Hi guys,
So I've played with .77 a bit and the initiative system still seems to need some work.
What I think is breaking the system comes down to 2 things:
1. All initiative costs are fixed.
2. There is no initiative modifier for moving (or it's too small).
For example, the great fireball caster issue. I can (and I'm sure everyone else has) created a caster that can get fireball of before anyone else even moves. Now, if you changed the spell initiative system so that the caster must act after *every other* piece on the board after charging fireball, that would make charge spells quite crap.
What I propose is the following:
1. Spell casts cost a *percentage* of the caster's initiative, including the charge time. This still makes initiative attractive to casters, to get first go, while reducing the silliness of initiative stacking. Stupid high initiative values will still get their cast off before some others move, but you should still have time for a counterspell if you have one.
2. Weapons have an initiative cost to swing rather than giving bonus initiative. This reduces casters' reliance on daggers, while still allowing daggers and other fast weapons to do their job of fast attacking.
3. Movement in a turn costs initiative. For this to be justified, you have to think of initiative as less a 'who goes first' mechanic a la RPGs, and more of an 'army C&C' mechanic, like a tactical wargame. For example, once your knights charge, they have to spend time reorganising for the next attack etc.
4. Initiative should be based on a stat. Troops are currently gimped because they have *very few* ways of increasing their initiative, resulting in OP heroes murdering them before they get one go. If you base it on a stat, then you can aim for that stat (or combination of stats) to get your troops more actions.
I hope you all like my first post.
Good post.
Get some karma, Colonel! Good points and outstanding first post, although I don't know how far the whole mechanics are going to undergo radical changes anymore.
I like the idea of initiative not just being (who moves first and how many times they move) ... but instead being a "currency" that you can use in a variety of ways (during your round).
You can spend Initiative by moving (up to your maximum movement) and you can spend your initiative by attacking.
In this way, if you have a lightweight weapon like a dagger, it uses less initiative to use (can move-attack, or attack 3 times)
while a larger weapon could require so much initiative that it would be impossible to both move AND attack.
However! ... the "Charge" ability could allow a person to move AND attack (no matter how heavy the weapon) at the cost of using up ALL initiative for the round. (Ie. A heavy-armor footman charging with a longsword, or a cavalry charging with a lance)
These are some excellent suggestions. I hope frogboy is reading this.
I'd actually like to see a move towards action points, where everything costs a certain number of them. Those with higher initiative have higher total action points, and accumulate them faster in TC. A dagger swing might cost 4AP, a blade cost 8, bows might cost 12 to nock and release. An initiative of 4 means you generate 4AP per turn. Whoever has the most AP gets to make a move, be that movement on the battlefield, or an attack, or starting a spell. If my archers currently have 16AP saved up, and there are thieves (daggerwielders) that are one square away from them have 12AP saved up (they only have 3 initiative, and in the 4 turns that the 4 initiative archers have built up their 16, they only got 12), then the archers can move away 1 space (2AP) to get to 14. They still have more points than the thieves, and so are still up in the queue. They can loose arrows at the thieves, which costs 12AP, bringing them to 2AP left. The thieves are now on top, with 12AP. They have to move 2 squares, (4AP), bringing them to 8AP. They can attack he archers with daggers once (4AP) to get to 4AP, and then can go again (the thieves have 4AP, the archers still have 2) which brings them to 0AP. The archers choose to wait a turn, rather than move, and get up to 6AP. The thieves wait also, and get 3AP. The archers move 1 square (4AP). The thieves wait (6AP), and so on.
The point is this, you have to pass your turn to get AP back, and every other action burns AP. It solves a number of issues, including the kiting issue we've been talking about.
Really good idea, Colonel.
Always nice to see a new poster. Is that a Serenity Firefly or just the shiny bug type?
I think the current system can work fine as long as it is balanced well. I would of course rather have a more complex initiative system, but it's not something I have reason to think is possible at this stage in development. We have about another month of beta 2 and maybe 2 or three more of beta 3. At this point it is more effective to think of ways to balance the current system, than think of a better one.
