Thoughts about current economic model

[piranha]

I've been thinking about one thing now and then when I play. Its really hard in warbarons to counter an enemy strategy even when you know what he is doing.


Example. My enemy have a very powerful hero and a good army that keeps taking city after city from me. There are counters vs this, for example archon. The problem is an archon costs close to 2000 and then takes 5 turns to produce. In most games the income after upkeep is payed is around 100-200 so it gives you at best 20 turns before you have 1 of them, usually even more.

There is a discussion in the other thread about having leadership and chaos negate each other and give the archon for example 4 in chaos, and some other cheaper unit could have 2 in chaos and that would be a good step towards making it easier to stop an enemy with a super strong hero. If you can get a unit around 1000 gold that will do something about leadership(command) and it might just take 12 turns to get it.

However I still think there is not enough room for strategy in army designing. Most of the time the only thing that decide what your army will be like is what you happen get from the cities you take. In beta3 you can ruin run and use that early money to buy some production but from beta4 that wont be possible.

How about increasing the income and making it cost gold for each produced unit, you will have the same amount of money as you do now, but you have the option to stop producing units to boost your income so that you can save up to buy important units in order to counter a enemy strategy or to design the kind of army you think will be the right for you depending on maplayout etc.


Btw perhaps the chaos/leadership concept should be applied to terrain/unicorn as well. There could be a unit that does -1 terrain bonus.

[KGB]

Piranha,

At some point games *have* to end. They aren't meant to go on forever. So if in your example the enemy hero is rampaging then it's probably time to resign and start a new game. Sort of like in chess when your position has gotten bad enough that checkmate is going to happen soon.

That said, the issue you are describing with the economic model really needs to be broken into 2 separate discussions:

1) 2 player games on large maps (possibly 4 player games too depending on map)
2) Multi-player games/2 player games on small maps

In game (1), money is almost never an issue because there are usually 25-50 cities for each player plus 10-25 ruins etc. So in these games coming up with 2000 gold isn't a problem. Plus due to the large map size a single strong hero stack will take a VERY long time to travel all around the map and conquer every city giving time to prepare a strong defense. So I'd say there isn't a problem in game (1). This is one reason I prefer to play game (1) because you can adapt strategy.

In game (2), money is always an issue. Mostly because there are only a few cities (5-10) and few ruins (2-4). So your only chance for an Archon is really from a hero offer as you'll never have 2000 gold for an Archon and if you did have 2000 gold you'd probably spend it on a hero or something else. These games are 75% decided by luck. Luck of hero ally offers, luck of quality city production (getting a spider city vs a Lt infantry city), luck of gold in a ruin (500 vs 1100 in L3 is a big difference)

To me, game type 1 is fine as it is. It works really well in terms of the economic model and your ability to counter enemy strategy. Game 2, definitely needs help. But the thing is, if you change things too much for game 2, you'll ruin game 1 so you have to be really careful what you do.

Here are some easy suggestions that won't unbalance game 1 but will help game 2:

1) Upkeep. I am not sure how you are doing upkeep in Warbarons. In War2/DLR, upkeep of units in cities is halved (you add up all halves from all cities in cases where you have a lot of 1 upkeep units in cities). So if you are not doing that, I'd suggest you halve the upkeep of units in cities. This will increase everyone's income.
2) Income. There are two ways to increase this. The first is simply have cities with slightly higher income. I don't know what the average income is but it could be raised by a couple of gold in the random city generator. The other way is from items that give +X gold per city or hero skills that give +X gold per city.
3) Ghosts. This is the alternative to the Archon. Right now it costs too much and has a VERY high upkeep (8). I'd suggest dropping the cost to 800 or 900 and lowering the upkeep to 4. This will at least allow Ghosts to be used as a substitute for an Archon.
4) Maximum stack bonus. Currently the maximum stack bonus is +5. This works fine in game type 1 but isn't so good for game type 2. So why not limit the maximum bonus to +3 in game type 2. Either as a game option at game creation time or simply mandate a +3 maximum bonus in any game involving 5-8 players. This won't prevent a hero/siege/spider stack from conquering a lot of cities but it will at least limit the super hero who gets +2 or +3 command and is stacked with a Dragon for +5 making even Light infantry deadly.
5) Quests. Are there going to be quests in beta4? If there are, gold from quests will help increase income if you make the gold reward fairly decent and the quests reasonable to complete.

None of the addresses the issue that 80% of the armies you make will be what you find in the neutrals. But Warlords 2/DLR worked that way too. You might buy some 1 turn units like Light infantry/bats/heavy infanty in a bunch of cities but the *good* production you bought was always limited to a couple of cities due to gold being scarce. I don't see what's wrong with that.

KGB

P.S. One more thing separate from the economic model. It would really help if 'self-raze' was added in beta4. That way you can raze those cities to deny them and their income/production to the enemy hero. Self-raze was one of the most important features in DLR to slow down a rampaging hero because you could raze your city and move all those units into another city and double it's defense.

[Pillager]

It would be nice to have some more control over your production without bankrupting oneself. I can sort of see how this would work..and if done right, it might work quite well.

A different implementation would be to allow cities to 'build trade goods' instead of producing a unit...this would increase (double?) the city's income...but it would be done at the expense of unit production.

Or, you could allow players to adjust taxes for the entire kingdom....low taxes (-50% income, -1 production time), normal taxes, high taxes (+25% income, +1 production time), very high (+50% income, +2 production time). This would be nice for the end game, instead of turning off all your city production individually, you could just raise taxes for the kingdom.

Introducing units with pillage bonuses will encourage players to pillage more, and build the units they feel they need.

I think that units that negate a specific amount of bonuses (IE chaos 1=enemy command -1, fear 1= enemy morale -1) would help counter an enemy superhero.

Right now, the way heroes gain experience is too hit or miss. So, your hero might win a huge battle and quickly become incredibly powerful, while mine gets next to no experience for taking cities and low level ruins. If hero xp gain becomes steadier and less 'streaky' I think the superhero problem will be lessened somewhat.

-1 terrain bonus sounds like a good addition to me. I love the unicorn's ability,..enough to actually fork out the cash for unicorn production. Take that spider lovers.