Design a Unit - Discussion and Q&A

puck11b said:
I hope no one takes offense at me critiquing their units. My thoughts are that as the dev team will be taking multiple units from the thread, critical discussion on the units will benefit us all when we get to play with them. *grin* Now then, on with the show.



If it is only one per city, then I'd think they should max out at 11-12ish. The (imho great) dynamic you've got with them will give you a viable, but not overwhelming, defender at any point in the game. If they max out at 7ish then towards the end game they are little more than a speedbump since they don't get any of the defensive promotions that make lonbows such a pita.

I do not believe that they are overwhelming since you'd need to have all three defensive buildings for them to get to their max level, I know that I am seldom tempted to build walls and castles in most of my towns with the current non-stacking nature of culture and building defensive bonuses.

Again, these are just my thoughts, it's your unit.

~p


I welcome your views!

Perhaps making a late game tech give them a boost or having certain buildings allow more specialists could also strengthen them. When do weaponsmiths and armourers become available, if they haven't been cut since FfH1?

Or perhaps just making them available later and increasing their base strength might be best.

Or perhaps they should just be given no maintanence cost, be given a heavy bonus against cavalry and only be there to keep the people happy / in case of emergencies. (I was thinking of adding this to the original post, but it's already getting a bit cluttered, so I decided against it.)

I guess you're right though, as they are now, they become a little redundant by the late game. I think raising their strength to 1.3 or 1.4 per specialist might be a good idea. Making more specialists available with buildings would start to become a problem, even having 7 specialists in a city under siege is probably not going to be easy.

I've edited my submission slightly

Unfortunately, I don't really have time to take a good look at the tech tree before the deadline. giving 2 per specialist would be good for the late game I think, but might make them overpowered in the mid-game
 
Chalid said:
Just to elaborate the new bombard system:

In Vanilla 20% Bombard means you reduce the Defense Value by 20% of its original Value. So If a city has a Defense of 200% You would need to bomabrd it 5 times to get the defence to 0. If the City has 40% Defense you would also have to Bombard it 5 times to get the defense to 0%

The New system works the following way. 20% Bombard means you actually reduce the defense by 20%. So if you bomabrd a city with 200% Defense you will reduce the defense to 180%. Thus you need to bombard a city with 200% Defence 10 times, but a city with defense 40% would only be needed to bombarded twice to get the defense modifier to 0%. This allows Cities with higer Defense to longer withstand an siege than cities with low defense. Also it than makes sense to bring catapults even for Cities with low defense as one hit with the catapult is as effective as it would be for an highly fortified city.


I like! sounds a lot more intuitive. I wonder why they didn't do that approach in vanilla? This approach might actually make me invest in city defense, rather than neglecting it like I do in vanilla :)
 
I'm basing the following on the idea that palisades: early game (tier 1-2), walls and ring-thing (palisades obsoleted): mid game (tier 2-3), and castle: late game (tier 3-4).
So early game base str is 4.25 (pop 5 city), culture bonus of 25-50% gives us 5.31 - 6.38
Lets call axeman our early game attacker, str 4, lets call him lvl 2 (training yard, apprentice civic, and one of the myriad barbs running around) with combat I and City Assault, final str 5.6. Looks just about right to me there, 2-3 to take your capital city's militia, 1-2 for a satellite city.
If you focused on it you could probably get one of these out by the time that Orthos came calling, but you'd be way behind the other civs as far as turn advantage is concerned. Orthos has a min str of 6.25 (I've never seen orthos with no promotions, but it could happen I suppose) so one might help save your city, but would be unlikely to hold him up by itself.

Mid game we've got two defensive buildings in walls and the ring-thing, so we've got a base of 6.5 (pop 10 city) 40-80% culture, gives us a final str of 9.1 - 11.7.
Lets call our attacker a str 7 maceman (I think they are str 7, please correct me if wrong), combat I-II and City Raider I (you should have plenty of lvl 3's at this point) for a final str of 12.6, or 11.2 if lvl 2 (city raider I and combat I)... looks like one should do the trick to take out your garrison troopy. Granted this is against a unit designed to take cities, but that is what I'd use to take a city.
Compare this to a Lvl 2 Longbowman in the same city, base 6 garrison I-II brings us to 11.4, 40-80% culture brings us to 15.96 - 20.52. This seems about right to me, longbowmen are much more expensive and require a special building to be built.


