Final Fixes Reborn

After I updated to Revision 301 and loaded my latest Autosave (playing as the Scions), I was no longer able to build Crossbowmen, they just don't appear in my build queue. This was reloading an Autosave of a game started under Revision 300, so maybe in a new game started under 301 this won't happen, but just thought I'd bring it to your attention.

 

Attached. I've tried a lot of different things, no matter what, the attached save crashes going to the next turn.

 

I haven't played the scions myself, but this probably makes sense. From what I've seen, they don't look overly powerful, and not having a Marksman unit at all until the very late game isn't exactly fair...

The Royal Guard is pretty overpowered in the mid game, what with being a mounted unit gaining defensive bonuses, having the highest base defense of non-UU units at its tier and getting metal weapons on top of that, and it gets the rare Guardsman promotion too. The Royal Guard is the only reason I even consider picking the Aristocracy civic, because if you rely on farms to be your primary food source, turning them all into pseudo-hamlets can be quite a harsh blow to your production...

Ah, right, that's because I made them national units again, and you've probably already built four of them. If there was a good reason for why they were made freely spammable in the past, I'm willing to revert that, but I'm of the mind that none of the top-tier units should be non-limited, and it was annoying me that Crossbowmen could be made your staple offensive unit as well, what with them having a higher base attack than the Champions (of course, being archery units, they don't get the City Raider line of promotions).

 

Re-Xbow:
I think the change was to follow what the real transformation of X-Bow were:
- Xbow are 'pre-gunpowder' revolutions : you don't need to have a huge training to be able to accuratly shoot an armored cavalry dead, when compared to longbows.
Longbows were powerful, but needed long training....
Xbow were as powerful, more in short distance shooting, but with less rapid fire... with cost in equipment, but less training.
to have Xbow equivalent to LB, you needed 2-3 more guys, 2-3 more cost in equipement, but the guys were newbies, only a few days/week in training, and each guy is less expensive.

so the idea was to reflect that :
a unit cheaper than LB, more powerful, that can be spamable. (but less defensive fire, and less first strikes).

Indeed, having XBow being elite super high power ranged units was opposite to the real gain that happened.

but one can do it differently and we can adapt lore

a bit more on this later.

 

I saw in the new game that I started that Crossbowmen are now National Units. I don't really have strong feelings on this one way or the other, will probably need to play a bit more to see how it plays out.

 

Ah, yeah, from a real world perspective, it makes a lot of sense, but from a real world perspective, it doesn't make sense that they are as crazy powerful as they are. All of my complaints are about the game balance. When every city in the entire enemy empire is guarded by 1-3 Crossbowmen, I have to rely completely on the AI being too passive to deal with my siegers in order to even keep an advance going. Defending simply becomes way too easy this way.

Now, Black Imperators's plans for the unit trees involves making Crossbowmen a tier 3 unit, so that will eventually resolve everything.

 

yup, I agree.
it's just that I remember that a few years ago there was that discussion for justifying the change on Xbow.
but I agree, the change was to have units slightly more powerful (in str) than Longbows, cheaper, but with limitations on defensive strike.
I agree that the aim was not to have the tierIV Xbow become unlimited without any changes.
It should have been a tier3.5 cheaper.

But Huge "repeatable Xbows" : aka chonoku, could well be tier IV units ; maybe with a cross with siege unit, and have it as "fantasy machine-gun" ?

 

Quick question: what's the name of the new main menu music?

 

Personally what I'd do with the crossbow is make it an alternative to riflemen for those civs that don't get access to gunpowder weapons. Makes for an interesting tradeoff.

 

There was a unit tier chart a few pages back, which IIRC wanted to have a split between Offensive Archers and Defensive Archers. Is that still a thing or are we ignoring it for the purposes of this discussion?

 

The chart is a long term plan. it's nowhere near ready to be implemented and can and will be amended if people come up with better ways to do thing ^^

 

Might be a big ol' pipe dream but I'd really like to see some of the unit automation options from Caveman2Cosmos in Ashes. Stuff like automate border patrol and automate hunt, especially border patrol.

