#Tier 4 too strong. Doom stacks syndrom.

1820 messages · Page 2 of 2 (latest)

crisp skiff
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still 🧂 i see

sage perch
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excuses even from me now

sudden gulch
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Contagious

crisp skiff
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@sage perch

by you xD
I guess it your loss, again this time

sage perch
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Don't forget to share a video, where I'm salty.... oh

sturdy haven
crisp skiff
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And? I cant agree with a good point even if we have different opinions?

sturdy haven
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Your position seems to be that "T4-T5 is not a problem". You are arguing against people who claim the opposite. You mentioned that people disagree with the opinion of those you argue with and quoted someone whose opinion is closer to those who you argue against than the one you subscribe to.

crisp skiff
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And? He is right about cost cap being a bad thing. No matter the where he/me stand

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Anyway, I believe this whole mess is because ppl cant see bigger picture about 2 parallel queues. This is a solution, a brilliant one, not cap, upkeep or whatever. Building units every turn will make t1-t2 spam a thing.
Nerfing high tier units will just toss fuel into t2 spam

sudden gulch
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Punish t1 spam just by setting the turn timer lol

crisp skiff
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By the time you start getting t4-t5 you will already have like 4-5-6 stacks of t1-t2 units

sturdy haven
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From what we have heard regarding the current experience from those with access to the preview high tier units seem to be problematic - not low tier ones.

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Historically, high tier unit prevalence in AoW was problematic and low tier units seemed to underperform.

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I don't think that the scenario you are describing is likely to happen.

crisp skiff
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You cant also deny it outright.
But first of all, game has to be seen how it was done by devs, without influence of those who cant even play it. After that, if high tier units turn out to be an actual problem, ppl can talk about nerfing.
Judging from PF, I can say they really killed t4 spam.

sturdy haven
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Well, we will have to wait and see how it turns out in AoW IV. Voicing our concerns to developers can still be useful though.

sage perch
sage perch
sudden gulch
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Should dwelling t4 even count

sage perch
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In AoW 3, Dwelling T4s were so spammable thanks to goddamn hurry mechanic, their cost was nerfed by competitive mod, and they are still spammable. If you were thinking about PF dwelling T4s, sure they are the same like other T4s, maybe even cheaper as you do not pay a hefty cosmite production price

gaunt mason
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i typically think that prod costs tend to work better as a deterrent than gold/energy cost

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you can optimize your econ to the heavens and back but getting hit in the timing really hurts

vapid prairie
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Making T4-T5 have an absurd draft cost compared T1-T3 could be helpful towards curbing the high-tier spam through turn efficiency and strategic flexibility, even if battles are capped to 18 vs 18 units on each side

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by the time you have gotten 18 T5 units, the opponent could have possibly gotten six times that amount and can grind you down in a war of attrition or spread out and besiege your less-defended settlements to force you to spread those T5s thin, or before that they are pressuring you by attacking regularly, forcing you to churn out more fortifications and lower-tier units in defense.

rare kiln
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I disagree. The units are as good as other units in their tier before evolving.

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I disagree. You are simply playing games differently.

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Btw, have the devs confirmed, that AI opponents have to pay the same upkeep as the players? Trying to prevent doom stacks with upkeep costs only works if the AI has the some economic problems as we have.

vapid prairie
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I don't think the bots in previous games had an upkeep discount

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they just straight up gained more resources

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Planetfall bots had both a flat and percentage boost to income for nearly every resource

rare kiln
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Felt differently in many games. But this might relate to the fact that we (me and friends) played with a mod, raising upkeep costs for the units depending on tier. Don't know if this has been the same for the AI then.

vapid prairie
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Upkeep changes in a unit's stats are applied universally

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but it still does not change the fact that the bots will crank out as many T4s as their buffed economy can handle

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you could lower their build priority for each T4 unit in the respective unit tables, but I am not sure how impactful that would be

rare kiln
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Hm... we had a game, where an AI had only one city but 8 T4 and a couple of T3 for a dozen turns. With the higher upkeep it would have to pay hundreds of gold each turn and the AI player never had enough cities to build up such a fortune. I wonder how the game manages that if the AI really has to pay the same upkeep.

vapid prairie
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As far as I can tell, there is no upkeep modifier in the bot resource cheat tables in Planetfall, and the AoW3 wiki does not show any upkeep modifiers in the AI difficulty page either

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each difficulty above knight increases bot gold income by 1/3

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at emperor difficulty, the gold income is doubled

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but also there is probably a flat gold boost not listed in the AoW3 wiki

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Planetfall bots both had a flat and percentage boost to income per difficulty

rare kiln
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Hm... in some games the AI suddenly surrenders with no apparent reason. This might be due to a gold shortage then. We play emperor, didn't know about the double gold.

vapid prairie
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I have had a bot surrender after I beat basically every stack they threw at my capital

rare kiln
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Yes, if you are too strong, they surrender frequently, but sometimes they surrender with lots of units standing around, offering stacks of units (had 5 T4 and their chief in the capital once). You see all the grey units after this and I wonder, if this is really because they ran out of gold.

vapid prairie
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I am not sure tbh

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I might have to play one match with fog of war cheat to figure out for myself

crisp skiff
scenic saffron
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The availability of tiers should also depend on map size imo. T4-5 spam shouldn't be the status quo on small to medium maps

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But now that the different production queues are separate, there isn't such an opportunity cost to creating lower tier units

ivory void
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Tbh I feel like that if you can afford a doomstack, your opponent can too

sturdy haven
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Frankly, I would prefer to see combined armies work even in mid-late game on larger maps.

gray dagger
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You might not be able to support more than 1 doom stack with city limits. How many cities did you end up with on large maps in PF?

sturdy haven
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Aren't city limits a soft cap?

ivory void
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Also hot take: having a couple of high tier doomstacks is a better gameplay than having to micro hordes of small tier units

gray dagger
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You can go over it but incur negatives

sturdy haven
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It depends on how severe these are, but going past the limit will most likely be useful past a certain point.

sturdy haven
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I don't think the scale of AoW makes moving armies in such a manner problematic, even if they are slightly larger.

scenic saffron
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The problem of doomstacks is that they usually consist of a single unit type (f.e. 5 Horned Gods + a hero), not necessarily that they are powerful

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Power is always relative to your opponents

sturdy haven
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In addition to that, they also decrease amount of viable compositions players can field.

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If it always comes down to 15 Horned Gods + 3 Heroes vs 15 Shadow Stalkers + 3 Heroes, players are forced into the same composition every game in the end.

gray dagger
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See the nice thing about tomes having the T5 units instead of classes/cultures/races is that you can make different decisions each game about what T4/5 units you get.

sturdy haven
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Yeah, but if you are still limited to pure T4-T5 late game, it still heavily limits your possible compositions.

gray dagger
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Yeah, true

sturdy haven
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Having a lot of possible high tier options partially solves that, though I don't think we will have that much variety of pure T4-T5 in AoW IV. Making low tier units viable in such scenarios solves it even better, in my personal opinion, since the amount of possibly viable compositions is higher and thus build diversity is better.

scenic saffron
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make lower tiers do more damage against higher tiers ¯_(ツ)_/¯

vapid prairie
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so basically if your city count is 9/5, that means all your cities will be producing zero of everything

sturdy haven
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Ouchie.

scenic saffron
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I'd copy the administration mechanic from Total War Troy

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It's much more elegant than brute forcing it like this

empty spire
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I'd just delete the city cap. It's not a solution.

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Will probably just make a mod raising it by 1000 for everyone.

sturdy haven
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I think the current intention is for players to release excess cities as vassals.

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Which, can work I guess, depending how it well you can manage your vassals.

empty spire
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So, enforce a playstyle we don't want through arbitrary caps?

sturdy haven
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Though, I personally feel that the described penalty is a bit too stiff.

empty spire
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I thought with the Forms and everything that AoW4 was all about catering to the player fantasy.

sturdy haven
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I think something like happiness system from Endless Legend would work well.

empty spire
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I tried Endless Legend, and I hope to god Triumph doesn't look at that for inspiration.

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They did literally everything worse than previous AoW games.

sturdy haven
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I would respectfully disagree - these games are very different, but I personally enjoyed the EL series.

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I think they handled city expansion penalties quite well there.

empty spire
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Then it is logical that making them more similar serves a group of people who already have games they want, while people who prefer the AoW style more suddenly get nothing.

sturdy haven
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I am not arguing for making them "similar" - I am arguing that the game did a city limiting factor well, and that AoW could work pretty well with a similar system.

empty spire
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My argument is about the very concept of limiting the amount of player cities, and that entire concept being wrong.

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HOW it happens is an implementation detail. There should just be no inherent limit on cities. The previous games never needed it. I never played a game where I felt it was needed.

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(And I played plenty games with limiting measures)

sturdy haven
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There should just be no inherent limit on cities. The previous games never needed it.
That's not fully true.

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PF added a cosmite cost for settlers, for example.

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It is also a limiting factor.

empty spire
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Which already doesn't apply to conquered cities.

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Also, that there's no limit to cities doesn't mean there's no cost.

sturdy haven
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Yes, but my point stands - it limits how quickly players are able to expand.

empty spire
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Cost is fine. I'm not arguing free settlers.

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Yeah, and that's fine. But a city cap limits how much player can expand, no matter the time taken.

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And THAT is what I have problems with.

sage perch
sturdy haven
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Besides, even then, massing T3 with a couple of supports from T2 and T4 might still be more viable even so late in the game in PF.

sage perch
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Continent maps have much more cosmite, than land ones thanks to aquatic rifts, so that is also a factor,as well as that it slows down the game. Generally applies the more water the bigger the units

sturdy haven
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PF cosmite + energy colonizer cost also limits expansion quite decently - you can't expand as quickly as you could in AoW III.

empty spire
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Cosmite cost for settlers is good. It's a precious resource, and spending it on settlers means your armies will be weaker.

But clearly that wasn't enough, and that's why we're now getting a rather painful city cap.

sage perch
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10 extra cosmite for every next colonizer isn't so bad, right? Even in AoW 3, you rarely build more than 4 cities, I tried to go up to 6 and got behind in military

empty spire
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AoW3 cityspam is still somewhat alive.

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But I think provinces are a much, much better way to counteract that than city cap silliness.

