Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Discussion of all aspects of multiplayer development: unit balancing, map development, server development, and so forth.

Moderator: Forum Moderators

Post Reply
Velensk
Multiplayer Contributor
Posts: 4002
Joined: January 24th, 2007, 12:56 am

Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Velensk »

@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.

EDIT: allow me to rephrase; I know full well that under the right conditions any of the three units I listed is a fine counter to cavalry however I've seen it demonstrated over and over again that cavalry (with appropriate support) can constantly force the situation to be in their favor and when it comes to it, none of those units can stand against cavalry at day even with good terrain and it is hard to prevent well-played cavalry from being able to retreat.
"There are two kinds of old men in the world. The kind who didn't go to war and who say that they should have lived fast died young and left a handsome corpse and the old men who did go to war and who say that there is no such thing as a handsome corpse."
User avatar
Wintermute
Inactive Developer
Posts: 840
Joined: March 23rd, 2006, 10:28 pm
Location: On IRC as "happygrue" at: #wesnoth-mp

Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Wintermute »

you are right, I misspoke. I what I was trying to say is that every OTHER faction has a great counter unit. Orcs don't have one unit that kills cav effectively, but if the loyalist player is recruiting lots of cav then the northerner *should* have several more units, even early in the game. I'm surely not advocating gobo and archer spam as a counter. What I'm saying is that if they are buying lots of cavalry then there should be an opening somewhere else against that many units that can't hold villages well and cost a lot.

Surely cav are great against orcs, and I would always get a few, but I'm not convinced that it's a major problem. Maybe some games and posts of replays will change my mind, we'll see! I won't be free today, but I'd love to play some trial games with you, maybe later this week some evening.

EDIT: I largely agree with your edit, though I think the best way to counter cav IS to trap them when they try to retreat, as it will take several turns for orcs to take down 2-3 cav. Sacrificing a wolf and a grunt to trap and kill two cav is still a win for the orcs. But let's play some games and see. :D
"I just started playing this game a few days ago, and I already see some balance issues."
User avatar
neki
Posts: 297
Joined: April 5th, 2009, 4:56 pm
Location: Your nightmares

Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by neki »

Guys, I really think we are missing the point here and we are having a narrow vision. Obviously, Loyalists without CAVS as FIGHTING UNITS ( RESISTANCE, HP and DAMAGE ) suck big time!!! Also, changing CAV as a fighting unit will have grave repercussions on all races since loyalists rely on them heavily to win most of the games.

I say keep them as fighting units! I say keep the RESISTANCE, the HP and the DAMAGE, but NERF them as a SCOUTING unit. There are just too many fruits on the same cookie! The movement on the CAV makes you lazy! By DEFAULT you are trap PROOF: you can REINFORCE from one flank on the other easily if you are caught on the wrong foot with a CAV heavy army. Furthermore, you see everything that's thrown at you without any MICROMANAGEMENT effort, playing CAVS is easy!!! Playing as DWARF vs. LOYALIST however is a total BRAIN KILLER. Just watch the replay here with all the arguments:

http://www.youtube.com/brutalwesnoth
The video's name is OVERPOWERED CAVS

Just make cav's movement go to 7 (you still have the horseman for 8 movement, if you absolutely need it) for a month. It is a psychological change, I agree, everybody will notice it, it is not a "smart" measure like the ones Cackfiend proposed, but compared to the "smart changes" the hit/retal ratios will remain the same for all races!!!

However, it will just force Loyalist to place his units more carefully, exploitable mistakes will appear in defense, Loyalists will become more attackable by a skilled player which plays the game at its limit and the VS. LOYALIST match-ups will become more dynamic with fair attacking chances for both sides. The game in its whole will win in DYNAMICS!

If the video and this post didn't convince you, you can still download the REPLAY attached to this post.
Attachments
DOC_PATERSON_2p_-_Sulla's_Ruins_replay.gz
(22.47 KiB) Downloaded 217 times
Velensk
Multiplayer Contributor
Posts: 4002
Joined: January 24th, 2007, 12:56 am

Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Velensk »

Regardless of how valid or invalid your case is, please present it in a more respectable way.

