Topic: Balancing around the tempo tournament

hessenfarmer wrote:
1. 1st hero should not be possible without having most of the economy
2. times to reach that point should be balanced among tribes
3. Changes to achieve that should be as minimal invasive as they could be

1) I'm not sure. If it leads to a deadlock, I think it's ok (but then it should be equal for all tribes).
2) If balanced means something like similar and not identical, then yes.
3) From code-perspective, yes. (I wanted to write something about bigger ideas should be discussable, but I think I know what happens then...)

hessenfarmer wrote:

Nordfriese wrote: I would additionally mention that heroes are and should be important, but perhaps they are too important as it is, so I would also propose
4. Take some focus away from making supersoldiers towards using medium-trained soldiers (without making supersoldiers cost-inefficient)

Ok noted. However I don't have a glue how to achieve this yet as the last weapon is already expensive and adds just the same amount of hitpoints as the previous one (which is spoken in percentage to less then the previous one). In the end everbody playing seriously and competitive would only do what is cost efficient. This is sad but I believe it is the truth. Sadly we are educated in this way in real life as well aren't we

Now you brought me back to the point with maintenance-cost:
Soldiers could, after sitting in a warehouse or milsite for maybe 30 minutes (or whatever) lose their last / highest ( / weakest ) promotion (only one time?) This should lead to players not train heroes to store them everywhere but instead train them only on demand.

This is just brainstorming. Pick, alter or reject whatever I write here

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the-x wrote:

Creating a hero should be the exception

actually, creating heroes used to be exactly that, the exception. it was something reserved for the very latest game. something almost unseen.

it only happened after months and months of gaming that i actually figured out first that it was possible to micromanage a hero without having a full flow of resources full time. i figured it serendipitously by doing no metal challenges of trident of fire, by the way.

and then i joined the first tournament, and i surprised eveyrone by getting the first hero after... 90 minutes!

and everyone was like "oooh, this guy makes heroes so fast! he broke the game!"

and i relaxed and didn't try to improve much, though i went to about 75 minutes.

and within the next year, worldsavior started to play. I remember his first few months, he was constantly asking questions, the best order to build, how many building X for every building Y. and everyone was like, "calm down dude, what we have is good enough". and he trounced me, because i wasn't applying myself fully. and then he still defeated me, though i managed some mixed success.

since then, time kept going down.

and now everyone can make heroes in 90 minutes, and nobody realizes how difficult it was, and that it took a lot of effort to figure out how. it literally took years.

and now people are all "oh, it's too easy to make heroes, we must make it harder". it's not easy. it's just that we figured out way to do it, and then we taught it to others.

Yes i mean its crazy that they took such a long time before, today we cant just imagine it. Especially the last weeks i was so micromanaging the weekend always my atlantean hero and i am saying yes i was very happy to have a time like 19 minutes and 18:12 minutes.

But good players always come with a new way of thinking and so i see that you must have completely changed the way that is played over time.

Maybe with teaching we can so some more thing, like before tournament i only had the questions we talked about and now the replays - never thought world had almost the identical build like me, with some changes in street managegemt but the build order of mine is sligthly better if you look at times wares need to the building and which one starts.

Anyway in the actual situation i think making it harder is good way because it challanges us more

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king_of_nowhere wrote:

kaputtnik wrote:

Heroes will ever be the strongest soldiers, so creating a hero will be ever the goal.

Not at all. If two half promoted soldiers cost as much as a hero and are more effective, why would I ever want to make a hero? I'll just keep making half soldiers and win with numbers.

But to be honest: I am not very familiar with all the promotion levels and i do not exactly know which armor/weapon produce which level of promotion. I am a friend to this game because of the nice graphics, the cozy gameplay, discovering a map step by step. So i am maybe not the person who should talk about hero creation Anyway i believe some people like the game in the same manner as i do.

yes, most people like the game this manner. I myself like to play it this manner every once in a while. But the thing is, nobody is stopping anyone from playing the game that manner. it's called casual gaming. it's not like if we take away a couple of starting wares here and there anyone's casual gaming will be affected. in fact, most people won't even notice. any change will only be relevant to highly competitive games. nobody is trying to forbid casual gaming.

