Balancing for Beta 3

[KGB]

Piranha, SnotlinG,

I realize Beta 3 may be months off still but when will you be interested in balance suggestions and/or features for Beta 3?

I've completed or am playing in about 20 games so far and I have some thoughts / ideas beyond what's been posted in some of the other threads. Plus it would be a good idea to have everything gathered in one place.

KGB

[SnotlinG]

Yea we have a bunch of new functionality to add to beta3 before we will turn our attention to balancing issues. Im currently working on re-structuring the game, to better optimize the database and use a new solution for mapbuild/drawing, and then I will turn my attention to FOW. So there is still much to do

Anyway, I dont see any harm in starting the discussion already now, so bring the feedback!

[KGB]

SnotlinG,

OK, here goes. Most of these are actually minor things that will make a big difference. Some of them could be put into Beta 2 quite easily to allow time to test them out to ensure they do improve things.

Map Issues
-------------
1) Initial Starting Positions - Right now they are randomly chosen and this doesn't work well in games with less than the maximum number of players. Looking at the map as:

123
456
789

Many times a 2-3 player game has starting positions in spots 1,2,3 or 1,2,5 type of thing. This leads to really unbalanced games as one or two players have huge initial advantages of open map space to expand into.

In another thread (which I can copy from) I indicated that the game should balance out the starting positions so that 2 player games have players starting in diagonal corners or opposite sides (top or bottom). 3 player games should have a triangle shaped starting position etc.

2) Starting Armies - In reality there isn't enough of them. Too many games see players losing their hero on turns 1-3 due to bad luck. DLR (Warlords 3) solved this issue by giving more initial armies which I think should be done here too especially once FOW/hidden map covers up neutral cities so you can't see where easy cities to conquer are.

Ideally you'd you the DLR model which had players purchase initial starting units from a pool of points. That pool ranged from 500-3000 (set by the game creator). Units mostly cost about 90% as much to purchase as starting units as they did to buy for production (capped at 1000 in DLR and I'd say cap at 1500 here). So with 3000 points you could purchase 2 starting dragons, or 1 dragon and 15 light infantry or any other combo that added up to 3000. This gives players maximum flexibility to obtain units that fit their initial map position and their playing style.

If that's too much to do for Beta3, just giving out a couple extra units (say 2 Elf Archers and 2 scouts in addition to your initial starting unit) would go a long way toward helping with the problem of losing all your armies on turn 1-3 due to bad luck or not being able to locate easy cities when FOW/Hidden map is on.

Extra men will also help the problem of someone finding your capitol on turn 2-3 before you have time to build any defenses.

3) Wizards - This unit is too good to be a production unit in someones capitol at the start of the game. I've seen 2 games now where someone started with a Wizard in their capitol and eliminated another player on turn 2/3 due to the huge movement (once on Small World, once on Bullrun). So no to Wizards as a unit in the capitol.

4) Light Cavalry - This unit is too good to be in the average neutral city production. This is easily the best unit you can get early on due to the 3 strength, huge movement and 1 turn build times. The difference between this unit and Hv Infantry (12), Pikemen/Dwarves (8), Lt infantry (14) means that you are moving 1.5 to 2 turns to everyone one elses 1 turn. So restrict this unit to only appear in the 'good' production cities that have 4 units in them.


Unit Issues
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1) First Strike - Neutral city units should not get the first strike power. Even though the percentage is small it can still cause some major upsets when it happens. Restrict the First Strike power to player units only to help players expand initially.

2) Elephant - If the +2 Open bonus does not stack with the +1 stack bonus given by Pegasi/Demons/Devils etc then this unit is way over priced at 1500 gold. A 1050 Pegasi moves further, flies, has the same strength (6 after the +1 stack bonus) and gives +1 to a stack in all terrain. The only place the Elephant is better is in the Open. That's not worth 500 more gold. This unit should cost 1000 gold unless the +2 Open bonus stacks. If the +2 Open bonus stacks then the Elephant would be worth 1500 gold only *if* you increased the strength to 7.

3) Demons - This unit should not fly. Otherwise it basically is just a +2 strength Pegasi. If you want the Demon to remain as a flier it should go to a 4 turn unit so that it and the Pegasi are different.

4) Bats - In Beta3 this unit should probably drop to 20 moves and have it's view reduced so that it is at least 2 worse than a scout. Otherwise the bat will completely invalidate the scout unit.

