Poll: morale and routing

[Graeme Dice]

Boron said:
i played it seriously for about 1/2 year and enjoyed it .
the only problem is that you have only about 200 units and 200 spells and know all too quick .

The balance isn't that great. Summoned creatures are pretty much a waste of resources, and are far too expensive for the small amount of power they give you. Battlefield magic is weak and unimpressive in general. The only spells that are worthwhile are those that boost your individual units and even then you can't cast very many of them. The experience granting system has the standard problem where only killing the unit grants experience, so you have to do silly things like save weakened attackers for your heroes. Spellcasting heroes don't gain experience anywhere near as fast as melee ones, since the spells that they can cast are extremely unlikely to actually kill more than one unit in a battle. It might be a game with magic, but the magic doesn't have nearly enough effect.

[Huzurdaddi]

Can you name me any reason from a balance point why they should?

Let me say again: this would only PROMOTE SC usage.

BLEEEEECH.

[The Panther]

Huzurdaddi said:

Let me say again: this would only PROMOTE SC usage.

BLEEEEECH.

Hmm.. this does not make sense at all. If your ice devil costs you blood slaves every turn it is alive, how does that promote SC use? And your air queen would cost like 5 air gems PER TURN at 1/10 and just over 3 gems per turn at 1/15! If you buy too many devils, they would desert or you have to blood hunt even more to pay for them, thus hurting your economy.

A single player would not be able to easily buy all the ice devils or air queens anymore. I think the ice and arch devils would be more spread out this way to the races that can't get blood as fast as Abysia can.

Artifacts would be more important for your gems since they would not incur a recurring cost.

So this would dissuade SC use, not help it. Heaven forbid that an SC just MIGHT cost something close to their true value in the game!

[Sheap]

The Panther said:
Hmm.. this does not make sense at all. If your ice devil costs you blood slaves every turn it is alive, how does that promote SC use?

By making all troops require upkeep, the pressure would be to focus on the troops that are most efficient relative to their cost. Since most of the value in SCs is in their equipment, not their summoning cost, they are comparatively more efficient than non-SC summons. If summoned troops cost upkeep probably no one would cast Vine Critters, undead, etc any more.

I should also point out that the summon-requires-upkeep is totally incompatible with Ermor, which would rapidly find itself with a hundreds of gems upkeep

[Huzurdaddi]

Sheap said:

By making all troops require upkeep, the pressure would be to focus on the troops that are most efficient relative to their cost. Since most of the value in SCs is in their equipment, not their summoning cost, they are comparatively more efficient than non-SC summons. If summoned troops cost upkeep probably no one would cast Vine Critters, undead, etc any more.

PHEW! Thank god someone was able to reason it out.

I have to agree that the moral system is a little wacky and probably should be changed I seriosuly doubt it was designed this way.

Also I seriously doubt that the game was designed with the idea that it would revolve around SC's *by themselves* in the end game. I'm sure that they wanted some units to be very powerful and for these well equiped units to be the center pieces of the massive armies but not to be the whole army.

I still think that Esben Mose Hansen 1st post ( the 1st post on the whole thread!) fixes basically everything by itself. Heck the human pretenders start to become better with his change as well ( however the ghost king is still probably a better choice for almost all nations ).

[Boron]

Graeme Dice said:

The balance isn't that great. Summoned creatures are pretty much a waste of resources, and are far too expensive for the small amount of power they give you. Battlefield magic is weak and unimpressive in general. The only spells that are worthwhile are those that boost your individual units and even then you can't cast very many of them. The experience granting system has the standard problem where only killing the unit grants experience, so you have to do silly things like save weakened attackers for your heroes. Spellcasting heroes don't gain experience anywhere near as fast as melee ones, since the spells that they can cast are extremely unlikely to actually kill more than one unit in a battle. It might be a game with magic, but the magic doesn't have nearly enough effect.

are you serious with this ?
gold dragons , dark angels , angels , the dark dragons etc. were a waste of resources ?

most battlespells were great like fireball , the armageddon like spell , cosmic spray etc. etc.

heros which are SCS in dominions 2-3 lvl 4 units were normally enough to kill any hero no matter how highlevel he was .
2-3 kharags , dragons , etc. killed normally every hero .
even 10 black spiders with web or 3-4 druids with entangle had good chances.


you seem to have not played aow 2 sm much right ?


magic was great but not that overpowered .
it was basically 50/50 over the whole game with magic + gold .

[Graeme Dice]

Boron said:
gold dragons , dark angels , angels , the dark dragons etc. were a waste of resources ?

You can't build anywhere near enough of them to make up any significant part of your army.

most battlespells were great like fireball , the armageddon like spell , cosmic spray etc. etc.

They can kill one or two units at most, like I said. They have very little real effect on the battlefield. Fireball for example, would have to have about a fifth to a tenth of the cost to be really worthwhile.

you seem to have not played aow 2 sm much right ?

I've played AOW2 enough to know what the major problems with its design are. Unless the game rules have been completely overhauled from the ground up in Shadow Magic, the basic problems are still going to remain.