Which is why I am most amazed to see so many casual gamers here trying to reject changes as if they would prevent them from casual gaming.

While someone else seem miffed about having to make fast heroes or lose to them. but they fail to realize that the key of the issue is that they are casual gamers and they are playing against competitive gamers. of course they are losing. if it is not by early hero rush, it will be by some different mean, but no one can pretend to play casually and stand up to a pro.

Yes, that's true. I didn't realized the fact that there are 2 types of widelands gamers.

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the-x wrote:

"and then i joined the first tournament, and i surprised eveyrone by getting the first hero after... 90 minutes!"

This one reminded me a little bit of me in Tournament 2019 when i made a build with Barbarians with only axes and beer

In that tournament you only used ATL

king_of_nowhere wrote:

kaputtnik wrote:

Heroes will ever be the strongest soldiers, so creating a hero will be ever the goal.

Not at all. If two half promoted soldiers cost as much as a hero and are more effective, why would I ever want to make a hero? I'll just keep making half soldiers and win with numbers.

+1

While someone else seem miffed about having to make fast heroes or lose to them. but they fail to realize that the key of the issue is that they are casual gamers and they are playing against competitive gamers. of course they are losing. if it is not by early hero rush, it will be by some different mean, but no one can pretend to play casually and stand up to a pro.

+1

Nordfriese wrote:

by the way, I think I got the perfect easy idea for making first hero unimportant. Giving EVERYONE heroes FROM THE START!

Think about it: your starting stock of soldiers will include 10 heroes, and a few more with lesser promotions. Oh, you made an 11th after only 20 minutes? It hardly matters.

I would not want this to be the norm. So I think we could add a new starting condition - elite army, or something like this.

Sound good in theory, might seem pretty pointless in practice to give players free heroes IMHO. But if we'd have a starting condition like this, perhaps it would be possible to balance this special MP starting condition without changing the actual tribes? If so, I'd support this proposal.

it wouldn't need any balance at all. tribes are already decently balanced when they have a full economy. it's balancing the start that is trickier.

JanO wrote:

Now, as a contrast to those huge posts, just two short ideas:

• Give Soldiers experience. Gained by winning fights, needed for higher promotions (maybe 0 experience -> all lvl 1 promotions possible, 1 experience -> all lvl 2 promotions possible etc.)

so, in order to help focus on the economy and not on fights, we should force people to fight if they want to train their soldiers? I don't see how it would be a good idea.

+1

• increase training time for higher promotions (lvl 1 promotions stay as now, lvl 2 promotions double (or even more) the time, lvl 3 double lvl2 time etc.)

easily fixed by building more training sites. aside from that, it's an artificial slow down, no different than a high number of promotions for a blacksmith.

and finally, it won't fix inequalities. if a tribe is faster, it will slow down everyone equally. if a player is faster, it will also slow down everyone equally.

Another idea, that was mentioned before, would be maintenance costs. Probably the hardest to implement and at the moment I haven't even a clue how to design this theoretically.

maintenance cost affecting soldiers would just force one to make heroes anyway, because they'd be cheaper to maintain. unless they are super expensive to keep, in which case upkeep would make heroes useless, and people would just fight with rookies.

+1

and within the next year, worldsavior started to play. I remember his first few months, he was constantly asking questions, the best order to build, how many building X for every building Y. and everyone was like, "calm down dude, what we have is good enough".

Looks like I should read some old discussions again

and now people are all "oh, it's too easy to make heroes, we must make it harder". it's not easy. it's just that we figured out way to do it, and then we taught it to others.

and if we make it harder, you can be sure someone will figure out something, and it will be easy again.

+1

JanO wrote:

Now you brought me back to the point with maintenance-cost: Soldiers could, after sitting in a warehouse or milsite for maybe 30 minutes (or whatever) lose their last / highest ( / weakest ) promotion (only one time?) This should lead to players not train heroes to store them everywhere but instead train them only on demand.

This wouldn't even work. Do you know why?

