28. Mär 2024, 14:01 Hallo Gast.
Willkommen Gast. Bitte einloggen oder registrieren. Haben Sie Ihre Aktivierungs E-Mail übersehen?

Einloggen mit Benutzername, Passwort und Sitzungslänge. Hierbei werden gemäß Datenschutzerklärung Benutzername und Passwort verschlüsselt für die gewählte Dauer in einem Cookie abgelegt.


Select Boards:
 
Language:
 


Autor Thema: General Balance Discussion  (Gelesen 77709 mal)

Mogat

  • LPS-Sieger
  • Heiler von Imladris
  • *****
  • Beiträge: 236
Re: General Balance Discussion
« Antwort #105 am: 1. Aug 2017, 07:10 »
Very nice post Goodfella, finally someone breaks down the general opinion of the Multiplayer about towers  :)
I can support every point of yours, especially the ugly catapult battles (they don't really leave a chance for the defender, but are a way to stretch the game up to 20 minutes longer).
For the sceptics here a perfect illustration of that point. Just watch the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5ilacLvDQw&t=1s

Sieging a tower-base is almost impossible without siege. Seeing someone trying it amuses me every time. Towers are my biggest concern in 4.x atm., changing it would improove multiplayer experience by a lot!
#onlygoodwithtowers
« Letzte Änderung: 1. Aug 2017, 07:55 von Mogat »


Cogito, ergo sum

Goodfella

  • Gastwirt zu Bree
  • **
  • Beiträge: 115
  • *Insert something cool here*
Re: General Balance Discussion
« Antwort #106 am: 1. Aug 2017, 13:28 »
Hi Elessar

Thanks for your reply.

Yes I'm pretty sure the Edain team is looking to nerf towers, i only hope that this post will outline (what i see as) one of the big problems in 4.4.1 - and how it could be improved in future patches! Basicaly, I just hope they are nerfed enough.


I think if they delete the towers it would be funny but not a joy for us.

Yeah, I agree we definitely need towers for defending against unexpected attacks on base etc.


If there is one thing you can exploit it would be a ballista.

Honestly, I kinda agree with this too, I think the siege does too much damage to units and it further encourages catapult battles. However, i think towers can be exploited too (also leading to catapult battles)


Actually there is no need to siege weapons to destroy a outpost which has three upgraded towers

Ok, NOW we disagree :) In the vast majority of cases you would 100% need siege in that situation - at least that is what i have experienced when playing online. Let's say (for a generic example), you attack that outpost with a generic (let's say) mid-game army, like gondor soldiers, a few pikes and maybe a hero.

What happens to your army in that situation with no siege? The fire rate of an upgraded tower is very high and will kill a unit in (let's say) 1-3 hits. Now times that by 3 and that's the damage output of the towers. The damage output of the soldiers to the towers is quite minimal and so it will take quite a while for the towers to be destroyed. All the time you're being pelted with 3 lots of high damage arrows at a very high fire rate.

Even if you manage to destroy the outpost (without siege) before your enemy comes to its defence you will have lost a lot of your army and your enemy will have lost nothing. Your enemy invested a lot in their outpost and you decided to invest your money in your army, but now a lot of your army is dead and your enemy can work to gain map control with a temporarily superior force. But ok, in this situation you may still come off better and the sacrifice you made to kill the expensive outpost would be worthwhile.

So there's no problem, right? But wait, what if your opponent came back to defend his outpost (the buildings have high health so he will probably make it back in time), then you will have to deal with not only the damage output of the towers but also the damage output of your enemies army. Now imagine that your enemy REBUILDS his towers that are destroyed! You'll have to hit the citadel first to stop this! But then your not getting rid of tower damage output AND the citadel has even more health AND your being attacked by your enemies army!

Then imagine that your enemy is smart. He has built cavalry and instead of letting the towers hit any-old-thing, they hit your pikes! You will have 3-4 pikes if you're smart, to defend against the cav. The towers can kill these few battalions quickly then the rest of your army is doomed to die to a cavalry charge (including any heroes you've got - even if you decided to go upgrades instead, you'll still lose your upgraded swords to cav.)

So no, you need At least a ram or two, so you can quickly destroy your enemies towers/citadel. And you need to protect those rams with pikes, but your enemy can still come over with his army and deal huge amounts of damage to you and aim for your rams, all the while your pikes (or whatever else) are being hit with high damage towers.

For the most part I therefore only attack outposts with catapults once they have enough towers to defend. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule:
1. If my enemy is no where near his outpost and i feel i have tanky enough units (e.g. tower guards) i will often rush his outpost.

2. If i am Imladris i sometimes use all my damage and speed buffs simultaneously to rush an outpost (because the damage output of my soldiers is so high in this situation the towers are not so bad) but of course, i can now no longer use all these buffs to fight my enemies army :(

3. If i am mordor, i generally don't care much about towers (apart from vs my trolls)  because who cares if you lose a hundred free units?

If, however, we are talking about sieging a base (and not an outpost) I can think of no situation in which towers are not a concern - once the enemy has filled his base full of towers.

Sometimes I attack a base before catapults, for example if i have destroyed my enemy in under 10mins and he not built towers yet, then i will rush into the base (maybe with a ram) and try and end it quick.

Other than that, trying to siege a base with units when facing 6+ towers is not an option. The only option in that situation are catapults. This, i have learnt from playing against some of the best (and most annoying :p) players online in 1v1 - I'm looking at YOU Dmitry!


In addition siege weapons are not for shooting each other it would be very funny and ridiculous scene watching them trying to shoot each other. It is never needed to carry the situation into that.  For me if you want to use your siege weapon you should learn how to defend them.

Unfortunately, i disagree with this too :/

I have seen first hand this very situation in my own games, and countless other times watching games of others play. It is a very real feature of edain atm.

Let me ask you a question: What do you do when your enemy is sitting in a base full of towers (which you cannot approach with units) and he realises your only hope is to break through with catapults?

If your opponent is smart and he wants the draw/ win he will focus all his energies on targeting your catapults. He can do this is a number of ways, but the most common is to build catapults of his own (on the walls, or otherwise) and target your catapults with his.

To be clear what i call 'catapult battles' are not only catapult vs catapult but a battle that focuses all the energies on killing catapults. The attacker will defend his own and the defender will try kill his enemy's catapults. This can be done with cavalry charges, summons or (worst of all) denethor!

If you think that this feature does not exist Please watch these videos:

The first (and i think the best) example of this ugly, ugly play style comes from a game that Elite KryPtik played with Haman. KryPtik played well and had-the-game-won at around the 30 min mark. The siege begins at around 42:00. Skip to that point and watch the catapult battle begin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkN8aIN2pqM&list=PL7-qpJu_KnvgFYqH1Kc-0a-yymsmbXcOZ&index=17

Also, this game (which mogat also shared), not as extreme as kryptik's game but has the same features nonetheless. Skip to around the 22:00 mark:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5ilacLvDQw&t=1s

Finaly a game between two players who would (i'm guessing :p) consider themselves about mid-level players: Ruuddevil and The Silver Elf, around 36:00 the siege begins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt8O3yWZSIE

That final game actually ended in a stalemate :( ^

Now, another question: How do you defend against this if your enemy really wants to play this way? The only viable thing to do is out-spam your enemies catapults. Kryptik discovered this and won his game. Ruuddevil did not and called it a draw. Django had the courtesy of surrendering rather than have the game last another 20 mins.

In every one of these situations, if the towers did less damage to units there would have been an opportunity to attack the base with units, to deal damage from multiple different directions - making it much harder for the defender to counter.

We need to be able to destroy a castle base by using a ram to get through the gate then storming the keep with a superior army - with the support of catapults if needs be!


And there is nothing easier to defender when one has already spent his high amounts of money to build an outpost, build towers and upgrade them.

This I don't understand: the outposts don't sit in catapult-range of castles, you can't siege if you are at your outpost. so do both players just sit at their outpost/base with catapults, defended by towers and wait till one person is so bored they quit? Sorry if i sound a little sarcastic, I just don't understand this point :)


You should actually think about "opportunity cost". If you want to take an outpost first you should send your troops there first it requires to sacrificing your economy by giving up the opportunity to extending your area and it requires to kill possible creeps or trolls nearby.

Now we are in agreement again (yay!). Even though i consider towers OP, i still don't go for early outposts. The risks are too high and the benefits too little.

