Regeneration of lifepoints

[The Dark Lord]

Yesterday I was playing a 8 player game with peace time, but since I hate it when people scout me I always make some militia at the start anyway and let them defend the borders.
Some guy tried to sneak into our village so I sent two militia to him. They didn't arive at the same time though. My first militia died, and my second militia arrived just at the moment that the first died. But the enemy managed to kill BOTH of them, and a little later he even killed a THIRD one. I know you said that the battle system is quite balanced... but you have to agree this should be impossible.

[Lewin]

Yes you're right, our lifepoint regeneration was very fast (1HP every 4 seconds) As well as what you mentioned this created weird issues like a 1vs1 battle with scouts lasting 15 minutes
I've increased it to every 10 seconds which roughly matches KaM's battle length for 1vs1 scouts (we don't have any way of measuring it directly) We'll see how it goes in the next release and continue to tweak it if necessary.

[Encaitar]

I do not agree that the lifepoint regeneration should be set much higher. If I understand your story well, your militia came one by one in battle to the eneny scout (wich unit you did not make clear, but even that does not matter).

When following the orginal KaM battle statistics (I think the remake is quite the same), there is a change your soldier kills your enemy's soldier lifepoint, till the soldier loses all lifepoints and dies. So a militia could kill a swordman, however the change is unlikely.

In this scenario, the change that you would lose all 3 of your militia is uncommon, but can be possible. To me that is quite realistic. A soldier that is supposed to last short, can fight possible longer than expected.

I do like that, because it makes the battlefield a little more varied + it is more realistic than you think it is. A one against one battle is quite different than a big army against a big army. Every general [I suppose you could call yourself that ] should know that a brave soldier alone could do strange + rare things. This is quite common in real life, otherwise there wouldn't be those stories about hero's.

[Shadaoe]

I already saw one enemy militia killing 3 of mine that came one by one before dying, it's really frustrating :/

[Encaitar]

I already saw one enemy militia killing 3 of mine that came one by one before dying, it's really frustrating :/

Yup, that is exactly what I meant. In AoE (or a game like that), you are absolutely sure the 'stronger one' defeats the 'weaker one' (or 2 'weaker' defeats 1 'stronger' if both 'weaker' together have more strenght than the 'stronger' ).

I really like in KaM that the 'weaker' can defeat the 'stronger'. It makes battles less predictable. Eventually it's more realistic, in my opion.

[Siegfried]

Speaking of average values, a scout needs 9 strikes to kill one militia. So a scout needs 27 strikes to kill three militias that come one after each other.

The militia needs 24 strikes to kill the scout.

So even if you set the hitpoint restore rate to zero and if you remember, that these are average values and the actual fighting system works with random numbers, you would expect that the scout will kill all three militias in almost 1 of 2 test runs.

This is not related to lifepoint regeneration and is needed to get a certain balance. You see, for a militia you need 2 resources (from 6 houses). For a scout you need 4 resources (from 11 houses). So it's neccessary that the scout has to be as strong as 2 to 4 militias (3 on average).

[Lewin]

I do not agree that the lifepoint regeneration should be set much higher. If I understand your story well, your militia came one by one in battle to the eneny scout (wich unit you did not make clear, but even that does not matter).

I've only increased it from 4 second to 10 seconds and this WAS necessary because otherwise a 1vs1 battle with scouts often lasted 15 minutes and that's clearly stupid and not the same as KaM. (it's now ~40 seconds on average, which is about the same as in KaM)

I already saw one enemy militia killing 3 of mine that came one by one before dying, it's really frustrating :/

Don't send them one by one. In AOE that works because they each reduce the HP by a fixed amount, but in KaM you need to attack with more than one at once.

[The Dark Lord]

I'm glad to hear you've increased it already.

@Encaitar
I don't think a militia should EVER be able to defeat a sword fighter when they are under the same conditions. Surely if the sword fighter is starving and the militia just had some food I can imagine the militia winning the fight, but nothing more than that.

