What if pikemen had their attack rate halved?

[Yekaterina]

Personally I like how pikemen work as they are now. If you really what to decrease their attack, fine. But maybe multiply RepeatTime by 1.4, not 2. 2 would be too extreme and makes pikemen useless. Meanwhile, we can boost their armour even further to emphasise their ability to act as a meatshield.  

[ChronA]

3 hours ago, Stan` said:

3 hours ago, ChronA said:

Perhaps another solution would be to scale down the models, but with the amount of art assets I'm guessing that would take months of continuous work.

Indeed. assuming we can scale them all without remaking them (some cannot be imported in blender), which we cannot.

And that sunk cost fallacy is precisely why I argue so loudly against adding more civs (and art assets in general) while the game remains in alpha.  It is a bad situation when art assets start dictating what is possible in core gameplay and balance decisions. But it is what it is, and we are stuck with it. 
 

This very thread is a prime example. A lot of people want pikemen to fit into the role of the tank, but it simply does not fit their art direction. Moreover, the fact that each civ gets exactly one P1 melee infantry unit, and for some civs that one is a pikeman, prevents us from exploring some of the more interesting possibilities for diversifying their role:

Making pikemen slow super-tanks doesn't work because (apart from not fitting their in game depiction) lowering their movement speed would nerf the economy of pike civs...

Making them melee superiority with high hack resistance but low pierce armor won't work because it would make an anti-cav counter, which the pike civs depend on, too vulnerable to ranged infantry... etc.

I don't want to point fingers. It seems to me that everyone working on this project does so out of genuine enthusiasm and good faith. But we should acknowledge that the art contributors, who appear to enjoy an privileged role in the governance of this project, are likewise culpable in an outsized fraction of its balance and gameplay issues. Maybe it is not unreasonable to ask those same contributors for some outsized efforts in service of solving those problems?

 

Edited May 17, 2021 by ChronA

[LetswaveaBook]

3 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

Personally I like how pikemen work as they are now. If you really what to decrease their attack, fine. But maybe multiply RepeatTime by 1.4, not 2. 2 would be too extreme and makes pikemen useless. Meanwhile, we can boost their armour even further to emphasise their ability to act as a meatshield.  

When I made the title of this tread, I purposely made it bi-ambiguous. It could mean ¨What would happen if pikemen had their attack rate halved?¨ and then the video would be the answer: They would still be excellent target dummies and that is the problem with the meta.  It was not meant to be a serious question of ¨What do you think about if pikemen had their attack rate halved?¨. I just wanted to say that their current gameplay role seems ludicrous to me.

 

1 hour ago, ChronA said:

Maybe it is not unreasonable to ask those same contributors for some outsized efforts in service of solving those problems?

I think the art team makes the models based on history. As a community I think we could all help out by shaping the balance such that the units serve a historically accurate role. If people want target dummies, they probably need to give that role to a unit with a big shield. Also I feel like the game should be shaped such that being a target dummy is not a thing. The problem does not lie with the art team, it lies with the people that decided pikemen needed to have huge armor stats.

[PyrrhicVictoryGuy]

"... pikemen needed to have huge armor stats" 

Yeah its weird , when I first played and didn't knew how to check unit's stats I was adamant that spearmen had better armor than pikemen.

[PyrrhicVictoryGuy]

1 hour ago, ChronA said:

And that sunk cost fallacy is precisely why I argue so loudly against adding more civs (and art assets in general) while the game remains in alpha.  It is a bad situation when art assets start dictating what is possible in core gameplay and balance decisions. But it is what it is, and we are stuck with it. 
 

This very thread is a prime example. A lot of people want pikemen to fit into the role of the tank, but it simply does not fit their art direction. Moreover, the fact that each civ gets exactly one P1 melee infantry unit, and for some civs that one is a pikeman, prevents us from exploring some of the more interesting possibilities for diversifying their role:

Making pikemen slow super-tanks doesn't work because (apart from not fitting their in game depiction) lowering their movement speed would nerf the economy of pike civs...

Making them melee superiority with high hack resistance but low pierce armor won't work because it would make an anti-cav counter, which the pike civs depend on, too vulnerable to ranged infantry... etc.

I don't want to point fingers. It seems to me that everyone working on this project does so out of genuine enthusiasm and good faith. But we should acknowledge that the art contributors, who appear to enjoy an privileged role in the governance of this project, are likewise culpable in an outsized fraction of its balance and gameplay issues. Maybe it is not unreasonable to ask those same contributors for some outsized efforts in service of solving those problems?

 

But pikemen being good against cav but bad against archers is the holy triangle of RTS counters!! 

Historically I bet they were more vunarable to archers than hoplites due their shield ( not sure if i should call it pelta) being smaller than the traditional aspis.

