First of all let me say that i know there are a hundred other posts like this (OrleanKnight's) but I need to get this off my chest or I just might Explode. I Just auto calc every combat I can because honestly, it's horrible.
Here's Why and some simplish fixes
Territory & Tactics
The first Reason Tactical combat is boring is that it involves absolutely no tactics worth mentioning. Controlling tiles in is a huge part of tactical combat in turn based games. In FE strategy is just running to mid and hitting first or pummeling with spells. The AI should just be waiting for the chance to pounce on your mage or archers, even to the point of keeping cavalry in reserve. To help prevent this many games use a system where units cant move next to enemy units without having to stop there. In FE zone of control is made usless because everyone dies in aprox two blows and some units have 10+ movement and initiative, also Terrain is too open. Chokepoints and defensible locations to move archers too are another thing that is completely absent. How about battling across a river with two bridges or something? Easy Simple fixes
Classes & Talents
Champion classes beyond the warrior and mage are horrible simply because the game is so simple. You cant specialize a warrior at all, a lv 15 warrior is exactly the same as any other and the stats system make Assassins pointless because theres nothing to specialize in. Defenders be useless becuase defense is pointless in a game where you exchange like 2 blows of 60 dmg(Also see tactics above). The Assassin specialization is pointless because they tried to make them specialize in dext, which is just as useless as int. Crit strike is flawed if warriors are defined by only their strength stat and weapons deal dmg based on strength. Talents needs to be made more complex to even allow the classes we have. The Simplest way to revive fun champions is weapon specialization talents. For Example daggers as they stand just suck, but how about a talent that lets Assassins always strike twice with daggers? Or a Talent that gives Assassins a Dext based dmg bonus when using a bow? This fixes Assasins and makes champions more interesting. Defenders could get an improved defend talent for shields or a multi turn resistible stun for maces. There should be multiple abilities for every weapon and class in the game.
Units and Monsters
There are multiple types of dmg in FE, why are they never used beyond champion armor? Rock Spiders should laugh at cutting weapons. Cavalry should be afraid of whatever it is spears do. Also higher lv spears would be nice. There should be units in the game that are almost impossible to kill unless you have their weakness, be it fire or hammers. Instead every unit and monster in the game is just X hp, X dmg, X Init with a face. If it's got four legs it's fast and if it's got eight it's poisonous.
Unit stacks are underpowered again due to their simplicity, their just normal units with a weakness. The interaction between monsters, champions and stacks should be made more interesting. Unless using a special ability or talent, champions or monsters shouldn't be able to kill more than 1 unit in a stack per turn. Inversely their should be a limit to how many guys in a stack can attack, maybe just the front row (Unless they have spears? or a Spearwall talent?). Just think about how much this actually adds to the game. It makes initiative more important if you want to kill stacks or strength more important to kill monsters. Plus abilities for warrior champions would become more specialized, allowing you to build warrior champions more than just one way. Sword/Shield Duelist to fight other champions? GreatSword wielding monster slayer? Mace wielding stack slaughterer?
Thanks to all those who took the time to read this and doubly for those saintly souls who reply.
Territory & Tactics: Zones of control are a good idea. The 10+ movement available on a 14 tile map is not. It shouldn't be 'easy' to work cavalry around to archers that have a front line defense, but it shouldn't be impossible either. Limiting tactical moves to units is a solid idea. How much may be up for debate, and will need to be balanced with the ammount of damage ranged units can do in a given turn. Choke points and varying tactical maps (based on terrain) are also good ideas, and I would like to see the game head in this direction.
Classes & Talents: While I agree with your points on classes not being unique, and paths not being balanced with each other, this has more to do with leveling champions than tactical concerns.
Units and Monsters: Reasons to construct different unit types is an excellent start. I'm actually fairly certain that monsters do have higher resistances against various elements (and perhaps weapons too) but I like this mechanic as well.
I am however, highly against 1 unit per unit killed. This makes champions functunally useless against large groups. Using regular troops should be a viable alternative, not a requirement, unless champions are changed to being 'war leaders', which is fairly unlikely to happen.
And finally, STOP posting your copy-pasted ideas all over the forum! We can clearly see new topics, damnit!
Sry about the copy paste thing.
No pretty sure monsters dont have any built in resistances to blunt, cutting or piercing attacks. Beyond elementals resisting their own type of dmg and some armor, resistances probably don't exist. There isn't even a spot to display such resistances.
