Balance testing release r4297

[-George Stain-]

I have watched it, and I have one question: what if there are no fish (or just very few) on a map? This build completely relies on fish; does that mean it would be impossible to do without fish? Or could you compensate by some bakeries without losing too much time and resources?
And lol, since when do stables need three farms to run smoothly (I mean, who came up with that)?

just add 1-2 bakers, rush is still better, becouse enemy doesen't have fish too, so they must solve more food problems. (I think 1 early baker and seccond baker lately)

[pawel95]

Well yeah, it was a question from me too. George,it isnt directly because of the backer but if you will add some backers/sausages you must pay more corn,so you loose time for building more farms+need more trunks to trade for horses,because the stable(s) get less than with fishes only.


An other short question is, what you mean with "a sawmill is producing out of 3 tree trunks" or sth similar like this? I dont get the point? I normaly make 0,5 sawmills of woodcutters,so if you will build 12 woodcutter, i normaly make 4-5 sawmills+market. What you mean with you explanation?!




pawel95

[EDMatt]

Well yeah, it was a question from me too. George,it isnt directly because of the backer but if you will add some backers/sausages you must pay more corn,so you loose time for building more farms+need more trunks to trade for horses,because the stable(s) get less than with fishes only.


An other short question is, what you mean with "a sawmill is producing out of 3 tree trunks" or sth similar like this? I dont get the point? I normaly make 0,5 sawmills of woodcutters,so if you will build 12 woodcutter, i normaly make 4-5 sawmills+market. What you mean with you explanation?!




pawel95

Well done on spotting this mistake, you are right, i made a mistake on commenting, saw mills produces 2 wood from 1 tree trunk, 2 woodcutters work for 1 sawmill.
1 sawmill for every weaponary, again, well done for spotting this mistake!
you get a golden cookie

as for the 12 woodcutters, since i only have 3 sawmills and they produce alot of axe, enough to use all my recruits, i use the rest of the 6 woodcutters as slaves for my market . FEED THE BEAST!

[Krom]

@EDMatt: You mean that having 6 woodcutters (4.4 trunks per minute) and feeding them to Market at rate 6:1 gave you more horses (0.73 per minute) than making another pair of farms and stables (0.575 per 1 Stable)

..... here I went rigging a testmap in Remakes Map Editor, encountered some bugs and went ahead fixing them ....

It's hard to say the exact value without test data, but it seems that Horses/Pigs should be pricier because of initial delay before the production rate comes stable.

EDIT: Tested, 2 farms + Stable produce 28 horses in 1 hour (including initial delay). Means that you could replace 6 woodcutters with 4 farms and 2 stables to get 1 horse per minute (58 in 1 hour) with fewer deliveries inbetween. Still I agree, horses should be a little more expensive at Market )

[thunder]

"Still I agree, horses should be a little more expensive at Market"

Just WoW!?

I use to listen to talking of TS guys and they are talking about the old market values than possibilities what maybe can stop the iron and militie rush.
Nowadays when I play see only maximum 2 players (from 8) whose try to make leather base(Classical base).
MAybe the problem is when your first leather jacket is ready(+7-8Xbows) then the opponent iron rusher already has 15 swordsman and 30 milities (it will be huge difference after PT).
Old market values maybe can help to make faster leather base because you dont need early woodcutter rush you can make easily more farms, swinefarms...and after the woodcutter rush...
If you use iron trade you will have less iron units after PT. If you trade gold you will have 200citizens little later...And if trade iron to horse you cant make 40knights because trade your all iron(need another way,and only knights)...and easier can make scouts too what i dont see in this shield patch...
Old values gave some handicap for the develop. But this treetrunks invasion. Tr3trunks are everywhere
The market coin also has two sides.
With Glad!

t


PS: Are Scouts out of the games??

[The Dark Lord]

Hahahaha, and why would this rush be any harder with the old market values? It would be even easier to get loads of militia. That's not the solution.
And it makes sense a rush strategy results in a stronger/larger army after pt than old, 'normal' strategies...

[EDMatt]

In my opinion , the best way to fix this is to make farmer work 10% faster, and grain grow 10% faster, I have come up with this idea together with Pizza.

This will result in lower peacetime game which will reduce rush army by a little bit.

[Guest]

Yes you came up with this idea because nobody else has sugested to make grain grow faster before.

[EDMatt]

Yes you came up with this idea because nobody else has sugested to make grain grow faster before.

?

[Da Revolution]

Faster growing grain will have negative side effects as well. It means you get pigs/flour/horses earlier. My main concern is the amount of horses someone can produce with this. Matt was storing some grain in his rush tutorial (2 farms and 1 stable). So it will be a little step to a 2nd stable + the market. Or maybe adding 1 mill to get a more sustainable rush when there isn't enough fish.

It might be a solution, but I'm not sure about it.