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In 3, you'd pick Warlord or Dread because they get more gold from cities regardless of size (War Effort and Steam Powered), and then spam a lot of them. This also increases racial happiness, which can give up to 300 free morale, increasing your income even more. Monoculture (8 cities) gives a stack of units to help defend.

Population cost was multiplied by 10, from 200 to 2000, to counteract it, but it didn't solve the problem entirely.

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Also, humans and Tigrans have Racial Governance rank 1 helping settler spam, with 25% cost reduction.

scenic saffron
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The more cities you have, the more micromanagement you need to do every turn

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Which means slower and slower turns

karmic coyote
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it's a soft cap and we don't know how harsh the penalty for going over it is or how difficult it is to raise

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also cities start off as outposts and I'm not sure if those contribute to the cap or not

empty spire
# karmic coyote it's a soft cap and we don't know how harsh the penalty for going over it is or ...

25% total income reduction per city over the cap. 4 cities over the cap, no income at all.

But we don't know about raising difficulty. On the other hand, we don't see it raised much in the footage we have, so presumably there are very few ways to do so.

However, I don't think there is any good reason for a city cap. If city spam is a problem in 4 without it, a better solution would be to make tall cities more worth it, therefore heavily encouraging people to focus on that instead. Especially if tall cities scale with # of provinces, which means that many cities make it impossible to scale as well as fewer cities with the same surface area would.

gaunt mason
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EL is a horribly boring game but it has a lot of cool concepts that triumph already borrowed from heavily in planetfall, mostly to great success (pop management was a misfire)

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I do not like a hard city cap largely because that's pretty inflexible for map size

empty spire
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Or game phase.

gaunt mason
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I was not the biggest fan of pf's escalating colonizer costs though they did solve the problem well. I always thought the cost scaling should cap out at 60 cosmite or so, so on larger maps rebuilding a city that got razed isn't obscenely expensive

sturdy haven
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I kinda prefer the idea of PF's escalating colonizer costs over city cap personally, though it depends on how they will end up implementing it in the final release.

empty spire
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final release has city cap.

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It's far too late in development to mess with that kind of fundamental things.

gaunt mason
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What the hell

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How did this become accuracy talk too

empty spire
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Must have posted it in the wrong channel.

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I'll remove it.

sturdy haven
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I think this discussion is the third biggest thread regarding AoW IV in this Discord.

empty spire
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#1066141227055059075 might be the primary contestant.

gaunt mason
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#1077746251753328720 Has this thread beat too

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And #1065719252692242564

sturdy haven
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Ah, the fourth biggest then.

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I have a feeling that this discussion will surpass its competition in time though.

gaunt mason
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It'll probs beat #1077746251753328720

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I have my doubts about the other 2

sage perch
stoic ferry
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mmmm

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I'm not sure the Dual Queue will actually fix not building T1-2's if they aren't useful late game

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because there's still gold costs for both buildings and units

sturdy haven
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This depends on how much gold you would get through the game.

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Though, I personally would prefer for T1-T2-T3 to remain useful late-game.

gaunt mason
sturdy haven
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In that regard, it does sounds like a partial solution to the issue of AoW 3 elite rush, yeah.

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Though, the mid-late game can still be problematic in terms of unit variety depending on how useful T1-T3 are and how expensive T4-T5 are to build / upkeep.

stoic ferry
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and we've seen it doing SOMETHING that isn't making T1-2's

gaunt mason
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Ehhh

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The thing you have to keep in mind is aow as a series rewards short term power spikes and has a military -> economy loop due to site rewards

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Being able to get a second clearing stack of t1s out earlier could easily net your more resources in the long run than spending that gold on buildings

empty spire
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Yeah, I'm only cautiously optimistic about split queue.

sage perch
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Doesn't mean you won't rush to higher tier so your clearing stacks might have as few long-term useless units as possible

sturdy haven
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Some places could only be attacked via a single stack in PF. Back there, it was possible to make starting units powerful enough to clear that with proper mods.

stoic ferry
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oh true

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the sites do seem to now have alternatives to fighting

sturdy haven
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It might make higher tiers more desirable to reach as quickly as possible in order to clear sites which can only be attacked via single stacks.

stoic ferry
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and I think the only vaguely serious fight we've seen where the dev didn't have to sac a low tier unit to pull off the win was the Spooder fight

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did "only" drop a summon in the FG fight

mystic wadi
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If you look at the announcement stream and dwarf underground stream, there is 'produce merchandise' in the building menu but nothing equivalent in the unit menu. And the income/turn does not change when they start producing units.

stoic ferry
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And we see it having an active icon when not producing units in those same streams

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so I'm pretty sure draft doesn't evaporate

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from what I remember of the icon

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it's probably a food thing

mystic wadi
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ok, looks like it costs a tiny amount of food

stoic ferry
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do remember that one pop does a lot more in 4 than in PF

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because it immediately gets a sector with exploit instead of you needing to spend the time to put up the exploit

mystic wadi
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tiny in the sense that a full stack of T1-T2 units would set you back ~1 turn in food growth. With the single food pickup being worth ~1.5 turns of food growth.

vapid prairie
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I am guessing build housing/grow crops is the draft equivalent of produce merchandise?

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but for some reason, there was not a button for it in the draft screen

sturdy haven
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Yep. Curious, how it will work in the final release.

sage perch
sturdy haven
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Yep. I assume they will be in AoW IV as well.

sage perch
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I think they already showed such site in 1st video

knotty stone
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Maybe something similar to the fix TW Warhammer 3 implemented for this same issue could work

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Basically giant, single-entity T5 units break through melee ranks easily but get shredded by ranged units

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That way even if you could afford a doomstack of T5s it’s not always the best strategic choice to do so

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Lower ranged miss chance against T4 units and increase their crit chance?

vapid prairie
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cavalry and big monsters in general should definitely be easier to hit than infantry, but I think the overall effectiveness of pikes should also be increased against them

sudden gulch
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I think there was a unit tag similiar to "Large Target"shown already?

vapid prairie
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allow us to turn our pikemen into Yari Ashigaru-level line-holding bad@$$es that you have to deal with using ranged because even Manticore Riders will trade with them very inefficiently

dim sparrow
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idk why take that from w3 and not the wound system

vapid prairie
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Wound system would be good too, I think that could be modded into the game by making single-model heroes and big monsters count as two models, though I wonder if that will result in them also visually turning into two models in-game.

wild cloak
wild cloak
knotty stone
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But there is also the anti-large quality of pike/halberd units which could help resolve the issue as well

wild cloak
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No that- that's a whole different problem

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The doomstacking in TWH was a problem of the recruitment system that's been getting worse basically since Medieval 2, I think

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The single entity problem is basically that while the anti-large bonus of halberd units could let them trade efficiently with big units (sometimes, it often wasn't enough - the quality gap was often too wide in TWH1, but 2 added more elite halberd infantry like Phoenix Guard and Stormvermin that held up better, although sometimes even they weren't enough), it did nothing to contest the greater mass that big monsters and heroes had, which allowed them to just walk through units and ruin the importance of formations and good tactics, a lot of the time.

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Like it didn't matter if you put a block of Phoenix Guard four ranks deep or eight ranks deep, they still could not stop a giant or a necrosphinx or whatever from just walking through them to eat your archers, or from disengaging and leaving them in the dust if it didn't like how the HP trade was going.

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(TWH also has a big and ongoing problem with missile units dominating meta, so TWH3's solution to big monsters arguably just feeds into another problem, but it's at least trying to reduce the number of problems, so...)

knotty stone
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Agreed on the single entity issue. The way I see it, the first 2 games had the same problem as AoW3 where once you could afford a doomstack of large T5 single entity units there was little to no reason to recruit anything else. The 2nd game tried to fix the issue by adding stronger anti large units which wasn’t enough like you said. Then the 3rd game also implemented the extra ranged damage against them which more or less evened the playing field. Maybe this game needs both as well to prevent T4 spam

wild cloak
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Ehh

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I don't think any of that solves the doomstack issue, tbh

knotty stone
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And yea although now they just broke ranged units and left them unplayable for close to a year

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Especially gunpowder ranged units

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Tht don’t attack enemies in LoS

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I think a solution needs to be a mix of economic reasons and strategic like the ones in WH

wild cloak
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Fundamentally, if you can afford a full stack of dragons or araknaroks or whatever, they might not trade efficiently with elite halberd units but they're still going to reliably win, and well, you can afford them.

knotty stone
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Ideally we should have 1 or 2 T4 units per army with a good economy because more than that would get countered

wild cloak
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The real solution for TW I think is one it already had, the recruitment system from back in Medieval 2 that made it genuinely difficult to mass a monostack of endgame troops.

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The problem in TWH is just that like

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Once you've unlocked the endgame troops, getting them is just gold (which a player's economy quickly ends up amassing in ludicrous amounts) and recruitment slots, same as anything else. If you can recruit endgame units eight cards at a time, there's no reason not to.

knotty stone
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Exactly. What was the Medieval 2 recruitment system you’re referring to which prevented doomstacking? I played Medieval 2 back in the day but don’t remember the recruitment being any different

wild cloak
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That said as far as AoW goes I don't actually regard armies of T4 or T5 units as inherently a problem, my problem is if that also means armies of identikit units.

knotty stone
wild cloak
knotty stone
wild cloak
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So you might have like, a T1 stables would grow up to 4 cards of light cavalry that you could recruit, after which it would need time to replenish its stock. Upgrading to a T2 stables might increase that to 6 cards of veterancy 1 light cavalry, but it would also unlock early knights - but only 1 or 2 cards of them, and so on up the chain until you've got a maxed-out stables that will grow a stock of like, 1 card of endgame Chivalric Knights, 3 cards of Feudal Knights, 5 cards of early Mailed Knights, and once you'd recruited them it would take time to replenish them.

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So you could have a doomstack of like 20 cards of Chivalric Knights, sure

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But that would represent the entire recruitment capacity of your territory for like, 8 turns or something.

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Maybe you need that force concentration for a key battle - but for sure you're paying for it by not having those troops elsewhere, because it was just totally impractical to recruit them everywhere.

knotty stone
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That could definitely help too. Of course I like the multiple T4 units solution the best but I understand it would probably also be the most difficult to implement

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Unless they do something like a mod system from PF so you could buff your T3 spearman enough to pose a threat to the T4 large unit

wild cloak
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It also helped to make those endgame troops valuable, in that if you lost a well-equipped army, fine, maybe your economy has ballooned enough that you can soak the cost of replacing it, but do you have the troops available to do that?

