Balancing Citizen Soldiers (CS) (long shot)

[maroder]

Since A24 is out there has been much discussion about the balancing, not only between factions but also between different strategies. But as @ValihrAntexplained it here:

Because of the Citizen Solider concept the best strategy is (in most cases) just to boom as fast as you can. As most units fulfill economic as well as defensive/aggressive roles at the same time you cannot separate strategies. This is not in line with the vision of 0 A.D:

" Single path to victory - It seems to be a trend that games cater to a specific strategy that is frequently used to attain a victory. That could be rushing, turtling, booming, etc. We recognize these are valid ways to win a game, but we will attempt to not favor one over another. Players should be able to successfully use (and adapt/change) any strategy to achieve a victory. " (citing from here: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/0AD_The_Vision)

Another problem is that this "booming is the best" gameplay leads to a huge snowball effect. So If a player is slower at the beginning, it is very likely that he cannot recover and will lose the game. This makes the game less dynamic and interesting. Being able to turn the situation around after some bad losses is much more fun than slowly losing to your opponent just because he has more units, because he was able to click faster in the first five minutes.

The question is, how can this be balanced?

In Delenda Est this is done by removing the Citizen Solider concept and using a wide technology tree with many pairwise techs, which forces the player to choose a strategy or to find a good balance between them. But this is also my main critique point with DE. While I like mostly all of the stuff in DE: new factions, better graphics, new features ect, the game feels slower to me. With 0 A.D being the only RTS I play it feels very frustrating to me not being able to use units for eco and it just "feels" slower when some units just stand around. The wide technology tree on the other hand is very interesting and let you do complex decisions, but I actually need to pause the game and read what each tech does and then decide what I want to do. This makes the game slower paced and more strategic (which is not necessarily bad, just personal preference), but it takes away from the fast pace and action, which is for me one of the key features of the main game.

So how can Empires Ascendant balance this without removing the Citizen Solider concept and while keeping its fast pace?

What if the player had with each phase the opportunity to specifically choose one of the three strategies? So a decision to upgrade your CC or research a technology which gives you either an economic, an aggressive or a defensive boost just for this phase.

Possible improvements from this mechanic:

• This would allow that each strategy is a legitimate choice in each phase, so a p1 turtle or a p2 push would be possible with all factions.
• It creates a a true "balanced" rock-paper-scissor system 
• This would also acknowledge the importance of scouting (in all phases): if you have the information about the strategy of you opponent, you will be able to counter it.
• It removes the huge snowball effect that is present at the moment and could allow a player to comeback after a bad start
•  It is easy enough to not make the game "slower" but enforces the ability to choose specific strategies.

Here is a mod as a proof of concept:empires-extended.zip

 

Note that this is only a very basic implementation of the idea. It only features positive auras which give you faster unit production and better gather rates for the economic strategy, quicker build times and more arrows for defensive buildings for the defensive strategy and more attack, movement speed and loot for the aggressive strategy. But this idea could be coupled with different art for the CCs, different options to produce units or even unlock new buildings ect.

Note 2: the mod is a suggestion/concept for the future balance of 0 A.D is therefore for A25 / SVN

So what do you all think? Besides the obvious: don't change anything about the gameplay.

 

I have took some inspiration by the following threads and ideas:

• Scouting should play an important role, gathering information should be rewarded by being able to make better decisions:  https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/36928-special-unit-scouts/
• There should be different strategies a player can use (i.e boom, rush, turtle) which works as the classic counter system with no strategy being preferred: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/39874-rushing-early-game/  &  https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/39901-what-do-we-do-with-the-defenses-of-phase-1/
• https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/39669-proposal-for-a-new-behavior-of-civic-center-reaction-to-farmfields/?do=findComment&comment=427486

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

20 minutes ago, maroder said:

In Delenda Est this is done by removing the Citizen Solider concept and using a wide technology tree with many pairwise techs, which forces the player to choose a strategy or to find a good balance between them. But this is also my main critique point with DE. While I like mostly all of the stuff in DE: new factions, better graphics, new features ect, the game feels slower to me. With 0 A.D being the only RTS I play it feels very frustrating to me not being able to use units for eco and it just "feels" slower when some units just stand around. The wide technology tree on the other hand is very interesting and let you do complex decisions, but I actually need to pause the game and read what each tech does and then decide what I want to do. This makes the game slower paced and more strategic (which is not necessarily bad, just personal preference), but it takes away from the fast pace and action, which is for me one of the key features of the main game.