For example, why build 3 towers on an outpost anyway? it will give you no benefit other than the minimal resource production of the citadel. However, problems do arise with things like the dunedain outpost for imla, where you can have strong towers without sacrificing outpost-usefulness - same goes for angmar citadel tower upgrade.

And the game is not about taking outposts and destroying the towers. You should first weaken the opponent's economy by taking economic structures and then you can deal with that outpost. Outpost and towers are static structures that they are not meaningful by themselves. They need opponents to do their job if you don't want to overtake them or to control the area you should not go near them at the beginning of the game once one took 'em.

100% yes! This is exactly what i do when faced with outposts, focus all my efforts on gaining outside economy. But once you do that there is still the arduous chore of destroying the outpost with catapults whilst your enemy targets yours, it's not impossible but it's boring and frustrating to be forced to play in this strange way.

Also, like i mentioned many outposts are not neutral, some are extremely good - take for example mirkwood, if you can get that up and upgraded with tower expansions it is so difficult to destroy. Your enemy gains access to 2 excellent heroes, a solid foothold on the map, excellent units such as the mega-powerful elk riders etc. What's more, all the money you invest trying to destroy mirkwood with siege, reduces the relative cost of your enemy's outpost. When I see my enemy go for mirkwood in a 1v1 i instantly cancel everything that i am doing and rush to attack it, targeting first the palace guard building that grants the tower upgrade. If my enemy has a superior army and i can't destroy it - it is almost always gg for me.



WOW! That was a lot of text! Thanks to anyone who read the whole thing (i'll post a condensed version for everyone else :p)

In summary:
Catapult battles are real (and real annoying!), as seen in the videos. In fact, they are often necessary due to the power of towers.

Towers are NOT impossible to beat. Nor (in many cases) are they the CORRECT DECISION, in fact i think they are often a MISTAKE! But dealing with them is frustrating, ugly and (worse of all) Not interesting!!!

IMO, I can sacrifice some things being 'not fun' in the game or 'frustrating', just as long as they are interesting and you can find a way to do it better in the next game (thereby making it more fun next time), i fear this is not the case for catapult battles atm.




Finally, I Know the team is re-balancing towers and siege in general. I am super happy and grateful about this!

The aim of this post is to clarify my own view (and the view of many other good online players) about how towers and sieging currently functions in 4.4.1 and how it can be improved in 4.5.

It may not change anything about 4.5, the edain team may already be incorporating all these changes as we speak.

But it might, at least, convince people that there is an issue in sieging and that it is a good idea to re-balance it. As well as convince people that towers are too strong atm.

If it does convince the team to change the direction of siege in anyway that will be a good thing imo, because it will improve the experience of the mod.

And that, after all, is what we all want!

Thanks for reading :)
« Letzte Änderung: 1. Aug 2017, 14:18 von Goodfella »
Euggghhh, I'm dead - Gildor 2017

Goodfella

  • Gastwirt zu Bree
  • **
  • Beiträge: 115
  • *Insert something cool here*
Re: General Balance Discussion
« Antwort #107 am: 1. Aug 2017, 13:44 »
Ok, now the condensed version :p

1. Towers do so much damage to units, they often force 'catapult battles'

2. Catapult battles are real! They are quite common actually, and are often forced upon the attacker.

I define a catapult battle as 'a battle in which the primary focus is destroying the enemy's - or defending your own - catapults'. Catapults can be targeted through powers, cavalry charges, heroes (e.g. denethor) or other catapults.

Here is some evidence that they exist:

The best example imo: Kryptik Vs Haman. Kryptik is completely winning but must spam catapults to destroy Haman's base. Skip to 42:00:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkN8aIN2pqM&index=17&list=PL7-qpJu_KnvgFYqH1Kc-0a-yymsmbXcOZ

A game i observed between ErenionF and Django. ErenionF is completely winning, Django makes ballistas in his base, defended by towers. Django courteously surrenders to avoid a boring 20 min siege. Skip to 22:00:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5ilacLvDQw&t=1s

The all-mighty Ruddevil plays Vs The silver elf, the match reaches a stalemate due to the power of denethor and the upgraded gondor base in catapult-battles. Ruud could have won, he needed to spam tf out of catapults (but where's the fun in that!). Skip to 36:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt8O3yWZSIE


Building towers is not a sure-way to win a game. In fact it is often a mistake imo! It just often forces the game down the path of catapult battling (and spamming).

Nerfing the damage of towers would allow units to get into, or near the enemy base, allowing for attacks from multiple directions, leading to more dynamic sieging that is harder for the defender to nullify.


I Know the team is re-balancing towers and siege in general. I am super happy and grateful about this!

The aim of this post to clarify my own view (and the view of many other good online players) about how towers and sieging currently functions in 4.4.1 and how it can be improved in 4.5.

It may not change anything about 4.5, the edain team may already be incorporating all these changes as we speak.

But it might, at least, convince people that there is an issue in sieging and that it is a good idea to re-balance it. As well as convince people that towers are too strong atm.

If it does convince the team to change the direction of siege in anyway that will be a good thing imo, because it will improve the experience of the mod.

And that, after all, is what we all want!

Thanks for reading :)
« Letzte Änderung: 1. Aug 2017, 14:06 von Goodfella »
Euggghhh, I'm dead - Gildor 2017

Julio229

  • Edain Betatesting
  • Gesandter der Freien Völker
  • ***
  • Beiträge: 372
  • King Of the Misty Mountains
Re: General Balance Discussion
« Antwort #108 am: 1. Aug 2017, 15:33 »
I support all of Goodfella's points about the towers, I have been a witness to my full upgraded Imladris army falling to a Castle full of towers, heroes included (and in the Legendary Heroes mode), and I always lose a lot of troops to them, even on camp maps (which I play the most in to avoid castles full of towers), so I always need to make Siege (which I almost never make until the attack on the enemy's base) and target the towers first so my army can survive and not get obliterated.

As the Team is working on that, I hope that in the next patch (when I think I'll start playing Online), they are less of an army-killer!


ElessarTelcontar

  • Bilbos Festgast
  • *
  • Beiträge: 21
Re: General Balance Discussion
« Antwort #109 am: 1. Aug 2017, 15:43 »
Hello again Goodfella,

First we should clarify what are we talking about. It is an outpost or a camp. Each of them has completely different scenario against siege weapons. So If we are talking about outposts if one in mid-game have an outpost with three upgraded towers then in the background one should have to spend money on unlock to "upgrade(s)" because one can't upgrade the arrows at the beginning, spend money on first troops to take the outpost, spend money on an outpost, spend money to towers and spend money to upgrade them. So if you managed to destroy that outpost there is no big chance to one take it again an destroy your army. If you count that one's expenses to achieve that you will understand what it costs to the one who wants to build a strong outpost. So in that situation (mid-game) one would not be able to have enough amount of army to supply for overtake the outpost again. To contrary if you achieve to destroy it you already give the one a huge economical and strategical hit because one's money  becomes being spent on nothing.

If we are talking about camps then as I said before if you already let someone take a camp and build 6+ towers on it you should have played wrong. It is already not a normal or advantageous thing to have more then one tower in the main building plots in the starting camp. I don't build towers in the beginning camp of mine.



And siege weapons against towers thing. I said that you don't need to have siege weapons to take an outpost with upgraded towers but of course you can make them an overtake the outpost easily for example ballistas, they can shoot the towers at a distance the towers can not even touch them. So if you want to win a game you should not go near a fully upgraded outpost with your army in the mid-game phase but you can use siege weapons an wait the opponent comes to your siege weapons so you can win that hand against your opponents with a larger army you have because the opponent would not be able to have a larger army then yours. As I said before you should destroy every other thing to come to that outpost.

Siege weapon fight thing. Okay. It is not a necessary or natural thing just because there are players who make it. I looked at the videos briefly there are some mistakes at the beginning or middle of the game. And I realised that these are mainly occurs in castle maps and of course you should have siege weapons to destroy the gate and to pass the defence . They should not be happen on normal settlements. Actually it is possible to generate such a scene with just one of the player's mistake. It is often the attacker's mistake to participate such a battle. In Ruuddevil and The Silver Elf's game why he wait with that army in front of the castle before his siege weapons destroy gate? And once the gate are destroyed he could push all of his forces inside to wound his opponent. He just waited being afraid to lose his army and as far as I seen he didn't have proper archers to be effective at distace. LOL.[/color]



Zitat
This I don't understand: the outposts don't sit in catapult-range of castles, you can't siege if you are at your outpost. so do both players just sit at their outpost/base with catapults, defended by towers and wait till one person is so bored they quit? Sorry if i sound a little sarcastic, I just don't understand this point

Let me clarify, I was talking about outposts not camps or castles. And if one just sits at one's outposts camps or whatever, one can't win the game. It is just meaningless. One who is a good player just doesn't do that. As I said before, it is just mistakes of both sides to carry the situation to a siege war. The sole purpose of this game is winning and to surrender is a fact of the war. End of story.



