Is everybody ok with how rams work?

[alre]

Hello everybody, I'm a long time follower, first time poster. First of all I have to thanks the developers for the continued amazing work! The game is not perfect yet, but it actually may be the one of its genre that gives most importance to real strategy in a multiplayer setting, which is an impressive achievement. 

I've been told that a new alpha is going to be relaesed and that rams are being reworked a little, but does this mean that they will only be unable to attack troops? Is there any other planned change? Honestly, the way rams work at now perplexes me a lot, and this is a feeling I share with my friends (we play team games together), so I wanted to ask if anybody else agrees with me here: at present stage, if one or more rams are attacking my place, and I only have spearmen and ranged units, I can do almost nothing to stop them. I can use slingers and women more or less effectively, but really, it makes no sense that spearmen are powerless. Is this a byproduct of hack/pierce/dunno mechanich, or is it a wanted feature?

To me, it would make a lot more sense if any melee unit would be able to destroy or convert a ram easy, I also have in mind a reworking proposal that wouldn't need too much work, would make rams a lot more realistic, and would solve the problem without sacrificing gameplay balance, but first I wanted to know if you too see the problem.

[Grapjas]

I think they are in an OK place... sword bearers are the most efficient against rams. But it would be cool if a ram could only move and attack if it has units garrisoned inside it. The troops pushing the rams inside can be attacked by anything but should get heavy armor bonusses for being in cover. If there is no one inside it, it simply does nothing. For balancing purposes it shouldnt be able to get stolen though, but still be able to get destroyed if empty. 

 

That said though, becareful to not use pike units instead of spears against them because they have a very weak attack overall. 

Edited January 1, 2021 by Grapjas

[borg-]

I am part of the balancing team. Rams can no longer attack organic units.

Some "new" units like maceman and axeman can make a good dmg vs siege units.

Edited January 1, 2021 by borg-

[alre]

16 hours ago, Grapjas said:

%I think they are in an OK place... sword bearers are the most efficient against rams. But it would be cool if a ram could only move and attack if it has units garrisoned inside it. The troops pushing the rams inside can be attacked by anything but should get heavy armor bonusses for being in cover. If there is no one inside it, it simply does nothing. For balancing purposes it shouldnt be able to get stolen though, but still be able to get destroyed if empty. 

 

That said though, becareful to not use pike units instead of spears against them because they have a very weak attack overall. 

I like the idea! I had a similar one some time ago, but I would probably prefer if rams were still able to move with no unit inside, that would be easier for newcomers. Anyway, I support it if it's being implemented. The fact that spearmen are useless against rams is still problematic though IMHO.

13 hours ago, borg- said:

I am part of the balancing team. Rams can no longer attack organic units.

Some "new" units like maceman and axeman can make a good dmg vs siege units.

Thanks for the answer, nice addings! However, why is that maces and swords are good against rams, and spears are not? This looks to me rather arbitrary and completely out of history, correct me if I'm wrong.

Now, these are my ideas:

First option is simple and very much AoE-like: rethink hack/pierce/crash system in a way that hack is 80 to 100% of any melee attack. My personal opinion is that this would only be for the better.

Second option: we make rams easy enough to conquer, even if there's people inside. This way any group of soldiers that's close to it and is big enuogh could counter it. If conquering is an issue for balancing reasons, we could make that conquered rams die instantly. We could make that people inside rams (and non fortified buildings?) get damaged when under conquest, that would be more realistic. There is plenty of solutions if we want this fix, and it doesn't seem to me like they are much work either.

Edited January 2, 2021 by alre

[Grapjas]

Few things I'd like to add to this though, is that spears are very unlikely to do much dmg against a ram from a logical and realistic pov I guess. Swords, maybe little more effective, but still horrible and no one would want to blunt his sword like that (made for cutting flesh, even sucks against armor). Blunt weapons have a large force that can actually offer very good penetration, so that makes kind of sense in actually breaking a ram. I believe a blunt weapon is a heavy armored persons worst enemy, and a sword would be the best case scenario for him. Axes is self explanatory. 

Also spears being mostly pierce dmg seems accurate to me. Though i do wish pierce dmg had more unique charactistics. Spears can kill rams, just not efficient.

Some ingame tips: Try to always have at least 20 swords garrisoned to counter rams and don't use them for anything else. Theres only 1 civ that doesn't have swords (mace), all other civs counter rams just fine with swords.

 

[badosu]

As an abstraction rams are fine as they currently are. The ideal state being to garrison men and killing men inside to disable ram.

Rams armor are being nerfed in a24. It would be nice to see log-ram implemented for p2. Similar to xiongnu in terra magna

[alre]

If it was someone decent at his job to make the structure of the ram, no man waved blunt weapon can ever destroy it. Not to mention swords.

