Making siege more interesting

[Outis]

40 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

micro in fighting is good, but forcing micro is not. Imagine having to train horses from the corral in order to train cavalry.

I think what has been suggested could be done well with siege towers, perhaps with rams. If these changes are brought to rams, rams should be more powerful and more costly, so you would need to "micro" fewer rams.

Fair enough, what about training siege units with a couple citizen soldiers already garrisoned inside, that way the micro of garrisoning extra units for extra speed and attack speed is optional and not forced.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

5 minutes ago, Outis said:

what about training siege units with a couple citizen soldiers already garrisoned inside

Now we have effectively returned to normal rams

 

6 minutes ago, Outis said:

that way the micro of garrisoning extra units for extra speed and attack speed is optional and not forced.

This is more simply accomplished by giving current (a25) rams a logarithmic bonus of speed and attack when garrisoned.

[chrstgtr]

1 hour ago, Outis said:

This is an RTS so i expect some micro is in order to win. Besides, siege units are generally not plentiful, so i expect it will be manageable.

Speaking as someone who does way more micro than average…this would annoy me.

Have fun microing this when you make 3 rams mid battle, have to micro the exact number of units (away from the fight) to stand idle next to the siege factory (which will make your idle hot key way less useful), click your view away from the battle to see if the rams finished producing, click back to the battle because you looked too soon, click back away to the battle to see if the rams are ready, garrison the perfect number of units into 3 separate rams (no shift clicking because then you might over garrison and leave one or more rams immobile), manually direct the rams to wherever you want them to go (because rally points will no longer work for siege), click back to battle to see that half your army followed a retreating unit and now you’re dead. 
 

This is also be one of the very few instances where micro is forced and it is forced away from the action. There are a ton of hot key/group control features that exist or are request just so that you don’t have to needlessly click/view away from the center of action. 
 

Giving an extra boost to siege with garrisoned units makes sense. Making siege useless without garrisoning  sounds terribly frustrating 

Edited July 6, 2022 by chrstgtr

[Outis]

57 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Now we have effectively returned to normal rams

Not exactly, please consider it with:

- siege units function only with units garrisoned,

- when you damage an enemy siege unit below a certain level, garrisoned operator are kicked out, and you have the capability to capture it.

This accomplishes 2 things:

- reintroduce the capture mechanic, but hopefully with enough micro to make it worth it (note you still have the no-painful-micro option to destroy it completely like the current game)

- introduce the mechanic to make siege units move and attack faster in a micro-intensive way, all the while avoiding loss of function without painful micro

In other words, no forced frustrating micro like suggested by @chrstgtror @real_tabasco_sauce, but hopefully implement some ideas from @Darkcity in a fun way.and give more options.

[chrstgtr]

1 hour ago, Outis said:

Not exactly, please consider it with:

- siege units function only with units garrisoned,

- when you damage an enemy siege unit below a certain level, garrisoned operator are kicked out, and you have the capability to capture it.

This accomplishes 2 things:

- reintroduce the capture mechanic, but hopefully with enough micro to make it worth it (note you still have the no-painful-micro option to destroy it completely like the current game)

- introduce the mechanic to make siege units move and attack faster in a micro-intensive way, all the while avoiding loss of function without painful micro

In other words, no forced frustrating micro like suggested by @chrstgtror @real_tabasco_sauce, but hopefully implement some ideas from @Darkcity in a fun way.and give more options.

I don’t know. That sounds a whole lot like the current system except that siege will discharge units when destroyed. It seems like it would make more sense to just keep it was the way it is and allow for bonus damage/speed if units are garrisoned. 
 

I think siege should be capture-able, but that seems to be a different topic. 

Edited July 6, 2022 by chrstgtr

[Grapjas]

@chrstgtr Well instead of needing to micro 5 rams, you could maybe now do it with 2 decked out rams dealing more damage and who move faster. You can now also prepare siege if you are capped at the pop limit. No need to wait for that new cata after waiting you are not at pop cap anymore, it's simply already there. It can be sniped, but isn't RTS about finding smart ways to defeat your enemy? 

Or maybe you have 5 rams and you want to attack the enemy, but in the middle you come across an enemy army. Thats 15 pop you are missing and who are unable to fight. With these changes you can pop them out and have them reinforce your army to fight. 

I would like to note again that far more players play the game at a slower pace and mostly in singleplayer/LAN envoirements and probably have been irritated about changes for the sake of MP balance, too. 

