Topic: Economic Part versus Heroes

teppo wrote:

king_of_nowhere wrote:

Current status: more economy produces more hero soldiers, which win the game.

I really don't see how changing it would favor economy.

Currently this is true only if the economy is huge. In early conctact game, micromanagement makes miracles.

true. economy dominates at every level if, and only if, both players micromanage. in the case i mentioned, both me and worldsavior micromanage, so winner is decided by the economy.

and yes, i can see how it can be a problem. i don't see a solution that won't cause more problems, though.

as you yourself agreed, having the military sites automatically only make heroes would not work. it would take a lot out of the game, and also there are many early game situations where you don't have time and resources to train a hero but you need instead to send out a few half promoted soldiers. other more radical changes, like the ones the-x proposes, would be disruptive of gameplay, and they wouldn't even reach their intended goals. as for the change i proposed, to make defence more efective, that's supposed to stop games devolving in a rush as soon as first contact is made, but they would not stop a full trained hero from trouncing lesser troops, so it's not intended to fix this particular issue.

so, right now, the only solution to this issue is "learn to micromanage", and then it's down to economy vs economy. which is not an ideal solution.

I am open to proposals to improve this part.

Perhaps one way would be to make micromanagement easier and less time consuming? say you could tell your training camp to only accept soldiers fully trained in evade. say you could tell your soldiers that one soldiers with evade promotion should be given priority to go into the training camp. this way you wouldn't have to cycle through all the soldiers to find the one with the evade promotion to send in the training camp to turn into a hero. it would save a lot of micromanagement time, and allow most people to micromanage.

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blind3rdeye wrote:

One of the things I personally find appealing about this game is that economic management, building placement and timing, road network design, and stuff like that is the primary focus; and military control is secondary. It's a novel change from most RTS games where the military control is the main game and the economy is a minor part. With that in mind, if I was in charge of this game's design, I would not be focusing on making it easier to micromanage soldiers and training; instead I'd make it less important to micromanage soldier and training - because in my mind, those things are not the main focus of the game.

From that point of view, I'd reduce the bonuses given by training; particularly at the highest levels. Getting soldiers to hero level is very expensive; but the payoff can be that you get an edge over the untrained soldiers, not shear domination. I'm happy that trained soldiers almost always win vs untrained, but I'd try to reduce how many soldiers they can kill in a row, (and perhaps reduce the rate of healing so that multiple waves of attacks are still kind of the same conflict, rather than a clean slate). In my vision, the trained soldiers should win comfortably vs equal numbers, but should struggle when they are outnumbered - more so than they do currently. I'd like if the net military power you can field in a given region was the main thing that determined the outcome of a conflict, not so much where the heroes are, but rather where the castles, towers, and barriers are. The main advantage of heroes would not be that they can butcher throngs of rookies; but just that they can win individual fights and survive to get back to safety to heal and fight again.

the main advantage of heroes is already that they can survive and get back to heal. unless they are fighting against complete rookies, that is. even soldiers with basic evade training, 3-4 will wear down a hero. a 5th will often kill the hero if it cannot retreat.

i've considered your solution myself, but the problem with it is that hero soldiers are VERY expensive. one of them costs, like, 20 times more than a rookie. easily 7-8 times more than an evade soldier. plus extra starting cost for making all the required buildings. so, at cost parity, hero soldiers already would lose, their main advantage being that they can afford to get back and heal.

if we reduced their effectiveness, then they'd become too expensive to be worth their cost. unless we also reduced their cost. that would require a massive change in both balance and coding. and we may not be happy about the end result anyway

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king_of_nowhere wrote:

the main advantage of heroes is already that they can survive and get back to heal. unless they are fighting against complete rookies, that is. even soldiers with basic evade training, 3-4 will wear down a hero. a 5th will often kill the hero if it cannot retreat.

i've considered your solution myself, but the problem with it is that hero soldiers are VERY expensive. one of them costs, like, 20 times more than a rookie. easily 7-8 times more than an evade soldier. plus extra starting cost for making all the required buildings. so, at cost parity, hero soldiers already would lose, their main advantage being that they can afford to get back and heal.

if we reduced their effectiveness, then they'd become too expensive to be worth their cost. unless we also reduced their cost. that would require a massive change in both balance and coding. and we may not be happy about the end result anyway

You're definitely right about that being a risk; and the balance might be a fine line, where heroes are very important on one side, and not even worth training at all on the other. I don't think the cost should be reduced - I think it's good to have big resource sink like that.

As I said before, I don't have a really strong sense of how well balanced game right now, because my own experience is not enough. Maybe the current balance is actually the right balance! I do feel like some tweaks would be appropriate; but maybe I should shut up about it until I have a bit more knowledge and experience.

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hessenfarmer wrote:

blind3rdeye wrote:

king_of_nowhere wrote:

As I said before, I don't have a really strong sense of how well balanced game right now, because my own experience is not enough. Maybe the current balance is actually the right balance! I do feel like some tweaks would be appropriate; but maybe I should shut up about it until I have a bit more knowledge and experience.

I don't think so. Your observations are well argumented and so it might be positive to acknowledge new views to improve the game.
Regarding balance: we try to balance the military though each tribe has its own flavour in 2 ways. First the complete Rookies are balanced which means we need to have balanced base values of the soldiers. Balanced means they have fair chances to win but are not equal as one tribe might produce them cheaper. If there is a bigger advantage we reduced the starting soldiers.
Next step the Heros are balanced in a way they have nearly equal chances only taking the attackers advantage into account (the soldier having the first hit will win with 55 to 60%. The actual values can be found in various threads about balancing. Including einsteins python script and my excel sheet to support balancing. (see post https://www.widelands.org/forum/topic/4732/?page=2#post-30747 for example to get the sheet)
While this is possible for soldiers it is much harder to balance the economy, because it is hard to calculate and is more based on experience.

