Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

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Cackfiend
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Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Cackfiend »

HODOR wrote:
Cackfiend wrote:After some extensive play and discussion with other high level ladder players I would like to submit these unit balance ideas for consideration in future patches.

It is suppose to be a scout unit with melee capability but is actually a Melee unit with scouting capability. Strong cavs at day do a devastating 9-3 dmg

and are far too effective especially against Orcs and Dwarves.
Cackfiend wrote:this is pretty funny to me honestly, because everyone knows Orcs are the only real main problem when it comes to cavs.
Hodor?
good point.. i think i was mostly thinking of the resists being the biggest problem for orcs, the movement of the cav is the big problem for the dwarves considering even a strong/resil cav or horsemen even die to 2 thunderer hits =D

but to say dwarves and elves have the biggest problem and not even mention orcs is blasphemous to me lol
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Rigor
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Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Rigor »

for those of u guys that havent enjoyed it yet, theres a new video replay over here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTce-15c ... ture=feedu illustrating some of the aspects of playing cavs with a zillion of possibilities.

i played jason1985 (loys vs orcs), he played it perfectly but had no chance as soon as he engaged his orcs during the first night in battle. and now anybody please tell me what a scary counter really is. i mean, u cant just force the other player to go for a mass gobo suicide mission, cavs could at any time run for it, and new slow units could stop gobos. here i did not run and still won just to prove how freaking strong cavs are even when being killed at the rate of a machine gun.
tom030890
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Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by tom030890 »

Why not make all cavalrymen 7mp, then give them all a dragoon trait, giving +1mp, with maybe a hp penalty similar to quick? They then get a second trait as normal.

You still get 8mp cavalry guaranteed, however the side effect is that strong or quick cavalrymen are rarer, and likely to be less powerful without a second random trait.

Possibly also reduce defense in villages to 30%, to force withdrawal behind front lines to heal/gather healthy horses. Maybe also reduce defense in hills to 30%.

Small changes,which reduce the devastating ability of cavalry to attack strongly in the day and simply run away at night.
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Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by IPS »

Cackfiend wrote:good point.. i think i was mostly thinking of the resists being the biggest problem for orcs, the movement of the cav is the big problem for the dwarves considering even a strong/resil cav or horsemen even die to 2 thunderer hits =D

but to say dwarves and elves have the biggest problem and not even mention orcs is blasphemous to me lol
The elves can eat a calvary by arrows with their archer 6-4 archer is also great to kill calvaries/horseman. And the horses has 40% def or lower. The northener can use easly orcish archers and goblings, a gobling can deal more dammage to a calvary than the calvary to the gobling ... at night time goblings eat calvaries and horsemen.
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Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Doc Paterson »

IPS wrote:The northener can use easly orcish archers and goblings, a gobling can deal more dammage to a calvary than the calvary to the gobling ... at night time goblings eat calvaries and horsemen.
I'm pretty sure you have little to no experience facing cavs in the hands of a good player. Go on the server and ask for a match with any of the players in this thread who've been claiming that they're overpowered. If you can get a win, great, post it here. ;)
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Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Radament »

silent wrote:Asides from the fact that's only a 25% chance to happen, what was your point? Northerners need help in this matchup. And I wouldn't even bother with a ghost when I could just blast my way through the horde with adepts and skele's, or simply corpse spam until I have a ridiculous amount of units.
I first thought that 8 fire damage would be groundbreaking and you could set forest hexes ablaze with that, thinking of the ghost, then I found out that a wose would still need 4 hits and cooled down a bit; ultimately though i still think that it would be too deep of a surgical strike into the murky tunnels of balance, because after 8 damage the rounding down gives another damage against all the -20% units, like saurians and skellies, which indeed would also only need 3 shots now. if UD vs Northies is indeed unbalanced, it would be a nice spot to adress though. I didn't play any 1v1 since ages so I can't really judge that; in 2v2 strengths and weaknesses kinda diffuse.
tom030890 wrote: Possibly also reduce defense in villages to 30%, to force withdrawal behind front lines to heal/gather healthy horses.
This one's interesting, but since chasing half-dead cavs would only be applicable for bats, more from the village stealing/map balancing perspective.
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Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Cackfiend »

