what do we do with the defenses of phase 1?

[alre]

What do we want the role of palisades to be? Because if they can be destroyed easily by both siege and melee, and they don't really affect ranged troups (because they don't), then what's their use? They are just a nuisance, only effective to disturb the pathfinder and attract the fire of idle enemy units.

[Grapjas]

1 hour ago, alre said:

What do we want the role of palisades to be?

They're main use should be blocking projectiles imo. Same goes for stone walls, but because stone walls are higher they should also block cata projectiles. Currently this doesn't work but hopefully in the future.

As a secondary feature; yes, they should be exactly that:

1 hour ago, alre said:

a nuisance

 

Edited May 12, 2021 by Grapjas

[Freagarach]

One could try adding area damage to rams, to see how that affects mass palisades.

[smgzlez]

I think it is a very good idea to increase the damage of melee infantry and siege weapos for palisades ,but.... What about elephants then? Many people build very elongated palisades to protect defensive towers or fortresses (in line with what was said about them being used as an equivalent to defensive stone walls) and it should be noted that while arrows from those buildings hardly affect rams, catapults and siege towers, they do affect elephants. If those siege weapons have a plus for defeating palisades, so should elephants. I do this thinking of a civilization like the Maurians, which I think and from what I have seen relies especially on elephants for siege, since it has elephantry since P2 and cannot build the siege workshop until P3. I know it's an OP civilization right now, but be careful that the new balance improvements don't render it practically useless as it was in A23. 

[Silier]

For blocking projectiles:

Well, one can still shoot over walls and palisades if one wants to. Main point is to prevent units from freely walking into the settlement/town and to give defenders some time to react.

But yes, would be nice, its just performance nightmare

[chrstgtr]

1 hour ago, Grapjas said:

yes, they should be exactly that:

2 hours ago, alre said:

a nuisance

Making a game purposely annoying shouldn't be a result of intentional design.

 

 

Palisades should be much more expensive than they are now, which is about as close to free as you can get from a resource cost and build time perspective, and much more quickly destroyed.  Area damage to palisades has been suggested many times by many people and it makes total sense to me. 

Edited May 12, 2021 by chrstgtr

[Lopess]

20 minutes ago, chrstgtr said:

Making a game purposely annoying shouldn't be a result of intentional design.

 

 

Palisades should be much more expensive than they are now, which is about as close to free as you can get from a resource cost and build time perspective, and much more quickly destroyed.  Area damage to palisades has been suggested many times by many people and it makes total sense to me. 

I believe that you must be careful or the Alpha 26 will be: Make palisades useful again.

[raynor]

Another idea to mitigate people abusing palisades for path finder would be to prevent people stacking them, like tower. For instance, it would still be possible to circle your base with palissade but not possible to stack 2/3 palissades walls next to each other. Not sure if I am super clear

[Grapjas]

54 minutes ago, Angen said:

For blocking projectiles:

Well, one can still shoot over walls and palisades if one wants to. Main point is to prevent units from freely walking into the settlement/town and to give defenders some time to react.

But yes, would be nice, its just performance nightmare

Yes that would make sense if you manually had to pick a direction to fire, you cant shoot what you cant see though and would probably considered a waste of ammo (i could be wrong about that though). Also currently ingame arrows literally dont fly higher than a palisade. Unless you're on a hill, which would be an issue to code i think aswell because footprint height is infinite i think. 

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

+ Area damage to walls (and maybe light structures: house walls)

+ a little build time

+ a little cost

This sounds good to me. I am thinking palisades will be good to help thwart p2 aggression and p3 nuisance raiding. But will not do much to prevent a full scale attack.

Edited May 12, 2021 by BreakfastBurrito_007

[Stan`]

5 hours ago, alre said:

The main problem with palisades, is that at now their role overlaps that of walls almost exactly. I know it sounds bad, but a good solution would be to remove them completely, until we find a way to introduce more anti-personnel defensive options. This at once would make it disappear those weird palisade mazes that can be seen sometimes in multiplayer games, substituded by saner stone walls.

Note that you can do exactly the same with stone walls. I've seen some crazy wall design over the years

4 hours ago, Feldfeld said:

Just make it so that when one palisade is destroyed, all palisades within a radius are destroyed as well, there problem solved

 

4 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

That is very hard to program, but I will try. I think destroying individual palisade is better because you might want to break one piece to get through while using the others to your advantage, e.g trapping the enemy supply

That's no so hard. Just edit binaries\data\mods\public\simulation\templates\template_structure_defensive_palisade.xml and add:

  <DeathDamage>
    <Shape>Circular</Shape>
    <Range>30</Range>
    <FriendlyFire>true</FriendlyFire>
    <Damage>
      <Crush>600</Crush>
    </Damage>
  </DeathDamage>

Note this will damage everything around it. (units, buildings etc.)