I'm still for decreasing cavalry resistances but for the purpose of scouting please do not make it so that loyalists have to get horseman for scouting purposes. Maps are designed for 8mp scouts and horsemen are more expensive and a more unstable combat dynamic.
"There are two kinds of old men in the world. The kind who didn't go to war and who say that they should have lived fast died young and left a handsome corpse and the old men who did go to war and who say that there is no such thing as a handsome corpse."
User avatar
Faello
Posts: 441
Joined: June 7th, 2005, 9:01 am
Location: Holy Office

Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Faello »

Probably the best way would be to decrease cavalry movement points by 1 as neki proposed, and add loys some scout cav version, lacking attack power and majority of resistances loys have

BUT

Considering this idea probably wouldn't get much of support because of the "wesnoth is already 99,9% balanced, move along people" policy, I'd say it should stay as it is. When I think about nerfing/changing cav, I simultaneusly think how it will imbalance loys vs. other factions, so ... :roll:
The yellow jester does not play
but gently pulls the strings
and smiles as the puppets dance
in the court of the Crimson King.
User avatar
Doc Paterson
Drake Cartographer
Posts: 1973
Joined: February 21st, 2005, 9:37 pm
Location: Kazakh
Contact:

Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Doc Paterson »

Ha, why does this replay have my name on it? :)

I don't have the power to change unit stats. All I can do to power down cavs, as the map designer, is to add a whole lot more heavy terrain, which as we know would unbalance almost any other non-mirror matchup you can think of. Putting more terrain adjacent to villages, as I've heard some 2v2 players suggest, doesn't work, for reasons I'm guessing some of you 1v1 players already understand. (If anyone wants the long explanation on that one, I'll give it to you.)

Also, if you look, I've said in this very thread that I think a nerf should happen, so no need to convince me of anything. I don't know if 7mp is the best solution or not, because it's true that that would force me to do a lot of map adjustments, and those changes would of course have wider reaching effects (though that's not to say I couldn't make it work, eventually).

As for this match, you sure did kill a lot of cavs with your poachers. In fact, it looked like you had this game absolutely won, with a huge monetary advantage, but then the leaderkill happened. (Does anyone else agree?)
I will not tell you my corner / where threads don't get locked because of mostly no reason /
because I don't want your hostile disease / to spread all over the world.
I prefer that corner to remain hidden /
without your noses.
-Nosebane, Sorcerer Supreme
User avatar
neki
Posts: 297
Joined: April 5th, 2009, 4:56 pm
Location: Your nightmares

Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by neki »

Ok, so if you don't get to decide, what developer do I need to beat 10 - 0 with loyalists so he nerfs the cavs already ?

As a form of militation for cav nerfing and as a form of protest against those who have not done so already, I will only play loyalist from now on (until the cavs finally get nerfed) and be certain to see winning streaks of 20 games of something similar.
User avatar
Cackfiend
Posts: 559
Joined: January 28th, 2007, 7:36 am
Location: Florida, USA
Contact:

Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Cackfiend »

choosing loyalist with lieutenant is a sure way to get lots of wins... until you fight a drake that goes heavy saurian rush and then follows up with clashers :)

afaik Noy and jb are the only real active unit balance developers... and neither play 1v1, so good luck with that
"There's no love in fear." - Maynard James Keenan

I'm the guy who's responsible for 40% Gliders in all hexes... I can now die a happy man. =D
Wesnoth Strategy Guide for competitive 1v1 viewtopic.php?f=3&t=54236
Madlok
Posts: 80
Joined: April 24th, 2008, 1:26 pm
Location: Poland
Contact:

Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Madlok »

-1 movement for cav is a interesting change. You can buy them still like crazy, and you almost always have one with "quick" perk, so you have something like a scout (8 mp). But you very rare will have scout with 9 mp. I am always in favor when the factions are becoming more diverse.
Quick bats are quick.
User avatar
Rigor
Posts: 941
Joined: September 27th, 2007, 1:40 am

Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Rigor »

u should have seen the obs chatlog for that particular game haha :D but lets get back on topic:

-1 mp for cav is indeed a very interesting idea, and brings fresh wind into the discussion. you are absolutely right that their maneuvering is the key to success in most games.
i dont think it would be a major problem to make horseman have more MP instead, like always 9. u guys say ok loys wouldnt have a scout unit anymore - but the thing is, dwarves have a griph as scout who is also expensive (and the footie as a cheap alternative) and no problem with it either.

a nerf that jumped into my mind is to enable a "scout" trait that would give horses +2mp randomly. this would lead to the situation that as a loys player you couldnt rely on fast shifting of units back and forth and would have to adjust your overall strategy from the start.
Kolbur
Posts: 122
Joined: April 29th, 2009, 9:33 am

Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Kolbur »

Rigor wrote:u should have seen the obs chatlog for that particular game haha :D but lets get back on topic:

-1 mp for cav is indeed a very interesting idea, and brings fresh wind into the discussion. you are absolutely right that their maneuvering is the key to success in most games.
i dont think it would be a major problem to make horseman have more MP instead, like always 9. u guys say ok loys wouldnt have a scout unit anymore - but the thing is, dwarves have a griph as scout who is also expensive (and the footie as a cheap alternative) and no problem with it either.

a nerf that jumped into my mind is to enable a "scout" trait that would give horses +2mp randomly. this would lead to the situation that as a loys player you couldnt rely on fast shifting of units back and forth and would have to adjust your overall strategy from the start.
I'm not sure I understand your idea correctly...
Are you saying that you want to enable horseman with 12 mp? :o
How is that "scout" trait supposed to be a nerf?