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Maybe! Probably not more than once.

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So even with infinite money you still ended up having to press lower-tier units into service to plug the gaps and bulk out the numbers

soft chasm
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its a very interesting sistem

sturdy haven
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If you are playing a duel against AI / another player, then if pikes were cost effective against dragons and could reliable kill at least some of them, they would probably be a stronger option.

wild cloak
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Yes but why would you be playing a duel?

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That's not how TW games work.

sturdy haven
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Ah, I am speaking regarding AoW.

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Though, in TW you could play duels.

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In fact, I even played in a couple of amateur tournaments which consisted of duels.

wild cloak
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Sure

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And maybe 5% of the playerbase actually did

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The game's not built around that

sturdy haven
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The game has a separate mode for that.

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One where you buy armies with limited funds and fight a battle.

wild cloak
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Yes I know

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Maybe 5% of the playerbase did the multiplayer

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Per dev comments, at least.

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The game had that functionality, but it wasn't built to cater to it.

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Neither is AoW, frankly.

sturdy haven
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I suppose, but both games received balance patches which addressed the issues mostly prevalent in MP.

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MP balance translates pretty well to SP most of the time.

wild cloak
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It doesn't, tho.

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For one thing, the AI has much more limited capacity for what sort of units it can make good use of - we've seen this a lot in Planetfall, where perfectly fine units like Vanguard Troopers and Dvar Barons perform like absolute garbage in the AI's hands, because it doesn't know how and when to use their abilities.

More pertinently, MP and SP have largely distinct goals for what 'balance' should even be, a lot of the time. MP balance wants to create an even playing field, but SP balance is far more often about creating a carefully calibrated facsimile of challenge for the player to ultimately succeed against, in a way that involves making interesting decisions and using exciting tools.

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Like, C&C style superweapons are absolute hell to balance in an MP format, but they're great for SP play, because they create those interesting decisions of when you deploy an orbital doom laser, and when you do, you get to watch an orbital doom laser &^$$ things up with an exciting SFX display.

sturdy haven
wild cloak
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Yeah and balancing these things is a thorny problem for them.

sturdy haven
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Indeed, but SupCom for example is mostly an MP game.

wild cloak
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It can be done, but it involves spinning different plates.

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SupCom was released as largely a campaign game, it's been kept alive by a more MP-focused community who have extensively patched the game as a result.

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FAF barely resembles vanilla FA.

sturdy haven
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Yes, but my point is that such things are not necessarily limited to SP.

wild cloak
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Cool

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I didn't say that

sturdy haven
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Fair enough, I suppose.

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Well, regarding MP and SP balance - cleverly playing AI in a similar to the player role can be a challenge on its own.

wild cloak
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But for another example, this kind of thing is why Starcraft 2 has all those campaign-only unit variants and upgrades. The devs even said this openly, that most of them are things that are fundamentally not good for multiplayer, but are cool ideas which are good for SP, offering players options and spectacle that's healthy for that mode of play. Even there I'd argue that they swung too far towards the MP side of things, cutting out features and abilities we saw in early promos of the game which just would not work at all in MP, like the Protoss Mothership's original black hole ability, or Terran Battlecruiser's having the capacity to individually upgrade with special weapons like plasma torpedo arrays.

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Wildly unbalanced in MP

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Would've been really cool and enjoyable to play with in SP

sturdy haven
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That's one way to look at it, but I would argue that such things were not inherently impossible to balance.

wild cloak
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Impossible? Maybe not. Impractical? Absolutely yes.

sturdy haven
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My opinion is that they were hard to balance and thus the devs decided to not implement them to avoid risk.

wild cloak
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There's only so many hours worth of dev time.

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And frankly, balance is far from the most important thing to spend those hours on.

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Even setting aside like, basic functionality and Actually Having A Game That Exists stuff, I wouldn't even put it in the top five. Maybe not the top ten.

sturdy haven
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I would actually disagree with that assessment.

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It depends on the game, of course, but all games need to be balanced - otherwise the fundamental gameplay loop becomes unfun.

wild cloak
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Nah

sturdy haven
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The balance does not need to be perfect, of course. Just good enough to allow a player to make proper strategic decisions.

wild cloak
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You need a basic level of balance to the level of avoiding like, "one side starts play with a button that makes all the enemies Just Explode", but past that a lot of other things matter much more.

sturdy haven
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Well, my personal opinion is that games are played because the gameplay loop they provide to a player is engaging. If it is not balanced properly, it stops being challenging, and thus stops being engaging.

wild cloak
#

From my perspective, drawing mostly on stuff like Giant Grant Games' and the polling he's done on what the strategy gamer population actually looks like, if you want an engaging, popular strategy game then the stuff that matters is,

sturdy haven
#

Ah, Grant. I've seen the video you are talking about.

wild cloak
#

a) Core engine and usability. For real-time in particular this means your pathfinding and responsiveness, but in both real-time and turn-based this is your user interface, how well you can customise animation speed and interface features to suit your preferences, engine stability, tooltipping, in-game encyclopedias, etc. How seamlessly and intuitively you can manipulate the control interface to actually Play The Game at all.

sturdy haven
#

With this one I absolutely agree - a lot of RTS games suffer in this area.

wild cloak
#

b) Spectacle and aesthetic. This is the stuff you put on the box art (well, assuming you're still doing physical boxes in this day and age :V) and trailers to wow people - it might be shallow, but it gets people on board long enough to dig into the deeper stuff, and there's just plain a lot of visceral enjoyment in big flashy stuff like superweapons and ultimate units. Cool stuff sells - it's one of the reasons I like Planetfall! The way that pretty much the entire unit roster can Do Things besides attack with better stats makes for a lot of cool abilities and makes the battles and the units in them 'pop', even before thinking about all the decisions it creates for the player.

sturdy haven
#

That is an important part of it, and I would argue that some of the stuff mentioned here veers into gameplay area and thus is affected by balance.

#

For example, you mentioned unit abilities in Planetfall.

wild cloak
#

c) Robust support for map editors and modding support, to encourage community maps, scenarios, mods, etc. Strategy as a format has historically been especially prolific in generating mods, up to and including spawning entire genres, and without speculating as to the why, it pays to enable that with your game. Modding will keep your game alive (see: C&C Generals, FAF), and it will also let you see what's popular in the community that you can maybe do your own official spin on.

#

d) Variant game modes to keep single-player fresh and interesting. More campaigns, more mission types, mutators - Planetfall's Empire Mode was a great example of this, and AoW3 tried it with the scenarios, but didn't really make them obvious enough for that to work.

sturdy haven
wild cloak
sturdy haven
#

I think this also falls under umbrella of "balance".

wild cloak
#

Cool! I don't!

#

I'm not talking about how well those abilities work

#

I'm literally just saying the brute fact of having them was good and exciting

#

And by contrast the lack of those abilities was a contributing factor to why I eventually burned out on AoW3; because far more of the units essentially boiled down to bundles of stats with some conditional numerical bonuses, like Overwhelm, Armoured, etc, they felt less exciting to use.

sturdy haven
#

I agree that "exciting" stuff is that makes players interested, and that it can be "hard" to balance at times. My point is, that if "exciting" stuff is balanced too poorly it quickly ceases to be exciting and makes you lose interest.

wild cloak
#

Ehhh... Yes, but it's a question of degree, and the bar for balance where abilities are fit for purpose and a newbie can see why you'd use this or that unit/ability/upgrade/etc is much, much, much lower than the bar for balance for head-to-head multiplayer play.

#

And I think chasing the latter can quite easily be not just wasted effort on diminishing returns, but actively harmful to the health of the game, because it encourages you to cut out the spectacular features because they have too much of an impact and are too hard to balance for multiplayer.

sage perch
# wild cloak Wildly unbalanced in MP

I just want to mention combat spells Rite of Malediction, Spontaneous Mutation, and Unstable Transformation from AoW 3, which did just that and nobody complained about them in mp.

wild cloak
#

Like, even within multiplayer games, balance isn't necessarily the most important design goal to chase - franchises like Call of Duty figured this out ages ago with the utility of 'noob tubes' as ways to give newer players a way to score cheap kills that they could get excited about, and thus encourage them to keep playing. Largely unbalanced, lead to a lot of salt among the more skilled players! Ultimately better for the health of the game than not having them, because it helped keep those newer players invested in the game.

sturdy haven
#

Can't comment regarding Call of Duty - have not played anything from the series.

wild cloak
sturdy haven
#

You seem to be arguing that building the game around trying to make it easy to balance is wrong.

sage perch
wild cloak
#

I don't think I would, no.

sturdy haven
wild cloak
#

Sometimes those goals overlap! Not always, not by a long shot.

sage perch
#

Not that I play much games, but I dare to say, I am able of inventing content for AoW at least, which is exciting to use, and balanced for MP. I worked with Juzza on Expanded Arsenal, and I don't think my focus on balance made my creation conservative by any means.

#

And so, the reasoning you are using kind of sounds as an excuse for selling bad design, wrapped in an "SP only package" to me, can't help it.

wild cloak
#

Bluntly, I am happy to dismiss that claim, Amikdara, because you're deep enough down the rabbit hole of competitive MP play that I doubt you'd even consider the kind of gameplay that wouldn't work within your preferred paradigm, regardless of how well it works for others, especially considering our previous conversations about how narrow your experience of the strategy genre is.

sage perch
#

I did not start an an MP, I played AoW in singleplayer for over a decade.

wild cloak
#

You are no doubt very good at designing things you'd enjoy playing with, but the folks at Triumph are in the business of making games for other people, which is why they get to sell them for money rather than just having fun with them internally.

wild cloak
sage perch
#

guess what works for me, doesn't work for others 🤷‍♀️

wild cloak
#

Where you started, plainly isn't where you are now.

sage perch
#

I believe I dismissed validity of SP even before I got to MP

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Basically as soon as I got to a first "hotseat duel against myself"

sturdy haven
# wild cloak Perhaps! But balancing it to be *exciting* and balancing it to be *fair* are dif...