Finally,

I think that fire rate or damage of the towers can be discussed but me and my friends think that health points of towers will be right if they will not be decreased too much.

And what would you think if allies can equip each others towers. You didn't say your opininon about it. I would like to see some comments.

Thanks for everyone who contribute to that discussion. And it is good to see people here discuss in a qualitative way also thanks for that.

I also have a topic discussed with Gnomi included that tower issue. May be it is helpful and beneficial to check here also.
Zitat
https://modding-union.com/index.php/topic,34820.0.html

Have a nice weekend. Do not forget to comment.

Peace.
« Letzte Änderung: 1. Aug 2017, 16:15 von ElessarTelcontar »
"Be it a rock or a grain of sand, in water they sink as the same."

Mogat

  • LPS-Sieger
  • Heiler von Imladris
  • *****
  • Beiträge: 236
Re: General Balance Discussion
« Antwort #110 am: 1. Aug 2017, 16:00 »
I would really like to see a replay of one of your 1v1 if it is possible, competative rules of course (1k, skirmish mode). Could you attach one please, Elessar?  :)
« Letzte Änderung: 1. Aug 2017, 16:05 von Mogat »


Cogito, ergo sum

ElessarTelcontar

  • Bilbos Festgast
  • *
  • Beiträge: 21
Re: General Balance Discussion
« Antwort #111 am: 1. Aug 2017, 16:13 »
Hi Mogat,

If one day I record our game of course I will. For now you can ask what would you want to learn in terms of my gameplay.

"Be it a rock or a grain of sand, in water they sink as the same."

Elendils Cousin 3. Grades

  • Administrator
  • Ringträger
  • *****
  • Beiträge: 5.677
  • German, Motherfucker! Do you speak it?
Re: General Balance Discussion
« Antwort #112 am: 1. Aug 2017, 16:53 »
Hey Elessar, I appreciate the effort you put into your posts but some of the things you mentioned are just plain wrong or contradictory^^

First of all, outposts. There are two things I want to point out here.
  • Even a single tower at an outpost, usually combined with a well, is enough to allow a weaker defending army to defeat superior attacking armies.
  • Even a single tower protects the outpost well enough from rushes, guaranteeing your army a safe retreat point outside of your base which in turn gives you an absolutetly massive mapcontrol advantage.

1. has to do with the pricing of towers. At an outpost, you pay just 500(!) bucks for one tower, that's what Imladris has to pay for their swordsmen and even less than what Gondor pays for cavalry. Of course you don't just run to the outpost buildplot at the start, kill the troll and start building towers, you wait until you have at least some units and then get the outpost. 1200+500 = 1700 resources to ensure your army will win every fight at the outpost is a good tradeoff for not getting a hero out on nearly every map, and that's not even counting the two other buildplots you get. This is not expensive, contrary to what you say. It is very affordable, and much cheaper than what your opponent has to pay to get catapults out in most cases by the way.

2. follows up on 1.: Having a safe haven where your opponent can't follow you means that the outpost alone denies your enemy a huge part of the map. While you have to retreat to your base to save your units, he just walks back a few steps to his outpost which usually is located in the centre of the map. Even with an inferior army, he can protect so much of the map that "weakening his economy" just isn't a possibility, something that should be obvious if you played some competitive 1v1s. You're even saying yourself that you shouldn't go near an outpost with towers with your army ;)


I won't touch on the siege battle stuff because I usually ragequit if somebody does that, but what I do want to mention is the pricing and buildtime of towers, especially in your base. In open bases like Isengard's, you pay 150 bucks for one tower that takes only 20 seconds to build. That is literally nothing to worry about ever. You could start with a tower protecting your citadel for the luls if you wanted to. So regardless of your situation you can always build a tower if the enemy threatens to attack your base and be sure it will be ready in time to shoot the living crap out of every soldier stupid enough to still be around. That's why it takes no skill whatsoever to use towers - you don't even need to plan ahead to account for buildtime. It also means that filling your base with towers costs you a fraction of what any decent army would cost. There are maybe ten small buildplots in a Mordor base, so for just 1500 bucks you can secure your base against everything but a full on attack by a lategame army.
Fortresses with walls need to pay more for towers (500), but those do even more damage and are invulnerable to anything but siege weapons. That means that, again, for just 1500 bucks you get three towers that do enough dps to absolutely decimate any army that goes near them, forcing you to get siege which then takes forever to bring those towers down. And costs much more than the towers. Just as a side note.

I do agree with you, Elessar, in that towers serve a purpose, and I don't think you should be able to take a fully upgraded Gondor base just with upgraded infantry either. The point is that the costefficiency of towers is so ridiculously good that just a few of them can make armies that cost thousands of resources utterly useless. If towers were priced around 800 resources (300 for the small ones) and took twice as long to build, even a smaller damage nerf could actually suffice for you to have a chance to do something against them. They would counter base rushes, but without being a simple "I win"-button. Destroying them would mean you now have a small timeframe where you won't be shot at instead of towers being up again immediately.

Towers are without a doubt in need of a change, as Goodfella said.

Goodfella

  • Gastwirt zu Bree
  • **
  • Beiträge: 115
  • *Insert something cool here*
Re: General Balance Discussion
« Antwort #113 am: 1. Aug 2017, 18:21 »
@Elessar

I was talking about how towers make it very difficult(/ impossible) to attack nearby buildings, thereby forcing a player into getting catapults - so they can attack from range. They do this because moving near a tower destroys your units very quickly, so it is beneficial to attack from a distance with catapults - this leads to the (almost objectively - i mean seriously who thinks these battles are interesting and fun!) ugly and frustrating catapult battles.

I think the only difference between Outposts and Bases is this:

Outposts tend to have less towers, therefore there are chances for the enemy to come in and attack with his units (whether he uses catapults too is up to him). However, in many cases, the best way to siege an outpost is to sit back with catapults, defend them with units and slowly destroy the outpost, just like you said. So that's outposts.

Now, Bases on the other hand have many more towers and so it is almost always suicide to move into, or near, the base with units. Therefore the attacker is forced to sit back with catapults and slowly destroy all the  buildings in the base from a distance. This is the point at which the defender uses all of his energies on destroying the catapults and it becomes very frustrating and boring.

Yes you make a valid point about how expensive it is to make upgraded towers. Once again, I think that going for outposts with towers is usually a bad idea. With the exceptions i mentioned - mirkwood, dunedain, angmar tower upgrade - this is where outpost towers can help decide a game in the defenders favour. Equally, you could get 3 economy buildings at an outpost and upgrade them with towers, thereby getting more eco and towers at the same time.

No one would build an outpost with 3 upgraded towers for no other reasons, all things being equal. It would simply be a waste of money. The only situation where doing that is viable is if your completely winning and you build an outpost near your enemy's base, so as to set up an impenetrable position on the map and launch attacks from there.

If you want to destroy this outpost, you're still gonna have to invest in some catapults. So towers on an outpost can be a pain-in-the-butt to deal with and can even turn the tide of the game if you get a good one like mirkwood

However, the big problem-area in which towers are too powerful is sieging a base. Especially Gondor's base. The upgraded walls, towers and wall catapults all combine to make it extremely difficult to penetrate. The only option is to spam catapults and avoid denethor's attacks. Mordor is a similarly extreame case. Once they get free upgrades on all their towers - and catas at the citadel. All other factions are basically the same, just not as extreme as gondor or mordor.

No good player would play as gondor and instantly start building towers and turtleing. You would lose every game so long as your opponent spammed catapults. I'm not saying it is an imbalance in that towers are so good they win you the game. I'm simply saying that the power of them makes sieging boring and fustrating!

Most importantly:

WHY SHOULD THIS BE THE CASE?!

Why should this be the only way of sieging a faction? To sit outside the base and slowly destroy all the walls/buildings - whilst constantly dodging attacks on your catapults!?