[Siegfried]

Don't send them one by one. In AOE that works because they each reduce the HP by a fixed amount, but in KaM you need to attack with more than one at once.

That's absolutely right. If you attack the scout with militia one after each other like above, you have roughly a 50-50 chance that the scout will die.

If you attack with 2 militia at the same time, one from the front and one diagonal from the front, they will need 8 strikes to kill the scout; the scout needs 9 strikes to kill one militia.

So you have a 50-50 chance to kill the scout without get even one militia killed.

That's the trick.

[Yeti]

I'm very glad KaM doesn't follow a AoE approach with life regeneration. Hit points as they stand in games such as AoE have always confused me a little. A unit with 10% HP is just as capable of dealing damage as a unit with 100% HP, which implies they're not wounded as wounds should inhabit one's ability to carry out actions (unless one happens have a hazard suit and gets pumped with an apparently infinite stock of morphine when wounded).

On a similar note, one doesn't always get wounded in a battle. Yet AoE has units wound each other all the way until one dies. The way KaM battles work I like to imagine the hits missing, glancing off shields/armour, being parried, or just creating flesh wounds (such as having all one's arms and legs cut off, "come back here and have what's coming to you, I'll bite your legs off!") eventually with one troop scoring a major killing blow and being able to go straight into battle with the next enemy.

So I find the KaM system quite satisfying in that regard, although perhaps troops should lose their ability to fight quite so effectively when they're hungry and certainly when they're starving.

[Siegfried]

I thought about the hitpoints again and think, that it would be possible to calculate the recovering rate with a few different scenarios.

We would need the data of 25 militia vs milita and maybe one or two others (and two mixed) for confirmation.
By data I mean the number of strikes or alternatively, the time in seconds until the first unit dies (and the time one strike animation takes).

With 25 simulations it would be possible to calculate the recovering rate up to 0.5 accuracy with a certainty of 99%. Unfortunately I absolutely won't find time to do this

Alternatively, we could relate to what the german strategy book says. Unfortunately it does not explicitly say how fast the hitpoints recover, but it says one suspicious sentence, in which it says that lost hitpoints recover during peace time.

Logically this would mean that hitpoints don't recover during the formation is engaged in battle.

[Lewin]

I thought about the hitpoints again and think, that it would be possible to calculate the recovering rate with a few different scenarios.

Yes we could, if someone would like to collect this data then please do so and I can help with the analysis.

Logically this would mean that hitpoints don't recover during the formation is engaged in battle.

We have very good reasons to believe that hitpoints do recover during battles. I set the remake to not recover hitpoints then sent 15 scouts against 15 other scouts, with code in place to time the duration of each battle (down to 1 tick ) Without hitpoint recovery the last scout died at 34 seconds, and the first one died at 17 seconds. I ran the same mission in KaM, and there were still scouts alive at around 1 minute. The first one died at 24 seconds. This strongly suggests that hit points recover during fights, or if they do not then there is something else seriously wrong with our fighting system interpretation.
By using a recovery rate of 10 seconds the results seem pretty similar to KaM but I have not done a detailed analysis due to lack of time.

[caykroyd]

I didn't know KaM's troops even had hitpoints hehe

[pavlos]

I didn't know KaM's troops even had hitpoints hehe

neither i! haha!

[Humbelum]

Hey guys!

Just to explain how we got the 4 seconds:

I used this formation in original KaM.


The result was that due to the different attackspeed for each hit(the units lag a bit) the scout survives sometimes 4 hits and sometimes 5 hits. We adjust the lifepoint regeneration in Remake up to 4 seconds to get the same results.

Unfortunatly 1on1 battles can take a very long time. But if you increase the regeneration time, bigger fights would end faster... maybe too fast to get other troops into this battle.

You should also remember that you cant compare bigger battles in KaM with Remake, like a 20vs20(with more than one row). The problem is that in KaM the left side of every unit is "bugged". For example if a bowman gets attacked in his back from the left by a bavarian he can survive 5 hits or more...

That makes it difficult to adjust Remake to KaM without collecting a huge amount of data. Currently I dont have this time :/