I am not sure if fair is a good way to describe it. In fact, I don't think this dichotomy holds up very well. Take "Cogmind" for example - a single player roguelike which has several balance adjustments to make it more fair, such as enemies being unable to spawn near the start of a level you are entering. A lot of MP games do not chase to be fair above all else either - SC 2 and League of Legends receive balance updates to already fair metas just to shake things up and make the game more exciting.

wild cloak
sage perch
#

you're welcome

wild cloak
# sturdy haven I am not sure if **fair** is a good way to describe it. In fact, I don't think t...

Fair point! I don't know that I'd altogether agree that SC2 and LoL have ever updated the meta 'just' to make an already-fair meta more exciting - I kind of doubt we could get broad agreement that any stage of the meta has been so fair as to not warrant more fine-tuning, among the MP communities for these games. That's more by way of a quibble though, the core point that mixing things up to keep the meta fresh is also a goal of balance patches in these games, yeah, fair enough, good point well made.

I think at this point we're getting to a point where the argument has become so much about squishy shades of judgement and a murky sense of where we draw the lines, how much of X vs how much of Y, that we're essentially talking in subjective terms. I'm not sure there's much more to be said, in that case?

sturdy haven
#

I suppose, though a lot of arguments eventually boil down to definitions.

sturdy haven
# sturdy haven It depends on the format, I would say.

Honestly, we kinda strayed away from the issue with this whole discussion about MP vs SP balance. Looking back at it, I should have probably worded my argument a bit differently. Personally, I would like a solution to the T4-T5 issue which would work for both, FFAs with a lot of players / AIs, and 1v1s. Especially considering that a lot of AoW MP comes in a form of FFAs.

#

Rewording my previous argument, I would say that if pikes were cost effective against dragons and could reliable kill at least some of them, they would probably be a stronger option in both FFAs and duels, depending on how quickly you could produce them and how much they would actually be "cost-efficient" in comparison to other options.

crisp skiff
wild cloak
#

rolls eyes

#

Go boast about your e-peen somewhere else please, it's not relevant here.

gaunt mason
# wild cloak Perhaps! But balancing it to be *exciting* and balancing it to be *fair* are dif...

to be fair in most cases the goals either overlap or don't particularly hurt the other side. tbh i think a lot of sp vs mp friction comes from how mp desires frequent updates and rebalancing of the status quo, while sp tends to settle into and get invested in a particular mode of play that is then disrupted by mp changes.

there's also, while perhaps not a difference in what is and is not valuable, a difference in focus. SP will care a lot more about more abstract game design concepts like "gamefeel" and "immersion" and "what looks cool" while mp cares a lot more about the minutia of very specific mechanical interactions and number-balancing.

ultimately both "sides" are very important to what makes a good game: mp players are unlikely to invest in a game that can't be sold to them on the aspects SP enjoys, and a game with poor balance is very likely to generate frustrating situations for SP players who will then leave for another game that "feels better" (or otherwise demand fairly specific and often unintuitive gameplay decisions to enjoy success). but this difference in focus tends to make what the "other side" values invisible to "your side". and when one "side" wants to make changes (typically MP) they're willing to sacrifice what the "other side" considers valuable, as its true value is not immediately apparent to their perspective.

#

racial variants have been an amusing example of this phenomena where they were originally pushed in aow3 by mp players for mp reasons, but are now most beloved by SP players

wild cloak
#

ultimately both "sides" are very important to what makes a good game: mp players are unlikely to invest in a game that can't be sold to them on the aspects SP enjoys, and a game with poor balance is very likely to generate frustrating situations for SP players who will then leave for another game that "feels better" (or otherwise demand fairly specific and often unintuitive gameplay decisions to enjoy success)
Mmm, I'm not so sure about this.

#

I can see what you mean, but I think it's not nearly as true as the 'other side' perspective.

gaunt mason
#

nah you just don't tend to see those games because they sink pretty hard. games that truly don't care about balance don't tend to do well unless they have dominions-level complexity where a still varied meta can organically develop as an emergent behavior

#

no one remembers stalin vs martians except for the truly incredible advertising videos

wild cloak
#

It depends again how you define 'balance', but like, an awful lot of singleplayer scenarios are deliberately imbalanced in the AI's favour in absolute terms, things like starting off with fully built bases and so on.

gaunt mason
#

ah, asymmetric ai balance is a bit of a different topic. but like, in those games the things mp values are still very important, you just like, aren't playing against a person

#

if only one of your units is worth building that sucks as an sp player

wild cloak
#

Sure

#

But there's a vast excluded middle between 'only one of your units is worth building', and the degree of fine-tuning balance that MP communities tend to want, in my experience, to the degree that I'm genuinely not sure how meaningful a statement it is that balance as a value is still important.

gaunt mason
#

well, again, you can look at stuff like racial variants. to refine it down to a core, what mp "values" most is having a varied choice of different build paths and strategies that can all lead to success

#

mp players tend to get out in the weeds with what they ask for but what they want is very much relevant to the sp experience

#

i am firmly of the belief that the laser tank nerf was a net positive for SP players as much as it was MP players, despite how reviled the change was by SP players who had gotten used to and "settled into" the game they had been playing

#

a game lacking balance is rarely an interesting one in effect

#

maybe the best way i can put it is: if pf had released with the laser tank nerf in play, that would have been categorically a better game. the "friction" comes not from competing goals (the things MP players want rarely truly harm the SP experience in the abstract) but from the simple fact that MP balancing is inherently disruptive on a status quo that SP players inherently learn to value

#

if you released the endpoint "balanced for mp" game sp players would generally like it about as much if not more. but achieving balance is inherently a post release process which causes conflicts that otherwise wouldn't arise

#

do note that mp players themselves are often pretty bad at suggesting good remedies for the problems that they are genuinely very good at identifying

wild cloak
#

In terms of abstract principles, yeah those values align, but I do still think the SC2 campaign/multiplayer divide is pretty informative in how the SP side of things has tons of additional units, upgrades, variants, etc, ditto the co-op mode, all of which are generally agreed to be impractical to balance for head-to-head play, but are great fun in a singleplayer environment for how overtuned and viscerally satisfying they can be.

Likewise things like the campaign mode in Dawn of War: Dark Crusade with its commander progression, honour guard units, etc, pretty much the entire strategic layer in Total War games and all the bonuses that come from then as they feed into the tactical battles... There's immense fun to be had with bombing around the campaign giving the Sword of Khaine to somebody completely incongruous like Skarsnik, but you couldn't really allow the Sword of Khaine to even exist in head-to-head multiplayer.

#

The values may align in the abstract, but when you get down to the practical layer of how far you can take things, that's where the friction starts appearing.

gaunt mason
#

i think i'd rather argue that balancing those things in an mp context is less "impossible" and more "more trouble than it's worth." and genuine conflicts between SP and MP certainly exist, but i think the goals align (often "secretly") some 90% of the time

wild cloak
#

NINJEW — Today at 00:46
i think i'd rather argue that balancing those things in an mp context is less "impossible" and more "more trouble than it's worth."
Perhaps, but I just talked about the difference between abstract values and how far you can practically take things, so, practically speaking, what's the difference?

gaunt mason
#

when building the game you have to think about the game "in the MP mindset" to achieve that baseline level of balance that makes the game fun for SP. i don't think it's correct to just like, take that as a given.

gaunt mason
# wild cloak > NINJEW — Today at 00:46 > i think i'd rather argue that balancing those things...

practically speaking the difference is that toys being triaged out of mp to avoid the hassle of balancing them is only really a benefit for SP because those specific devs chose to adopt that kind of mindset for their game. i'm also hesitant to get too into starcraft specifically, the most mp-focused and high profile strategy game on the planet, as yes that does put it in extreme circumstances that are otherwise atypical for game dev

#

i do not believe that aow would benefit much from a strict divergence in "mp balance" and "sp balance" as two different games with two different available sets of mechanics and assets

sudden gulch
#

Balanced age of empires 2 stuffs imbalanced age of mythology in a locker

wild cloak
#

To be honest I find starcraft to be a very useful and informative comparison to draw, precisely because it's the most MP-focused and high profile strategy game on the planet, because we know from dev comments that the playerbase still splits something like 80/20 in favour of singleplayer content, something that you can still see at work in the way that, say, the much-marketed Archon Mode was dead on arrival, while the relative afterthought of a co-op vs AI mode exploded in popularity and has been heavily developed afterwards.

gaunt mason
#

it's useful to consider but it's also important to keep in mind that "mp balance" for starcraft and "mp balance" for aow are two different pictures

wild cloak
#

It's very informative for me, about how substantive 'only really a benefit for SP' is - that is, potentially not very substantive at all, if SP is such a large proportion of the playerbase.

gaunt mason
#

starcraft benefits from that balance divergence due to the artificially heightened value of mp balance, such that the SP specific concerns as they are languish rather than there truly being a back and forth between them

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what would otherwise be a footnote is exaggerated into a much bigger problem in the case of starcraft. that remaining 10% in the "genuine conflicts between SP and MP certainly exist, but i think the goals align (often "secretly") some 90% of the time"

gaunt mason
#

they bolted extra stuff onto mp that specifically caters to SP, they didn't throw out the existing MP game because it was a perfectly good game missing some of the extra love in areas that SP players particularly care about or are specific to them

wild cloak
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Marketing, name recognition, and a variety of other virtues - the mission design for its campaigns is something I'd call a genuine strength of the title, for example. But I've also seen a few people digging into how the community drives away potential players by pushing ranked competitive play as what starcraft is 'about' in a way that creates an intimidatingly high perceived barrier to entry.

gaunt mason
#

...i think that's a little bit of a different discussion from mechanical balance philosophy

wild cloak
#

So, while it's something of an impossible question to answer, I do think it's nevertheless worth asking how much bigger SC2 could've been if it hadn't had that focus.

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That is, you ask why SC2 was able to maintain an SP population, I would suggest that its SP population was already stifled to a degree by the MP focus, but maintained by other factors.

gaunt mason
#

i mean if you really want to have that discussion you have to ask how much of the name recognition came from how big the MP community was in starcraft 1 and the publicity that their esports tournaments drew

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if you removed mp from starcraft 1, would starcraft 2 even exist?