Imagine if you could move into or near a gondor castle even with lots of towers up with your UNITS. You could launch an attack on the gate with a ram, whilst your units valiantly protect the ram from attack. You could use siege ladders, you could sneak in isenguard mines, you could destroy the gate and storm the keep with your army. You could still use catapults as an additional weapon in your arsenal to fire from a distance, with a few units back their protecting them.

It would 'feel' more like a siege, it would feel more 'lord-of-the-ringsy' it might even 'look' more like the battle at helms deep or minas tirith.

Imagine if you had multiple siegeing techniques occurring simultaneously. Imagine how cool and intense it would be to be defending against a ram at the gate, having uruk-hai scale your walls with siege ladders - attacking your archers that are trying to bring down the ram. All the while your walls are being pelted with ballistas, then all of a sudden

BOOM!!!

Your wall is blown up by a mine that you missed because your focus was split all over the place, and you're forced to retreat to the citadel for a final stand. Perhaps your powers will recharge in time (the ents, or rohan, or the eagles may save you) and you can stop the attack and have a chance of a comeback, or perhaps your enemy is too skillull and he wins a deserved victory because of his great micro management of the siege.

Now imagine how cool it will be for others to watch it live in tournaments and on youtube. What a great advertisement these kind of sieges would be for edain!

This is the ideal, it may never work like that but that's what i think the edain team should have as the end-goal!

However, with towers being as powerful as they are, all these options are worthless, except for using catapults from a distance, because you can't attack a base with units when your enemy has 6+ towers, every unit in range of the towers is toast. Nerfing towers would free up so much more dynamic tactics to be viable. Instead we are left in the current state where we must use catapults once your enemy gets towers, and the defender can easily focus all his attention on the one threat of catapults.


If we are talking about camps then as I said before if you already let someone take a camp and build 6+ towers on it you should have played wrong. It is already not a normal or advantageous thing to have more then one tower in the main building plots in the starting camp. I don't build towers in the beginning camp of mine.

How can you stop a good player building towers? I really don't see how i can stop someone from doing this.

If they play mordor or isen, each tower is like 150-200 resources, that is super cheap and even if they are a castle-faction, the inside economy will be strong enough to support towers.

This is how almost all my games go, and how the games of almost all online players go atm:

The game starts and we fight for map control, for economy buildings, for map presence and sometimes for outposts.

The player with the better macro and micro skill will win the fight for the map control (just as long as no one uses anything mega OP (e.g. thorin iii :p))

Now, 1 of 2 things will happen:
1. The player will be a nice well-respecting pleasant edain player and concede defeat to your mighty pro skills and resign

OR

2. They will refuse to resign in the face of the better play and decided to make it as painful as possible. They'll set up camp in their base, build towers, build catapults and (if they're a real sum-bag) build denethor

If option 1 happens we both leave happy and content that a good game has been played by both.

If option 2 happens the game will continue for an extra 10-40 minutes (depending on your catapult skills) in which neither player learns anything new about the game, and all units, heroes and powers are used to attack or defend one-and-other's catapults.

How can i stop my enemy from making towers if we have fought for 20 mins and both have a strong inside economy? The only way is rushing his base and getting his citadel before he can build them. Sometimes this works but sometimes the towers come up in time and your army is too far into the base and it gets rekt.

It has therefore resulted that, with many people, it is common courtesy to resign once you have lost map control/ your army. Lots of people get annoyed if people continue to play after this. This should not be the case! Sieging should be every bit a part of this game as outside fighting.

This is why I for one am happy about the edain team's decision to change sieging. If it can become an interesting and dynamic part of the game it will make edain even better, and even, truly unique to the rts world.

A big nerf to towers is such a simple change that may lead to such an improvement in the quality of games. It will make attacking outposts that little bit nicer, sure. But more importantly it will make siegeing a castle so much more fun and dynamic. It is a small change and will not fix everything, but it is key to the sieging gameplay changes in 4.5 imo!

And siege weapons against towers thing. I said that you don't need to have siege weapons to take an outpost with upgraded towers but of course you can make them an overtake the outpost easily for example ballistas, they can shoot the towers at a distance the towers can not even touch them. So if you want to win a game you should not go near a fully upgraded outpost with your army in the mid-game phase but you can use siege weapons an wait the opponent comes to your siege weapons so you can win that hand against your opponents with a larger army you have because the opponent would not be able to have a larger army then yours. As I said before you should destroy every other thing to come to that outpost.

Yes i agree, making outposts with towers is, for the most part, a bad idea as you're investing money in static defence, whilst your enemy invests in actual units. There are exceptions to this and it all depends on the balance of power in the game.

Yes, you're also saying that it is very often the better option to use catapults which out-range towers to destroy the outpost and minimise loses to your units, now imagine the defender makes catapults to target your own! Or summons some orcs behind the catapults and hits them in that way. Or uses a combination of both, (and more) to kill your catapults, so that you have to dodge incoming catapult shots after every shot you take, but also not send that cata outside of your infantry clump otherwise the summon or cavalry will get them.

Now imagine what you must do to attack the outpost: target your enemy's catapults with your catapults and summons. But wait! you can't send your cavalry in because they will be destroyed by towers. And your summons will drop like flies to the towers. This is catapult battling^.

Whoever has denethor wins. This is why he is so OP, he's the steward of gondor but the king of catapult-battling!



Siege weapon fight thing. Okay. It is not a necessary or natural thing just because there are players who make it.

Please tell us, if it is not necessary how do you fight a gondor base that has had all its upgrades? If you could tell us that, all the people in the multiplayer community would have much more fun when sieging.

How do you stop your enemy attacking your catapults, i can find no way. If my opponent really wants to do it, he will!

If I don't attack his, he will keep attacking mine and i will never be able to destroy his base. What do you do to stop this?

I looked at the videos briefly there are some mistakes at the beginning or middle of the game.

Yes, they were not perfect games.

So you must play the perfect game to avoid catapult battles?

What's more, if both players play well, the defender will have built a large inside economy - so he will be able to afford his towers and catapults. So even with perfect play on both sides the game can descend into catapult-battles

And I realised that these are mainly occurs in castle maps and of course you should have siege weapons to destroy the gate and to pass the defence . They should not be happen on normal settlements.

Ok, but we need interesting siegeing for castle maps AND camp maps - not one ore the other- nerfing towers may help to do this.

In Ruuddevil and The Silver Elf's game why he wait with that army in front of the castle before his siege weapons destroy gate? And once the gate are destroyed he could push all of his forces inside to wound his opponent. He just waited being afraid to lose his army and as far as I seen he didn't have proper archers to be effective at distace. LOL.

If he did this, his units would die to the towers, that is my point. he can only do what he did in that game: Sit outside with catapults. He just didn't spam them enough and called it a draw.

Watch the elite kryptik's video again. See how he gets frustrated with haman and decides to send his army in. His command points plummet at this very moment. He loses his entire army and then even the heroes are being killed by the towers! There is one good thing about that: it freed up command points for 30 more catapults, so he made them and won.

It is such a shame that losing your entire army and many heroes like kryptik did in that game was a GOOD thing - if he hadn't done that he never would of had enough command points for all those catapults - surely this is something that should be removed as a viable option from the game (if we can)!

If you are patient and play in the correct way, you should still be able to win by spamming catapults (unless your enemy has a vastly superior cavalry army - then he can harass from his base and regain map control and potentially make a comeback - but this point is for another post!).

You can win, but it is a silly, strange, dull and uninteresting win when you spam catapults like this.

Let me clarify, I was talking about outposts not camps or castles. And if one just sits at one's outposts camps or whatever, one can't win the game. It is just meaningless. One who is a good player just doesn't do that. As I said before, it is just mistakes of both sides to carry the situation to a siege war. The sole purpose of this game is winning and to surrender is a fact of the war. End of story.

Sorry Elessar, i still don't understand (see below)

I think you admit that there are ways of destroying an outpost. Actually there is no need to siege weapons to destroy a outpost which has three upgraded towers. In addition siege weapons are not for shooting each other it would be very funny and ridiculous scene watching them trying to shoot each other. It is never needed to carry the situation into that.  For me if you want to use your siege weapon you should learn how to defend them. And there is nothing easier to defender when one has already spent his high amounts of money to build an outpost, build towers and upgrade them.

I thought you meant by this that it is easy to defend siege weapons if you are at your outpost with 3 upgraded towers. If you were at your outpost with towers, you wouldn't be near the base and therefore wouldn't be able to siege anyway. Maybe i misunderstood what you meant.

