Balance and Gameplay discussion.

Er... in my version pikemen get +50% to gunpowder not melee.

Im quite pleased with this, because otherwise I thought that it was doing away with macemen being the main medieval unit. I was planning of using only pikemen and seige if this was the case.

Are you sure it has changed in the latest version?
You're playing 0.8.2 ;)

I fully agree with the axes down to str 4, I do still find that swordsmen are underpowered and easily stopped by fortified axes now though - with their combined +75%. Swordmen have also lost their +10% to attacking cities, so maybe they shouldnt have been increased in cost? Or increase in cost but keep +10% city attak or even +20%?
The reason swords lost their city attack bonus is because with the addition of Rams, and the delay of Longbows, attacking cities is easier now, they simply don't need it, and removing it was done for balance. They will not be getting that back.

In terms of cost, I upped them (and lowered axeman cost) by 5 :hammers: to make the choice of building Swords/Chariots/Axes/Spears a difficult one for the player. Due to the cost, and various strengths, the best unit should be hard to figure out, and situational. From the little play testing I've done, I don't find Swords useless or overpriced at all. But certainly more comments on this may change my mind, and cause me to tweak things slightly. Keep in mind though Swords are proportionally stronger against Axes then in default BtS 6 v 7 instead of 6 v 7.5. This is the exactly the type of discussion I'm looking for though, and will help me tweak things into proper alignment for 1.0
 
I agree with the new ancient line up, and think that it makes the player use a mixed attacking and mixed DEFENDING force.

I think the thing that was my finding in my game - when cities are defended properly with a mixed force, attacking them is very difficult. A couple of axemen and archers in a city and you have no easy routes of attack. You need a mixed force heavy on seige and chariots/horsemen. Emphasis off melee and on to cavalry.

Same with the medieval.

To add to phungus420 post.
Pikemen: strong vs knights and cuirassiers, good vs macemen
Trebuchets: Prime city attackers combined with collateral damage
Macemen: Prime city invaders with good strength and city raider promotions, good vs longbowmen.
Crossbowmen: Excellent vs pikemen, good vs macemen, decent vs longbowmen, good city defenders
Longbowmen: excellent city defenders, in the field decent against pikemen and crossbowmen. Weak in the field.
Knights: Good stack breakers, especially with flanking promotions to retreat or anti-melee promotions to beat pikemen. Strong vs everything except pikemen. Can flank attack siege units.

The only thing that changed is the matchup between macemen and pikemen which is now won by the pikemen while they were being massacred in regular BTS.

Footmen used to be the majority of my force, but I really dont see a use for them anymore. Against a mixed defending force, attacking force needs to consist of lots of seige for barrage and collateral damage, no more masses of footmen smashing against everything.
A defending force made up of pikes and longbows, with a knight to counter and take down attacking seige will pretty much be able to handle anything.

My views;
  • Attacking more expensive - even more seige needed.
  • City Raider Melee used as part of force not whole of force.
  • Mixed defending force will cause attcker a lot of trouble.
 
How about this for a mideaval balance tweak:

Pikes -10% vs Archery Units
Heavy Footman +20% City attack
 
If you think the default strength 5 axeman was balanced, I don't know what to make of the rest of your post scu98rkr. The strength 4 axeman actually makes it so the other ancient units have a use, rather then just all axes, and maybe a single spear being the only units you need.

I think your missing my point im not saying the change isnt needed or isnt fairer. In fact it you reread through my post I suggest if it happened earlier it might have been a good change. Im just saying that people have got used to the spearman/axeman/archer/chariot balance whether its good or bad. I just think changing this could distinctly change the balance of the early game (which is the most important). I think its less important if your just adding in another ship or submarine as usually by the end stages things are getting settled.

But changing the balance of some of the main offensive/defensive units from ancient + medieval (pikeman) means that people are going to have to relearn how to fight early wars.

From your introduction and previous post I thought the thinking behind this mod was players could pick up start playing this mod with out drastically relearning anything. I obviously am slightly wrong and you are considering bigger changes to the game than I thought.

So its your mod do what you want, feel free to ignore me Im not doing any of the work.


