devs gonna make a new mistake in a26

[king reza the great]

hi.

idk how to talk to devs although vali described a noob way...

so i decided to post something here about game balancing. hope devs read it and take it on account.

1-  still mercs are not balanced in a26 then we have to ban them from our games again... when we talk about merc balancing we mean the resources that they need. to limit mercs only with metal is not good even if u change 80 to 90, because its still easy to abuse them in early game. mercs should be wood food included/ like 50 wood 50 food 50 metal for merc cavs.

2- civs like iber, brit need a fort to make a hero while some civs like ptol and sele easily can make hero from civ and its too imba. all civs must have a special building for making heros.

3- put merc cavs of sele and ptol in estables.

4- sword cham of maced is very unuseful and almost nobody buy it as a antiram. because it needs unlucking that takes time. instead of that sword cham give a merc sword man to maced.

Edited June 16, 2022 by king reza the great

[Yekaterina]

35 minutes ago, king reza the great said:

idk how to talk to devs although vali described a noob way...

You can talk to them directly here: https://webchat.quakenet.org/?channels=0ad-dev. You can also ping other balancing advisors. Most people use the same names as their lobby account. 

I agree with everything else that reza said. 

36 minutes ago, king reza the great said:

put merc cavs of sele and ptol in estables.

Then what should the colony train? Should we also put merc inf into barracks?

Some opionions on reza's idea would be appreciated. @BreakfastBurrito_007 @real_tabasco_sauce @LetswaveaBook @chrstgtr 

[Dakara]

2 hours ago, king reza the great said:

hi.

idk how to talk to devs although vali described a noob way...

so i decided to post something here about game balancing. hope devs read it and take it on account.

1-  still mercs are not balanced in a26 then we have to ban them from our games again... when we talk about merc balancing we mean the resources that they need. to limit mercs only with metal is not good even if u change 80 to 90, because its still easy to abuse them in early game. mercs should be wood food included/ like 50 wood 50 food 50 metal for merc cavs.

2- civs like iber, brit need a fort to make a hero while some civs like ptol and sele easily can make hero from civ and its too imba. all civs must have a special building for making heros.

3- put merc cavs of sele and ptol in estables.

4- sword cham of maced is very unuseful and almost nobody buy it as a antiram. because it needs unlucking that takes time. instead of that sword cham give a merc sword man to maced.

1- For me, we need to absoluty change the concept of mercenaries. 

• They can't recolt, i'm totaly agree for this point.
• About the cost i want have big cost like 100 for infantery and 150 for cavalery. 
• All mercenary is rank 2
• recruitment is instant, the units are not formed, we pay for their service.
• Limit the number of mercenary by 50 for each player (sound good or not?)
• One tech for recruit mercenary rank 3 in phase 3 in castle or CC.  Like 500 FOOD and 500 METAL cost tech.
• I would also appreciate that the initial mines be less loaded in resources (5000-> 2000) so that the eco is more relocated and risky, but that's another subject but it can nerve the mercenaries a little.

 

2- It it true that it is frustating and make good advatnage. But i think we see that like a bonus of civ (only 2 civ have this advantage so it ok), maybe we need more balance all champions. Some seem too weak or situational. Take care to don't starndardizes all civilisations.

3- I think nop, if you look point 2. Ptol and Sélucid have good bonus with production heroe in CC. So it make a malus effect to balance the advantage of the point 2.

4 - Noboby forces the infantry to serve only as anti ram. i find the current situation satisfied. No easily accessible sword infantery that'is ok. It is charming to know that the Macedonians have this weakness.

 

[chrstgtr]

1 hour ago, Sevda said:

You can talk to them directly here: https://webchat.quakenet.org/?channels=0ad-dev. You can also ping other balancing advisors. Most people use the same names as their lobby account. 

I agree with everything else that reza said. 

Then what should the colony train? Should we also put merc inf into barracks?

Some opionions on reza's idea would be appreciated. @BreakfastBurrito_007 @real_tabasco_sauce @LetswaveaBook @chrstgtr 

I think making all civs play the same is undesirable. 

