William Blake
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Posts posted by William Blake
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31 minutes ago, Ivory Knight said:
When you disband your units go into mercenaries or rebel groups, sounds like an amazing and cool idea!!! Absolutely approve.
So you want me to slain my units instead of disband so they won't create a rebel army in my provinces?
40 minutes ago, Ivory Knight said:I very very very much disagree with having XP as a resource needed to upgrade your units.
Yeah, it should not be required, but it probably would be better if you spend XP while converting unit type, such that if you have 3 start unit it will lose a star or a level. Just to avoid training 5 star peasants and converting them to a 5 star feudal knights out of a blue.
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Yes, it would be very beneficial to keep existing units who survived battles because you can later upgrade them. I totally agree.
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In terms of upgrade path for units in general - yes, I agree. The implementation itself... I don't know.
It appears that the main barrier to better units are buildings which are very expensive compared to a unit cost. As a result it could be a very long time before next unit tier gets available. Most of your peasants won't live long enough probably.
Second, if the current approach of "peasants are cheap but triple population cost" stays. It would be counter productive to train peasants up instead of 3 new units.
Third, I'm not sure I want to lock into a specific unit type, it could be the case what I had veteran spears for a long time, but now I want them to be cavalry. So I'm not sure if we need to follow a path by unit type since it is dramatically narrower to progress.
Fourth, I have an issue of runaway increasing advantages:
- One player happens to get some wins and have more experienced unit
- Other players do not
- First player has increasing advantage by being able to convert experienced units to even better tier units
- With that first player is able to win more battles against non experienced enemy and upgrade and train even more
- Other players are getting more and more behind
It is especially true from Marshal skills perspective, but marshals are mortal, they lose all skills and exp over time. But units are not, potentially an veteran unit an go though all the game from day one and get only stronger and stronger never to die. I'm not sure how to deal with that if experience and veterancy can synergize with unit upgrades. I mean I've started with peasants, they got top veterancy but middle end game they are still just veteran peasants, But with upgrades we are looking at Feudal Knights veterans you know.
PS
For the peasants specifically, the solution I had in mind was "exhaustion mechanics", peasant would be cheap, but they would start to desert over time so you could not keep them in check. They would stay at full strength for a short time but then start deserting from the unit. But it is not very relevant to unit upgrades discussion.
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43 minutes ago, Ivory Knight said:
. Yes you may be able to squeeze out a unit more or two, but that doesnt equal huge army spam.
Well, depends on your perspective, but for instance:
at a very start of a game from video you can make only peasants but your city is 4 out of max 11 population. And this is practically as basic a city can go with very little upgrades and buildings. Which is easily a full army of 8 units other than peasants, each non peasant unit is 1 population. Even a +6 units out of the blue will be more than 50% of an marshal army, so in my mind it would shift an outcome of a battle for sure.
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5 minutes ago, Ivory Knight said:
More then 1 way to skin a cat.
If you are about to lose a province you will use all available manpower to build up an army all you can. As I said in a cost analysis it appears that cost of units is negligible compared to cost of buildings, and if you lose a province it would be better to use up all people resources so enemy would have less people in captured province. So the only reasonable defensive play is to spend all possible men and gold for maximum amount of units you can possibly fit.
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6 minutes ago, Ivory Knight said:
. If anything it just adds strategic planning to the game of when you should recruit and not. Also I state again that the point is to prevent army spam.
In a context of multiplayer it is somewhat dangerous to add time delays, it can make the game overall too slow and require too much time for the game state to progress. Just saying.
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I would hold my opinion on an UI and visuals as it is obviously work in progress. Some icons are clearly placeholders, not to mention green placeholder stabs. It is also hard to say about real quality as we look at a video played over a live stream so amount of resizing and compression is significant.
For the navigation and naval parts of the game I don't think we know anything about it at all.
For dynamic line of sights and fog of war I doubt they want to go overly hardcore on that. Most likely you will be able to see everything in your province and something in any province next to you, but a dynamic cumulative fog of war based on settlements and marshal units and different bonuses on specific unit types in an army... I doubt that.
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8 minutes ago, Ivory Knight said:
"ALL battles would have no player input." I think you need to be more specific with that statement. Cause things that happen outside of the battle specifically can be very interesting and might give enough depth to satisfy players in multiplayer (consider battle engagements in EU4 where you tehcnically have no mechanic to do other then retreat once a battle starts, but before the battle you can do soooo many different things to increase your odds of winning that battle).
Well sure, I can give you a very concrete example.
