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Autor Thema: Healing wells  (Gelesen 2332 mal)

kmogon

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Healing wells
« am: 15. Mär 2020, 18:13 »
Greetings fellow Edainers !

I would like to talk about one of the mechanics present in Edain, which is the healing well, and the fact that it causes some problems.
Gameplay in fashion puts great emphasis on protecting your troops from death, which is associated with reduced power of spellbook abilites, or overall slower gameplay. Because of that there are certain problems occuring with capabilities of wells:


-Economy is slower, thus healing troops has an increased relevance in comparison to 4.4.1

-Banners are more expensive, and for some factions, locked behind other upgrades, which is another reason to prefer wells in current version.

-Heal works even during combat, which allows player to easily defend himself against larger forces without risking anything.

In result any fight near a well gives a huge advantage to the benefited player. In siege scenarios or similar, the defender can heal after every fight, boosting the cost-efficience of his units (it can be exemplified as equivalent to buying new battalions for free, but with higher levels). In other scenarios (outposts, assembly points for Rohan, Lorien blessed trees) the defensive bonus is similar. Wells not only benefit players in too much in defensive gameplay. They highly increase effectiveness of cavalry harrasments, especially with factions like Gondor or Imladris ( who have access to powerfull elite cavalry ). That leads to scenarios when player doesn't care if his cav units got greatly harmed by pikes , as he can quickly heal them up , without major consequences of his mistakes.
In addition, wells are mostly available in bases or outposts, and encourage a campy, clumpy style which helps the defender to survive longer (not necessarly to win the game).


In this case, I wanted to suggest an idea for a possible solution to the above problems, which includes reworking the way in how wells work right now. For this I have prepared two concepts, which are pretty similar , mainly due to simplisity of well mechanic. Nevertheless they serve two different ways of solving above mentioned issues:

1. To deprive wells of the possibility of replenish units - in my opinion, the ability to heal alone is a sufficient reason for someone to build a well, and would not lead significantly to the situations I mentioned above. moreover, the role of a banner carrier  would increase, which as an upgrade is definitely less frequently bought than in the case of the others upgrades.

I might understand that some of you will say that kind of downgrade is too much. In that case I suggest that the wells would have an additional ability:

healing waters - all battalions around the well replenish their units once. This power has cooldown and can be used once per (insert balanced amount of time) .

Thanks to that solution, wells could retain their ability to renew units, without exaggerating the use of this mechanic in an unpleasant way from the gameplay point of view.


2. the well does not heal or renew units around - instead, it has the following ability:

healing waters - all battalions around the well are healed and replenish their units for a short period of time.  The ability has reasonable long cooldown.

Thanks to this idea, the healing properties of the well are preserved. In addition to that,  situations where defending player is just camping near well or fountain and is basicaly untouchable have gone since wells no longer provides passive healing. The power of the active one can be adjusted so wells should be still worth to build to quickly heal smaller wounds.

Overall both concepts can be enhanced with some additional ways of balancing the healing abilities. For example , for factions which require more healing than others there is always an option of adding upgrade do wells which is decrease cooldown of abilities listened above.

Thanks for reading it all, I hope to hear some feedback from you so we could discuss healing wells and come with proper answer.

And great thanks to Max_Power for helping me with this idea  xD

Spartacus_

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Re: Healing wells
« Antwort #1 am: 15. Mär 2020, 20:54 »
"
2. the well does not heal or renew units around - instead, it has the following ability:

healing waters - all battalions around the well are healed and replenish their units for a short period of time.  The ability has reasonable long cooldown."

I like so much this concept. I totally agree with you that atm the healing mechanics need a rework, and this concept could 100% improve the gameplay. Also the solution in the point 1 is always good, since it fit more in the healing's role.
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OakenShield224

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Re: Healing wells
« Antwort #2 am: 15. Mär 2020, 21:08 »
Between the two ideas, I think I prefer the first option. It doesn't go too far and still keeps the nature of the wells without it being too excessive like the second option.

