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As a French person I feel like it's my duty to explain strikes to you. - AdrienIer |
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Early Armorer's Guild
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 (January 6th, 2019, 17:37)Seravy Wrote: Obviously adamantium matters, but casting Holy Armor or Endurance can have the same effect or more Yea, holy armour would be as good as adamantium. Probably should have picked it instead of 1 nature book. I was hoping to find/trade it but no luck. ps. i know a link to part 4(final) now works only is some countries. Youtube is trying to mute a song he doesnt like. So that part for everyone might be availible tommorow.
More thoughts:
*I'd rather have a turn system that isn't so much 'can't build' to 'you can build' instant transition, and definitively not turn 80 - that will cause a lot of confusion and is a terrible idea for some races with inferior armorer guild units. *so let's say armorer's guild, maritime guild, and fantastic stables production cost Y+0.02X or Y+0.03X where Y is the production cost of building and X is 2% or 3% extra cost per turn before turn 72 (6 years) *Ideally, I'd like the turn limit in formula to be 60 maritime, 72 armorer, 84 fantastic stable Another idea: *Make war college available to all top-tier unit races and make it a prerequisite of both war college and fantastic stables. That's make it much harder to buy top military buildings early. *Replace 'heroic heart' with a research that allows these 3 military buildings to all your cities.
Berserkers definitely don't do the same. They have no defense, less hit points, they die like flies. That's exactly what the problem is with Barbarians currently.
Troll halberdiers might be a problem but they only move 2 and we no longer have wraithform ships to speed that up. Trolls are on the potential problem list anyway due to regeneration allowing zero cost battles - they'll be the next race I'm testing. Golems are faster at 3 moves and quite durable but still not as bad as doom drakes (fear and fire breath) - we'll figure out if they need to be moved to require armorer's guild or not when we reach dwarves in testing. Stag Beetles could probably do the same - they have 7 armor, 20 hp and move at speed 4. You'd need slightly more buffs to do it most likely as they only have breath but no fear. Taking 2 Death for the fear spell is a trivial solution. Minotaurs at 4 armor and 3 speed are unlikely to succeed but given enough buffs they might pull it off. Endurance+fear sounds like the way to go. Summons, the common and cheap uncommon ones, simply aren't as powerful and durable as the armorer's guild units. They are fighter's guild level, give or take a little. The strong uncommons cost so much research that you will be getting them on turn 60-100 anyway, and even then can only summon one each 5-10 turns. Yes, we've discussed this before and even added it to the known and unfixable problems list. So it's not new, the difference is we got an actual demonstration of it so it's no longer just a theory, and it is way more effective than we thought. Tying it to actual research is sounds like a good idea but isn't - why would magic research allow better military units? I've been thinking and this variable cost isn't really different from saying "you can't build these before turn X", except it also leaves them open as a trap - you can queue them up and they'll not complete until turn 80+ anyway, wasting you several dozens of turns. A more serious issue is, I think buildings costing over 1000 production cause the game to crash, or at best, break the city screen as there is only room up to 1000 production to display the progress. So it might be simply best to say these buildings unlock on that turn. If not, then we'd need some sort of metric for how advanced your nation is, technologically, and use that. But it shouldn't be one that actually grows by expanding or magic research.
Please note, you've already agreed (and sapher) that you'd want/need holy armor. That turns this very much into the same strategy I use with bezerkers.
This isn't an armored guild problem then, it's a 'stack early armor/defense buffs'. Which is what we concluded a swordsmen could do. So no I don't think this demonstration is any worse than what we already had. Take those doom drakes, remove the holy armor, the adamamtium, and send them against that nomad city your bezerkers died against, and I'll wager the doom drakes also die. 
Even if you don't have the buff, you can just use 2 doom drakes per city and lose one. Turn 35 is that early, you can afford doing that. Not that you need to, most AI cities will still only have the 4 swordsmen. Only the first two built from the starting settlers will have anything better in them.
This isn't about armor. Obviously it helps but that's not the key. Higher tier units are simply different. They have high armor to begin with, high hit points, often other defensive abilities, fast overland movement speed, often flying movement, and high resistance all in one. To do the same with a Fighter's Guild unit, you need too many buffs, and buffs have limited availability. While you can spam 1 unit each turn from gold, you can only buff up one unit every 4-5 turns if you need 3 buffs for example. Plus, it makes your strategy vulnerable to dispel magic - you start to have actual losses in lost enchantments. So yes, you can do the same using a Klackon Halberdier. You'd need like 4 buffs on each to get this result. You'd need to buff the movement, the resistance, the armor, and would likely need to also add fear. And the result would still be an inferior, speed 3 version with no fire breath. You could also do the same with Pegasai. You won't need any buffs whatsoever, you can take advantage of having a move 5 flying ranged unit with 16 hit points and 8 ammo. Your heals cancel the AI's spells and you don't take much damage from units because you fly. (against arrows, just move far enough to give them like -3 range penalty. Against ghouls, you have high resistance) (last time we've made sure you can't do it with swordmsmen and fighter's guild units anymore. We made sure none of the remaining units have the necessary stats. The new Gladiator if we add one for Barbarians, might be a problem though.)
