A radical balance proposal

[TL]

I noticed the balance changes in the 1.5 dev branch so far were pretty tame compared to what went down in 1.3. Granted, this is probably because 1.4 is better balanced than 1.2, but nonetheless I believe there is still a bit of room for improvement so I figured I'd toss this out here.

Preface (skip this part if bored)

While the recent boost to saurians has drastically improved the drakes-loyalists matchup, I still think this fight skews to loyalists in most matchups. Saurians are excellent support units, but their ability to wage stand-up battle is very poor, which is problematic as the spearmen they are expected to counter are some of the most cost-effective ground pounders in the game. Indeed, at nighttime spearmen are still formidable opponents for saurians if they can get a terrain advantage (which is likely, since that's their time to defend.) Then if the loyalists are annoyed by saurian spam they can bring out one of several potent saurian counters.

Now the situation is not exactly hopeless; saurians do retain a mobility advantage and can potentially outmaneuver loyalists. But mobility is the drake's chief weapon in every non-mirror matchup, so that's nothing new. In fact, since drakes have to rely heavily on landbound saurians here and can only use flyers with extreme caution, their mobility is generally going to be more inhibited here than against other factions. This is in no small part due to horsemen and their ability to keep up with almost any drake troop movements while threatening instant death to anything that steps inside its gigantic strike radius. Moreover, while loyalist land units don't have especially good movetypes, they can afford to be very forward in their nighttime disposition since saurian nighttime damage capacity remains low. Drakes have to fall way back out of range at day to avoid catastrophic daytime casualties; at night loyalists just have to move to the closest defensible position.

So, drakes are worse at standing up to loyalists in battle than any other faction save perhaps undead... and they're also worse at outmaneuvering loyalists than any other faction, definitely including undead. I don't think there's any question that this is their worst matchup. It is by no means impossible for drakes to win, but on most "balanced" maps they are at a slight but noticeable disadvantage (note that I speak purely of 1v1 here; although I am not a 2v2 player I am pretty sure they do considerably better there, since borrowing just 1 tank unit from an ally drastically improves their capability.) And even if you honestly believe the matchup is truly even under present map selections (which you could make a halfway convincing argument for; I realize I am oversimplifying the situation a little bit here, and there are a few perks drakes have available which I have not gone into), I think play could be improved by making drake flyers less cripplingly vulnerable, thereby opening up the game and making more units and more strategies viable.

Proposal (read here if bored)

This proposal has two parts:

First, raise drake pierce resistance by 10% across the board

A considerable number of L1 units that deal piercing damage tend to deal it in chunks of 5 or less, so rounding error mostly swallows pierce resistance +/- 10%. Loyalists are a very prominent exception, having fully half their units--including both their most basic grunts and their most powerful specialist--deal pierce damage in sizeable chunks. This is part of the reason why drake pierce vulnerability is a big deal against loyalists but doesn't matter as much in other matchups; not only do loyalists bring more pierce to the fight, but their piercing damage matters more. Conversely, then, going from -10% to 0% (and 0% to 10% for clashers) would have relatively little effect on most matchups, but it would knock a point of damage off from most loyalist attacks.

Second, give mages an alternate 5-3 magical ranged arcane attack

I actually don't think the above change would really do more than even out the loyalist vs. drake matchup. Clashers with 10% pierce resistance would be formidable, but clashers are expensive and relatively easy targets; loyalists need only throw enough bows and spears at them, and the problem is solved. That's not especially interesting, though. Therefore I propose making mages effective anti-drake attackers. Similar to the adept's arcane attack vs. undead, 5-3 arcane is weak enough that the mage's standard fire attack would still be superior against essentially all units except drakes, so there would be no noticeable change in MP play against other factions. But vs. drakes this would scale up to 8-3 at day, which would actually give loyalists slightly more clasher-busting power than bowmen vs. 0% pierce gave--but only by diversifying loyalists' unit selection and using fragile expensive specialists instead of strong efficient grunts.

So: drake flyers are not quite so gimped, allowing drakes a little more leeway to use them in a non-suicidal manner. Drake clashers actually have a hope of being halfway effective tanks. Loyalists can break clashers with mages, but that means they lean less on pierce, leading to even more opportunities for drake fighters and gliders to get into the fight.

Fallout

Of course these changes do not exist purely in a vacuum, so other matchups would be affected somewhat as well. Rebels lose some damage-dealing ability, but much of their piercing damage would be unaffected, plus they'd still get the boost from mages. Rebels pretty much come out ahead of the game here, which I consider a good thing since they often have trouble dealing with drakes.