Could another option just be to remove the amount that the wells heal/increase the time between unit replenishment though? I feel like that would be a simpler option

Elendils Cousin 3. Grades

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Re: Healing wells
« Antwort #3 am: 15. Mär 2020, 21:11 »
Healing amount and respawn rate can easily be adjusted. Imladris' Mystic Fountain already heal and replenish at a much slower rate than other wells.
« Letzte Änderung: 15. Mär 2020, 21:18 von Elendils Cousin 3. Grades »

kmogon

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Re: Healing wells
« Antwort #4 am: 15. Mär 2020, 21:17 »
Between the two ideas, I think I prefer the first option. It doesn't go too far and still keeps the nature of the wells without it being too excessive like the second option.

Could another option just be to remove the amount that the wells heal/increase the time between unit replenishment though? I feel like that would be a simpler option

The clue is that constantly healing well is still benefiting player without him loosing or risking anything. Even will longer time between replenishments those are still free units without any interaction form a player.
That's why I would like to see second option more as it forces player to actually take some action in order to heal his troops as well as adding a risk to having a well in a shape of well being destroyed during cooldown.
« Letzte Änderung: 15. Mär 2020, 21:22 von kmogon »

Shadowlord

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Re: Healing wells
« Antwort #5 am: 19. Mär 2020, 00:22 »
I am generally in favor of the second option as well since it adds a form of risk to the healing well mechanic so it's not an automatic go to option. But one concern I do have is, how would cooldown work exactly, I think with the second ability, you could just destroy and rebuild the well as you please to avoid the downside, assumming the new well would have a reset cooldown. Albeit paying more resources, I don't know if you plan to increase the price of the well to counterbalance this.

Your thoughts?

Seleukos I.

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Re: Healing wells
« Antwort #6 am: 25. Mär 2020, 19:22 »
Hello there!
This is a really interesting discussion and I’d like to share some thoughts about healing and regeneration.

I agree with you when you say that healing and wells are a problem right now. As Fabian explained in his post (https://modding-union.com/index.php/topic,31984.msg479010.html#msg479010) wells allow the player to regenerate his army or some units (like cav) after a fight. This makes him loose almost no units while his opponent, who cant’t heal up his forces, needs to invest money in rebuilding his units.

So the question is: How can we balance healing in Edain?

In order to answer this question I think it can be worth looking at other RTS games to see how they deal with healing.
The prime example for a RTS game is StarCraft2. SC2 however has a significant difference to Edain: It uses only single units – you don’t have battalions like in BFME.  This means when you take a fight with, let’s say 15 marines and you loose 10 of them, then these 10 marines are dead. You can’t regenerate them, all you can do is heal up those who survived the fight.
For Edain this would mean that wells only heal wounded soldiers but don’t regenerate fallen members of the battalion.  So if you take a fight with 15 Gondor soldiers and only 5 of them survive you can only heal these 5 men back to full hp, but you can’t regenerate the fallen ones. While that wouldn’t be too bad balance wise (“evil factions” don’t have wells anyway), it would make wells extremely unviable.

But there is another RTS game, even a game using battalion-based units, that is played competitively. This game is Company of Heroes2.  In CoH2 your infantry is made of so called squads with between four and six members and the game also allows the player to regenerate his squads. However, regenerating fallen soldiers costs money!

I think this could be a way to balance wells and regeneration in Edain.

It would just work like Kmogon suggested in his first option:
Wells would only heal the wounded men of the battalions nearby, without regenerating fallen men. However they would also have an active “ability”. At the cost of a certain amount of resources the well would start to regenerate fallen members of the battalions for a short amount of time (e.g. 30 sec). After 30sec you can activate the ability again (by paying money) and so on.
In my opinion it should be cheaper to regenerate a battalion than to buy a new one, or at least it shouldn't be more expensive.  This means the cost needs to be adjusted depending on the faction (one “round” of regeneration should be more expensive for Imladris than for Rohan).

I think this kind of rework for wells would balance them, but they wouldn’t be unviable.


Another important step to balance wells would be the removal of the “in combat healing”. Right now fighting an army near a well (for example a Rohan assembly point) is nearly impossible, since hostile units are constantly healed and regenerated. With removing the in combat healing it would be way easier to counter an offensive assembly point or an outpost with a well. At the same time wells on outposts and assembly points would still be useful. Their ability to heal and regenerate (at the cost of money) units near the front is very powerful. 


Another positive effect of reworking wells would be that banners are more attractive. When regenerating units at a well costs money, banners will be more efficient in the long run.



Now my question is, first of all, is it even possible to make regenerating units at a well cost money, and second of all, what do you think about the idea?