[Pizzaisgood]

Hey ho
Well what i think is that the problem is that leatherbases start their production way way later than rushbuilds. The idea with the farms was to make leatherbases start with their production earlier. I think rushbuilds don´t benefit as much as leahterbuilds from this change , because a once running leatherproduction produces way more quality in a certain time than a rushbuild could compensate with its spamunits .
Also pigfarms working less random would be nice, so make them produce 1 pig and skin every 4 corn they get ( but keep the image of loads of pig rolling in the pigfarm, so a pig doesn´t have to dissapear necessarly when the pigfarm produces 1pig and skin) , also same for stables .
A nice balance of builds would be an average army of 50-60 leatherunits and 40 ironunits against a rusharmy about 120 units. Like that one leatherarmyguy can defend easy against a rusher and like that rush has to be used more tactical ( 2 rushers early rushing on one player ) . Rush should be a dificult task to do , so that it becomes more rarely used . If rush would be easy like now , everyone could go for it and and make an imba army which results in games with only 1-2 big fights and 10-20 minutes after pt finished games. I personally don´t like this kind of games because its not about building sustainable towns but about building towns which only survive the pt.
Anyway also if it´s not my style rush should stay in his current form. It´s the leatherbuilds which have to get stronger in pt.
And btw i think unitbalance is perfect right now : swordmen and axefighters create the mainarmy , pike and lancers are mostly anti cavalry or defendingunits , x-bow and bowmen just support the fight right now and aren´t the maindamagedealer anymore and scouts and knights really have the strength which they should get for their price now.

[Jeronimo]

I support the idea of making FARM more efficient

It's true that there is no leather combination capable of beating 100 militia, 20 swordmen, 10 knights.
The classic Crossbowmen+Axemen+Spearmen just gets destroyed before they can do anything (and consider you get like 25 Xbows, 25 axemen, 15 lances -> most times less than this, not efficient base/ incomplete recruits).

Crops are ready to harvest after aprox 10:45 minutes. My suggestion is to decrease it around 9:30 mark.
As positive effect, the area of fields will be a little smaller (more space to build).

I think farmers will work faster whenever the problem about their pathfinding is solved... do you remember that problem Kruciprdel discovered?
When placing many farms together, farmers often go to far tiles to work, which overall means having -25% corn recollection.

viewtopic.php?f=24&t=1256&hilit=farm

IMO the best way to resolve it, is programming that farmer moves towards closest "ready to harvest" crop (counting from the building door).
However we keep the "random seeding/replanting" phase as it is now, so whole process doesn't become too rigid.

[The Dark Lord]

I don't really like the sound of that idea... Farms are like the 'main' production buildings in KaM, they harvest wheat, and you can produce pigs, sausages, skins, leather, flour, bread and horses with them. Decreasing growth time will have loads of effects, and some of them may be undesired (for example: you are able to produce more bread, so it is easier to trade bread in the market and then you may have something imbalanced again). So if you want players who invest in leather to have more leather after peace time, the solution should be sought somewhere between the pig farm and the tannery.
On a sidenote; I think many people don't realize that 'mass militia' has always been a powerful strategy. It was just never used. I think the only way to beat this rush is to perform some sort of 'half-rush', where you try to have a lot of units as well but focus on economy a little more.

[batoonike]

If rush would be easy like now , everyone could go for it and and make an imba army which results in games with only 1-2 big fights and 10-20 minutes after pt finished games.

Well you can't really remove rushing from a game like that. If the requirement for a sustainable town gets more important, people would still build that town as fast as it is ever possible and then build an army and then have the first big battle and game over. The fastest player will win whatever they are required to do before the only big battle.

If you want to have more battles you would need some kind of mechanism that would favor recovering from losing a battle. For example fast military RE-production + much higher army upkeep rates from the beginning of having an army. So massing a huge army would result in almost certain bankruptcy in case your army is bigger than your town would normally allow to sustain. You wouldve already spent tons of resources to keep that newly massed army alive for 5 minutes. The other player, who didn't mass so big army, could replace his units faster than the rusher can. In this case there could actually be gameplay after the first battle.

I'm not really suggesting any of this but what you would need is a combination of stupidly high and steady upkeep from the moment a unit is trained + really fast unit replacement in case the army is lost. Aka:
1. Reqruits eat 4x less often at inn, so you make as many as you want into the barracks,
2. however the trained soldiers have condition only for 2 minutes and require 2 units of DIFFERENT food for full condition. And you can't order them to eat only 1 unit of food, so you can't send them to fast death after giving them 1 wine.

As I said I aint really suggesting any of this But that would most likely result in more battles than 1-2.

[Romek]

The rush build is the best what you can do to have big army after PT. Rush build works on 60 PT but im sure it wont work on 70 min game or mby even 65 min vs player on the same level as rusher who will do normal base with leather production.
I personaly dont like the idea to change something with pig farms or ideas to make something faster or slower. In my opinion it is all about PT and map.