Please reduce speed of battering ram

[Thelegionare]

Ok, i just tried out the lastest version. Everything is so good so far but it seems battering ram speed is way too high and unrealistic. They have almost the same speed as light infantry. I don't mind the fact that it is hard to be destroyed and deals lots of damage to buildings but the speed is way too high. Please reduce it. Everyone who is familiar with history knows that battering ram is a very heavy siege engine, it should not be as mobile  or move as fast as currently depicted in the game. Thanks

Edited June 9, 2018 by Thelegionare

[superflytom]

I totally agree with this. It seems insane that my infantry struggle to keep up with a ram that must weigh tons! It leaves factions that lack sword cavalry with effectively an invulnerable attacking enemy.

Thanks for bringing this up @Thelegionare

[aeonios]

After looking at the files you're right. They have a relative speed of 0.9, which is actually faster than pikemen. Siege towers have a relative speed of 0.7 by comparison, which is a little slower than pikemen. Given that only melee units can damage them and given that melee units are generally slower than ranged units, that's pretty ridiculous.

[fatherbushido]

4 minutes ago, aeonios said:

given that melee units are generally slower than ranged units

It's currently not the case (iirc).

[aeonios]

8 minutes ago, fatherbushido said:

It's currently not the case (iirc).

Most melee units have a relative speed of 1.0, while archers are 1.1, slingers 1.2 and skirms 1.4, AFAIK.

[fatherbushido]

I meant it's not always the case ;-)

 

[fatherbushido]

 

 

 

Edited June 11, 2018 by fatherbushido

[nosilver4u]

Just to add my two cents as a newcomer (fresh perspective and all that), I just destroyed an AI player with 12 rams. Used nothing else, and finished with 5-6 rams intact. Granted, it was against a "very easy" AI as I'm still getting my feet wet, but I was surprised at the massive damage combined with the AI's inability to destroy the rams. Part of this might have been the civ I was playing against, I captured one of their civic centers and they did not appear to have anything but ranged units available. I'm not sure which one that is, but perhaps they are week on the "hack" units and that made it worse. For context, the AI did control half the map and was about as well developed as it was going to get on that difficulty (I like to let games play out for a while, especially since I'm learning).

At any rate, I think lowering the speed would definitely help. It seemed that swordsman could take out rams, but everything else pretty much just fell down in front of them or ran to hide. It also seemed that they dealt quite a bit more damage than I expected (coming from AoE II), but perhaps that's historically more accurate than the damage in AoE.

[andy5995]

@elexis I could create a ticket for this. I'd work on it. Is this a desired patch?

[elexis]

Balancing is very delicate, I don't want to burn my fingers with that unless there is powerful evidence for the balancing not resulting in 10m high waves of complaints. It's easy to type a different number, but it takes the best players of the lobby to determine if it should be 10% greater or smaller.

[borg-]

Why we did not invest in something smarter, a new upgrade, "flamming arrows", deals extra damage vs sieges and perhaps also against buildings, this would make battering rams much more vulnerable, archers would become an interesting and important unit, and encourage players play with archers civ (little used at the moment).

Edited August 14, 2018 by borg-

[RomuloSinRemo]

100 archers taking down all the city. seem op

[Lion.Kanzen]

58 minutes ago, borg- said:

Why we did not invest in something smarter, a new upgrade, "flamming arrows", deals extra damage vs sieges and perhaps also against buildings, this would make battering rams much more vulnerable, archers would become an interesting and important unit, and encourage players play with archers civ (little used at the moment).

I prefer an ability  to waste (energy/stamina or chemistry/oil)

[Guest]

Or perhaps we can make building destruction more realistic. All units (melee and range) could throw torches or something at buildings from a range. AoE3 mechanic for those wondering.

edit: I might actually do some experiments in a mod.

Edited August 14, 2018 by Guest

[borg-]

51 minutes ago, RomuloSinRemo said:

100 archers taking down all the city. seem op

It depends on the values,  i thought of something like crush 1.5x, similar to slingers. Slingers have 1.0x but higher dps.

Would be very acceptable values, not make it super op, it requires a good amount of archers to be effective.

 

[Hannibal_Barca]

1 hour ago, (-_-) said:

Or perhaps we can make building destruction more realistic. All units (melee and range) could throw torches or something at buildings from a range. AoE3 mechanic for those wondering.

edit: I might actually do some experiments in a mod.

Like total war units firing gates?

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

11 hours ago, elexis said:

Balancing is very delicate, I don't want to burn my fingers with that unless there is powerful evidence for the balancing not resulting in 10m high waves of complaints. It's easy to type a different number, but it takes the best players of the lobby to determine if it should be 10% greater or smaller.

It would take 5 mins to make a mod and test it out. Could even be added to the mod.io list and let players, you know, playtest. That was one of the selling points of making modding so integral to these alpha releases right? So balancing work could be done by hundreds instead of a handful?  

I reiterate that it is my opinion that fine tuned balancing discussions are worthless at this juncture, unless there is some kind of gross imbalance. The question is whether battering rams are grossly imbalanced (I think they are). 

So, let's make 2 "official" balancing mods. One where the battering ram speed is reduced, and one where they can't attack soldiers. Get people to test them out and then they can report back here. That's the real way to "balance" these things. Another mod could be adding @borg-'s flaming arrows idea. 

Or you can play Delenda Est where battering ram speed has been reduced for over a year and flaming arrows have been implemented for a couple civs in some circumstances for a long time too.  

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Hannibal_Barca said:

Like total war units firing gates?

If its the same as min 1:28 of this video, then yes. Contrary to a lot of AoE fans, I actually liked AoE3. Maybe its because of the fact that it depicts a very interesting time frame for me.

