How unbalanced is Age of Heroes as of Sep 2016?

[marcnn]

Just as the subject says.

Last threads on this subject are very old and may be out of date.

[Velensk]

AoH is imbalanced to the point of being beyond fixable.

[marcnn]

Hmm... can you please elaborate? Are there any pairs of factions in AoH which are balanced ( i.e. is there a balanced subset?)

Besides, can't it be balanced by tweaking gold settings ( starting/income)?

[Velensk]

AoH was never designed to be balanced. You may be able to find a couple factions relatively balanced against each other but it would surprise me.

Tweaking the gold settings would do nothing to help the balance. The problem is that the capabilities of the higher level units and especially the leaders are things that are not in any way accounted for. How does the undead fight against the capabilities given by a goblin pillager? How does anyone deal with the ridiculous advantage it is to have a silver mage for your leader who can easily be on the battlefield providing high damage and recruiting at the same time?

In order to even attempt to balance it, the cost of all higher level units would have to be examined (and almost certainly modified in ways that would throw off the balance of all campaigns, recruit lists would have to be modified to account for match-ups, change available leader lists, spend hundreds of hours testing, ect.

The easier way to balance it is to just make all of the higher level units so expensive that they're never efficient, which actually is pretty close to being accurate now in most cases but then you run into those special cases where they are and then you have a problem. If it simply was never worth it to recruit the higher level units even in the situations where they'd be best and if the lvl 3 leaders were chosen carefully (Silver Mages as mentioned earlier would need to be just gone) you maybe could balance AoH but that seems like it'd defeat the point (also, could throw off campaign balance).

[Eagle_11]

why dont we trash this useless era since can do unit testing in debug mode anyways.

if youd like to revision it: do it such that it's same as default but with an twist.
At game start each player gets a pool of extra gold, can pick lvl2's of his faction to be recalled later on. Each pick costs gold. Hereby the player buys each piece seperate, not the right to recruit it. Bought units get placed into recall list. If gold is left can start match with extra funds. Or can entirely skip this extra buy phase even to begin with more gold.

[ForestDragon]

why dont we trash this useless era since can do unit testing in debug mode anyways.

if youd like to revision it: do it such that it's same as default but with an twist.
At game start each player gets a pool of extra gold, can pick lvl2's of his faction to be recalled later on. Each pick costs gold. Hereby the player buys each piece seperate, not the right to recruit it. Bought units get placed into recall list. If gold is left can start match with extra funds. Or can entirely skip this extra buy phase even to begin with more gold.

interesting idea, btw, you could do that in your Uber Default Era (it already has lots of neat things, so why not try even more )

[Eagle_11]

Im but only one man, and the 'stuff to fix' list is ever growing. Surely will try if have some energy remaint for it.

[Gyra_Solune]

Silver Mages are in fact gone! After all they have the capacity to violate the most basic of leader rules, that it cannot move more than 6 spaces. I believe they were taken off the pool of AoH Loyalist leaders a while back but only somewhat more recently did they remember to do the same to the Rebels.

It is probably possible to balance Age of Heroes by and large through changing around gold costs, but I think that would merit a lot of testing by a lot of experienced players, which is unlikely. There's a lot of weirdness with pricing though that drastically changes with the usual pattern of a faction beyond just 'do the same thing but get their level 2'. Most strikingly, for the Rebels, the Sorceress is your more affordable and practical ranged unit since the Mages and level 2 Archers are very very expensive by level 2 standards. Meanwhile, the level 2 Spearmen and the Longbowman are extremely cheap for level 2 units and so their standard units become even more dominant compared to the normal ones found on other factions. (The Orcish Crossbowman and Warrior are comparable but they make more sense - low cost is the Grunt's defining feature and the Crossbowman is a very weak ranged unit among level 2s).

It's not really a high priority since it's really more of a gimmicky mode you try every once in a while and not the main feature most work is put into, but it still certainly wouldn't be an outright bad thing if it were made relatively balanced on its own. It's definitely a harder task to make it as rigid and tightly made though, especially since you also have to factor in that you can recruit level 1 units as well, which may be a more sound strategy than buying many level 2 units. I'd actually consider experimenting with a game in which you can ONLY buy level 2s. I don't think Age of Heroes ought to be done away with altogether, since it's just a minor thing that's fun to play around with and doesn't really much impact the rest of the game.

[Velensk]

I'm glad someone got around to getting rid of Silver Mages.

I don't see any reason to remove it honestly. I suppose that if you're looking for everything you release to have a certain standard of quality I can see why AoH would be a stain but when it comes to it I don't see any harm in giving people more options to have fun with just so long as they understand that it's not going to be the best environment for a serious competition and I think that should be fairly obvious to anyone with an eye for serious competition.

[Sudipta]

I'm glad someone got around to getting rid of Silver Mages.

I don't see any reason to remove it honestly. I suppose that if you're looking for everything you release to have a certain standard of quality I can see why AoH would be a stain but when it comes to it I don't see any harm in giving people more options to have fun with just so long as they understand that it's not going to be the best environment for a serious competition and I think that should be fairly obvious to anyone with an eye for serious competition.

Beautifully Summarized

[iceiceice]

Actually, IMO it would improve Age of Heroes if the leaders were level 2, like in default, rather than level 3. The level 3 leaders just make it really campy, you can't get close to the enemy at all or your guys just get destroyed. Idk if change like that is worth it, though.

[Yomar]

I don't find this era so crazily unbalanced, I had some nice and smoth games using this era, but the units prices have to change for sure (the Rogue for example is way to cheap considering his abilities over his lv.1 counterpart), to begin any balancing attempt.

[Gyra_Solune]

...i still do not know why the Khalifate has the Mufariq and Tineen as leaders in AoH but don't have the Faris and Qatif-al-nar in default!

[Shiki]

^ Interesting Question.
Really nobody knows?

[The_Gnat]

why dont we trash this useless era since can do unit testing in debug mode anyways.

I personally don't think we should remove age of heroes for the reason that it is still good to play them. Not everything needs to be balanced and if players decide to play AoH then they both know what they are getting into I personally like unbalanced maps also because they can be much more interesting similarly the AoH faction is more fun to play then default, if properly played every faction in AoH can beet every other faction. Also there are so many units in wesnoth that would virtually never be seen if AoH was removed.

However, there is no denying that AoH is unbalanced.