Lets say we play against each other, start of the game, I have 3 provinces, you have 3 provinces. I build 8 peasants 1 marshal you build 8 peasants 1 marshal. We go into a battle on autoresolve. Tell me who should win and why? Some autoresolve magic happens, but players have no control really. If we do that 10 times in a row with variable results 50 - 50 win loss rate do you know why or what you are a player could do to change that?
Let's say we start building some units. You go with spearmen for instance. And I have archers. If it was RTS battle you will charge me and it would be right play. Or you could stand your ground and take my arrows and it would be a bad play. Now in autoresolve, how do you know what autoresolve would do? Could you change that?
Let's say we have multiple unit types each, if you were playing RTS in a singleplayer you would not charge your cavalry on my spears and wait for my cavalry to crush your archers. But autoresolve would do something and now "you have lost" and I "have won", As a player do you even know what happened? Was there too little cavalry on your side? Was there too many archers on my side? You have no idea, so you have no idea how to fix that next time. If you had any control during a battle you could at least try to direct your army in a direction you might think is better or next time you would try another way.
Lets say we are playing multiplier 2 on 2. And your ally is coming to help you, but he needs time. Can you engage in a battle and hold, just hold to gain time? No. Can I engage in a battle and make it faster disregard my losses but I need to end the battle before your ally comes in, no I cannot do that too. If I find that I need with my army full of spears press your cavalry so my other army with swords will later has less trouble with your cavalry I cannot do that to, because I cannot target your specific units no matter what since autoresolve has no idea about positioning of units or selective targeting.
No matter how you look at it, composition of an army is a long time consuming process, starting from buildings you have up to the chain of events before a battle which lead you to have this specific army in this specific condition. But in terms of appropriate battle orders same army sometime should hold, sometime should push, sometimes need to be cautions. Sometimes you sides are getting flanked, sometimes you center might fail and all other combinations you can think of if you look at RTS battle dynamics, but it is all completely lost in a multiplayer with full autoresolve.
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1 hour ago, Ivory Knight said:
I think you can give trading many effects into diplomacy to give the whole system more depth. For example maybe giving 10 sacks of trade to France gives you +5 relations. So now you may want to trade with poor nations to win their favour.
Yes, potently it could be much more interesting to shift focus of "sack trading" to be more of a political/ally support kind of thing rather than mostly straight exchange for gold (especially silly system of select furthest kingdom away to gain most gold). It should be more valuable to trade with allies you need a good relations with rather than some remote nation you have nothing to share but the total sacks to gold exchange is slightly better.
I also feel a bit awkward that sacks are such a basic resource but it is used for nothing else so there is nothing really to safe or balance with sacks consumption. It almost begs to be used in some upkeep for units or buildings, but at the time I have no good way to make a simple trade system within given bounds.
1 hour ago, Ivory Knight said:If you want to influence the battle, during the battle, lead it your-self after all that’s what its there for. In multiplayer and if you choose to only autoresolve, this obviously means you need to play your game thinking that battles are not going to be the way I beat my opponents, I attain victory by economy, diplomacy or use of spies in that case.
Yes, but only if lead yourself RTS is available, which cannot happen in a multiplayer due to time constrains. If we were to have a combat system which would work for single player autoresolve as well as for multiplayer autoresolve we need to take into account that in a multiplayer with current system ALL battles would have no player input. And we can't have a multiplayer only separated mechanics for battles because it would mean people won't be able to use same understanding and skills with mechanics which are available in their singleplayer game.
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6 hours ago, DoVlaLegend said:
Thats why royal court has 9 slots,not to much micromanaging
If you realistically have 3-4 marshals total. And they will not be constantly in a battle somewhere I honestly don't understand why adding few clicks or orders per battle would be such a burden. You already have to click at least once per battle "Auto", "I'll Lead", "Retreat" choice as it is right now. Why don't you want a bit more control and variety with battle phase orders?
6 hours ago, DoVlaLegend said:No, but I would love the option to queue 2-3 buildings.
Yes, at a mid late game when you have resources and many provinces queue for the building order would be very nice.
6 hours ago, DoVlaLegend said:Like I said, there is no drawback in using only DEF tactic (at least the way you presented).
Well, lets throw it out and think of a better set of manual orders with better bonuses and drawbacks to each, I didn't think it was the best ever system, I though it would be a compromise to give a player control and variety with minimal effort.
5 hours ago, Calliope said:My suggestion was to make it that way : among the six, five are already there (cannot be changed), and one is yet to be built.
Mmm, well ok. That would be five are given and 1 is a choice. Which is around 20% of production volume you can add. Would it change that much to have a whole new mechanics of building a settlement to be added and issues with finding place and changing map and graphics due to "empty place vs settlement which has roads in and out"? It appears to me it would be pretty hard to implement the way they have map manually created with roads and geographical features around it.