Doc Paterson wrote:
IPS wrote:The northener can use easly orcish archers and goblings, a gobling can deal more dammage to a calvary than the calvary to the gobling ... at night time goblings eat calvaries and horsemen.
I'm pretty sure you have little to no experience facing cavs in the hands of a good player. Go on the server and ask for a match with any of the players in this thread who've been claiming that they're overpowered. If you can get a win, great, post it here. ;)
doc summed up my response to this perfectly lol


its always easy to tell when its theory talking vs experience talking
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Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Cackfiend »

tom030890 wrote:Why not make all cavalrymen 7mp, then give them all a dragoon trait, giving +1mp, with maybe a hp penalty similar to quick? They then get a second trait as normal.

You still get 8mp cavalry guaranteed, however the side effect is that strong or quick cavalrymen are rarer, and likely to be less powerful without a second random trait.

Possibly also reduce defense in villages to 30%, to force withdrawal behind front lines to heal/gather healthy horses. Maybe also reduce defense in hills to 30%.

Small changes,which reduce the devastating ability of cavalry to attack strongly in the day and simply run away at night.
out of all of these ideas the only one that would probably even be slightly considered is 30% defense in hills, which is honestly an interesting idea


personally I still feel very strongly that they just need their blade/blunt resists lowered by 10%
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Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Tonepoet »

High frequency occurrence an imbalance does not make. Every faction has units that're more effective against certain units than the others and the responsibility falls upon the Orcish Assassin to work against Dwarves for Northerners as it is the job of the Mage to work against Undead for Loyalists. It's one of the few ways of dealing with good all 'round resistance for the typically lower quality, cheaper units. Reducing poison damage by half could cause many problems in gaining ground from dwarves, especially when dealing with Guardsmen and it's not like there aren't many counters, such as Gryphons, Thieves, Thunderers and Ulfserkers. It'd also have the unintended consequence of reducing the Ghoul's effectiveness as well, altering Undead/Knalgan dynamics greatly, since Ghouls make great sacrificial units for poisoning large numbers of melee fighters. I would also suggest that granting such a new ability to counter poison would be unKiSS as it has so many rules and limitations already and may even be against FPI #29.

If there is an imbalance in the assassin, I'd theorize that it's that the relatively recent addition of marksmanship makes for an increase in the number of hits the assassin makes. The effects of this are twofold:

1: the Assassin is overall more effective against high def. units. Not much of a problem, since the former state of affairs when it came to this class vs. Northerners was near ridiculous. Blade damage or not, Grunts can't very consistently kill with footpads using only a paltry 2 strikes and average movement point allocation, especially if said footpad is on a village. Trolls even less so, albeit they at least have the benefit of regenerating 2 strikes' worth of damage a Footpad can deal. My typical strategy before the Orcish Assassin got Marksmanship would be to use various 3 strike units, since at least each should get approximately 1 hit in on EV, with at least one Marksman to poison since poison reliably kicks in on afflicted units regardless of

2: The amount of evaluaated chip damage an Orcish assassin deals in a single attack against 60-70% units on average is practically doubled. Before it would be closer to 1 hit, which is all that's needed to activate poison. Now it's closer to 2, which activates poison, with 3 additional bonus damage and added value against already poisoned units, should attacking already poisoned units ever be your priority, which may be far from the intended use of the unit but often times I find, every hitpoint counts. I'd take special note that much of the rebalancing of units is done in the 1-4 hitpoint range in fact, making this a possibly unintended side effect detrimintal. When I last played I noted that if the opponent relies heavily upon footpads, Assassins are a relatively reliable way of taking out footpads through direct damage, which seems contrary to their nature as poisoners.