Edited July 6, 2022 by Grapjas
typo

[real_tabasco_sauce]

IDK, I am just not a fan of adding such specific "details" to gameplay.

Should we now train horses from corrals, garrison them in stables, and then train cav?

It just seems like a lot of complexity for minimal gameplay benefit.

How about:

1. Rams get logarithmic speed damage bonus with garrisoned soldiers (in addition to their default "crew", which is reflected by a pop space cost of 3).

2. bring back siege capture.

Edited July 6, 2022 by real_tabasco_sauce

[chrstgtr]

1 hour ago, Grapjas said:

@chrstgtr Well instead of needing to micro 5 rams, you could maybe now do it with 2 decked out rams dealing more damage and who move faster. You can now also prepare siege if you are capped at the pop limit. No need to wait for that new cata after waiting you are not at pop cap anymore, it's simply already there. It can be sniped, but isn't RTS about finding smart ways to defeat your enemy? 

Or maybe you have 5 rams and you want to attack the enemy, but in the middle you come across an enemy army. Thats 15 pop you are missing and who are unable to fight. With these changes you can pop them out and have them reinforce your army to fight. 

I would like to note again that far more players play the game at a slower pace and mostly in singleplayer/LAN envoirements and probably have been irritated about changes for the sake of MP balance, too. 

I’m unmoved.

Everything you said (with the exception of siege costing 0 pop), can be achieved with the alternative that @real_tabasco_sauce and I provided where siege basically remains the same but extra strength/speed is conferred upon garrisoning. Making units that are inherently useless unless you engage in micro sounds annoying and not fun. Some things you mentioned, like popping out of garrisoned siege, is already possible with zero changes and it only hasn’t happened yet because you haven’t tried to do it  

Your general point about SP vs. MP also makes no sense. No one complained about balance. People just said it sounds annoying and pointed out how it could be. In fact, this was suggested by someone who plays MP.
 

Lastly, the notion that SP preferences should prevail because there are “more” SPs is baseless. Yeah, there have been like 10M downloads of 0AD. And yeah, you only see 1K of those online regularly. That doesn’t mean that there are 9.999M SPs. The number of SPs is almost certainly  no where to close to that. The only people that you know actually play SP are those that you see post online. For all you know, save for the couple dozen SPs that post on the forums regularly, the game has uninstalled by 9.999M people

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I'll use this as an example against overly complicated warships too. Do you want to have to load up garrisons in each and every ship in order to make it useful? If so, then for apm's sake you'd only be able to play with a very small number of ships. If you keep them simpler, each ships requires fewer apm, and you can have a larger number of ships (fleets instead of a small squadron). Same thing with making siege more complicated. If you add complexity in one area, then you probably need to remove complexity somehow. In this case, limiting you to like 1 or 2 rams.

I can see a gameplay where Walls become more useful and interesting and then the attacker building 1 or 2 rams that they have to stock with troops and skillfully use to knock down the enemy walls effectively can be fun. But the game's not there yet, and it's not clear whether most players would like that (I would, but that's beside the point: I'm not most players).

[Darkcity]

I think conversations are going on everywhere without the objective to "Suggest interesting changes for siege". Given the input from 0ad community (Which most of us can agree) following can be done.

1. Leave catas and bolts as it is. No need for adding and removing unit complexities.
2. Ram pop should be reduced from 3 to 2. Its attack will remian the same but speed and interval will reduce to 2/3rd. 
   1. If you garrsion 1 unit, it's attack speed & movement willl be same as present.
   2. If you fully garrsion 20% bonus of attack, movement & attack speed. (If you don't have siege upgrade and wants to take down a building where tons of troops are garrsioned smart way to do it.)
3. For siege towers: We already have a couple of points about, siege towers units can be attacked (but they will have high armor bonus while garrsioned), siege towers can capture buildings, and so on. In can be discussed on other thread as well.

@chrstgtrI think with this, it's not a forced micro but a reason to interact. Here you can either play without garrsion which is fine or with garrsion.

In general, game should have machanics to give you a reason to treat a different unit differently rather then all of them with different armor and attacks. 

For ships @wowgetoffyourcellphone. We have separate thread but to add few points, we can use similar mechanics as above to reduce pop taken, default arrow and speed for empty ships and give bonus to garriosned ones. 

Always welcome for suggestions.

[chrstgtr]

2 minutes ago, Darkcity said:

I think conversations are going on everywhere without the objective to "Suggest interesting changes for siege". Given the input from 0ad community (Which most of us can agree) following can be done.

