Overpowered Faction. Requires reduction.

[Tonepoet]

Generally, if you fear night and pierce as a drake player, you're likely forgetting about Saurians.

Cold is pretty menacing though; adepts blow most of their units away if used cautiously. You'll never see such high numbers per strike as an adept vs. drakes at night outside of using a horseman and the special is Magical as opposed to Charge. It's a fairly vicious fight between the two factions usually, mostly due to this.

[MDG]

I think all the factions are overpowered and should be nerfed.

I can't beat anyone...

[Zarel]

I think the RNG is overpowered and should be nerfed.

*runs away*

[siowy]

<span>

Hello all, just joined the Forum. By the way, I am an Undead player. But in the Online-Matches, ...*snip*

Well, there's your problem. The moment you pick a faction, your asking for trouble. If you think undead have it tough against drakes, that's just the tip of the [url=<a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=28936]iceberg[/url]" class="smarterwiki-linkify">http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=28936]iceberg[/url]</a>.</span>

<span>Wesnoth is not balanced so that you pick any faction, in fact [url=<a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... 31#p410931]most" class="smarterwiki-linkify">http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... 31#p410931]most</a> serious multiplayer players don't[/url]. My advice, unless you wan't to work extra hard to become one of the few successful MP faction specialist (or die trying), choose Random. You'll probable learn faster, wont get continually drake'd (or [url=<a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=28936]worst[/url]" class="smarterwiki-linkify">http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=28936]worst[/url]</a>) and at least get a bit more survivability (less effective initial recruiting against random).</span>

In fact, many of the above suggestions come from how these players experience the faction by choosing Random, then getting Undead, which in my opinion is very different from choosing them directly.

actually, i'm probably best versus drakes using undead, though my specialist race is orc. adepts and skeletons, wow package.

[Captain_Wrathbow]

I think the RNG is overpowered and should be nerfed.

[LeatherChemist]

Maybe because he was complaining about drakes vs undead? Also, the rebels do not have arcane damage available at level 1. They have to level a mage or a shaman to get arcane damage. And the drake pierce weakness isn't enough to increase the damage done by fighters or non-dexterous archers, although they won't run into the blade or impact resistance... But then again, the blade resistance is not enough to reduce the damage non-strong fighters do, either. I agree, though, that the shaman is very useful against the drakes; tremendously so.

As someone who mostly plays undead, rebels vs undead tends to be much harder than Drakes vs Undead.

The basic theme of drakes vs undead is that both factions compliment each other, except that undead are cheaper and more interesting and have better defense options. During the daytime you keep your more fragile forces (DA's and Ghosts) on the back field while leaving skeleton archers and ghouls on highly defensible terrain (castle's/moutains) in the front field along with blocking forces in each village accessible from the front field. The combination of higher defense vs drakes (60% vs 40%) plus workable counter attacks/resists should keep you roughly even during the day time.

Drake players will either try to melee the ghouls (bad idea) or attack them with fire (so so idea). Due to the drakes low defense, you have a good chance of poisoning them in the day time with a melee attack if they are foolish enough to sit next to a ghoul. Remember, ghouls and zombies are fearless, which means no damage penalty during day time. Drake fighters/burners have either fire or blade melee attacks, blade melee is mostly useless vs skeleton archers due to the 40% resist, and if they use fire, you are doing 4-3 pierce in return so the attack is not free damage for the drake player.

Sending drake clashers vs skeleton archers is just silly, since they resist blade (40%) and pierce (60%!), and can do irrestable ranged damage in return. Thinking in terms of skeleton archers is the reverse of usual undead thinking, where DA's greater ranged damage is the overwhelming consideration such that you normally don't recruit many Skeleton archers. Vs drakes you need something to keep them busy during the day time.

Your hope is that the drake player will spend time beating on your front line during the day time, rather than going for a direct attack on your back line. Drakes do have high HP, but can only restore 8/10hp in a village it is possible to wound drakes enough to the point where it isn't practical to heal them back (or doing so will keep them out of the fight for a cycle). So if you can wound them, (and the Drake player doesn't keep lots of saurian healers around) then when night falls, many drakes will be somewhat softened, and now vulnerable to a one shot kill by a DA. DA's do 19-2 damage to Drakes at night, which is huge (38 damage!). It would take four turns to heal all that damage in a village. DA's also have enough hit points to resist one round of melee attacks, especially at night.

When you attack drakes at night, your strategy is defeat in detail, killing them one at a time by applying concentrated force. You want to do a cycle of wound, then kill, making sure you have an extra unit in reserve in case the DA missed a shot, and ideally to fill in the place formerly occupied by the drake. That prevents them from striking back at the DA with melee, next turn. If you attack a drake, make sure you have a credible plan for killing it in that turn, which suggests using a combined mass attack. Think about the sequence of attacks.

As soon as night ends, you want to start planning your retreat, pulling back your most vulnerable units for defense/repair, while leaving behind a sticky residue of obnoxiously placed ghouls and skeleton archers. You want to make sure that DA's/Ghosts are kept at least 10 spaces away from the front line during day time. So start pulling them back at second watch.