[Boron]

Graeme Dice said:

You can't build anywhere near enough of them to make up any significant part of your army.

uhm : normally 1 city gave you about 60-70 gold and between 30-50 mana ( depending on nation ) and about 20 research points .
since once you have researched all spells research points were converted in mana too it was normally the following :
while researching gold to mana ratio was 2:1 .
at the end it was about 1,5 : 1 .

normally i had about 60% of my army composed of national troops and 40% of summons lategame .
if they would have fought each other they would have given a very close fight .


[quote]
Graeme Dice said:

Boron said:

They can kill one or two units at most, like I said. They have very little real effect on the battlefield. Fireball for example, would have to have about a fifth to a tenth of the cost to be really worthwhile.

you have missed the main point of spells in aow :
e.g. a chain lightning normally always hitted 5 enemies .
the purpose was not to kill the enemy totally but to weaken it that much that you can kill it with the first blow .
thanks to the good dice roll system in aow 2 too if e.g. a karrag ( goblin lvl 4 unit ) fought against a dredd reaper ( the undead lvl 4 unit ) in about 50% of the cases the karrag won and in 50% the dredd reaper .
if you used battle tactics / spells better than your enemy you changed the odds to 90% vs 10% for you .



[quote]
Graeme Dice said:

Boron said:

I've played AOW2 enough to know what the major problems with its design are. Unless the game rules have been completely overhauled from the ground up in Shadow Magic, the basic problems are still going to remain.

you played only aow 2 ?
with what patch ?
in aow 2 shadow magic with the latest patch the game was really overhauled .
most strong attacks like a fire breath of a dragon were reduced to 3/battle , same with the making immobile attacks like entangle from druid , grasp from rock bird , web from spiders etc. etc.

spells were fine tuned etc.

[Boron]

well cainehill since you started name calling me again as you did cohen before once you need to use such things and can't keep it rational you proof with this that you have run out of arguments and it lets luck you just bad .



can anyone of you name me a game where an upkeep mechanism is included but about 50% of your troops ( nationals) cost upkeep and about 50% (summons) are upkeep free ?

since you state you know so many games caine :

a nearly perfect balanced game is starcraft broodwar :

there the troops with the lowest tech levels can beat some high tech troops .
to win you have to mix your troops but all troops have a role in the whole game .

example : a terran marine is tech wise the cheapest troop , it is your first one .
a proton scout who is very lategame tech wise and has huge costs is easily defeated by marines for the same cost .

the protoss base unit , the berserker wins against 2 marines , the same costs .
terra can advance then to flamethrower infantry .
they win against berserkers .
they lose against the next toss unit , the dragoon .

the dragoon though loses against marines again .


if you combine marines with medics they are rather horrible . then you need e.g. reavers to properly beat them .

reavers beat everything on ground expect good managed terran siege tanks .

both of this units have no anti air capazities .

so against a few fliers they lose .


most fliers again lose against Medics + Marines .

the medics + marines lose though against a reaver .




so it is well balanced and depending what your opponent uses you need to build a counter but normally your cheapest troops techwise : marines , berserks and zerglings are useful in the whole game .


in dominions this is simply not the case .


and a few REAL LIFE history examples which show that new tech is not always better :

world war 2 :
surely in a 1on1 comparison a king tiger was much better than the german mark 4 tank .
costwise the ratio though was something like 1 tiger to 5 mark 4 tanks though or 3 panther tanks .


the soviet union had about the same capazities than germany .
germany focused on their ultrahuge tanks like tiger , king tiger , jagdtiger , elefant ... and wasted lots of resources .

the soviet union concentrated on the very good t 34/85 .
while in a 1on1 clearly inferior to a tiger tank it was so cheap to produce that it normally fought in a 10:1 ratio against the tiger and won easily .

furthermore 1 infantry with a bazooka could defeat any tank when it came close enough .
a tiger was as vulnerable to an airattack than a t 34/85 e.g.


so though the tiger series was technically far superior than e.g. the t 34/85 or the sherman they could be beat still by them .

[deccan]

Boron said:
the protoss base unit , the berserker wins against 2 marines , the same costs .

Actually it was a Protoss Zealot. But yeah, SC is great game. I wish Blizzard had seen it fit to make an SC 2 instead of a WC 3.

Boron said:
so it is well balanced and depending what your opponent uses you need to build a counter but normally your cheapest troops techwise : marines , berserks and zerglings are useful in the whole game .

Yeah, that's my personal preference as well, emphasis on personal. One of the interesting card-design policies that Wizards of the Coast devised (but didn't really put into practice consistently) for Magic: The Gathering was that cards should be balanced, so that rare cards should not be more powerful per resource (mana, card in hand whatever) than common cards, but instead should be more complex. That is, rare cards should have wide-ranging, game-changing effects that are really powerful but limited in application to very specific niches (combos, specific strategies used by an opponent, vulnerable to a prepared opponent etc). Common cards however should be versatile and good just about any time.

But of course, that's something that's easy to idealize after, but very hard (impossible?) to put into practice.