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3 minutes ago, frujin said:
. Peasants are not very reliable (notice their negative resilience, the only unit type with such) in the long run
Even if peasant are all pure junk. A player has very little choice. The jump in cost between peasants and anything but peasants is too dramatic. In your own video you have marshals full of peasants. But it won't matter, cause the enemy will have roughly same economic issues and will also have to run peasant armies.
If you start with 3 provinces lets say. You invest in 1 barracks, gives you zero units. You invest in a smith, you start marking 1 (!) non peasant unit type. If you lose that province and these barracks you will never recover. Moreover your 2 other provinces can only make peasants for all that time.
The cost of buildings vs cost of units from these buildings is too dramatic. As I said, it would be worth for an enemy to lose 5 full armies of light spearmen just to take a city with NOTHING but barracks and spearsmiths and still it would be good move. This is too great of a exchange because real city would have other buildings and generates income.
You unit ladder is wrong. You cavalry not only requires extra produced good (trained horses) which is not common everywhere, but it is 10x more cost for a building. It means that spear units as hard counter to cavalry are not required. If so you already take 2 types of units out of 4 from an early game - one is too expensive to start building and the other is hard counter to that class but enemy won't have it because economy won't allow it in a early game.
It is clear for me even from rough numbers that you make top infantry most cost effective while mid tier are least cost effective. This will make first kingdom to top tier units unbeatable on a long run. You can't just compete with that on resource scale. 1 tier units will be too weak for the available max slots and 2nd tire units are too cost inefficient vs top tier.
Yes I do agree that all this is just fun and jokes because I don't know how battle work. But overall even now this make no sense to me.
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On a side note, about the gameplay video impressions:
Knights of Honor Logic:
- If you are light spearmen you eat half of rations (food upkeep) compared to heavy units, but you have most stamina
- You get +2 attack (or +16%) and +1 siege strength (+20%) for double in price with triple defense going from Light to Heavy spearmen
- On top of that you need Heavy Armorsmiths upgrade to build Heavy Spearmen
- Yet, Heavy Infantry for the same buildings as Heavy Spearmen, same food upkeep is DOUBLE attack but LESS defense compared to Heavy Spears for just +30% cost of gold, same cost of food and men.
Yep, as expected - fill all the slots with lowest units you have they are most cost effective. Build better units ONLY if you have no free slots left in the army. Top units are totally better than medium tire for very little extra cost, while jump from cheap to middle tier is very significant.
But it will take you a while to get to that level:
You need 1000 gold for barracks, then you need 1500 for swordsmith, spearsmiths or fletchers = 2500 gold to get to 1 type of non peasant units.
Which is a cost of:
- 47(!) Light Spearmen units at 53 gold each
- 23 Heavy Spearmen units at 105 gold each
- 18 Heavy infantry units at 132 gold each
Let it sink in, a cost of barracks and 1 "smith" to get to FIRST non peasant unit army type is 2 full armies by 8 slots of TOP infantry and 2 units extra. Or almost 6 (six!) full armies of Light spearmen. Which means that loosing a single city with barracks and any smith is worth MORE to the enemy than 5 armies worth of units killed.
Then you might want to look at stables at 10k gold + trade good on top. Well in short, you could probably conquer half of Europe before you can afford any cavalry )
Or look at this:
2 armies full of peasants are same siege strength as 1 army of basic(!) sword infantry. But to get to that 1 army of 8 slavic axemen you need barracks + swordsmiths and 8 x 105 gold unit cost = 1000 + 1500 + 840 = 3340 gold compared to.... NO GOLD, some food and 6 times more men from province. Depending how population grows it might not be a problem at all.
Told you, it will be peasant wars all over again. You first several generations of marshals should never take any cavalry skills, cause you won't see any cavalry anytime soon.
All slots with peasants and this marshal skill:
Go conquer the world!
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1 hour ago, Lighthope said:
Sure, if you don't mind leaving more of your land unprotected. It's a strategic choice to have lots single armies or few multiple armies.
Unprotected land is meaningless in KoH. What enemy can do to my land? Raze some settlements? I can't care less. Start a siege on a city? Well its a lot of time you lock an army into a siege for my blob to come and crush it.
Loosing a single marshal on the other hand is a significant blow. I can't risk a marshal and its units. You would have many provinces which are replaceable and conquerable back, but a loss of a marshal with good units is great blow. Why would I risk it going alone? Safety of my main army worth several provinces I can give away. Because if I have my marshals and my maxed out army I can take all that back.
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2 hours ago, Calliope said:
In order to make it strong and risky at the same time, this choice could not be reverted, unless during building construction time (player's changing his mind) : the player should then make his decision with great care.
