Ruins

[piranha]

We are going to work on ruins in not too long. We have talked quite a lot about how ruins should work and I'd like to present our idea, perhaps someone else have a better idea because I'm not 100% satisfied with our idea.

In warlords 1,2 that I played ruins was roulette to me . You click search and face an unknown opponent called ghost and your hero will slain or win without me knowing at all what went down, what my chances were, and then I could walk away with a super army on turn 2 if I got lucky.

I then played a lot of Heroes 3 which have similar things, you went into a "ruin", fight some monsters with your whole army (it was a random system that decided the amount of monsters but always the same type of monster in the same ruins type) and if you win you are awarded with a treasure that is bigger if there were more enemies. Their system was pretty easy to understand and still fun.

I prefer a when you can have a pretty good idea of the chance to win and where its easy to understand what matters and what not.

At first I thought ruins were just going to be a battle like any other vs a powerful enemy. But Snotling thought that it should be the hero fighting and the hero that dies like previous versions. I decided to go with that
so I started to come up with various ideas for how to evaluate heroes when doing ruin battle. If STR is used the valkyre would be useless and right now ruin hunting is what she is best at. My next idea was to use all the heroes points in all abilities to decide how good it is but to balance that some points need to be worth more than others. In the end it seems like a pretty bad system that only the most hardcore will bother about understanding.

So I'd like to ask you if you any ideas.
I'm quite positive to making it a normal battle but with some sort of difference since so far that is what makes sence, its something that can easily be understood but then the dreadknight will be the best ruin hunter and he is already good vs castles.

[KGB]

Piranha,

DLR just used the hero strength as you noted (with no bonus's from command/stack but with bonus's from strength items). But each addition army in the hero stack gave an extra +1 to the hero's strength facing the monster. So if you brought 7 units with your hero you added +7 strength.

The base chance of success was 85%+(hero strength-monster strength)*5.

So if the hero was 5 strength and the monster 5 strength you had 85% chance of success. If your hero was 8 strength and the monster 5 strength you had 100% chance of success and if your hero was 3 strength and the monster was 5 strength you had 75% chance of success.

If you use that method then the Valkyrie is fine because she can always bring along some units to increase her chances of winning.

You can always modify it in later versions but this is nice and simple to program.

KGB

[Pillager]

The DLR system was functional...but certainly nothing special. Not sure that it was any different than the system used by 1 and 2.

Warlords 4 had armies in ruins (if I recall correctly). The problem was that your army suffered losses during the battle...so the reward had to be quite impressive to make ruin hunting worthwhile.

I like the idea of having a hero fight alone vs a guardian unit. But, combat is pretty random, and heroes aren't all that strong...a combination that would likely result in mass hero death.

Perhaps level one ruins could be guarded by a bat or an orc...not much variety, but a starting hero would at least have a decent chance of winning. Higher level ruins would have more powerful guardians, so a hero would be wise to level up before attempting them.

What if ruins contained between 1 and 3 defenders...the hero could bring in a matching number of units to face them. So, a hero could bring in 2 units to fight against 3 guardians.

I like that this system would encourage players to spend their points on a Hero's personal combat abilities..I currently only buy command and stack bonuses for my heroes (because these are far more valuable in large battles).

In any case, I think we need more ways to make a hero personally powerful. In DLR, heroes could get more wounds, and an ability called 'trample' which allowed them to score extra wounds with each hit. 'Missiles' gave a hero some free attacks during combat. Heroes could become truly frightening, and some were capable of destroying stacks of troops by themselves.

[SnotlinG]

My initial thought is that ruinsearching shouldnt be just a normal battle, as there is already good enough reward for getting a good "battle-hero", but rather take all the hero charactiristics into account somehow. If we can get it to be simple/easy to understand that is.

Also another idea is that a hero which loses a fight in a ruin might not die, but get some permanent negative effect instead (as we dont have hitpoints), lets say lose one move, or lose one command etc...

[KGB]

Pillager,

You recall correctly. Warlords IV had armies in ruins and it used regular combat as Piranha first envisioned. But in Warlords IV any army could search a ruin, not just heroes. So that part wasn't popular as players like ruins to be hero only.

I personally like the simple DLR model. Ruins are just meant to be an extra reward, not something to sap your strength (which is what having 1-3 guardians you have to fight would do). Having actual fights like Warlords IV would require showing all the guardians, having players bring all kinds of units with them, selecting which units to use (if you brought 7 and could only use 2) etc.

High level DLR heroes like the Monk going on a personal rampage were a sight to behold. But then you had to be pretty high level to accomplish that. High level Warlords IV heroes could do much the same thing. Not sure if this is a good or bad thing as that's a personal gaming preference. I never want my hero fighting in battle and assume that when he does, I've made a mistake in calculating battle odds. But as long as Ghosts/Wolfriders exist it's fine with me.

Now one thing I would like to borrow from Warlords IV that was hugely popular with players was having ruins re-populate over time. Each turn a searched ruin had a 1% chance to be re-populated with a new guardian + reward due to a new monster taking up residence in the cave/tower/ruin etc. That means you theoretically never run out of ruins to search in long games.

