Thanks. This seems to be a good time to speak about strategic combat, as you have the procedure fresh in your mind, I hope you'll bear with me.
I tested some attacks against water elementals and sprites with earth elementals, as a fun extreme example. Victory without losses and minimal damage! Woop! In strategic combat of course. So I already suspected the answer but I wanted to double check with you first. Having some difference between strategic and tactical results is acceptable but the ranged mechanics difference exacerbates the problem.
Both forcing quicker or flying ranged troops to fight in melee and spreading their damage are big issues. The forcing melee is quite obvious, it makes it possible for swordsmen to win against sprites or horse archers. But also the spreading damage is a big problem. There's some logic for why damage would split in melee: the troops can't all reach the same target. But in ranged that's not true, and logic apart, that makes ranged attackers super ineffective: they should reduce the number of attackers, reducing the number of attacks received by the defenders, but if they spread damage this doesn't happen.
With the number of ranged attackers in nodes and lairs currently in the game, this is a big part of why there's such a huge difference between tactical and strategic. In strategic currently ranged troops are basically useless, compared with high defence units. The water elementals in tactical would kill half of the EEs before melee even started, and possibly run around for 25 turns afterwards, while the sprites wouldn't ever fight in melee.
I understand why you've made strategic spread damage, I'm not suggesting to roll that back; I'm however convinced that the ranged phase should be treated differently than the melee phase. Making strategic combat closer to tactical is good because it reduces the great disparity of troops needed for one or the other style. For example, it'd reduce the overpoweredness of berserkers which, at its core, is the fact that they're great in both types of combat. As a result, the enormous difference of strategic value of the human and AI cities, because obviously in defence ranged troops have a sense - when it's not strategic.
There may be ways that keep it simple. For example, ranged losses could reduce the opponent's attack even more to simulate the concentrated damage, and then not spread. Maybe, you could use the old procedure (if I got it right, the old one kept damage concentrated?) in the ranged phase before using the new procedure for the melee part?
For forcing ranged troops in melee, I wonder whether having flyers or high speed shouldn't add to the strategic combat value, preventing the fights could achieve the same results. Otherwise, if possible, I'd set the damage to zero once one side has higher speed, or flyers and the other doesn't. This gets of course complicated with web, but well...
Anyhow, big kudos for the work done, finding that allocated memory treasure trove was the proverbial needle in the haystack.
I tested some attacks against water elementals and sprites with earth elementals, as a fun extreme example. Victory without losses and minimal damage! Woop! In strategic combat of course. So I already suspected the answer but I wanted to double check with you first. Having some difference between strategic and tactical results is acceptable but the ranged mechanics difference exacerbates the problem.
Both forcing quicker or flying ranged troops to fight in melee and spreading their damage are big issues. The forcing melee is quite obvious, it makes it possible for swordsmen to win against sprites or horse archers. But also the spreading damage is a big problem. There's some logic for why damage would split in melee: the troops can't all reach the same target. But in ranged that's not true, and logic apart, that makes ranged attackers super ineffective: they should reduce the number of attackers, reducing the number of attacks received by the defenders, but if they spread damage this doesn't happen.
With the number of ranged attackers in nodes and lairs currently in the game, this is a big part of why there's such a huge difference between tactical and strategic. In strategic currently ranged troops are basically useless, compared with high defence units. The water elementals in tactical would kill half of the EEs before melee even started, and possibly run around for 25 turns afterwards, while the sprites wouldn't ever fight in melee.
I understand why you've made strategic spread damage, I'm not suggesting to roll that back; I'm however convinced that the ranged phase should be treated differently than the melee phase. Making strategic combat closer to tactical is good because it reduces the great disparity of troops needed for one or the other style. For example, it'd reduce the overpoweredness of berserkers which, at its core, is the fact that they're great in both types of combat. As a result, the enormous difference of strategic value of the human and AI cities, because obviously in defence ranged troops have a sense - when it's not strategic.
There may be ways that keep it simple. For example, ranged losses could reduce the opponent's attack even more to simulate the concentrated damage, and then not spread. Maybe, you could use the old procedure (if I got it right, the old one kept damage concentrated?) in the ranged phase before using the new procedure for the melee part?
For forcing ranged troops in melee, I wonder whether having flyers or high speed shouldn't add to the strategic combat value, preventing the fights could achieve the same results. Otherwise, if possible, I'd set the damage to zero once one side has higher speed, or flyers and the other doesn't. This gets of course complicated with web, but well...
Anyhow, big kudos for the work done, finding that allocated memory treasure trove was the proverbial needle in the haystack.