Your comparison of Loys with Knalgans is interesting and I have thought about that too. Footpads have 7 mp and cost 14, cavs would have 7 mp and cost 17. They both would fit the semi-scoutish role and the higher cost of the cav is justified by the superior fighting capability. Gryphs have 8 mp and cost 24, horsemen have 8 mp and cost 23. Again it seems pretty similar, Loys still have an 8 mp scout like Knalgans with high damage output and high cost.
But, and this is huge imo, cavalry and horseman have one of the worst move types (only HI have a worse one) while the move type of footpads and gryphons is great (dodgy move type and flying). So the reduction of cav to 7 mp would make Loys the worst scout faction of all (all other factions have better units for scouting). Actually I'm not opposed to make Loys the worst faction in one area because they excel in so many others but the implications of that change are great and I think the people who mention it here casually underestimate it. For one thing Loys would play quite different than now. Think about it. You currently can play completely without horseman and it causes not problems at all. With that change it's not so easy anymore, using no 8mp unit can cause quite some trouble. Also maps may be needed to change, this is indeed something that I'm opposed to.
Of course you can bump up the scouting capabilities right again by giving horsemen 9 mp. Only this has implications too... Strong charge attacker with 10 mp anyone? Good luck staying out of range of that. :D

Overall it is my opinion that reducing the cav mp to 7 is a much severe change than reducing their blade and impact resistance by 10% or simply reducing their hp somewhat. Something has to be done with the cav and for balance improvement the smaller changes are preferable to me.
Velensk
Multiplayer Contributor
Posts: 4002
Joined: January 24th, 2007, 12:56 am

Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Velensk »

Griffons are Knalgans only 8 mp scout however they are not anywhere near as 'unstable' as horsemen are. I have no problem with the way horsemen currently work however I do not like the idea that you'll need to have a couple of them around for efficent village grabs on a few maps as p2.
"There are two kinds of old men in the world. The kind who didn't go to war and who say that they should have lived fast died young and left a handsome corpse and the old men who did go to war and who say that there is no such thing as a handsome corpse."
User avatar
neki
Posts: 297
Joined: April 5th, 2009, 4:56 pm
Location: Your nightmares

Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by neki »

@Kolbur and @Everybody:

The -10% change you are talking about will change the game completely, 5 other races have to be reconsidered. For the movement change you do not have to reconsider anything, that is the idea. CAV is a cookie with too many fruits and developers did a great mistake by doing that. Now that you want to take some of the fruits back, people are crying: meh meh, but the cookie was soo good, give me something back, change the map so the change you made has no effect whatsoever.

The point is: take the CAVS 1 movement and don't give them anything back! You all like to use your cavs to grab one extra vill at the beginning, then use them for fighting cause they are so great for that too. If I take 1 movement point away, I take it because it is OP, not to give him something back!!! Doc should not worry about having to redesign maps, if you redesign maps just to make the 7 movement of cavs more useful... then just forget my proposal.

Regarding village grabbing, it's only one vill in the initial village grabbing grabbed later, which u can still grab if u recruit a horseman, the unstable horseman and that's exactly the idea:

You want villages ? Then go one extra unstable horseman!
You want solid fighting ? Just make another fighting unit spearman, cav, whatever works for you!
You want village grabbing and solid fighting ? Then let's just all go play minesweeper or a game we easily win without using our brains too much. Or let's go play RTS, like all others do. Let's be a sensible and smart community (Wesnoth is a chess like tactical game after all) and just let one fruit from this overpowered cookie go! Let's do it for one month, see how it goes. In my vision and experience it will balance things out. After we implement the nerf, then we can make discussion like: Take something from here and put there. Now in the case of CAV, we need to only take!

This was the concept, which you can counter with other concepts, not functional details. Some functional suggestions:

Make horsemen have 9 movement and that's it, just 9, have the default quick trait. They will be most efficient at scouting and intial village grabbing. On some maps, where vills are 9 hexes away, you will be able to get away with more than 1 vill for sure if u recruit 2 horsemen (AGAIN, if u are greedy and want wills and are willing to fill your army with unstable horsemen). For example Sabelstone as P2: you can get the far left vill with a 9 HP horseman and the far right vill with a 7movement cav! for bad terrain u still have to use fencers. And that's the whole idea guys, take 1 movement away from them and keep the terrain penalties, we take, we don;t give back. If u say: Ok, we give them 7 movement, but we cut all terrain penalties, well maybe I should just quit wesnoth and start playing online pool on games.yahoo.com or another brain killing game.