Skeleton archers lose a little bit of damage (those poor poor undead! now they will have to rely on crappy 38-damage adept attacks, boo hoo hoo.)

Knalgans lose 2 damage from thunderers and a bit of damage from strong guardsmen, but guardsmen were never an especially good idea against drakes anyhow. I don't think this is a decisive change here as knalgans have lots of interesting options for dealing with drakes (and thunderers would still be pretty effective), but it could be a potential problem.

Northerners lose a point of nighttime damage from archers. Grunt spam is generally more effective vs. drakes than archers, but archers are pretty important for bringing down clashers without crippling retaliation, so this change may sting a bit. It would also kind of counteract a lot of the recent goblin upgrade.

Drake mirrors of course would not have any change in balance per se, but they may actually become slightly less diversified. Clashers would become a little less effective along with skirmishers to a lesser degree (but skirmishers were never that hot here to begin with).

It might look like this would introduce RIPLIB problems with mages, but the mage line isn't quite RIPLIB compliant to begin with. Mage -> White Mage is still as close to RIPLIB compliance as it ever was (and it was actually pretty close; against most units 9-3 arcane is still better than 7-3 fire).



So... thoughts? Not sure that this change is ever likely to get implemented, but figured I might as well throw it out for discussion.

[Skizzaltix]

First, I'm glad to see that someone with a balance proposal has worked out a basis for their argument and gone over most, if not all, of the ramifications.
Second, I don't actually player Wesnoth very much, and I don't usually play as the Drakes even when I do, but I've always found that Burners and Clashers/Skirmishers handle the situation fairly well--Then again, I'm playing against the default AI, rather than a skilled human opponent

[Turuk]

Aas these proposals come up from time to time, and as Skizzaltik pointed out, you took the time to outline the problem as you see it, your idea for a fix, and the advantages/disadvantages of that change, why not just edit the unit files and test out your idea?

It would not be hard to go in and change the pierce resistance of drakes, and then test out the difference it makes against each faction through a series of games. By the same token, you could also easily add a second ranged attack for mages, and note the effect that has as well.

Then you can post up your replays/results, and give examples of how it supports and/or shows problems in your idea, and how they can be addressed.

Just my thoughts.

[JW]

Adding a secondary arcane ranged magic attack to a mage unit seems like an unoriginal idea. See Adept.

[TL]

@Turuk: Gathering a meaningful playtesting sampling means recruiting other players to playtest with, which involves convincing them it's a worthwhile idea to pursue.

[Turuk]

I completely understand that, and I am not saying you should put up your idea with all the results and replays in hand. I just meant that now that you have your idea up, see if you can find others to help you prove that your idea is worthwhile.

I am not going to really go one way or the other on the idea, but I do not mind helping you test it out if you would like. Or if you want, I can code in the changes you have asked for and send you the folder to have to test.

[TL]

@Turuk: okie dokie. Sorry, I interpreted "why not just do X" as "why not do X instead of what you're doing here". My bad. I'd like to see more feedback before I get into seriously playing it out though.

@JW: This is more an aesthetic concern than anything else. Gameplay-wise, the only change here is that mages are reasonably effective against drakes proper. Against any other faction, the extra attack would never enter play (unless someone actually leveled a merman fighter into a hoplite.)

Still, it is worth considering aesthetics. I don't think parallelism between mages and dark adepts is exactly a terrible thing to have, but if this is a concern you could achieve roughly the same effect by leaving mages alone and reducing drake fire resistance to 10%. Actually I think this would probably be an even better idea as it addresses two of the minor issues with the proposed changes; it would help orc archers make up a little ground lost from the pierce resistance (verrrrry slightly), and the drake mirror match would be opened up considerably by making burners decent general-purpose ranged damage.

Some people may think 10% seems unrealistically low for fire-breathing, heat-loving drakes (which is odd, considering 1. balance trumps realism, 2. just because something is built to withstand a certain amount of heat doesn't mean that overheating is not a serious danger for it, and 3. we are talking about impossible magic creatures). To this I would point out that the change is being proposed primarily to give loyalists a non-piercing method of dealing with clashers, thus only the flameless clashers need to go all the way down to 10% although I would still suggest an intermediate value (20-30%) for other drakes. For that matter mages would still be worthwhile attackers vs. clashers even at 20% fire resistance.

[Doc Paterson]

I think (and I'm not alone here) that it's actually the Drakes who have a small edge over the loyalists, ever since the saurian changes.