1. Leave catas and bolts as it is. No need for adding and removing unit complexities.
2. Ram pop should be reduced from 3 to 2. Its attack will remian the same but speed and interval will reduce to 2/3rd. 
   1. If you garrsion 1 unit, it's attack speed & movement willl be same as present.
   2. If you fully garrsion 20% bonus of attack, movement & attack speed. (If you don't have siege upgrade and wants to take down a building where tons of troops are garrsioned smart way to do it.)
3. For siege towers: We already have a couple of points about, siege towers units can be attacked (but they will have high armor bonus while garrsioned), siege towers can capture buildings, and so on. In can be discussed on other thread as well.

@chrstgtrI think with this, it's not a forced micro but a reason to interact. Here you can either play without garrsion which is fine or with garrsion.

In general, game should have machanics to give you a reason to treat a different unit differently rather then all of them with different armor and attacks. 

For ships @wowgetoffyourcellphone. We have separate thread but to add few points, we can use similar mechanics as above to reduce pop taken, default arrow and speed for empty ships and give bonus to garriosned ones. 

Always welcome for suggestions.

Sounds good to me. I would make the speed, attack, and/or attack speed increase as an exponential function of number of units garrisoned. But this works too. (My only objection was making them useless unless garrisoned)

 

I think it was mentioned somewhere in the thread, but I would also reintroduce capturing siege. That may be for a different topic, though

[Darkcity]

12 minutes ago, chrstgtr said:

I think it was mentioned somewhere in the thread

When I initiated the thread that was the suggestion. That was to introduce capturing rams also (with other gameplay use cases). But i think with current mechanism in place, we can apply similar capturing mechanism that was there in a23 to all sieges. 

So, skirmish can capture the Rams also rather then attacking for 1 min to destroy it. Should be fun.

 

[chrstgtr]

33 minutes ago, Darkcity said:

When I initiated the thread that was the suggestion. That was to introduce capturing rams also (with other gameplay use cases). But i think with current mechanism in place, we can apply similar capturing mechanism that was there in a23 to all sieges. 

So, skirmish can capture the Rams also rather then attacking for 1 min to destroy it. Should be fun.

 

Agree. I would just want to make sure that the capture resistance is high enough that rams aren't easily captured. It's silly that a ram can resist 100 skirms when no other enemy units are around. But I wouldn't want to make rams so vulnerable that a group of skirms under fire from enemy units can capture an advancing ram. It would really nerf rams. 

[Stan`]

With regards to wall I'd like gates to be turrets and only damageable by rams. Then you'd be able to repair restore the gate once it's been damaged knocked down.

[Grapjas]

11 hours ago, chrstgtr said:

like popping out of garrisoned siege, is already possible

You eniterely missed the point. You cant do this:

13 hours ago, Grapjas said:

Or maybe you have 5 rams and you want to attack the enemy, but in the middle you come across an enemy army. Thats 15 pop you are missing and who are unable to fight. With these changes you can pop them out and have them reinforce your army to fight. 

 

11 hours ago, chrstgtr said:

Lastly, the notion that SP preferences should prevail because there are “more” SPs is baseless. Yeah, there have been like 10M downloads of 0AD. And yeah, you only see 1K of those online regularly. That doesn’t mean that there are 9.999M SPs. The number of SPs is almost certainly  no where to close to that. The only people that you know actually play SP are those that you see post online. For all you know, save for the couple dozen SPs that post on the forums regularly, the game has uninstalled by 9.999M people

Just by the sheer amount of daily downloads of mods on mod.io that you never see (or extremely rarely) being played online tells me more than enough. On a good day it can surpass the number of online people in the lobby. The difference is, the lobby mainly consists of the same returning players while number of mod downloads are likely new people. Just to provide you a statistic.

 

11 hours ago, chrstgtr said:

units that are inherently useless unless you engage in micro sounds annoying and not fun

It's not annoying if it's rewarding.

 

11 hours ago, chrstgtr said:

Your general point about SP vs. MP also makes no sense. No one complained about balance. People just said it sounds annoying and pointed out how it could be. In fact, this was suggested by someone who plays MP.

My point is, you're purely talking from a competitive perspective while many people don't play the game competitively. It often feels like the entire game gets build around the 1% of the (loudest) playerbase. 

 

Back on subject, i agree that buffing siege if you garrison them is the very least thing that can be done to make them more interesting.