Going back to turn limitations for top-tier military buildings and how it can work on an intuitive sense: 'buildesc.lbx'
Reduce building description sufficiently to allow room for something like: *Requires wizard time/experience to pacify/convince citizens that advanced military units are not a threat. Building cost reduced to normal by turn 80. Or make the increased cost formula based on the unit but not the building: *Requires wizard time/experience to recruit advanced military units - their cost is reduced to normal by turn 80. What if the armorer's building cost stays the same, but instead of the unit costing 200, they cost around 400 by turn 30 (300 by turn 50-60). Would someone really pay 800 gold for a griffin? Maybe, but buying 4 settlers for that money is not exactly inferior and can be the better choice sometimes, especially for less experienced players. With a bit of creativity, this can be a solution that reduces incentive to recruit advanced units particularly when they are most unbalanced, but not outright eliminate the option when near turn 80.
Adding it to the building description is a good idea. Been thinking about it for more and I think these are the most viable solutions - I take back fame not being compatible with the queue system, if it's only two buildings, not being able to queue them isn't a big deal. You just stop your queue at the fighter's guild and when it's complete build the armorer's the old fashioned way. If it was a whole bunch of buildings, that would be a problem. So anyway, we should be picking one of these :
-Can't build before turn X -Can't build without X fame -Can't build before turn X, where X is reduced for each point of fame. -Can't build without X fame unless it's already turn Y. We could do the variable cost versions of any of the above BUT I think that's strictly inferior. Doing so would : -Leave it open as a trap, you could queue the building without noticing it will waste your 40 turns for no reason. -In extreme cases of treasure you could still pay the price no matter how high (although you likely win those maps anyway there is still a difference between a hard earned victory through reasonable units, and steamrolling the enemy using top tier ones) -Displaying over 1k production costs is not implemented/not compatible with the existing way of displaying production costs and progress. -Requires teaching the AI not to pick those buildings too early. -But we can explain the mechanic on building description which we otherwise can't (as it doesn't show up at all in the first place) Making the units more expensive instead is an interesting approach that could maybe work but I have doubts. It still allows you to use a low quantity of those units to crush all the 3 wizards, leaving only their strongest 1-3 cities for later when you can build them at a low cost. Basically, a single such unit acts like an unstoppable hero unit when produced that early.
Cool, basically a 2-tier system (yes, no) based on a wizard condition that is described in builddesc.
My question is, would the two buildings even display as an option to allow reading such text (Can't build before X)? Would 'ok' be greyed out and/or unclickable? I like the third option: -Can't build before turn (80) , reduced for each point of fame I assume if fame is the primary variable, it'd have to be no more than 30. However, a wizard that is 'famous' with 'just cause' almost gets there. Such wizard is life, thus has buffs, then can recruit top-tier buffed units. So option 2 and maybe 4 are out.
Unfortunately no, the building will not show up so the description won't be visible until after the 80th turn. It's reasonable to assume players will see it on their first playthrough and know about it afterwards in most cases.
I also think the third option might be good, it encourages picking the otherwise nonmilitary choices of Famous and Just Cause. It also offers a nice backup strategy for when you play for heroes but fail to get a good one (or fail to find items for them). However if we do it that way, it likely shouldn't be more than 1 turn per point of fame. The downside is, it's harder to explain. While "this building becomes available in 1406" is easy to understand and short, "this building becomes available in 1406 January minus 1 month for each point of fame you have" might be a bit too much text to fit into the builddesc text, especially if we also want to explain why and say this building is for military units. So the upside of the first option is simplicity. The other upside is, Life generally already has the best use of these units and has the highest likelyhood of having Famous and/or Just Cause so the third option would just give them an unnecessary head start at a strategy they are already the best at using. I agree options 2 and 4 are bad.
True, but it might still work with a bit less explicit text:
"This building becomes available as late as Jan 1406, depending on fame" "This building becomes available between 1404 and 1406, depending on fame" Yes, I'm saying we should not allow anytime before 1404 (only 48 turns). So the range would be 48 to __ turns (72 to 83 will be the max for 1406) Can you provide a new turn pop-up message when the time does come? |
