New unit brainstorm

[EDMatt]

I've just read a whole bunch of text, but there's one thing I'd like to clarify:

Matt, you can't force people to use TeamSpeak because you want them to. It's their choice, and if you want to discuss things here on the forum that you've already discussed on TeamSpeak that's fine, but you're talking to a different audience here, so you shouldn't assume that people know what you're talking about. Post your idea in whole, not with only half the information. It prevents a lot of misunderstandings and arguments.

Thanks for the clarification.
I tried to summarize and keep it as short as possible on page 4.

[Jeronimo]

I understand you Matt. I understand your feelings.

Long long time ago... I suggested rebalancing Townhall in a way that could incorporate 4 missing units: Rebel, Rogue, Vagabond, Barbarian.
I think the "Warrior" which has same stats than Barbarian can be ignored... Besides is more realistic the need of super attack + weak defense.

Here appears my final sketch, though I admit we can make it better if we think carefully in a new system for it.
viewtopic.php?p=16672#p16672

However, it hurted me at that time in the past... when some started to like it like my forever friend Sado, and suddenly all the enthusiasm got ruined because of 1 Bo's comment (in which I still think he would change his words by now), however Krom considered it appropiated to revalidate his thoughts about how this game must be -> which is KaM: Shattered Kingdoms.
viewtopic.php?p=16707#p16707

We are many intelligent minds... we... we can rebalance to create a good use of Townhall and add extra strategy to the game.

I'm against traslading Townhall units to Barracks: It simply won't work.
Too much job and complications, while we can choose another path... yes... I'm referring to the simple paths of changing internal Townhall mechanics, or rebalancing their prices of gold chests (which was the path I choose in my post).

I would gladly put my neurons to work in order to create a greater Townhall system (only for the 4 "cloth" units mentioned above), however I would regret it if at the end... Krom says his absolute killer phrase -> Your idea is not humanistic enough

[Krom]

@Jeronimo: I would appreciate if you were referring to on-topic arguments, instead of random unrelated phrases:

The command "Split hungry units" has more potential than it seems.

This is not a good argument from humanistic point of view, it encourages separating hungry units to send them off to their death instead of feeding them. Player would think: "hmm, I have these hungry units, do I feed them and waste precious food, or just send them on a suicidal mission to enemy? hmm...".

@EDMatt: Don't see you answering about Arab storehouse

I agree with TDL that adding more does not helps us to balance the game. We already have 3 footmen types and whole TownHall in reserve (+5 units) and Ballistae workshop (+2 more units). No need to draw another barbarian with a double-handed sword - that's not gonna be a miraculous cure for balancing. However we cant forbid you to. Draw it for yourself - that's a good practice. KaM alpha had some sprites that you could use for reference too. Thing is - we are unlikely to include it into the game, but you can make it a mod that replaces existing barbarian and share it with everyone.

[EDMatt]

@Jeronimo: I would appreciate if you were referring to on-topic arguments, instead of random unrelated phrases:

The command "Split hungry units" has more potential than it seems.

This is not a good argument from humanistic point of view, it encourages separating hungry units to send them off to their death instead of feeding them. Player would think: "hmm, I have these hungry units, do I feed them and waste precious food, or just send them on a suicidal mission to enemy? hmm...".

@EDMatt: Don't see you answering about Arab storehouse

I agree with TDL that adding more does not helps us to balance the game. We already have 3 footmen types and whole TownHall in reserve (+5 units) and Ballistae workshop (+2 more units). No need to draw another barbarian with a double-handed sword - that's not gonna be a miraculous cure for balancing. However we cant forbid you to. Draw it for yourself - that's a good practice. KaM alpha had some sprites that you could use for reference too. Thing is - we are unlikely to include it into the game, but you can make it a mod that replaces existing barbarian and share it with everyone.

It is rather annoying to keep saying the same thing over and over, So Ill just quote for you, Krom.

