Summary
I propose a way of making the combats in FfH less random. I explain first why I believe this is necessary, then how it's done in the xml, how it affects the gameplay, what doesn't work yet, and finally what I would need some help with still.
Why I believe combat is too random as it is now
FfH 2 concentrates your overall army strength in fewer units, mainly due to two changes:
1) promotions are much stronger than in Vanilla
2) FfH has Heroes
This change means that losing a single unit tends to have much more of an effect on your overall strength than it used to in Vanilla. Certain circumstances exacerbate this effect: losing Barnaxus as Luchuirp for instance or losing your main hero as the Mercurians can be the end of a game.
This leads to certain behavioral patterns that are much less fun than they could be. For instance, players will very rarely use their heroes unless they have really high combat odds. Entering a 80% combat with a hero is foolish, as things are right now. This means that players will drag their heroes around with their invading armies, only to use them when the odds are overwhelmingly in their favor.
Also, certain very powerful units become nearly unkillable to a player who only has much weaker units (and no matter how many of them) since the very powerful unit will win most combats without taking any damage.
Especially in competitive multiplayer I've often found this highly frustrating. You may have the better strategy and you may have performed much better so far, but hey, here's your hero attacking at 98%, and look, he's lost, it's game over.
Now you may argue that this is realistic; that in war there is no such thing as a safe win. Be that as it may, in a computer game this sort of unpredictability can become very frustrating.
After yet another multiplayer game that ended prematurely due to a ridiculous combat outcome (highly unsatisfying for both the winner and the loser) I decided to attack the problem, and I've come up with a sort of preliminary solution.
What to change
Essentially, you want to turn the MAX_HIT_POINTS setting in the GlobalDefinesAlt.xml file up to 1000. You will also need to multiply the enemy/neutral/friendly/city_heal_rate settings by 10. In case you want to try this in any version of FfH running on BtS (right now either the beta or AoI), you will also need to go into the CIV4UnitInfos.xml file and multiply each iCombatLimit by 10. This is a very tedious process unless you know a scripting language that can do this for you. If there is any demand, I'll post a modified xml for Age of Ice and for FfH itself as soon as there's a semi-complete port to BtS.
The easiest way to do this is to use the Excel based FfH editor.
Before you run off merrily changing this setting, do read on; some things break or behave oddly for the time being.
What you get
You get very predictable combat. 3.00 vs 2.00 combats will practically always end as you would assume: the 3.00 unit winning but suffering some injuries. Also, there will practically not be any combats where the victor emerges unscathed. This has a number of implications, which we'll get to in a moment. First, bugs.
What doesn't work
The percentile combat odds do not work. They will practically always be 0%, even in a 12.00 vs 1.00 combat. Ignore the percentage and look at the actual numbers. You can trust them. You will win a 7.0 vs 4.0 combat all of the time. That said, the higher number does not always win; there is still some residual randomness, which comes into play when the two strengths are very close to each other. 10.50 and 10.00 are much much closer to each other than 1.00 and 1.50. We're talking ratios, of course.
I'm not at all sure how the AI handles this change. I've played some games and they performed alright--not much worse or better than otherwise. They've attacked both in combats they would clearly win and in combats they would clearly lose. Note, though, that I'm testing these changes against the AI of Smarter Orcs.
How this affects balance
First of all, heroes and stronger units become even stronger than before because you can now use them in a much higher percentage of combats. Combats that would have been 60% before may now be 99%. I'm not convinced yet that a rebalancing of costs is required though, due to the new efficiency of swarming.
Swarming a very powerful unit with very many weak units becomes feasible now. No matter how much difference between the strengths, an attack will now always weaken the attacked unit.
This makes magic considerably stronger. For mid to late game purposes, mass summoned units (and fireballs) are perfect swarming units. Instead of sinking 10 fireballs into Hyborem and watching him shrug off most, if not all, of them, you can now be sure that you will cause damage. Offenbarungsjoe points out that this effect is self-amplifying and as such much, much stronger when there's a lot of weak units. The logic behind this is simple: the first attack is guaranteed to remove a bit of strength, making the ratio a little bit better for the second attack, and so on. This aspect may require rebalancing.
This change has not been thoroughly tested!
We've had a couple of games with those settings and we didn't run into any crashes or anything like that, but we never got anywhere near building and using all of the units in the game. I hope that most magic will be percentage based and as such work the same on 1000 hp units as it did on 100 hp units.
What I would like some help with
If someone who knows the source well enough (and isn't busy doing outstanding work on Smarter Orcs, cough cough) can look at why the percentile odds aren't calculated properly, I'd be much obliged. Also, maybe someone with a good knowledge of the FfH source will be able to tell me right away which other areas might be affected by this change.
I wouldn't be much surprised if the AI cannot really handle this after all. That wouldn't be a show stopper for me: I want this change for competitive, fair multiplayer. If any of you other multiplayer people would like to test this change a little and give balancing feedback, I'd be much obliged.