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(yes, probably, but i would argue almost certainly not to the size and prevalence it enjoys)

wild cloak
#

I think it'd be radically different if we're getting that far into 'what if?' territory, but yeah I think so. Brood War genuinely was a great campaign in its own right.

gaunt mason
#

the point is: yeah, it would be radically different. starcraft is a household name in large part due to that mp that you're saying stifled the sp environment. it cuts both ways though, people liked stacraft's campaign. but starcraft's mp was beloved and to say that was a net negative for it is i believe very false

#

starcraft 2 didn't lean into mp just because

wild cloak
#

No, but that MP scene took a long time to get going in a way that trying to force has damaged a fair few strategy titles, and it's worth noting that the MP scene is generally more visible to devs as MP players are more liable to turn up on the forums and argue balance, so it pays to remember that devs can easily get a distorted perception of what the playerbase wants, or even what the playerbase is

gaunt mason
#

similarly, SP players tend to exist in a bubble of "themselves and the 1 to 3 people they know who also play the same game" which is why they tend to show up and have some bizarre ideas of what the problems in the game are

empty spire
#

Starcraft solves that by having different ruleset and stats for MP, and for campaigns.

#

That's not a good idea to do with AoW.

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It lets the devs tweak them seperately for seperate goals.

scenic saffron
#

History has shown that trying to balance SP and MP together is a disaster

rare kiln
#

If some simple switches in the setup can make MP or SP happy without bothering the other, it should be done.

scenic saffron
#

There is literally no downside to separating MP and SP balance

empty spire
#

It makes MP much less accessible, therefore providing fewer people to play with. The learning curve just gets steeper, because there's also a sudden increased impact of autocombat, at least for 95% of online games.

But for 3, there was a mod basically doing the seperation, for the more dedicated MP players. There's no reason that couldn't be a thing again.

scenic saffron
#

MP is already played by a fraction of the playerbase, different balancing won't stop the dedicated few, trust me

crisp skiff
#

This is thread about t4-t5 problem, dont drag MP and SP here, those 2 have nothing to do with thread

#

Why MP and SP are not relevant here? Because both are played with similar rules and the only difference is either you play competitively/efficient or you dont.

empty spire
#

AI T4 spam hasn't ever really been a problem. Devs fixed that long ago by telling it it wasn't allowed to build a unit if over X% of its army was that unit already.

#

At least in 3.

#

Probably also PF.

crisp skiff
#

IMO listening to SP experience on this matter is waste of time. Why? Because in SP you decide how game goes and tweak it yourself. Why in the world you care about doomstacking in SP. AI never does it. If you do it yourself and than cry its your own problem, just dont do it

empty spire
#

The T4 stacking problem is inherently a MP one.

crisp skiff
gaunt mason
gaunt mason
gaunt mason
vapid prairie
#

If there is one time where it was the case, it would be Tiberium Wars, though I chalk that one more to the devs basically forgeting to properly tweak the campaign to account for the economy changes

gaunt mason
#

you can see that in: many of the participants of this very thread are not MP people

crisp skiff
gaunt mason
#

'cause spamming t4s is boring

#

don't gotta be knee deep in MP to come to that conclusion

crisp skiff
#

yeah that's why they spam it vs a focking ai

#

literally this

Bike-Fall.png
gaunt mason
#

SP players are not necessarily good at the game, which can lead to a perception that you need to do x for success when x is really jsut the easiest way to achieve victory, not the only way

#

also the aow3 ai had artificial limitations to prevent mono unit spamming but that often meant what you fought was like 50% t4s and 50% 1-2 types of t3, so the issue was still apparent if not as acute

silk jay
#

and frankly I don't trust their judgement

sturdy haven
#

I mostly play MP myself, but don't think that SP is necessarily a sandbox experience - a lot of players enjoy playing challenging SP as well.

gaunt mason
sudden gulch
#

SP Emperor AI will mono stack around turn 65-70 as production classes and 90-100 for summoning classes

#

the SP players complainging about it are usually playing Large Map + full 7 opponet to give that time to happen

#

It can happen in campaign which I think ? Uses Lord difficulty AI

#

but the human has to get really lost imo

gaunt mason
#

SP players like to turtle and tend to come from civ or other 4xs where turncounts in the hundreds are expected as the norm

silk jay
silk jay
gaunt mason
#

i think the age of spells were supposed to fill that role but rather than giving you a victory screen they just gave you some overwhelmingly powerful empire buffs

#

unsure how pf ai handled doomsdays tbh. rather got the impression they don't go for it with much urgency

silk jay
#

They definitely putter around. You need several of them to have one succeed.

#

It should be easier for them in 4 since the tech tree doesn't branch away from the tech victory - the path to military victory also leads to the magic victory

wild cloak
sudden gulch
#

planetfall AI gets stage 1 and stage 2 doomsday remarkably early actually

#

I think they build the doomsday structures WAY in advance of actually researching the doomsday finisher though

#

I will need to watch a few games to see when they have it ready on average

stoic ferry
#

I don't think I've ever actually seen the PF AI click that final op

#

but as far as AoW3... I usually played vs Squire AI and they'd be tossing T4 doomstacks by like, turn 60

#

so I dunno what people were doing to have them be waiting to turn 90-100

frozen kelp
#

T3 should cost much Mana. T4~ T5 should cost huge Mana. only resource difference when they are produced makes T1~T3 use. huge mana cost on high tech units can serve as a soft limit for them.

#

In AOW3, high tech units cost a little mana, so we can produce full of T3~T4 units for every turn in city, without T1~T2.

vapid prairie
#

Doomstacks are way too expensive in AoW4. Sure, you can have one or two, but they get really expensive to maintain, especially on smaller or middle-sized maps. Most particularly because a lot of the best units cost mana and mana can be in short supply if you're using enchantments and conjuring units. I simply didn't see them as being as bad as AoW3 to any degree. And trust me, those doomstacks ruined AoW3 for me, too.

scenic saffron
#

1-2 doomstacks are enough to demolish everything ;d

gaunt mason
#

it is true that a big part of the t4 problem in aow3 was the massive economic engine you could spin up via settler spam

#

do we know how heading off exponential econ growth is handled in 4?

scenic saffron
#

There's a soft cap on cities I guess

gaunt mason
#

what's the cap?

#

also how soft

scenic saffron
#

Every city after the 5th confers a -25% income malus

vapid prairie
#

no more settlers, heroes build outposts that can be upgraded to cities instead. city cap is technically soft but has a pretty harsh penalty, reducing income of every city by 25% for each one that goes over

gaunt mason
#

a hard cap could pretty well shut down that kind of economic advantage. if that's actually enough to stop t4 spam on its own i'm skeptical of, but it's certainly worth exploring that factor

gaunt mason
#

that's not very soft

scenic saffron
#

¯_(ツ)_/¯

gaunt mason
#

is that global?

vapid prairie
#

if you have 7/3 cities, that means your cities basically all produce 0 income unless there's a minimum

scenic saffron
#

Yeah

gaunt mason
#

hahahaha

#

ok

scenic saffron
#

It's not very elegant

gaunt mason
#

at that point why make it a "soft" cap lmao that's just a newbie trap

vapid prairie
#

reminds me of the old admin cap in Stellaris 1.0, that forced you to relegate systems over the cap to terrible bot-managed sectors

gaunt mason
#

ok well that's a pretty settled factor then. guess next question would be what's the upper limit on a single city's income before you hit substantial diminishing returns such that the return on investment is bad

vapid prairie
#

though hopefully the vassals in this game will be more competent than the sector AI in old Stellaris

gaunt mason
#

relative to t4 cost and upkeep

#

that will be a hard question to answer from stream glimpses unfortunately, unless we have some pretty specific info there

scenic saffron
#

I somehow doubt it will remain like this

#

And those 25% might be multiplicative, not additive

#

It's still quite harsh though

vapid prairie
#

considering how the damage reduction system is also percent-base and multiplicative, I guess that could be possible

gaunt mason
#

what city could you possibly gain that's worth more than 25% of all other cities combined lmao

scenic saffron
#

Maybe a frontline base from which to pump out troops

#

But I can't think of anything else ;d

gaunt mason
#

that better be pretty damn frontline and very damn good at pumping out troops

sturdy haven
#

Also, I've heard that the cap can be increased by spending Imperium.
"For those that do want to micromanage and control their Empire in every detail, you need not worry. You can invest your Imperium into extra City Cap indefinitely, but it will cost you more Imperium each time.."

empty spire
#

Yeah, but exponentially increasing amounts, while imperium production seems much more limited than cosmite.

sturdy haven
#

Another point in favour of making T4-T5 cost Imperium to upkeep, eh?

empty spire
#

For example, the standard city tree very explicitely has no way to generate imperium.

#

Uhg, please no.

#

It's probably going to be limited on a faction basis or something. I haven't seen any non-limited way of Imperium generation.

#

And with limited, I mean they're all things you can't have more than a certain amount of.

#

But I'm pretty sure that won't be a mistake that's happening.

sturdy haven
#

I vaguely remember some stuff on the map granting Imperium income to players.

#

Kinda like Cosmite in PF.

sturdy haven
#

Looks like T4-T5 units do not need special infrastructure to be built.

#

Though, Jordi mentioned that most of them are summons anyway.

empty spire
#

I'd complain about that, but tome units don't get racial identity anyway, so i guess it doesn't matter.

gaunt mason
#

an up front imperium cost without upkeep would be an effective limit on how quickly you can make t4/5s, which is the major factor in "spam"

#

...eventually anyways, depending on how much imperium you can reasonably bank

#

note: that didn't quite pan out for t2 flyers in pf

sturdy haven
silk jay
#

Imperium is also used to found and control cities, and to buy empire upgrades which you will keep unlocking even in late game.
I'm expecting mana to be the theoretical limiter on T4 units in an analogous role to Cosmite in Planetfall. You can't make Mana Conduits just anywhere, there's a limited supply. Unit enchantments and transformations require mana to upkeep. They just need to figure out the numbers.

empty spire
#

Eh, mana will more than likely be very abundant compared to cosmite. In most earlier games, it's generally regarded as worth less than gold.

silk jay
#

And the right formula probably involves partly funding your golems' upkeep with Gold rather than Mana.

silk jay
#

And you don't get mana naturally the way you did by having mana nodes and enchanted trees in AoW3. You'll have to go out of your way to pick an eligible province and develop it accordingly.

#

I could be wrong, but I think there's a base for at least an interesting management of mana in 4.

empty spire
#

...building conduits on mana nodes doesn't sound that "out of your way", though.