 

[elexis]

2 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I reiterate that it is my opinion that fine tuned balancing discussions are worthless. The question is whether battering rams are grossly imbalanced.

Preventing 100 lines of complaint each day for half a year is worth a lot of additional testing time. So I agree that the question is whether there is gross imbalance.

2 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

It would take 5 mins to make a mod and test it out

It takes a number of matches, not minutes to test the balance, i.e. more hours.

2 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

So balancing work could be done by hundreds instead of a handful?

Sometimes balancing issues are unambiguous, but I have seen many balancing discussions about concrete balancing patches on code.wildfiregames.com (not the forums) where one gets 15 opinions by 10 players, so increasing the pool to 100 players might give you 200 opinions. So unless it's unambiguous, one might have to work with forensic evidence or trust.

Players who are the most competitive ones in the lobby have the best qualification to judge, it was them fixing the grossly imbalanced units in the last alphas. I'm not even trusting my own judgement in most cases.

3 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

That was one of the selling points of making modding so integral to these alpha releases right?

Being able to download and install mods easily is extremely powerful and can help if there is a grossly imbalanced unit. Unless everyone is using the same balancing mod however, one doesn't have the freedom to chose the lobby games, not the freedom to chose with whom to play (which is one of the most decisive factors as to why people play currently).

3 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

The question is whether battering rams are grossly imbalanced (I think they are).  

My impression was that it was just right, maybe 15% off in the attack speed, but not so much more. You have to consider that they have to be able to break multiple layers of walls, not only some houses and a CC.

In particular their attack speed is comparable to elephants no? So isn't it rather a problem of missing swordsmen of the defenders? They melt within few strikes if one hasn't neglected that the enemy will have to train rams.

(What does seem overpowered are massed ranged siege engines - one can't get even get close to them with a huge army before everything died off. Rams seem like the best unit to counter in my experience. But the problem of massed units is universal, so not sure what one could do there.)

Anyhow, I put my imaginary money on the players better than me to judge that

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

4 minutes ago, elexis said:

Preventing 100 lines of complaint each day for half a year is worth a lot of additional testing time.

Well, yeah, people have been complaining about rams for a loooong time.

4 minutes ago, elexis said:

It takes a number of matches, not minutes to test the balance, i.e. more hours.

Minutes to make the mods. The hours of testing don't need to be done by you or stan or the 1 or 2 other active guys.

5 minutes ago, elexis said:

Players who are the most competitive ones in the lobby have the best qualification to judge

In general, maybe. Likely, they are the best to just what is best for competitive play. 90% of your user base are probably not very competitive. Though, 90% of those probably would not have any idea why they're not liking the balance, only that the gameplay feels unbalanced or bad or frustrating.

7 minutes ago, elexis said:

You have to consider that they have to be able to break multiple layers of walls

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Barely anyone even uses walls.  But honestly, I think rams should be more about attacking walls and other defenses, specifically bringing down gates. But we have yet to construct a meta where the player actually is incentivized to use walls and build proper cities. That's what the "normies" and "casuals" do after all.  

[Stan`]

If we ever have #2577 the one thing I'd want is doors independent from the walls. Then we could make destructions variant for them too.

[elexis]

11 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Well, yeah, people have been complaining about rams for a loooong time.

New players on the forums yes, on the lobby Ive never seen a single complaint.

13 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

90% of your user base are probably not very competitive

If it's player error, it should be addressed by informing the player better. For defending against rams, we may also consider giving more civs easier access to sword units (or new upgrades or whatever)

14 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Barely anyone even uses walls

It's refering to the historic reason why they were buffed (it's a big part of the announcement and even in the trailer...). Siege engines were inherently incapable of breaking well fortified players and then games could not conclude. Now it's the better player (or AI) being able to destroy the opponent, fortified or not. One requirement of siege balancing is to not have walls become useless nor overpowered, but just right.

22 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

But we have yet to construct a meta where the player actually is incentivized to use walls

Walls are quite effective if they are used correctly. It's just that a big army is more useful first and then the walls come after that, economically. What do you need a wall for if the player can just walk around it. If you make walling too cheap, then it will be too easy to fortify and possibly result in a stalemate.

If players want to have walls before they have an economy to afford them, they usually do contracts to first build a base for some time (if they didn't discover the ceasefire setting yet).

22 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I think rams should be more about attacking walls and other defenses, specifically bringing down gates

Possibly. (Note gates are incentivized already to be attacked, as they have less HP.)

I wonder if it isn't the AI spamming rams that people complain about, rather than multiplayer. The AI does economic cheating, so it might be that this is one source of the issue.

[Hannibal_Barca]

22 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Barely anyone even uses walls.

Not helped by the "no walls" rule established in alpha20 (due to some miscreant blatantly abusing wall turrets)

 

Of course rams are faster than it would be historically plausible

But so are all siege, and I agree with this unrealistic aspect.

Just imagine playing with siege towers when their crawl is barely noticable, rams plodding along and getting nowhere compared to the distance needed to reach cities that don't have walls (rams vs houses yay!)

Then an elephant comes along and wrecks everything in 2s, goes on to demolish everything in sight (great siege in this game)

 

Change this and you'd need to change half a game to get things right

And at the end someone is not going to be satisfied and suggest we fix this

80% chance that it'll take several releases to get something of this magnitude done, finally leaving us with more grumpy (sorry) people

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

3 minutes ago, elexis said:

Walls are quite effective if they are used correctly.

In the like 100 matches I've seen casted on Youtube, I can't remember a single player actually building a curtain of walls, but I'm not sure if that's a whole other discussion or if siege weapons should be discussed in concert with walls. 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

2 minutes ago, Hannibal_Barca said:

Not helped by the "no walls" rule established in alpha20 (due to some miscreant blatantly abusing wall turrets)

 

Is that even a problem anymore?