Ok on a similar line of thought I think balancing the early units is most important. Im still not sure about Wolfs additions of the ram/capped ram. The ram in particular seems to be pretty weak. If the AI gets stuck without metal it tends to build alot of rams when frankly it would just be better off building standard melee/mounted units. To be honest I'd get rid of the ram I find it tends to muck up the AI's early warmongering. The stacks arent really big enough at this stage to need siege units.

Enlightened used to be +10% :science:, but the AI sucked with it so I bumped it up to 15%. I do have my eye on enlightened though, but certainly need more oppinions on it before I tweak it any.

Ok I can imagine this will be hard to balance, I think +15% is too much. The final figure is up to you.

Also scu98rkr when I moved all the concepts from BtS over to main game concepts in the civilopedia and created the new LoR concepts I was able to compare the LoR and BtS changes. They are very comperable, I just don't think you realize how much was changed in BtS.

Your probably right here but I was expecting there to be big changes from BTS and it was official and remember that was done in two stages alot of changes were made in Warlords (ie vassals,warlords,unique buildings,Charismatic, Protective and Imperialistic,Ten new leaders) then balanced and if you reread my original post one of my suggestions was you were adding too much at once and balancing might be hard. It might be better to add small amounts balances then add more ?

So I'll conclude this post by saying I'm more interested on specific game balance issues (like the enlightened trait). Telling me I've added to much doesn't say much, other then you're unaware of the actual content changes from Vanilla to BtS.

Well that last sentence is a bit personal and I might conclude by suggesting you dont remember how many changes were made from Vanilla to Warlord before BTS. I might even suggest you did nt buy Warlords and went straight to BTS.
 
How about this for a mideaval balance tweak:

Pikes -10% vs Archery Units
Heavy Footman +20% City attack

I like it. Seems good to my mind.

Footmen will tear through cities defended with longbows only then, CR3 would give 65% (is that right?) plus the 20%, total of +85%. However, stick a pikeman in there, and you might be on an even footing with defenses and fortfied.

Heres an idea - make footmen attacking units and pikemen defensive. Remove all offensive upgrades from footmen and only give defensive, visa versa.
 
How about this for a mideaval balance tweak:

Pikes -10% vs Archery Units
Heavy Footman +20% City attack

I like this idea, it might balance stuff out a little more, although I haven't played to the middle age yet.
Also on your point of adding some more legends in and leaders, I am planning to do this (have it for old versin of LoR but still need to update and balance some). I especially want to focus on some more leaders to give every civ at least two. This to make sure that when a revolution forces a leader change, the leader will also change. I'm still thinking of which traits to add in (Mercantile and Seafaring from Tsentom I like very much). If you want I can post it here when I have it converted for the new version of LoR and BtS.
 
How about this for a mideaval balance tweak:

Pikes -10% vs Archery Units

I don't quite see why this is needed or what will change due to this small tweak. Crossbowmen will already eat pikemen for lunch. They'll now have a 60% bonus against them instead of 50% but that won't make much of a difference.

Pikemen will likely only meet longbowmen in cities and there the longbowmen will enjoy bonuses due to their inherent city defence bonus, fortification and city garrison promotions. So pikemen will also not be successful in this situation.

So you can tweak the pikeman a little with this penalty, but I don't think it will change how they are used or change their victory odds a lot in most practical situations. In the end, I'm thus neutral in respect to this tweak.

Heavy Footman +20% City attack

I guess this is to make the heavy footman more useful in stacks that attack cities. At the moment, the heavy footman is already the strongest non-siege city attacker. With city raider promotions, it is cheaper and more effective than knights with combat or flanking promotions which is it's only competitor for the role of city attacker. Pikemen are significantly weaker than heavy footman as are crossbowmen and longbowmen. They will all not fare well against the defending longbowmen.

The problem is, that if you arrive with enough siege units, then after they're done the defenders will be so damaged that any unit can finish them. It really doesn't matter at that point whether the heavy footman has an inherent 20% city attack bonus or not. Even axemen or swordsmen could finish the medieval defenders at that point at very good odds. If you want to make strong city attackers needed to take a city, then the damage inflicted by siege units needs to be lessened so that there is still a job to be done.

