My idea for counter system.

[borg-]

Well, this has been discussed for some time, quite simply I'll put my idea of a counter system. I prefer a hard system where the bonus is high, and you have to use your units wisely, making it almost impossible to win a game with only one type of unit (which happens for some time).

Spearman: 3x - All Cavalry;

Pikeman: 4x - All Cavalry;

Swordman: 2.5x - All Infantry;

Archers: 1.5x - All Infantry;

Cavalry Swordman: 1.50x - All Ranged (including ranged cavalry);

Cavalry Archer: 1.25x - All cavalry, All Infantry;

Cavalry Spearman: 2.0x - All Cavalry;

Cavalry Skirmisher: 2.0x vs Ranged Infantry;

Skirmishers: 2.5x - Ranged Infantry;

Slingers: 2.0x - Ranged Infantry;

The system includes champions.

It is clear that the values may be smaller, but all in equal proportions.

Of course, the system requires some changes in the overall balance.

 

 

Edited August 8, 2017 by borg-

[borg-]

We have to keep in mind that the units will need new values, for example, skimirsher cav can never have an attack of 18, it should only be effective against a type of unit, so the general attack of the units will probably be lower.

Edited August 8, 2017 by borg-

[Lion.Kanzen]

Lancer tier ( Cataphract and shock cavalry with powerful armor and resistency vs heavy swordman infantry. But more slower than Carthage lancers.

 Are missing cavalry bonus vs siege units except bolt shooter.

add to the mix defensive buildings.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

2 hours ago, borg- said:

Well, this has been discussed for some time, quite simply I'll put my idea of a counter system. I prefer a hard system where the bonus is high, and you have to use your units wisely, making it almost impossible to win a game with only one type of unit (which happens for some time).

Spearman: 3x - All Cavalry;

Pikeman: 4x - All Cavalry;

Swordman: 2.5x - All Infantry;

Archers: 1.5x - All Infantry;

Cavalry Swordman: 1.50x - All Ranged (including ranged cavalry);

Cavalry Archer: 1.25x - All cavalry, All Infantry;

Cavalry Spearman: 2.0x - All Cavalry;

Cavalry Skirmisher: 2.0x vs Ranged Infantry;

Skirmishers: 2.5x - Ranged Infantry;

Slingers: 2.0x - Ranged Infantry;

The system includes champions.

It is clear that the values may be smaller, but all in equal proportions.

Of course, the system requires some changes in the overall balance.

 

 

Hmm I feel like with counters that strong there's no way say 100 hoplites could kill 60 swordsmen. The hoplites would nearly always lose no matter the realistic advantage they have. 

 

Also you have cav archers countering everything. 

Edited August 8, 2017 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[Lion.Kanzen]

Merle cavalry must deal with them and Bolst shooter must insta kill but cavalry can take down is a double K.O.

[sphyrth]

Women > Siege Weapons

Who says women are weak?

[Lion.Kanzen]

Your counter system works fine @wowgetoffyourcellphone But javelin cavalry can be better vs other ranged may be archers.

 

[Servo]

It's nice to have counter system like this but A22 unit/s balanced are not too bad. It only needs some tweaks. Civs need some bonus tweaks too. 

Nowadays skirmisher cavalries are told to be OP, maybe yes, maybe not. It is still hard to execute if you are not quick or skilled. The good thing about skirmisher cavalry OP is that some decent players could compete with the best and will encourage more players. 

I played with almost all civs but Romans and Macedonians are really in the disadvantage right now because they don't have skirmisher cavalry. Somehow their starting melee cavalry gets hurt by elephants, boars and other food producing animals. IMO we need to tweak a bit just make skirmisher cavalry less OP on most if not all skirm cav civs. 

Examples of tweaks are:

1. Require metal for every range units except slingers. More metals for civs with starting bonus like Mauryans, Gauls, Britons and Iberians.

2. Tweak the melee cavalry attack to say from 3.5 seconds to 2. 

3. Tweak the skirm cavalry or any range units to have a minimum distance to launch their weapons. 

4. Reduce starting bonuses for civs having those. 

Thats it for now. 

[Nescio]

6 minutes ago, Servo said:

1. Require metal for every range units except slingers. More metals for civs with starting bonus like Mauryans, Gauls, Britons and Iberians.

2. Tweak the melee cavalry attack to say from 3.5 seconds to 2. 

3. Tweak the skirm cavalry or any range units to have a minimum distance to launch their weapons. 

4. Reduce starting bonuses for civs having those.

1. This would probably do more harm than good. Personally I use civilian ranged infantry from the start for wood cutting, because melee infantry is simply moving too slowly. Adding a metal cost would severly disrupt setting up an early economy.

2. Personally I would prefer to normalize the attack rate of *all* human soldiers to 1 second. This would make it significantly easier to compare individual units and to tweak or rebalance things.