Hmm, I tried to make warrior with two handed sword myself. And I think it looks acceptable. Using tablet, and PS layers it ain't that much work.
I took the files form TPR, I don't know how to do it in Remake, nor implement them back. But take a look, I made full foward walking animation. Obviously it requires some polishing.
http://i.imgur.com/PsQqcZc.gif

And here the rar of animations : http://wyslijto.pl/plik/3sja45b7b2

I'd like do hear your opinions, and mayby little tutorial about geting files out and back into game.

But I am not sure you need to edit any sprites, I think we can just use the warrior sprites that already exist in the game.

My idea is just using the original warrior/barbarian , and use one of the deleted buildings that could work for the big axe to be built in it, the serfs would then bring the axe into the barracs.
So the only thing that will have to be drawen is the serfs bringing the big axe and the carpenter animation within the building.
http://www.knightsandmerchants.net/file ... ithy_2.gif
this is the building that im reffering to.

[Krom]

I see, discussion topic has changed. Thought you wanted to draw some unit to add to the game ..

Chances this new house appears in Remake are rather slim. I don't see how it is going to help us with balance and how it fits with the game either. Barbarians were introduced in campaign to be powerful allies of super-warriors that player could not obtain by other means. In that role they should remain.

To replace sprites in Remake you need to put them (under same numbers as they were exported) into Sprites folder. That way Remake will load your sprites instead of default ones. For example to replace Serf walking animation you need to make new files 3_0065.png .. 3_0128.png. Each sprite consists of main image (#_####.png), mask for places where player color goes (#_####a.png). Would be nice if you write a tutorial about this along the way ) Any questions - feel free to ask.

[EDMatt]

I see, discussion topic has changed. Thought you wanted to draw some unit to add to the game ..

Chances this new house appears in Remake are rather slim. I don't see how it is going to help us with balance and how it fits with the game either. Barbarians were introduced in campaign to be powerful allies of super-warriors that player could not obtain by other means. In that role they should remain.

Why can you not see how it will help balance the game? I have written a detailed enough post that clearly explains it, I haven't yet had anyone challange my point about the balance itself and how the barbarian/warrior will help the balance, while you are stating that it doesnt fit and it should remain in single player, that is about the only argument I see brought forward by you.
At first it was that we have enough units as is in the game itself (town hall, barracs, balistas) and now it is that it doesnt simply fit?

Please explain why you think my balance analysis is incorrect/wrong , so that your argument is justified

[Da Revolution]

I think that it is worth testing because people like matt can make the sprites and stuff needed. I don't know how much work it would be from a programming point of view, but if it isn't too much effort then would testing harm no one. The only risk then is that matt for example spend lots of time on it (which doesn't bother him i think).

[Krom]

Adding more units wont help to balance the game. The more units there are, the more combinations need to be checked and tested and tweaked. Overall complexity raises tenfold with each new element. If we can't balance some set of M elements (M^2 combinations), then how come set of M+1 ((M+1)^2 combinations) becomes easier to balance?

KaM has already number of units we could add, _IF_ that would have solved the balance issues. We do not add them partly because of balance, partly because of poor fitting. KaM Remake is a KaM TSK remake and we add only those elements we feel confident in (Fisher, Market) and even with those there are issues and balance changes.

I interpret this topic in 2 possible ways:
1. Desire to restore balance in game.
2. Desire to draw something that will fit into the game.

For #1 - there are already finer and better tools of doing that (screwdrivers we use to tweak existing units power and weaknesses) instead of spamming more units and getting progressively more complicated interactions in balance.
For #2 - There are units animations we could add without affecting gameplay balance that much (even so, stonecutter animations would change some locations balance).

[EDMatt]

Adding more units wont help to balance the game. The more units there are, the more combinations need to be checked and tested and tweaked. Overall complexity raises tenfold with each new element. If we can't balance some set of M elements (M^2 combinations), then how come set of M+1 ((M+1)^2 combinations) becomes easier to balance?

KaM has already number of units we could add, _IF_ that would have solved the balance issues. We do not add them partly because of balance, partly because of poor fitting. KaM Remake is a KaM TSK remake and we add only those elements we feel confident in (Fisher, Market) and even with those there are issues and balance changes.

I interpret this topic in 2 possible ways:
1. Desire to restore balance in game.
2. Desire to draw something that will fit into the game.

