Balancing changes in 1.13 cycle?

[iceiceice]

Yeah, changing the blade and pierce resistances of skeletons may go too far. Probly better to test without that, I was just throwing it out there. It also damages the flavor of the skeletons a bit. But I think improving the impact resistance would help greatly with the woses and footpads which is one of the most problematic things right now for undead. It would still have characteristically extreme resistances after this proposed change.

Elder: I guess I think loyals are already at kind of a disadvantage vs undead, they have kind of a hard time with skeleton archers, and mages often get poisoned, turned to corpses, etc. Maybe reducing cost of HI is better than reducing fire resistance of skeletons.

Horus: Cool, if you will make some kind of test era I'll maybe defer to your test era for now, so we don't spread our test efforts thin.

[Horus2]

Horus: Cool, if you will make some kind of test era I'll maybe defer to your test era for now, so we don't spread our test efforts thin.

Yes, the Discretional Multiplayer Sandbox addon is basically this, so if you want to try your hand at a balancing era, this is where you should gather.
Please focus on the ghoul.

[name]

Please also always consider first the balance solutions that don't involve further gutting the stats of all loyalists besides the spearman. At this point, the faction is evolving into a one unit army with seven small support units, like a second northerners. It may be one way to balance things, but it is not the way that most respects the uniqueness and strategy of this faction.

So if cavalrymen are still considered too strong, consider increasing their gold cost rather than making them even less of an effective fighting unit or too slow to do their job.

the horseman just has stupidly high damage per hex, and Loyalists really don't need more breaking power, what with spears and mages already. It's sometimes a problem in other matchups also, but it's most obvious for the dwarves which have 30% def on the flat.

That high damage is because horseman has Charge, which is an ability almost exclusive to that one unit, so by changing the mechanics of Charge you can fix the horseman. For example, make Charge ability increase attack and retaliation damage by 50% rather than 100%.

Thief is the only really efficient way that Knalgan has to clear a village. This is why levelling the thief to a skirmisher is critical for Knalgan in a real match -- it's one of the only things they can do to improve their breaking power. This is why I proposed the "stealthy" buff. I think it would be too good if the thief always had skirmisher, I mean he would just be stealing your villages constantly. But if at least he can get some backstabs even after the game has progressed a little it makes Hodor a lot more viable.

Sounds reasonable to give thief skirmish. Or you could try giving him nightstalk?

If you want to make him stronger at clearing villages specifically and you are willing to create a new ability to do it, how about one that increases attack damage against an opponent on a village tile? Call it "Infiltrate" or "Assassinate" or something like that.

Wose Nerf: I see no issue here.

But is it really better to make the wose weaker against cold rather than arcane? Adepts have both attacks, but weakness to cold makes woses useless against saurians in addition to being slaughtered by drakes.

[Elder2]

1. Undead resistance tweaks
Skeleton and skeleton-archer to 0% impact resistance. (This is intended to help undead vs footpads and woses.)
Skeleton and skeleton-archer to -30% fire resistance. (This is intended to counteract the impact resistance improvement.)
Skeleton and skeleton-archer to 50% blade and pierce resistance. (Need to test this more. This is intended to help spearman vs skeletons, while also making elf fighters slightly less effective vs skeletons.)

btw, you seem to be ignoring realism whatsoever with these ideas: look, how can a human skeleton be as resistance to blade weapons as a freaking steel plate armor? btw, the fire resistance shouldn't be changed, bones don't have almost as much flammability as a tree