3. If I recall correctly, ranged units used to have minimum range, which was removed.

4. In principle a good idea, although it depends on the details whether or not it would have any effect.

[Servo]

My point is to reduce the OP of any Civ trying to raid and neutralize the opponent in very early stage of the game. For A22 you make infantry as priority you will lose early especially if you are in the frontline. You have Romans or Macedonians you will lose too if skills are even. You have an OP team but you have Romans/Macedonians your losing percentage is very high if the skills won't differ too much. 

Now if you you require metal for units who really use metal even the slingers if they have metal armor then unit production is limited and not enough to wreck havoc on their opponents. For example if 10 metals are required for any cavalry and another increments if they upgrade in ranks or by techs then it will be harder to produce massive raiders. The skirmisher cavs are very effective only when you have lots of them. I use a minimum of 20 when raiding pocket players and good players but boomers. In Africa Plains they are really OP because of too many animals for hunts. Mauryans is becoming too powerful with mobile dropsites and less wood for houses if all players stay in phase 1 much longer. 

 

BTW the developers should disable the identity of the players on the diplomacy options when the game settings is random Civs because the game could mostly end shorter in A22 just my opinion.  Though it's easy to scout enemy camps but this identity could aid a good Civ player early on the game. 

[Lion.Kanzen]

2 minutes ago, Servo said:

BTW the developers should disable the identity of the players on the diplomacy options when the game settings is random Civs because the game could mostly end shorter in A22 just my opinion.  Though it's easy to scout enemy camps but this identity could aid a good Civ player early on the game. 

You mean like RoN, that was good feature...but

[Grugnas]

What mainly concerns me about a counter system is that every unit would need new attributes in order to best fit the new bonuses resulting in a time consuming work and a deep testing.

There is already a good base to work on, thus a focused tweak would make the job.

What could come in hand? an explicit explanation of which units are supposed to be good against. Selecting a building then placing the cursor over the icon of an unit in the production menu may show the pros and cons of such unit (f.e.     for swordsmen:  strong against spearmen, weak against skirmishers,  for skirmishers: strong against melee infantry, weak against sword cavalry) or at least a supposed usage of the unit instead of the historical description (thing that could be interesting to read while observing a game  thus showed in the structure tree).

There is a too high gap between melee cavalry and ranged cavalry and this is noticeable especially on the hunt. 6 skirmisher cavalry can hunt down animals and defend with too much ease thereby the amount of food provided by hunt is so much profitable that civs relying on other type of cavalry in early game would be too behind in their food production.

Perhaps all the skirmishers (thus including skirmisher infantry) could have a hunting bonus (slaughter bonus) in order to allow other civs to have a decent hunting potential by hunting with a bunch of infantry skirmishers then using spear cavalry to gather the food. Spear cavalry would also be a decent counter hunting/cavalry unit with a bonus against cavalry (1.25x bonus would be good enough) and a slightly lower attack rate (3.5 sec it definitely too much since they potentially lose against infantry swordsmen).

Sword Cavalry perhaps could have a slightly bonus against ranged infantry units since more than often they are outnumbered by ranged units and poked with ease. In the current state sword cavalry are just a better version of spear cavalry units in any situation.

[Servo]

RoN is different because the game strategy is too deep and each Civ has bonuses that can be utilized immediately. Knowing each other's identify is very crucial. Mostly you can know within a minute or 2 but in than span of time you have made lots of decisions already that it's quite hard to alter.

0AD is pretty straight forward that you don't care about your enemy Civ very much except if they are Romans or Macedonians in current alpha(22). 

[Lion.Kanzen]

2 minutes ago, Grugnas said:

What mainly concerns me about a counter system is that every unit would need new attributes in order to best fit the new bonuses resulting in a time consuming work and a deep testing.

There is already a good base to work on, thus a focused tweak would make the job.

What could come in hand? an explicit explanation of which units are supposed to be good against. Selecting a building then placing the cursor over the icon of an unit in the production menu may show the pros and cons of such unit (f.e.     for swordsmen:  strong against spearmen, weak against skirmishers,  for skirmishers: strong against melee infantry, weak against sword cavalry) or at least a supposed usage of the unit instead of the historical description (thing that could be interesting to read while observing a game  thus showed in the structure tree).

There is a too high gap between melee cavalry and ranged cavalry and this is noticeable especially on the hunt. 6 skirmisher cavalry can hunt down animals and defend with too much ease thereby the amount of food provided by hunt is so much profitable that civs relying on other type of cavalry in early game would be too behind in their food production.