As I said before, it is just mistakes of both sides to carry the situation to a siege war.

How does one destroy a castle without siegeing it? Every game will end in a siege war if the defender does not surrender.

I'm not saying we should not have sieging, I'm saying we should make sieging more interesting and dynamic (which the team aims to do! - partly by nerfing towers).

All I'm trying to say in these posts is that allowing units near (or in) a base to deal damage to buildings(/ enemy units) would drastically improve the sieging in edain and that cannot be achieved with towers doing as much relative damage as they currently do!

And also that the team should not underestimate the degree to which towers damage should be reduced :D

I think that fire rate or damage of the towers can be discussed but me and my friends think that health points of towers will be right if they will not be decreased too much.

Yeah i don't mind if the health of towers stay the same either. In fact i would much rather see a big damage nerf to towers, but with similar health, - than less health but the same damage.

I'll have to read through your discussion with Gnomi and maybe even make a post on that thread, to discuss your idea.

Hope you have a nice weekend too! :D

Shout out to the edain team for all the great work! I hope you can make sieging as cool as it can be in the confines of this very old game!
Euggghhh, I'm dead - Gildor 2017

ElessarTelcontar

  • Bilbos Festgast
  • *
  • Beiträge: 21
Re: General Balance Discussion
« Antwort #114 am: 2. Aug 2017, 00:58 »
Hey Elendils Cousin 3. Grades and Goodfella,

Well, a single tower outpost combined with a well can not defend itself without a good army even being equipped with non upgraded archers. You should upgrade your tower or equip it with upgraded archers it is what costs considerably much.

Getting the well functioning outpost costs more than 1700 with training archers and unlocking the upgrades cost. And with them you choose defending so you can not build an army like being never spent this money. So it deserves that function you mentioned above. So actually things you give up to build a strong outpost does not fit with being affordable. I can not see any contradictory thing here. Again you should consider "opportunity cost".

You can't say one can not win the game against an opponent who have a strong outpost or you can't say one can't overtake a strong outpost either. Just because one's opponent have a strong outpost in the middle of the map one should not be fall back to the one's base. I said don't go near the this kind of outpost with your troops in mid-game because it should be end-game business but you can build siege weapons to wound them or incur the opponents army to your siege weapons away from towers so you can win the hand in that area with your stronger army and you should because if you can't then what were you doing when your opponent spending his money and effort to build such a strong outpost?. If your opponent building a strong outpost with upgraded or equipped towers, you should take the other building plots then because it will give you an opportunity to train bigger army. So I can't see any contradictory thing here also.

Furthermore, when I was talking about something, most of the time they were not camps or fortresses they were outposts and towers you build near that outpost again I am not talking about towers you build in your camp or castle. But also I mentioned about open camps you can take over the map. If you let someone build towers to all of the building plots meaning that your opponent spending 5000 just to get towers on that camp(I did not count the upgrades), you are doing something wrong it is a huge comfort to find in the middle of game to build something like that. I was arguing this about camps and my argument regarding towers is not about towers in the camps, it is your gameplay to let this happen. Because of that I separated them at the beginning. There is no contradicton.

Also I have no argument about towers at the fortresses. As I said before they all have completely different scenarios. In skill, costs and other arguments I excluded them.
Let me clarify that I am not a tower fan or something. Their price can be discussed, their damage can be discussed and everything they have can be discussed. I did not say anything like they should be the same but I think their health points should not be decreased too much because they are already vulnerable to multiple ballistas at distance. Again there is no contradicton.

All I mentioned above is basically "opportunity cost".



Zitat
I was talking about how towers make it very difficult(/ impossible) to attack nearby buildings, thereby forcing a player into getting catapults - so they can attack from range. They do this because moving near a tower destroys your units very quickly, so it is beneficial to attack from a distance with catapults - this leads to the (almost objectively - i mean seriously who thinks these battles are interesting and fun!) ugly and frustrating catapult battles

I understood your point about why these catapult battle begin and as I said I don't wanna see this kind of scene and I don't play like that. But siege weapons should have their own purposes too. I mean if there were no towers or gates so what would you do with that siege weapons? -They would be weapons just to give too much damage. So towers should be able to change the decisions and preferences of the opponent. They should drive you to build catapults, ballistas or rams. It is like chess, kinda fast played.

Zitat
Outposts tend to have less towers, therefore there are chances for the enemy to come in and attack with his units (whether he uses catapults too is up to him). However, in many cases, the best way to siege an outpost is to sit back with catapults, defend them with units and slowly destroy the outpost, just like you said. So that's outposts.

So we agree here. I did not say anything different from this. I am talking about towers which can be builded with outpost. There is always a way to destroy and overtake outposts and this is not too hard to achieve.

Zitat
Now, Bases on the other hand have many more towers and so it is almost always suicide to move into, or near, the base with units. Therefore the attacker is forced to sit back with catapults and slowly destroy all the  buildings in the base from a distance. This is the point at which the defender uses all of his energies on destroying the catapults and it becomes very frustrating and boring.

As I said about having all map and trying to win, you should be able to finish the opponent because eventually the one's economy will not let him to build anything. And it can be discussed also if it is too long to achieve this but I wasn't discussing this things. I was discussing that if one can have another camp with 6+ towers then you are playing wrong as I explain above.

Zitat
No good player would play as gondor and instantly start building towers and turtleing. You would lose every game so long as your opponent spammed catapults. I'm not saying it is an imbalance in that towers are so good they win you the game. I'm simply saying that the power of them makes sieging boring and fustrating!

I agree with you except the last sentence, I can accept that their damage is a bit high but until they get the upgrade they are just nothing against siege weapons. Also siege weapons like ballista and catapult without upgrade can easily destroy a tower. Once towers get upgrade they become powerful. And again we can discuss that damage.

Zitat
Imagine if you could move into or near a gondor castle even with lots of towers up with your UNITS. You could launch an attack on the gate with a ram, whilst your units valiantly protect the ram from attack. You could use siege ladders, you could sneak in isenguard mines, you could destroy the gate and storm the keep with your army. You could still use catapults as an additional weapon in your arsenal to fire from a distance, with a few units back their protecting them.

It would 'feel' more like a siege, it would feel more 'lord-of-the-ringsy' it might even 'look' more like the battle at helms deep or minas tirith.

Imagine if you had multiple siegeing techniques occurring simultaneously. Imagine how cool and intense it would be to be defending against a ram at the gate, having uruk-hai scale your walls with siege ladders - attacking your archers that are trying to bring down the ram. All the while your walls are being pelted with ballistas, then all of a sudden 

BOOM!!!

Yes! It would be good. In fact I would glad to see a roof above rams to add more protection in terms of health. I also agree with your other ideas about siegeing.

Zitat
However, with towers being as powerful as they are, all these options are worthless, except for using catapults from a distance, because you can't attack a base with units when your enemy has 6+ towers, every unit in range of the towers is toast. Nerfing towers would free up so much more dynamic tactics to be viable. Instead we are left in the current state where we must use catapults once your enemy gets towers, and the defender can easily focus all his attention on the one threat of catapults.

Yes, if nerfing towers damage will balance this situation We are already ok with this, our point is that tower should not be destroyed so easily. You can make your siegeing while towers alive with balanced damage. I think we can agree with this also?

Zitat
Yes, you're also saying that it is very often the better option to use catapults which out-range towers to destroy the outpost and minimise loses to your units, now imagine the defender makes catapults to target your own! Or summons some orcs behind the catapults and hits them in that way. Or uses a combination of both, (and more) to kill your catapults, so that you have to dodge incoming catapult shots after every shot you take, but also not send that cata outside of your infantry clump otherwise the summon or cavalry will get them.

Now imagine what you must do to attack the outpost: target your enemy's catapults with your catapults and summons. But wait! you can't send your cavalry in because they will be destroyed by towers. And your summons will drop like flies to the towers. This is catapult battling^.

Whoever has denethor wins. This is why he is so OP, he's the steward of gondor but the king of catapult-battling!

I think one who have that deadly towers and I think one is not enough to be that deadly, can not be able to make siege weapons in an instant. You should make your move before one makes one's own. And I agree that denethor is OP.

Zitat
Please tell us, if it is not necessary how do you fight a gondor base that has had all its upgrades? If you could tell us that, all the people in the multiplayer community would have much more fun when sieging.

I didn't mean there is no siege weapons involved or they don't shoot each other. I mean it is not a proper thing to a siege weapon thing occurs in a way that preclude the normal battle.