To explain this better all champions could get talents. For example triple strike for daggers, rain of arrows for archers and sweep for great swords to kill stacks, but only if they choose these abilities over stat boosts and single target abilities. One reason I like this idea is it adds a lot of interesting potential talents. My system would slow down combat but mostly late game and even then I don't think that would be a bad thing as it should make it more interesting and fun to play.
I would argue that regular troops should be a requirement.
I don't agree with all of his specifics (the one-unit-killed thing is a bad idea imo, for instance), but the OP has the right idea, generally. Tactical combat is far and away my least favorite part of the game. If it wasn't for the fact that I can usually do better by playing it out than auto for the tough battles, I'd never fight a battle as it stands.
Mind you, it is quite a bit better than in original Elemental. They're putting a lot of work in, and they've made the game taken as a whole fun already, so I bet they'll beef up tactical.
Especially if we keep making our voices heard.
What could work are attack with special effects - weakening, poisoning, sleep-inducing, petrifying, armor-shattering, etc. And corresponding resistances for the defense. Also, greater weapon diferrentiation by damage types I speak about elsewhere. What is essential, however, is, that the combat should present you difficult choices. Without choices to make, gameplay is boredom.
I pretty much auto every battle. There really isn't any fun to playing them out, not like there is anything going on other than running to the eney and swinging my weapon or spamming magic. The only thing I can do differently than the computer is protect my weaker units and be more conservative with my mana.
I would love for it to go one of either two distinct paths, either the Final Fantasy Tactics route or the Dominions 3 route. Either give me meaningful terrain, ZOC, flanking OR let me set up my battle formations, set unit AI and tactics, and let the battles be done automatically. Right now I have to choose between either playing out a bland tactical fight, or roll the dice with an auto fight, knowing it's my weakest units that seem to rush to the vanguard.
Agreed on all fronts. Something more needs to happen with Territory & Tactics, Classes & Talents, and Units and Monsters. There just isn't meaningful strategic depth yet to these areas, which makes the game bland. The initial game is fun, but re-playability suffers greatly when everything is the same from one game to another.
Some ways to addresses this by Stardock would be:
1. More content/variety. Both in equipment, units, and monsters.
2. Better incorporation of damage types and existing stats. Either that, or eliminate a bunch of almost worthless stats.
3. Improve the leveling system, as suggested earlier.
Thankfully some of these items aren't huge requests and something that I imagine will be incorporated as the Betas progress. I'm anxiously awaiting the details on the next patch!
I play every battle only because I don't like my mana being wasted. I'll probably auto-play once they put in an auto-play with no magic button. So yeah I guess I do need the tactical battles to be a little more interesting.
The first step is to fix the blatant OP stuff like overblow, some spells, movement boosting, and champions. Then fix the tactical AI. At this point the game will be alright, but needs to be more engaging. You are right that monsters need more ranged attacks, abilities, and armor weaknesses. The other half of this though is that basic troops need more options in regards to their own armor in the early and mid game. You need to be able to choose more than leather armor. Also more player controlled monster would spice up tactical combat. A flanking dmg boost or guaranteed critical strike when attacking enemies from behind would work great with the current ZoC mechanic as well. It would definitely make Assassin champions more interesting.
I would also like to see tactical maps improved, they look different but are all tactically the same. I would like to see defense boosting tiles, movement slowing tiles, and chokepoints on the tactical map. Why is there no river crossing tactical maps? I would be nice if the type of strategic tile you are fighting on effected the fight. For instance on forest tiles mounted units lose their movement and initiative bonus.
None of these things would be that hard to implement and I think they are pretty much the minimum requirements to making tactical combat engaging.
Brad has said before that champs are supposed to be like Sauron in LOTR, killing swaths of fodder. How much would it suck if Sauron had to stop attacking after he killed 1 unit? Give me a break. Too many people are going to complain and champs will get nerfed into oblivion and then this game will suck in a different way.
Agree.
To explain this even better all champions could get talents. For example triple strike for daggers, rain of arrows for archers and sweep for great swords to kill stacks, but only if they choose these abilities over stat boosts and single target abilities. One reason I like this idea is it adds a lot of interesting potential talents. Champions that choose stack targetting abilities and talents would kill mutiple units in a hit (Just like the Sauren Gif) and easily take out stacks, High lv champions would have both single target and multi target abilities. The point is this makes you have to choose bewteen different types of champions and the weapons they use instead of just how much Str vs Dex you want. You should earn the Sauren Smash not start with it.
Very embarrased that I forgot about flanking.... Definetly a necessity in turn based tile games and your right about how the game needs more armor in the tech tree. There should be mutiple types of armor for early, mid and late game, each protecting against a different ype of dmg.