You made me realize that actually 17 g HI may be a good balancing change xD Because skeletons have 4 hp less (actually like lets say average 7 or 8 hp less because HI can get resilient or strong trait) but they actually take less dmg from blade atatcks because of their defense, a 40% skeleton vs 30% hi is expected to take 35 dmg out of 100 compared to 36 dmg out of 100, skeleton vs HI cost compared skeleton is significantly more cost-effective at tanking blade damage. And when you compare their pierce res it gets even funnier, skeleton is expected to take 24 dmg and Hi is expected to take 42 dmg, and that was 30% HI vs 40% skelleton, it should also be noted that skelletons get 60% in villages, 60% on mushrooms and can get up on the mountains where they also get 60% so they have significantly better defense. Sure you can say that HI also has slightly better damage but 1 or 3 if strong damage more than skelleton is not worth it especially when we also consider that HI not only has worse movement but also significantly worse movement cost than skelleton, that ridiculous 3 on hills and 0 on mountains means that hills and mountains are HI's enemy. So in total 19 g HI is more squishy than skelleton sharing the fire weakness and also having cold weakness on top of that, and is actually pretty weak to pierce for its cost. It doesn't even work vs dwarves, I have ladder replay to prove that, its not satisfactory vs dwarf for its cost and mobility is hampering it too much. Honestly it would be nice to maybe see it get like 60% blade and 50% pierce res instead of changing its cost too drastically to like 17 g, taht would be more fun and interesting

[iceiceice]

If you could link to replay I would probly be interested enough to watch it.

Honestly it would be nice to maybe see it get like 60% blade and 50% pierce res instead of changing its cost too drastically to like 17 g, taht would be more fun and interesting

Yeah I would totally playtest that era.

[ForestDragon]

hi, speaking of buffing, i see that many people hate bats because they are garbage in their opinion, btw, why is it really necessary to have the 'feral' trait as a trait? you can just edit the unit files (which is way easier) and just mention the stuff in the special notes part. also, you can lower their price to 12, these changes will make them at least somewhat loved again

[Elder2]

If you could link to replay I would probly be interested enough to watch it.

Honestly it would be nice to maybe see it get like 60% blade and 50% pierce res instead of changing its cost too drastically to like 17 g, taht would be more fun and interesting

Yeah I would totally playtest that era.

http://wesnoth.gamingladder.info/gamede ... %3A07%3A01

Full dwarf knalga vs mass (10 or 11) HI loyals on freelands. It seems like an ideal situation for HI, I even purposefully chose lvl 2 HI leader to test it because I knew my opponent would pick knalga and go full dwarf xD

I thought that why HI didn't work for other players trying HI in this matchup (I have seen some games where like 3 or so HI loyal got destroyed by full dwarf when it attacked) was because they didn't wait long enough to get enough HI and got too many of other units overall, so I waited until I got 11 HI and then I attacked the dwarf line.

I also had 3 mages to hopefully deal with village units so lack of mages was not a problem, I hoped to wear dwarf down and actually as individual units HI seemed to fare pretty well vs dwarf at first and I thought I may have a chance of doing some damage, but it turns out that unlike spears HI will take quite significant damage from attacking dwarf fighters in mele since it doesn't have ranged like spears do and it doesn't really do more damage than spears would do to these dwarves, it was suprisingly easy for dwarf to kill my wounded HI and I felt like they were very much killable and not a dwarf bully like I thought they were.

Then dwarf started recruiting footpads and and because my HI was so slow I had no chance of retreating, that I think is the biggest problem of HI, the lack of mobility, when defending near the hills my HI couldn't even get up the hill. Also, footpads are a very cost-effective tool to deal with HI especially combined with unpenetrable dwarf line so they can wait until the night to attack, I would even say that HI felt like it was actually more vulnerable to footies than ud skelletons since skelletons can still destroy footies at night because of the damage, can retreat, and take roughly the same stone damage (7 vs skelly on 40% vs 6 vs HI on 30%), with HI you can not run so dwarf can just wait for the night to use footies.

Also from that dwarf engangement near the hills you can see that HI can win vs dwarves on flat, spears probably wouldn't be able to do that and it looked like HI was dealing a bit more damage to these dwarves on flat than the dwarves were dealing to HI, but HI is 19g while dwarf fighter is 16 so 1 to 1 trade is still favorable to dwarf.

So as a summary HI does in fact have a bit better combar capabilities vs dwarf than spear but compared to its cost, the nature of dwarf vs loyal matchup (campy dwarf line) and its slowness it is definitely not worth it, the advantage of HI over spearmen in combating dwarves is not worth it when HI costs 5 g more, is vulnerable to footpads and is very slow, and the advantage is not even that big.

