Trample balance discussion

[Xietor]

Elephants are not supposed to be "fun" to fight. If you read about historical accounts of their use in Ancient Greek times, they were a terror in battles. While Lord of the Rings battle scenes has them too big, it actually may not exaggerate the terror they cause even battle hardened troops.

Given these accounts it would be justified to give them fear. Obviously that would not be good for balance. But arcos needs its elephants. I challenge someone to play ma or la arcos and not use elephants.

If elephants are nerfed, arcos needs a better sacred. maybe a chariot with good armor, attack, and defense that does not trample. And the national summon cannot use s gems. arcos heart and soul is its s gems. a sirrush either has to be so good it is like an abomination, or it needs to cost n gems. As it is they are useless as a 10s item.

maybe if you could get 5 of them for 10s, and move them down the tree a bit. But at 10s a piece they might as well cost a 100s a piece. no one in their right mind would buy one.

Too many arcos units use spears. thematic yes. But maybe a sacred unit with a sword.
Greeks knew what swords were you know. And swords do more dmage. and 25 gold for a heart companion? they are not as good as the 15 gold units which are all i buy when i have the gold and resources.

Now this thread is not about arcos., but that is the nation most hurt by an elephant nerf. bandar log has strong nationals and good sacreds, and caelum gets cold bonus
and better attack mages.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Xietor

bandar log has strong nationals

What? No it doesn't.

Agema: Completely ignoring graphics when it comes to the size of units is counter-intuitive and silly. They are there for a reason.

[Agema]

Originally Posted by Sombre

Agema: Completely ignoring graphics when it comes to the size of units is counter-intuitive and silly. They are there for a reason.

No. It's the size stat that is there for a reason. The reason for the graphics is they make everything look prettier: you could do the battles with ASCII symbols representing everything (like Nethack) and get as much information out of it. Similarly WRT the sphinx, I know it's a statue in-game. My point is that the Egypt statue is not reflective of what sphinx has to be: there are statues and bas-reliefs of sphinxes from India to Europe, many (all?) of which are much smaller.

What I'm getting at is that I think people are applying too much logic and reality to it all. It's a game. It's about the interplay between various statistics, attributes and effects, where the designers put a lot of time and effort into making it work. Hence if elephants should be nerfed to size 5 you should make the case with whether they are unbalanced or not.

When you start basing arguments on the fact you can fit more than 3 humans into the area an elephant takes up, or that a mammoth was 20% larger than an elephant is in real life, guessing that Niefel giants were supposed to be 15, 20 or 30 feet tall according to Nordic myth, or that the in-game graphical dragon has 28% more pixels than the in-game graphical elephant, it's all missing the point.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Agema

No. It's the size stat that is there for a reason. The reason for the graphics is they make everything look prettier: you could do the battles with ASCII symbols representing everything (like Nethack) and get as much information out of it. Similarly WRT the sphinx, I know it's a statue in-game. My point is that the Egypt statue is not reflective of what sphinx has to be: there are statues and bas-reliefs of sphinxes from India to Europe, many (all?) of which are much smaller.

What I'm getting at is that I think people are applying too much logic and reality to it all. It's a game. It's about the interplay between various statistics, attributes and effects, where the designers put a lot of time and effort into making it work. Hence if elephants should be nerfed to size 5 you should make the case with whether they are unbalanced or not.

When you start basing arguments on the fact you can fit more than 3 humans into the area an elephant takes up, or that a mammoth was 20% larger than an elephant is in real life, guessing that Niefel giants were supposed to be 15, 20 or 30 feet tall according to Nordic myth, or that the in-game graphical dragon has 28% more pixels than the in-game graphical elephant, it's all missing the point.

No, I think it is you who is missing the point. For one, saying the graphics are just there to look pretty is ludicrous. They are a massive boon to play - you can at a glance tell what sort of unit it is, what weapons and armour it might have, even guess at resistances and other attributes. Of course you might want to know more, in which case you can look over the stats, but to have /just/ the stats would make the game virtually impenetrable.

Realism can serve a similar purpose. When you call a weapon a sword or a short bow or 'fire breath' people immediately have some idea of what it will do. They can still go and look at the stats (which are 'hidden' for a /reason/) if they want to know exactly how it works, but believe me people would enjoy the game far less if a unit called a 'knight' with a heavily armoured powerful looking graphic was actuall a hoburg with a pitchfork. According to your logic there wouldn't be a problem there - It would still be just as pretty, in terms of gameplay people would only need to look at the stats to know. Yet it's clearly absurd and counterintuitive.

You're also putting far too much emphasis on the design decisions of the devs. I'm willing to bet KO doesn't even remember why krakens are whatever size they are. He's said numerous times he isn't even very concerned about balance and he's often very surprised at how things actually work in terms of gameplay. I'm not criticising him here, it's just the way he is.

People have already, many, many times discussed the balance of elephants and tramplers more generally. When people talk about size and graphics and so on, they are considering the other effects a change in size has - besides graphics. Whether it will make the game less intuitive, or has a 'wrong' feeling about it. That's precisely the sort of thing KO thinks about, not so much balance and stats. He primarily wants an elephant to be an elephant (as he envisions), not unit X to do Y or Nation A to be stronger than nation B at point C in the game.