That's at least what I'm going to do in my own personal modification of this great mod, but it quite a radical change from BTS where enough siege units can weaken a (city defence) stack until anything can kill it. So I don't know if it's something that you wish to do in your mod. You want to create an unofficial expansion pack and that limits the extent of the changes a bit.
 
Roland Johansen did you notice seige units were tweaked where max damage is lower? Trebs max at 50%, and Catapults 40% (They also have reduced strengths across the board, but with the lowered max damage this leaves their survival %s virtually unchanged). I did this to make dedicated city attackers necessary. Has this tweak not had the desired effect?
 
I like this idea, it might balance stuff out a little more, although I haven't played to the middle age yet.
Also on your point of adding some more legends in and leaders, I am planning to do this (have it for old versin of LoR but still need to update and balance some). I especially want to focus on some more leaders to give every civ at least two. This to make sure that when a revolution forces a leader change, the leader will also change. I'm still thinking of which traits to add in (Mercantile and Seafaring from Tsentom I like very much). If you want I can post it here when I have it converted for the new version of LoR and BtS.

Great I can't wait to see a proper modmod that adds some more legends. It seems alot of users really want that :). achilliszero said he planned on working on something like this, you might want to coordinate with him. Feel free to start a new thread on it of course, or just do whatever you want. What mod modders do is entirely up to them.
 
Having two leaders per civ incase of revolutions is actully a great idea for a modcomp. My only concern is that we are nearing our limit of top and 2nd tier leaderheads, atleast in my opinion. To clarify, leaderheads that look as good ar almost as good as ones firaxis made.

I was just interested in making just a small modcomp for people wanting more, not really wanting more myself. But if what I do is only half as good or complete as what others do than I guess making my own would be kind of a waste. Although the lure of having my own knight templar legend wreaking havoc is very tempting.
 
I have a question ...which could also be taken as a suggestion...

Is there some way to slow down the rate of Revolution for AI players? At the moment, playing MP with AI's included, the AI's tend to be rather dumb in countering Revolutions. Specifically, I was playing a game not long ago where I started with 3 players and 3 AI's....by about the 1400's there were 24 AI's spawned by Revolution. Now, myself and the other human players were picking off single state AI's like fish in a barrel, but this didn't seem to help a great deal....and tended to slow game play down to a crawl! Even my MP game last night, with only 1 vs 1 and 2 other AI's ended up with 1 vs 1 and 6 or 7 other AI's. (This save game I can post here later tonight if needed).

Not being a Modder myself, I don't wish to mess around with any .ini files ..and on whole, I rather like the Mod as it is. Aside from the AI being to dumb to quash Revolutions to a better degree. Human players seem to have little trouble fixing things before a break away occurs by and large...but the AI is pitiful.

Now if there is some means to change this rate and I missed it ...please tell me where it is, and otherwise ignore this post.
If there is Not a method to adjust this, would it be possible to add some sort of map setup option to limit, or perhaps put a max cap on, the number of AI revolutions?

Thanks!
 
The only real way is by tweaking the ini file. It's fairly easy though (in MP both players must do this). In your LoR folder is a file called revolution.ini open it with regular old notepad. Go to the Edit header at the top of notepad, select find and type in IndexModifier find it. It'll take you to this section of the ini file:

; Adjust rate of rev index accumulation, additional options for human (offset adds that value to each city per turn, keep it small)
IndexModifier = 1.0
IndexOffset = 0
HumanIndexModifier = 1.0
HumanIndexOffset = 0

Reduce the IndexModifier, and since you want the human to stay the same, adjust the HumanIndexModifier accordingly to offset your change. I'm actually surprised there isn't a specific AIIndexModifier, but that's how it goes.
 
Having two leaders per civ incase of revolutions is actully a great idea for a modcomp. My only concern is that we are nearing our limit of top and 2nd tier leaderheads, atleast in my opinion. To clarify, leaderheads that look as good ar almost as good as ones firaxis made.

