special damage - half of total HP

[Aldarisvet]

I am thinking a lot how to diversify tactical challenges in Wesnoth.
What I understood is that recall system largely disbalances the game, I mean in campaigns. With the ability to recall high-level units on fixed cheap price (20 gp) there is no reason to recruit high-level units for their high base price. And also low level units are mostly useless at later scenarios too, except cases with using leadership. A player creates some group of high-level units and often uses them mostly at later scenarios, neglecting recruiting low-level units because they are almost useless at later scenarios. Or, to say correct, even level1 units are too expensive to recruit at later scenarios because at that stage a player relies on his recall list. Often this system creates a situation that a campaign length is limited with the time needed to get units in recall list to advance to highest level. Or, to lenghten it, the author creates some massacre scenarios, where most of high-level units supposed to be killed.

In the current situation it is obvious that a player should use high-level units with a maximum amount of HP at the front line. So AI would not able to kill front units at one turn, then you rotate your wounded units and heal them at back. Almost all mainline campaigns is about this frontline_rotate_heal system and from some point it becomes quite boring, actually I am fed up of this, it is hard to found tactically intresting campaign because of this. AI just cannot stand against this tactic, that is the main problem. And this because AI itself cannot use this tactic.

Now stright to the point. I think that would be good to create a unit which would have not a fixed damage, but a damage relative to attacked unit's HP. So this unit would be not too dangerous for low-level units. There was a unit called Demon in old 1990 King's Bounty game, that sometimes had HALF attack, so this is inspired by that. Look, 80 hp unit succesfully attacked by this special attack gets 40 hp left. And 20 hp unit attacked by same attack gets 10 hp left. So with units with such type of attack AI would not be helpless. This frontline_rotate_heal system will not work anymore, and high-level units will no longer be so good, it would be a sense to use level1 and, moreover, even level0 units, because they are really cheap to recruit comparing to 20gp recall price.

I have no idea if this was already implemented or suggested before.

[Ravana]

It sounds similar to sapper, that takes terrain def % away from current hp. (capped at 20 and 15 damage for balance)

[Aldarisvet]

It sounds similar to sapper, that takes terrain def % away from current hp. (capped at 20 and 15 damage for balance)

Could you plz say more, in example? Cant catch the idea.
For me the main point is that AI would be able to succesfully understand and use this ability. I have no idea how AI calculates the damage and how he makes choices. But what is needed. Imagine level3 Dragonguard that attacks 40-1 and level1 Thunderer that attacks with 18-1. For the 80 hp unit attacked with that special half attack, AI should consider the attack as if he atacking with Dragonguard. But for 36 hp unit attacked with special half attack, AI should consider the attack as if he attaching with Thunderer. I am worried for AI would understand this clearly and make right decisions.
And, as you see, the unit with one 'half attack' per turn is no way overpowered, he is obviously weaker than level3 Dragonguard because he is less effective vs low-level units.
Also it is possible to create a whole line of units with such attack. For example, level1 attacking with 30%, level2 with 40%, level3 with 50%.

[Dugi]

It's similar to devastating blow from LotI. Units with it have a chance to remove a fixed percentage from the enemy's current hitpoints. Have a look at its source code if you're interested in coding it.

[Aldarisvet]

It's similar to devastating blow from LotI. Units with it have a chance to remove a fixed percentage from the enemy's current hitpoints. Have a look at its source code if you're interested in coding it.

Thats great! Thanks.
By the way, you tried gifting this ability to AI? How he copes with it? I think this would revolutionize the appropach for playing vs AI.

[Ravana]

It sounds similar to sapper, that takes terrain def % away from current hp. (capped at 20 and 15 damage for balance)

Could you plz say more, in example? Cant catch the idea.

description={AE_EFM_UNIT_NOTICE}+"The sappers are all slaves who have been given the opportunity to die honorably. The legions rarely run short on volunteers as many of the conquered people were proud folk who would rather die in battle than be a servant for the rest of their lives. It is not unknown for free citizens to take the role too if they feel sufficiently disgraced. Note: Their attack reduces their targets current hitpoints by the % of their current defense.(Capped at 20 damage, for units higher than level 1 at 15 damage) (Example: a thirty hitpoint unit standing on 50% defense terrain attacked by a sapper would take 15 damage)."

AI doesnt know about this event, so in its current form it wont help you.