Yes, but the problem is with 300 provinces on the map, adding a single settlement to a player province... it is just feels strange on a scale. Well it is actually one of the cornerstone problems of KoH you start very small but expect to grow up too big and it is hard to find a balance of what is meaningful size and what is not.
1 hour ago, illbe85 said:To me it would be more meaningful, and satisfying as a gaming experience, to lost a battle in 60 seconds in which I made one wrong decision, than to win 4/5 battles played in the same time, without putting any effort in them, trying to expand my territory as fast as possible.
Can't agree more. I think there should be less meaningless battles everyone expects to avoid by autoresolve and more direct victories or losses based on a player actions. More importantly in the context of a multiplayer I hate even a possibility that in a military conflict between me and another human is all about AI autoresolve on both sides. I want to learn and master the fight so I would lose a lot but then learn how to win and overcome a human in a combat, see my mistakes to predict other people mistakes. Otherwise I would play single player on my own pace.
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56 minutes ago, Lighthope said:
The possibility of reinforcement is something you need to consider before attacking or defending.
Removing an ability to catch part of enemy army alone is worse. Reinforcing blobbing is bad for gameplay. Ability to reinforce from outside makes all single marshal moves dangerous forcing player to have max force all together, 2 marshals, 3 marshals.. if the limit on reinforce was 5 marshals you just made players move 5 marshals all together because there is no reason to risk weaker armies alone.
I'm puzzled how I cannot get this point across, but apparently I cant. I say make speed variable and food consumption variable to balance army sizes - everyone sees "micromanagement". I say make flanks fight flanks and center flight center to separate units from a big blob to a small groups - people see "micromanagement". I'm trying to find a way to fight strong force with a weak force and maneuver to get gameplay richer and all people see is "too much clicks, lets autoresolve".
All you do with reinforce mechanics in real games we saw in KoH is just increasing engagement radius from 1 marshal area to 2 marshal areas with second just joining in a moment. Ok fine, make AI understand this well enough and you will have never ending AI blobbing you can't win. Everyone wants autoresolve so they don't attend battles, but if AI will jump in with reinforce into these auto battles while you are not looking and defeat you all the time whole forum would cry "make game easier on autoresolve?"
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4 hours ago, frujin said:
It actually does this. And more than this.
Heroes of Might and Magic III with autoresolve battles with AI doing everything most optimal way should have been a lot of fun, I wonder why they didn't add this could be such a great gameplay. They probably could not handle AI I guess.
From a unit pool of 8, an AI will always find most optimal counter to enemy counter. Enemy AI would do the same thing. It practically irrelevant how complex AI is if its fighting itself it will produce same results at the end.
1 hour ago, DoVlaLegend said:I don't want to spend 70% of the playtime around just clicking "attack/defend"
Set default orders once and forget about it. What is the problem if you don't want to attend to you battles - don't. Do you find selecting a marshal which should attack also be a micromanagement issue? Would you like an AI to automatically select the best marshal around and order to move and attack? How about buying units? Is that too much micromanagement too? Would you like an AI to auto build army for you? Where the line is? How about city buildings? Should AI build your cities too so you don't have to spend 70% of your time upgrading provinces?
2 hours ago, Field Marshal said:Why would I want to decide what happens in that semi-autoresolve if current autoresolve can do similar thing too without me even having to bother or think about it?
Well because you are playing a game. In a game you make good moves and bad moves and you can make mistakes or you can make a great play with different results. If I want to play chess then let computer play all my pieces and I'll just move a king that would be pretty lame game of chess in my mind.
2 hours ago, Field Marshal said:Now you might say that player doesn't have to pick command in every phase, it could be (somewhat) randomly decided, but does that make any difference with current autoresolve? I don't think so. The whole idea is kind of a EU IV battle system (which I find to be quite poor) with additional player management required (bruh).
The game supposed to have multiplayer on a global map. Competitive pvp multiplayer. This is a game about medieval kingdoms. Marshals, units and combat are the most extensive part of this game so far. Yet you take away all the control over battles from players. I don't see how it will fly. I don't think my solution with battle orders is a good combat system. I think it is a compromise to start moving with a minimal effort in a direction which is appropriate for the multiplayer medieval war game.
There is already nothing to play in a multiplayer:
- Build orders and upgrades are linear one by one
- Units are linear upgrades with half of the game probably peasant armies running around
- Economy has no play, settlements are given, province resources are fixed, produced goods are too many to care
- Trade is nothing interesting at all... fine "nothing interesting in a multiplayer context"
- Battles are autoresolve
There is nothing to play. What are you going to tell you friend? "Buy this game, I've played multiplayer last night for 3 hours, had a blast with autoresolve battles! I'm going to play it again tonight, will build same 3 buildings in the same order having functionally same 3 provinces but my AI autoresolve battles is so good, it finds counter units to enemy units on itself, I was told, because all I see is just animations and a result. Awesome game!".