I was just interested in making just a small modcomp for people wanting more, not really wanting more myself. But if what I do is only half as good or complete as what others do than I guess making my own would be kind of a waste. Although the lure of having my own knight templar legend wreaking havoc is very tempting.

I currently have the following list for additional leaders. The ones marked with a star are not necessary (because the civ already have more leaders) but I like the leaderheads:
  • Arabia: Abu Bakr
  • Austria: Maria Theresa*
  • Aztec: Atotozti
  • Babylon: Nebuchadrezzar (might need a better leaderhead although I'm fine with this one)
  • Byzantine: Constantine and/or Basil
  • Carthage: Dido
  • China: Taizong* and/or Wu*
  • Dutch: Adriaan van der Donck (CivCol)
  • Ethiopia: Sellassie
  • Greek: Philip II* and/or old Alexander model leader (whatever fits best)
  • Inca: Pachacuti
  • Khmer: Pol Pot?
  • Mali: Sundiata Keita
  • Maya: Shield Jaguar?
  • Portugal: Henry the Navigator
  • Rome: Marcus Aurelius*
  • Spain: Charles I (CivCol) or Franco
  • Sumeria: Sargon
  • Vietnam: ??
  • Viking: Harald II (the bearskin leaderhead)
  • Zulu: ??
  • India: Akbar*
  • Persia: Xerxes* (beautiful model)
  • Japan: Jengu* (not necessary, already enough leaders)

For the greek I'm not yet sure. It would be really cool to split them in Macedonia (with Philip II and Alexander the Great) and Greece (with Pericles and a leader with the old Alexander model) but I'm not sure about the differentiating factors (barrack replacing building of course for Macedonia and the Companion cavalry maybe or the hoplite and give Greece another). This is just some brainstorming.

A civ which I'm also pondering on adding is maybe Gran Columbia (with Simon Bolivar and maybe someone else like that (Santa Anna or is that Mexico?)). But these could always be released seperatly.

For the additional leaders, I do need some additional traits. I like the Mercantile and Seafaring traits from Tsentom. What do you think of those? Also, would the Strategic trait from Tsentom be overpowered (the one with 50% less upgrade cost)?

Also, I would be open to some ideas for legends (I don't want to spam it full, it should still be balanced and special). I already like the Santa Maria caravel. I like all ideas (no matter where they are from (no offense Phungus)).

@Phungus: maybe a wierd question but I always wondered why the Egyptian UB is not very special (the obelisk). The stele and totem pole are much more powerful. Does anyone have an idea how to beef this a little (maybe remove one of the priest options and adding something else?) or is this only me that it is unbalanced for such a cool civ ;)?
 
The Egyptian UB allows you to run early Priests, which can be very useful (bulbs, shrines, etc).
 
Berenhor, I think maybe you should start another thread. But to answer some of your questions:

All good ideas for leaders so far (i think it was Smoke Jaguar though).

While Macedonians were very distinct from the other city states, so were all the city states. I always looked at macedon as kind of a region of greece that was looked down upon as uncivilized and boorish, sort of like how the rest of the US looks at me and my ilk in the South. I guess it could go either way with splitting them or keeping them the same. But Making the greek civ into even smaller bits doesnt seem neccesary. Alex carved out a greek empire even tough he used mostly macedonians, and the rest of greece liked that he was destroying persia in the name of greece.

Gran Columbia and Santa Anna of Mexico were both on my lists of Civ/Leaders that I could add.

As far as Tsentoms traits go, both Strategic and Resourceful are very appealing to me but are way too powerful, and thusly need tweaking. Mercantile is promising but it is almost the exact opposite of the civic Mercantilism. I think if you added that one you should change the civiv name. Seafaring (as well as Agricultural) never seemed like good trait ideas. They seemed better as describing a whole culture and not a leader. Also seafaring is kinda weak in its present form, considering how lame navies are (although I use the hell out of them).

I have tons of Legends you could add of you were interested. Phungus mantra of spreading out legends over the wole world is absolutely neccesary for the main mod but you are free to splurge.
 
