauryan archer on elephant don't need nothing but a change in unit fighting statistics (sry don't have the word).

I do agree that the vanilla Elephant Archers are strange indeed. They should be slower than other cav archer obviously (half as fast) and higher health (maybe double health, exact number is unimportant in alpha). It's an elephant, not a horse, make it unique some way. Just get it close for alpha, fine tune in beta.

 

I like Lion's idea of making the priests have other abilities too. I'd make the abilities unlock with tech. Maybe use some old school tech names like "Fanaticism" for conversion.

Edited February 16, 2017 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[Libervurto]

I like the idea of Priests converting enemies.  How would this work though?  How would the priest be able to convert an enemy without your other troops killing them and without the enemy killing your priest before conversion is complete?

Priests could also be involved in researching tech in some way.  This would make sense since historically, priests were the most educated people and some clergymen were the earliest scientists.

[Feldfeld]

44 minutes ago, Libervurto said:

I like the idea of Priests converting enemies.  How would this work though?  How would the priest be able to convert an enemy without your other troops killing them and without the enemy killing your priest before conversion is complete?

Priests could also be involved in researching tech in some way.  This would make sense since historically, priests were the most educated people and some clergymen were the earliest scientists.

About priests researching tech, this could be hellenic and roman's priests special ailities following Lion.Kanzen's idea

[Grugnas]

I think that balancing is the most important thing and it should come even before new features since determines the players preferences too. Player shouldn't be forced to pick those most popular civs because of their units strength, but civs should be picked because of their particularity in terms of gameplay (say no to skiritai, say yes to pikemen!!).

Returning in to the topic, I think that healers are not worth their cost because 250 food is too much for those weak units. With weak I mean their overall attributes. Rank 3 healers are underrated because they heal pretty good but they techs are too expensive and rank 1 healers aren't much efficient, considering the fact that if their range is 20 mt for healing they will be very vulnerable to the enemy melee units. They could have increased healing rate and increased hp healed by changing the hp restored from absolute value to percentage in order to heal any unit in the same time, decreasing the effect of elephants and maybe giving priority to low hp % units.

Converting units can be interesting. Only a priest at once can try to convert an unit by "locking" that unit to a position for tot seconds (something like 10 - 15 sec?) and doubled time for champions (maybe decreasable by a tech research in temple).

Area effect priests would be probably too significant.

I like the idea of the camp, since i proposed a similar stuff (Garrisoning priests in the tower could let them heal from the tower with an increased range letting them heal from a secure place).    The particularity of the camp could be that those camps can heal aoe allies too, since temples don't heal ally units if not garrisoned.

I'm still waiting to see that "Druid healings increase healed soldiers attack rate" for celtic tribes since it would be really cool

[sphyrth]

Don't the Celtic tribes have this tradition of suiciding priests to boost moralle?

I wonder if that could work. A priest who commits suicide would temporarily give boosts to the units around them.

[elexis]

There was a healer balancing overhaul last Alpha by causative:

r18280 Reduce upgraded and promoted healer range and make healers smarter (#3932)

Healing range was kept short as it appeared like magic to the reviewer (I don't care much, many auras are magical too)

Area healing could be done with an aura, but that would be dirty. A cleaner solution would be more involved and I don't see anyone being incentivized to rewrite much code to implement that.

Making healers cheaper or heal faster can be proposed if you can show me some replay or mathmatical equatoin showing that they are currently useless. (I don't believe they are useless as in fact they add many health points, but perhaps could become more useful, dunno)
 

[Wesley]

If you're going to produce locked battalions from the barracks etc to reduce lag then embedding a priest in the battalion is possible. 

For a basic battalions take your spear men (Or what ever) into blender clone them 10 times in two rows of five. Run the animation to check they look right. No clipping allowed. Add a single hit box/ bounding box and center of rotation. Export as a new unit. Add a single damage bar. If it falls to 10% have that group unit despawn and spawn 3 or four lone spearmen. (Who knows? They may still win. Who are we kidding!)

For a mixed unit of melee/ ranged formations. Clone a row of guys with shields and a row of guys with ranged weapons behind them. Off set them so they are not shooting their shield bearer in the back of the head. Add the bounding box, hit box etc. 

For a self healing unit add a priest to the back row and require the temple as the prerequisite for the formation. When destroyed the priest is one of the surviving single units.  

I can think of a few other formation combinations but you get the idea. 
Instead if players spamming an ant train of hundreds of single units it's ten compound units (same total cost) with some being elites with healers in them. 

I've reposted this with the heading battalion as a separate topic.  

Edited March 13, 2017 by Wesley