Kris Swordsman -- I'm not really a"WTF!!" kinda guy, but if I was...

I didn't have this problem at all

Of course, part of that is that I contacted a few of the civs I wasn't at war with and traded those bonus luxes for iron while swordsmen were the deal of the day

Thanks to that (and the great gold production Indonesia is capable of by selling off luxes) I had enough Kris Swordsmen to get a bunch of the great bonuses like Restless (+1 Move, +1 Attacks), Heroism (Great General-esque bonus), and the like

Once the war was over I canceled the excess iron deals, disbanded the few who had bad statuses, and just kept upgrading the good ones - by the end game I had infantrymen capable of swinging twice or acting like Great Generals that formed a brutal core (along with a nasty air army - I started trading luxes for oil in the modern era)
 
HeraldtheGreat said:
A few of the promotions from the Kris' unique promotion pool are negative, making it more of a gamble.
Click to expand...

yeah, that's the beauty of it. Isn't it exciting to find out how many of your army will remain and will be deleted/donated to CS/and do crazy Suicidal attacks???
ptoss1 said:
Not only is it a gamble, it's a horrible gamble. To make use of the UU you have to make quite a few of them, find someone to do battle with, and see if you get a really good bonus, or a really bad insta loss. If you get enemy blade your unit is pretty much useless and with the new gold restrictions any plans of invasion are kaputz.

With the new AI focus on science and culture, by the time you've amassed enough Swordsmen, they'll be out teching you EVEN IF YOUR BATTLES GO WELL. Without war your swordsmen are even more useless. They literally do nothing.
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And if you don't want to play the gamble, its easy. Download DonQuiche's Ingame Editor then create an army of kriss swordsman, create a horde of barbarian units, attack those barbarian units, earn promotion, delete all you don't want. Then you get bored of too easy Indonesia game, and you will not play as Indonesia Again. Ever. :crazyeye:
 
People always complain. Few years back people used to complain that Firaxis took out randomness from game by removing random events. They also complained that even bad events were nice for gameplay as they made the game more challenging. Now we have people complaining about randomness of Kris swords promo & very low chance of it getting a bad promo (only one, enemy blade can almost be completely avoided by not using it for offence).
 
Kris Swordsman is a major turn-off for me. The special ability sounded nice at first but with some of the promotions being exclusively negative I won't be playing as them.
 
Babri said:
People always complain. Few years back people used to complain that Firaxis took out randomness from game by removing random events. They also complained that even bad events were nice for gameplay as they made the game more challenging. Now we have people complaining about randomness of Kris swords promo & very low chance of it getting a bad promo (only one, enemy blade can almost be completely avoided by not using it for offence).
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It's certainly important to bear in mind that people will always complain. However, it's also important that all the "people" you refer aren't actually part of one big,aggregate complaining about things that contradict each other. Also worth noting is that there are also people who will always leap at the chance contrarian (kindly referred to as "devil's advocates").

It's not that low of a chance, and more to the point--why should there be any chance that a unique unit will wind up with a penalty? If there was some give-and-take, some risk-and-reward mechanic behind determining how good or bad the ability gained is, that would be one thing. But a totally random reward or punishment is pretty unappealing design.

Btw, complaining in a reasonable fashion is pretty healthy. It lets people when something's wrong and fuels discussion on how to fix it.
 
Well lets be honest; You got a UU which gets a special promotion. Cool.
Then that special promotion might be negative sometimes, so it's a gamble.

Now to me it's like this:
When I do get one of those horrible bad promotions I'm angry, because that unit is worthless (losing a swordsman early game for no reason whatsoever makes me kinda wanna throw the game).
It would already feel like a loss, when I didn't get any promotion at all as my special promotion! But no it must be a super high negative like -30% cs or 20 dmg per turn, huh?
Really: Make it -5% combat strength and only lose 5 hp per turn. That would be disappointing enough, but you can still play on without getting too mad.

Random Question: I already know you shouldn't settle on a luxury resource as Indonesia due to the UA replacing/wasting that. But how about strategic or bonus resources like iron or sheep (I know that bonus resources don't even "work" under a city, it has relevance though if that city gets burned later and the resource is gone).
 
It's really poor game design imo, and it seems so different from the approach they took with the rest of the game where negative random events have been pretty much removed (thank god). Even goodie huts are positive-only events now. I also seem to recall Sid Meier himself talking about how this was bad game design.