SnotlinG,

A hero who loses in the ruin should die. With Beta3, you never wait long for a hero offer if you have gold. With no upper limits on the number of heroes you can have (unlike the limit of 5 in War2/DLR) losing one isn't a game breaker. There should be a reasonable deterrent to just searching every ruin you can find as fast as you can get there.

KGB

P.S. If you want to differentiate ruins slightly since you have L1,L2,L3 then you might want to say that only heroes of a certain level can even attempt a ruin. So any hero could attempt a L1 ruin, maybe only L3 or higher could attempt a L2 ruin and only L5 or higher could attempt a L3 ruin. This has the advantage that you don't have to worry about placing L3 ruins near capitols because initial heroes won't be searching them on turn 1 or 2.

[Pillager]

Perhaps the hero fights a single guardian alone...using the normal combat mechanic.

Losing wouldn't have to mean death. Perhaps the lethality is related to the level of the ruin balanced against the hero's level. So, a level 3 ruin would likely kill a level 1 hero, and a level 1 ruin would only very rarely kill a level 5 hero.

If a hero is defeated by a ruin guardian (and doesn't die), the hero flees in shame..losing all accumulated experience. That hero may not attempt to search the same ruin again until he/she has gained a level.

[KGB]

Pillager,

Losing all XP then not being able to return until you level up makes ruin searching too complex. I can live with the XP loss part as that's simple but the not returning part makes no sense. If you are a hero and lose you'd want to try again as soon as possible (the way I want a rematch in games I lose).

I still think death is the best deterrent to having heroes be nothing but ruin whores especially on maps with lots of ruins and only 2 players playing. Death is a serious enough consequence that you won't foolishly take risks. Just losing XP would mean I would endlessly attempt searching with L1 or L2 heroes who lose nothing/almost nothing by failing. And sometimes losing XP and sometimes dying again makes the whole mechanism way more complex than it needs to be.

Heroes aren't near the precious commodity they are in War2/DLR thanks to the removal of the 5 hero limit.

KGB

[Moonknight]

Got to have death involved with ruins! I like the idea of Hero only versus one guardian only. Should have the three different difficulty levels, lowest levels have strength 4/5 guardians, middle 6/7, high 8/9. I like the formula that KGB mentioned.

There could be a ruin strength bonus for cost of 5, so you could make a Valkyrie nothing but a ruin explorer.

Will the rewards from ruins still be gold only, or will there be items as well? What if you got gold and the guardian that you defeated?

[piranha]

We have new units specially ordered to lurk in ruins. We have 3 different level of ruin and when comparing to heroes 3 ruins (where you used your entrie army vs the ruin) the hardest ruins required quite big armies to win, but the reward always made it worth it.

I thought it was pretty fun because its not only the first person to reach a difficult ruin who gets it but rather the first person who has the right amount of power. The question you need to ask yourself is, am I going to fight this ruin and lose several good units in trade for items that I could otherwise not get. Units can always be reproduced. The interesting thing about this is that we can have ruins that are hard, but the reward can be units, gold, items to make up for the loss.

Since we have 3 levels the easy ones could still be weak.

But if there are going to be ruins that are difficult like that we need to send the whole army into the ruin (which should be the easiest programming wise). If we only use the hero the difference between ruins can't be very big unless we take other things into account than just STR.
But I think that using different battle algorithms in different situations is a bit confusing. We have realised that this game is quite hard to understand for new players.

If we redesign the heroes a bit for next beta (which we will) the valkyria can be useful.

[KGB]

Piranha,

I'm still not sure from your last post whether you *are* going to have multiple unit combat in a ruin like Warlords IV or just a pure win/lose scenario like Warlords 2/DLR.

Both have their merits. Also the first person to arrive at a ruin in Warlords 2/DLR doesn't always get the prize either if the hero dies to the guardian.

What I found in Warlords IV games was that unless you knew the exact guardian AND reward (which was possible with certain spells/items) it was risky to attack ruins in the early game unless it was going to be a very easy win. That's because even a couple of early lost men means you fall behind quickly in the expansion phase of the game. Sure, it's nice to get a great item (Warlords IV also offered the possibility to get a hero (L2-5 depending on ruin) as a reward or a large chunk of XP as a reward. Warbarons should consider these rewards too) but 90% of the time that item won't be needed till mid/late game and getting it on turn 2-3 isn't that useful. But early gold/allies were especially if they were the right allies.

The other thing against the Warlords IV model of having an actual battle with multiple units is why in that case do you need a hero? Any stack should then be able to search a ruin just as any stack can conquer a city.

For simplicity I think the War2/DLR model works well. You can put in the Warpedia the chance of success. For L1 ruins you could use 90%+(hero str-guardian str), for L2 80% and L3 70%. So that a L3 ruin with a Dragon would require 14 strength to guarantee 100% success which would be a 7 str hero + 7 units accompanying him while a L1 ruin with a Minotaur would only require a 5 str hero + 2 units. That's a fairly large spread to get 100% success.

KGB

P.S. The Valkyrie would be much more useful if she could fly on her own.