Perhaps all the skirmishers (thus including skirmisher infantry) could have a hunting bonus (slaughter bonus) in order to allow other civs to have a decent hunting potential by hunting with a bunch of infantry skirmishers then using spear cavalry to gather the food. Spear cavalry would also be a decent counter hunting/cavalry unit with a bonus against cavalry (1.25x bonus would be good enough) and a slightly lower attack rate (3.5 sec it definitely too much since they potentially lose against infantry swordsmen).

Sword Cavalry perhaps could have a slightly bonus against ranged infantry units since more than often they are outnumbered by ranged units and poked with ease. In the current state sword cavalry are just a better version of spear cavalry units in any situation.

We can test something similar in Delenda Est mod.

-----------

Servo we are getting off topic over here. diplomacy isn't related here.

[fatherbushido]

All that work had already be done many times (and is also done in some mods).

IIrc, one of the final version in 2004 was something like that.

Uhm.

----------

But around 2014 (I won't quote),

people came to the conclusion that the game needs rebalanced and combat refocused on things that make combat interesting. RPS type of combat ignore combat mechanics and just consists in learning a whole graph.

----------

If people really want to go with hard counter, they can imo nuke most of the stats, even civ bonus or things like that.

-------

(by the way, I am more annoyed by the fact that graphical equipment doesn't reflect stats...)

------

What I am for is the other option, work on features and mechanics to allow a better gameplay experience.

So:

instead of

      <Bonuses>
        <BonusCavMelee>
          <Classes>Cavalry</Classes>
          <Multiplier>3.0</Multiplier>
        </BonusCavMelee>
      </Bonuses>

 

[Lion.Kanzen]

I was thinking the same, charging and run. And double K.O

 

for example Heavy lancer (Cataphract type) can be beating for weak slinger. But slinger have less armor to hold a melé combat.

Cataphract can win if they catch slinger but slinger can win  if are more than one and if are in inaccesible terrains for Cataphrsct.

other double can be heavy infantry vs archer , if they success catch , bye-bye archer, this is how in real life work.

 

Yesterday  Delenda Est show me the counter is possibly. Romans spam 2 types units. I spam their counter.

to make counter possibly we need examples, real life or abstraction like AoE.

 

the armor and blacksmith must be more relevant. Some special units can solve some abuses.

 

[borg-]

I'm sure my system works because very similar systems are working on other rts, and also for the lot of experience I have with 0 a.d and other rts. If accepted, with adjustments in the balancing, we could make it work very well, I'm sure.

[borg-]

This type of system can also give versatility to the game. You do not need to have the same 3x for all spearmans, sparta for example for u history, can have something like 3.5x.

 

Edited August 10, 2017 by borg-

[Grugnas]

31 minutes ago, fatherbushido said:

All that work had already be done many times (and is also done in some mods).

IIrc, one of the final version in 2004 was something like that.

 

this is a good inspiration to work on the question, considering also the economical contribute they can give.

I agree on the usage of features like trample and run to achieve victories in a complex and intriguing strategical way, still there is the need to achieve almost the same result without those. Indeed slingers were strong against units too, resulting in a dead end strategy. I am not against the idea of having them as hybrid between a building crushing oriented unit and a medium range unit as far as they are counterable (for example while skirmisher infantry fail against slingers, skirmisher cavalry may win thanks to their high hp.)

[Nescio]

That graphical representation looks nice, however, it could probably be achieved without hard bonus attack multipliers, just by carefully assigning and tweaking balanced stats. Given that the game is still in alpha stage, it is a waste of time to do that now, better wait a few years, until gameplay features such as charges, formations, etc are implemented and have proven to work properly.

Then there is the question of what is intrinsically important. I fully agree with the statements that the focus should be on a dynamic, flexible, and balanced system. Personally I consider damage counters merely an instrument, which can augment balance when used in moderation (e.g. the proposed "Swordman: 2.5x - All Infantry;" would do more harm than good); sometimes it could helpful to give certain units actually a damage penalty vs others. However, counters are not intrinsic objectives, they're just a tool to assist in achieving balance.

Furthermore, having hard counters makes the game more rigid and less versatile, realistic, and historically accurate. Three examples:
i. in Antiquity, missiles were highly ineffective vs heavy infantry, merely a nuisance, not really deadly at all; however, when the melee infantry was fleeing from the battlefield, ranged light infantry and cavalry was at the advantage in the pursuit and could kill many by shooting them down
ii. a direct frontal cavalry charge at a formation of pikemen would be suicidal if the formation holds, but if the formation breaks, the cavalry can easily massacre the fleeing pikemen with minimal cavalry losses
iii. nimble melee cavalry (OAD's cavalry swordsmen) was very often used to chase away and kill ranged light infantry on flat terrain, however, on rugged terrain skirmishers or massed foot archers have often massacred cavalry
In my opinion both situations of each example ought to be possible in 0A.D.; assigning a high hard counter of one unit type against another would prevent this and would therefore be highly undesirable.