In my game I rolled 5 (!) Enemy Blades out of the 6 iron I had. Bad luck I know, but they're so completely useless that I had to give up on my plan to invade Egypt. 20 damage per turn is insane, it's almost like every enemy tile is a citadel. You may as well disband it as soon as you roll it. It would've been a much better design to have more upgrades with an Ambition-like trade-off.

Another issue is that the AI has no idea how to use a unit like that and will gladly sacrifice it to attrition like it does with missionaries. I really hope they fix this, it's not like Indonesia is that strong to begin with.
 
FeiLing said:
Indonesia due to the UA replacing/wasting that. But how about strategic or bonus resources like iron or sheep (I know that bonus resources don't even "work" under a city, it has relevance though if that city gets burned later and the resource is gone).
Click to expand...
It removes any resource - but the bonus case doesn't apply, as an Indonesian Spice Island city can't be razed.
 
Well even a unit has bad promotion it can still fight, its not wasted or useless it just isn't at full strength. Its not like wounded units can't be used. Why don't you complain about good promotions then..
 
_invy_ said:
Its not like wounded units can't be used. Why don't you complain about good promotions then..
Click to expand...

Maybe that's because, let me think... unique units are supposed to be better, not worse than their normal equivalents?
 
VainoValkea said:
Maybe that's because, let me think... unique units are supposed to be better, not worse than their normal equivalents?
Click to expand...

The good promotions are better than any other melee UU in the game. That balances it out.
 
Borrowing from another thread (kudos to Karmah), this:

Game design anti-patterns

Skills are tools. Players count on them to do a job. When a skill is highly unreliable, we have to overpower it to make it 'satisfying enough'. Let me give you an example: Let's say Kayle's targeted invulnerability ult had a 95% chance of working, and a 5% chance of doing nothing when cast. We'd have to make it a LOT stronger to make it 'good enough' because you could not rely upon it... and it would be a lot less fun. Random abilities have this problem on reliability -- they tend to be a lot less satisfying, so you have to overpower them a lot more. Small amounts of randomness can add excitement and drama, but it has a lot of downsides. There are other examples of non-reliability, but randomness is the most obvious one. Abilities that require peculiar situations to do their jobs tend to run into the same problems, such as Tryndamere's shout that only slows when targets are facing away from him.


So you have an UU that has, on a random roll, either a very powerful speciality or a crippling disability. That's a sorry excuse for interesting design if you ask me.
 
There's a gazillion random elements in Civ though, your starting location and available resources being probably the biggest. Comparing it to LoL which is a very competitive game is kinda pointless in the first place.

If someone is that offended with an UU having a fun but random promotion, they can choose not to play it.
 
There are lots of random elements to the game . But its not totally random . For instance when you first attack with a kris warrior it wont turn pink . It wont eat a french fry or suddenly reinstall windows on your computer .
If you take out what wont happen and then plan for what might occur then you can make best use of the probability factors .
 
I'm choosing not to play it alright. It's not just about the randomness, it's about the unit either gaining an extremely potent promotion or a crippling one. It's not fun anymore.
 
Well what does the Kris swordsman give "in exchange"? Nothing. It's just a swordsman with a random, possibly crippling promotion that will stick with it.
 
Free/Extra Great Generals.
Great Generals as Normal Troops, a unique ability that lasts till end of game.
+1 move, may attack twice, a unique promotion that lasts till end of game.
Two different and unique healing promotions that last till end of game.
A unique flanking promotion that lasts till end of game.

So, it introduces all these concepts, giving Indonesia a truly different playstyle for those to whom such a thing might appeal. You are not one of them, fair enough. Neither am I to be honest with you. But it's not bad design, it's tradeoff. Your viewpoint would seem a little egocentric, if it's not for you it's crap etc....
 
Those are not design tradeoffs. They could've been included regardless of the two completely negative promotions, so I don't really see your point.

I would've been fine with mystic blade producing very specialized troops, as long as there was something positive in each specialization. The current Kris Swordsman is just disappointing, because "random promotions" could've been implemented much, much better.
 
VainoValkea said:
Those are not design tradeoffs. They could've been included regardless of the two completely negative promotions, so I don't really see your point.
Click to expand...
No, they couldn't. A civ with just those positive promotions for it's troops would be utterly broken.

I would've been fine with mystic blade producing very specialized troops, as long as there was something positive in each specialization. The current Kris Swordsman is just disappointing, because "random promotions" could've been implemented much, much better.
Click to expand...
In your opinion. Which I now utterly mistrust because you think having an army of ultra healing, blitz attacking, great generals - which is what would happen in 100% of games once your whole army had say 4 promotions each - is balanced....
 
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