[Samonella]

Hey, as long as you're all doing all this experimenting and testing, you should consider giving the orcish assassin a more orc-like move-type. There's been discussion about it here and, much more recently, here. Just something to think about.

[Elder2]

Fighter and thunderer cold res nerf is mandatory as evidenced by this replay, I just made a shallow attack as ud at turn 100 and still got absolutely destroyed, dwarvish fighters do not care about damaget hey take because adepts can't kill them anyway, maybe you should even try -10% cold res because this is simply too crazy.

http://wesnoth.gamingladder.info/downlo ... %3A56%3A32

[UK1]

I think the buffing of skellies vs woses and footies is unnecessary. We already took away the cold buff from footies which, imo, alleviated a great deal of the problem. By reducing skeleton impact damage and increasing fire damage, all you're doing is making them even weaker against Mages, which are, imo, more of a standard recruit for Rebs. So I'd say it's probably a wash in that regard. And it has, I think, the disastrous consequence of making Undead v. Knalgan matchups even more game-y and gambitty than they already are. We've reached a middle ground, now, where NEITHER side can just win every game by spamming one type of unit (ghosts/footies). With this change, I foresee skeleton spam being absolutely devastating for Knalgans. What are they going to do? Thunderers suck against it. Dwarvish fighters now suck against it (both their impact AND their blade damage have been reduced!). What can they kill these things with now?

First, I'd like to express my pleasant surprise that anything other than once again nerfing Undead is even on the table. Honestly, just get rid of feral. It was a stupid change to make and it was made for stupid, non-mechanics, non-gameplay reasons. It was a long time ago, but I was told explicitly when I asked that it was done for "Clarity and consistency". Feel free to continue the thing where bats get a penalty on all villages except this special type of village found on, like, four maps. Fine, whatever, the point of bats was never to hold villages. Just get rid of the trait that takes up a trait slot and further decreases the likelihood of getting quick. Honestly, if you think undead need a slight buff (which, after being nerfed, what, three times in the past five updates or something? Is completely reasonable) just do it this way. Don't go screwing around with resistances and... stuff. The undead, pre-latest nerf had precisely TWO good units: The DA and the bat. Every other unit was just along for the ride to increase the number of DAs and bats that you can have AND keep alive. Skeletons are fragile, expensive, don't get traits, have a whatever average attack and unimpressive HP. Skeleton archers have pretty limited utility. Ghouls are decent in a lot of applications and are the most underappreciated unit (I think), but nothing to get wet over. Ghosts are prohibitively expensive. I'm a big fan of WC's in 1v1 matchups, but that doesn't seem to be a popular opinion. And even I don't find them useful in many scenarios other than that.

That's fine. Everyone understood and accepted this. But now bats suck too. Just un-nerf it. Get rid of what never should have been there in the first place.

Make Bats Great Again.

And to address the guy above, ANY negative cold resistance adjustment on any unit is essentially just a buff of Dark Adepts. I'm a self proclaimed Undead apologist and even I think the DA has absolutely no business being buffed.

Someone mentioned realism... Can we just NOT nerf or buff anything for any reason other than making the game more fun, please? First we nerf bats for "clarity and consistency" or some nonsense... Fun>Realism. Fun>"clarity". Nerfs and buffs should really be rooted in gameplay and mechanics.

[Elder2]

I think the buffing of skellies vs woses and footies is unnecessary. We already took away the cold buff from footies which, imo, alleviated a great deal of the problem. By reducing skeleton impact damage and increasing fire damage, all you're doing is making them even weaker against Mages, which are, imo, more of a standard recruit for Rebs. So I'd say it's probably a wash in that regard. And it has, I think, the disastrous consequence of making Undead v. Knalgan matchups even more game-y and gambitty than they already are. We've reached a middle ground, now, where NEITHER side can just win every game by spamming one type of unit (ghosts/footies). With this change, I foresee skeleton spam being absolutely devastating for Knalgans. What are they going to do? Thunderers suck against it. Dwarvish fighters now suck against it (both their impact AND their blade damage have been reduced!). What can they kill these things with now?

