Making dragons suffer revenge damage

[Le Sournois]

Hello Edain team,

My suggestion here woul concern Smaug and dragons, but also potentially Fellbeasts (I think eagles are good as they are as a temporary units).

Flying units are hard to balance, and I don't know if it could be an option to think their attack move a bit more like what cavalry does, that means suffering revenge damage as they trample.

For flying units, it would be certainely impossible to perform an adequate revenge damage type, but why not simply make them suffer a fixed standard amount of damage at each attack they perform against fearless ennemies ?

The point is this : making them resistant to archers in order not to be destroyed by a few arrow volleys, but deter them from destroying entire armies without cost if the ennemy has no archers.

Dragons would have to be used carefully in that way, the player would have to ensure each strike is well adjusted and deal massive amount of damage to be worth the  health it loses at each one of these.

Archers would still be the only way to finish them but would not be an ultimate weapon against them nonetheless (as it already is more or less but with such a system it could be buffed even further).

When dragon health would go under a certain limit, when it is close to dying, it would turn so much fierce that it could ignore that fixed damage at each strike and could be only finished by arrows, or specific powers, or other flying units.

For the moment, I feel that Smaug and dragons are a bit overpowered.

[Elendils Cousin 3. Grades]

While your suggestion sounds nice at first, I firmly believe that it only leads to annoying gameplay. Dragons should feel powerful. Having to withdraw them from enemies like swordsmen or cavalry, simply because they would literally kill themselves with their next attack, is the opposite of that. Or imagine your dragons dying because you forgot to stop them from attacking a building - you're busy doing something else like recruiting more soldiers, and then suddenly your expensive hero died even though there were no enemies around at all.
If you feel that flyers are too powerful in general or that Smaug is too powerful in particular, we can adjust armor and/or health pool relatively easily. If you're up against MM, you know that they can recruit flyers sooner or later, so you can always build archers to prepare for that - just as you would build spearmen against Rohan to prepare for their cavalry.

[Le Sournois]

Thanks first for the answer and the explanation.

I just want to make my point more clear because it was just a idea, vaguely described at first, and I cannot desagree to what you say about the building, but that wasn't my point :

Revenge damage if applied should only occur when attacking "fearless units" as I mentionned, and I should add in this second post, that this could only occur when attacking swordsmen or pikes excluding all strike done against building, archers or cavalry exclusively.

This is it, when a strike damage even one (maybe more,  maybe only if 4 or 5 units are hit at least) unit of swordsmen or pikemen, the revenge damage would affect Smaug, or dragons or Fellbeast (which could have way to inspire fear to avoid that).

I don't know however if this is technically possible to apply this damage only if those categories of units are attacked. Maybe it is not..

But then, it would not be as horrible as you mentionned because Smaug could not die just from attacking a building with no ennemies around it. If any other units would attack swordsmen or pikemen, it should take care and not be forgotten about, even if it is Gandalf, who cost also 4000.

The idea is to insert a more extensive gameplay for flying units because having only one weakness (archers) mean that you will probably give those counter a good inherent strenght to kill flying units easily enough. Insert more damage types and then it is easier to make this archer weakness less "weak"


Finally, I wanted to share an alternative to balance flying units, it is simply reducing the damage when the unit is hurt and its hit point below a certain threshold.

Thanks once more for having studied the question. Have a good week.

[Halbarad]

I also think that this would be a great addition to the gameplay and would also logically fit in really well. Right now flying units eigther do a lot of damage because the enemy has nothing/ not enough to counter them or they die relativly fast. Like when the enemies archers are down, even with 1 hp flying units can go down without a pause on the enemies army. While logically, a pikeman or a swordsmen should be able to defend him from close combat attacks from above. So I think it wouldn't be that bad if an eagle would suffer a lot of revenge damage when flying right into a clump of pikes (with their weapons raised into the sky). Similar to cavalry which also dies when one bataillon tries to single handly crush a huge clump of swordsman.
Last time I asked about implementing that I was told, that a system like crush revenge from cavalry would be possible but time-consuming in programming because you would need to design such a crush revenge system for every unit in the game.

I'm of course still strongly supporting the idea and still hope that it would find its way into the mod evetually.

[Le Sournois]

In my opinion, making an all revamped system with individual stats for revenge damage rather than making a simple standard fixed revenge damage against flying units would be a mistake that wouldn't help balancing the system at all.

What I would like to see with flying units are 2 things :

-at the beggining of the game, it should not be invulnerable and be able to win the game on its own, that's why the revenge damage from infantry would help to complement archer damage in order to repel them

-at the mid and endgame, flying units should be able to do stuff, which they would never be able to do if revenge damage is increased because troops are stronger and more well equipped.

By mid game, the elemental damage from arrows do far enough more damage to flying units, no need to add any more penalties.

When suffering revenge damage, flying units should have no care of forged blades, and no care of whether it's attacking basic units or heroic units, it should not suffer more revenge damage than in the beggining of the game, otherwise flynig units will be garbish, and there I totally agree with Elendil's Cousin when he says that dragons should feel powerful.

If the revenge damage is a fixed standard damage, flying units will be especially good against fully-upgraded troops because it will not suffer more damage than if it attacked a basic unit, and then the feel of power will not be negated in then endgame.

Revenge damage should not destroy flying units, it should only work as a complement to archer damage at the begginning of the game, but it should not by any way get more powerful over time.

That is why if revenge damage is chosen to be implemented, I would advise a simple system with a fixed revenge damage if some conditions are fulfilled (infantry striked, maybe 4 or 5 men of a batallion at least, who don't cover in fear, and maybe revenge damage from heroes also).

The only interest of revenge damage is balance and helping flying units to resist more against archers though not being completely invulnerable from doing so.