Now in the late game we've got all three defense buildings and good sized cities ( unless you are playing the vamps...) so lets say pop 20 for a base str of 9, 80% culture bonus for a final str of 16.2... we've almost caught up to the longbow in the earlier city.

All in all it looks like you've designed a unit that is best in the early stages of the game but continues to be useful throughout the entire game. Although it gets eclipsed by more expensive units in the later stages of the game it is still nothing to sneeze at and can stand up to anything short of a hero or tier 4 unit, which I think fits thematically with the idea of a city militia as well. If you put the time and treasure into "training" them (developing the techs to be able to build the buildings) you have a staunch but not overwhelming defensive force.

Uh yeah, did I mention that I really like this idea?

~p
 
Well thanks for the glowing review! I hope I can count on your vote :D
Oh and, thanks for doing all the maths for me! It's appreciated!

So uh, Kael, I suppose we're honour bound not to vote for ourselves when it comes to the public pole... Are we allowed to vote at all?
 
kevjm said:
Well thanks for the glowing review! I hope I can count on your vote :D
Oh and, thanks for doing all the maths for me! It's appreciated!

So uh, Kael, I suppose we're honour bound not to vote for ourselves when it comes to the public pole... Are we allowed to vote at all?

Good question. How many new accounts I need to create to vote for unit of my choice:mischief:?
 
Tsk tsk. You can go ahead and vote for yourself or someone else (your going to want to vote for someone so you can see the results). The voter details will be public, so if your going to create multiple accounts I wouldn't suggest making multiple versions of your own name to do it. I would recommend making multiple versions of the leading contributor's name and use them to vote for him. Then when he gets disqualified you will be 1 step closer to the lead! ;)
 
@Gladi it depends... As the design team selects units that will be available for the vote.... So the best way to get the unit of your choice would be to put some money into an envelope and send it to me.
 
Kael said:
I would recommend making multiple versions of the leading contributor's name and use them to vote for him. Then when he gets disqualified you will be 1 step closer to the lead! ;)

...And there goes my clever plan
 
Chalid said:
@Gladi it depends... As the design team selects units that will be available for the vote.... So the best way to get the unit of your choice would be to put some money into an envelope and send it to me.

So the deal holds;)? Good to hear that.
 
The FfH team will also be taking part in the public vote, right?
 
Regarding militia:

At current, my suggestion is that it is always the last unit in a stack to defend, to prevent the exploit of being able to build a potentially powerful unit for practically nothing. But do you think this system would be better:

Penalising the player for losing the unit. If the unit is lost, the city will go into revolution for a set amount of time. This time will be one turn for every militia specialist you have working in the city, up to a maximum of two turns.

Having any harsher a penalty could make the unit a liability.

So what do you think is better? The latter system makes the unit a little more useful in an actual war, I feel.
 
If you're going to have loss of the militia unit cause a penalty, then they should provide a +:) for hanging around when the city is not under attack. After all, they would be the police force, which would cause happiness under normal situations.
 
kevjm said:
The FfH team will also be taking part in the public vote, right?

Definitly, we have to vote so we can see the results. Each team member who decides to participate will pick an entry they like best so every entry will start with 1 vote from eachof us and you will be able to see which team member liked your idea.
 
YNCS said:
If you're going to have loss of the militia unit cause a penalty, then they should provide a +:) for hanging around when the city is not under attack. After all, they would be the police force, which would cause happiness under normal situations.

Problem with this is that it becomes a great disadvantage not to have one in the city, it'd force the unit on a player. They'd still prevent unhappy faces in a city though due to the 'we demand military protection'
 
The happiness penalty on death of the unit.... I just don't like it. I think making it the last line if defense just has more flavour.
 
Bright day
When does the contest end btw?
 
Gladi said:
Bright day
When does the contest end btw?

From the original topic:

Kael said:
The contest starts right now and we will be accepting submissions until May 28th at 9pm EST (Eastern Standard Time).
 
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