[Aldarisvet]

description={AE_EFM_UNIT_NOTICE}+"The sappers are all slaves who have been given the opportunity to die honorably. The legions rarely run short on volunteers as many of the conquered people were proud folk who would rather die in battle than be a servant for the rest of their lives. It is not unknown for free citizens to take the role too if they feel sufficiently disgraced. Note: Their attack reduces their targets current hitpoints by the % of their current defense.(Capped at 20 damage, for units higher than level 1 at 15 damage) (Example: a thirty hitpoint unit standing on 50% defense terrain attacked by a sapper would take 15 damage)."

AI doesnt know about this event, so in its current form it wont help you.

Ok, got it. I would say that capping killing the whole idea of % damage.

[Ravana]

True, but this is recruitable unit in faction.

[Aldarisvet]

Heh, I just understood what a fun it would be if that 'halfer' unit faces ulfserker.

4-4 versus (-50%)-1

Well, that 'halfer' would make ulfserker's HP: 34-17-8-4-2-1
It would take 5 rounds to half ulfserker to 1 hp. And so 6 to kill, if we suppose that 0.5 is rounded to zero.
For that time ulfserker will make (at 50% success) 16*6*1/2=96*1/2=48 hp.
Would halfer have less then 48 hp, ulfserker will have advantage.
So even some level1 unit is better. There is no way to say that this 'halfing' ability is something overpowered.

[Ravana]

It has great potential to be overpowered, only for closed system like campaign you can efficiently test it.

[Aldarisvet]

It has great potential to be overpowered, only for closed system like campaign you can efficiently test it.

Well, as I wrote, what is really disbalanced in campaigns is that you can recall level3-4 units for just 20 gold.
And in multiplayer, well, in multiplayer you almost always play with level1 units that do not have much HP. So in fact most of level1 units would be able to kill a halfer in duel. For 36 hp units halfer initial damage would be 18 hp. It is like of level1 thunderer as I wrote. And it is no sence at all to attack weakened units with a halfer. This halfer is effective only against units with lot of HP.

[Dugi]

Thats great! Thanks.
By the way, you tried gifting this ability to AI? How he copes with it? I think this would revolutionize the appropach for playing vs AI.

No actually, because it's an event-based ability and the AI cannot use these. Only the player can have it and it's not very available even to him. It's of course very useful against enemies that have a lot of hitpoints.

[Aldarisvet]

I just got how devastating would be this halfer with a skirmisher ability!
It would be twice harder to protect high-level units from being halfed. And AI would be able to use it effectively.
That would make playing vs AI much more complicated.
Using such unit as goblin spearman would be much more efficient even in later stages of campaign.

[skeptical_troll]

In general I personally think that unit and strategic variety should be forced more by the scenario design rather than by ad-hoc penalties for some units (I know, it's not easy), however I guess your idea should be tested to see if it works well or not.

I am not completely sure whether this is possible or not because I haven't played much with the AI tags so far, however: one possibility of circumventing AI's ignorance of the 'halfer' ability could be to manually set the target values of the units with this ability based on the HP (or level) of the candidate targets. I think that if one knows how the AI works, such values can be tuned to mimic what would happen if the AI was aware of the ability.

This sounds like a lot of work, though.

[Aldarisvet]

Well, i would say that in most campaigns, that I saw,, the complexity of scenarios at later stages was made only by giving to AI masses of level3 units. So if you have 10-15 level3 units, you have to kill kinda 100 of AI units. Is this not some kind of penalty? It is indeed, but quite boring one. And I do not know much cases where the complexity is realised by scenario design, and not just by giving too much gold for AI. May be only Secret of the Ancients is somehow works this way, because its undead campaign, there is just 1 healer there and you play vs units with attacks that quite unpleasant to undead, such as fire and crush. So even there the idea is to give some advantage to AI, just more intresting than primitively giving to AI a lot of units.

Well, anycase the idea is to make AI less helpless in campaigns that it is now. I will try to study Dugi's code for the beginning.
_________________

What I understand later is that the best way to solve the problem is just not let ordinary units to level up. Only heroes should level up, but not ordinary meat. So no high-level ordinary units and no recalls, he-he. Level0 units capped with level0 under heroes leaderships of different sorts can be quite good, but still easy to kill by AI. But they are expendable. So every game you have to recruit, no sence to recall. But with kinda 5-7 heroes that can advance there would be no sorry that ordinary units can not advance.