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1 hour ago, Lighthope said:
There is a magic number that makes it interesting but not overly complex.
The magic number right now is 8 because UI as shown already has 8 slots for units in multiple places and they reduced armies to 8 slots variable unit size very recently to argue to change that again. Garrisons already have 5 slots so magic number is 8 slots + 5 slots max. The compromise is to make something useful to see if a system is better or worse for least cost of redoing stuff. So magic number right now is 8.
Double marshals... ok fine, you can have 2 marshals 8 + 8 only to attack a city to balance 1 defending marshal 8 slots + 5 slots garrisons, how about that? So 16 slots per side max, can we have that compromise or now you want 24 slots per side?
However it was not the point, the point was that mechanics that allow long battle on a global map to be reinforced from a far away by another full marshal army was bad for single player war and will be lame for multiplayer too. If you have a limit of 2 marshals max unit which is easy to do but there is nothing to counter that, you will always walk around with 2 marshals, there is no reason not to.
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21 minutes ago, Lighthope said:
I'm not. Armies constantly called for reinforcements, and sending an untrained army from a nearby fort/city is something that happened all the time.
If you have 8 units per marshal you need UI space for 8 vs 8 units max to have 1 on 1. If you have reinforcements with 2nd marshal per side you need UI space for 16 vs 16 units. How about 3 per side? Why can you have 2 in a fight and the 3rd have to wait, let the 3rd one in? Now you need 24 vs 24 for 3 vs 3. In fact if you take into account that you have a garrison of 5 units + a single marshal you need 13 vs 8 units on a screen. If 2 marshals can attack a single marshal plus garrison you need 13 vs 16 unit slots on a screen. But if you can reinforce with 2 vs 2 marshals plus a garrison 5 in a city you need 16 vs 21 unit on slots on a screen.
I don't think this complexity adds anything to the game. I think that a battle should be much more meaningful with fewer units of different type and quality countering each other and a set of right orders from players to direct these armies. Reinforcing hordes or cannon fodder with even more untrained urgently summoned cannon fodder does appeal to me in a war game.
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14 minutes ago, Ivory Knight said:
Done problem solved. no more ability for someone to just spawn an army close by when a unfavorable engagement occurs.
It is not about marshal spawn itself. If you have a clear maximum army which is 2 marshals everyone will max it out, because there is no reason not to.
Why 2 marshals? Why a 3rd marshal can't join? Why not five per side? This race can go forever, but you have to have a reasonable limit. If a limit needs to be 1 marshal 1 army per side it would not that different from a limit of 2 per side, but it solves other problems. So I'm willing to throw out battle reinforcement feature which was clearly abused anyway.
14 minutes ago, Ivory Knight said:Also I you seem to indicate both that you dont want long battles because you hate the idea of reinforcement, but then offer having long battles as a solution to the intense micro management that will likely follow with the attack phase system you wish to introduce. Unfortunately you cant have it both ways.
In my design depending on duration of battle phases a battle can be shorter than current autoresolve shown on the video. So in fact I can have more control, more involvement and shorter battles at the same time, I'm not sure what you meant by "can't have it both ways".
Selecting a choice of 3 buttons 3 times per battle is not what I would call a "micromanagement" ) But sure, an default preset order setup can be a good addition, sure. It is just I envisioned more of a action/reaction loop during a battle and it would be hard for me to rely on a preset, but as as default tool, sure, by all means.
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I don't have a problem with any in game mechanics which adds more value to the game at expense of reality. But original mechanics of armies joining ongoing battle had proven (to me at least) a problem.
Because of ability of other marshals to jump into a battle you had:
- A possibility of AI to jump into a battle you lead 1 on 1 or was on autoresolve from places you (player) didn't expect. (outside you vision). Such that a new player had to do something about it.