Tactical combat is much improved over WOM; however, it could be improved further.
As stated; allow units to select additional combat actions (beyond defend) when leveling up. Give a bonus to flanking attacks to the rear flanks. Make the maps more interesting with bonuses/penalties based on tiles.
The iniatiative system is good but I would consider refining it to let champions and sovereigns impact the iniatiative of units close to them.
Sauron was not a ten a penny hero.Only the Channeler should be at that level.Champions should be army leaders like Aragorn and only be great mortals.
Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli killed hundreds of orcs while all the men around them died. Remember the counting "comedy?"
It was not "hundreds", merely dozens.
It is at least faster now, and looks better (partially because of the higher resolution, and also the higher unit size).
But fundamentally I question a few of the premises on which the combat is built and has been evolved:
The game is still about 1 BIG ATTACK VALUE. No one pays any attention to accuracy because missing and dodging is still a fairly rare occurrence. So these stats have been implemented in a very piecemeal and half-hearted way. But at the same time, if we had a situation where they were meaningful and half of all attacks were missing, the game would be really slow and unsatisfying. I don't think these stats can be done in a useful way at the moment, so we'd arguably do better just cutting them in the name of streamlining. That's not to say I think the combat should be simpler, I just think accuracy and dodge are a poor way of adding depth.
Secondly, I question how useful this fixation on slashing/piercing/bludgeoning is. I mean, even if it is well implemented, it doesn't really effect how you behave in a battle does it? It just effects which units you recruit and choose to bring with you. In GalCiv2 this three-damage-types thing kind of worked because you had three different weapon trees and three different defence trees. But Elemental only has one defence tree. If Leather is good against slashing and poor against blunt, but plate is good against blunt and poor against slashing (which by the way is kind of silly and forced), then why would i bother researching plate, when the two are (on balance) equal? On the other hand, if plate is overall better, and leather is just better PER BUCK against slashing, then aren't I still just going to use plate anyway? Unless you have three separate trees i don't see it working. And I can't imagine player really wanting to do that anyway. It just means you have to research more and have lots of redundancy just in case.
The iniative system is okay (grumble grumble), but better than the combat speed system it replaced. But the haste and slow spells need to alter iniative more than they do at the moment imho.
So that's the stuff I'd take out. I'll make recommendations for how I'd add depth and tactics in another post.
The 1 BIG ATTACK VALUE is one on the main things my 1 hit max 1 kill(Except special weapons, talents and skills) is designed to reduce.
Dodging is hard to balance because its a all or nothing stat and those only work if they can be evened out over longer combat, with the current system of everything dying in like 2 blows it's just too random and hard to balance. To make it work combat would have to be made longer and Dmg reduced.
I disagree but see you point.
The dmg is a little redundant when you consider just infantry fighting infantry but if you consider pikemen,archers,mounted units and monsters it becomes better. Without it your just equiping units with the best items you got and running them into the middle to fight. Specialization is the heart of tactics.
If the Dmg type system was implemented correctly then it wouldn't be redundant. If mounted units were weaker against piercing attacks then you would naturally bring not only swordsmen to battle but spearmen and in battle you would try to tactically arrange your spearmen to avoid enemy swordsmen and attack mounted units. Basically it makes combat not only about whose got the better equpment but who can control the battlefield. That said you woudn't make the bonuses huge just enough to make a little difference.
Couldn't agree more. I prefer the former but would settle for the latter, which is probably much easier to balance from the development standpoint. I know that FE is a massive improvement over WOM but there is still a very long way to go in my opinion. I hope Stardock will be able to slow down this time and really look at tactical combat. It's currently very underwelming.
This.
@Sethai: All that stuff is just balance. Any system with bad balance is itself bad.
Yes it would. But would combat where 50% of attacks did nothing at all really be more fun to watch or play? If, on balance, a warrior's skill at arms reduces the amount of damage they do over time, then why not just integrate it into the attack value, and have units do half as much damage in the first place, instead of annoyingly missing half the time? The reason accuracy and dodge are underpowered atm is because stardock quite rightly don't want to make combat that lame and unsatisfying.
Yes, that is the kind of situation we want to reach, where cavalry can inflict devastating charges (especially to flanks), but risk suicide engaging spearmen head on.
But why are cavalry like that in reality? Is it because cavalry wear certain armour that is more vulnerable to piercing? And if that's the case, then doesn't this approach fall apart once I give my cavalry armour that is good against piercing?