Edited July 7, 2022 by Grapjas

[real_tabasco_sauce]

2 hours ago, Grapjas said:

Just by the sheer amount of daily downloads of mods on mod.io that you never see (or extremely rarely) being played online tells me more than enough. On a good day it can surpass the number of online people in the lobby. The difference is, the lobby mainly consists of the same returning players while number of mod downloads are likely new people. Just to provide you a statistic.

I would say another difference is those downloading many mods and playing SP are "trying out" the game and the mod.io mods, and will likely not play for a long time. I would say MP has the most longtime fans.

 

2 hours ago, Grapjas said:

It's not annoying if it's rewarding.

his point is that it is extra details that the player has to do that don't add to gameplay. I would consider this annoying too.

Another (extreme) example, what if we had to manually give each soldier a shield?

 

In my opinion: too many details, and the game becomes a simulator, too few details and the game is too simple.

I think this would be a simulator design choice, and that we can do other, simpler things to allow for more interesting siege.

8 hours ago, chrstgtr said:

exponential function

Surely you mean logarithmic here, like units building structures?

Edited July 7, 2022 by real_tabasco_sauce

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

36 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

I would say MP has the most longtime fans.

At most, 100-200 (?) consistent MP players? 0 A.D. has probably had close to a million (?) downloads from various sources.

[Darkcity]

Monthly active player base should be the right measures, as the impact of any change will be higher for such players. Downloads are mostly misleading measure. 

[real_tabasco_sauce]

57 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

0 A.D. has probably had close to a million (?) downloads from various sources.

I guess we cannot know how many of these have played for more than a week, a year etc.

To be honest, recalling my SP days, I don't think the original changes would be good for most SP players either.

[chrstgtr]

0AD has had millions of downloads. AOE had only 3M sales. Do you really think 0AD is as popular as AOE? Downloads clearly do not tell us how many actual users there are. 

New people/downloads doesn't equal actual users. Should a game be designed for the person who plays it three times? Should we really debate the merits of p3 siege for all the users who experiment with the game for 10 minutes and never get past p1? Of course not. 

There is no true way to measure the number of active SP users and we don't know how many active SP users play the game for a meaningful amount of time. Pretending otherwise is misleading. Even if there was a secret trove of SP users, how can you say they resemble the couple dozen of forum posters here? 

4 hours ago, Grapjas said:

Just by the sheer amount of daily downloads of mods on mod.io that you never see (or extremely rarely) being played online tells me more than enough. On a good day it can surpass the number of online people in the lobby. The difference is, the lobby mainly consists of the same returning players while number of mod downloads are likely new people. Just to provide you a statistic.

This metric is also misleading. You have no idea how many people actually play those mods. It could be people who download the mod thinking it is the entire game and then get frustrated and uninstall the game before ever playing. It could be people that download the mod right immediately after downloading the game and then uninstall the game five minutes later. It could be regular users that are reinstalling the mod, which is something I know I have done. We simply don't know what these downloads are and whether they translate into any actual plays

-------------

None of your substantive statements merit a response in the context of the current proposal.

[alre]

I remember my SP days. I downloaded the game, installed it, tried it one time, uninstalled it shortly after.

[borg-]

Are diverting the focus of the topic...

Pls stay focused on finding solutions and bringing new ideas 

Edited July 7, 2022 by borg-

[chrstgtr]

3 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Surely you mean logarithmic here, like units building structures?

I actually did mean exponential. Something like x^1.25 makes sense to me. More garrisoned men means less men outside to protect the siege, which makes the siege more vulnerable. More garrisoned men also makes men outside of siege more vulnerable to arrows pounding down from a CC, fort, or tower (Imagine attacking a fort with 50 men and 3 rams. Imagine how much quicker 20 men would die under fort arrows than 50 men would die--garrisoned men means damage is more concentrated). In short, garrisoning, more often than not, is riskier than not garrisoning. Exponential would provide an increasing benefit for taking on more risk.

Logarithmic or linear would be fine too, of course. These are just minor details. 

[Grapjas]

@Darkcity do you know how to make a patch? Otherwise it will be all talk but no action like many other discussions. If not you could learn how to if you want. 

 

EDIT: if you're on windows i can help you out.

Edited July 7, 2022 by Grapjas

[Darkcity]

@Grapjas it has been 3 years since doing any coding xd. Now i'm product manager so hard for me to code, all I can do is suggest some good gameplay and design changes. Although will try on weekend. If you have resources I can utilize to make patch, I can look into it. Let's coop to make these changes.