One last note: In case I’m missing an important detail in my comparison of healing to other games please tell me :D


 best regards,
Seleukos I.

turin.turambar

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Re: Healing wells
« Antwort #7 am: 26. Mär 2020, 09:29 »
Just a suggestion in what Seleukos said, I think it could be less micro intensive to have the "regenerative healing" be an activate / deactivate ability of the well, that would make it cost money as long as it is active.

That way, you wouldn't need to click every 30 seconds should you decide you really want your well to keep on healing.

FG15

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Re: Healing wells
« Antwort #8 am: 26. Mär 2020, 11:32 »
An ability costing money in such a way is not possible.

dgsgomes

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Re: Healing wells
« Antwort #9 am: 27. Mär 2020, 00:10 »
Healing amount and respawn rate can easily be adjusted. Imladris' Mystic Fountain already heal and replenish at a much slower rate than other wells.

Personally, I like how wells function now, but I know that for competitive games it is causing some trouble (I actually use them a lot in PvP), so they probably need a change. Well, I'd stick with what Elendil said, changing healing and replenishing rate (in this case, slightly reducing) would be a more simple way to balance the wells without needing to make them too complex, as I feel they should'nt be (and it could create other balancing issues). With a slower healing/replenishing rate, as long as the enemy player don't play too defensively, the player with the well will not be able to completely heal units before needing to use damaged troops in engagements - and automatically banner upgrades will be more important.

kmogon

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Re: Healing wells
« Antwort #10 am: 27. Mär 2020, 00:36 »
Personally, I like how wells function now, but I know that for competitive games it is causing some trouble (I actually use them a lot in PvP), so they probably need a change. Well, I'd stick with what Elendil said, changing healing and replenishing rate (in this case, slightly reducing) would be a more simple way to balance the wells without needing to make them too complex, as I feel they should'nt be (and it could create other balancing issues). With a slower healing/replenishing rate, as long as the enemy player don't play too defensively, the player with the well will not be able to completely heal units before needing to use damaged troops in engagements - and automatically banner upgrades will be more important.

Problem is that no matter how slow well is healing , it still provides you with free units. And nerfing healing time would probably lead to wells being frustrating and not used at all. What would be good would be to implement similar system to cp increase. So that well have healing button which cost some amount of money each time it's used and it's "recruting" healing object which heals neaby units for some time.
The main problems with wells are that they are neglecting mistakes done by players by healing all wunds done by , for example cav charging into pikes , and helps to creaty too campy positions by placing them on outposts. They also indirectly makes players don't go for single units that ofter as battalions can be replenished. And most of those problems are connected with the fact that wells are constanly healing, and are doing so for free.

AmosVogel

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Re: Healing wells
« Antwort #11 am: 27. Mär 2020, 01:31 »
Zitat
The main problems with wells are that they are neglecting mistakes done by players by healing all wunds done by , for example cav charging into pikes , and helps to creaty too campy positions by placing them on outposts.

Then forbid wells to be built outside, for you are right, this ends into an almost impassable place for the enemy.

Do you remember that the old BFME2 gondor fortress had 'houses of healing'? well, shouldnt also a new building must be created (having that name)? I know the well its a very iconic building, since the very classic BFME, but right now its been discussed the whole concept!

This building could welcome even five battalions at once to heal to full HP, but as the Rohans summon, for Gondor, the quickest you release the battalions, the less they are cured; to get your battalion at its prime, youll need to wait till the end.

This way, the healing abilities stay, but you cant use those troops in the while!

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turin.turambar

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Re: Healing wells
« Antwort #12 am: 27. Mär 2020, 09:20 »
Thank you for answer and sad you can't make it this way FG15.

Fully supporting the removal / replacement of wells with a house of healing building, where you could "store units" so they get health back. It would probably be a garrison building AND you could even improve it to increase healing speed and/or capacity. Down for that idea for my part at least.

tolgayurdal

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Re: Healing wells
« Antwort #13 am: 29. Mär 2020, 18:13 »
Healing wells seems to take more time than expected. 'Healing in combat' sounds does not work. Maybe it is better to remove it completely for a long time. The opposite would be a heavy burden for ET in short terms (i don't prefer less than %100 health of units).

Agreed turin and Amos said.

Have good fortune in your way.