Unit Upgrade Costs

[[to_xp]Gekko]

how do people feel about the current incarnation of the gold cost to upgrade obsolete units?

while I understand the reasoning behind VEM's design, I don't think it results in better gameplay. making unit upgrades very unefficent just means players keep lots of obsolete units around imo. you're already somewhat punished for upgrading due to higher maintenance costs.

I think Thal wrote "it feels weird to just build units in the early game and then upgrade them throughout the whole game" but isn't that just fair? opportunity costs are higher in the early game and someone who spent their hammers on infrastructure will balloon a lot more than someone who built units. why punish the player for investing in military early on?

another issue with this is that with the tradition policy that gives free garrison maintenance, I'll stick the upgraded, high maintenance units in the cities and keep the obsolete units in the field, which is obviously backwards in respect of the desired effect ( use older units as cheap garrisons )


while my preferred solution would be to have the upgrade cost be entirely based on the hammer cost difference ( multiplied by the goldrush factor ) , I think a middleground can be found. a couple options:


a) NIGHTS method: the more units ( of the same type ) you upgrade, the more expensive it becomes. this way you still discourage mass upgrading and encourage "traditional training practices" ( i.e. via hammers ) , without punishing the player too much for just upgrading a "reasonable" military. ideally you could put the upgrade cost between vanilla ( 1st upgraded unit ) and make it smoothly increase to VEM cost.

b) make it based on unit XP, with high XP units costing less to upgrade ( which seems to be the intended design ) . this is good in that it helps warmongers more, and these are exactly the people who will build more units and get bit in the arse more by the VEM method.


actually I guess you could also have a combination of these two methods

 

[mystikx21]

I don't think you are punished for higher upkeep cost when upgrading. You have a higher XP unit now that you would otherwise have to produce and send off to fight and did so for cheaper gold than you would have to use to rush one out at lower XP. This is the actual trade-off and benefit for upgrading.

The actual problems I see for upkeep are that it rises too rapidly and too substantially later in the game and/or that you have no incentive to upgrade garrison units under the honor tree (typically low XP units, not high XP units). I don't think there's a significant problem for warmongers other than the cost of keeping a large army rises too rapidly generally, which isn't a problem limited to upgrades.

I don't think a scaling cost upward system would help if the supposition is that warmongers are getting bit on upgrading.

Upgrade costs should probably go in the opposite direction than this, higher for initial units (representing prototypes or new concepts of warfare), and cheaper from training and economy of scale. I think they're fine in between where they are fixed rather than increasing or decreasing as a result. This is a good balance between game play and reality.

I think the best option would be to somehow combine VEM with vanilla, where upkeep costs could rise with eras but also are flexible for better unit quality and cost. This would mean that the upkeep disparity between an obsolete archer, chariot, or vanguard unit sitting around in the modern era would be far less than it is now and we would have incentives to disband them or upgrade them.

 

[Ahriman]

I think you should be able to upgrade units you build throughout the game at moderate cost. I prefer the vanilla method.

I dislike the idea that you are somehow getting a reward for the opportunity to upgrade a high xp unit; you already earned that reward by earning the experience.

There are already strong incentives not to upgrade - lower maintenance cost. Having upgrade costs [*edit* be very high creates a further disincentive to upgrading.]

I do not think we should ever be trying to encourage people to disband units rather than upgrade. The only reason why you should ever want to do that is if you now have more free XP providers than the current experience of the unit (ie disband a 0 xp swordsman and rebuild a 30 xp longsword).

 

[wobuffet]

I think you forgot to finish a sentence there, Ahriman.

Some example numbers/costs would help here...

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

another issue with the VEM method is that it makes it a lot harder to benefit from UU abilities throughout the whole game by upgrading UUs.

 

[Torvald]

I think you should be able to upgrade units you build throughout the game at moderate cost.

Yes, I quite agree. My personal strategy, for better or worse, is to build a moderate size force and then try to keep all of my units alive for as long as posible, slowly gaining experience and upgrades. This requires careful strategy, such as pulling damaged units back for healing, plus budgeting for the periodic upgrade costs.

The alternative aproach is to simply build disposable armies and toss them at your opponents in a war of attrition. While sometimes effective, this requires much less player skill than carefully preserving a "core" army, and I enjoy games much more when they involve using skill versus using brute force or luck.

 

[mystikx21]

another issue with the VEM method is that it makes it a lot harder to benefit from UU abilities throughout the whole game by upgrading UUs.

Again, I'm not following where the problem here is related to the system for upgrading.

