So I haven't actually played a round yet and this may invalidate my opinion a little bit but:
Balancing a game is about increasing diversity of gameplay, and I'm not sure that 3.0 has much room for diversity. Classic rwl had some diversity: 2 strategies (indy/leader) with some tuning that made them good in various scenarios. Not to say it was perfect, 2 is still pretty dry especially for a game that has been around 10 years. But 3.0 doesn't seem to have any sense of primary strategies, which means you can't balance it because you don't know which styles of gameplay you are promoting. Balancing means finding at least 2 different (usually dramatically different, think Zerg, Terran, and Protoss [and that subsets in to even different styles of play. macro and cheese, mech or bioball, etc.) styles of play and making each of them viable. The fun and interesting things occur when the two different styles find ways to compete with each other.
I'm worried that 3.0 doesn't have much diversity. I haven't seen the games play out, but I get the sense that there isn't a diverse set of strong strategies, just a mostly homogenous set of weak strategies.
I like that you made the worker important but I don't like that you completely changed everything around completely. But I guess it shakes things up a bit.
But I would really like to see 2 (actually, I would really like to see 3) dramatically different styles of play appear that all have a decent shot at winning a round.
The other thing I'm questioning (since this post is mostly about balance) is the clan mechanics of the game. Right now, it seems like 2 or 3 people in a clan have an almost complete advantage over single players. And 5-6 people in a clan have an almost complete advantage over smaller clans. Some games like it this way, clans are overpowered by design because they want people to clan up. But are rwl clans too strong? I don't know how the clan dynamic works in 3.0 but the winners usually seem to be part of a large clan (large meaning 30% of active players). Maybe this is what we want.
edit: oh, and one more thing that is overpowered, I'm certain of it: using towers to allow your other units to come to the defense of a unit-versus-unit match. The whole point of having 4 different types of units is that in order to lock land you have to keep a mountain of expensive units around. But if skiffs and weasels can come to the aid in defending against attacks from rats and stoats, then locking land is significantly easier as long as you maintain towers.
In the previous iteration of the game, towers were not useless, and you found people with huge land advantages building towers nonetheless, because having towers helps to fight against all unit-unit attacks and against all-all attacks. Maybe they were a bit weak but now it seems they do far too much. Towers should be the building you use when you want to remove the low hanging fruit. But the new towers seem to barricade all of the fruit (proverbially speaking).
To your first point, there should be 3 main strategies. Cash, food, and indy. Right now cash dominates and food is weak. Ill address that in july.
The power of clans is more due to the smaller player base than he code, I think. However, the curent lock on turbo is due to the power of unclanned teams, which I will also be addressing.
Regarding towers, I will reserve judgement until I see the results of the next round of balances.
Thanks for your thoughts! Keep them coming.
I would like to suggest removing desertions on unclanned players with a LARGER net. They are arbitrary and make it too easy to lock. Really, I think there should be more incentives to emp and stay clanned, but that is an issue with reg as well and not new to 3.0
I also think leader attacks should be brought back, though not as they were before. There are two main reasons:
- There is no logic in being forced to build a massive army to attack somebody when my leaders way outnumber theirs
- Suicides, though overpowered, were necessary to prevent people locking early than being unbreakable.
On the second point, I'm not necessarily suggesting bringing leader suicides back per say, but there needs to be a more effective way to damage big people than try to mass enough troops to break them, because that is night impossible. When somebody has a lock, leaders are useless, because it is not possible to get enough land to build sustainable leaders. Leader attack was always useless for attacking in the past due to the massive losses, so I think it would need to be completely revamped anyways.
Basically, it's too difficult to do any damage to somebody when they are entrenched from a first week unopposed. The best way is to market troops and co-ord buy out to break, but this is not in keeping with the markets function and should not be happening anyway.
edit: I forgot you are on holiday haha, I doubt you'll have the time/desire to do any of this balancing in the near future. Sorry!
Agreed. I am hoping the next round of balances makes locking a little harder. I dont think leader attacks are necessarily the wa to go, though. What if there was an attack buff that made the defender take leader losses even If it didn't break?
If im being honest, I always have the desire to talk about balance. Its a problem.
And yes, I think if you break someine much larger than you you should actually gain troops, not have desertions. Maybe even have some of their army join yours. Badass theme idea for july!
I think that buff is a very good idea, though to balance make it costly on troops.
I also think that July theme sounds beast. Desertions, but from them to you. You could even have a "bribe" buff that gains power the higher the empire you attack, though it could easily be OP.