#

Also, city improvements generate mana.

sturdy haven
#

I personally would prefer for Imperium to fill that role.

#

Since mana can also be spent to upkeep unit enchantments for lower tiers / maintain lower tier summons.

#

From that I've seen mana definitely did not seem as limited as Imperium.

silk jay
#

I still think you're trying to brute force a solution to a problem that flows from somewhere upstream, Forgotten. If it does flow at all.

#

Mana scales with the size of your empire and Imperium does the opposite

sturdy haven
#

Not fully, but that's the reason I would prefer it over mana.

#

I would say that Imperium scales less than mana.

#

And thus provides a bit stricter limiting factor.

#

It still scales though - ancient wonders grant Imperium income, for example.

silk jay
#

https://youtu.be/0roRtwLA3MM?t=2232
Here, Turn 47, Tom only has +44 mana and is floating about 15 turns' worth.
https://youtu.be/w7pKeH1cLb4?t=2153
Here, Artica has +10 mana on turn 60. Floating a ton of resources, but it certainly seems like the balance sheet is riding pretty close.
https://forumcontent.paradoxplaza.com/public/942539/Vassals.png
Super late game at turn 84, still doesn't have enough mana to use all their casting points every turn.

Does that convince you that mana might be limited in this new game?

sturdy haven
#

Let me rephrase it a bit.

#

Mana is spent on a lot of things which also need it, but can be partially replaced by T4-T5.

#

Namely, unit enchantments and low tier summons.

#

I feel like while mana partially fills the role of a limiting factor it makes spending mana on T4-T5 compete with spending mana on lower tier summons / unit enchantments.

#

Spending Imperium on T4-T5 in contrast competes with empire building, adding an additional factor into the calculation.

#

Thus, adding an Imperium cost or upkeep to T4-T5 serves as a limiting factor which helps lower tier summons compete with them better.

empty spire
#

Spending mana on high tiers seems natural to me, but I don't think that's anything that addresses the problems referred to as "t4 spam".

Imperium is far too limited to spend on it, IMO.

#

Ancient Wonders won't be as common as Cosmite.

sturdy haven
#

The basic income of it is a bit higher than that of Cosmite in PF though.

scenic saffron
#

there really are a bajillion ways to limit high tier spam imo

#

sure, some more elegant than others but all in all they are pretty close

#

soooooo

#

I don't really know where I'm going with this ;d

#

I guess it depends on what Triumph want to do with the high tiers since we see how there are so many ways to limit them

#

the worst way would just be a flat hard cap on the quantity

#

but that would theoretically work too

#

and it's probably the easiest solution in terms of development time

sturdy haven
#

Seems inelegant, yeah.

scenic saffron
#

I'd start with the question of why we have an extra tier now

#

I've never said to myself "wow, these T4s are really ineffective, I want stronger units"

sturdy haven
#

To differentiate unit power-cost better, I think.

stoic ferry
#

I don't THINK we've seen anyone taking Astral tomes though

#

and like

#

Tome of Evocation has what looks like it might get pretty nutty mana income

silk jay
#

I think the extra tier is Tier 1 personally. Tier 1 is going to actually stink, it's the scout tier.

#

They've moved a lot of units out of Tier 1 and given them proper clothes

sturdy haven
#

Limiting total amount of T4-T5 player is able to build would require a separate system to manage just that, while changing costs requires tweaking a couple of numbers which are already there.

#

So, not only it is inelegant, it is also harder to implement.

scenic saffron
#

maybe

#

I doubt they are going to go with that anyway

civic star
#

and he also said that t1 & t2 units becomes obsolete when reaching mid game. and late game race evolutions doesn't compare to the strenght of T4 & T5 tome units.
¯_(ツ)_/¯

dim sparrow
#

ok, thank you internet explorer

vapid prairie
#

if Imperium is too limited, then maybe just having a small upfront cost, but not upkeep, in Imperium for high-tier units would be fine-ish

sturdy haven
vapid prairie
#

He says in the explorminate article and YT vid "what’s worse is that the culture-specific units are very limited and become practically useless by the mid to late game. Okay, I’m being too nice… they’re completely useless by the end game."

#

perhaps I should ask him about the T3 units on his forum thread

empty spire
#

Given that his longest game was about 15 hours, I definitely don't consider him as having seen "late game". And since it makes me doubt he interacted all that much with the city cap, I similarly doubt his opinion on Imperium and what it should be spend on.

dim sparrow
#

He said most of his games were on megacity maps so yeah

maiden sphinx
#

Yeah, I like Rob and Explorminate's stuff, but a lot of people seem to be drawing a lot of conclusions from one person's limited experience with a few games.

vapid prairie
#

I can see lower-tier units' effectiveness tapering hard into the late game when you literally have only one unit draft queue

#

perhaps they could continue to be useful when you can crank out fat stacks from multiple owned cities

empty spire
#

Another solution for T4 problem could be larger battles. If instead of 7 armies, a battle map could have 19 (2 hex radius instead of 1 hex radius). Then you could bring a lower tier army's numbers advantage to bear on those few high tiers.

#

Sadly, combat maps have been getting smaller with every AoW game.

vapid prairie
#

the range of the adjacency rule has been increased to like 3 hexes I think, though I think unfortunately the devs may have added a limit to the number of total units or stacks that can join

empty spire
#

Yeah, it's looking like the stack # limit in combat is similar to previous games, judging by battlefield size.

gaunt mason
#

I do not want larger battles, I think 18 vs 18 at aow's level of unit complexity is pretty much the sweet spot for variety of choice against amount of data being tracked and time spent processing a turn before the first unit you moved is allowed to take its second turn

#

God 54 vs 54 unit battles would take all day to play out

silk jay
#

If the max is 18 vs 18, you can still probably pack 18 houndmasters and wildspeakers and have them summon their familiars turn 1. And then cast "Call of the Wild" or whatever the spell was called. Summon 7 more.

empty spire
#

24 vs 18 in 3 and PF, anyway.

silk jay
empty spire
#

Eh, that's not an engine limitation. It's a design choice.

sturdy haven
#

While 54v54 sounds fun on paper, it would be an absolute chore of a battle to play.

#

AoW tactical battle system lends itself best to small and medium tactical battles.

empty spire
#

less of a chore than restarting battles because you couldn't fit all the stacks in a single one.

#

But then, I also strongly dislike the stack size having been decreased to 6 instead of 8.

#

It really hurts unit variety.

sturdy haven
#

decreased to 6 instead of 8.

#

It was 6 in PF.

empty spire
#

Yes, and it was 8 in 1, 2, and Shadow Magic.

#

Hence, decreased.

#

I didn't say it was a new AoW4 only problem.

sturdy haven
#

Well, in older parts of the series you could not use more than one stack in battle.

empty spire
#

Yes you could.

#

It was in AoW 1 already.

sturdy haven
#

Oh, it was in AoW 1 already?

empty spire
#

Yyyyup.

#

AoW 1 also had dynamic combat maps, that really were just a large version of the 7 hexes the combat took place on. That includes cavern walls and terrain types.

sturdy haven
#

Ah, curious. For some reason, I always remembered AoW 1 as the one where you could not do that.

sturdy haven
empty spire
#

Fast combat against AI helps.

#

But otherwise you have to fight a battle in parts, going in and out of it multiple times.

gaunt mason
#

the solution: don't let the game drag so long that you have armies larger than 3 stacks

#

this is how i personally avoid that and many other issues

sturdy haven
#

It is a solution, but only a partial one - a lot of games will last longer regardless, especially MP FFAs.

tribal vapor
#

Eh, the overall thing with tiers is the economic and technological progression which interacts with strategic and tactical layers in various ways.

On a tactical level you have limited space so you can't just make lower tiers effective through superior numbers hence there is a bias towards maximazing combat effectiveness per unit.

Strategically you have to have the capacity to produce enough combat power which was limited in aow3 due to no production overflow which lead to a bias towards higher tiers.

Plus it's kinda annoying to control tons of units manually and with tons of units you eventually decrease ability to maneuver creating environment that favors more specific tactics. And on a strategical layer it's more of a grand-strategy game but with a LOT more clicking.

As far as I can understand it AoW4 seem to lean into more clear specialisations of units which is good while also making the roster pyramid like where unit types are trimmed down the higher the tier goes which isn't great for variety.

If the lower tier unit utility is desirable there could be way of making them viable.
Strategically: decrease efficiency of spent combat ability per gold, mana and draft spent as tiers go up.
Could also fight fire with fire and allow them to evolve into higher tiers either by accumulating EXP or by spending resources. For example you could simply combine 2 T1 units into 1 T2 but it may conflict with progression introducing high tiers too early and skewing overall production efficiency to starting units and making research less powerful.

Tactically: make the battle size greater so you can outnumber opponents, which isn't a great solution. You could also make them synergistic with higher tier units were you benefit from mixing them rather then doing higher tier of the same class of unit.

Alternatively if the problem is the doom stacks then there could be a penalty to mobility the larger the army is.

#

Or order the terrain such that you can't move armies freely like placing lakes and mountains all over the place, but this may exacerbate the problem if you find high tier all-terrain unit. I suppose planetfall did this good by limiting flyers to T2 and heroes.

Also strategic spells that have AOE can help if doomstacks are derived from massed armies. Or maybe there could ways to single out armies like strategic spells that locks out surrounding armies from participating but that feels kind of cheezy (I guess the most conventional way being simply displacing an army a tile or two away).

Personally I think that current setup may lead to low variety in high tier units, specifically T4-T5. It could be okay if T5 was basically a support but if T5 are supposed to be combatants than it would be better to have 2 T5 per tome. Or if you could get more variety through vasals or ancient wonders, but I'm not sure how that would interact with tech progression.

tribal vapor
tribal vapor
#

As in if they are too weak then you'll probably will rely on raw stats of higher units to do things.

rare kiln
#

For the doom stacks... did anybody already tell how many mythic units of a given type are allowed into one stack? If this is limited somehow, it would limit doom stacks too.

gloomy quarry
#

no per stack limit mentioned afaik. I think the only limiter could be the 1 hero per? Maybe not even that

#

Heroes where very good in earlier games, getting them there took work but they could become a powerhouse

tribal vapor
#

Come to think of it, what are the stats of T4 and T5 anyway? What if I stack like 3 weapon enchants -2 and +4 damage each with some +% damage on T1 from tome of the horde and all that?

silk jay
#

Stats aren't final

empty spire
#

Most enchants apply to unit types, not tiers. So for example, all shock infantry.

tribal vapor
#

Yeah yeah, I know. I was thinking about easy to manage stuff like archers.

silk jay
#

But as far as I gather, that's the entire reason "Mythic Unit" is a class. So they don't get enchantment bonuses.
But until the final game is out, it's hard to tell. We don't know how the stats compare between tiers, we also don't know how stats compare between a racial standard role T4 like the Tyrant Knight and a monstrous mythic T4 like the Bone Dragon. And we don't know what the availability of the two will be; I can guess Warbreeds will be racial and Chaos Eaters won't be, but otherwise we lack the insight.

