[to_xp]Gekko;13695187 said:
Captain Ostanes: Barbarian, Slaver, Savage
Ostanes seems too similar to Weevil in my opinion, and Barbarian/Savage seems like a bit of overkill. What about switching Savage with Imperialistic and using something else for Uldanor?
[to_xp]Gekko;13695187 said:
Captain Uldanor: Organized, Imperialistic, Ingenuity
Does Uldanor really need the three traits? The main leaders have only two...
I want to express what I would like to have in features. It is about the multiplayer gaming. I have asked from them several month ago, but as I see you are interested by feedback, I ask them again here. ^^
Well; feedback is providing information about how existing stuff works and your post suggests new features without talking much about the ingame. What I said in my previous post is that I'm lacking feedback, not feature proposals. Having said that, proposals are of course also welcome and I will answer for each one.
- I would like a game option option to hide totally the scores of the players (if not, by looking the scores you can immediately see the military power of everyone, which hugely destroy the mystery of each game, and change the strategies of the games).
I think that this is a bad idea. The value is visible for a powerful motive; the AI uses that value as the basis for most of their calculations regarding enemy players. Civilization IV in general, and MNAI in particular, have
AIs that do not cheat. Therefore, allowing human players to see the value is the only way to ensure that the AI does not have access to hidden information. Needless to say, rewriting the whole AI to calculate approximated score values based on what it knows is completely out of the question.
- I would like a game options to remove any hawk & invisible eyes, because it is too easy to have them and scout everywhere without risk. It breaks the multiplayer, you can too easily prevent barbarian spawnging with few hawks.
You can't scout everywhere, hawks must be based on other units or cities, and invisible eyes are summoned by arcane units and they last only for a turn. Since those units are usually weak, you can negate this advantage to your enemies by using fast units to take off the unit in which the hawk is based or the arcane unit summoning the eye. Sure, they can spend resources in defending them, but then scouting with hawks and eyes is not cheap anymore. Both hawks and invisible eyes require a significant technology investment and are available in a point in the game in which you could be spamming your surroundings with scouts anyways, so I don't see why it breaks multiplayer either. For the same reason, I don't consider that reducing barbarian spawning at that point of the game is something bad as there are many other cheap ways of doing it.
- I would like a game option to remove any hidden & invisible unit, because it is too strong in multiplayer and require to scout with hawks every turn the same region. Unless the hidden or invisible feature is changed, I would like a simple option to remove it from game.
Again, I disagree on hidden units being too strong, and you provide no arguments on behalf of your opinion. It may be possible (and even desirable) to increase the number of units that can see invisible, but I don't believe that these units should be removed in any case. I'm also wondering something... if you believe that hidden and invisible units are a problem, why are you requesting to remove hawks and invisible eyes when they are one of the best counters for invisibility?
- I would like an option game to remove the assassins units of the game, or to make unfonctionnal the assassin talent (targeting the weakest unit). Why ? Because assassins are a perfect counter to any priest or mages units, as the point it destroyed any interest to bring them in offensive stack in multiplayer. Moreover, assassins can easily kill any wounded units, including hero or anything.
So, as assassins break the multiplayer games at the point it destroy any interest to invest in adept or priest, and as there is no efficiant ways to protect your units from assassins (except Royal guards, but you can only have 4 of them, and they need Aristocraty civic), and as you don't plan to change the game to give new options to protect you from assassins, I would like an option as described in the line one.
Without assassins, the game is completely dominated by mages, priests and heroes. I mean,
evenwhen I have assassins, my brother always ends up killing them and then conquering me with their arcane units. The mere thought of removing one of their best counters makes me shudder. Putting my frustrations aside, there are a lot of ways to counter assassins. They require some effort, yes, but it's not like running a magic unit + defenders SOD is complicated. For example:
- Bring hawks, set them to scout automatically and kill the assassins before they can touch your stack.
- Promote a few strong melee units to Guardsman.
- Promote some scouts or archers to Perfect Sight and kill enemy assassins as they come.
- Bring up low level adepts along with your stack to be used as bait, as both assassins and runewyns (in EMM) will target them first.
- Cast Stoneskin.
- If none of the above works, go Empyrean or Bannor.
There may be other ways to stop them but I believe the ones I mentioned (specially hawks) are efficient enough.
I also want to mention something that applies to all of the balance suggestions you made. In a game like FFH2 units and strategies are not equally powerful, and therefore they are designed by taking into account not only their raw power, but also their counters and what they counter. These conections imply that you can't simply take one aspect of the game out, even if it is truly overpowered. The reason is that you would be making units and strategies countered by that aspect of the game completely overpowered, and the units and strategies that used to counter that aspect would now be more useless. If after removing something and realizing that you broke other things you continue trying to balance the game just by removal, you will end up with either something that is not FFH2 anymore or with something extremely plain and boring (and in that case you may as well be playing checkers).
Instead of using the removal approach, with games like FFH2 in most cases it is better to follow an iterative approach that can be summarized as follows:
1) Test the game and analyze player feedback in order to find problematic parts of the current game balance.
2) Discuss possible small changes that improve the situation without altering the rest of the game much.
3) Implement the chosen change and playtest the game again.
4) Repeat.
This iterative process is long and painful, but in games with complex equilibrium it is usually one of the best options. Many commercial games such as Team Fortress 2 or nearly everything made by Blizzard follow this approach. Erebus in the Balance also follows this iterative approach; you can check the process by going to its forum and reading the game threads and the progress thread of the next future version. In a more limited way, I try to do the same in this thread for EMM specific stuff.
If you are interested on game balance, there are many resources about game design and game balance available for free on the internet, that will have far better explanations than the poor summary I posted here. For the specific case of FFH2, the old FFH2 development and release threads, the Realms Beyond subforum mentioned earlier and
this blog also contain a lot of useful pointers.
If you just want to tweak the game to your very specific needs, as lfgr says what you want is not something really complicated. You could follow that advice and create your own version. ExtraModMod source code is easily available at the project's homepage (Downloads page -> download repository), and if you are interested in using Mercurial/version control you can even
fork it and just pull from my repository to get updates on top of your own changes without having to do anything.
Tholal proposed a possible solution to hawks being OP
here, but I don't think it will be implemented soon.
That is very interesting, but unless there are some vanilla Civilization IV mechanics for interception already in place (it's been so many years that I don't even remember how the normal game worked) it sounds very complicated to implement. I should check MNAI's feature requests in case there are any interesting suggestions that I could do.
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