Even if generals are tweaked to be as essential for a team as assassins ( which they are not, currently ) They will not be as fun. Call me weird, but adding health and mana and shortening cooldown to my allies is just not as satisfying as fireballing a retreating red-health demigod.
And what kind of a general stands beside a portal and just watches a reinforcement wave happily heading for the nearest enemy tower to get slaughtered ?
Powerful auras for generals is one way I suggested to balance generals, allowing them to seriously enhance minions ( all minions, not just idols; and seriously = NOT +50 health ) but is still passive. Control over reinforcements can be a natural way to make them busy. I mean, Rook can think of stun+warp+hammer, other assassins have other combos. General have less to be active about in a battle ( QoT is okay, the rest are not ).
If generals could, for example, order catapultasauri to shell a tower position, with soldiers waiting behind to charge a demigod, and a powerful mana-consuming aura to activate and make them a force to actually threaten the demigod - that could be nice.
Watching your expensive idols feed another demigod's gold and xp with a couple Fire Nova / timely-thrown Mines is not nice.
I could see applying the Morale attribute/skill of a General to friendly Minions of all types within a certain range of that General, but I would not want to see control of regular reinforcement waves. The pacing of the game relies upon this autonomous activity. Changen it and you change the flow of the game for the worse.
Besides, giving players control over the units that provide the enemy with experience will simply lead to people ordering all their low tier Minions into a far removed corner so that they can`t be killed. You know that would happen.
I would contend that much of the perceived weakness of Idol Minions (specifically) is the direct result of the deployment by a foe of the Parasite Egg Item. It should be removed. Do that and you`ll see 2100 hit (!) Minotaur Captains make a difference again, as they otherwise do.
(Cleave capabilities can curtail Idol Minions too, but at least when those occur they are applicable only to targets within 'X' range, not automatically every follower in your army no matter their location!...)
As for fun, I have a great deal of fun wirth Oak, Queen Of Thorns, Erebus, and Sedna (Aunt... heh). I don`t need/want greater control to enjoy playing with them.
just because support heroes are not fun for you doesn't mean they are no fun for anyone.
If you give the players control over minions they will just let them stay at the most furthest away defense to deny their enemies gold and xp.
Okay, maybe I am weird. Come to think of it, I did hear it mentioned before once or twice : )
Most minions are demigod fodder and that's ok. What I suggested is to give generals abilities that make them significant. In that case they would be actually put to use, not stuffed away. That would be a general's strength, and activity, thus solving both problems ( the first of which I believe you agree with, the second - not ).
I agree with you _Mercury_
A "general" should have the RTS-style command powers of a true general, directing and commanding waves of reinforcements, and not "simply" be pseudo-assassins with a retinue of minions.
And Mroale would still be pretty useless even if it buffed ai creeps around you, i think. :/
Generals just need good items that rely on their minions.
The original concept of generals vs assasins was a single unit vs a stronger army.
Now, it's a few minion units plus special soldiers that each general can create. OK. We can work with this.
I'd suggest making citadel upgrades, especially for minions, be cheaper for generals. Generals still have a major problem getting gold and with buying Items and Idols, doesn't leave much for contributing to the whole team. It's still not a perfect fix though.
Maybe have General only upgrades for the citadel or more upgrades such as faster, movement-wise troops or create a 5-10-15% evasion chance for troops.
Another General only item might be a orders menu. Basically, setup a 1 minute large glowing arrow that would allow troops to move to the other lane, move to a flag, move around active fortifications (thinking of crucible here... why wouldn't you send your troops around the middle?). Heck, Give them access to a playbook and have generals choose between different routes for 2000 gold a pop.
My view is that Generals should have various money bonuses.
I was in a game that was 2 assassins + 1 General vs 2 generals and 1 assassin and the gameplay was completely different from the usual 3 assassin groups. A lot of teamwork was involved and all the fights were intense instead of the usual 5 second gank fest. I would say that if either team went pure assassins they would have lost, though I can't be sure on that.
That being said, there is no reason to spend money on idols or gear that boosts your minions right now mainly because there are too many ways to kill them and they don't hurt enough. One solution would be to boost general gold income so they can either afford more gear for their minions or buy idols.
Another solution would be to make the idols free / automatic and auto-upgrade as war rank increases. This would mean every general would have 6 idol based minions available and it would encourage them to up their war rank in order to upgrade their idols sooner.
Wow Frogboy. That'd break the game so bad.
If that was patched in, say, tomorrow, Generals would be far better than Assassins if it weren't for rook and TB being rather broken. But they'd probably be as good as Rook and TB, still, maybe even better depending on the bonus.
But, they wouldn't be good using their minions or idols. They'd still not use minions, they'd be better from using their money bonuses to buy items which make them better as pure assassin playing style.
Generals work fine right now as Assassins. So people think they're bad because they're newbies, and don't know how to play the game(this is said frankly, not offensively), so they try using the minions and idols which are bad. Generals actually are all pretty good right now when you play them as an assassin. And it SHOULD be that way. You should be able to play them either way. It's their Minion builds that are bad. Their solo builds are fine. So the solution used needs to be one that just buffs their playability with minions, without improving them significantly when played without minions. Generals aren't bad. General minion builds are bad.