For #1 - there are already finer and better tools of doing that (screwdrivers we use to tweak existing units power and weaknesses) instead of spamming more units and getting progressively more complicated interactions in balance.
For #2 - There are units animations we could add without affecting gameplay balance that much (even so, stonecutter animations would change some locations balance).

So you are saying that adding a barbarian/warrior to counter a swordfighter is going to be too complicated to balance it, and because you dont feel confident about it?
To me the current balance is as close as you can get it with using only 9 pieces, but that isnt enough , there is an odd one out, let us look at it this way:

For many reasons we will call xbow a universal xbow in the following example.
Unit | HARD Counter

Miliita Bowman
Militia Sword fighter
Militia pike
Militia Scout
Militia : Justified by the cost as Militia is cheap, it has 4 Hard counters.

-----------------------

Bowman | Xbow
Bowman: Justified as bowman counters most leather units quite well and xbow is very common, and cheap, therefor a valid hard counter
----------------------------

axe fighter Scout
axe fighter Sword fighter
axe fighter Knights
axe fighter xbow
Axe fighter: Justified by the number of counters for this unit
---------------------------

scout lancer
scout pike
Scout: Very cheap counters but unit itself is very expensive, so therefor unit is almost useless, not justified
---------------------------

lancer bowmen
lancer Xbow
Lancer: Not a very useful unit since it is a very cheap counter for scout , and since scouts are overpriced for its strength almost nobody trains them not justified
-----------------------------

Pike Xbow
Pike Bowmen
Pike Sword fighters
Pike: Justified cheap unit but totall counter vs knights and works quite well against leather melee
------------------------------

Knights Pike
Knights: Justified as it counters everything else in the game
-----------------------------

Sword fighter Knight
Sword fighter - Sword fighter has only 1 very expensive counter, that cannot be mass produced and achieved through a full iron production cycle, making sword fighters impossible to counter effeciently withot going for iron , leaving only 1 way to play.
-----------------------------

So knights are the counter of sword fighters, but mass production of knights is very very difficult and almost impossible as the hard counter for the knight itself is very cheap, a pike.

I have underlined and printed in BOLD what I found after playing for a long time on the beta release what the developers should be concerned about, and I am suggesting strongly that a barbarian is a very good idea for the following reasons:
1: It will give the option for people who would like to go for leather only to produce only as far as the iron bar production, iron bars will be combined with wood to create big axe for a barbarian/warrior which will counter the sword fighters.
2: Right now you can almost win for sure in 1v1 games by going 1 way and massing sword fighters , infact if you restrict one player from building sword fighters and let the other build them with a mix of other troops, it is almost a guarantee that the guy who is forbidden to build sword fighters will lose (provided that they are on similar level skill wise).
Sword fighters are not OP, they are justified by their costs, dont get me wrong!but the problem is the counter measure against it, that is what has to be changed.
1 piece is missing IMO and that is all.


I invite everyone to discuss this topic.

[pawel95]

Sorry Matt that i am posting now a small thing, i hope all users will see your important good post over this post (I´m writting for you in smaller letters,that everyone will know that my post isn´t important lol)

These are only tiny things, but i dont think (like i´ve mentioned before) it will be good to add the barbs to the list of doable units. I havent nothing about it,but i think that many KaM players will have it. Also Lewin told me sth like that some time ago: "For me the barbs are a special unit so you cannot make them. If you can make them,they aren´t special anymore for any player,playing the campaign TSK 08/09 the first time", for example (Not one by one quotetion from lewin)

My 2nd thing is,maybe Krom can answer this answer about this...

I think the "Warrior" which has same stats than Barbarian can be ignored... Besides is more realistic the need of super attack + weak defense.

....do you think it is possible to change the defense point of warrior,so that Barbs and Warriors AREN´T the same unit anymore i think the kam developers wanted it the same,but hadn´t the financial medium to make this thingi, what do you think guys?


Matt what do you think,maybe asking Anti if he could split up this big topic now in balance discussion and your first thingi with new units?


pawel95

[EDMatt]

Let me write a quick summery .