First, I'd like to express my pleasant surprise that anything other than once again nerfing Undead is even on the table. Honestly, just get rid of feral. It was a stupid change to make and it was made for stupid, non-mechanics, non-gameplay reasons. It was a long time ago, but I was told explicitly when I asked that it was done for "Clarity and consistency". Feel free to continue the thing where bats get a penalty on all villages except this special type of village found on, like, four maps. Fine, whatever, the point of bats was never to hold villages. Just get rid of the trait that takes up a trait slot and further decreases the likelihood of getting quick. Honestly, if you think undead need a slight buff (which, after being nerfed, what, three times in the past five updates or something? Is completely reasonable) just do it this way. Don't go screwing around with resistances and... stuff. The undead, pre-latest nerf had precisely TWO good units: The DA and the bat. Every other unit was just along for the ride to increase the number of DAs and bats that you can have AND keep alive. Skeletons are fragile, expensive, don't get traits, have a whatever average attack and unimpressive HP. Skeleton archers have pretty limited utility. Ghouls are decent in a lot of applications and are the most underappreciated unit (I think), but nothing to get wet over. Ghosts are prohibitively expensive. I'm a big fan of WC's in 1v1 matchups, but that doesn't seem to be a popular opinion. And even I don't find them useful in many scenarios other than that.

That's fine. Everyone understood and accepted this. But now bats suck too. Just un-nerf it. Get rid of what never should have been there in the first place.

Make Bats Great Again.

And to address the guy above, ANY negative cold resistance adjustment on any unit is essentially just a buff of Dark Adepts. I'm a self proclaimed Undead apologist and even I think the DA has absolutely no business being buffed.

Someone mentioned realism... Can we just NOT nerf or buff anything for any reason other than making the game more fun, please? First we nerf bats for "clarity and consistency" or some nonsense... Fun>Realism. Fun>"clarity". Nerfs and buffs should really be rooted in gameplay and mechanics.

I agree that the bat should be buffed however I don't think the bat is the reason for ud's current perceived weakness. There is just too much cheese that can demolish ud, I am not even talking about woses, I bet mass fighter+mages from elves would probably work just as well as mass wose and would be easier to do.

And I want to say one more thing, while in any other matchup it is not possible to just win spamming one type of unit, with one exception, it is not that uncommon to be able to win spamming 2 types of units.

And about that exception, I bet you if I was allowed to pick a steelclad leader and just spam only fighters, not a single other unit, I would probably be able to win like 60-80% of games as dwarf vs ud, though that is not the optimal strategy, mixing in ulfserkers and maybe like 1 thunderer or so would be optimal. But yeah, seriously, I think fighters are just that strong and ud would be able to do nothing about it, it cant really rush me since I have fighters and steelclad and I could just wait for it to attack me, almost every player would finally break and attack me, and attacking dwarf with mass fighter as ud late game is also not an option and you just cant win it. Even if you got really lucky and took one village then well, I just need to roll enough with my leader and either get 1/2 and 2/4 from fighters or just 2/2 to kill the village skeleton. Its not like clad cares about the damage it takes with 30% res.

[Caritas]

Full dwarf knalga vs mass (10 or 11) HI loyals on freelands. It seems like an ideal situation for HI, I even purposefully chose lvl 2 HI leader to test it because I knew my opponent would pick knalga and go full dwarf xD

I thought that why HI didn't work for other players trying HI in this matchup (I have seen some games where like 3 or so HI loyal got destroyed by full dwarf when it attacked) was because they didn't wait long enough to get enough HI and got too many of other units overall, so I waited until I got 11 HI and then I attacked the dwarf line.

I also had 3 mages to hopefully deal with village units so lack of mages was not a problem, I hoped to wear dwarf down and actually as individual units HI seemed to fare pretty well vs dwarf at first and I thought I may have a chance of doing some damage, but it turns out that unlike spears HI will take quite significant damage from attacking dwarf fighters in mele since it doesn't have ranged like spears do and it doesn't really do more damage than spears would do to these dwarves, it was suprisingly easy for dwarf to kill my wounded HI and I felt like they were very much killable and not a dwarf bully like I thought they were.

