Version 0.9 hero preview

[KGB]

What's wrong with 2 Rangers with 20% giving a total of 40%? If Warding is capped at 70 it's fine if they stack. I can't imagine many players are going to take 2 Rangers anyway since you are realistically limited to 5 heroes so 2 being specialized Warding units doesn't give you much else hero wise.

Piranha I'm happy you changed Ambush back to instant kill. Now it has value again as a deterrent against strong stacks.

2 points of path finding for the Ranger to start with seems right. Most times I expect players won't buy him till mid game when dealing with Assassins since he isn't needed in the early game. So at L2 or L3 you can immediately purchase a 3rd point to get his movement down to 3 in hills/swamp or even a 4th point to get to 2 movement.

As far a icons go, you definitely need to find a group icon for all the group related skills you now have. It could be that the group indicator is different shape (circle/triangle/octagon instead of the square) and/or background color around the symbol in the middle. Or maybe instead of the outline of the square being a line it could be a bunch of small men. If you look here you can see some examples of group icons http://findicons.com/search/group that you might be able to add on to the existing icons to indicate stack related.

KGB

[SnotlinG]

These additions look great! Is there any change in the hero skill system for this version? I expect a firm "no", but it's important to the discussion/speculation!

No change to the hero system, it will be reworked for next version. Just adding this new skill for the Ranger into the current system for now.

[Moonknight]

Great to get another female hero type (even though it just looks like the Assassin has been re-colored )...

I think with the Warding, no need to do the 3 HP for ambush.

Once the hero system is reworked, maybe the Barbarian can even learn Warding at a high cost (something that might happen once he has maxed out STR and HP if he gets to that point).

[KGB]

Great to get another female hero type (even though it just looks like the Assassin has been re-colored )...

I noticed this as well. Dual swords seems kind of funny given that the portrait shows a quiver of arrows. It would make more sense if she was holding a bow like Katniss...

KGB

[LPhillips]

What's wrong with 2 Rangers with 20% giving a total of 40%? If Warding is capped at 70 it's fine if they stack. I can't imagine many players are going to take 2 Rangers anyway since you are realistically limited to 5 heroes so 2 being specialized Warding units doesn't give you much else hero wise.

If you missed the other posts then it wouldn't make sense to you. This is vital and I think you'll agree after you read this. Points in order:

1) The curve for Group Warding needs to be flattened. It needs to start at 30-40% and increase by 10%. For a passive ability that is only useful against specific units/heroes which the enemy may or may not even employ, it needs to start out being somewhat effective. A hero which is non-effective in city battles should not need to be well leveled and completely specialized to soft-counter one tactic. There should also never be a non-hero Group Warding ability.

2) It is important to balance it around point 1, not around two heroes being stacked with Group Warding. It seems you get this, but didn't follow through from point 1 to this conclusion. If it's not overpowered to stack two heroes with Group Warding, then Group Warding isn't powerful enough on the individual heroes. It needs to be balanced around ONE Ranger being effective, not 2 or more being needed.

3) Assassins and the Ambush skill can be restored to previous strength, and similar high-power individual ambush units like the Medusa can be employed if Warding is properly high-powered. This adds considerable depth, as investment in over-the-top ambush units will be wasted if Warding isn't in play, so scouting and understanding your opponent is more important than ever. If you take the middle ground with Ambush, one good Ranger can screw you up. However, you can still be moderately effective even against Rangers if you scout and produce stronger ambush units. This completely eliminates creating the equivalent of the Archon-of-tactical-death problem.

It is a very different way of looking at it, and should both solve current problems with individual hero effectiveness and prevent future ones. We need to avoid balancing things such that two heroes of one type are needed to be effective, especially as the number of hero types increases and the game can take on more complexity.

[KGB]

It is a very different way of looking at it, and should both solve current problems with individual hero effectiveness and prevent future ones. We need to avoid balancing things such that two heroes of one type are needed to be effective, especially as the number of hero types increases and the game can take on more complexity.