 

I hate you now. jk

 

Quote

the game feels slower to me. With 0 A.D being the only RTS I play it feels very frustrating to me not being able to use units for eco and it just "feels" slower when some units just stand around.

I see what you mean, but most players (I think) have played other RTS games, and the citizen-soldier concept isn't in any of them, so this "feeling" from soldiers doing guard duty isn't out of place. If anything, EA may "feel" too fast to those players. But in DE, soldiers don't have no other abilities. They do have the ability to build, so they can be used for other things than just standing around. There are also many capturable objects on a DE map, which makes scouting and capturing things with your soldiers a beneficial thing to do.  IMHO, EA maps are very static and boring, so you need your soldiers to be doing something else, else they feel useless for anything other than dying for the motherland.

Edited May 15, 2021 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

1 hour ago, maroder said:

Another problem is that this "booming is the best" gameplay leads to a huge snowball effect. So If a player is slower at the beginning, it is very likely that he cannot recover and will lose the game. This makes the game less dynamic and interesting. Being able to turn the situation around after some bad losses is much more fun than slowly losing to your opponent just because he has more units, because he was able to click faster in the first five minutes.

I agree with you on this, however, if the game enters the never-ending, stabilized state, it does not matter who got to p3 first. 

1 hour ago, maroder said:

What if the player had with each phase the opportunity to specifically choose one of the three strategies? So a decision to upgrade your CC or research a technology which gives you either an economic, an aggressive or a defensive boost just for this phase.

Possible improvements from this mechanic:

• This would allow that each strategy is a legitimate choice in each phase, so a p1 turtle or a p2 push would be possible with all factions.
• It creates a a true "balanced" rock-paper-scissor system 
• This would also acknowledge the importance of scouting (in all phases): if you have the information about the strategy of you opponent, you will be able to counter it.
• It removes the huge snowball effect that is present at the moment and could allow a player to comeback after a bad start
•  It is easy enough to not make the game "slower" but enforces the ability to choose specific strategies.

Here is a mod as a proof of concept:

As for broad upgrades like these, I feel like they would separate your gameplay into buckets, like a less diverse version of the "cards" from AoE3. 3 strategies (rushing/booming/turtling) is not much better than one, and allowing different strategies to be equally effective can and should be done without such guide-rails. Infinite strategies is best: any combination of boom amount/rush amount/turtle amount being viable provided you have the creativity and in-game knowledge to make it work.

I think rushing/ turtling/ naked booming should be rarely seen in isolation, and any mix of the three would create great fun and variability through the phases of 0ad. 

Much discussion in other forum topics has been oriented to:

1.  increasing feasibility of rushes (risk/reward) and adjusting p1 defenses 
2. civ differentiation and inclusion of things such as p2 champs (more popular) and p2 siege (less popular) If mercs were fixed, they could also be used like this. This would expand the Action versus time/phase envelope.
3. ranged unit running speeds (needed anyway but allows for raiding bases that have archers
4. unit train times, (barrack vs cc, or general)

A combination of these things could work to allow more fighting and more complex decisions at every stage of the game. In p1 you would need to decide how much defenses you might need, how big your eco is compared to enemies, how much army you could attack with. All of this is informed with scouting.

I think these changes could bring more variability to the early and mid game. Also I think this could help make the late game less static and stabilized.

[maroder]

1 hour ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I see what you mean, but most players (I think) have played other RTS games, and the citizen-soldier concept isn't in any of them, so this "feeling" from soldiers doing guard duty isn't out of place. If anything, EA may "feel" too fast to those players. But in DE, soldiers don't have no other abilities. They do have the ability to build, so they can be used for other things than just standing around. There are also many capturable objects on a DE map, which makes scouting and capturing things with your soldiers a beneficial thing to do.  IMHO, EA maps are very static and boring, so you need your soldiers to be doing something else, else they feel useless for anything other than dying for the motherland.

Yes true. It is also critique on a very high level   as I said, I like most of the other things as the more diverse maps, mercenary camps, farmlands ect. I think it just comes down to preference regarding the CS concept. And if this concept should stay, it is just hard to balance with different strategies. The difference between DE and EA feels to me like a little bit like the difference between chess and bullet chess. One is more strategic and the other one has this felling of urgency that you need to make decision more quickly.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

2 minutes ago, maroder said:

The difference between DE and EA feels to me like a little bit like the difference between chess and bullet chess. One is more strategic and the other one has this felling of urgency that you need to make decision more quickly.