Then dwarf started recruiting footpads and and because my HI was so slow I had no chance of retreating, that I think is the biggest problem of HI, the lack of mobility, when defending near the hills my HI couldn't even get up the hill. Also, footpads are a very cost-effective tool to deal with HI especially combined with unpenetrable dwarf line so they can wait until the night to attack, I would even say that HI felt like it was actually more vulnerable to footies than ud skelletons since skelletons can still destroy footies at night because of the damage, can retreat, and take roughly the same stone damage (7 vs skelly on 40% vs 6 vs HI on 30%), with HI you can not run so dwarf can just wait for the night to use footies.

Also from that dwarf engangement near the hills you can see that HI can win vs dwarves on flat, spears probably wouldn't be able to do that and it looked like HI was dealing a bit more damage to these dwarves on flat than the dwarves were dealing to HI, but HI is 19g while dwarf fighter is 16 so 1 to 1 trade is still favorable to dwarf.

So as a summary HI does in fact have a bit better combar capabilities vs dwarf than spear but compared to its cost, the nature of dwarf vs loyal matchup (campy dwarf line) and its slowness it is definitely not worth it, the advantage of HI over spearmen in combating dwarves is not worth it when HI costs 5 g more, is vulnerable to footpads and is very slow, and the advantage is not even that big.

Heavy infs dont work vs dwarf fighters. Why would they? They have 0 impact res, worse terrain defence and less hp. Why would anyone recruit heavy inf vs fighters? Some players tend to think you recruit units vs factions, instead of recruiting vs units that are on the map. Every faction will find counter to full heavy inf spam as it would vs full skeleton or spear spam. In this case heavy infs dont work vs dwarf fighters but are very good vs thunderers (HI have both pierce and blade res) which some players tend to overrecruit. I won a game like that when my opponent was expecting many horses and i barely recruited any. Heavy infs losing v dwarf fighters is the case of choosing bad recruits not bad balancing.

And I would like to say this again: Nerfing woses arcane ressistance would pretty much affect adepts and ghosts only. Elvish sorceress doesn't matter as this is mirror and one more unit that would benefit would be white mage. This would make undead v elfs more competetive.

[Oook]

What I'd like to see:

Lower arcane res on Wose, to make them more vulnerable to Adepts.
Footies get pierce (or blade perhaps?) melee - gives skellies a chance v them.
Dwarves get hardy (only take 6dmg from poision, no other heal buff) as a racial trait, along with two regular traits - mainly to increase their mobility again.
Ulf blade res gets reduced, helps elves in that matchup.
Lieut gets slow trait, for obvious reasons, as does marksman.

That should do to begin with, see how that beds in.


Caritas - spot on. Units like HI are never meant for spamming, I think if HI spam did work it would be a sign balance was broken.

ElderofZion - I'll take up that bet Against decent play you should get nowhere near 60-80%. I think you might be underestimating the ways UD can attack a sluggish defence. Also, why so certain it would be a skelly on the vil? Not to mention the wisdom of a banking war v UD...

[Caritas]

If footies get blade/pierce then i think bouth UD and LOY will get huge advantage. Footies work very well against retreating heavy infs and vs skels. I dont personally think that dwarfs have advantage v undead right now and I prefer to be UD in that match up, if footies get pierce i dont see how dwarfs can win it.

I dont think full dwarf spam can win v undead, maby with huge rng bonus but on normal luck it should be losing.

Slow trait on lieutenant sounds interesting.

[Oook]

The footie change would only be for melee damage, ranged would stay as impact. So they'd still be good at harassing retreating HI / skellies, it would just mean that they wouldn't be such a strong counter to skellies at night. Have to disagree on the UD / Knalgan balance - I'd say it certainly favours Knalgans right now, but if you're worried, note that dwarves are buffed slightly in my proposed changes.