- A possibility to create a marshal in the nearest city, after battle has started, with zero experience, but give the marshal local units and suddenly reinforce the ongoing battle out of blue
- Yet because you could max out marshals and marshal slots at 2 per side a player could do that 2 marshal max units and make sure that enemy cannot overwhelm
- This lead to "double marshal meta" which was human player having always 2 armies next to each and jumping to any battle with a second marshal to have max unit and morale
- This was 90% of the time so effective against poor AI that you could catch enemy that calculated roughly 50-50 but a player would add second marshal and dominate
- This lead to double marshal junk units blobs able to win against most single AI armies due to size, instead of actual skill or army composition
- This lead to inability for AI to calculate and build armies to stop a roaming 2 marshal player
- This suddenly lead to all the sieges to be very easy because double marshal player would already have all setup for maxed up units/morale and only 1 marshal needed to have a siege units and skill but overall double/maxed manpower
- In fact since a player would always have 2 marshal battles it threw marshal skill balance out of the windows because a player could focus 2 marshals on 2 different skillset and gain both advantages without downsides no matter if it is an open battle or a siege
It also took a lot of good things away:
- There was no way to deal with part of enemy army if there was a second AI marshal nearby, including AI ally or a city which could spawn a marshal
- Such that a player could not possibly hit and run or split and hit weaker armies and win before AI would reinforce with second marshal
- Locking your single/weak army into any battle became a problem because you could not control AI jumping into the battle with a of reinforcement or just because a battle would take too long and you could not move out if another enemy started approaching
- Since the loss of a marshal was very bad a player could not allow such mistakes and had to blob as much as possible making war very boring and limited options
And it was all in a singleplayer context. Now imagine all this multiplied by human players coordinating. Any time you engage with a weak army would pretty much be a bait with much bigger army waiting to join. But once you max out marshal/units it won't be a problem. so everyone will move with double marshal meta only and make zero unsafe moves. Armies will become "any junk I can fill the max slots with" and all this will repeat.
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43 minutes ago, BC Knight said:
How you would be able to handle battles like this in real time if you have 3-4 battles at the same time while you are being invaded and besieged and non-stop getting messages on the left side of the screen and popups.
Well in my mind there is a big difference between a siege and a battle. In my mind sieges should not really be battles, but rather be a stage one - blockade running for a long time, and stage two - an actual battle which is swift. First can wait for a long time in a siege stage before you actually have to have a player input to resolve the actual battle.
Overall for single player yes, it would be the same if a player selects to go into RTS battle - you have to stop the game until you get out of RTS battle.
The reason you see that as a problem is because the original KoH had battles going for a long time while the game runs forward. It was done to leave time for other armies to join an open battle. I personally find this to be a very exploitable mechanics and I don't even want to think about that in a multiplayer context. For me a battle should be short and deceive. I really don't see how another army can march half of a province and join on ongoing battle, nor do I see any value in that, so making battles long running in my mind is a negative thing anyway. A battle is half a day in real life. Your armies move at pace of a snail on foot with gear and provisions, we are talking about 10 km at best for half a day on a road. Why would we want to make long in-battle periods and have same issues we had with original KoH "double marshal maxed slots" meta? I'd rather not.
As to a potential multiplayer context (time does not stop or change pace for all players). Yes it could be a problem if you have been engaged in multiple battles right at the same time. Yet I still can probably see a player managing to jump between ~3 active battles and have enough time to give orders for next battle phase in each. If you want to deal with that problem you might want to increase the duration of a battle making phases longer (Id rather have that as a setting so you can adjusted before a game).
However, no matter what you do, if you aim to have a solution where a player has an input in a battle my approach is significantly more tolerant - player might skip a battle phase and the last order still stands, not ideal but it works. By some great coordination multiple people might attack another player right at the same time to overwhelm him, but due to the different travel times to targets it would be hard to sync, a defending player might see that coming and strike some of the armies first in order to prevent a deadlock. You might also for sure be overwhelmed and some of the battles probably will run at a default battle order, say "def, def, def", but I would say it would be a feature rather than a bug, you can't expect such a coordinated effort from many people at once to be manageable by a single player singlehandedly.
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No, it is much more than a speculation ) For people like Vesso (who used to do bit masking to store some internal model flags a bit more efficiently) if something looks like an integer - it will be an integer and never decimal or god forbid a double.
I can bet food has no fractions. In fact I can almost imagine a heated discussion they had with arguments to make food to be unsigned 8-bit and it won't even go over 255)) But they felt generous and it is unsigned 16.
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8 minutes ago, Ivory Knight said:
Because I do not know how you deduced this from the game play footage??? Yes the units types had associated food upkeeps, we see that in the footage. But how do you know they didnt scale that consumption with how filled that unit is. AKA 50/50 spear man consumed 1 food and 1/50 spear man consumed 0.02food? How do you know thats not what they did? Time Stamp?
If this is a screen of unit to be build
and this is the screen of a unit in an army
It tells me that upkeep is per unit. There are no fraction of food anywhere on the UI, so food is integer value.
If squad size is 60 for a full squad, food upkeep is per unit and unit can be damaged with less than 60 men up to 1/60, but there are no fractions of food and food is on unit level not on army level, it means to me that food upkeep is fixed regardless of current men in a squad. I can also elaborate that most likely any infantry unit is 1 food and any cavalry is 2 food or maybe 3 food. But there are no other logical options left if the food is integer and is on a unit level not on an army level.