Alright, ill try to include all thT in my july release, and we can decide to make the theme permanent if people like it
Quote from: Shadow on May 17, 2013, 03:34:35 PM
And yes, I think if you break someone much larger than you you should actually gain troops, not have desertions. Maybe even have some of their army join yours. Badass theme idea for july!
Yes, this!
Desertions on larger empires really need to go, people up top can stay unclanned on most of the land, then it's nigh on impossible to do much, even if you break the losses can be pretty crippling (up to 10% I heard from somewhere?) so as to ensure you only break a couple of times, and it almost ends up not being worth it.
I think I'm repeating what's already been said, but I felt the need to rant about that.
I also agree with Taek on Towers being a bit OP too, I can't remember the exact way in which they work (although I'm sure I've read it somewhere before) but after getting a bit of a feel for them playing this round they seem a little too effective. Although I can't say I necessarily agree on clans being OP. well ok, they may be OP in some ways (I don't disagree with that part entirely), but there has been discussion about this in the past and I think many people agreed that there needs to be a big incentive to clan up, people that get engaged in the community in some ways (clans are a great way of doing this) are more likely to stay and sign up the forums etc.
Towers are easy to tweak, but id like to see what other balances do first
Here's my idea for diverse play styles - diversity means more than just using 3 different resources, there have to be different implications to each style. Not saying that the current game doesn't have diversity, but right now I don't know how it works. Are the main methods for acquiring cash and food that different?
Here 3 different play styles I thought of, based on the old game, but re-adjusted to fit 3.0 better. I actually like how this turned out and hopefully other people like it too:
1. Army based, indy-style, glass cannon play.
+ networth based on army, sell army to fund next army
+ gameplay style involves dramatic swings in networth every run
+ easy to destroy and indy's current resources, but the indy has an easy time rebuilding, even coming from the complete brink an indy should be balanced to achieve full capacity in 3-4 runs. If they have money in the bank and food in the storehouse, then they should recover in only 2 runs.
- under clan play, armies can be shipped around quickly, turning the old indy strat into a strat that generated an obtuse amount of resources because the armies never actually consumed any resouces (which is what originally balanced indy)
fix: limit the amount of aid that can be sent, in or out of clans
2. Worker based, long term play
+ networth and resources are built up slowly, but by the end of a round they should be ahead of the indys by 20-50%, assuming minimal shenanigans (but shenanigans are how indys still have a chance at winning)
+ well defended, takes coordination to tear down resources. Unlike indy, who is ideally quite vulnerable, this style of play should less vulnerable to basic attacks but still vulnerable to attacks that have been planned out and skillfully executed. If this player suffers a large loss in the mid-game, they will only be able to win if the indys have unsuccessful final runs. If they suffer a large loss in the late-game (last week), they will be unable to win against an indy.
3. ?Leader based play?
Here is an idea for leader based play (it requires a fair amount of adjustments probably):
leaders are the "information" style of play. They have increased abilities to keep tabs on their opponents and they also have high-loyalty spells that allow them to steal food, cash, and armies. Success is based on leaders ability to judge appropriate times to engage in a theft. Army theft is easy but costs lots of loyalty (maybe 1 runs worth of loyalty to take 50% of a players army.). Worker-based theft is hard but doesn't cost as much loyalty - workers can be counted as defensive leaders but don't generate loyalty and can't cast spells. Indys are going to have less workers because they will be using the workers for recruiting, but a food/money strat will have lots of workers because they are never conscripted.
Effectiveness of steal (whether the steal is army, food, or money) depends on how great the leader advantage is. It will be highly effective against indies with no workers (who can regenerate their networth quickly anyway) and less effective against indies with many workers (if they have more workers, it is because they are not conscripting as many into the army and so their total networth is lower). Steals are less effective against workers (for balance) because workers can't regenerate their networth quickly.
Leaders will be unable to sustain their stolen goods. Once they have the goods, their chances to win are limited to either pulling off a land lock (which should be difficult), or simply by not using very many turns.
Checks and balances:
Indies can keep check on the workers play through the use of sacking. Even with sacking, worker-based play should be able to achieve (by the end of the round) 20-50% more networth on similar amounts of land. After that, the amount that workers produce is about equivalent to the amount that indies sack. By sacking though, the indy takes less land and compromises their run. Indies can also defend against workers by maintaining armies in all 4 categories, forcing the workers to buy an army in order to acquire land. This second method should actually be what makes indy nearly equal to the worker; if the indy is meticulous about keeping land hard-to-get for workers, the workers will take longer to hit a critical mass.