[LetswaveaBook]

1 hour ago, Stan` said:

Note this will damage everything around it. (units, buildings etc.)

Would it be easy to make it 1 crush damage and give a 600 multiplier to palisades?

[Freagarach]

Aye, very easy. The hard part would be to justify that to the players. (The value is shown and non-competitive people will wonder why this value is there.)

[Yekaterina]

Even I as a competitive player wonder why all of the palisades need to collapse. This did not happen in real life for decently build palisades. We can make them brittle against P3 units and I think that is enough. 

[Grapjas]

I think increasing palisade costs is a good option. Just looking at it you would see it requires alot of logs to build it. Besides, the palisades have a rock foundation, it should be accounted for. Up  the wood price by quite a bit (triple?) and make it also cost stone 1/3 of the wood price.

In this example the price for this length would be 588W and 196 stone. Numbers are just examplary though.

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

1 hour ago, Yekaterina said:

Even I as a competitive player wonder why all of the palisades need to collapse. This did not happen in real life for decently build palisades. We can make them brittle against P3 units and I think that is enough. 

Looking at images of such palisade walls, I get the impression that it would not take many strikes from a ram to take them down. Also, wood has leasst strength in shear with respect to the grain. This is the situation of 0ad palisades. If there are no horizontal stabilizers to keep the vertical logs in position then 2 things happen:

1. the absence of one log allows surrounding logs to move more, creating more instability
2. the impact of a ram is not distributed, meaning only one or two pieces of wood takes the whole load of the ram strike.

This is enough to justify halving the crush armor of palisades, A ram should probably be able to breach it in 2 strikes. This discussion of historical accuracy and engineering limitations is pretty pointless for these palisades as they are just art-pieces for a game mechanism.

We should free ourselves from this thinking, and let us make the palisade walls perform a logical, fun, and varied function in 0ad based off of a gameplay point of view. lets ask these questions:

• How much do we want small fragments of un-destroyed palisades to just sit and clutter the map and cause bad pathfinding?
• How effective should spamming multiple layers of palisades be in multiplying the strength of the overall barricade?
• How does it affect gameplay movement, fluidity, and decisions?

I think the answers to these questions can be found in area damage, cost, and build time.

Edited May 12, 2021 by BreakfastBurrito_007

[Yekaterina]

45 minutes ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

How much do we want small fragments of un-destroyed palisades to just sit and clutter the map and cause bad pathfinding?

If I was attacking, I would hate this because I can't push as quickly as I can. 

If I was defending, I am very happy to see this because the attacking troops are stuck there, during which time they take more arrow hits from my cc and towers. Trapped rams also give me more time to train swordsmen and reinforce. So I guess there isn't a binary answer to your question. 

48 minutes ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

How effective should spamming multiple layers of palisades be in multiplying the strength of the overall barricade?

Multiple layers should be more effective, logically. The builder obviously has invested a lot of wood into building this stuff, so the outcome should be better than just one row. In A24, it would make more sense to build a stone wall instead because stone is quite useless and much more efficient in defending your base from siege attacks, whereas you can use the wood to spam more troops or build more barracks.

To prevent spam we can increase the cost of these palisade walls, so that they are less cost-efficient than stone walls.  

 

[Dizaka]

21 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

The builder obviously has invested a lot of wood into building this stuff, so the outcome should be better than just one row.

 

That's actually the problem.  The cost-utility is low.  That is, the utility of palisades is so great, because of their low cost, that it's frustrating when allies don't build them and get overwhelmed.  The problem summarized:  Weak players fail to utilize palisades while strong players overuse them as they know their utility.

Also, palisades are "short" between the "towers."  I think they should be longer and the "towers" farther apart thereby if one "wall" is killed more units can fit through.

Palisades decide games, tbh.

Edited May 12, 2021 by Dizaka

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

@Yekaterina

I think some form of damage spread from layer to layer and along the length of a section of wall is a good way to address both of these things: wall spam and small fragments 

 

With damage spread, multiple layers would be more effective, but each additional layer effectively gives you less total hitpoints. This means that rams and elephants will accelerate across and along wall segments, meaning that quantity of wall placement does not equal quality (such as shorter segments, using chokepoints, and existing defenses).

small scattered remnants of palisades do not have any positive effect on gameplay, they do not reward skill, action, or risk taking. They only cause frustration, and are another reason why palisades contribute to turtling and hesitancy to attack.

