Spearmen Balance

[Gyra_Solune]

So I am against weaking spearmen because in that case elves will dominate over loyalists.

But do Loyalists currently dominate over Drakes? And is that match up fun to play or is it Spearman spam?

The trick to Drakes against Loyalists is to get a lot more Saurians and Clashers than usual to deter Spearman spam. Big weakness of Loyalists is their very low maximum mobility, so Skirmishers run circles around them and Clashers contend with them one on one. Then when they diversify their own forces to deal with them (like Fencers to deal with Skirmishers and Bowmen for Clashers), you bring out a few more of your Fighters and Burners and the like.'

If you just bring out your units wholesale, Loyalists ruin Drakes - Loyalists ruin everyone by just getting out there and holding lines. That's why usually to deal with them you use some of the tricks up your sleeve, which the Loyalists are hard-pressed to deal with.

[name]

I agree that's about how you should play this match up.
But for well experienced players playing on competitively sized maps (i.e. not wilderlands, not isars) are we seeing that kind of mixed unit fighting and are we seeing roughly equal wins between the factions?

[Velensk]

Personally, I feel that when the drake play it right they have a slight edge. Certainly, a skilled drake player isn't going to be too worried about pure spearmen on a typical map. That said, IMO the impetus to attack is on drakes as at a certain critical mass of loyalist units saurian tactics become less effective.

Most of the time drakes play with almost purely saurians and clashers and the loyalist composition adjusts based on which saurian and/or clasher the drake composition favors.

[Battlecruiser_Venca]

btw what impact will have buffing saurian's pierce resist in order to help Drakes in this MU (and to prevent spearman spam so Loy has to recruit something other) without ruining other MUs? AFAIK the saurians aren't main force as they lack both HP and damage. In this MU their pierce resist is what makes them massively recruited

[Mabuse]

umm,

as velensk already stated, drakes/saurians arent weak against loys.

saurians are cheap, mobile and have magical attack, and are chaotic, so guess when its time for them to strike and guess which units will be weak then

[Mabuse]

And is that match up fun to play or is it Spearman spam?

the thing is, playing loys IS spearman spam, with some variation. and thats no bad things anyways
spearman spam is prety much fun if it works out.

(but e.g. in cramped caves enviromment, spearman wont be able to take or hold villages for example against saurians , so you need something else)

[Velensk]

Drakes do not need more help in this match-up.

The idea that saurians lack damage is misleading; saurians are very effective on offense. It's not that they're high damage or high damage per cost, rather that it's hard to defend against them without a certain critical mass of units. They can get past high defenses, they can get past ZoC, they can concentrate their damage and take down their target. They're highly mobile and can commonly control when to engage and choose their ToD. In truth, saurians have only one practical weakness before the armies get massive: if they are in the open or against magic, they die to any effective counter attack in a way that isn't very costly to your enemy. This is a necessary weakness as otherwise saurians would give too much value/flexibility with too few limits.

The reasons saurians are your mainstay against loyalists isn't actually as much their pierce resistance (though that helps a lot), it's that loyalists are the one faction that cannot counter attack super effectively at the time when saurians want to be attacking. You can afford to field them in larger quantities than the amount of terrain affords and attack with them without losing them too inefficiently.

As I said, drakes do not need help in this match-up but if you want the theoretical implications of increasing saurian resistance:
Vs Loyalists: Spear and bowmen even worse at dealing with saurians. Even worse idea to attack skirmishers with horsemen than normal.
Vs Rebels: Rebels have an even harder time dealing with saurian supported drakes
Vs Knalgans: Thunderers even worse against saurians, probably no effect on poachers but I haven't done the math.
vs Northerners: This I suppose is the one match-up where I think the change might actually be a nice one. A northerner who knows how to press his advantage can put drakes in a bad position and the new orc archers are nasty vs drakes. Making them slightly less effective against saurians is unlikely to change much but the little change seems not a bad one.
vs Undead: Harder for skeleton archers to poke saurians to death. I'm ambivilant on this one. I don't favor the drake style that let's the undead approach and then uses mass saurian counter attacks but this change would make that style more viable as it helps with one of the primary issues with the other approach (which is that after you kill all the adepts, you tend to end up with a bunch of saurians vs a bunch of skeleton archers who can poke you to death as long as you are not in cover).

Of the five:

-Three I find undesirable as I think loyalists, knalgans, and to a lesser extent rebels already have a slight struggle against drakes and saurians are already very important in those match-ups.
-One I think would be a nice minor touch-up.
-One I'm ambivalent on as it promotes another way to play a match that I'm not sure would be ideal even with the change. It's possible it could be a problem (not sure) but on the other hand it might make a match-up more diverse/interesting.