5) Wolfrider - This unit is still fairly useless. I don't ever make one and I never see one used. It's cost + strength + build time means so many other units are SO much better to make (1 turn Lt Cavalry are equal in the open, 1 turn Pikemen/Dwarfs are equal anywhere, Any other 2 turn unit is much better strength wise). So something needs to be done for this unit. Maybe something like 10% First Strike power or more.

Hero Issues
--------------
1) Experience - The formula now allows heroes to level up way too fast once the game gets to the point where players are attacking other players instead of neutrals. A good solution to this would be to take the number of points in the enemy stack and multiply by the ratio of points between the two stacks (with all bonus's added in on both sides):

Eg. A stack of 8 light infantry (16 points) is killed by a hero stack containing the hero and 7 dragons (80 points - lets assume 10 strength each including the hero after all bonus's/items are added in). So the experience awarded would be 16*16/80 = 16*1/5 = 3 XP.

This means that evenly matched battles award more XP because the chance of losing is greater while easy battles award very little XP.

It would even be possible to get a multiply ratio > 1 if a lone hero of 6 strength killed 2 Pegasi (6 strength) on his own 12*12/6=24 XP.

A quick short term solution for Beta2 would be to just award the amount of XP of the strongest enemy unit (as I mentioned in another thread).

2) Lost Heroes - As I've mentioned elsewhere, on turns 1-5 where many games are won/lost (esp in 4+ player games) players need another hero VERY cheaply with a much higher chance of getting that hero. I'd suggest setting the minimum cost down to 100 gold for those turns.

A loss of a hero early in the game is the biggest reason for players resigning or losing the game because many games are finished by turn 20 so waiting 10 turns for a hero isn't reasonable. It will be much worse once ruins are in play and players who lose heroes watch while others search ruins for gold and allies.

3) First Strike - Heroes have none. How about giving them 1% per level. Later items can be added that give increased first strike power.


I'll post more items as I find them.

KGB

[piranha]

Starting positions
---------------------
I'm not sure how we are going to solve this at the moment as it will require quite a lot of programing. But one way to do something about it quite soon is to build a couple of maps that are made for less players.

for some reason we didn't think so much about 1v1 games for example and right now 1v1is more or less a race to capture cities until you have meet the winning percentage.

When I created river war I had the idea that I wanted to put many possible starting positions so you wont know where the enemy is located (with FOW). But for serious competitive play I know mirrored maps might be the most even way to go.
I agree that something needs to be done to prevent that 1 player get 50% of the map and 3 other share the other 50% because of starting positions.

We are making efforts for beta3 to make map creating way easier and faster.

Starting armies
------------------
Interesting. I will talk with Snotling about this, but in my mind it should decrease the luck factor which is a good thing. I think we will add something for beta3.

Unit balancing
-----------------
Wizards ok, it might be true. I think we will have to look at the start unit thing a bit more. If we should switch to players buying production in their first city.
Light cav, do you think they should cost more to buy?
Elephant, I agree it should be cheaper.
Demons are very similar to pegasi, we might try to come up with something different to make them more interesting.
Bat, Im ok with lowering movement. On maps with lots of terrain scouts should still have a purpose. I get the feeling that many maps don't have a lot of terrain that are popular in the DLR community, is that right? a scout on bullrun would probably be useless, but on a map with a lot of terrain scouts should still have a place.
wolfrider, wolfrider have 15% critical strike. We will display critical strike values in beta3.

Experience points
---------------------
I'll leave this to snotling for the moment as I haven't been paying close attention to how fast I level.

Lost Hero
------------
I agree

Strike/Heroes
----------------
I think our long term goal for the heroes is to make it a bit more roleplay like by awarding points when leveling and let the player add stats.I think would be cool is if you can decide if you want more movement, command, strength or critial strike.

One thought we have been discussing is to let people build things in their city.
I know this is not in the warlord games I played at least but I think that part is fun in many games.
I think we will add this at some point but keep a "vanilla" version for those who prefer the old school way and then add our own ideas to "modern" version.
Giving players points to buy their production from is not really like having a building aspect in the city but it's one step closer to it I think.

[Itangast]

Only 2 turns for Wizards is too good to be honest.
Wizard towns are very high in deman atm - simply too good.
3 turns to produce a wizard is better.

Light cavalry - definatly must be tweaked. Higher cost to buy and perhaps 18 in move (now 20).

Heavy infantary could use some love too... perhaps +1 in defence (?)

Another question:
The devil is supposed to neglect all non-hero bonuses... what does that involve? City defences, Terrain bonuses as well?

[piranha]

Devil will only remove stack bonuses and terrain based bonuses. But right now he will remove attack bonuses as well which he shouldn't.

