Balance testing release r4297

[The Dark Lord]

I agree, changing things doesn't have my preference either.

[pawel95]

Yeah i think "romo" is completly right. Farms need time to make the first grain. So with 50 Min PT you cannot have (normaly) a leather army but a iron army for example. We should test to play like 80 Min PT, i think rusher havent any chance then. Because corn is grown up and iron is ready also and so after a time the "normal" player will have much stronger army than the rusher,i think.

[Jeronimo]

OK, lets keep something like corn growth rate as it is now.
Still the farmer pathfinding when going out to harvest should be fixed.

The suggestion I made can solve that: farmer harvest from closest ready crop (counting from farm's door), however keeps random seeding behaviour.
The goal is making 1 farmer work better (and not -20/-27% because he goes to far neighbour's crops).

If that "bug" is fixed, we can see more alternatives to the 60 pt basebuild.
Just that fix will bring solutions to the issue.

[The Dark Lord]

Yeah it would be nice to see it fixed anyway, but it won't solve the main problem.

[EDMatt]

Last night we had a very long discussion on teamspeak between Myself, Revolution, Mulberry, Romek and Pizza, some other players were present like Sado and Thunder.

I think we all agreed that if pigfarms were to be more consistant (e.g. 4 corn will give you 1 skin for certain) , that would be good enough to give that little boost that leather builds need to stop this rash chaos.


As for market, the horse trade needs to be fixed too as it looks like the market aids the rush big time!

[Jeronimo]

Yeah it would be nice to see it fixed anyway, but it won't solve the main problem.

I bet my hopes that solves it, if you do proper build.
Lets remember that tactics success depend on the map actually, some are better for rush, while others like Cursed Ravine, are for leather build.

Last night we had a very long discussion on teamspeak between Myself, Revolution, Mulberry, Romek and Pizza, some other players were present like Sado and Thunder.

I think we all agreed that if pigfarms were to be more consistant (e.g. 4 corn will give you 1 skin for certain) , that would be good enough to give that little boost that leather builds need to stop this rash chaos.

As for market, the horse trade needs to be fixed too as it looks like the market aids the rush big time!

Pigfarms are ok in the rate, and how they work.
When farmer's pathfinding are fixed you will have the extra corns for creating the first breed quick.

Respect Rushes, the militia threat is easily killed by a decent group of archers.
I suggest anti-rush unit archer is quick with taking down militias (faster than Xbows), you can test my words are true.
For knights threat, having 20 pikemen is enough. Then you decide what else you want in your army.

[Da Revolution]

Respect Rushes, the militia threat is easily killed by a decent group of archers.
I suggest anti-rush unit archer is quick with taking down militias (faster than Xbows), you can test my words are true.
For knights threat, having 20 pikemen is enough. Then you decide what else you want in your army.

Thats true, archers are good against militia, but rush also contains swordfighters/knight and they are extremely bad against those tanks.

[-George Stain-]

Respect Rushes, the militia threat is easily killed by a decent group of archers.
I suggest anti-rush unit archer is quick with taking down militias (faster than Xbows), you can test my words are true.
For knights threat, having 20 pikemen is enough. Then you decide what else you want in your army.

sound more easier in theory, then is in real game.. imo you need to be one of the best player to defeat full rush, and you need good location..

I am for script farmers to walk to the nearest possible fields, that sounds good for me.

[Mulberry]

Hey. I wasnt here for a while so i will shortly reply on posts from the beginning.

I support Bo in his vision and his constructive critics. I believe this is a good non-emotional explanation of testing expirience. Thank you, Bo.
Pizza was very much reasonable in his analizis too.

I dont support people who played only few games(or even no games) on testing platform like Jeronimo or batoonike.Jero you are just mixing clear testing information here with your strange untested things an suggestions. Please, participate in testing and discussion on TS to find a way to consolidate opinions and actually test.