I read your other posts. I agree 100% that you should not need 2 heroes of the same type to be effective. My response had nothing to do with that. It was simply that there is no reason for 2 Rangers with Group Warding not to stack.

For example if Rangers start at 40 (as you suggest though I am not convinced they need to start that high given no one will ever start with a Ranger as their initial hero so you can always get a L2+ Ranger. Maybe 20 and increase 15 per level to max of 65 at L4) then what's wrong with 2 Rangers in the same stack giving 70 (or 65 as I'd prefer)? Sure you reach max Ward with 2 low level heroes instead of a 1 higher level hero but on the other hand you waste 2 heroes in 1 spot when you are basically limited to 5 and the 2 you selected are very specialized and unlikely to have much value beyond their warding skill.

KGB

P.S. Incidentally I'm mostly worried that Warding is going to help the defender far more than it helps the attacker. To be able to attack a city containing Group Ambush will require 1 of your 8 valuable slots for a Ranger hero leaving you with only 6 other spots for units (you'll need another hero for sure) making it less likely you'll be able to be able to take the city and very unlikely you can afford a 3 hero stack for Leadership/Chaos/Warding. On the other hand the Defender can easily put 1 more hero into his 32 unit city making it impossible to wear down a strong city with a few Ghosts/Wolfriders/Orc stacks.

[LPhillips]

KGB,
The point of defense or attack is well taken. Honestly, I'd like to see 2 stacks able to attack a city at once, but that isn't on the board for discussion at the moment. The game would then focus more on interception and combat than take-and-hold.
However, I do have to ask: since when was Ambush intended to assault cities? It is already ineffective for that purpose. The lack of other more appropriate abilities doesn't mean we should balance Ambush around something that isn't its purpose.

I think the Ranger needs to be effective alone. If you are spending points on Group Warding, then you're not spending any on making the hero better. You're only investing in a passive ability that is rarely useful and does nothing to improve general combat ability. 15 points per hero level (at the cost of all other abilities) with a useless base level is extremely steep. You'd need level 3 or above for the hero to have any notable effect on battles against Ambush. Even then, you're countering less than half of any opponent's ambush ability. Even then, only Rangers can counter and they can only be in once place at once, while multiple Ambush stacks will still roam the map completely unimpeded.

What on earth do you see the Ranger being used for, if used at all? She would be a weak support hero who is at best only situationally useful, if the opponent has invested heavily in ambush, and only if you have leveled her solely for Group Warding. At level 3 you're still only employing 40% Warding, which is applied pre-cap and will likely result in only a 10% or less reduction to the enemy stack's combat ability. Then we have to always balance Ambush with the fact in mind that the counter is highly ineffective and takes too much time and resources to employ, so we can't have nice Ambush units.

Now going my route, you would have max Warding just by stacking two level 1's together. That is obviously unacceptable, and stacking is also obviously completely superfluous, since as you say there should be no incentive to deploy 2 Rangers together. So there is a very good reason not to stack Group Warding: It allows it to be powerful enough that 1 Ranger suffices for an army, without any threat of imbalance. Inversely, there is no reason whatsoever to allow Group Warding to stack.

[smursh]

I think KGB's point is not using an assassin to attack a city, but rather if the defender has an assassin you need to add a ranger to the attack force, taking up a valuable spot, and forcing you to develop an additional strong hero.

Beyond that I think everyone is so focused on the warding skill that the rangers other skills are being ignored. In one sense the ranger is to swamp and forest what the horselord is to plains, tundra, and desert. Yes you max a little lower, but it takes fewer points. And the anti-air skill can be useful.

That being said the ranger will be used much like the horselord, very useful on certain maps, not so good on others, but a better late game hero to support powerful heroes.

[KGB]

LPhillips,

Ambush isn't intended to attack cities. However you *can* use it for that purpose if you group Ghosts/Wolfriders together. I have more than once spent my production on such units while my opponents took Spiders/Gryphons etc. When they created the inevitable Hv Inf/Spider/Gryphon city with bonus units+heroes I was able to use a couple of those stacks to break down enough of the defenders to allow one of my hero stacks to finish off the rest. With a Ranger in such a city that won't even be an option any longer.