Nordfriese wrote:

. IMHO a desirable outline would be that a mixture of a few heroes plus many medium soldiers is stronger than many medium soldiers and also stronger than heroes only. Let me phrase it like this: if three players turn the same amount of ores into a) only heroes, b) only medium soldiers, or c) use half the ores for heroes and the rest for mediums – then C is stronger than A, and A stronger than B (and B weakest of the three).

I don't like it to share my insights, but this is already the case (at least if you replace "medium" soldiers by "weak" soldiers). At the other hand, we would need more matches with large distances to verify that.

This would not be trivial to ensure, but perhaps it could be done by fiddling with the upgrade costs and a non-linear level increase system.

How do you mean "non-linear"?

Nordfriese wrote:

Most of these suggestions are not that drastically, but yes we shouldn't change too much about this game for the sake of balance.

I think they are that drastically

I would additionally mention that heroes are and should be important, but perhaps they are too important as it is, so I would also propose
4. Take some focus away from making supersoldiers towards using medium-trained soldiers (without making supersoldiers cost-inefficient)

Matches with medium-trained soldiers can be played for example on goldless maps, and heroes are still there, and very cost-inefficient

So imho this is already enough.

hessenfarmer wrote:

1. 1st hero should not be possible without having most of the economy

-1 As already stated, the current state allows more different strategies, brings more variety to the game. We have long distances and short distances between the players, which increases the depth of Widelands.

1. times to reach that point should be balanced among tribes

depends on how much. Does anybody play in a 1vs1 like someone played in the TTT? I don't think so.

I'd agree to

• lower XP of the Frisian blacksmith,

• lower costs of Imperial Colosseum,

-making marble mines more clever,

• maybe making barbarian trainingssides cheaper

• *adding one gold to the costs of the atl. Labyrinth, as this would slow them down (especially when they train their OP level5 soldiers, which can overrun every other tribe on a short distance)

• nerfing ATL maybe even more (removing gold thread maybe at least partly? even more gold added to trainingsside prices)

1. Changes to achieve that should be as minimal invasive as they could be

Of course

If we can't agree what the problem is and what should be aimed to achieve I'd rather vote to not change anything.

+1

Nordfriese wrote:

by the way, I think I got the perfect easy idea for making first hero unimportant. Giving EVERYONE heroes FROM THE START!

Think about it: your starting stock of soldiers will include 10 heroes, and a few more with lesser promotions. Oh, you made an 11th after only 20 minutes? It hardly matters.

I would not want this to be the norm. So I think we could add a new starting condition - elite army, or something like this.

Sound good in theory, might seem pretty pointless in practice to give players free heroes IMHO. But if we'd have a starting condition like this, perhaps it would be possible to balance this special MP starting condition without changing the actual tribes? If so, I'd support this proposal.

+1 very good

honestly that starting condition sounds much more interesting to me than village, poor hamlet, struggling outpost and the discoveries

JanO wrote:

Now, as a contrast to those huge posts, just two short ideas:

• Give Soldiers experience. Gained by winning fights, needed for higher promotions (maybe 0 experience -> all lvl 1 promotions possible, 1 experience -> all lvl 2 promotions possible etc.)

Counter suggestion: Play Wesnoth
This would just make the game much more military-focused, because it would force players to start many battles so the higher part of the economy can even start working. -1

+1 for the -1 ( = -1 )

• increase training time for higher promotions (lvl 1 promotions stay as now, lvl 2 promotions double (or even more) the time, lvl 3 double lvl2 time etc.)

I like this idea This would keep supersoldiers the strongest while giving more importance to medium-trained soldiers.

At the other hand, on long distances one would still make mainly heroes.

I don't like the idea

Wouldn't fix the problem that a good atlantean player has a free win against any frisian player on early-contact maps…

As I mentioned, we could increase gold need of Atlantean Trainingssides and remove some gold thread.

And maybe we could change the order of Frisian training?

Like:

• camp trains fur2 instead of attack3

and/or

• camp trains attack2 by using a long sword instead of a broad sword.

(In that case the attack promotions look like long, long, broad, broad, double, double )

I mean, Frisians don't have the cheap evade training, so they seem to be somewhat disadvantaged.

Enough for now, I might comment pages 1-3 of this giant discussion another day.

Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

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