Edited August 10, 2017 by Nescio

[Lion.Kanzen]

If my memory don't fail, there are planned/or a ticket   something like frontal,sides and rear.

infantry can be weak from behind. And bunch of archers can defeat heavy sword infantry. If they try to retreat can be have more injuries and casualties 

 

here formation like testudo or battalions enter a tactics, they can hold a attack forming testudo, wall shield, etc.

[Lion.Kanzen]

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameplayFeatureStatus

 

It doesn't have a ticket but is planned.

[sphyrth]

Let's see if I have things in better perspective:

1. Charging, Trampling, Bonus by Formation, and Battalions - All of these were intended to replace the Counter System.
2. The nagging problem is that either these features aren't yet implemented or are too buggy to be used (i.e. Formations)... even after after 6(?) Alphas.
3. It ended up as if the Counter System was nuked instead of replaced, and we have some players & devs wanting them back.

Last time I said that I couldn't care less if either there was a Counter System or not.

But given the current situation, I think they should be put back in as a placeholder for the planned battle system.

[temple]

I think in general I would prefer to have gameplay that naturally results in the counters we want, rather than having explicit bonuses. But of course some might be necessary.

We already have hack/pierce/crush damage and armor which takes care of some balance. E.g., siege is good against buildings and other units aren't, ranged units are terrible against siege, etc.

There are planned things that can take care of other issues.

• Secondary attacks (#252, D368) would for example give a minimum range to ranged units, which I think is a better solution for melee > archers rather than the current way of giving them less dramatically less health and armor (it's a 3x difference). The idea is if melee units get close enough to ranged units then they'll be forced to use their inferior secondary melee attack.
• Trample damage (#995) aura for cavalry, so they are better against infantry. Also charge attack (#994), but maybe the effects are similar enough so that trample damage would be enough. Or maybe not. (Charge attack could be a way to differentiate spear cav and sword cav, which are currently the same unit just with different stats.)
• But also make cavalry obstructions bigger (#4516 is chariots) so that massed infantry can surround them. Imagine how good elephants would be if you could fit them as closely together as infantry! This goes in the opposite direction, and not as extreme. But along with attack/armor/health adjustments, maybe we wouldn't even need the spear bonus against cavalry. Note that already melee units have different ranges (sword 2m, spear 4m, pike 8m), so spears and pikes should be able to attack two or three deep. But in practice that doesn't really happen because units stop at their max range rather than walking forward to make room for units behind them.
• Some changes to ranged units: elevation bonus (#4028, which I've just submitted D781 for) and ballistics. Currently units aim at moving targets just as accurately as stationary ones, which really shouldn't be the case. If we change that then ranged units would naturally be less effective versus fast-moving cavalry. (Cavalry have large footprints, so right now archers hit them more easily than infantry.) This would help against early raids, since for example jav cav wouldn't hit fleeing women as often. And it would probably help with hunting, too.

Edited August 11, 2017 by temple

[Servo]

There seems to be not much problem to unit balance except the very OP mechanical siege weapons(hoping women will really counter them). 

The main problem imo is just the ability to mass produce these organic units that could ensure a player/team victory early on. It's nice to watch or play with cavalries or special units early but so frustrating if they are wrecking havoc that makes the raided player to just sigh. 

At least if metal is required to produce these units (for ex 10 each cav more on sword cav) they can only produce maximum of 10 units until they mine, then strategy is added like team tributes. 10 skirm cav won't hurt a raided player much except if you have Borg skills or you are doubled. Nor these mass raiders are very effective after P2 when defenses are put up. 

Been spectating so many games last night and I can see that few raiders(10 or less) don't really devastate the player and the game is still undecided until the final phases and become interesting.  These devastating raids are only very effective (imo and little experience) when you have 20 units or more. Ten below you need another partner to neutralize an enemy. Then the game becomes interesting if there were less devastating raids.

I had quite a lot of previous games that hope to upload and players last night can tell when they review  their games. The ones in particular are the games of Boudicca, iapprove, JorgeGijon, and Pretension vs Borg, niegel, gabrielponti, Boyca. Then the next one temple, pretension, kisiton and Phoenix vs Borg, niegel, causative and D_wayne. Hope they can upload it. Maybe my bad as spec to tell causative to produce skirm cavs as Seleucid then raid or maybe he knows what to do but the result was very impressive  (with D_wayne help coz less than 10 cavs) than his previous game. They neutralize kisiton (and his quite op team) who did not make skirm cavs while in the enemy edge.

I'm not a pro player but I had quite a few games that took down 2 pros on a 1v1 easily not because I'm good but rather the effect of these mass raiders. I had couple 2v2, 3v3, with pros or good players that just last less than 30 minutes with fair amount of actions that could tell that the A22 is quite fine except mass production of units (and op siege units) early on or later.