Also, I would like to correct Matt since he wrote that we(he wrote who) have some conclusions. He mentioned:

- We discsussed that leather needs a small boost. Thats true.
- Horse trade should be balanced. True, but also we talked about trading for iron wich is not balance right now too. So i think we all really wish to have balanced values in programmers vision ("market is an equal option for getting resources". Now some resources are more easy to get from market).
- There were more thing we discussed yesterday:
- We'd like to play without builder rush or with fix like sado suggested (unlimited stone for killing builders). Also,some people think its good to have an option to kill own builders somehow .
- Fish-living city is too much good option for all in rush. So maps should be edited and rebalanced(equal amount of fish and not to much of it like on loc 2,7 of border rivers or some locs on Back in the Desert or DoW)

I think that from this moment testing release needs changes. Because it is becoming hard to test game( all mentioned issues above). Can you tell us please: when can we expect for new patch and what will be included in it?

[Lewin]

Regarding builder rushes:
- I don't like the idea of towers killing citizens for free (it makes good sense for balance but it's not intuitive or realistic)
- Making towers ignore citizens (only kill warriors) is also unintuitive and there are some cases where you do want citizens killed.
- Player zones will help to stop builder rushes before peacetime (and will also stop scouting enemy villages with labourers which is a lame thing to do and should be stopped) but you may want to build into your enemy's area after PT (when he's defeated or you are taking territory from him) so I don't think it will work after peacetime.
- Preventing players from ordering construction within 10 tiles of an alive enemy tower sounds like the best solution to me. I can't see a justification for building near enemy towers. There are also other games where you can't build near your enemies so I don't think it's unintuitive, as long as the game makes it clear that the tower is preventing you from building, not the terrain or something. What do you guys think about that?

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

Sounds ok to me.

The suggestion I made can solve that: farmer harvest from closest ready crop (counting from farm's door), however keeps random seeding behaviour.
The goal is making 1 farmer work better (and not -20/-27% because he goes to far neighbour's crops).

I don't think that will look as good (too predictable) but I agree something should be done because 20-30% inefficiency when with neighbours vs without neighbours is too high. Also planting is part of the problem, so I don't think your solution will solve it completely. I'm interested in suggestions.
My suggestion is that farmers should prefer to work within 6 tiles of their house, and go beyond that if there's no work available within 6 tiles. So they will only use their neighbours field if there's no work to be done in their own fields. We can test and compare efficiency with a change like this implemented. Can you think of any problems with that?

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 .

I think we all agreed that if pigfarms were to be more consistant (e.g. 4 corn will give you 1 skin for certain) , that would be good enough to give that little boost that leather builds need to stop this rash chaos.

Pigfarms/stables are not very random in their production, I'll explain how it works. On average 4 corn gives you 1 pig. There are 5 "slots" for pigs/horses in the swine farm/stables. Each time the animal breeder feeds them a corn it is given to one of the slots at random. The age of that slot is increased (starting at 0 when there is no animal there), and once the age reaches 4 the animal is harvested. So the only thing making it not "consistent" is the corn is not always used to grow the one pig, it is randomly distributed. Sometimes 4 corn will give you no pigs (if it just increased the age of 4 of the slots but none of them reached 4) and sometimes 4 corn will give you 4 pigs (if 4 of the slots were already at age 3). I don't see any problem with this, it adds some random element to the game but doesn't change the overall output (e.g. you can't get 4 pigs from 4 corn more than once in a row, since those 4 slots will be reset back to age 0). This means if I feed my farm 400 corn, it will produce between 85 and 100 pigs. But if I feed my pig farm 4,000,000,000,000,000 corn it will produce between 999,999,999,999,985 and 1,000,000,000,000,000 (so there is a maximum of 15 corn that can be "buffered" if all 5 pigs are at age 3, the average amount at any time is probably 7.5). I don't think you'd really notice a difference if we made pigfarms produce 1 pig per every 4 corn, it really only makes a difference for the first minute when he starts off with no pigs. I don't see any reason to change it.

I'm enjoying this discussion, I think we'll find a suitable solution to make rushing less over powered.

- We discsussed that leather needs a small boost. Thats true.

If we improve farmer efficiency when sharing fields that will be a small boost to all corn based production We just need to find a way to do it.