If you cheapen the Idols about 1k across the board for all the level 4's, and add items which only give bonuses when you have minions, and give better bonuses for more minions in some cases, then Minions will work better. That solution only effects them being used with Minions, is it's the proper one, in my opinion.. If someone has a better solution, that's fine. But every other solution either makes them completely overpowered and they'll still just be used as assassins, but overpowered ones(frogboys), or makes them useless as assassin's(what most of the community has suggested with nerfing their damage and buffing their survivability). See: http://forums.demigodthegame.com/343154 this thread on general items.
Like if you have a +100 armor +health item per minion you control (max 800) then you have to at least buy 3 idols and use level 1 of the minion skill for Sedna/QoT to get the maximum bonus from it. Or level 3 of it, and buy 2 idols. Oak and Erebus could get the bonus with their minion skills maxed alone. That last part woudl be interesting in of itself, how it works differently on two sets of Generals, and is more depth some people say the game lacks. (Which, it lacks FAR FAR less than pretty much everyone says. The game has a good deal of depth, but COULD have more without adding senseless things.)
Plus, fix bugs like nightwalkers not (or not able to) attack people that are moving. Spirits do a bad job at this too, but are slightly better since they move faster. Not sure about Yeti's but I imagine they have the same problem. It's hard to judge how good something is when they won't even work because of bugs! What if thye're actually okay, but no one can tell because the bug makes them useless?! I've also had tons of cases where minions ignore my orders, or move in the complete opposite DIRECTION of where I tell them to go. It does this with my Demigod too, but less often.
Thanks...
With love, Innociv.
i think giving generals extra money, or making things cheaper for generals is a great idea. Minions cost a lot, and its one more thing that they need to purchase that assassins don't
Assassins: items, citadel upgrades
Generals: items, citadel upgrades, minions
I think that generals should either get 150% more gold than assassins or have things be 2/3 of the price since they have 150% more (3:2) areas to spend their money.
SIGHHHHHHHHH
And what's to stop me as a General from JUST buying items with my extra money?!
Not like I buy citadel upgrades either, except to get catapultasaurs and giants.
I hope GPG knows not to listen to stuffl iek "I think that generals should get 150% more gold than assassins".
I have to agree with this statement. Just giving generals more money will cause them to spend more money on assassin type gear, it won't encourage them to be more general like (ie: minions).
they could JUST buy items, but because generals AREN'T assassins, those items won't help them out as much as if they were. Or at least they shouldn't, but it seems that generals currently are capable of fighting without minions, so I guess it could pose a problem as is.
I think these money bonuses Frogboy is mentioning though is a team thing so, (whenever the oak kills a reinforcement the team recieves a cut of 50% of his earnings) or something like that...At least I hope, or that would just be a retarded idea
WOW. You mean if generals got 1 gold more than Assassins it would break the game so bad? I didn't realize that the integrity of the game was so fragile.
I love how some people, with no game design experience whatsoever, are so certain in their knowledge. I guess it's a good thing I don't design games, I'm sure they'd all tank.
Care to be less vague?
Sure. In the short-term, I think the quickest/easiest way to make Generals more competitive would be to start Generals off with more gold so that they can choose to buy more items OR choose to buy minions. How much gold would need to be played around with.
I also think their minions should be tougher but that would take more time.
If you give the generals more money in the start like lets say 1500 instead of the 1000 they would buy their assassin ally one of the very nice 1500 gold items which totally changes the early game - Regulus with wyrmskin gloves or ring of nature or even both when you do a 3vs3 and have 2 generals 1 Assassin. As Sedna/QoT you can hold your ground without an item in the beginning. And yes the balance of Demigod is very fragile, most games have a very fragile balance, one change at the wrong spot can screw the whole game.
Instead of increasing the money generals get (for some dubious reason - alone explaining consistently why they get more money should be hard), wouldn't the minimal impact change be to make minions more useful or idols cheaper instead of coming up with a solution which has so many possible side effects?
How would making minions tougher take more time than changing the gold income / starting gold for generals. The first is just changing a few numbers, the latter needs new code - probably not much and easy lua code but still new code.
Eliminate Parasite Egg, improve/refine the aforementioned A.I. problems for Idol Minions. Do this first and then lets see how Generals that are Minion-centric flow.
Giving Generals Monetary boosts would simply allow players to purchase regular Items more quickly. Innociv is correct. Besides, then you no longer have every Demigod starting out on an even/fair playing field; you`d have to potentially introduce all sorts of governing & restricting rules about expenditures to prevent General players from utilizing their extra gold in ways Assassins could not (by sheer amount in such an instance).
My guess is that with release right around the corner they don't want to risk any changes to gameplay. The gold thing is something they can play around with and fine tune to the point where 50% of players are playing generals and 50% are playing assassins.
Later on, after release, they can make more significant changes to the game to make minions more likely to be used.