Remember than in Wesnoth, a unit can only kill 1 other unit during its turn, therefore if you are able to kill more/equal units at night, than your opponent can kill during daytime, you will win because your units are cheaper (and can therefore be replaced faster).

Now one thing to look out for are saurians, in which case you want to have some skeleton's handy, as well as zombies/skeletons to hold vilages. The main issue with saurians is that the skirmishers will steal vilages, and/or wound+tie up DA's, while the healers will reduce the effectiveness of poison damage, and damage accumulation more generally.

[Caphriel]

...
When you attack drakes at night, your strategy is defeat in detail, killing them one at a time by applying concentrated force. You want to do a cycle of wound, then kill, making sure you have an extra unit in reserve in case the DA missed a shot, and ideally to fill in the place formerly occupied by the drake. That prevents them from striking back at the DA with melee, next turn. If you attack a drake, make sure you have a credible plan for killing it in that turn, which suggests using a combined mass attack. Think about the sequence of attacks.

...

Now one thing to look out for are saurians, in which case you want to have some skeleton's handy, as well as zombies/skeletons to hold vilages. The main issue with saurians is that the skirmishers will steal vilages, and/or wound+tie up DA's, while the healers will reduce the effectiveness of poison damage, and damage accumulation more generally.

As a general rule of thumb, if the undead catch the drakes at night, the drake player did something wrong. Also, saurian skirmishers are a terrible recruit against the undead, because unless a skirmisher is resilient and not quick, a DA has a 50% chance to kill one outright at night, and the undead player is going to have plenty of DAs. If the drake player wants to waste gold and feed your DAs experience like that, having a DA or two tied up for a little while seems like a fair exchange. If you use a lot of ghouls, though, you can expect to see augurs for poison control, though.

[Yoyobuae]

Thinking in terms of skeleton archers is the reverse of usual undead thinking, where DA's greater ranged damage is the overwhelming consideration such that you normally don't recruit many Skeleton archers. Vs drakes you need something to keep them busy during the day time.

In a similar manner, drakes can reverse their usual thinking, recruiting also gliders and a few (but not too many!) augurs.

With ranged fire not being a such good option against skel archers (maybe burners at day), melee impact becomes the only good replacement. A scout and a mage doesn't seem very good for melee combat, but -20% impact resistance makes a whole lot of difference. Skel archers are also somewhat low HP unit. Just a bit of damage is necessary to force them back to heal at a village. That's one less unit that can protect DAs.

For ghouls ranged damage comes into play. Both of these units can deny the advantage of high defense terrain. Ghoul still resists cold to some degree, but less than skels, so are slightly more useful augurs against them (magical attack are always good for finishing, even if low damage). Plus Gliders/Burners/Fighters can all pitch in their share of fire damage in this case.

At last but not least, Drake fighters are always vital to slice any exposed DAs to pieces. Perhaps a lone skirm as a finisher/threaten villages.

I feel that on this matchup Drakes need to take it easy, slowly gaining an advantage over many day/night cycles. They need to wear down the blockers during the day, so they lack the HP to make a night time offensive. Then move away from any DA (easily done with nearly all +6 MP units) and wait out the night. The daytime offensive needs to be extra careful to not lose units to DAs, as when one of your units survive this a DA is automatically open to counter attacks. IMO, it's mostly a battle of attrition.

[Gambit]

I think the RNG is overpowered and should be nerfed.

It wins every single match.

[TeamAmerica]

usually when a player loses a match they look for an excuse. In real-time games they say "lag" or "low fps" and in Wesnoth they say "bad luck" or "unbalanced era". If the drakes are "overpowered" to you just play with them

While I get where you're coming from, bad luck isnt always an excuse... I just played a game where out of the ~100 attacks my units launched (or retaliated with) less than 15 of them hit... (over 50 of those attacks I had 60-70% chance TO hit). Sometimes your computer just hates you...

Just saying, doesnt mean that the unbalanced era excuse isnt still true, just that the bad luck one is kinda conditional.

[Dodgy Tactician]

While I get where you're coming from, bad luck isnt always an excuse... I just played a game where out of the ~100 attacks my units launched (or retaliated with) less than 15 of them hit... (over 50 of those attacks I had 60-70% chance TO hit). Sometimes your computer just hates you...

That occasionally happens. Remember that when you have a large number of attacks, you get a bell curve when you plot relative hit rate (actual hit rate minus theoretical hit rate) against frequency. Yes, you will occasionally get a game where your troops can't hit for toffee (a campaign game springs to mind where I had four Elvish Archers attacking an enemy with 1 HP, no ranged attack and an 80% CTH - they all missed) but this is a relatively rare occurrence. That example is approximately a 153 billion-to-one chance - it's possible so at some point it will happen, but not commonly. Failures tend to be more memorable than successes though.

Bad luck with the RNG may be an excuse for one game but the game is generally still lost because you couldn't kill a key unit or because your enemy could. This shouldn't be mistaken with your opponent's faction having a particular strategy available that your faction cannot combat no matter what happens. You had a viable strategy (I assume, although this may not be the case), your troops just couldn't execute it properly.

