Desired gameplay(planned) features for A23

[causative]

1 minute ago, Grugnas said:

this is true, is it worth considering a bonus for archers against skirmishers?

No because skirmishers usually don't go in alone, there will be spearmen or swordsmen in front.  To buff archers it would be necessary to increase their damage or perhaps increase their walk speed.  Increased walk speed would allow them to more easily kite enemies with good micro, like cavalry archers.  By the way, cavalry archers are more in need of a nerf than skirmisher cavalry.

[causative]

15 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

You guys could also play on SVN and report these things before the release. That's also why we have release candidates.

Yeah not much people on SVN but I'm sure you could sort this out

Think about it pragmatically.  People play the current release because:

• a22 doesn't require them to have the technical ability to update and compile svn.  A lot of players, maybe even some good players, don't have this know-how.
• a22 doesn't require them to take the effort to update and recompile it.  Before I upgraded my HDD to a SSD last year, and upgraded my internet connection from 1Mbps to 50, doing this could take me up to half an hour, slow my computer drastically during that time, and sometimes cause crashes.
• large svn games often fail because someone else didn't update properly (if they applied other patches, had unrevisioned files, or just forgot to update)
• Social network effects:  if everybody else is playing a22, it's easier to find a game there.  Many good players prefer 3v3 or 4v4.

It would be ideal if more players played svn, but is it going to happen?  For these reasons, as a practical matter I do not expect the amount of svn playtesting to ever reach a high level.  Other games that have open betas, such as Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, and PUBG, push out updates automatically for immediate testing.  It's important that the update be by default, requiring minimum or no effort on the player's part, to get maximum testing.

Edited January 18, 2018 by causative

[elexis]

We typically have 5 to 10 die hard lobby fans playing svn games once svn is more interesting than alpha 22. This will happen very soon for a23. They find all the relevant bugs and then we release with some of them not properly fixed sometimes, which we should try to avoid.

[causative]

Is it enough?  Seems there are balance issues every release.

[Feldfeld]

1 hour ago, causative said:

Is it enough?  Seems there are balance issues every release.

If i recall well, a22 SVN games were mostly played before the important balance changes. (for me, I didn't play any after,but i can't be sure for other people)

[Loki1950]

3 hours ago, causative said:

a22 doesn't require them to have the technical ability to update and compile svn.

You only need to recompile if you are on Linux or OSX there has always been a Window's exe as part of the SVN though the auto build fails sometimes so all you need is TortoiseSVN to get the svn version on Windows if one gets an svn error please post about it one of our more geeky types will be able to help you clear it up.

Enjoy the Choice

[elexis]

2 hours ago, causative said:

Is it enough?  Seems there are balance issues every release.

The accuracy issue in a21 (units didn't hit often enough) was because a bugfix was committed before the release without considering balancing impact.

Slingers being OP is rather a relic of the time when any unit could destroy buildings easily.

Mauryan warriors and ptolemian cavalry archer rush... when was that, 3 years ago?

It's mostly an issue that we don't have anyone in the team doing any balancing maintenace at all. It needs dedication. The few active people we have are either developers or artists.

Would be nice to have someone we can trust to give commit access to, but one typically also needs to know basic programming in order not to make a mess out of the templates.

[Grugnas]

7 hours ago, causative said:

No because skirmishers usually don't go in alone, there will be spearmen or swordsmen in front.  To buff archers it would be necessary to increase their damage or perhaps increase their walk speed.  Increased walk speed would allow them to more easily kite enemies with good micro, like cavalry archers.  By the way, cavalry archers are more in need of a nerf than skirmisher cavalry.

Indeed skirmishers don't go alone, what I was talking about is to manually select skirmishers while moving archers in a way that archers will attack skirmishers instead of spearmen. This would be an interesting strategy requiring some skill by the player.