[KGB]

Piranha,

I'm not sure how we are going to solve this at the moment as it will require quite a lot of programing. But one way to do something about it quite soon is to build a couple of maps that are made for less players.

Why would it require lots of programming? It's only a one time thing done at game setup. I coded the logic in Warlords4 in <100 lines of C code. I'll be happy to email you the logic. All it requires is that you have the X,Y co-ordinates of the cities on the map. Once you place 1 starting city all the rest fall into place quite easily.

for some reason we didn't think so much about 1v1 games for example and right now 1v1is more or less a race to capture cities until you have meet the winning percentage.

Yes, but this will change completely with FOW/Hidden Map options. Of course games that don't use FOW/Hidden will still suffer the 'race to capture cities' problem. That's why I suspect no one will play without either Hidden Map/FOW.

When I created river war I had the idea that I wanted to put many possible starting positions so you wont know where the enemy is located (with FOW). But for serious competitive play I know mirrored maps might be the most even way to go.

You don't need 100% complete mirror maps. Bullrun isn't a mirror map and it's been a successful map for a long time. Your Riverwar map is fine too and it's not a mirror map either. Maps just need to be reasonably well balanced in terms of cities/ruins etc. FOW/Hidden Map options will make a lot of maps that aren't 100% mirror maps, fine for play.

If you get the starting position problem + starting armies sorted out I'll bet you find a lot of things that look unbalanced now will be just fine. I say this because of experience with DLR / Warlords 4.

Wizards ok, it might be true. I think we will have to look at the start unit thing a bit more. If we should switch to players buying production in their first city.

If you switch to letting players buy their initial production I suspect you'll find that only a few units ever get bought. Depending on how many points you get, the units worth buying are Pegasi/Gryffon/Lt Cavalry/Elf Archer and *maybe* a spider (this assumes Wizards/Dragons/Archones etc can't be bought). I wouldn't even remotely consider any other unit. Generally I'd want to buy a Pegasi/Elf Archer for 1500 pts or Gryffon/Lt Cavalry combo for 2000 pts.

Light cav, do you think they should cost more to buy?

I think they are fine for 400 gold, 3 strength and 20 moves. Itangast thinks they need to be tweaked. Maybe they should instead go 2 strength with +2 bonus in the open. That makes them less valuable defenders/attackers of cities etc while retaining their usefulness of movement + attack in the open terrain.

Again though, if you remove them from the average neutral cities and force players to buy everyone for 400 gold (or get them from good production cities) then I suspect they won't be considered too good.

Bat, Im ok with lowering movement. On maps with lots of terrain scouts should still have a purpose.

Just drop the bat to 20 moves. But mostly when you get FOW going make sure it only sees 2 squares like it did in War2. If the Scout sees 5 squares it will always have a place in FOW games for it's view range + the ability to move units over rough terrain.

I get the feeling that many maps don't have a lot of terrain that are popular in the DLR community, is that right? a scout on bullrun would probably be useless, but on a map with a lot of terrain scouts should still have a place.

It depends on the map. I chose Bullrun because it has the smallest amount of terrain on it. Just enough to get in players way and to afford the occasional place to place armies on their native terrain to avoid being in the 'open'. This makes for a 100% complete contrast to your Riverwar map which is loaded with water + terrain. I did that just so that I could see how units behaved on different types of maps. For example on Riverwar, the Wizard isn't near as overpowering as it is on Bullrun because of the need to enter/exit the water all the time. But on Riverwar, flying units are much more valuable than they are on Bullrun.

Anyway, back to DLR. There are lots of other user created maps with heavy terrain like Riverwar. Most of those use terrain you don't have yet (desert, lava, ice, rock etc) so it's hard to chose one of those maps to bring over until (if) you add more terrain types. Other maps are mirror maps, some are 4 island maps with lots of water between the island etc.

In DLR it was found that the more difficult the terrain on the map, the better flying units became.

wolfrider, wolfrider have 15% critical strike. We will display critical strike values in beta3.

Cool. I didn't realize that. Even the Warpedia for units doesn't mention the critical strike chance so I had sort of forgotten what it was.

It would also be nice to have a stack menu (maybe a button next to the group/ungroup button) that pops up a stack menu showing all units in the stack along with their strength, moves, bonus's they are giving etc so players can see what their stack power is.

Also I keep forgetting to ask. But I've never seen a Ghost unit in any game. Do these units not come as allies? They definitely don't seem to appear in neutral cities.

I think our long term goal for the heroes is to make it a bit more roleplay like by awarding points when leveling and let the player add stats.I think would be cool is if you can decide if you want more movement, command, strength or critial strike.