During a game, look at the statistics screen (press s) and look at the damage inflicted and received in this turn and throughout the entire game, particularly the percentages. The per turn one is unlikely to ever be zero, because the "average" amount of damage is damage per strike multiplied by number of strikes multiplied by chance to hit and that is rarely possible to achieve exactly. However, the overall damage is likely to be quite close to zero - over the course of a battle anything within about five percent of zero will have negligible effect (or even more if you are a better player). If however you are inflicting -25% damage and receiving +25% then yes, you have been unlucky and it is likely to have contributed to your defeat. If on the other hand you are inflicting +25% and receiving -25%, then your victory was less glorious because you had the advantage.

[Chosen1]

Drages are actually pretty good.. They do well at day and there is saurians for night. And saurians have good pierce resistance... Drages have anyway like -10% pierce resistance, so its not even so effective... Well yes, they have bad defence, but they have alot of hp and as I said, they can rule at day and night whit +25% bonuses.
What is actually their weakness?

[LeatherChemist]

I feel that on this matchup Drakes need to take it easy, slowly gaining an advantage over many day/night cycles. They need to wear down the blockers during the day, so they lack the HP to make a night time offensive. Then move away from any DA (easily done with nearly all +6 MP units) and wait out the night. The daytime offensive needs to be extra careful to not lose units to DAs, as when one of your units survive this a DA is automatically open to counter attacks. IMO, it's mostly a battle of attrition.

One of the key things in Wesnoth is that a single unit can only kill one other single unit. Therefore it can be very hard to recover from losses of materiel, and doubly so for drakes, which have expensive units to begin with. Undead have the same issue in that a combined attack will leave valuable units exposed to counter attack, especially if the opposing player makes sure to have a "network" of mop up forces. With drakes, the undead player can attempt to trade a DA vs a drake, while risking not more than two units.

Compared to other factions vs undead, drakes are at a slight disadvantage to the best.

1. Rebels have a combination of 2 types of mages (Human mages which can damage undead, and Elf shamans which can slow and weaken the effectiveness of poison) along with a heavy hitting impact slow infantry unit (which even worse has regeneration ability). The elf shaman upgrades into the elven sorceress which is absurdly strong vs undead given its strong magical arcane attack. Same issue with upgrading a mage, the white mage is more effective vs undead than the red mage and has a healing/curing.

2. Loyalists have Human mages and heavy infantry, along with a strong long range unit (Horsemen). The horseman is problematic because it can kill a DA/Ghoul in one shot, and then run away to be healed. If leveled up to a charger it becomes very strong for leader kills. More effective than a shadow, and easier to level up. HI are weak to cold, but they are not proportionately as weak as drakes are especially when you consider the ability to deal effective retaliation. Oddly, I think people tend to under recruit the fencer which is quite a reasonable unit vs undead, it can sneak around and kill DA's while dodging melee attack

3. Knalgans have the advantage of being able to deal impact damage from typical units, as well as the ulfserker. The footpad is quite the strong unit as well.

4. Northerners would be weak, except that they have favorable economics, especially with respect to the archers (which deal fire damage) and troll whelps, with impact damage. I imagine that the uselessness of orcish assasins is annoying though.

5. The drake mages are mostly useless vs undead. The trick with Drakes is that attacking with ranged fire is a bad idea vs DA's and Skeleton archers. The solution to that is that the glider has the marksmanship attribute+impact damage. The clasher isn't worth it compared to the burner for just two gp more.

Taken as a whole the improvement that make the undead more balanced in typical MP game, would be to allow for the recruitment of L1 Souless at 14gp, as well as the existing L0 zombie at 8 gp. The L1 Zombies useful attributes (fearlessness and plague) are counter balanced by its low HP/slow movement and lack of resists (although at the same time its not weak to anything except arcane. This would allow for quite a bit of expansion to undead strategy since L1 Zombies could start moving in at 2nd watch to mop up the battle field just as the DA's etc are retreating. It would also create dilema's for the opposing player with respect to chasing after the UD with wounded units at favorable TOD vs risk of creating more zombies.

If you are able to level up a zombie in MP, it starts to become part of your strategy, since creating new zombies is valuable. It also creates issues of managing kills, since you must trade the value of a "free" L0 unit vs 8 points of experience to some other unit.

Zombies (and undead in general) should have much better performance on frozen terrain, since they don't suffer from cold feet. Should be 1x movement at 40% defense. I would note some support for this in the fantasy literature given how Frankenstein monster has an easy time of it in the arctic.

2p_-_Silverhead_Crossing_(_Very_long_game_vs_AI).gz

Very long game vs the AI as rebels, where zombies became important.

(29.82 KiB) Downloaded 241 times

[Sapient]

Wow... a thread about drakes being overpowered and you post a rebels vs. undead replay against the AI.
That is wrong on so many levels.

[Captain_Wrathbow]

For a second I lit up cause I saw someone was actually posting a replay to prove their point, then I realized how irrelevant it was...