The only issue with this is that units keep attacking the most near enemy unit after they kill the previous target.q

[causative]

Grugnas, I don't know about the viability of clicking on skirmishers.  Aside from the high number of clicks involved, I ran a test once when I tried individually clicking on enemy units with ranged units in a ranged vs ranged battle, and compared to attack-walk, the DPS was much reduced and I had a worse outcome than attack-walk.  Presumably that would be because of overkill when the unit is already dead but 50 arrows are still in the air going towards it.

When I do mass archers I usually find most of my micro is involved in walking small bands of archers backwards away from the enemy.  My archer plan is:  shoot, get them to run at you, then retreat into fortifications.  This yields an OK k/d usually, but it would work a lot better if the archers were faster.  Realistically, why wouldn't archers be as fast as skirmishers?  They are light unarmored units.

By the way: clicking on enemy units individually is something often done when the enemy dances a unit in front.  Reminds me that it would be nice if we could fix "dancing."  One possible fix:  ranged units can just preferentially attack stationary units that are in range, over moving units.  This would be more realistic too.

[Feldfeld]

I think he thought of a way to make archers automatically target skirmishers if triggered by some actions.

Obviously it is not viable to do it manually, and it becomes even worse when there are large numbers involved.

[Grugnas]

3 hours ago, causative said:

Grugnas, I don't know about the viability of clicking on skirmishers.  Aside from the high number of clicks involved, I ran a test once when I tried individually clicking on enemy units with ranged units in a ranged vs ranged battle, and compared to attack-walk, the DPS was much reduced and I had a worse outcome than attack-walk.  Presumably that would be because of overkill when the unit is already dead but 50 arrows are still in the air going towards it.

About your last statement, won't the arrows in air have a chance to hit nearby units anyway?

I tested that and this is totally right, i can't find a valid reason aside the fact that archers have to walk toward the new target to get in range. Matter of fact by focusing fire on skirmishers, archers should be able to remove the most of enemy army power because skirmishers deal the most of the damage and half the hp of spearmen who are obviously weaker to javelins than bows.

I was wondering if it is doable something like the feature in SVN ( drag a lane and and deploy your soldiers in such a dragged shape ) with archers attack, where  one is able to drag a lane where to shot the arrows without even need to select a target thus deploy your archers in order to have their fire reach the interested spot. This would be a workaround to manually queue targets with shift.

While skirmishers were really used as hit and retreat soldiers and trained to such a task, archers use their high range as advantage and eventually retreat with almost the same effect ( skirmishers can use their movement speed for sneaky actions, while archers can retreat in time ). I kinda agree into slightly increase archer movement speed which is kinda low compared to others and unjustified, but in a situation where melee have secondary place perhaps those observation may also delayed.

[Mephos]

I think there should be an option to finished the enemies' unfinished buildings instead of of just destroying them. Especially if those buildings are civic centres or harbours.

[Hannibal_Barca]

46 minutes ago, Mephos said:

I think there should be an option to finished the enemies' unfinished buildings instead of of just destroying them. Especially if those buildings are civic centres or harbours.

Meaning foundation capture?

[Mephos]

Is that what it is called? What I am talking about is supposing you meet the enemy building a civic centre and you kill them, what happens afterwards is  you destroy what they were building. I think there should be an option to continue the work and claim it as yours. If that is foundation capture, then yes I would like that.

 

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

3 hours ago, Mephos said:

I think there should be an option to finished the enemies' unfinished buildings instead of of just destroying them. Especially if those buildings are civic centres or harbours.

 

1 hour ago, Mephos said:

Is that what it is called? What I am talking about is supposing you meet the enemy building a civic centre and you kill them, what happens afterwards is  you destroy what they were building. I think there should be an option to continue the work and claim it as yours. If that is foundation capture, then yes I would like that.

 

 

While that is interesting and would be cool, I think it might introduce additional gameplay ramifications I'd rather not have to deal with. Forward building is already pretty dangerous, and this would make it even more dangerous. That's just one ramification off the top of my head.

[Lion.Kanzen]

How are you with next release gameplay features?

Ande next alpha road map?

Some  was  working in conversions. 

What about some siege features like or  some counters like Buildings vs units and units vs buildings or new units or support units.