Indies can defend themselves against leaders by conscripting less army at the end of their run and allowing their workers to build up. This of course minimizes the amount of production that they get, but is perhaps worthwhile if there are other indy players who are not doing this.
(side note: to me indy is a strategy that generally run every turn with food/cash in the red, because that makes it fun and exciting)
Workers can defend against indies by ?(towers)? -> workers should have some way to make indy runs less effective while at the same time compromising their own run. Maybe when there are towers sacks are less effective, but there are less workers so production goes down (I don't like that idea, there's gotta be something better). Maybe workers are just powerless against indies and focus their advantage that they don't need to ever decrease in networth while they run.
workers can defend against leaders by building huts. The total amount of leader defense goes up (because 100 leaders + 20-40 workers) but the total amount of workers (and therefore productivity) goes down.
(side note: worker strats should always have stats in the green. This is more intuitive. There are also plenty of reasons for worker strats to keep armies around, just not as the same magnitude of indies)
leaders don't really worry about defense, because they can't build any of their own things, they can only acquire them from others. Armies that they get from indys starve because leader races have high-cost armies, and low-cost mercs. Stuff that they steal from workers is probably more to sustain the army than to actually acquire networth. The hope for leaders is not in stealing enough food to actually have a networth but rather in stealing armies from multiple indies, using loyalty pent up over several days (maybe a week but that might be too long) to acquire troops in 1 run equivalent to 150-200% of what any indy could do on their own. Then of course the leader is completely immobile.
Side note: After thought, I think that the only reason team play is over powered is because aid is over powered. If you make aid take longer (say 10 turns to send a shipment of aid) and set maximums (say 10% of resources per shipment, maybe only 5% of food/cash), then in order to ditch 50% of your army you'll need to still feed it for 50+ turns. Then you can just remove aid limits because turns themselves force a limit. Aid heavy strategies will mean less turns spent doing other things.
This should balance all team play, because the aid is really the only problem I've ever seen.
You have described pretty much how it actually works, it just isn't quite balanced out yet, and workers matter for everyone.
I encourage you to play around and get a feel for the new style. This round is a bad example because of drakus ruining It instead of reporting a bug, so the imbalances you see aren't quite as bad in reality.
One thing that I actually do really like is the food vacuum for indies. Every run I've struggled to make ends meet from a food perspective. Foragers don't seem to help [me] much at all, mercs definitely don't sell enough food, and the market is completely empty. This gives me two options
1. Be creative (good thing)
2. Compromise so I'm not 100% barracks and 5% tax. (good thing)
And it also means that if someone did play a farming strat, I'd most likely be willing to pay the full $25 to get extra food, something that would most likely help out a casher a lot. Maybe the max market price should even be raised to $50, though I probably wouldn't go beyond $30 personally.
protip after ghostig your account: below 20% tax, you dont get extra workers.
!
really? Then why is tax allowed to go as low as 5%? There is no advantage. That doesn't even make any sense.
You gain workers faster and have a higher ceiling of workers if your tax is lower.
there is a small gain at lower tax but not enough to make it worthwhile. when I set up that formula I was mostly concerned with the mid tax behaviour, the very low end just worked itself out this way.
Quote from: Firetooth on May 17, 2013, 03:44:05 PM
I think that buff is a very good idea, though to balance make it costly on troops.
I also think that July theme sounds beast. Desertions, but from them to you. You could even have a "bribe" buff that gains power the higher the empire you attack, though it could easily be OP.
rotflmao. typical suggestion from a struggling sub-par player. learn to cope, poo or get off the pot.
Quote from: Wolf Snare on May 25, 2013, 12:26:22 PM
Quote from: Firetooth on May 17, 2013, 03:44:05 PM
I think that buff is a very good idea, though to balance make it costly on troops.
I also think that July theme sounds beast. Desertions, but from them to you. You could even have a "bribe" buff that gains power the higher the empire you attack, though it could easily be OP.
rotflmao. typical suggestion from a struggling sub-par player. learn to cope, [poop] or get off the pot.
Judging by the reg score boards, you are in no position to brand anybody struggling. :P
Cue "suicides are bork" rant. Whatever, learn to cope, poo or get off the pot (what the hell does that even mean?).
means he's off to a good start being ungagged
Quote from: Shadow on May 25, 2013, 01:00:23 PM
means he's off to a good start being ungagged
You'd think he'd learn from his probation badge of shame. :P