It sounds like the problem is still more closely related to the issue of high upkeep more broadly than a need to repair the upgrading structure.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

Again, I'm not following where the problem here is related to the system for upgrading.

UUs and civs are balanced taking into account UU abilities persisting through unit upgrades, don't they? making upgrading UUs less efficent also makes UUs less useful, which is bad imo.

 

[mystikx21]

That's not what my argument concerns. How exactly is this a problem with upgrading. Isn't it an upkeep cost problem? If upgrading does increase upkeep, by some slight margin, it should still be more efficient to upgrade XP'd units over producing new ones (and UU's tend to have special promotions which upgrade as well). So the problem there isn't upgrade related per se. It's related to the upkeep cost.

That is essentially what the poll seems to be about, whether a flat upkeep per unit system (vanilla) or a more flexible per better unit system (VEM) is preferred? Upgrading is only tangentially related to that issue.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

there's no problem with the fact that upgrading means higher maintenance, that's fair since you get a better unit.

I just think that the VEM change that makes upgrading units cost a lot more than vanilla worsens gameplay instead of improving it: punishing the player for upgrading his units is simply not fun, and needlessly unbalances some mechanics.

the "unit maintenance is too high right now" is a completely separate issue.

 

[mystikx21]

Right, I'm still not following how this is related to upgrading however.

You could leave your units obsolete, and watch their hard-earned XP go to waste as they are slaughtered so you could build fresh units with less XP. Or you could upgrade them. The upkeep costs being higher on the upgraded unit are more a problem with upkeep costs rising too much or too steeply between units and eras as even if you don't upgrade, any new replacement unit will also be expensive. But will lack any UU promotions or earned XP promotions. You should still be better off in most combat related circumstances upgrading a unit as a result. I can understand the upgrade penalty existed back in Civ4 where a unit lost most of its higher XP points (but not promotions earned) when it was promoted. That was a penalty, too much of one. This is a wider problem that impacts upgrades.

Are we referring to the raw cost of an upgrade being too high? Or the cost of upkeep change? The impression I have is that both upkeep and upgrade cost are associated with the change in raw cost going from 1.4 to 1.8. Neithet formula was adjusted to this after having been balanced for vem.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

raw cost of upgrades being too high, yeah.

 

[mystikx21]

As an example of the base unit cost change on upgrading. Swordsman would be 45 in gk to upgrade. They are 80 in GEM. Before any considerations of upgrade cost formula take effect, the units have more upgrading to do. This is more noticeable in later eras usually (archers are about the same for example). The formula can be rescaled somewhat to recognize this just as the upkeep could be.

 

[Ahriman]

Isn't it an upkeep cost problem?

This issue is that it takes very large amounts of gold to upgrade units in GEM, more so than in vanilla.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

As an example of the base unit cost change on upgrading. Swordsman would be 45 in gk to upgrade. They are 80 in GEM. Before any considerations of upgrade cost formula take effect, the units have more upgrading to do. This is more noticeable in later eras usually (archers are about the same for example). The formula can be rescaled somewhat to recognize this just as the upkeep could be.

archers don't seem "about the same" to me, I think archer -> composite bowman is 80 gold in vanilla and 220 in GEM.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

another mechanic that could tie in with this is unit gifting to CS. in theory you could keep the high XP ones and gift the outdated ones while you build new ones.

in practice unit gifting seems completely useless. I think it's 5 influence for a GP for example, and I got 1 (!!!) influence point when gifting a CS a scout in the early game.

now if the influence reward for gifting units were raised a lot till it's actually meaningful, this could be a good argument towards higher upgrade costs. right now however...

 

[mystikx21]

By about the same I refer to the cost in hammers between them. 35-40. I'm pretty sure it wasn't 220 my last test run. But I was looking at glitches still more than changed mechanics.

 

[mystikx21]

Comp Bows are 130 to upgrade in GEM (confirmed). In vanilla GK they are 80. The disparity there is much less than usual because the change in rough cost is lower than most units.

Infantry from Riflemen (GWIs) for instance is 310 from 120. A large chunk of that gap is established because the cost change is 100, when it was 55. They would be 210 in GK vanilla's upgrade formula given the current unit costs.

Knights from horsemen or longswords from swords are also large changes. 250 from 100. With the default upgrade cost applied they would still be 170.

@wobuffet, that should be the sorts of numbers you want yes?

 

[Ahriman]

Right.

I think that a good place to start would be the GK cost formula with the GEM unit costs. But the changed formula combined with the changed costs seems to make upgrading much too expensive.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

agreed, I'd like to test that as well