At first my enitial intention was to add another unit because there was a missing piece , why did every use to build 5-6 pig farms in the older release but now a maximum of 3 pig farms is being built?
no one use to build sword fighters in the previous release but when the new beta release came out, the best thing was to spam in large ammount sword fighers and militia, and even if you go for a leather base, you must go for a few sword fighers yourself to counter sword fighters.

Why are sword fighters OP?
They are not, infact, I think that the balance as it is , is very close to prefection , or atleast prefection by using only 9 units in the game, so why is the sword fighter so powerful? because of its counters. every unit in this game has a hard counter, a unit that will be very effective against it, except for 1... sword fighter. Since no units are extremely effective against a sword fighter, more or less everyone is forced to go for the full cycle of iron production thus reducing the need for leather. This limits the oppertunities that this game could deliver making it very much the same when it comes to sword fighters in the battle field.
If one wants to train a unit, most of the time he has to guess what the opponent will have before peacetime, and has to come up with effective tactics to use the unit, knights, pike , axe fighters, bow men , with great risks in mind and possible disastrous outcome of the enemy having a counter against it, but not when it comes to sword fighters, you can never go wrong with building them and therefor a big element of suprise is instantly vanished from the game, alot of cowardly tactics are being used right now and those are probably the only ways to stop these rushes such as 4 markets blocking enterances and and spam of towers behind them and crazy stuff like that, but that still doesnt guarantee your teammates safety against sword fighters.

The suggestion of bringing one unit into the game to NOT restore but rather COMPLETE the balance of the game is badly needed in my opinion to make the game more broad and enjoyable , it will certainly add another dimention to the game and bring the possibility of 2 entirely different bases .

think of it this way, if you had a pie chart representing both, as of now it is 70% black (iron) and 30% white (leather), but if a barbarian would be added to the game, it will enable the player who wants to choose to go for leather to go for the opposite side , which is 70% white (leather) and 30% black (iron)

The idea is rather straight forward, introduce either the warrior OR the barbarian (how the unit looks is irrelevant at this stage) as the new unit into online multiplayer, it doesnt really matter which one, as long as the stats match the requirements to counter the sword fighters, the idea is simple, it will be strong vs sword fighters and weak vs bow men arrows.

This will fit perfectly to the current kam battle system.

The unit will be trained in the barracs, the requirements to build the unit is a certain number of iron bars and wood in the current or seperate buildng(to build a large axe), I can add the animation if needed and add serfs sprites carrying the big axe into the barracs

[dicsoupcan]

I do not know if i can bring in a new perspective, but i will voice my opinion anyway.

I have to agree that swords have no good counter. But on the other hand if we made them weaker they will not be used again and i do not think you can use the screwdriver to tweak that. As far as i played in the balance release swordfighters pretty much dominate the battlefield and thus everyone rushes iron to get a good amount of swordfighters and some crossbowmen and fill up the rest of the army with militia to be used for different purposes like cannon fodder or flanking or even destroying an economy because you have a lot of them anyway. Me as person who is in rgeat favor of leather units has to say that there is hardly a leather combination that works without iron. i had good bases with a lot of production, only to get destroyed right after peacetime if i was on the front lines. I tried a various amount of things and i shall describe the situations.

The first iron rush i encountered was on back in the desert. i was playing loc 6, big leather base with plenty of crossbowmen. i had 30 axefighters and 45 crossbowmen after peacetime, wich is a pretty good army. i was wiped off the map in a few minutes.

The second thing i tried is leather only on loc 3 back in the desert, wich is a good loc for supporting, no front line, hidden behind allies. i had a huge production where i needed 3 schools to keep up with recruits and traded iron ore for skins/trunks or whatever i needed. but despite the fact that i recruited way faster than anyone, i lacked the power of iron and i could not compensate the power of swordsmen in numbers with axemen. the bowmen did a pretty good job but it was not enough due to the enemy having crossbowmen, wich is logical.

I tried another thing, and that was axefighters + swordfighters on golden cliffs and i walked trhough an enemy army without swords like it was nothing. my axefighter production was not big and i had to switch over to militia not much later but the only weakness i had was towers, wich in the end became quite a problem for me because i had no ranged units.