- Horse trade should be balanced. True, but also we talked about trading for iron wich is not balance right now too. So i think we all really wish to have balanced values in programmers vision ("market is an equal option for getting resources". Now some resources are more easy to get from market).

In what way is iron easier to trade? Trunks -> iron ore (or iron bars?). What changes do you suggest to improve this? And what other resources are easier to get from the market? Since tree trunk values have reduced slightly after this balance release that might make trading a bit less attractive.

Also,some people think its good to have an option to kill own builders somehow

We're planning to have a "Dismiss" button on citizens which makes them walk into the school and disappear.

I think that from this moment testing release needs changes. Because it is becoming hard to test game( all mentioned issues above). Can you tell us please: when can we expect for new patch and what will be included in it?

It doesn't take long to make a new release, and balance changes are usually quick to implement. But right now the only change we have is to make tree trunks slightly less valuable. None of the other suggestions have been 100% agreed upon right? Here are the ones I think are worth considering:
- Prevent building near towers to stop builder rushing
- Make horses slightly more valuable at the market as Krom suggested
- Somehow stop farmers becoming 20-30% less efficient when sharing fields. (maybe farmers should prefer to work within 6 tiles, and go beyond that if there's no work available within 6 tiles?)
- Prevent building in enemy player's area during PT to stop exploring enemies with builders. This probably can't be implemented in balance test releases because I think it requires Krom's new influence system which is only available in the development version of the code, the balance test is using the code from our last public release (we don't want to use the development version of the code for balance testing because it could have bugs/crashes).

Are there any other changes/ideas you think need to be addressed? If most people like these ideas we can implement them and make a new balance test release
Cheers,
Lewin.

[Mulberry]

Are there any other changes/ideas you think need to be addressed?

Yes. Please find a way to take away shoot/halt option from the game. Players saying "while its in the game we want to use it". But it makes really big difference so i'd like to see this issue fixed.

Also we might need some help on requesting mapmakers to balance fish issue.

In what way is iron easier to trade? Trunks -> iron ore (or iron bars?)

Iron ore.

About another values we should ask Pizza and Matt. If they will be honest they would find all current unbalanced values.

If we improve farmer efficiency when sharing fields that will be a small boost to all corn based production We just need to find a way to do it.

Can we suggest few ideas? How else we can help you to find out the answer?

[Da Revolution]

About the builder rushes:

I don't think it will work when you disable building within those 10 tiles from the tower. I would prefer the idea of not losing a stone when killing a builder, but that this option is enabled when at least one stone is available (if this is possible), this way its less unrealistic and it will solve the problem.

About dismissing of citizens:

I'm not sure if people will use this option for builders, but it will be really useful for excessive serves and miners. The builders will be used as meat since thats more useful than just losing them because of the dismissing.

[The Dark Lord]

- Prevent building near towers to stop builder rushing

This sounds good but disables tower wars. Maps without peace time or where you have to 'race' for resources will be almost unplayable (e.g.: Valley of Dangers, first one to build a tower in the center locks up the opposite player). I am almost afraid to say it, but maybe it should be an option you can set in the lobby (sorry Krom's bus! ).

[EDMatt]

About making dismiss button : easy to abuse.
Now rush will be imba for sure, you dont have to feed your serfs, dismiss the serfs and builders that are hungry and build new serfs and builders, Rush no longer needs food completely (or less food).

[Nissarin]

About making dismiss button : easy to abuse.
Now rush will be imba for sure, you dont have to feed your serfs, dismiss the serfs and builders that are hungry and build new serfs and builders, Rush no longer needs food completely (or less food).

We can just "reverse" the training process, this way "dismissing" citizens will block the school for some time but I guess it will still need some testing.


About the whole towers issue - for now it would be nice if every citizen treated area in shooting range of towers as "can't walk zone", since it's equally annoying to loose serfs while feeding your soldiers. In the long run - see my ZOC proposal in ides thread


Also, don't touch the farms/swine farms, other than eliminating the issue with efficiency of multiple farms close to each other. You're all thinking how to kill the rush strat, completely ignoring the fact that such change might destroy the balance of late game.