To be fair, I think this may come down to the fact that most people play DE in single player rather than against other humans. I imagine "the sense of urgency" would be heightened if it's played against another human being.  

[LetswaveaBook]

1 hour ago, maroder said:

What if the player had with each phase the opportunity to specifically choose one of the three strategies? So a decision to upgrade your CC or research a technology which gives you either an economic, an aggressive or a defensive boost just for this phase.

The problem in RTS is that a better economy is always useful. So you can use the better economy for all of these strategies. That does not make it impossible to get good game design, but it needs to be considered.  I wouldn´t like it if the choice you made in p2 would put you at an irrecoverable disadvantage. It could work this way to prevent so: In p2 you get the choice between 3 techs, one for rushing(more loot, more cav speed, better capturing rate), one for turtling(cheaper/free tower upgrades) and one for booming(eco upgrades cost 50% less metal). Once you reach p3 you get all of them.

1 hour ago, maroder said:

The wide technology tree on the other hand is very interesting and let you do complex decisions, but I actually need to pause the game and read what each tech does and then decide what I want to do.

I don´t think the tech tree is wide compared to age of empires 2. I think the main difference between the games is on one hand the civilizations are more a like (most get all generic available units in castle age), while each civilization diversifies in imperial age(mostly from lacking techs)

[maroder]

33 minutes ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

Much discussion in other forum topics has been oriented to:

1.  increasing feasibility of rushes (risk/reward) and adjusting p1 defenses 
2. civ differentiation and inclusion of things such as p2 champs (more popular) and p2 siege (less popular) If mercs were fixed, they could also be used like this. This would expand the Action versus time/phase envelope.
3. ranged unit running speeds (needed anyway but allows for raiding bases that have archers
4. unit train times, (barrack vs cc, or general)

A combination of these things could work to allow more fighting and more complex decisions at every stage of the game. In p1 you would need to decide how much defenses you might need, how big your eco is compared to enemies, how much army you could attack with. All of this is informed with scouting.

I agree with all of this.

But the underlying problem of the balancing is the Citizen Soldier concept. As long as the units you use for eco are the same that do rushing/defense, the best strategy is always too boom as fast as possible. This proposal should be regarded in combination with the changes you mentioned and not on its own, so you still should have a different gameplay with each civ and you should be able to take different strategies, but it could imo help to disentangle the booming=turteling connection.

[maroder]

2 minutes ago, LetswaveaBook said:

I wouldn´t like it if the choice you made in p2 would put you at an irrecoverable disadvantage

Exactly, that's why I thought it would be good the have the choice in each phase, so that you can recover if one strategy fails.

[Yekaterina]

3 minutes ago, maroder said:

But the underlying problem of the balancing is the Citizen Soldier concept. As long as the units you use for eco are the same that do rushing/defense, the best strategy is always too boom as fast as possib

I think Delenda EST fixed this problem, but slaves being not available in P2 made initial economic development very slow. If @wowgetoffyourcellphone allows Training slave in P1 that would be much better. 

 

[maroder]

5 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

To be fair, I think this may come down to the fact that most people play DE in single player rather than against other humans. I imagine "the sense of urgency" would be heightened if it's played against another human being.  

True. And the AI is tailored to EA so it feels a little bit stronger there, even in single player.

[Yekaterina]

1 minute ago, maroder said:

Exactly, that's why I thought it would be good the have the choice in each phase, so that you can recover if one strategy fails.

I think I can add this tech. Where do you want to research it

[maroder]

Just now, Yekaterina said:

I think Delenda EST fixed this problem,

Yes, indeed. But there is no Citizen Soilder concept anymore And this proposal is an attempt to balance it while keeping this concept.

1 minute ago, Yekaterina said:

I think I can add this tech. Where do you want to research it

Its already in the mod

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

2 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

I think Delenda EST fixed this problem, but slaves being not available in P2 made initial economic development very slow. If @wowgetoffyourcellphone allows Training slave in P1 that would be much better. 

Slaves are unlocked when you build a Market, so perhaps I can move the Market to village phase. Villages have markets, after all, and phase requirements in DE don't rely on building classes, but rather amount of buildings regardless of class (type).