[name]

As I said, drakes do not need help in this match-up but if you want the theoretical implications of increasing saurian resistance:
Vs Loyalists: Spear and bowmen even worse at dealing with saurians. Even worse idea to attack skirmishers with horsemen than normal.
Vs Rebels: Rebels have an even harder time dealing with saurian supported drakes
Vs Knalgans: Thunderers even worse against saurians, probably no effect on poachers but I haven't done the math.
vs Northerners: This I suppose is the one match-up where I think the change might actually be a nice one. A northerner who knows how to press his advantage can put drakes in a bad position and the new orc archers are nasty vs drakes. Making them slightly less effective against saurians is unlikely to change much but the little change seems not a bad one.
vs Undead: Harder for skeleton archers to poke saurians to death. I'm ambivilant on this one. I don't favor the drake style that let's the undead approach and then uses mass saurian counter attacks but this change would make that style more viable as it helps with one of the primary issues with the other approach (which is that after you kill all the adepts, you tend to end up with a bunch of saurians vs a bunch of skeleton archers who can poke you to death as long as you are not in cover).

Interesting analysis.
What do you think the theoretical implications would be of reducing the loyalists spearman melee from 7-3 to 6-3? (including the mirror match up)

[Velensk]

Loyalists would become mostly unplayable.

It's not that much of an exaggeration. There are two very critical factors here that make that '7' damage a magic number. One of them is the ToD swing modifier and the other is the way unit hp is distributed. The jump from 7 to 6 damage is not small or trivial.

The difference between 7 damage and 6 is massive because of the ToD modifiers. 7 has a +/-2 damage swing while 6 only has a +/- 1, on a unit with a decent number of swings (like a spearman or especially a clasher) that translates to a huge amount of damage. Now, there is a corresponding weakness at the weak time of day (a 7 damage unit and a 6 damage unit deal the same damage when ToD isn't on their side) but the boost you get at day pushes your damage across a critical threshold if you are not a neutral unit.

The other important thing to remember about the way Hp is assigned, is that the numbers aren't arbitrary and then assigned relative to each other, they are roughly balanced on the idea of 'how many hex sides do you need to attack from with a chosen base "good attack" do you need to take this unit out in one round. As it happens, in the default era for wesnoth a competent attack is assumed to be about 20ish damage and most units unless they are exceptionally tanky/exceptionally weak die if they are on the open and the attacker can get access to 3 hex sides. Now obviously there are degree's and detail; nothing is that exact and traits throw it off further but that is the general scale the game tactics and logic are based on. But using this scale, the 27 or 30 damage attack the spearman gets at day reaches the point where you can start having fairly high odds of taking out units on the lower end of the toughness scale with access to just 2 hex sides. On most wesnoth maps, you simply cannot build formations that don't leave units in the open with two exposed hex sides (and honestly you shouldn't design maps were it is possible to do so). Loyalists get this power, and they get it on a cheap durable unit that comes with a couple other perks as well.

So why do we let loyalists get away with this? It is because this and their cavalry are essentially all they have going for them other than access to a variety of specialists. Loyalists don't have a favored terrain, they can't abuse overwhelming numbers the way northerners can, their main muscle isn't very mobile, they don't have good efficient range damage of any kind, their specialists give them some good utility options but none of them are very efficient (other than the merman but that is very niche). What loyalists have going for them, is being the undisputed king of fighting at day and combat effective (if clumsy) scouts to give them a chance of actually fighting at day. At day loyalists can slaughter anyone you leave out of cover and use their specialists to dislodge you from cover, and this raw power is what the loyalist play style is based on. If you take away this power by reducing their damage below that critical threshold where two of their cheap infantry can kill anything that isn't a tank or in cover then the loyalists have nothing.

I'm not going to bother going through each match-up because in all match-ups (even undead) the potency of spearmen is an important part of how you play.

[Cackfiend]

What do you think the theoretical implications would be of reducing the loyalists spearman melee from 7-3 to 6-3? (including the mirror match up)

the main reason this will never happen is because it would affect the single player campaigns too much

however, in a competitive era i would like to test it still

but like i said, when this idea and others were discussed heavily on the ladder forum it was decided that the best nerf to the spearman would be lowering his range damage. there was also decent support to raise his cost to 15

[tekelili]

when this idea and others were discussed heavily on the ladder forum it was decided that the best nerf to the spearman would be lowering his range damage.

This idea was very reasonable even at radical reclamation (totally remove range attack and lose work invested in animation). However I brought my think further while I was a member of Ladder Council: Political direction in BfW has a problem. BfW was created as a do-cracy and I am agree in that concept that has proven be sucesfull. However, when we analyze power about decisions in balance and game mechanics... are we really under a do-crazy or under a we-were-first-crazy?