[king reza the great]

12 hours ago, Sevda said:

You can talk to them directly here: https://webchat.quakenet.org/?channels=0ad-dev. You can also ping other balancing advisors. Most people use the same names as their lobby account. 

I agree with everything else that reza said. 

Then what should the colony train? Should we also put merc inf into barracks?

Some opionions on reza's idea would be appreciated. @BreakfastBurrito_007 @real_tabasco_sauce @LetswaveaBook @chrstgtr 

Only women and swordmen I give.

Edited June 17, 2022 by king reza the great

[Yekaterina]

2 hours ago, Dakara said:

• About the cost i want have big cost like 100 for infantery and 150 for cavalery. 
• All mercenary is rank 2
• recruitment is instant, the units are not formed, we pay for their service.
• Limit the number of mercenary by 50 for each player (sound good or not?)
• One tech for recruit mercenary rank 3 in phase 3 in castle or CC.  Like 500 FOOD and 500 METAL cost tech.

Perfect. This is what mercenaries should be. 

 

4 hours ago, king reza the great said:

4- sword cham of maced is very unuseful and almost nobody buy it as a antiram. because it needs unlucking that takes time. instead of that sword cham give a merc sword man to maced.

I disagree. They are the same as any other sword infantry champions, it's just that their champion spearmen with silver shield upgrade (argyraspides) are extremely OP and outshines everything else. 

[Gurken Khan]

3 hours ago, Dakara said:

recruitment is instant, the units are not formed, we pay for their service.

We may not raise and train them but they still have to be brought in from wherever they originate, so I'm totally fine with a certain delay. Might also be OP otherwise.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

8 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:

We may not raise and train them but they still have to be brought in from wherever they originate, so I'm totally fine with a certain delay. Might also be OP otherwise.

yes, instant would allow for instant anti ram, maybe a couple other cheesy strategies.

I vote for not quite instant, but close to it. like 2 - 6 seconds, maybe 3 sec for inf and 6 sec for cav is good. In this case, they should also keep the batch train bonus.

 

In general though, I think this is how mercenaries should play. I remember we had discussion of this before a25, but nothing became of it.

how do we feel about 100 and 150 metal? This is the metal equivalent of their food/wood costs. I think it is perfectly fine because the fact they train at rank 2 and very quickly should be enough to justify the cost being metal.

 

Also, I disagree with reza_math points 2 and 3.

4 could go either way. It would be nice for mace to get a more helpful antiram, but there certainly are more pressing balance issues.

 

5 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

how do we feel about 100 and 150 metal?

maybe this, but Carthage get a -10/15 percent mercenary cost team bonus? If not, civ bonus.

[Player of 0AD]

On 16/06/2022 at 6:57 PM, king reza the great said:

2- civs like iber, brit need a fort to make a hero while some civs like ptol and sele easily can make hero from civ and its too imba. all civs must have a special building for making heros.

Actually its good that the Seles have this bonus as they are not very strong. It can also be a weakness: If you lose your hero you have to rebuild a cc sometimes.

On 16/06/2022 at 6:57 PM, king reza the great said:

3- put merc cavs of sele and ptol in estables.

Sele? Ok, makes sense. But ptol? No. Nobody needs to play macedonians in that case and Ptols are already OP

On 16/06/2022 at 6:57 PM, king reza the great said:

4- sword cham of maced is very unuseful and almost nobody buy it as a antiram. because it needs unlucking that takes time. instead of that sword cham give a merc sword man to maced.

Or both.

[Nobbi]

On 17/06/2022 at 4:06 AM, real_tabasco_sauce said:

how do we feel about 100 and 150 metal? This is the metal equivalent of their food/wood costs. I think it is perfectly fine because the fact they train at rank 2 and very quickly should be enough to justify the cost being metal.

Using the equivalent resource costs is to simplistic. There is a different value of the resources, due to the different total amount of food, wood and metal on the map. Most maps have less metal than wood and food can be gathered infinite from farms and therefore metal has a higher value in my opinion. However there are even more things to consider as I wrote in this post:

The time you need for gathering the resources also needs to be considered, if you want to make a useful balance.