Zitat
If he did this, his units would die to the towers, that is my point. he can only do what he did in that game: Sit outside with catapults. He just didn't spam them enough and called it a draw.

As far as I remember, he had have all the map and have economical advantage but did not train rivendell archers. He could take his time to train them while sacrificing his useless forces to wound his opponents and then invade. He would eventually win. And I personally, don't like to win or lose a battle without skill, being good at tactics, strategy and good fair gameplay.

Zitat
Zitat
Let me clarify, I was talking about outposts not camps or castles. And if one just sits at one's outposts camps or whatever, one can't win the game. It is just meaningless. One who is a good player just doesn't do that. As I said before, it is just mistakes of both sides to carry the situation to a siege war. The sole purpose of this game is winning and to surrender is a fact of the war. End of story.
Sorry Elessar, i still don't understand (see below)

Zitat
I think you admit that there are ways of destroying an outpost. Actually there is no need to siege weapons to destroy a outpost which has three upgraded towers. In addition siege weapons are not for shooting each other it would be very funny and ridiculous scene watching them trying to shoot each other. It is never needed to carry the situation into that.  For me if you want to use your siege weapon you should learn how to defend them. And there is nothing easier to defender when one has already spent his high amounts of money to build an outpost, build towers and upgrade them.

I thought you meant by this that it is easy to defend siege weapons if you are at your outpost with 3 upgraded towers. If you were at your outpost with towers, you wouldn't be near the base and therefore wouldn't be able to siege anyway. Maybe i misunderstood what you meant.

I mean if you want to use your siege weapons against towers you should know how to defend them I didn't mean outpost with siege weapons. You asked to me that should we sit at our outpost throughout the hole game so I answered that question. As I talking about outposts there is no base siegeing involved.

Zitat
I'm not saying we should not have sieging, I'm saying we should make sieging more interesting and dynamic (which the team aims to do! - partly by nerfing towers).

I agree.

Zitat
Hope you have a nice weekend too! :D

 :D

Finally, we are also supporting to changes in towers like ability to equip with ally forces. You didn't comment on this again. :) Really I would like to see some.

Thanks for reading.

Have a nice week. And don't forget to comment.

Peace.

« Letzte Änderung: 2. Aug 2017, 01:07 von ElessarTelcontar »
"Be it a rock or a grain of sand, in water they sink as the same."

TheDarkOne

  • Thain des Auenlandes
  • *
  • Beiträge: 41
  • Ancient evil. Endangered species.
Re: General Balance Discussion
« Antwort #115 am: 2. Aug 2017, 15:09 »
Catapult battles erupt when both players possess long range siege weapons in order to crush the opponent. Sometimes quite a natural response to seeing a catapult defending an enemy's army would be doing the same to balance the situation and take a less risk. And attacking a catapult with your own catapult is too 100% natural reaction when a time is right, cause it can leave an enemy without a powerful weapon to threaten your outpost or a base - destroying an enemy siege weapon gives you time. The exact problem is the whole thing itself. It's nasty and sometimes excruciating to bear witness to such a situation. Such catapult battles happen when players face a lack of available harassment opportunities like sending a cavalry to intercept a catapult or summoning eagles and so on...

The winner takes all and moves to the loser's base where the final stand will happen. However the same extremely boring catapult battle will take place. If the next patch surely does amplify the wall catapults damage output against ordinary siege weapons, it may not solve the problem because building a wall of upgraded Gondor catapults will be even more impenetrable. This counts for every single siege weapon of close combat too.

Such games are not even challenging but just mere prolonging and stretching of time. I'm glad Goodfella has tons of evidence, more importantly the YouTube content to supply us with a proof. The problem here is that it seems we can't totally agree upon any kind of solid decision to change anything. Towers is something required but becoming strangely too strong in late games, catapults are essential but their reach extends far above just structures.

One of the ways out could be watching closely on more games, especially played between high ranked players, pros. Only then under the overwhelming pressure of evidence we can finally all come up with a fair conclusion and after stopping neglecting each other's points. Seeing is believing. And Goodfella makes it happen.

Goodfella

  • Gastwirt zu Bree
  • **
  • Beiträge: 115
  • *Insert something cool here*
Re: General Balance Discussion
« Antwort #116 am: 2. Aug 2017, 16:21 »
A summary (kind of) and Clarification (hopefully) of my thoughts on this topic xD

I am NOT saying that building an early outpost and getting towers on it is a GOOD IDEA.

Also, I'm NOT saying building towers all over your base early-on is a GOOD IDEA.

In fact, in my opinion it is almost always a BAD IDEA to go for towers on outposts OR camps/castles early on.

I have made a video on outpost rushing and why i think it is not a good tactic - despite the power of towers. It is a static defence that is only good if your opponent does not effectively counter it.

So how DO you efficiently counter it? You SHOULD imo be able to move in with your superior army and simply destroy it, because as Elessar said, you can use the money your opponent invested in the outpost on your army units.

You CAN still do this (attack with units) in some situations - depending on a number of factors including: balance of power, timing, positioning of your army etc.

However, unfortunately, if your enemy manages to get some towers up on that thing, you basically have to avoid it for the foreseeable future.

In this situation the correct counter is to use your superior army to gain the outside economy buildings.

Once you have a better eco, you can prepare to attack the outpost.

This outpost has sat there since it was built - a mini-fortress on the field that cannot be approach by the enemy - thereby blocking off some routes of attack. The degree to which an outpost blocks-off routes of attack depends on its position on the map. some people hate the map FOI2 because it has a central outpost (*cough* Elendil *cough*).

Nevertheless, let's imagine you've played the prefect game and countered the outpost:

You've played well, you've got map control and won all the outside eco buildings. You're winning! You've proved that the outpost rush is a mistake.

You've got loads of #money because you got all dem outside farms. You've invested all dat ca$h in your army: You've got upgraded troops, some of which are elite/heroic and you've got a few heroes. Great!

So, how do you kill that outpost-thing?

Even with your late-game army, you might Still not want to go anywhere near that death trap of towers*.

So, (for the most part) you do what any sane person does: build a few catas, sit-back out of range of the towers and bomb the sh*t out of it.

Once that is dead, you can move to the enemy base.

Now, because your opponent has made an outpost with towers, he's probably a scum-bag. So like all scum-bags he's built his fort full of towers and has made a sh*t-tone of catapults.

Now, how do you beat that base? It's rinse and repeat for the outpost - sit back with catapults and bomb the base. All the time making sure your catapults aren't being killed by the enemy (who is throwing everything he can at them). You'll inevitably lose a lot so you gotta keep spamming em'.


YOU'RE GOING TO WIN.

In fact, you should ALWAYS win against this play-style. Wasting so much money on all those static defences is a BAD IDEA. Towers DON'T win you the game. Spending all that money on them SHOULD LOSE you the game!

The problem is not that towers are so good they win you the game.**

The problem is that towers FORCE the enemy to get catapults - and only catapults - to siege from a distance.

Seriously, what else can you do against all those towers? Your units can't get Near them.

You MIGHT be able to kill an outpost with 1-2 towers if you're army is so much stronger than your enemy, but why risk it?

Attacking bases? There's no debate. ONLY catapults will work when lots of towers come up. Every other siegeing technique goes out the window.

You can TRY to send a few rams at the fort, but your enemy can easily attack them with his units; you can't defend them with your units, they will be in range of the towers!


THAT is the problem with towers - they force you to sit out of range of the towers with catapults. What's more, the defender can easily counter this technique by focusing down your catapults.

So, we battle our catapults for 20 mins, while anyone who is watching falls asleep.

It speaks volumes when Elendil says

I won't touch on the siege battle stuff because I usually ragequit if somebody does that

That is the issue with sieging! It's boring af and fustrating atm.

How can it be that you win the battle for the map through good macro and micro, then you lose because you literally don't want to siege the enemy?

THAT'S why sieging needs to be rebalanced.

My analysis is simply that:

Extremely strong towers are making sieging limited to catapult battles, and that is no fun!

There's just a few more things I've got to say about this (thank god):

Previously i've been talking about some pretty bad tactics on the part of the tower-spammer. No good player would mindlessly spam towers and think they will win the game.

However, you can easily play a good game, with decent, sound tactics: focusing on building a strong economy and army and fighting for map control. Them, lose the battle for map control and STILL build all your towers in the base and force a siege. Once again, towers = catapult only siegeing.