#

If you'd like you can check the Tyrant Knight's stats in dev diary 2, the Bone Dragon's stats in the stream that came along with dev diary 5, and the Golden Golem's stats in dev diary 5. But keep in mind that it's unlikely they haven't been changed in the release version.

tribal vapor
#

I swear I've seen somewhere the golden golems stats sheet but can't find it for the love of meMorale_Low

#

oh, thanks

#

I wonder if higher tier weapon enchants are stronger, although idk what upkeep is going to be like

silk jay
#

maybe Mythic units really will have mana upkeep to compensate for the fact their power doesn't need enchantments?

tribal vapor
#

I'll see about that after I compare stats and see unit enchants

#

Also IIRC mythic units do have classes, at least some of them?

silk jay
#

Mythic Unit is the class, as best I can tell. Do say if you find otherwise?

tribal vapor
#

I'm not sure if that denotes a T5 or just a fantastic creature
like sprites or something
I mean, they aren't animals or anything so an another name for magical creature

#

Also like compare Tyrant Knight T4
https://forumcontent.paradoxplaza.com/public/929569/tyrant knight.jpg
And Bastin T3
https://forumcontent.paradoxplaza.com/public/935379/aow4-devdiary5-6.jpg
The tyrant knight has an edge in movement but that's about it. Bastion probably also can be converted into mounted unit via trait. Well, assuming the stats are actual.

Doubt that the 27 damage attack is a multi hit either. IIRC a hero with a sledge hammer had 1 hit attack AND couldn't retaliate on top of that.

silk jay
#

That's a promoted Bastion though, he's rank 3

#

Interesting though, that tracks with what I imagine for the game

tribal vapor
#

Although golden golem does look pretty strong with high stats all around.

silk jay
#

Yeah but he doesn't have Searing Blades and Steelskin and all those good things. So a Bastion could probably outlast it, and possibly outdamage it even if you stack enough enchantments.

#

Although, again, we don't know the price of upgrading units in that way

#

That's the upkeep cost next to the unit rank isn't it? Looks like pure gold on everyone.

tribal vapor
#

Yup. Enchants cost mana but I'm not sure how that is calculated. I think it's like baseline 2-4 mana for T1 and maybe it scales with tiers, either unit and the enchant, but idk. Might be a flat rate.
Although race transformations seem not to have upkeep.

silk jay
#

Maybe it's a resource optimisation thing then? If you have a lot of gold, you spam T4s and T5s. If you instead have a lot of mana, you go for upgraded T3s and 4s? Provided your economy is draft oriented rather than summon oriented.

tribal vapor
#

Well, I suppose it depends on the unit in question since there are some that are produced in cities and some that are summons.

So I'm wondering here like with 4 T1 tomes I could hypothetically get T1 archer with -6 phys +4 frost +4 fire +4 blight with like +40% damage from transformation + hero skill so... Idk how much the base damage is so I'll guess for an T1 archer something like 8-9 base that would be a total of 5,2 + 16,8 so about 22 per hit attack plus 2 DOT effects. Probably could push it further via culture stuff or other buffs?
Granted you'd have to be lucky to roll specific tomes and the time to research them and the mana and time to cast everything.

torn moat
#

They could give some low tier units new talents as the game progresses like giantsbane "deal extra damage to higher tier units"

stoic ferry
stoic ferry
tribal vapor
stoic ferry
#

if it was specifically about the Golem

#

you'd need a genuinely absurd amount of enchant to try to match that 22 repeating never mind the 45 damage thingy

tribal vapor
stoic ferry
#

and that ignores whatever riders that thing has

#

which is basically garaunteed

#

given the lines in the dev diary about it

#

also, of course, the Tyrant Knight's 48 mp is actually an absurd deal

#

never mind that we currently don't know how much demoralizing it does

tribal vapor
stoic ferry
#

coming from the same tome with the "Mind Control Routing Unit" spell

#

45 is almost certainly not repeating

#

and might have conditions

#

but it is still true, that you'd need genuinely absurd amounts of enchants to match that damage

#

especially because we haven't seen any enchants that added damage in the same channel

#

which means you've got a bunch of instances of damage, each being cut by the resistance of the target independently

tribal vapor
stoic ferry
#

is that assuming 0 res?

tribal vapor
#

I mean yeah, same with golems 22 base damage.

stoic ferry
#

...Frost Blades is -2 phys +4 frost

#

Bastion is 12 damage, you need to gain 10 damage to match Golem

tribal vapor
#

so you stack different elemental enchants. see above.

stoic ferry
#

how is that four enchants? Four enchants at -2 +4 each you go -8 +16

#

you are down to 4 phys damage with four different channel 4 damage

#

five x four is 20

#

not 22

tribal vapor
#

I assume that baseline 8 damage would get boosted via 40% damage increase. But that could be wrong.

stoic ferry
#

where's the 40% damage increase?

tribal vapor
#

Tome of horde

stoic ferry
#

...isn't that for T1's?

tribal vapor
#

race transformation + hero skill, works only on T1 units.

#

Although hypothetically you could other stuff like feudal adjacency damage bonus.

stoic ferry
#

Bastion is not T1

#

also

tribal vapor
#

Yup, I was considering to do this on T1 archer hence I counted all the arrow enchants. There is also tome of evocation for one extra enchant for melee but at that tome count you'd probably get something better.

stoic ferry
#

also, at this point, that Bastion is more expensive to upkeep than the Golem

tribal vapor
#

Although to be accurate that would be 3 enchants and 1 transformation.

tribal vapor
#

and I don't remember many options for bastion. Maybe like the retaliation trait or something.

stoic ferry
#

ok you know what

#

multiple convo's got confused here

#

in my head

#

this has all been one convo starting with the Tyrant Knight v Bastion comp

#

but no rereading

#

yeah you were talking about a T1 archer

#

not about the Tyrant Knight Bastion Comparison

silk jay
#

Please refrain from tagging me if you don't need me, Ethorin. Especially when you're going to misread my message and make wild claims.

vapid prairie
#

what if lower tier units got bigger bonuses from medals than high tier ones?

empty spire
#

They already go their bonuses for less EXP in every earlier game.

vapid prairie
#

yeah but like what if they gained more health and abilities than T4/T5 units per medal

#

and both defense + resistance for each instead of alternating def/res between medals

empty spire
#

I think that'd make hier tiers completely worthless.

vapid prairie
#

Like an Anvil Guard may get 4/6/8/10 Health and Inflict Crippling, Tireless and Defender. A Tyrant Knight only gets 2/4/6/8 Health and then only gets a new ability at Gold.

#

high tiers still have a big base stat advantage, but I think it could help make ranked up low tiers get left behind less

tribal vapor
#

From what I've seen the main disparity is HP and perks.

Plus with the cost difference it makes sense to have higher tiers stronger the the lower tiers. Making them as strong for lower upkeep will make higher tiers a bit weak.

Although I guess they could levelup indefinitely for extra hp, but I don"t think that that sort of leveling should be easy.

vapid prairie
#

I am not saying equalize their base stats, but maybe make ranked up T1/T2 almost match unranked T4/T5.

frozen kelp
#

That's not good. T1 and T2 should be viable as a cannon fodder role or a slot filler. They should die instead of elite group when the fight is hard. They should have weak potential but be useful at recruit level.

tribal vapor
#

Well, IIRC T1 has 4g upkeep, T2 8, T3 20 so others I assume are going to have even more

frozen kelp
#

Because they die a lot and are produced a lot.

tribal vapor
#

Doesn't sound like a good financial decision to produce T4/T5 if you can rank T1/T2 up via society traits.

vapid prairie
tribal vapor
#

Well, aow4 doesn't have mods now does it? Plus it has enchant and race transformatins.

dim sparrow
#

You answered your own question

frozen kelp
#

Carry role(exp farming for future) is for high tier elite and hero. Low tier units should have decent initial stats but not high level up potential.

#

T1/t2 are mass-produced war tool.

vapid prairie
#

mass production of low-tier does not really work in an AoW game unless high-tier spam is given a massive strategic and cost efficiency disadvantage

tribal vapor
#

I mean depends how many of them can you get

frozen kelp
tribal vapor
frozen kelp
#

Actually t1 are great cannon fodder or slot filler in aow:p

tribal vapor
#

eh, planetfal derived a lot of military utility from mods so that's a paralel system to tiers

vapid prairie
#

late game PF, especially in MP, still becomes high-tier spam galore if Ambalabada's experience is anything to go by

#

as much as I like my heavily modded Troopers, Lancers or Raiders or etc, they do not have the same stack density as heavily modded Walkers, T-Rexes or Refractors

tribal vapor
#

Fair enough. Planetfall still had more variety though.

vapid prairie
#

a variety that I hope will carry over somewhat to 4

frozen kelp
#

If you give high level up potential to low tier units, you have to give low initial stat to them for balance reason.

vapid prairie
#

perhaps low-tier units will be more useful when not playing on mega-cities like Rob did

vapid prairie
tribal vapor
#

the thing is that leveling up can mess with progression - you have potential to get basically a T3/T4 unit before anyone gets to producing any

vapid prairie
#

I would not mind

tribal vapor
#

Plus there are already units that evolve like lesser elementals, assuming that they keep the evolve ability in aow4, which are the format of units that are high potential

vapid prairie
#

Yari Ashigaru with multiple chevrons and circles in Shogun 2 and Rhino Tanks with max veterancy in Red Alert 2 are some of my most fav units in any strategy game ever. Closest AoW ever got to that feel for me are Prime-rank T1s in Planetfall with late game mods.

tribal vapor
#

eh, IMO planetfal levelup upgrades were meh. But that's largely due to stagger mechanic.

vapid prairie
#

yeah I know, the mods effectively became the true source of veterancy

#

except for pre-nerf Drained maybe

#

which were the only units that had AoW3-style damage bonuses on rank-up

frozen kelp
#

by the way, T1/T2 in AOW4 will be more and more useful than they are in AOW3. Calculation for damage is changed!! now defense lowers damage with percentage like AOWPlanetfall.

vapid prairie
#

I know

#

I will have to see how they fare in non-megacity maps first though

#

I think Rob's complaint about culture units being useless in the late game may have been heavily influenced by him mostly playing on megacity maps

#

where you literally only have one draft queue

#

since you cannot absorb, migrate or found more cities

#

you gotta vassalize the rest

frozen kelp
#

what's the megacity maps?

vapid prairie
frozen kelp
#

you are really fast.👍

vapid prairie
#

to be fair, Eric's info compilation threads help in that regard

empty spire
#

..also no city capture. That's really different.

tribal vapor
#

Dunno, about multi-city being better. If there is production overflow the only difference would be speed of growth and base draft othe city centre and buildings within.