 

that's something i intend to look into at some point, but it won't be before i fix the current issues and finish the Magic AI update.

 

Got a crash at the end of the turn, crash dump files attached. SVN Revision 301.

 

A whole bunch of CtDs, dump files attached.

 

I know this thread is mostly for bug reporting and such but I have a more tactical question. Basically, there is a mechanic in the game that I find to be interesting but have newer really found a good use for. I just basically don't get it. And yet because I find it to be neat I want to base some of my future work on it so I thought maybe you people could help clear things up for me.

I am talking about withdraw chance. As in, the ability cavalry gets to retreat from attacking if you lose instead of being killed. It's something that I newer really got the hang of playing.

Like, I get the idea that it's meant to be a way of softening up stacks by chipping away at the high power units without having to sacrifice units of your own. But even in the base game it always seemed to be inferior to the alternatives such as collateral damage. And in this mod with magic and ranged attacks I have even less desire to ever use it.

Like, why risk a cavalry unit on a 20 or 30 % chance that it won't get killed when I can just throw a couple archers or a fireball/lightning/other damage spell or even just a catapult on the problem?

So what am I missing here?

 

i think they also have a chance of escaping if attacked (scouts can get this too).

 

In vanilla Civ, withdrawal chance is pretty weak. In expansion-less Civ IV, it's only a way of cheating death, which is nice with highly promoted units, but since getting any decently high withdrawal chance required several promotions for itself, and because promotions simply are way less powerful in vanilla Civ, they weren't really worth it until you already had everything else, and even then, it wasn't as much an insurance as just another chance for you to get lucky.

In BtS, they added flanking attacks, which was a way of damaging siege units at the bottom of a stack through a successful cavalry/helicopter attack. Since siege wasn't harmed by collateral damage, this was a way of intercepting advancing siege and reduce their effectiveness before they could cause collateral damage to you. Since withdrawing from combat counted as a success, you would still cause flank attack damage to the enemy siege even if you failed to beat the top defender. However, the maximum achievable withdrawal chance with non-unique units was 95%, and that was only doable with a Cavalry with a Great General attached, so you would only have at most one or two units capable of executing this stunt while still remaining likely to survive the encounter. And harrassment was the only thing that unit would be capable of, on the defense, it was just equal to any unpromoted cannon fodder..

Here in AoE, though, units tend to get a lot more promotions, and since promoted units are a lot more powerful here, dipping promotions into withdrawal chance isn't an entirely bad idea. Especially for cavalry and beast heroes which already have finished the Combat and Drill lines of promotions will with Flanking III be likely to survive at least one unlucky assault, which translates to a lot of time and resources saved which otherwise would have to be put toward training a replacement. For mostly unpromoted cannon fodder, it's just a way of offsetting the cost analysis. If you expect to lose 5 units in an attack, but each of those have 20% withdrawal chance, that'll probably turn out as 4 losses in practice, which translates to one fewer unit you have to rebuild and ship to the front line to have your army fully reinforced. Given, it needs to be healed first, but that's not really an issue in AoE either.

Also, having that 15% defensive withdrawal chance trigger on a Skirmisher when attacked by a greatly overpowered enemy translates to a ton of XP.

This mechanic wasn't in the vanilla game, though.

 

That's an interesting analysis. It basically got me thinking and now I have a lot more thinking to do.

 

for me I take it as a way to increase my survival chances:

if I have 75%chances to win the combat, with 20%withdrawal, I count that as a 80%chance.... to see if I try to battle, but a win at 75%chances gets more xp than a win at 80%.

further it's good for big bad acheron (or other), whether you have 6str+40% combat or 6str+40%withdrawal, you have the same odds : 0.01%
and he is immune to magic
and catapults target him... so the collateral damage is not done to acheron.
(and vanilla FFH didn't have those cheat archers )

however out of your horse archers with 40%withdrawal (and easily 75), you have 4 chances to damage a bit Acheron, and only lose 1 unit, instead of sacrificing for certain 4 champions.

but I agree, on the whole, withdrawal is much less interesting than what it should be