With a base 20 and an increase of 15 for 10 points at L2 you have 35% and 50% and L3. That seems very reasonable to me and not far from 40/50/60 at L1-3 going your way. However if you start at 40 and only allow increases of 10 for 10 points (your slower level up) then there is almost no reason to ever spent points on more warding because the cost (10 points) for what you get (10 points of warding) isn't worth it compared to how much you start with. The only way to provide incentive is to make the level up be a large amount +15 and the base be low enough that you need to spend points to increase it.

As Smursh mentioned the Ranger has some other skills with the high Woods/Swamp leadership bonus allowing you to buy a +20 leadership bonus in the Woods/Swamp with a L3 hero. It will be possible to buy a Ranger on in a front line city and destroy an enemy hero/powerful stack due to that +20. Also the Anti-Air comes at +5 to start too. This makes the Ranger a perfect unit to also counter those who want to use Green/Gryphon/Demon stacks (I usually see at least one of these being made) since you can once again boost a stack/city by 5 initially and 10 or 15 at L2/3. Since Anti-Air can't be countered now by Archons the Ranger is also going to have value in that regard especially if you get one of the AA rings. So she definitely has value beyond Group Warding.

Also how many Assassin stacks do you expect to see? Stacks of Ghosts don't worry anyone I assume. So you are really only talking about countering stacks containing an Assassin hero. Of which there can only be a few because of the hero limits and the time needed to level them up. I think buying one L3 Ranger with 50% warding (my way) will be plenty given you can simply disband such a hero when no longer needed.

If you go my route then stacking Group Warding doesn't matter much given a L3 hero is better than 2 L1's. Given that Group Ambush is stacking it more or less makes sense that Group Warding would stack. But I honestly don't care that much either way.

KGB

[LPhillips]

I thought it went without saying that 10 points couldn't cost 10 leadership points. But I guess it bears pointing out. I would imagine that it would cost more like 5 to 8 points, leaving the opportunity to purchase some practical abilities as well.

Also, please consider the addition of more powerful and effective Ambush units in the future, or even simply the reinstatement of our previously good Ambush units. That is the point. Not just balancing it around Ghost stacks or Ghost+Eagle/Wolfrider now (which are in fact a real and present danger in many games, especially with fast movement, moderate upkeep, moderate investment, versatile employment, and high effect on strong stacks).

We can't balance Ambush around using it to break down cities, no matter how fond we are of doing it. It's not intended for that. If anything, we must push for a more effective siege weapon or combat system, rather than gimping normal combat balance to fill the hole. I admit there's a need, but Ambush isn't a solution.

Your comments on purchasing a level 3 and then directly employing it as a +20 leadership unit brings up a separate but important issue: without the need to level new heroes, without the opportunity cost and required stratagem, how can abilities like this be balanced? If I can purchase a hero (very randomly, which makes it even worse) and immediately use it with +20 morale against your stack standing on the appropriate terrain in the same turn, how can that ever be balanced? Anti-Morale will have to be as common as Ambush, and these hard-to-level but situationally strong heroes will still be gamebreakers.

I could see only allowing hero offers in Capitols, but that doesn't fully alleviate the problem. That moves heroes toward the point of being only marginally involved in the real conflicts, without helping with their easily overpowering stature on the battlefield. Alternately, a level 2 or 3 hero could always come with their own native skillset, preventing imbalance. For example: A level 3 Ranger always has +12 in each terrain bonus. Ability points might still be accessible to the player. A level 3 Valkeria can't come pre-loaded with +14 Attack bonus, can she?

Edit: KGB, There's also an increasing return for higher Warding skill. Especially when it is applied pre-cap, and especially if more strong Ambush units are ever to be present in the game. This also should go without saying. 70% Group Warding is over 100% more effective than 40% Group Warding. Being a big math guy, you'll appreciate that.