I think for Seleucids the heroes can stay in CC but Ptol need a nerf, so it would be good when they could not train their heroes in CC. They most often the first in P3 so it could help, balancing them better.

Mercs  need higher costs and a26 will rise the cost to 90 metal, but its hard to say if this is enough, because it is not that simple to predict (available metal amount on map, time to mine it and make mercs vs the time your enemy can prepare for your attack and so on...). I recommended higher costs for mercs CAV because with 90 metal they still cheaper/resource efficient than mercs INF and so far no one complained about OP INF mercs.

There should be a way for Macedonians to counter early ram attacks, one way could be making the swords champs available in P2 as it will be the case for Athens in a26.

Edited June 18, 2022 by Nobbi

[chrstgtr]

2 hours ago, Nobbi said:

Using the equivalent resource costs is to simplistic. There is a different value of the resources, due to the different total amount of food, wood and metal on the map. Most maps have less metal than wood and food can be gathered infinite from farms and therefore metal has a higher value in my opinion. However there are even more things to consider as I wrote in this post:

The time you need for gathering the resources also needs to be considered, if you want to make a useful balance.

Mercs  need higher costs and a26 will rise the cost to 90 metal, but its hard to say if this is enough, because it is not that simple to predict (available metal amount on map, time to mine it and make mercs vs the time your enemy can prepare for your attack and so on...). I recommended higher costs for mercs CAV because with 90 metal they still cheaper/resource efficient than mercs INF and so far no one complained about OP INF mercs.

150 metal is still way faster than 100 food and 50 wood. 

1-food is the slowest gatherer resource

2-it requires upgrades for only one resource type

3-metal mines take a long time to deplete whereas wood is quickly chopped down. As a result, players must build multiple storehouses to always be close to wood while they only need to build two storehouses for metal mines. This means that collecting wood costs resources (the cost to build storehouses), time (the time spent building storehouses), and shuttling time (the amount of time wasted when units walk from the wood to the storehouse). These costs are almost nonexistent for metal. 
 

 

[real_tabasco_sauce]

5 hours ago, Nobbi said:

Most maps have less metal than wood and food can be gathered infinite from farms and therefore metal has a higher value in my opinion.

I guess it is true that in the long term, metal can be a scarce resource, but this is actually a misconception in the early to mid game: Metal resources are often very safe (under CC), and availability at this time really depends on how many workers you task on metal.

The distribution of metal actually favors the proposed mercenary model (fast train, equal cost to CS -> metal) because it establishes them as a quickly available fairly powerful unit. In this model, you can still do a fast rush using a lot of metal, but you will be hard pressed to sustain it all game.

Conversely, if you lose an important fight late in the game, you could quickly assemble a mercenary army for defense (including anti-ram).

I don't think this will be massive nerf to be honest, more like giving the mercs more interesting use cases: since 5000 metal gets you 33 merc cav (more than enough for devastating raids), and as carthage you would probably only need 1 embassy to get these mercs quickly because of the train time.

TBH I give it the green light, but then again what's my opinion's worth

On 16/06/2022 at 7:06 PM, real_tabasco_sauce said:

maybe this, but Carthage get a -10/15 percent mercenary cost team bonus? If not, civ bonus.

what do ppl think of this? Considering there are already many trade team bonuses, this could be neat.

[LienRag]

On 16/06/2022 at 11:02 PM, Gurken Khan said:

We may not raise and train them but they still have to be brought in from wherever they originate, so I'm totally fine with a certain delay. Might also be OP otherwise.

Would be nice to have the delay for calling mercenaries independent from their numbers, then.

But could someone explain to me why mercenaries are considered OP ? They cost a lot of a rare resource and they always die fairly quickly when I recruit them...

[alre]

5 minutes ago, LienRag said:

Would be nice to have the delay for calling mercenaries independent from their numbers, then.

totally possible by changing the batch training time multiplier of embassies, but I don't know if this can work with to mercs trained in buildings along with CSs.