My suggested course of action, should any course of action be deemed to be necessary, would be to reduce the number of stikes by 1. It'd be less deterministic but I think the chances for poison to activate would still be increased as the marksman addition was intended to do (do remember absolute determinism in Wesnoth is usually considered bad) but the total number of strikes the assassin would hit against all units would average approximately 1, including the high def. ones the assassin so often targets.


Otherwise the stats are all tried and true from most of the prior versions up until now, aren't they?
Velsenek wrote:@Wintermute: If you see me on the server I'd like to see what you think the northerners counter to cavalry is. I've seen far too many archers, goblins, and assassins be tampled without a chance to fight effectively to believe it is them.
I'm not sure about archers or assassins but I'll vouch on the goblins, for whatever little experience I have using them. I just can't figure out what you're supposed to do with a gold economy of 2:1, especially when the total isn't ever much higher than 18. Seems like they're completely useless during the day and not much better at night. They just don't last very long, even when on a village.

Perhaps it's because I try to be less of a sacrificial fighter when I play Northerners than the average player. Reserving gold or recruiting goblins to save on upkeep and unleash the hordes is just so effective if timed right. The concept of recruiting a unit with the sole purpose of using it as a "Glass Cannon" as others have suggested seems highly dubious to me, especially since it severly limits your ability to adapt your tactics based upon the on field situation and seems highly suicidal. Additionally a glass cannon unit even seems to do less damage than a normal unit would, since dead units can't dish out retaliation. This places the Glass Goblin lower on my sliding scale of unit priorities than a you-know-what, which would at least survive the blows and not need constant replenishment. Whoever made a cannon out of glass instead of iron or steel anyway? I'm uncertain but it surely can't be anybody alive today. =P

7MP is an absolutely terrible solution though, with efficient village collection being vital as it is. Lacking a village means lacking a few gold pieces and might even allow the enemy a premature capture. While they'll do in a pinch, horsemen don't make great scouts since they're one of the only two units in the game that can afford to wear much coveted diamond studded 24k gold underpants and this one can't even fly. Enemies will often hit the weak spot for massive and that's too great a risk to take considering what's to be lost. I also doubt it'd help the goblin any.
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Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by tuffgit »

cavalrymen are pretty good at taking down woses too
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Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by The Black Sword »

Hi guys, I just watched neki's OVERPOWERED CAVS video now(He's posting them quicker than I can watch :P ), so for anyone who's wondering about my replay he talks about at the end, here you go. I also remember doing this to someone else but I can't find the replay. Anyway its an interesting game even if you aren't particularly interested in the balance debate.

btw neki, I agree with others that that game wasn't the best example of cav power and you made a lot of exaggerations in your comments. You can't really use a HODOR game for balancing evidence :wink: .
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Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Wintermute »

The first of presumably several games regarding the cav / orcs matchup is posted in the archive.
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Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Paxe »

Good night everyone.

Have seen all your commentaries about OP Cavs. I can agree about
playing vs Northererns but maybe not against other factions.

In general players have said that next worst faction to play against
OP Cavs is knalgans, as I have just watched in Neki video at youtube:

I would like to post a ladder game at crescent lake loys (Dreadnough)
vs knalgans (me).

http://ladder.subversiva.org/gamedetail ... %3A34%3A21

You will find at first knalgans having a lot of difficulties mostly
Because of this OP Cavs but step by step knalgan recruiting some
guardmen got to stop the rush and got to finally win.

Hope you enjoy the game and I help you to get to more conclusions
on this matter.

Sincerely

Paxe
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Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Reepurr »

I watched your replay Paxe (well, some of it, up to around turn 11) and I couldn't really see a majority of cavalrymen. It was more a bit of everything.
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Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Paxe »

Reepurr wrote:I watched your replay Paxe (well, some of it, up to around turn 11) and I couldn't really see a majority of cavalrymen. It was more a bit of everything.
Good morning

That is the reason why Knalgans did not recruit more guards. I honestly think that guards are
best option to stand against this OP Cavs. With them you have great chances to win brutal
lloyals, even in a huge scenary such as Crescent Lake with lot of field to run...

Sincerely

Paxe
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