So a good player (if he wants) can force catapult battling in every game! The player Dmitry ALMOST NEVER resigns, he fights until the last minute. You're therefore forced to siege him in almost every game.

Most players will resign after the map control is lost and therefore sieging is often not seen in online multiplayer games with good players.

But if a good player WANTS to make it difficult for you at the end of the game, you can't stop him, unless you launch an extremely risky base rush on him.

His inside economy will be strong, because he is a good player with good macro. He can therefore afford to fill his base with towers and make some catapults. What's more, you can't attack his inside eco unless you use catas of your own.

The final point is that so far I've talked about towers being a kind of 'annoying-but-pretty-useless' tactic. However, that's not rly the case in many situations. Sometimes they CAN win you the game, it just depends on the situation (see footnotes)

Also, towers are INCREDIBLE at defending attacks from units. A few (extremely cheap) towers on a mordor or isen base can instantly stop harassment of your inside economy. You're therefore relatively free to build a very strong inside eco.

But that is what towers are for! You need them to stop that constant harassment (especially from huge clumps - that surround buildings with an ungodly number of units (#OrcClumps))
 
In my opinion, THIS is what the debate should centre around:

'How strong do towers need to be to sufficiently defend against unstoppable harassment but still encourage dynamic siegeing?'

We need to think about whether harassment of inside eco is such a bad thing and to what degree it should be viable. And how to balance factions with no walls vs those with walls when thinking about inside-eco harassment. It is nice to see the team using ALTERNATIVES to towers, like warg sentries. Clearly, there's more interesting ways of re-balancing towers than just a simple dmg nerf.

However, I think the question should NOT be 'Should towers have a damage nerf?'

I think the question should be 'HOW MUCH of a damage nerf should towers get?'

It sounds like the team knows about this issue and IS nerfing tower damage in 4.5.

I therefore hope these posts aren't redundant.

If nothing else, I hope they convince some people who are unsure/unhappy about sigeing getting a re-balance that it is 100% needed to improve the gameplay.

I also hope that, if tower damage isn't such a big consideration of the team, that they'll read this and agree with me that the number 1 way to free up alternative siegeing techniques (other than catapult battles) is a VERY BIG nerf to tower damage

Thanks again for reading  :)

Footnotes (Follow the '*') (a.k.a the complications i left-out to keep it simple(ish)):

*There are, of course exceptions - LG erebor can rek buildings nice and quick and luckily all buildings on an outpost are in a small area - so the whole thing goes down pretty quick. You just better hope your enemy hasn't got a big army of his own. If he does, you can still be in trouble when getting hit by towers at the same time. Mostly, it's not a risk worth taking - just get catapults to be on the safe side! Why risk losing your army when you're winning so much?
So yeah, outposts can sometimes be destroyed with units - mainly because all the buildings are close together and there aren't THAT many towers. BASES on the other hand? Forget it! You can be Eru himself and you'll still get rekt by all dem f*cking towers!!! Eru's gonna have to visit the siege works :/.

** Once, again there can be exceptions - getting mirkwood up with towers can win you the game if the balance of power before-hand is quite even. Angmar citadel towers too.  All thanks to the additional benefits these outposts provide, which can tip the balance of power in your favour.
The map you play on can also play a big role: getting an outpost at the top of the 3v3 map 'Rhun' with a forward facing tower can change the game a huge amount, just as long as the attacking team doesn't team-up on that outpost it will be extreamly difficult to destroy (but even if they DO - it will leave other areas of the map vulnerable for a counter push!). Again it's (mostly) catapults-only in a 1v1 situations at the top of the map. So you have to sacrifice one of your (very-few, it's a camp map!) building plots for a siege works, then upgrade it all the way and get out 1-2 catas - and upgrading them will help. It gets expensive! In the mean-time your opponent is reaping the rewards of the outpost. Now imagine, you can get teamed up on by the enemy army and lose all your catapults to powers, cavalry, denethor etc. etc. etc. OMG it is so frustrating! The best thing to do sometimes is say: 'f*ck it' you can have the outpost I'll just find something else to do on the map'. You just have to be prepared for constant harassment attacks coming from that outpost. Ok, salt overload over!

@Elessar

It sounds to me like you're not against a tower damage nerf, which is good news imo!

It also sounds like you're frustrated with catapults destroying towers from a distance - which is basically catapult battles with no fighting back!

I have no problem with towers having the same health as they do now.

I would MUCH rather they have the same health but much lower damage!

If they lowered the health but kept damage the same, you'd have to run around the base killing all the towers and re-killing them when they're rebuilt like a headless chicken :p

If they instead significantly reduce the damage of towers, you will still be concerned about them, but you will at least be able to do some kind of significant damage with units before they get destroyed. Once again, also allowing for different siege techniques.

I agree with your points about spending way too much on towers being a mistake (only mordor/isen are exceptions to this with their cheap towers imo).

It also sounds like you would like to see siegeing being more dynamic (and who doesn't!). All i'm saying is nerfing tower damage is the key to this!

I will have to read and think about your point on equipping towers with units - I'll make a post on that thread about when I have!

Thanks for helping me clarify some of my own arguments on this topic! :D

P.S.
Oops i nearly forgot to shout out @Selfie1999AD for being the first one to raise this point and give detailed info on some of the stats. Hopefully the evidence from those posts and the ones from my self - and other regular online players - will convince everyone that towers do too much dmg atm!

But for anyone that disagrees with me feel free to make your own counter-argument.

Robust discussion is the most important thing for balance changes i think!
« Letzte Änderung: 2. Aug 2017, 18:25 von Goodfella »
Euggghhh, I'm dead - Gildor 2017

-DJANGO-

  • Balins Schriftführer
  • **
  • Beiträge: 572
  • I might play Unchained!
Re: General Balance Discussion
« Antwort #117 am: 3. Aug 2017, 18:05 »
Thats quite a huge wall of text for a summary/clarification  [ugly]

However i agree with the points you make. Although i am quite sure that the current problems with towers and catapult battles can be fixed with the upcoming siege overhall, its always nice that such topics are discussed on a larger scale, getting input from the hole community.

Especially the point about inside eco harassment will be interesting, bcs of how strong the LG inside eco will be in 4.5. To what degree it should be viable is definitely a thing we need to check and balance the factions that have walls / no walls.
If im not mistaken, factions with walls like gondor, already have fewer defensive plots than faction without walls.
One goal of the siege overhall is to define the counter system of siege weapons / defensive structures better. Tower Damage Nerf and less tower health are changes that are very likely to be implemented in 4.5 and will make different ways to siege possible. The new citadell passive upgrade, will also help to destroy an enemy base quicker, once the citadell is taken down, as well has the effect to motivate the player to siege differently.

- THE EAGLES ARE COMING -

Goodfella

  • Gastwirt zu Bree
  • **
  • Beiträge: 115
  • *Insert something cool here*
Re: General Balance Discussion
« Antwort #118 am: 24. Aug 2017, 21:17 »
Hi again everyone,

I was slightly wrong on my conclusions about towers:

I have recently found a second way to overcome the extreme power of towers (i.e. avoiding catapult battles) and it goes something like this:

Win the battle for map control and get ready to siege. You should've forced your enemy's army into his base through fear of death :p

Now get one or both outposts - you can build a few towers on that thing and camp around it to ensure your units stay safe.

Now eco-upgrade EVERYTHING - so double production everywhere and as many eco buildings you can build.

Consider getting a second barracks + stables + potentially 2 siege works

(You might guess where this is going :p)

Attack your enemy's base, and focus the farms 1st. Kill as many farms as you can with 1800 CP worth of fully-upgraded troops.

Most/ all of them will die to the towers and your enemy's army.

But alas, the whole time you've been spamming from every production building you have, and you've soon rebuilt your army, have more siege and can upgrade it all thanks to your HUGE booming economy.

Now rinse and repeat until you've pulled the eco-rug from under your enemy.

All these kamikaze attacks on his inside eco will leave him with very little income and you can start to overwhelm him and switch your attacks to the citadel/ unit production buildings.

You can also now make better use of catapults because he does not have the eco to keep producing his own.


Clearly, this works WAY better vs factions with no walls. Vs Gondor it is very difficult(/ impossible) if they have turtled and so you have to deal with denethor in cata-battles.

This tactic is a lot more risky than cata-battles as you're accepting that your gonna lose most or all of your army in exchange for enemy eco.



But it's an alternative, which is nice.