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

50 minutes ago, LetswaveaBook said:

I think the art team makes the models based on history. As a community I think we could all help out by shaping the balance such that the units serve a historically accurate role. If people want target dummies, they probably need to give that role to a unit with a big shield. Also I feel like the game should be shaped such that being a target dummy is not a thing. The problem does not lie with the art team, it lies with the people that decided pikemen needed to have huge armor stats.

Definitely the defining trait of pikemen that should dictate their advantages in fights should be their long range.  That said, all melee infantry should be able to tank arrows relatively well if they are slow.  With that in mind, pikemen have to have good pierce armour since they have been defined by the trait of being slow units.  I think that by and large there is a good argument for making all melee infantry (with some exceptions) start with roughly the same movement speed.  Technologies could then potentially serve to differentiate them in later phases.

[LetswaveaBook]

1 hour ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

Definitely the defining trait of pikemen that should dictate their advantages in fights should be their long range.

That´s very true, but we don´t see that in any aspect of the game.

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

1 hour ago, LetswaveaBook said:

That´s very true, but we don´t see that in any aspect of the game.

It is, but the unit collision and a few other factors make it very rare to properly show up in gameplay.  Unlike kamyuks, in which there seems to be enough range for up to three units to stand between, pikemen instead can only reach about the size of a single person standing.  A reason for this is that the sarissa is represented as fairly short in game.  According to a random google search, the average man in ancient Greece was roughly 1.6 metres tall.  The length of the sarissa according to wikipedia was roughly 4-6 metres.  Looking at the game, pikes stand at roughly twice the height of a person, making them only 3.2 metres if the information from earlier is correct.  That 0.8-2.8m is a rather massive disparity that translates into their range in game being rather lacklustre.  If one watches kamayuks fight in Age of Empires II, their range still plays an important role even without formations since it allows for them to attack more frequently without needing to move.  

In short, make pikes longer and extend the range of pikemen.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

7 hours ago, LetswaveaBook said:

As a community I think we could all help out by shaping the balance such that the units serve a historically accurate role. If people want target dummies, they probably need to give that role to a unit with a big shield. Also I feel like the game should be shaped such that being a target dummy is not a thing. The problem does not lie with the art team, it lies with the people that decided pikemen needed to have huge armor stats.

In history, pikes were used en masse to pin down enemy formations so the skirmishers and cavalry could pick the enemy apart with flanking maneuvers. Without hard battalions or formation fighting, the only way to simulate this is to make the game's phalangites very very tanky ("meat shields", "damage sponges"). And to prevent them from being OP, their speed and attack has to be unusually low.

[Lion.Kanzen]

10 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

In history, pikes were used en masse to pin down enemy formations so the skirmishers and cavalry could pick the enemy apart with flanking maneuvers. Without hard battalions or formation fighting, the only way to simulate this is to make the game's phalangites very very tanky ("meat shields", "damage sponges"). And to prevent them from being OP, their speed and attack has to be unusually low.

That is the problem of not having bonuses for formations.

Will be simulated better.

[PyrrhicVictoryGuy]

Since changing up the standard pikeman would upset the balance so much  why not give the champion pikeman a bigger sarrissa ando so , more range , in exchange for less armor?

[Stan`]

See 

 

[PyrrhicVictoryGuy]

4 minutes ago, Stan` said:

See 

 

thanks, this post seems to be more about making it possible to ahve a working syntagma, and the scale of objects in game. As someone already pointed that formations are not a priority and will remain  as eye candy for the most part so I already quit trying to advocate for working formations .

 

[Stan`]

21 minutes ago, PyrrhicVictoryGuy said:

why not give the champion pikeman a bigger sarrissa

Was answering this ^  Which is what the post was about before it went to formation.

[PyrrhicVictoryGuy]

Yeah it is something i could get behind but the problem is that changing champ pikemen can make the ptol  and seleucid rosters bloated.

[alre]

On 18/05/2021 at 2:19 AM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

In history, pikes were used en masse to pin down enemy formations so the skirmishers and cavalry could pick the enemy apart with flanking maneuvers. Without hard battalions or formation fighting, the only way to simulate this is to make the game's phalangites very very tanky ("meat shields", "damage sponges"). And to prevent them from being OP, their speed and attack has to be unusually low.

and why would that armor be pierce-resistant then, instead of mostly hack-resistant? The latter seems more logical.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

3 hours ago, alre said:

and why would that armor be pierce-resistant then, instead of mostly hack-resistant? The latter seems more logical.

Well, again, it's a simulation attempting to get something close to what happened in history. Historically, archers weren't necessarily very good against pikes. It's not like phalangites had bigger shields or anything, I've read it may have been the "forest of pikes" phenomenon which scattered the incoming arrows. Very difficult to simulate in 0 A.D. with its very simple combat paradigm. 

