Siege units - what are they good for?

[Mick]

New:

* Added a new map type: Plateau of Circumstance
** A land of chaos and unpredictability.  All tile types have equal chance of popping up as the land continues to build itself, which means that every game plays out differently... and crazily.  Note that statistical clustering will sometimes make it seems like there are patterns or weighting where there is none.  This is an illusion!

While while you are doing this, can you add a setup option to choose randomly among the map options as well:

http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=11357

[x4000]

That's a polish thing for next week or after; I know that sounds arbitrary, but it's much slower to implement compared to the new map type.

[Misery]

Most grand!

That sounds like a ton of fun, thanks!

As far as I'm concerned, nothing else missing from this game now.  I think this one really is hitting it's high potential at this point overall!  Even the non-cataclysm version is pretty fun at this point and holds my attention well.



I'm curious though, do you guys intend on adding in some more pre-made maps to come with the game as well?

[Cinth]

Well, that's kind of the point.  A big problem with games being samey is how much players are able to affect the map buildup.  Using mountains costs you almost nothing in terms of creating choke points -- no resources, one action point, no opportunity cost in your towns.  This emphasizes towers more, and makes it so that choke points are harder to set up.  You can of course still create them, but now it's harder.

If I want to place mountains in the middle of the map it usually will cost me 2 AP per mountain (knock out a tile to place a mountain).  That's most of one sides AP per turn or 1/3rd if I take advantage of both sides AP.  Right now I find myself floating with 9 AP per side because I'm watching resources or military balance.  Landscaping gave me an AP sink while I burned off 4 or 5 turns observing.

[x4000]

In terms of more pre-made maps... maybe, if we have time.  I think the current selection is pretty good, though.  If players have ideas for variants then certainly we could look at those.

[orzelek]

About siege units - I wrote in the other thread about some of them.

Main problem with siege units is that they don't really arrive at enemy towns that often. So no building shooting for them.
And vs units they are goon in Greek camp. Even very good.. like above mountains good.

As for maps - I think that specialized maps are a bit to specialized also. They could use 5% of plains addition for example. Without that they get really monotonic.

Hard difficulty level might earn it's name if you can't plant mountains on it thats for sure. Especially with current town limits which mean not so much space for towers inside towns.

Could you consider always allowing to replace schools to better variant if we want to (thats for the stop smiting buildings part of hard+)?

[x4000]

The no-smiting thing is just on Expert, bear in mind.

[orzelek]

I wouldn't like to avoid expert because of annoyance of building schools or having all schools in one town.. wait you can't demolish there at all. So you need to actually leave that squares open in all towns for later rounds.
It seems really annoying for me to be forced from game start to leave space for all the schools in each town or force yourself to play with lvl 1 units until you can build universities. I guess I'll check which variant is less annoying.
And poor Norse will get kicked again in town space department

[Cinth]

It seems really annoying for me to be forced from game start to leave space for all the schools in each town or force yourself to play with lvl 1 units until you can build universities.

Or have Lvl 2 units in round 1, LVl 3 in round 2, and lvl 4 at round 3.  You need to leave space open but can have the max level available at each round.

Or you could build up your resources so you can support a full town of barracks/archery/siege with all 3 schools in round 3

[orzelek]

Thats a ton of wasted slots... it might be difficult especially on expert.
Trick is that you actually need only 1 of schools in whole world and then university in each town

[Cinth]

I didn't know that.  I haven't played around with them outside of one match. 

[Misery]

About siege units - I wrote in the other thread about some of them.

Main problem with siege units is that they don't really arrive at enemy towns that often. So no building shooting for them.
And vs units they are goon in Greek camp. Even very good.. like above mountains good.

Aye, this.   That's the same problem I have.

I like the idea of having to use siege units and such to shut down a city if need be.... it fits the theme of the game, right?    But I feel like there simply arent enough tools to "suggest" units go somewhere or lure them or whatever without doing something silly like dropping lines of "first 5 to grab" type tokens.

Example:





In that map, for most of the time the main place producing siege units (and just my main military city for awhile) was the city circled in green.  On the blue side, the cities circled in red, for various reasons relating to tactics I was trying to pull off at the time, there was reason to temporarily shut these cities down for a bit.   BUT.   Smite was necessary here.... trying to get the siege units to head over there.... I seriously have no idea how to do this WITHOUT commandment.   Alot of the time, the units ended up heading towards that northern blue city, the one that isnt circled, instead, via their own movements and AI.  None of them really went down to the right, and even if they had it would have been entirely random.


The only other idea I've had is to plop down some mythological units in the appropriate city, but even then..... they may smash things, or they may wander off.  And even if they do smash things, they're not really that sort of unit (or in that sort of number most of the time), and they'll take FOREVER to do it.



EDIT:  Bloody hell, got the colors backwards in the text there, fixed that.... might make sense now....

[madcow]

Misery your comment about -suggesting- units go somewhere reminds me somewhat of a system Majesty used.  You couldn't control any of the units or tell them where to go, they did their own thing. What you did to nudge them in directions was place bounties on either locations or monsters. If it was on a location, the first unit there would claim the gold.  If it was on a unit, it was marked for getting killed and any units attacking it when it died split the reward.  Obviously your units could simply ignore the bounties, so it was in your best interest to really up the bounty if it was something important, difficult, or far away.

I'm not sure if some sort of graduated system like that is
a) feasible
b) fitting in the theme
c) game breaking even if it did work.

I do feel siege units don't do enough to avoid enemies while going after buildings though.

[Misery]

Misery your comment about -suggesting- units go somewhere reminds me somewhat of a system Majesty used.  You couldn't control any of the units or tell them where to go, they did their own thing. What you did to nudge them in directions was place bounties on either locations or monsters. If it was on a location, the first unit there would claim the gold.  If it was on a unit, it was marked for getting killed and any units attacking it when it died split the reward.  Obviously your units could simply ignore the bounties, so it was in your best interest to really up the bounty if it was something important, difficult, or far away.

I'm not sure if some sort of graduated system like that is
a) feasible
b) fitting in the theme
c) game breaking even if it did work.

I do feel siege units don't do enough to avoid enemies while going after buildings though.

Actually, that sounds pretty interesting if done right.

Maybe like, a weaker version of commandment, that wouldnt pull the ENTIRE army over there..... but the units that got close to it or completed the job or whatever, they get a major buff like what some of the tokens give, like that silver thing the Norse have.   So, you'd have gotten your guys IN there, and they'd have done the job.... but now they're stronger because of it, and already in a group, and now, the challenge is.... stopping them from causing MORE mayhem that you didn't plan.   

[x4000]

We thought about the Majesty system, but decided against it as it really doesn't fit with the theme here.  Besides, everybody would just go "oh that's the majesty system."  What is being discussed here really has nothing to do with not being able to nudge the AI in the right direction, it is related to the siege units not filling their role properly in general.   So....

* All of the siege units now have 4x more health than before.

* All of the siege units are now ABLE to damage regular units, but should show no interest in doing so.  They were getting way too distracted with regular fighters around rather than going to enemy towns to bring some pain.

Thanks!