I even renember a game on dead of winter where we used 2 armies to stop 1 rush army with many swords. sure after that you are stronger because you have a better production, but alone you will have a hard time defending.

I also noticed trhough these games that leather is hardly used anymore since everyone goes for iron + militia, wich makes leather seem obsolete. The only one i have seen using leather the most is da revolution, but that is a small leather production and even he relies on militia + swords/crossbowmen.

so basically swords are dominating the battlefield if used wisely, but on the other hand the cost is justified for their performance because i think 3 iron units (sword, armour, shield) is very expensive (3 iron ore, 6 coal and a long proces). and just like matt stated knights are an official counter but they are very expensive, if i have knights i have a maximum of 5 in an entire game. I do have to say scouts can be usefull but only if you have leftover grain to supply a stable with, otherwise i would not bother with it. The fact that mounted units are a rare sight and due to their low production rate their only good purpose is to harras enemy ranged units to give your melee units a better advantge in battle. They are unable to go head to head with swordfighters because they will always be heavily outnumbered. And on top of that a pikeman can easily counter a mounted unit as matt stated, and therefore mounted units are units you need to manouver carefully with.

Basically there is a piece missing in the puzzle. I think you guys did a great job on balancing the current units, but i also think that this is the point where you cannot get further balance and different tactics without adding new ones. You can use the screwdriver to tweak as much as you want, but if the engine is missing a part it still won't work great. The tweaking is good now, i think we are at the point of expanding balance and exploring new opportunities because you can tweak the swords however you want and they will either not be used because they are too weak for their costs or overused because they are really strong like they are supposed to be.

So i think the suggestion matt made to implement the warrior(a barbarian will not fit civilized people) to counter swords is a positive development towards better balance. It is more work to balance it, but in the end you can get a better balance between units wich opens roads for very diverse strategies.

Do not get me wrong, i love what you guys are doing and the path the remake is going. And i respect that you want to to stay as close as the original as possible. But i think the remake is growing bigger thenTSK ever could and it already has many features wich the original kam did not have and it all had a positive influence. Sure it was not gamechanging and just convenient, but if you think about it we ascended above the original kam a long time ago already.

[pawel95]

Good post for my mind.

So i think the suggestion matt made to implement the warrior(a barbarian will not fit civilized people) to counter swords is a positive development towards better balance. It is more work to balance it, but in the end you can get a better balance between units wich opens roads for very diverse strategies.

This is good, but i would say it second time: Maybe it would be better to give Warriors in whole Game now +1 defense than normal barbarians. Like i have said before the developers wanted the same( i am sure) because why there should be 2 units with same opportunities and voice but different look?

After (maybe) adding this,i would say adding warrior to a makeable unit would be good (after long testing) and I think this discussion has the highest priority now for balance things.
I think sth like siege equipment would help to make the game more balanced also(shooting faster on towers..) However this will be also a long dicussion. Also discussions about reimplementing town hall(without the warrior than,only barbs) i would prefer to take later later, because they are 100 of (good/not that good) ideas from different people i have talked with them.


pawel95

[dicsoupcan]

Good post for my mind.

So i think the suggestion matt made to implement the warrior(a barbarian will not fit civilized people) to counter swords is a positive development towards better balance. It is more work to balance it, but in the end you can get a better balance between units wich opens roads for very diverse strategies.

This is good, but i would say it second time: Maybe it would be better to give Warriors in whole Game now +1 defense than normal barbarians. Like i have said before the developers wanted the same( i am sure) because why there should be 2 units with same opportunities and voice but different look?

How can you be sure? Maybe the developers wanted to make a warrior sprite since that is more fitting in a civilized nation but did not want any stat changes, so they said the armour was just for show and not for fighting purposes. and the voice might be the same for budget reasons, or to just reduce the overal cost of development.

[pawel95]

Ok this is a think i havent thought about it. However would be than everything the same? The voice from a typical unciviliciced person for example and when they wanna add really a 2nd barbar only to add them as civiliced version for the kam players,than i dont understand why in TPR you can get randomly a barb or a warrior clicking on "warrior" So it looks for me like this isnt a finished thing,because the developers just crashe financially.