[Yekaterina]

Pikes should not be longer than 6 metres because that would become unrealistic. The longest sarissa was 6 metres and it was already bending.  Longer pikes put more tension in the material and very few materials back in 0AD can withstand such stress, while being of a reasonable mass. 

 

[Huffman3829]

I was thinking that if you do this, maybe consider giving more armor. More health is already needed.

Edited October 2, 2021 by Huffman3829
Typo.

[Huffman3829]

Pikemen? Please.

They are weak enough as it is. I never seem to be able to kill units, especially Hoplites. By half is too much.

I was thinking 1 point each at most. But to be honest, I think Pikemen should do more damage.

Or why not leave it as it is? Anyways, it's best to use Spearmen early in the game, because they do more raw damage than Pikemen. If you want to fight with Pikemen, (they are one of my favorite units) wait until later in the game. It would be easier to make a larger group of them, and that is the only way to do some real damage on your foe, isn't it?

Pikemen were made to be crowd-fighters, they can never fight on their own, or in small groups. I have experimented with this in the Map Editor, pitting Spearmen and Pikemen against each other, and the results were interesting. First, I fought 10 v 10. At the beginning, it seemed the Pikemen would win. They lost about 2 men while the Spearmen lost 5. Then the Spearmen started winning after they killed the unit at the far right, and they started picking off the enemy one by one until they had obliterated the enemy forces and left them at 4 men.

Next I fought 40 v 40. The Spearmen won very easily, losing very little. The Pikemen lost quickly.

Next I fought 60 v 60. The Pikemen somehow tore through the enemy within the first, about, 10 seconds. In those 10 seconds, the Pikemen lost around 3 men while the Spearmen lost most. Then very shortly after, the Pikemen lost 1 man while the enemy forces were destroyed.

These are the results of my experiment, and I would say the damage of the Pikeman currently is fair.

[LetswaveaBook]

@Huffman3829 I guess the title for this tread was maybe a ill proven. I mainly wanted to make a point in a humorous way that the armor values are problematic. So take the suggestion with a grain of salt.

[Dizaka]

On 16/05/2021 at 6:58 AM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Fenris Wolves in Age of Mythology have a similar bonus. The bigger the pack, the faster they move for instance. In Delenda Est, phalangites have the "Massed Pikes" aura that improves their combat effectiveness when fighting in groups. Hoplites have their own aura, called "Shield Wall" which improves their armor values when fighting next to each other. 

What if Pikemen had their armor bonus be based off being in a formation?  Especially their pierce armor.  The bonus could be based on proximity and maxes out when X units are only Z distance from each other in a chain.  Once they deviate from this the "armor chain" is broken and they have low armor.

Therefore, lone pikemen (outside formation) could be eaisly picked off, etc.  However, in a group they would still be as strong as they are.

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

@Dizaka That seems like a great idea, especially if it is based off of their proximity rather than a particular formation, since formations are not always the best way to move around in game. 
 

This would add some element of skill in the positioning of pikemen, especially if you bring attack-ground into the equation. With both features, a player using pikemen needs to decide between the compactness of their pikes versus the volume of ranged units they protect from attack-ground, as well as how far to advance forward.

 

 

[Dizaka]

1 hour ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

@Dizaka That seems like a great idea, especially if it is based off of their proximity rather than a particular formation, since formations are not always the best way to move around in game. 
 

This would add some element of skill in the positioning of pikemen, especially if you bring attack-ground into the equation. With both features, a player using pikemen needs to decide between the compactness of their pikes versus the volume of ranged units they protect from attack-ground, as well as how far to advance forward.

 

 

Yea, that is what I was thinking.  Also, the word proximity was used loosely b/c I know pikemen can't always be in a formation.

This could also maybe add an melee cav debonus.  If pikemen/spearmen are in a closed formation they debuff cavalry armor and/or attack.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

12 hours ago, Dizaka said:

What if Pikemen had their armor bonus be based off being in a formation?  Especially their pierce armor.  The bonus could be based on proximity and maxes out when X units are only Z distance from each other in a chain.  Once they deviate from this the "armor chain" is broken and they have low armor.

Therefore, lone pikemen (outside formation) could be eaisly picked off, etc.  However, in a group they would still be as strong as they are.

 

2 hours ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

@Dizaka That seems like a great idea, especially if it is based off of their proximity rather than a particular formation, since formations are not always the best way to move around in game. 
 

This would add some element of skill in the positioning of pikemen, especially if you bring attack-ground into the equation. With both features, a player using pikemen needs to decide between the compactness of their pikes versus the volume of ranged units they protect from attack-ground, as well as how far to advance forward.

 

 

This is done in DE already. Check it out!