The nice thing about gold is that you can tweak it on the order of magnitude of a single gold. All of the other suggestions (including mine) are significant and could easily throw the balance too far in the other direction and there is no middle ground for most of them (you can't half remove parasite egg).
And no offense Frogboy.. but would you want to play against any of clanX in sins?.. Or anyone like TBO/TLO in Demigod? :/ There is a reason Blizzard pays the top players of starcraft to alpha test SC2 because they know their feedback is far more crucial than what the designers THINK will work. They've had to completely rework units in SC2 because the top gamers have found how too abusable they are, or because of how one unit intereacted with another (IE, medics were removed and they changed one ship into a medic ship. The problem was that the medics where too slow, and couldn't cross over obsticles, to keep up with the new fast jumpack guys, but the new medic ship can. With the normal medics, Marines were far far more prefered since they could be used with medics. Sure, they could of just buffed the jumppack guys, but the medic plane turned out to be a much better option.) A lot of these "non-designers" know your own games inside and out far better than you do. Often a part of why they're much better at playing the games is because they see these synergies of how units work together, and they see what about units can be abused cheaply. Such as a General buying a unit and dropping it for an Assassin. Though, GPG has shown they know a great deal about balance with Supcom:FA. Sins on the otherhand.. not sure how the current game is, but we warned them that's what was going to happen from the preview notes, before the patch even went up, and was ignored. Like when we told them how a patch was going to turn the game into nothing but cruiser rushing, it was ignored and it did just that. All other units where useless after the first few patches, it was completely about getting cruisers out ASAP.
Yeah, I don't think giving them more money for minions will make any difference at all until changes are implemented that make minions worth using. As it stands, 1k is just about enough to buy the starter monks and use them for a healing advantage in the early levels, and that's really the most you can get for your money. Besides that, minions are mainly useful for taking hits from creeps / towers, and are too expensive for that purpose.
A more simple answer to your suggestion: Giving Generals more money at start doesn't fix the root problem (which you seem to realize).
I think one way to give people incentives to use more minions would be to give each general bonuses like the one Oak has with his spirits - the more minions you have, the more powerful your General is. Oak's spirit bonus isn't particularly noticeable as is, but it's a good concept.
Like Innociv said, though, all of the Generals are pretty good / balanced if you play them as Assassins, though a few of them could use a little bit of boosting. They just seems weak / unfun when you compare them to the grossly OP Assassins (reg / ice tb / rook). If you try to play Generals the way the name would suggest, as the leader of an army of minions, then you start to see why people think they are weak.
It all comes down to two things: balancing the OP Assassins, and making minions more useful AND more interesting (not just player-controlled creeps with unique skins).
This is basically what I meant when I say items for generals. It'd be exactly like that mechanic, pretty much.
And yeah, Oak pretty much is the one General where you usually WILL get minions(your skill one at least, not the idols except maybe 1k priests) because they boost their weapon damage. If there were good items that buff your Demigod based on how many peoples you had (some would need caps, some not) then you would need minions for the effects. This would buff Generals using minions, without really buffing them played like assassins which works fine currently.
Like I suggested in my thread.. If you have an item that has a 50% chance on hit to heal your minions for 75hp, and each time a minion is healed you gain 15 health, you have an incentive to get a lot of minions and keep them alive, since when they're up and alive, you're significantly harder to heal. It acts like life leach, but requires minions instead of high damage. But these items can't cost TOO much, since you already spend much of your gold on the idols. Since these items only have benefits when you have minions, they do not benefit assassins, or General's being played with non-minion builds, so their high-performance-per-cost doesn't matter to them.
*nod*
How about having a zero XP gain from killing both Idol and regular minions? As it is, the Idol minions give 0 XP. If the gameplay only allowed XP gain from capturing flags, destroying fortifications and killing Demigods, perhaps that might give Generals a specific boost to their intended mechanic of fielding more numerous and powerful minions.
A straight transition of this would slow level progression immensely though, but I guess my intention would be to eliminate the farming of regular minions for XP, which I think would dramatically change the game play balance since the game would absolutely focus on territory control and strategic pushes. I think this gameplay change would emphasise Generals strengths and versatility, if normal minions garnered zero XP.
('-')y
I'm just gonna throw my two Canadian pennies in:
I think Generals should start of with lvl. 1 Idols as an integrated part (to stop selling for early better goodies). All idol minions should scale up with the general's level, and can have 6 - 12 spawn each, spawning at 1 - 2 at a time for much less mana (the time between casting will force more preservation). Each idol level should do a 25hp damage per strike increase, starting at 25 at level 1 (remember the armor mitigation before crying OP, or UP if I misscalculated), variably less for archer and priest units due to ranged status. Minion HP should start at twice that of their spawn creep counterparts, doubling or tripling at each level.
All values should be tweaked as they are a rough estimate of what would be balanced and useful. Something else I would like to add to the minion summon, but didn't due to clarity in the above paragraph, would be to reduce the time per minion spawn to 18 seconds, but each spawn starts the timer for all three idols, not just the one used.
[EDIT for why] What these changes would do is give an actual army to command that won't just evaporate on the first demigod.
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