I've always assumed that attacking a ram was a representation of the soldiers killing the people inside of it, they aren't tanks! I don't know guys, it feels a lot weird to me, and also this is the only game that has this mechanic.

Edited January 2, 2021 by alre

[badosu]

7 hours ago, alre said:

If it was someone decent at his job to make the structure of the ram, no man waved blunt weapon can ever destroy it. Not to mention swords.

I've always assumed that attacking a ram was a representation of the soldiers killing the people inside of it, they aren't tanks! I don't know guys, it feels a lot weird to me,

Yes. Ideally the ram would be "dead" the moment enemy units reached it. Properly it should be guarded with meat shields but for the scale of at most a couple hundred fighting units it's a compromise with gameplay. Ironically it's one of the few siege units s that makes sense to be capturable.

 

7 hours ago, alre said:

and also this is the only game that has this mechanic

I think I didn't understand this comment. Most RTS in the medieval era have rams that can be killed even with arrows.

Would be nice to have flaming arrows or a torching mechanic for melee units to kill rams tho

[alre]

9 hours ago, badosu said:

I think I didn't understand this comment. Most RTS in the medieval era have rams that can be killed even with arrows.

I mean the fact that you have to spare some particular units for killing siege machines, as the other melee units are not effective against them, whis mechanic is nowere to be found in other RTS. In AoE for instance, rams have high ranged units armor, but low melee armor, so any melee unit can damage it quickly enough, this is the first solution I mentioned above:

22 hours ago, alre said:

First option is simple and very much AoE-like: rethink hack/pierce/crash system in a way that hack is 80 to 100% of any melee attack. My personal opinion is that this would only be for the better.

 

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

1 hour ago, alre said:

mean the fact that you have to spare some particular units for killing siege machines, as the other melee units are not effective against them, whis mechanic is nowere to be found in other RTS. In AoE for instance, rams have high ranged units armor, but low melee armor, so any melee unit can damage it quickly enough, this is the first solution I mentioned above:

Agreed.  In a topic I wrote entitled 'The Problem with Sword/Spear Units' I basically outlined the fact that differentiating between these two types of soldiers merely based on their weapons has little basis in history and hardly even functions well from a gameplay standpoint since spear units are by and large ineffective cavalry counters.  

Essentially the underlying logic of why spear units are bad versus rams and buildings is because they use a pierce attack, which rams have a good deal of armour versus.  This of course is meant to be an intuitive choice but leads to this strange outcome.  If I were to rectify this, I think that all attacks should be reclassified as melee, ranged, and siege to better help players understand their purposes.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

5 minutes ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

melee, ranged, and siege

hack, pierce, crush already do this, it's just WFG stubbornly does not want to fix spearmen attack to align with this.

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

9 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

hack, pierce, crush already do this, it's just WFG stubbornly does not want to fix spearmen attack to align with this.

They do do that, but the reason that WFG chose to give spearmen pierce attack to begin with was because well... most of the time spears pierce.  It's a case of making a thing intuitive on paper that is much less so in relation to the game.  The reason I prefer melee, ranged, and siege is that there is little doubt about how these work, which I consider grounds enough to make it an objectively better improvement.  Granted, hack, pierce, and crush are fine and perhaps good enough to not warrant bothering with a change, but it's because of these terms that the problem existed to begin with for vanilla 0 A.D.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

3 minutes ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

They do do that, but the reason that WFG chose to give spearmen pierce attack to begin with was because well... most of the time spears pierce.  It's a case of making a thing intuitive on paper that is much less so in relation to the game.  The reason I prefer melee, ranged, and siege is that there is little doubt about how these work, which I consider grounds enough to make it an objectively better improvement.  Granted, hack, pierce, and crush are fine and perhaps good enough to not warrant bothering with a change, but it's because of these terms that the problem existed to begin with for vanilla 0 A.D.

Right. If it's a simple change in terminology then I'm okay with doing it if it's more intuitive. The change from Armor to "Resistance" made things less intuitive IMHO. But I think changing Hack, Pierce, and Crush to Melee, Ranged, and Siege can be okay, if that makes WFG fix spearmen. lmao

[hyperion]

3 minutes ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

They do do that, but the reason that WFG chose to give spearmen pierce attack to begin with was because well... most of the time spears pierce.  It's a case of making a thing intuitive on paper that is much less so in relation to the game.  The reason I prefer melee, ranged, and siege is that there is little doubt about how these work, which I consider grounds enough to make it an objectively better improvement.  Granted, hack, pierce, and crush are fine and perhaps good enough to not warrant bothering with a change, but it's because of these terms that the problem existed to begin with for vanilla 0 A.D.