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So after my emotional appeal, I’d rather go to a more constructive feedback.
This are the things I would advise to implement or consider.
1) Autoresolve combat
I cannot stress this hard enough, but auto resolve battles cannot suck. Most of the battles in a singleplayer are going to be autoresolve (very very few people can claim they played all battles manually in their original KoH experience) and all of the multiplayer battles have to be autoresolve due to the time constrains. Autoresolve combat has to be appealing and interesting, not mundane, lame and repetitive.
Lets make a first iteration with minor changes. You are set on 8 slot army variable men size per unit. Marshals has 8 slots, garrisons have 5 slots:
Ok good, lets keep it like this.
Now, changes we will make:
Slots become directional and represent flanks and center of army on a field dividing an army in 3 sides - Left Flank, Center, Right Flank. By placing a unit in a slot you are changing it position on a field.
Division of armies for 5 and 8 slots is shown below:
During an autoresolve combat, units of one army first have to fights against units on the corresponding side. Flanks fight with flanks, center fights with center. If there are no more units on the opposing side left then you get a morale bonus and attack closest side next to you just like you would in a RTS battle with line vs line and one flank failing or center pushing through. This will displayed somethings like this:
Not only this is practically direct representation of how RTS positioning would be, but also has a lot of value in term of positioning of units across each other to counter different types, splits the big army blob into 3 groups which are facing subset of enemy army. It makes positioning relevant and very intuitive with practically same UI real estate you have now. You can suddenly make a strong flank, a weak flank, you can have good choice of units in front of you or bad choice of units and a player can actually affect this a lot by very easy movement of units between slots.
Second change, an auto battle happening in the position described above is happening in fixed amount of time say 60 seconds. This amount of time is split in 3 equal phases. I, II, III. During a phase a player can make observe and make a decision about next phase battle order. Battle order is applied for the full battle phase and changes only in a next phase. If player does not change battle order before the next phase starts previous battle order continues.
Battle orders are:
- Attack - high losses for max damage
- Defend - minimal losses for minimal damage
- Retreat – retreat from battle if enemy has defend, huge loses if enemy has attack.
In a battle phase both armies will have some battle order selected with the combinations giving you the following modifiers:
- Attack vs Attack – highest losses on both sides
- Attack vs Defense – high losses vs moderate losses
- Defense vs Defense – low losses on both sides
- Attack vs Retreat – low losses vs huge losses, you could not retreat, battle continues
- Defense vs Retreat – no losses vs one side escapes from the battle
The battle screen all together will look something like this:
Why this is amazingly deeper gameplay:
You can take same armies and play differently based on who plays what at what phase.
I have weak army, you have strong army. You play "attack, attack, attack". I can play "def, def, def" for maximum losses on your side. So you can try to play "def, def, def" to just push me to retreat with minimal looses to yourself. If I play "retreat" in the first phase, it would work for you and I will flee the battle at the first phase. But I can also play "def, def, def" and buy a lot of time with minimal losses and you might not have enough damage to kill my army. You might have units on a flank which are hard counter to my units and only DURING the battle I can see that and I have to REACT on the next battle phase or a lot of your spears on a flank vs my a lot of cavalry make this very hard. We both have time during a phase to see and predict how it is going and make a play selecting order for the next phase, yet the battle is fixed in time in total duration and has very little drag on overall game.
With system like this you have MINIMAL changes with a huge impact. You can replay same battle several times with a different result, you can make a mistake in a battle order just like in RTS battle and lose an advantage in army you had. There is PLAY you have to make and a situation you have to react.
This makes unit matter because they are set to a specific side to face specific few units, this makes counter units important to each other. This is simple to make and show and understand for a player, left, right center sides. It is easy to manage. It removes blob of total army strength doing something in autoresolve you don’t even know how to show. This gives you exact understanding of why your army failed, which units were weak, on what side and so on. By the time you came to a battle it is too late to change armies, but you can still affect outcome by proper battle orders and reacting to enemy units positions and battle orders.
Vesselin, my dear friend! You can make a paper prototype of this in half a day and play that kind of battle vs someone and see how many options you suddenly have compared to you current autoresolve. Please do that. If you want more depth you can have battle orders separated per flank, so one side can push and the others defend, or expensive units retreat while meat shield defends, or even separate battle order per unit per phase, and it will get even deeper and more engaging yet still being time limited, very basic, not time sensitive so people in multiplayer have time to think a bit for the next battle phase order and so on. Not that hard to implement for a huge value gain.