@Velensk: Before you bring any "counter-arguments" to my argument, please have minimum respect for my effort of posting the replay, casting the game on my channel and bringing it here to sustain my argument, cause I can tell from your replies that you didn't bother to look over any of my evidence, as lame as you may think it already is.
User avatar
Faello
Posts: 441
Joined: June 7th, 2005, 9:01 am
Location: Holy Office

Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Faello »

I think that whole discussion is pointless, changes in cav are unrealistic - a lot of time was spent to balance the factions in combat and still this discussion about imba cav resistances is almost 100% theoretical, seems like nobody can present +10-20 replays with obvious examples of OP'ed combat cav stats OR want to do it (mostly because these have to be the cases of OP and flaws in choice of the strategy should be almost non-existant to prove the point and that would require a lot of analysing nobody wants to do & confirm)

I can agree that cav is remarkably fast and resistant considering it's a price, but it's also the WORST scout unit around, it's more of the combat unit than scout, thus probably the best idea (that isn't against "wesnoth is 99,9% balanced, move along people" policy) to balance it's combat abilities would be to indeed cut the cavalry default speed by 1 point and leave anything else as it is.

Still, I get the feeling that balance might shift dangerously into the side of the other factions because, as I already said, cavalry is a worst scout unit (it's movement type is just a high point version of human heavy infrantry movement type with different def values) BUT it still has a scout tasks! So be prepared for getting outmanouvered by other factions scouts A LOT (gryphon rider & elven scout will be masters of that I presume...).

It would definitely rise the question about how well loyalists scouting abilities would work with 7mvp cav (since line of sight is affected by mvp and 23gp horseman seems to be a pricey and not well suited for this task choice...)

I think that it can be tested in dev version, but I don't believe that this idea will be accepted - mostly because it would require to give loyalists some pure scouting unit that they don't have right now (like maybe a weaker version of cav) and you want to rob the cavalry from 1mvp, thus taking scouting abilities from whole faction, not just single unit and giving nothing in return, while the developers won't add any new unit to this faction = seems like a zugzwang to me, thus best option is to just drop the matter.

EDIT: Btw. grrr proposed that instead of just nerfing the cav mvp by 1 point, it could be a good idea to take 1mvp from cavalry and give it to fencer instead to boost loyalists line of sight (it would also make fencer more useful than it already is) - I think it's an interesing idea :)
Last edited by Faello on January 29th, 2011, 5:06 pm, edited 2 times in total.
The yellow jester does not play
but gently pulls the strings
and smiles as the puppets dance
in the court of the Crimson King.
Velensk
Multiplayer Contributor
Posts: 4002
Joined: January 24th, 2007, 12:56 am

Re: Balance Ideas (Unit Changes)

Post by Velensk »

neki wrote: @Velensk: Before you bring any "counter-arguments" to my argument, please have minimum respect for my effort of posting the replay, casting the game on my channel and bringing it here to sustain my argument, cause I can tell from your replies that you didn't bother to look over any of my evidence, as lame as you may think it already is.
I do not believe I've offered any counter arguments (in the technical sene) so far. I did not infact look over your evidence as I am perfectly willing to believe it is entirely legitimate as I have seen the effects you were describing already. My problem is not with your evidence (though it might become so if I actually looked at it) but rather with the solution you propose as I believe that it would create an effect which is undesireable reguardless of the problem it solves.

Since you bring it up, I do not believe that decreasing impact/blade resists on cavalry will require any of the other factions to need to be rebalanced. Blade and impact units still are not going to be in any way ideal for bringing them down and the difference in the loyalists ability to tank against such units seem like it would be relatively insignificant.

I have tried watching replays on your channel. I find it far more of a hassle than it's worth. I will however take a look at the game since you seem to want me to.

EDIT: Having seen the replay I am confused as to why you are attempting to post this as evidence for your case. It looked to me like you were doing a fine job of keeping him busy and off balance and getting a fair number of kills and had very good odds of winning up until the suicidal leader move. Sure he was not having a hard time chasing down your outlaws and killing them but that seems like the way it should be.
"There are two kinds of old men in the world. The kind who didn't go to war and who say that they should have lived fast died young and left a handsome corpse and the old men who did go to war and who say that there is no such thing as a handsome corpse."
Post Reply