This balancing is very nice working, if we keep a look at itself. I mean they are more than perfectly balanced. Rather if we keep a look to reality it doesnt leed to balanced games, since their are things, mostly the infinitely healing tool which makes in the long term other things than balanced games

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the-x wrote:

This balancing is very nice working, if we keep a look at itself. I mean they are more than perfectly balanced. Rather if we keep a look to reality it doesnt leed to balanced games, since their are things, mostly the infinitely healing tool which makes in the long term other things than balanced games

Why?

blind3rdeye wrote:

As I said before, I don't have a really strong sense of how well balanced game right now, because my own experience is not enough. Maybe the current balance is actually the right balance!

Probably it is

the-x wrote:

blind3rdeye wrote:

One of the things I personally find appealing about this game is that economic management, building placement and timing, road network design, and stuff like that is the primary focus; and military control is secondary. It's a novel change from most RTS games where the military control is the main game and the economy is a minor part. With that in mind, if I was in charge of this game's design, I would not be focusing on making it easier to micromanage soldiers and training; instead I'd make it less important to micromanage soldier and training - because in my mind, those things are not the main focus of the game.

+1 Yes, i also think micromanagement should be thinner, while economy and all building stuff should be more in focus

I like the diversity of the game. If you don't want to micromanage that much, you can simply play on a map with big distances to the enemy, or a peaceful mode match, for example collectors... And on small maps I like it that micromanagement can improve the playing. The question how to micromange is like a puzzle. In Widelands it's not only about economy, but also about combining the right actions to achieve a goal.

"just that they can win individual fights and survive to get back to safety to heal and fight again" --> This is the main problem we have ...

How could that be a problem? If this would not be the case, they would not heal. If they would not heal, they would be rather meaningless, and all promotions would be meaningless, because rookies would be the most cost efficient then!

A hero can be endless winning if he just gets the seconds time to heel

Yes, and that's good. In other strategy games this can also be the case.

which is on 2x speed really very short time

You exaggerate... Like someone told recently, it can take minutes.

Yes, but if we lower the healing rate a lot then a lot of imbalancies / strenghten eco part will follow without changing anything in current mechanics which is also fine - but we'd have to lower the rate.

Lowering the healing rate could make training pointless. And it can already take a lot of time until a whole army is completely healed...

king_of_nowhere wrote:

blind3rdeye wrote:

the main advantage of heroes is already that they can survive and get back to heal.

Exactly

i've considered your solution myself, but the problem with it is that hero soldiers are VERY expensive. one of them costs, like, 20 times more than a rookie.

Or even more.

easily 7-8 times more than an evade soldier. plus extra starting cost for making all the required buildings. so, at cost parity, hero soldiers already would lose, their main advantage being that they can afford to get back and heal.

if we reduced their effectiveness, then they'd become too expensive to be worth their cost. unless we also reduced their cost. that would require a massive change in both balance and coding. and we may not be happy about the end result anyway

Exactly

blind3rdeye wrote:

I'd make it less important to micromanage soldier and training - because in my mind, those things are not the main focus of the game.

No matter if it's the main focus or not - as I said, micromanaging can be an interesting thing.

From that point of view, I'd reduce the bonuses given by training; particularly at the highest levels. Getting soldiers to hero level is very expensive; but the payoff can be that you get an edge over the untrained soldiers, not shear domination.

Why would anyone train soldiers not at all?

I'd like if the net military power you can field in a given region was the main thing that determined the outcome of a conflict, not so much where the heroes are, but rather where the castles, towers, and barriers are.

How do you define "net military power"?

And why should barriers full of rookies be better than small towers full of heroes? They are heroes after all, they don't need castles for being strong

Regarding defence; one suggestion is that maybe it should be more difficult for wounded attackers to retreat. ie. if there is a low-health attacker retreating, then a full-health defender could intercept it rather than letting it walk away.

-1 It can already be hard for attackers to retreat.

Also, low health defenders should not leave their buildings to intercept! It's just suicide, they should be waiting and healing.

Yes, we had another discussion about defender behaviour somewhere else...

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All that said, I'll just say again that I myself am a bit of a novice in this game. I've got ideas about how I think the game should be, but compared to other people here I don't have as strong of an understanding of how the game actually is.

You're right about that

JanO wrote:

'Don't change anything' is very unequal to 'prefer mediocore'. If military sites don't pull any soldiers out of warehouses, one gets the possibility to send them precisely into specific places before they are pickted by any algorithm.

Exactly

teppo wrote:

WorldSavior wrote:

Solving proposal for number2: For military sites a third option 'don't change anything' between prefer rookies and prefer heroes.

+1 Would be a very valuable feature

In what situation do you want this?

For example, if you have a lot of rookies in a building and some heroes. You want your heroes to stay there, but you don't want that half trained soldiers go in there instead of the other trainingssite.

It could also be a good default setting for some buildings, for example it's not so good that the atlantean tower prefers rookies.

The feature was in at some point, but was dropped apparently because of lack of interest.

That's a pity

Should the military site also be able to prefer mediocre soldiers?

I don't think that this is necessary. It's complicated to determine which are the "most mediocre" soldiers...

king_of_nowhere wrote:

really the odds for lack of shields are so great?

yes

personally, the major reason i don't play multiplayer is that i prefer to play civilization 4, which has a fairly similar concept (strong focus on economy and growth) and I just happen to prefer it. Also, we regularly have 4v4 games there, while here 1v1 is already rare.

What kind of advantages does this game have over Widelands? Maybe Widelands could learn from it

Certainly your hypothesis may explain why nobody plays against worldsavior

Many people play against me actually

Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

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