I propose a way of making the combats in FfH less random. I explain first why I believe this is necessary, then how it's done in the xml, how it affects the gameplay, what doesn't work yet, and finally what I would need some help with still.
Why I believe combat is too random as it is now
FfH 2 concentrates your overall army strength in fewer units, mainly due to two changes:
1) promotions are much stronger than in Vanilla
2) FfH has Heroes
This change means that losing a single unit tends to have much more of an effect on your overall strength than it used to in Vanilla. Certain circumstances exacerbate this effect: losing Barnaxus as Luchuirp for instance or losing your main hero as the Mercurians can be the end of a game.
This leads to certain behavioral patterns that are much less fun than they could be. For instance, players will very rarely use their heroes unless they have really high combat odds. Entering a 80% combat with a hero is foolish, as things are right now. This means that players will drag their heroes around with their invading armies, only to use them when the odds are overwhelmingly in their favor.
Also, certain very powerful units become nearly unkillable to a player who only has much weaker units (and no matter how many of them) since the very powerful unit will win most combats without taking any damage.
Especially in competitive multiplayer I've often found this highly frustrating. You may have the better strategy and you may have performed much better so far, but hey, here's your hero attacking at 98%, and look, he's lost, it's game over.
Now you may argue that this is realistic; that in war there is no such thing as a safe win. Be that as it may, in a computer game this sort of unpredictability can become very frustrating.
After yet another multiplayer game that ended prematurely due to a ridiculous combat outcome (highly unsatisfying for both the winner and the loser) I decided to attack the problem, and I've come up with a sort of preliminary solution.
What to change
Essentially, you want to turn the MAX_HIT_POINTS setting in the GlobalDefinesAlt.xml file up to 1000. You will also need to multiply the enemy/neutral/friendly/city_heal_rate settings by 10. In case you want to try this in any version of FfH running on BtS (right now either the beta or AoI), you will also need to go into the CIV4UnitInfos.xml file and multiply each iCombatLimit by 10. This is a very tedious process unless you know a scripting language that can do this for you. If there is any demand, I'll post a modified xml for Age of Ice and for FfH itself as soon as there's a semi-complete port to BtS.
The easiest way to do this is to use the Excel based FfH editor.
Before you run off merrily changing this setting, do read on; some things break or behave oddly for the time being.
What you get
You get very predictable combat. 3.00 vs 2.00 combats will practically always end as you would assume: the 3.00 unit winning but suffering some injuries. Also, there will practically not be any combats where the victor emerges unscathed. This has a number of implications, which we'll get to in a moment. First, bugs.
What doesn't work
The percentile combat odds do not work. They will practically always be 0%, even in a 12.00 vs 1.00 combat. Ignore the percentage and look at the actual numbers. You can trust them. You will win a 7.0 vs 4.0 combat all of the time. That said, the higher number does not always win; there is still some residual randomness, which comes into play when the two strengths are very close to each other. 10.50 and 10.00 are much much closer to each other than 1.00 and 1.50. We're talking ratios, of course.
I'm not at all sure how the AI handles this change. I've played some games and they performed alright--not much worse or better than otherwise. They've attacked both in combats they would clearly win and in combats they would clearly lose. Note, though, that I'm testing these changes against the AI of Smarter Orcs.
How this affects balance
First of all, heroes and stronger units become even stronger than before because you can now use them in a much higher percentage of combats. Combats that would have been 60% before may now be 99%. I'm not convinced yet that a rebalancing of costs is required though, due to the new efficiency of swarming.
Swarming a very powerful unit with very many weak units becomes feasible now. No matter how much difference between the strengths, an attack will now always weaken the attacked unit.
This makes magic considerably stronger. For mid to late game purposes, mass summoned units (and fireballs) are perfect swarming units. Instead of sinking 10 fireballs into Hyborem and watching him shrug off most, if not all, of them, you can now be sure that you will cause damage. Offenbarungsjoe points out that this effect is self-amplifying and as such much, much stronger when there's a lot of weak units. The logic behind this is simple: the first attack is guaranteed to remove a bit of strength, making the ratio a little bit better for the second attack, and so on. This aspect may require rebalancing.
This change has not been thoroughly tested!
We've had a couple of games with those settings and we didn't run into any crashes or anything like that, but we never got anywhere near building and using all of the units in the game. I hope that most magic will be percentage based and as such work the same on 1000 hp units as it did on 100 hp units.
What I would like some help with
If someone who knows the source well enough (and isn't busy doing outstanding work on Smarter Orcs, cough cough) can look at why the percentile odds aren't calculated properly, I'd be much obliged. Also, maybe someone with a good knowledge of the FfH source will be able to tell me right away which other areas might be affected by this change.
I wouldn't be much surprised if the AI cannot really handle this after all. That wouldn't be a show stopper for me: I want this change for competitive, fair multiplayer. If any of you other multiplayer people would like to test this change a little and give balancing feedback, I'd be much obliged.
Any strategy game benefits from favouring planned strategy over random luck. And since strong units (heroes) & swarming (taking down said heroes) play a big part in FFH, this idea feels like it isn't just nice to have, it's required.