I know we play Drakes very differently, TL- You like to start with a fighter or two and a glider or two, whereas I generally do 2 Clashers and spend the rest on saurians (and adapt accordingly to the opponent's faction after that). "Wasted" gold is therefore never an issue against a random Loy. Random Undead is never a problem for the clasher/clasher/saurians recruit in my opinion, because I think a good drake player is already hard enough for an Undead player to beat, and such a small early disadvantage is easy to make up for. (I think Drakes have a very small edge there as well, but not so significant that anything should change balance-wise.)

We do appreciate that you took the time to write out your points in such detail, but if you want to convince all or most of us, you should focus on getting replays against good players (preferably with you as Loys, though that may not be much fun. )

[TL]

Thanks for the recruit advice--I'll have to try it and see how it goes, although I'm not eager to see what happens when that many saurians run into random knalgans or northies (the extra clasher means it's not exactly catastrophic but it's still definitely more saurians than I'd like to have around in those fights). I'm not talking strictly about random loyalists, though, since my picked drakes tend to prompt a lot of players to change from random to picked loys and my recruit against picked loys boils down to about the same as yours (I generally throw in a glider anyhow, unless I think I can manage a 1st night saurian rush). I remain unconvinced that the clasher/skirmisher/augur mix can effectively outfight the loyalist array; you can kinda sorta outmaneuver them but not enough to make up the difference on most maps.

The one saving grace drakes have here is the ease of leveling saurians--level 2s can really make the loyalists sit up and take notice where level 1 saurians struggle. So they got that going for them. Which is nice. The general ease with which loyalists can kill anything in the drake lineup means they level up pretty quickly themselves, though, and they have some beastly L2s; I know I'm a bit sloppy with XP conservation, so that might explain why I find the matchup so troublesome. Even if the matchup is truly balanced, though, don't you find it a bit one-dimensional on the drake side of things? I think diversifying strategy on both sides would be a worthwhile objective.

If you come across any good drake vs. loy replays that feature drakes winning without a lot of luck or a dumb move from loys be sure to send them my way; I'll keep an eye peeled for them myself. If anyone cares to educate me in practice I'm up for a game from either end of this matchup (I'm hella rusty with loys, but I'm leaning towards switching to loys primarily anyhow at this point.)

[Fosprey]

here is my opinion.
Drakes have a slight advantage over loyalist imo, and the reason is that the drakes rush is very hard to stop for loyalist.
That's unless loyalist have tenient, then rush don't work and lategame is loyals game, so in summary.
Loyal have tenient, they have an edge on every matchup.
Loyal don't have tenient, drakes have a slight advantage.
I can't believe wesnoth is this far and loyals still have tenient

[JW]

I can't believe wesnoth is this far and loyals still have tenient

Maybe my English is a little rusty, but what is "tenient"?

[Turuk]

Funny you mentioned that, a bunch of us were debating that on IRC. We came to the conclusion that we assume he means lieutenant? Possibly.

[Skizzaltix]

I was wondering if it was a similar arrangement to the tenure of a school's teaching staff, but I think Lieutenant is probably more likely...
If so, I'm not sure I see what you're saying, though, Fosprey. If humans have Leadership, they have a slight edge? I can see that. On the other hand, Drakes have some wicked movespeeds, and skirmishers--If your opponent decides that he's going to stick his leader out in the fray instead of recruiting, on the off chance that you'll send a glider in to get pummeled, that looks like a prime time for an assassination to me

Edit:
Somehow missed your other point there...
How is the Lieutenant a balancing issue? His leadership makes him handy, and he's an okay combat unit, but he's not the toughest guy around--Some well-used skeletons will knock him down in no time. Add in a DA or two, and you have yourself some frozen chopped meat in a handy metal packaging. Then again, I don't play MP much, so am I missing something?

[TL]

It's not just the leadership, it's his 6 movement points, which is in itself a tremendous advantage for a leader; you can grab villages more easily early on and can cover a wider area while still remaining close enough to recruit. Having 6 MP and leadership gives the lieutenant two great bonuses with excellent synergy (not only can you move farther than most leaders, but the leadership effect lets you contribute to an attack without even having to get adjacent to the enemy, boosting your range even further!) Most 6 MP leaders are very fragile to make up for their mobility and other advantages, but lieutenants are reasonably sturdy.

[Doc Paterson]

here is my opinion.
Drakes have a slight advantage over loyalist imo, and the reason is that the drakes rush is very hard to stop for loyalist.
That's unless loyalist have tenient, then rush don't work and lategame is loyals game, so in summary.
Loyal have tenient, they have an edge on every matchup.
Loyal don't have tenient, drakes have a slight advantage.
I can't believe wesnoth is this far and loyals still have tenient

Agreed on all points.