I don't quite see why this is needed or what will change due to this small tweak. Crossbowmen will already eat pikemen for lunch. They'll now have a 60% bonus against them instead of 50% but that won't make much of a difference.

I'm in the middle of a large scale medieval/gunpowder war at the moment. Roland is right - last night I turned up with 5 bombards per city by the time I had destroyed the city defences and caused collateral damage a few bonuses here and there didn’t make much difference.
I'm using an old version, my bombards do 80% of max damage, has this been changed?

Basically my point is, we are discussing this from the wrong perspective, decide what you want battles to be like and then make changes to match.

It this realistic? Turn up at a castle and you have no chance of attacking if you don’t have a load of siege equipment. Most medieval battles were about prolonged sieges (I believe). CR promotions in my mind represent a well equipped unit with siege equipment, ladders etc but not catapults.

In my battle last night I turned up, bombarded for 2 turns, send in the bombards, then mopped up with CR Footmen, Knights and the defenders that were in my stack but still had 95% chance.

What do we want out of the combat system?
  • Remove unit spam, particularly axeman rush
  • Make battles use a mixed force
  • Create a realistic-ish battle scenario that can be represented in a turn based single unit system.

Do we want scissors-paper-stone style combat where you can use tactics or more realistic "war is expensive" idea where you need to through lots of units against an enemy city to win?



(My other idea – Walls and Castles are underused by most players, in most places in early history fortifications were a very important part of a city, and castles were centres of power. How often do you build a castle?
I feel that these are massively under used, and should be made of greater importance, either my creating stability within the populace or massive defensive bonuses.)
 
Regarding the str 4 axemen... I would agree that this causes some gameplay changes I'm not sure whether I like... for instance...

vanilla axes could usually defeat a defending chariot

LoR axes have a hard time killing a defending chariot

Defending chariots are presumably stationary... I think it's a problem if an axe doesn't have the advantage in that situation. I liked the vanilla balance where axes were vulnerable to chariot attacks and chariots were vulnerable to axe attacks.

Furthermore, the CR promotion for axemen is almost completely nerfed... and defending CR axes are at a greater disadvantage because even with a base +25% against swords, that +25% only gets them to their previously un-promoted vanilla strength.
 
Regarding the str 4 axemen... I would agree that this causes some gameplay changes I'm not sure whether I like... for instance...

vanilla axes could usually defeat a defending chariot

LoR axes have a hard time killing a defending chariot

Defending chariots are presumably stationary... I think it's a problem if an axe doesn't have the advantage in that situation. I liked the vanilla balance where axes were vulnerable to chariot attacks and chariots were vulnerable to axe attacks. And whats up with defending CR axes? If a CR axe is defending he should die for being ignorant and not attacking a city.

And defending CR axes? Whats up with that, they should die.

Furthermore, the CR promotion for axemen is almost completely nerfed... and defending CR axes are at a greater disadvantage because even with a base +25% against swords, that +25% only gets them to their previously un-promoted vanilla strength.

Take another look what the axeman does. It has +25% vs Swords and +50% vs melee. This way axes still crush swords but their total dominance is brought down. Now swords are the dominate city attacker. Even though in BtS they are supposed to be, a stack of axes could do the same thing.

As far as the axes/chariot thing goes, what good is a counter if they can take each other out evenly. Chariots are supposed to cruch axes. But in BtS axes could easily attack a chariot, provided he could catch it, and win.
 
The ancient units are pretty much perfectly balanced at this point. I don't think anything will change there. My main headache is with mideaval units, the balance just seems like it could be adjusted slightly. Mainly I don't see a good role for Heavy Footmen anymore. Maybe I should reduce their cost to 60 :hammers:, I don't know, I haven't gotten a good set up for the mideaval era yet. But I do need to get that figured out by 1.0. On the whole I think ancient/classical/industrial/modern/future era unit balance is good though, other then minor tweaks it's doubtful things will change. Of course I'm always interested in user opinnions and experiences (especially MP players), as it's really playtesting that gives the best feedback in terms of balance and gameplay. I've just played through enough Ancient myself, where I am very satisified with the balance.
 
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