[iceiceice]

+1 Tekelili

As nearly as I can tell, wesnoth is not and has never been a "do-ocracy", at least as understood by other open source projects. I used to think that it was, and even said so to others, I think -- all I can say now is that I just saw what I wanted to see.

You can see how the Debian project defines "do-ocracy" on page 19/49 of these slides:
http://upsilon.cc/~zack/talks/2011/20110321-taipei.pdf

• Debian’s special #4: decision making
  • do-ocracy

    An individual Developer may make any technical or
    nontechnical decision with regard to their own work;

  • democracy

    Each decision in the Project is made by one or more
    of the following:
    1. The Developers, by way of General Resolution [...]

• that means:
  • reputation follows work
  • no benevolent dictator, no oligarchy
  • no imposed decisions
    by who has money, infrastructure, people, . . .

(Emphasis mine).

If the project were a do-ocracy, I think a lot more bugs would have been fixed in the last two years.
Also, I think Fabi would not have been kicked from the project with no public discussion... seeing as he was one of the most productive developers in 2014...

[Gyra_Solune]

What do you think the theoretical implications would be of reducing the loyalists spearman melee from 7-3 to 6-3? (including the mirror match up)

the main reason this will never happen is because it would affect the single player campaigns too much

however, in a competitive era i would like to test it still

but like i said, when this idea and others were discussed heavily on the ladder forum it was decided that the best nerf to the spearman would be lowering his range damage. there was also decent support to raise his cost to 15

I doubt single player campaigns would really be that thrown off by the change in the spearman's stats, mostly because the campaigns are not quite such intricately tuned machines as the multiplayer setup is. Despite the centrality of the Loyalist armies to the setting, they're arguably the second least encountered of the major MP factions, second of course to the drakes. Almost every campaign has a showing from orcs, most have a showing from elves and undead, dwarves are extremely often-encountered for how reserved they are in the lore, and outlaws pop up with quite great frequency. Loyalists are only ever fought sporadically and rarely ever ally with another race. The campaigns where you play as them, while numerous, have things that prevent spearmen from being the be-all end-all of the game: Tale of Two Brothers is very short and easy, Rise of Wesnoth is very friendly to rushing at people with Horsemen, Eastern Invasion largely revolves around fighting Undead which makes Heavy Infantry and Mages the real mainlines of the game, and The South Guard is a touch on the gimmicky side and fairly welcoming to a greater diversity in units.

[Cackfiend]

I doubt single player campaigns would really be that thrown off by the change in the spearman's stats

I appreciate your doubt, but this is what Devs have actually told me. Its the main reason there arent balance changes in mainline now for many years even though many many changes have been presented and some are seen as needed for competitive 1v1.


for example, here is a quote for you from a dev

Stuff like dexterous on the poacher, for example, is a good idea and been talked about before - but the "fluff" crowd (people who mostly design and play single player campaigns) just hates it. They want dex only on elves and don't want to talk about it.

[Gyra_Solune]

Well it's one thing for traits, another for more normal stat adjustments. I can kiiiiind of see why certain traits exist solely for certain races? It firmly establishes that elves are on average ranged-focused due to being elves, and establishes that dwarves are on average hardier due to being dwarves. It is pretty loose what with Heavy Infantry for some reason randomly getting Fearless, or Naffats being unable to be Strong for...reasons? Poachers...I'm not certain they really need dextrous? They're kind of explicitly 'budget thrift-store elf archers' - you pay less money for a unit that isn't as dodgy and not always as powerful, but can do about as much damage if it's nighttime, and is a little hardier and uniquely able to hold swamps. They're also in the Knalgan Alliance because their only other ranged unit has a single-shot attack and is slightly more costly, which can be undesirable if you need to surround and trap a dodgy unit on fortified terrain - an encirclement of Thunderers is difficult on account of them being slow, and they have a low chance to do any damage whatsoever against an enemy on favorable terrain, potentially leaving your target perfectly unscathed. An encirclement of Poachers is easy on account of them being quicker, and because they hit more often, (and even for slightly more damage overall at night), they have a much better chance of actually doing at least some damage to their target.

That being said, I absolutely think that balance changes for multiplayer should come first beyond all else - because that is where this video game has to be utmost designed as a video game made to be played competitively. Campaigns can be adjusted and tweaked and usually don't need as much effort to be balanced, mostly because they are above all else designed so that the player can beat them, and mostly so that they can tell an effective story. It's perfectly fine in a scenario if you can absolutely rout an enemy effortlessly or if you have no chance and have to retreat - because they're set up that way for the sake of the story. It's not fine if the competitive multiplayer where every faction needs to be able to contend with one another ends up suffering for the sake of those stories.