Early game strategies not balanced?

[Seravy]

Continuing the discussion started in the other thread, in short, early game strategies are better than slower strategies because the core mechanics of the game (conquest, AI bonuses) make it so.

The suggested assimilation mechanic would be...really hard to implement, primarily the interface - the player would need to know where the penalty comes from, how long it lasts, how much are they losing, etc. It's also alien to the game - we already have racial unrest which is a mechanic based on the same source.

Increasing the destruction rate of cities across the board is doable, simple, but probably won't be very popular and is hard to justify (how the hell does half the city burn down and everyone get killed when I march into an empty city with a settler or spearmen)

So...here are a few ideas that could be done instead :

1. What if the base "destruction percentage" used depended on your main race?
Early races are less civilized, so they are expected to do more damage when conquering.

2. Racial unrest was harsher
Like, the current tables, plus an extra 2 rebels for any race different from yours.

3. Racial unrest was harsher on early races
Similar to above but only the unrest for early races is higher.

4. Move Fortress no longer changed your "starting race" variable. That is what allows the player to completely bypass their starting race disadvantages.

5. Same as "1", but the percentage is calculated from the race of units used in battle.
Like, Death and Barbarian units do the most damage, High Elf or Life units do the least?

6. As 5 but in addition, the NUMBER of units also counts.
More attacking units mean more pillaging and damage. This rewards stronger units that can win using a smaller amount - less damage is done to cities if you use 1 Great Drake than if you use 9 Berserkers.


7. Instead of a penalty, add a bonus. Cities of the wizard's own race build faster, pay more taxes, grow faster, or something like that.


Making it harder to use multiple races effectively reduces diversity in units and is in general bad for the game, unfortunately.

[Nelphine]

From a balance point of view:
Rush tactics ar e typically best done with city troops. The best realm for city troop tactics is life.

Therefore, we should not base city damage on realm.

Similarly, life has the best unrest control. Therefore, any unrest modifiers have a good chance of not having any impact on rush tactics.

So, I would say no to 2, 3, 4, 5.

A mix of number 1 and 5 is interesting, but I would base it on the troops you use, not your home race. (Bezerkers are the best troops for ages for their cost; jackal riders are the best with a buff strategy.) Summons should be ignored (making attacking with summons encouraged, which again would reward AI, and encourage the 'magic' aspect of the game) or the same for all realms.

6 is good because it will reward the AI for attacking in the manner it already does (since it attacks based on target strength, AI often attacks with less than 9 units against weak garrisons).

7 is good but emphasizes move fortress as an economic spell. I don't like that idea. If you made it ignore move fortress it would be good as it would encourage more cities if your starting type. But it would also boost rush strategies.

[Catwalk]

I agree with your objective, but I'm not a fan of making conquest less profitable. I'd much rather make it harder to conquer instead.

[Nelphine]

I don't think you can. The game favors offense too much - we call them doomstacks for a reason. The amount you'd have to improve defenses to stop a focused attack.. It would make any random stack utterly useless.

[Catwalk]

That's been done already, through making early node conquest harder. Noone suggested for that problem that rewards should be slashed across the board.

Easy access to neutral cities is a big part of what makes my early game work right now. I need those to snowball my economy while building up my troops. Make neutral cities larger and better defended and you've already accomplished a lot.

[Seravy]

"harder to conquer" well, that's a good idea but how?
Increasing various defensive spell effects or guardian retort only covers some wizards and is situational.
Making the AI keep more units in garrison..will have no effect until late game when it has real choices, and would make their offense worse.
Neither is a solution.
Slowing down units would be unfun and would have a bad impact on combat.

[Catwalk]

Making neutral cities harder to take out as soon as it's possible to do now would be sufficient. Taking neutral cities is key to my rush strategy. So was taking lairs and nodes, but you (correctly) made that harder across the board (not just for Sprites).

Make neutral cities bigger (increasing the prize money), but also increase garrisons substantially. Make barracks, fighter's guilds, alchemist's guilds, shrines and city walls far more common.

Also, we already discussed before that you could give the AI more garrison swordsmen at high difficulty (not just for the capital, where they make no difference at all). It can afford their upkeep easily and will probably just disband them when they're not needed.

[MrBiscuits]

The reason early game strategies are the only ones that work on the highest levels is because the AI gets such bonuses that if you don't win early it becomes almost impossible. So if the player is ever going to win then obviously rush strategies are going to be the best.

I'm not sure changing all the game mechanics specifically to combat this problem is a good idea. Most of the proposed solutions seem a bit unfun...like more unrest or more city destruction on conquest.

Also more cities are always better in MoM as there is no penalty to having too many. Civ 4 solved this by having maintenance for each city which went up for all of them the more cities you had. So you couldn't over-expand too quickly.

[Seravy]

Of all things, neutrals?

We've already done that. Neutral cities are smaller, and for their size, come with stronger garrisons. Pretty much anything over 4 pop will have at least some ranged unit, where possible, magical. I don't think I can do any more to improve that, unless we decide even the tiniest hamlet deserves elite magicians in garrison, or neutrals do not come in small size at all, ever. I don't think they are a large threat to balance now, not any more than the remaining chance for easy nodes. (also, some races are just easy to conquer because they do not have good defending units, even if they have anything available. You can still take out 9 Jackal Riders with a few sprites, or a dozen phantom warriors.)

More sworsdsmen...well, that works. They won't get disbanded though, and I see two possible outcomes :
-The AI sees the city has enough garrison and is less likely to build troops. The swordsmen stay there instead of halberdiers replacing them, making the city easier to conquer for a while, even if the AI did rush the fighter's guild.
-The AI does produce the halberdiers, so the swordsmen are pushed outside. Ultimately they get used to attack targets - most likely the human player.

Certainly, stealing 1 pop cities is a problem of its own, but that's something you do without needing to rush. A single Gargoyle or smart use of your combat spells can do it. If we want to fix rush, we need to do something about conquering larger targets, where those rush strategies do matter.

[Nelphine]

And we actually did hugely tone down lair and node rewards, somewhere round.. 2.8? I used to plan strategies around ending the game with more than 20 picks of retorts and spellbooks. There are certonly times when reducing rewards is needed.

I'm also OK with the idea of not changing anything. I do think there are gameplay styles for everyone right now. Is everything equal? Definitely not.

But I don't think that's horrible.