2) Army management
Remove food upkeep from unit level. Calculate food upkeep ONLY as a combined actual solders per marshal. 8 units with 1/50 soldiers cannot consume the same food as 8x 50/50.
On marshal army level make a toggle:
- Slow march – 50% food consumption, 25% of speed movement
- Regular march – 100% food consumption, 100% speed movement
- Quick march – 200% food consumption, 150% speed movement
This should allow you a great deal of option to move fast spending more food or spend less but moving slow. This is very simple mechanics, but it has tremendous possibilities on a strategic level. Small armies can afford extra food cost but they are quick. Large armies cannot afford such huge food costs but they can overwhelm anyone once they get there. If you have a lot of food production and you are close to your own lands you can trade food for speed and so on. Same speed of all armies all the time are bane of KoH these endless chases needs to go. Speeds need to be variable in cost. Army food is a perfect trade-off for that.
At the start of the game, there should be basic DIFFERENT units available to a player beyond peasants. The core of the military gameplay should be counter units with other units, not just a blob of single unit which are worst at everything. Every start of the KoH game was “maxed out armies of peasants” blobs and I see the same in the KoH2. This should not happen, this is stupid and lame boring start every time. You are medieval KINGDOM, you made it to middle ages, have cities and organization and government, but you can’t make anyone armed and organized in a different? Ancient Egypt had unit types thousands years before that, and you can’t make anyone but a crowd of peasants? Come on. You don’t start a game of WWII with naked people with sticks waiting for a rifle to be invented. Same here, basic short weapon combat, long weapon, ranged and cavalry unit should be available at the start so I can compose my army from different parts. Weak yes, but different roles per unit type. Peasants should be like last resort pure meat shield type of unit. Don’t make most of the opening battle and most VALUABLE new player experience about hording peasants, this is not a prehistoric age.
On a different note. It should be more valuable to upgrade existing units to better weaponry and type than to buy a new unit with a new tech. Existing units should be valuable due to experience with new gear and weapon should be just addition to trained men, not replacement of existing units with new units which are better because you now have an upgrade on some building.
3) Trade
Reconsider all trade mechanics with “sacks” exchanging for gold. Especially with drop down menu select. This add zero value to a player, it is lame and boring mechanics. Lets say I’m Sweden year 1097, I have these sacks auto generated in my settlements and somehow I can select Algeria for trade and magic exchange to gold happens. How? Maersk is running container ships or something? It is long way, half of Europe is at war, pirates, enemies all kinds of things happening, but all a player need to do is select Algeria from a drop down and gold comes in automatically… Come on. You can do better.
Use this sacks resource for something else, upkeep on buildings I don’t know anything. This “trade” is not a trade it is fake placeholder mechanics at best.
We don’t understand much about 65 produced goods you have and how to import them. But I’m sure with 65 types you can make enough good trading mechanics to avoid generic “sacks” to be equal “some gold” if I care to select from a drop down.
4) Internal Economy
You might want to have a second look at settlements. It appears that fixed settlements are too restricting for player development options at a given territory. There should be more freedom to direct economy in different ways rather than just maxing out starting fixed conditions.
I would urge to avoid line of thinking that “anything I want I can conquer” which was mentioned over and over again. This is not how it works and this is not how you should expect a player to behave. You don’t scroll across a map looking for resource you need and then moving your marshal to capture the province. Barrels or no barrels you kingdom can only afford a conquest which is close, can be defended and is against kingdoms you can mess with. Which are HUGE limiting factors. If you plan the economy in a way that there are dozens of unique resources like mentioned barrels which you absolutely have to get but they are rare it is a bad design and a bad gameplay. Even if you are France and you have conquered Germany you are still like a dozen or less provinces combined, if you have to have 50+ provinces to get access to rare resource which are required to play it is a bridge too far.
5) Diplomacy
You probably want to have a look at global awareness and global diplomacy. It is very odd that kingdoms across the map suddenly want to do peace or pacts which each other. It is very odd that you even know about things happening all around on political scale and have that notification messages at the bottom constantly telling you who is not in what relation with whom. It feels wrong, Algeria should not care about Estonia, they are too remote, Naples should not come to Portugal to have a pact against Poland. These are medieval time everything should be much more local and much more pragmatic. Globalization like that feels odd and out of character.
PS
Thank you for understanding of my unreasonable passion for you to succeed.
PSPS
Spelling and grammar are messed up everywhere, but I don't have time to fix it and proof read again, sorry.
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Thoughts about Upgrading Units, Recruitment of Units, and Peasants
in General Discussion
Posted
Veteran (gold star) units in orignal KoH were significantly stronger than regular units. Elite (3 star) units were amazingly strong.