Hack, pierce, and crush aren't good enough (however they are named) as otherwise there wouldn't be "counters" damage modifiers while still a pain to balance. There should be a couple more damage types. Well I think fire and poison were added by now.

[Stan`]

35 minutes ago, hyperion said:

Well I think fire and poison were added by now.

Poison hasn't been yet. #5768

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

34 minutes ago, hyperion said:

Hack, pierce, and crush aren't good enough (however they are named) as otherwise there wouldn't be "counters" damage modifiers while still a pain to balance. There should be a couple more damage types. Well I think fire and poison were added by now.

Hack/Melee, Pierce/Ranged, Crush/Siege attack types are plenty enough to balance most units. How many units will use "other" types of attacks?

[hyperion]

27 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Hack/Melee, Pierce/Ranged, Crush/Siege attack types are plenty enough to balance most units. How many units will use "other" types of attacks?

"melee pierce against cavalry" is technically already a damage type.

Ideally for balancing you would have a matrix defining how long it takes any unit to kill another. Each such unique vector then can be said to be a damage type. Things like damage, armour, health, attack-speed are just transformations thereof.

[alre]

1 hour ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

They do do that, but the reason that WFG chose to give spearmen pierce attack to begin with was because well... most of the time spears pierce.  It's a case of making a thing intuitive on paper that is much less so in relation to the game.  The reason I prefer melee, ranged, and siege is that there is little doubt about how these work, which I consider grounds enough to make it an objectively better improvement.  Granted, hack, pierce, and crush are fine and perhaps good enough to not warrant bothering with a change, but it's because of these terms that the problem existed to begin with for vanilla 0 A.D.

I can't possibly agree more! I think this change would make the game a lot more intuitive, coherent with other titles, and also quite a bit more trustworthy to history: from a tactical point of view, the hack/pierce/crush system, as opposed to melee/ranged/siege, if we want to call it this way, has two relevant consequences:

• spearmen are powerless against siege machines
• slingers can destroy walls

Neither of them has any support in history. Let's fix this to normalize the game, then we can think of other types of attack (in vanilla at least - if modders need other types of attack I guess it's best to add them already). In general I think that toups stats should be designed to serve gameplay and tactical dynamics.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

3 minutes ago, alre said:

I can't possibly agree more! I think this change would make the game a lot more intuitive, coherent with other titles, and also quite a bit more trustworthy to history: from a tactical point of view, the hack/pierce/crush system, as opposed to melee/ranged/siege, if we want to call it this way, has two relevant consequences:

• spearmen are powerless against siege machines
• slingers can destroy walls

Neither of them has any support in history. Let's fix this to normalize the game, then we can think of other types of attack (in vanilla at least - if modders need other types of attack I guess it's best to add them already). In general I think that toups stats should be designed to serve gameplay and tactical dynamics.

(emphasis mine)

Neither of those 2 weird unit behaviors has anything to do with using Hack/Pierce/Crush instead of Melee/Ranged/Siege for attack terminology. It's just terminology. In my mod, spearmen don't have any Pierce attack and slingers don't have any Crush attack, so they don't have those bad behaviors. Nothing inherent to the current terminology says spearmen and slingers have to be that way, it's just a conscious choice. lol

But to ram the point home, I definitely can support changing their names to Melee/Ranged/Siege, but then someone in WFG might say, "Spears are looong, lol, so we give them Ranged attack too, mkay, lulz."

[alre]

yeah I know, if you notice, my first proposal didn't consider terminology.

So what's the next move?

[badosu]

Make spearmen not have pierce dmg but lower dps/still counter cav (for some reason).

Make lograms

[alre]

Spearmen already have an extra bonus against cavalry I think (dev confirm please).

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

3 minutes ago, alre said:

Spearmen already have an extra bonus against cavalry I think (dev confirm please).

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

 

[Grapjas]

23 hours ago, alre said:

If it was someone decent at his job to make the structure of the ram, no man waved blunt weapon can ever destroy it. Not to mention swords.

Rams were quite easy to destroy or to word it differently, sabotage (simply cut the rope holding the ramming log). But like Badosu said, you'd still have to reach it first and obviously there would be men inside the rams fighting back. Rams were also used on walls or gates, not on buildings generally speaking. No one in their right mind would open a gate just to attack the ram, thats why they threw/fired/poured all kinds of @#$% all over them from walls. 

There is also a difference between 1 man swinging a blunt weapon vs 20, thats alot of force, especially if they timed the attack together. 

Anyway,

Flaming projectiles would be neat indeed. Wouldnt mind a stamina system in this game too so certain units would tire out.

Edited January 3, 2021 by Grapjas

[Boudica]

These are some nice suggestion. It might be a good idea to check how the behavior has changed in the SVN version of the game though. The current alpha is already two years old and many changes have been made since.