However, this could be considered equally as strange/ annoying as catapult-battles. I know a lot of players will not be willing to destroy their sexy army for the sake of winning the game a little quicker!

What's more, there is a big time-gap between winning the map and launching these attacks - while you do an eco-boom - which is boring for everyone.

In fact, i don't like this eco-boom feature in general. It allows the winning player to get into such a dominant position that there is no hope of a comeback from the defending player, no matter how bad the micro is from the attacker - he's just always gonna be able to afford more stuff!

I'm in favour of having some kind of inflation, whereby you can't steam-roll your eco in this way. Without inflation, matches can be decided in the early game and then both players simply wait, either to kill the enemy or be killed, depending on if they won or lost the early-game.

That point is for another time but I think/ hope there may be some changes to eco coming in the near future - although nothing to drastic (yet  [uglybunti])



It's difficult to know what changes like this will do to the game, and opinions change on the dynamics of a game (like mine - from last post to this one :P)

Either way, I am still 100% in favour of reducing (by quite-a-bit) the damage of towers - to improve the quality and enjoy-ability of siegeng

Ok thanks Bye!
Euggghhh, I'm dead - Gildor 2017

Max_Power

  • Edain Unterstützer
  • Thain des Auenlandes
  • ***
  • Beiträge: 32
Re: General Balance Discussion
« Antwort #119 am: 15. Apr 2019, 00:15 »
Hi everyone!

Following some Discord debates about balance, I noticed how little of the issues discussed there are actually being posted in the balance forums here (specially in the english ones), so I decided to take a first step and make this post  :) I hope this serves as a starting point to discuss balance and improve the competitive experience even more :) I would like to adress some general ideas, see what other players think, and make specific posts about each issue when needed.

Balance is a difficult subject, as it needs a lot of testing by high-skilled players to determine if something is really over/underpowered, and how it should be dealt with. The ideal balance itself and the definition of "overpowered" are in themselves open to debate. Also, there are different reasons of why something is unbalanced. Maybe it lacks a counter, or rewards low-skill playing, or simply performs too well for its cost. Also the solution isn't as easy: sometimes a simple armor/damage nerf is not enough, or causes other imbalances. As a simple example, we can make cav weaker by strenghtening its counter, pikes, without actually changing the stats of the cav  xD.
So I think we should be careful, try to support our ideas with testing, reasoning and evidence, and propose creative and well-crafted ideas to bring balance to Edain  :D

So for now, I will present some of the issues that myself and other players have talked about, in order to hear what everyone thinks and hopefully achieve some conclusions. Plase take into account that I talk from the perspective of Edain 4.4.1 with Megafix 1.2/1.3, as it is the most played in competitive games. I know that 4.5 attempts to solve some of the issues here described, and introduces new gameplay features, but I haven't played it and am unable to judge. So...

-The first problem to take into consideration is faction imbalances. Right now, some factions decide the outcome of the match more than the skill of the players involved. I'm specially talking of Lothlorien, Isengard, and the three Dwarven factions. I will write and link a specific post about each faction in the corresponding thread.
-Lothlorien: Right now, Lorien combines a very strong eco in base with very fast producing citadel (once the ghaladrim quarters are upgraded). That allows them to spam good units in large numbers, and later in the game, heros and upgrades. In my opinion, that strong eco allows the player to play worse (for example losing heros, not microing properly, losing map control, etc.) without significative negative impact on the game.
-Isengard: As Lorien, Isengard has a very strong inside economy, combined with very good options in early, middle and late game. In most matches, Isengard can get heros, upgrades and bigger armies faster than their enemies because they just get more income.
-Dwarves: Standard dwarven troops have very good base stats (armor and damage), at the cost of speed (except Ered Luin). The problem lies in the combination of mines, which help to mantain map control (almost instant transfer of units through the map allows to defend any mine very quickly), battlewaggons (specially Ered Luin and Erebor ones, since they can shoot whilst moving, targeting pikes, which cannot run away because have lower speed, and trampling the rest once the pikes are down) and upgrades on standard troops. The standard troops are not expensive but once upgraded deal a lot of damage to everything (specially Erebor against structures). Ered Luin gets even more advantage thanks to their speed.
-Angmar: I would like to speak also of Angmar because their early-mid game is very weak in most matchups. Thralls die very easily and wolves are a good support unit thanks to their speed, but their low damage to buildings doesnt make them suitable for creeping or destroying enemy buildings. Angmar elite troops are very good but expensive and thus not possible to use until late mid-game.

In addition to the inherent advantage that some factions have, other game features can break the balance and make very difficult or impossible to win the game:

-Heros: While single heros aren't a problem, when a player spams them (let's say, gets 2/3 or more heros), combined with a small-medium army, it is very difficult to counter, as the heros give a lot of strenght to their army (with abilities plus their normal attack). Targeting them with units is not useful unless isolated (you can't deal enough damage in enough time), so the only option is having high damage units than can target them. Since at the moment there are not a lot of them (beorns in human form being an example), the best option is to go for heros of your own, since one hero-killer hero will die to the enemy hero spam. This way, hero spamming is almost forced and becomes the most rewarding meta-strategy. Also, the player who goes first for heros has an advantage, since he can get more of them earlier and possibly level them up faster. A possible workaround would be to increase the CP cost of all heros, thus making the player decide to get a big army or a smaller army combined with heros, and/or giving each faction anti-hero units.

-Outposts: Although early outposts can be risky, once in mid-game outposts can give huge income (equivalent to 3-4 farms at least) to the player, also a strong hold on the map (very prominent in Fords of Isen 2, for example) which traduces in even more map control (of the plots nearest to the outpost) and prevents enemy flanking manouvers. In some cases, the outpost can give enough advantage to recover from poor map control thanks to said advantage. Some problematic outposts even in early game are Dunedain outpost, Dale, etc, which generate a lot of resources, are quite cheap and allow troop regeneration, also have leadership, making up for their cost very quickly. We could say that the enemy player can use the resources not spent on the outpost on countering it (via more units and/or siege) but in many cases the outpost gives enough benefits to allow the defending army to survive the attack. At the same time, the longer the outpost stands, the more benefits it gives and pays for itself, narrowing the gap between the two players eco and army, thus making the outpost more defendable.

-Base Rushing: Now that arrow towers have been nerfed, Mordor and Isengard are very vulnerable to base rushes, as their arrow towers are not powerful enough to stop a quick attack. Isengard is a very strong faction so that could compensate for that weakness, but Mordor in early game is very set back from base rushes. Also, constructing defensive structures as a "preventive counter"  to a base rush is detrimental to that player economy. In any case,  I can't find a way where a player can defend from a base rush since the enemy army can deal damage to the resource buildings quicker than you can harm the attacking army enough to compensate for the loss. If confronted with a superior defence, the attacking army can leave the enemy base after destroying a building or two before suffering significative damage.

-Archer clumps (specially in team games and sometimes 1v1 late game). Archers are very good anti-infantry (thats their role, after all). But a clump of archers with one or two pikes inside to protect from cav, is very strong, specially once they get upgrades. Once this happens, the player with the clump just has to sit in range of the enemy, stop, and let the archers shoot. If enemy army engages, will lose half the army before reaching the clump. Cav is not useful as counter since the archers can target them and some pikes inside are enough to protect the archers. And if the enemy retreats, your clump quickly destroys the buildings (base included), no siege needed  [ugly]. Why upgraded archers should do so much damage to buildings?

-Cavalry (specially Gondor Knights): once upgraded they can trample pikes without suffering many loses, specially if enemy pikes are lower in number (than the cav) or not upgraded. So you have to almost outnumber the cav with pikes in order to defend properly, which now renders your army weaker because pikes are more vulnerable to archers and swordsman. In some extreme cases, cav can actually kill pikes in a 1v1 scenario, if microed well. In regards to map control, cavalry stops enemy splitting (as a small force of 1-2 swords and a pike, for example, will die to 4 good cav units, and cav can be quickly at any point of the map). Also allows to the cav owner player to split less, as the cav enough will win the battle for the map control. Factions with unupgradable or weak pikes (mordor for example) will suffer the most.
Please let us know what you think, from your experience, and feel free to discuss any point that I made. The main goal of this post is to start a public talk about balance (as there have been a lot in internal forums and discord servers) and provide more insight into the intrincate equilibrium that makes this game a truly fun and enjoyable experience.
Thanks!!
MaxPower
« Letzte Änderung: 20. Apr 2019, 00:23 von Max_Power »