Cavalry charges are devastating because of the momentum delivered by charging horsemen, especially when delivered through a lance. The advantage of spears in in their reach, preventing the enemy getting close, and often allowing you to strike him before he strikes you. These are the things we need in the game. I personally don't believe damage type is the most important thing in (pseudo) medieval warfare, or the big thing this game is lacking.
i believe it's a combination of bracing spears against the ground to face frontal charge negate the riders' momentum, and horses being unwilling to throw themselves onto a spear wall. Unfortunately most strategy games don't have a specific horse morale algorithm (with the exception maybe of dwarf fortress)
edit, and of course, like you said the reach. in games with counterstrike or opportunity actions it's common to give spearmen First strike to simulate their reach, but i don't know what we'd do here
Exactly
But it would help and is worth the effort.
Also you reading too much into my examples, there really just general examples instead of the exact system I would implement. I really just wanted to highlight the games weaknesses and give general examples, as long as it works to increase tactics and fun I'm happy.
Before I start what will be a long post, I want to talk about the R word: Realism. Whenever I use this word people shout me down and say "fun is more important than realism," and they're right. Units that run out of breath half way through the battle may be more realistic, but they are not more fun.
But when my swordsmen stab your guy in the back i expect him to die because i stabbed him in the back, not do even better because he is wearing chainmail. This is intuitive. Inuitive is a better thing to aim for then realistic. But in this case we would make the system intuitive BECAUSE it would be realistic. If a intuitive approach is one that a player reads about, sees in films and imagines happening in real life, then by making our game model more like films and real life, won't we make intuitive approaches more viable? The most popular, mainstream and intuitive military strategy games at the moment are the brilliant Total War series, which model military combat more realistically then almost any other type of game.
Like I said before, I think the ONE BIG ATTACK VALUE is a bad way to go. But a game where every other attack misses isn't very fun either. It would be better to simply half the number of attacks and at least make the game more satisfying. So we need to add depth without lots of misses. And I think I know the way to do it.
At the moment a spearman has 8 attack. There are also three of them, so the game displays this at 24 Attack. But this is not the same as a Sov with 24 attack.
When a unit of 3 spearmen attacks a unit with 5 defence what the game actually does is 8-5, and then multiplies the result by three, ie: 9 damage. Whereas a sov with 24 attack just subtracts 5 from 24 and does 19 damage (there are also random elements, but that's broadly how it works). What this means is that our Sovs (and our monsters as well) work in an almost entirely different combat system to our units. That's why we've never been able to get a good balance between characters and units.
The "multiple roll" system is a good one. It moderates randomisation. It's how Warhammer, or total war or any other game works. It's intuitive and realistic. 3 Spearmen = 3 attacks = 3 dice. 5 arrows = 5 dice. What I'd do would be to make characters and monsters behave more like units. I'd give a standard spearman an attack value of about 10, and an elite infantryman an attack value of say 20. A sov by contrast might have an attack value of 15, increasing to maybe 40 by the end game (I'd also rename the attack stat as "damage" to make the system clearer, because that's what it really is). After all, a sov with a sword is not 5x as strong as an ordinary schmuck.
"But Seth-dude," you scream. "How will a sov with a measly 15 attack ever compete with 5 guys with 10 attack?" And the answer is simple. Give the characters more attacks too. That's what warhammer or total war do. You'd start with two and then gain more with traits up to a max of maybe 5 or so. Sovs, monsters and units would then be covered by broadly the same combat system and it would be easier to balance. Skilled swordsmen, mighty monsters and powerful catapults would have high "damage" stats but low numbers of attacks. Units ouwld have large numbers of attacks. Because defence is subtracted from each attack roll individually, you'd then have a situation where units did more damage against lightly or unarmoured foes and other units, but might struggle (or be unable) to pierce the hide of a dragon. Whereas a hero with high damage values and low attacks would be much slower at mowing down darkligns than an army, but do much more damage with each stroke of the blade. You'd struggle to increase the damage values of you basic soldiers, but when you did give them +1 attack, it would make a lot of difference, because that would be multiplies by 10 for all the guys in the unit.
So that, to me, is the most obvious way to balance the game. Give the Sovs and monsters multiples attack rolls like the units, brig every unit type into the same combat system, and then there is never any need for anyone to have a damage value greater than 40 or so. As for the strategy, spearmen and cavalry stuff, i'll talk about that tomorrow when I'm exhausted from writing this.
Yes. The reach and the first-strike thing are two sides of the same coin. I've got an idea for this that I'll talk about tomorrow.
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