[Dizaka]

4 hours ago, Stan` said:

Note that you can do exactly the same with stone walls. I've seen some crazy wall design over the years

 

That's no so hard. Just edit binaries\data\mods\public\simulation\templates\template_structure_defensive_palisade.xml and add:

  <DeathDamage>
    <Shape>Circular</Shape>
    <Range>30</Range>
    <FriendlyFire>true</FriendlyFire>
    <Damage>
      <Crush>600</Crush>
    </Damage>
  </DeathDamage>

Note this will damage everything around it. (units, buildings etc.)

 

Can this be done so that "connected" units get damaged/destroyed and not those within a "radius?" 

For example, if you have a palisades like this o--o--o--o--o--o--o  and the actual damage is this o--o--o--x--o--o--o then what gets destroyed is this  o--o--x--x--x--o--o.

In another example, if you have a palisades like this o--o--o--o--o--o--o  and the actual damage is this o--o--o--x--o--o--o then what gets destroyed is this  o--o--d--x--x--d--o (x=destroyed, d=damaged, o=still standing).

Edited May 12, 2021 by Dizaka

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

19 minutes ago, Dizaka said:

 

Can this be done so that "connected" units get damaged/destroyed and not those within a "radius?" 

For example, if you have a palisades like this o--o--o--o--o--o--o  and the actual damage is this o--o--o--x--o--o--o then what gets destroyed is this  o--o--x--x--x--o--o.

In another example, if you have a palisades like this o--o--o--o--o--o--o  and the actual damage is this o--o--o--x--o--o--o then what gets destroyed is this  o--o--d--x--x--d--o (x=destroyed, d=damaged, o=still standing).

This is what I am talking about for longitudinal spread damage, I am wondering wether this could also apply to next layer immediately behind the palisades (ones within a certain distance). One other thing that might serve to limit the effectiveness of palisade spam is reduced archer move speed, since in a24 archers can run to defend every corner of a huge area of turtled territory faster than an attacking army can flank to undefended spots. Reducing archer run speed will mean that palisades and walls will be less effective over ludicrous lengths.

[Yekaterina]

Two obvious solutions:

1. Increase cost of palisade. Actually palisade spamming is a bad habit carried fo6 from A23, because in that alpha wood is plentiful but stone is much needed. In A24 however, stone is not demanded as much so it makes sense to build stone walls. I have seen a few pro players using stone walls and they did have a much better effect compared to spamming palisades. There is already no motivation to spam palisades, but old habits always haunt us.

2. Increase the length of palisades to decrease the frequency of towers. The gaps between towers will be massive so no unit would be trapped.

 

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

1 hour ago, Yekaterina said:

Two obvious solutions:

1. Increase cost of palisade. Actually palisade spamming is a bad habit carried fo6 from A23, because in that alpha wood is plentiful but stone is much needed. In A24 however, stone is not demanded as much so it makes sense to build stone walls. I have seen a few pro players using stone walls and they did have a much better effect compared to spamming palisades. There is already no motivation to spam palisades, but old habits always haunt us.

2. Increase the length of palisades to decrease the frequency of towers. The gaps between towers will be massive so no unit would be trapped.

 

The reason to spam palisades is to ruin pathfinders and limit movement of the enemy and make rams spend eternity taking them down. The power in palisades is not health of the barrier, that much I can say for sure. In a23 people had no extra time to sit and build defenses anyway, the game was much more dynamic. Usually only a few strings of walls. Only exception being the roman siege spam, which was a rare tactic and even rarer to succeed.

@Dizaka surely you can explain this  you are an expert in palisades

Edited May 12, 2021 by BreakfastBurrito_007

[Lion.Kanzen]

3 hits and it should fall

10 minutes ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

the enemy and make rams spend eternity taking them down.

 

Edited May 12, 2021 by Lion.Kanzen

[Dizaka]

@BreakfastBurrito_007

 

Noob wall (It's not invisible, it's the noob wall):

Cost: 0 wood but frustrated allies

 

The "I built a wall, no idea what went wrong" wall:

Cost: 300-400 wood (allies go "meh, he built a wall")

 

 Normal game wall (Rams delayed maybe 15-25 secs): 

Cost: ~1K wood, happier allies

 

 

Pro wall (Note how walls are in parallel.  This delays ram movement substantially only for 500-800 more wood. Rams going to be delayed for 2-3 mins minimum):

~1.5-1.8k wood, (each line of 3 turrets 2 wall units is about 58-60 wood)

 

The "I hate you, have fun" wall (The "meh, I don't want to deal with this, let me find another entry point"):

~1.8-2.1k wood, pros have too much wood.  Garrison sword units in tower preferably.

 

 

 

Edited May 13, 2021 by Dizaka