This was the DLR model. There were 15 unique hero types (Warrior/General/Priest/Monk/Thief/Wizard etc) each with their own skills, spells etc. Some skills/spells obviously overlapped between heroes. Skills cost different amounts of points depending on the hero type. So a +X strength might cost 1 skill point while a +X command might cost 2 or 3 skill points. Players could save their points and spend them later as they saw fit.

This kind of change really strays away from Warlords 2 and into DLR territory. Not sure how much Warlords 2 players would like that.

One thought we have been discussing is to let people build things in their city.
I know this is not in the warlord games I played at least but I think that part is fun in many games.
I think we will add this at some point but keep a "vanilla" version for those who prefer the old school way and then add our own ideas to "modern" version.
Giving players points to buy their production from is not really like having a building aspect in the city but it's one step closer to it I think.

Yes it certainly is one step along that direction. What you are basically talking about here are what DLR had as 'sites' which gave bonus's to movement/strength/hit points/view range/production times/temple blessing etc.

Wizard towns are very high in deman atm - simply too good.
3 turns to produce a wizard is better.

I suspect they are in high demand in your capitol because on turns 1-5 you can eliminate a player on Smallworld/Bullrun thanks to the Wizard movement. In neutral cities I don't really care that much about getting a Wizard unless I manage to do so on turn 1 or 2.

Also once FOW comes into play they will be far less useful because they can't be used to cherry pick easy cities far away on the map or go right to enemy cities that are lightly defended because you won't know which ones are like that. If more starting units are introduced the Wizard becomes less useful than ever because players will start with 8-16 units and you won't be able to jump an empty capitol on turn 2-3.

Heavy infantary could use some love too... perhaps +1 in defence (?)

They seem fine to me. 3 strength with +1 in the open making them equal to Light Cavalry just with 12 moves instead of 20. They move 50% more than Pikemen/Dwarf Infantry which I find very useful. At worst they are too expensive to buy but they definitely are useful.

The unit I find completely useless is Lt Infantry.

Devil will only remove stack bonuses and terrain based bonuses. But right now he will remove attack bonuses as well which he shouldn't.

Wait, I thought the Unicorn removed terrain bonus's. Are you saying the Devil does too? I always thought the Devil only removed stack bonus's which are currently from the Pegasi/Dragon/Demon/Medusa. It should not for example remove the +1 in the Open bonus that a Lt Cavalry unit gets or the +1 City bonus a Minotaur gets.

KGB

[KGB]

One more quick thing for the 'to do' list.

When a player resigns at the moment all his cities are turned to neutrals with the armies contained within becoming neutral. I don't have an issue with that (tho I'd prefer they were all razed).

But what happens quite often is that several cities are left empty. This lets the closest player simply scoop up many cities with nothing but a single bat visiting them. It would be nice if when a player resigned the empty cities were populated with a unit again so that they had to be conquered.

KGB

[KGB]

Wait, I thought the Unicorn removed terrain bonus's. Are you saying the Devil does too? I always thought the Devil only removed stack bonus's which are currently from the Pegasi/Dragon/Demon/Medusa. It should not for example remove the +1 in the Open bonus that a Lt Cavalry unit gets or the +1 City bonus a Minotaur gets.

OK I just tested this in a game. The Devil definitely removes terrain + stack bonus's, not to mention gives a +1 stack bonus of it's own. No wonder it's the best/most expensive unit in the game!

But it means the Devil overlaps on the Unicorns skill. Therefore I think the Unicorn should only be a 3 turn unit.

KGB

[piranha]

I'm currently making some changes in the battle stuff to fix the bugs/bad calculations discovered.

Which units would like to see changed?
Here are some suggestions.

Orc: move:15
Light cav. STR 2 +2 open
Dwarf. Move: 10
Catapult. move: 12, cost: 1100 gold
Wizard: build time: 3
Unicorn: build time: 3, cost: 1200 (cancel terrain only outside cities and can't cancel stack bonuses that are terrain based)
Elephant: cost 1200
Ghost: 25% Critical strike (still +5)
Devil: Cancel positive stack bonuses only, including stack bonuses that are terrain based (medusa still doing -1). Cost 1800
Demon: Remove +1 stack, instead fights vs cities as if there was no city wall making it a high quality cannon fodder type unit instead of support unit.

We plan to have two systems selected when you host. The current one and one where 1 turn units have 3 HP, 2 turn units 4 HP and so on. HP will heal when you begin your turn, not between battles.