[wraitii]

My belief is that making it so that it takes time to switch from gathering to attacking mode for soldiers would help with balancing citizen-soldiers considerably. Because then each 'variant' can be considered sort-of-in-vacuum.

I'm not sure 'hardcoding' strategies is the way to go, but maybe, you know.

That being said, don't expect this to get in A25. I think the target for A25 will be to fix the most egregious issues with A24, so players are happier with the current state of the game, before running into an experiment that tweaks a core concept like this.

[LetswaveaBook]

As I see things, we allready have the tools for creating booming/rushing/turtling gameplay

Booming: the unit that does this are women.

Turtling: This can be done by building towers and citizen soldiers.

Rushing: This could be done by cavalry or p2 champions.

The thing is that though we have the tools for it, it does not work out like this. That does not mean the citizen soldier concept is flawed, but rather that our citizen soldier concept is ill-balanced.

[Yekaterina]

1 minute ago, maroder said:

, indeed. But there is no Citizen Soilder concept anymore And this proposal is an attempt to balance it while keeping this concept.

Another solution: citizen soldiers offer very weak attack, champions offer huge attack. Meanwhile make champions cheaper, so the army would be half champions and half citizen soldiers.

[Yekaterina]

Also severely cut down gathering rates of citizen soldiers and boost the wood and mining ability of women

[Yekaterina]

I think we need to encourage the use of dedicated soldiers and prevent the use of citizen soldiers as an economic tool. Any army should be an expense, not profit.

[LetswaveaBook]

 

7 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

severely cut down gathering rates of citizen soldiers

I don´t think it needs to be severely. In age of empires the devs gave the Franks civs a bonus that helped their eco by a little and gave them +20% HP to a unit they used only to rush in early game. Such a small change turned a bottom tier civ in the top tier civ. Balance is a super frail thing and even the smallest of changes can make a huge impact on which strategy is preferred.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

3 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

Another solution: citizen soldiers offer very weak attack, champions offer huge attack. Meanwhile make champions cheaper, so the army would be half champions and half citizen soldiers.

What the game needs is a soldier-citizen concept, then, instead of the current citizen-soldier concept.  You need citizens (workers), who just happen to fight, rather than soldiers who just happen to work.

 

Then you could create more champions (your "real" soldiers) for each civ and move their availability to P2, along with some weak siege ("dudes carrying a log")

P3 has heroes, advanced siege, mercenaries (and possibly extra champs unlocked).  

[maroder]

10 minutes ago, wraitii said:

That being said, don't expect this to get in A25.

Yes, it's really more of a long shot.

[Yekaterina]

Sorry I don't know what Frank's are as I don't play AoE.

But sure, maybe make citizen soldiers gather at 75% of women and make women good miners.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

1 minute ago, Yekaterina said:

But sure, maybe make citizen soldiers gather at 75% of women and make women good miners.

Alternatively, have citizen-soldiers and female citizens have the exact same worker stats, but the citizen-soldiers are now weak fighters. They're only good for maybe holding off a P2 champion rush or something for a short time and supporting your champ&merc expeditionary force. 

[maroder]

17 minutes ago, LetswaveaBook said:

As I see things, we allready have the tools for creating booming/rushing/turtling gameplay

Booming: the unit that does this are women.

Turtling: This can be done by building towers and citizen soldiers.

Rushing: This could be done by cavalry or p2 champions.

The thing is that though we have the tools for it, it does not work out like this. That does not mean the citizen soldier concept is flawed, but rather that our citizen soldier concept is ill-balanced.

I generally agree, but problem I see is that booming with women is only in P1 and that turtling is basically late P2/P3 activity, because in P1 you need to invest all your resources in building your eco. And building one sentry tower is not what I would call turtling.

So the strategies don't change that much over the course of the game and the snowball effect still happens. Not sure if there is a good way to balance this without bigger changes to the concept as my proposal or what @wowgetoffyourcellphone said.

Edited May 15, 2021 by maroder

[Yekaterina]

@maroder I found a little bug in your mod: you are missing the icons for the CC upgrades. By default you get 3 purple blocks. I fixed it by copying 3 copies of the default civic centre icon into the correct folder, and everything works smoothly now. If you want different icons to represent different upgrade routes just send me the images and I will implement it for you.  

Well done!

maroder fixed.zip