#

although I guess the draft building are sufficient enough

vapid prairie
#

the difference here is that you have multiple queues to crank out units from at the same time

tribal vapor
vapid prairie
#

with megacities, you only have one, even with draft carrying over, you will not be able to amass as many low-tier units at the same time as you would if you had multiple cities under direct control

tribal vapor
#

I mean the second queue is for building exlcusively so.

frozen kelp
#

i think 'non-megacity = more city = longer battle front line = more units is needed = low tier filler would be usefull'

vapid prairie
tribal vapor
vapid prairie
tribal vapor
#

Also on top of that you can get economical bonuses from heroes based on affinities and maybe more. For draft you get +2 per chaos affinity.

#

but a hero can govern only 1 city

frozen kelp
#

even if 18 vs 18 rule is there, i guess you can get second round fight if you have 6 stack.

sturdy haven
#

You can build more than one unit per turn from a single city.

vapid prairie
frozen kelp
#

yeah

vapid prairie
sturdy haven
#

Fair enough, though I would point more to the inherent economical bonuses provided by the capital.

#

If you have more cities, it sounds like you have less money / mana per city and thus it might be more efficient to spend money / mana on cheaper units.

#

Since you are more limited by money / mana rather than by draft.

#

While the opposite might be true in case of megacities.

vapid prairie
#

yeah that could be the case

frozen kelp
vapid prairie
#

though it is odd that Rob seemingly went back and forth between "culture units are useless late game" and "doomstacks are less of a problem you need a lot of mana to draft them" and then "high tiers need an imperium cost/upkeep to counteract them" in the same breath

delicate sedge
#

All three statements can be true at the same time.

Doomstacks, as they were in AoW3, are less of a problem here due to the production & upkeep costs. That said T4/5 units are still frequent too the point that an additional cost/upkeep would easily reduce their occurrence which allows Culture T2/3 to be more present in the late to end game.

#

Whether that's actually the case, you'd only know by playing yourself.

vapid prairie
#

I really do hope culture units will be more useful than they first seem when the game comes out

sturdy haven
#

Not only culture units, but Tome units and summons of lower tiers, I personally hope.

#

I asked Rob regarding that and he answered that the same that he said about low-tier culture units applies to low tier Tome units and summons.

sturdy haven
#

Good news, everyone. We are now the third most popular thread in this Discord. We are now more popular than this one:

image.png
#

These ones still remain more popular though:

image.png image.png
gray dagger
#

customization leads to sameness has been dead for weeks, someone posted a nothing post in it the other day

soft chasm
#

its good this thread is popular, its a very important topic

sturdy haven
#

Hey, look!

#

We got Imperium upkeep on some of the units!

stoic ferry
#

noice

vapid prairie
#

ouch, blocking spells for the enemy

#

imagine having to fight multiple of those

#

as a high level wizard king with gifted casters, powerful evokers and a mostly support and battle mage army

sturdy haven
#

Ouchie.

#

Though, I think these are astral creatures.

vapid prairie
#

hope you brought a lotta lightning damage

#

they do seem like something that would show up in a late-tier relative of tome of warding

sturdy haven
#

Yep. Certainly looks interesting.

#

The upkeep is also on the higher side.

#

3 Imperium / 30 Mana.

vapid prairie
#

I wonder if the imperium upkeep is something all or most high-tier units will be getting now, or if only some of them have it

#

a T4 that can block all spellcasting for the enemy side just by being there seems pretty insane, so I can see why it would have an imperium cost and/or upkeep

#

also seems kind of anti-fun to fight against imo, I would have made it only block spellcasting in a short radius around itself if that was possible, or maybe only allow it to do that if it is not crowd controlled by stun/net/etc.

empty spire
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Ouch, Imperium upkeep. That's gotta go.

delicate sedge
empty spire
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threateningly reaches for mod tools

delicate sedge
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Haha, you can

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It was needed though, the gold/mana upkeep just wasn't enough to properly curb them

empty spire
delicate sedge
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It really depends on playstyle

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I don't really build cities so I always have imperium to spare (same with mana and summons).

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And there's more ways to get imperium than cosmite I feel

empty spire
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Well, I'm gonna find out then.

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Most balancing happens for games far smaller and shorter than I play.

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To scale your late-game off something like a wizards tower, which you only ever get one of, really hurts for that.

delicate sedge
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There's the wizard towers, ancient wonders, Spells & Skills so I think it'll largely be fine

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Certain styles will have an easier or harder time with it

vapid prairie
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I remember Planetfall having some fairly big balance changes throughout development as well

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like the removal of like 99.9% of damage immunities

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or the far too situational Extermination Targeting Relay changing to the much more generally-useful Thermal Targeting Relay

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Focus Lightning and a Bio -> Thermal conversion were also a thing, I remember the latter being mentioned in one of the dev diaries, I wonder why it was scrapped

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Focus Lightning came back as a Voidbringer exclusive

regal tide
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Seems reasonable to me. I don't want T4/5 to dominate everything.

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But I still want them to be powerful

faint shell
frozen kelp
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I have found imperium upkeep of t4 unit on the latest streaming of aow4. Thanks a lot to dev.

scenic saffron
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imperium upkeep seems reasonable

frozen kelp
karmic coyote
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yeah

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if it proves to be excessive you can shift to imperium upfront for T4 and upkeep only for T5 as PF did with T3/T4 cosmite

silk jay
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When they introduced T5s I kind of assumed they might be unique units

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Like, you'd only have one Golden Golem in your whole empire

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So I was a bit shocked to see two Astral Mages here, along with two T4 units. What kind of stack do you need to bring to bear to beat that? Is the Golden Gate a secret victory condition?

gaunt mason
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2 heros and some t3+s with medals i imagine

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you also get enchantments and they don't right?

silk jay
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I'm not sure, marauders that are part of a civilisation do get enchantments

lone cradle
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can you bring 3 stacks into an event like that? or just regular battles? I didnt notice

silk jay
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And marauders have veterancy levels in Age of Wonders 4

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On top of this, a number of the T4s you could bring are themselves mythic units that don't enjoy enchantments

silk jay
lone cradle
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I miss dungeons in 1, where you had to actually explore them. awful in multiplayer though lol

silk jay
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But basically if you don't intend to lose an experienced T4 to that battle, you better have a full stack of T4s with a couple of well armed heroes and your favourite T5. The rewards better include a win button.

regal tide
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I think even the high level landmarks could be cheesed at relatively low levels in Planetfall. They're going hard in the opposite direction here.

lone cradle
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it does feel properly epic though doesnt it lol

silk jay
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Oh I don't mind it at all! But again, I could also muster this deathstar of a stack to wipe my enemies off the map and just win the game

lone cradle
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I dont think I have been this excited for a game since shadow magic

soft chasm
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its not that much it cost 3 imperium, they were getting by turn 18 50 imperium a turn, and that thing block magic, its really powerfull, 3 imperium is nothing

silk jay
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Do cities cost Imperium to maintain or only to found ?

tribal vapor
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oh it's all t4\t5, nevermind.

tribal vapor
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Hence if you make it too powerful it will lead to convergence of player strategies due to its effectiveness.

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It's a carcinisation of gameplay. 🦀

empty spire
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My problem with Imperium cost is that I think it'll scale badly with larger maps. You get a significant chunk of Imperium from your throne city with the Wizard's Tower, so your T4/T5 forces cannot scale with empire size.

On top of that, Imperium is also required to just keep your empire running and upgrade it. IMHO, if you're playing the long game, they're just a really bad investment if you could just send two stacks instead.

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The entire issue is that you can't double down on Imperium income.

tribal vapor
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Eh, it's a trade off between expanding via your own economy VS conquering neighbours economy.

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IIRC there wasn't any example of outright imperium upkeep for your empire outside combat units.

tribal vapor
empty spire
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Wonders give you Imperium income, but are limited on the map.

And since founding cities cost Imperium to increase your city cap, that's a rather painful way to acquire more, if you invested into high units instead of economics.

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Ancient wonders are basically Cosmite Rifts, but you can't attack with multiple stacks and they have stronger guards. (because they'd be far to strong with their other benefits otherwise).

tribal vapor
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well to be fair you won't be fielding T4 turn 1 either so running low on imperium is a bit of a scaling issue.

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You probably could rely on vassals for expansion?

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Also could scale imperium income if the game somehow provided imperium income per vassal or based on vassal size.

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Also also, you don't necessarily need to constantly push the cap due to maximum size per city and the tiles of the map being finite.

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Although in a way it is more effective due to less shenanigans with food cost growth per tile plus the ability to specialise into multiple things plus the flat income from building for each town centre.

gaunt mason
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sounds like t4s/t5s will be a step between normal troops and heroes in terms of scarcity then, since those also don't scale with empire size correct?

serene fractal
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bruh

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i love how people already know the games balance

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even before its out

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and only seen 5-10% of the actual game

tribal vapor
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I'm here to argue and play games, and I'm all out of games Morale_VeryLow

gaunt mason
crisp skiff
sudden gulch
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I'm pretty sure a planetfall style Gameflow where you only found 3-4 cities will have oodles to spare on units

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Just that these have 160% combat numbers compared to in planetfall><

sage perch
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Cities in Planetfall produce more resources though, and are much easier cheaper to grow and upgrade.