That said, this seems like a great initiative system. Taking out he special point I saw that fits well into game balance for the current system, let's talk about fixing daggers. IMO daggers and spears got mixed up in the development process. No matter how light and shiny a dagger is, it doesn't make a spell cast faster. More weapons should have minor reductions to Initiative to prevent mages from using them. This is related to the unbalanced encumbrance issue. Daggers should be able to ignore armor. Spears should be able to counter mounted units. I really don't see why this is not already the case. From a realism or gameplay perspective, these two weapons don't make sense. I could rant for hours on how this is bad design, but I'll have to make my own thread for that. Daggers don't need an initiative bonus.
As to Magic, AoE spells were recently balanced in the internal beta. According to Derek, they take more turns to cast and do less damage. You can still overpower them with Fireshards and Evoker III, but it takes longer to cast. So you can expect any level one mage to befoul your spell. Essentially that means no AoE unless you can outnumber enemy casters and even then, you would be paying for 3-5 Fireballs instead of just one. Can't wait to test this out.
Initiative as its own stat is better IMHO. Connecting it to Dexterity or something will just give heroes a new stat to max out. Initiative as its own stat allows for very controlled amounts to be given out. Of course there is little balance at this point with Initiative, a level 5 hero can get double that of a regular army without much effort. There is a deeper problem with armies. They are hollow units. They can only gain early game levels of stats through some traits and a leader hero. Even the enchantments to increase their abilities don't let them come close to a balance with heroes. The best solution is to prevent heroes from getting so much Initiative and Movement without making any trade offs. You should have to choose a Path that defines the traits your hero can have. Impulsive, Fast, Quick, +1 Init for whole army, are just terrible to have in the general trait pool. Even a hero specializing in a Path that focuses on Initiative should only be getting one point or less per level.
Something like this would help Brad with his Kiting problems. I've found it strange you can move anywhere you want and still attack.
Like others here I agree that the idea of having actions slow down your next move is a great idea. It's also a pretty intensive change, and there's a certain burden of knowledge you're putting on the player. It's a non-trivial task to show how much an action is going to affect initiative in a clean way.
For argument's sake, I'm going to repost my suggestion to cap initiative as a 2x bonus. I posted this in the kiting thread, but there wasn't much response.
Mathematically this could be accomplished pretty easily:
I like this idea because it still allows quick units to act more frequently than slower units, but keeps things reasonable no matter how insane iniative gets. Although a bit mathy, it should be pretty easy to implement. Since lowest initiative breaks ties, all units will get to take one action before any unit gets to take its second (important for nukes).
If we manage to fix initiative itself by keeping things within reason relative to each other, then this change would be completely unneccessary. I think this would take drastic changes to the mechanics, such as making it a stat or increasing its base substantially so that a +10 isn't stupid good. If such changes aren't made, initiative will never be reasonable and a cap like this will be necessary.
I don't like the idea of an initiative cap. This is a fantasy game. It's fun to be able to have very powerful heroes that can wipe out entire armies. Beyond that, I have seen many fights in real life where one opponent strikes four or five times as much as his enemy. Since this is fantasy, it doesn't seem odd that a level 15 hero can strike three times faster in a round. They just need to balance things so that it is not so easy to get Initiative at low levels. I just raised up Markinn to 20 Init and 6 moves at level 5. That should be a level 15 stat.
I'm sorry seanw3, but if we have that 3x or more turns nothing but champions are going to matter late game, unless their offensive power is nerfed so much that champions without a heavy init are useless. 2x was a stretch for me, and may need to be balanced.
While it should be fun to have powerful heroes that can wipe out entire armies, doesn't that mean that no one should ever build armies? Isn't that the situation we're dealing with right now? I don't think it's necessarily better gameplay to say that units only exist to support champions until champions get powerful enough to win the game. It's basically the same thing we have now, but it just takes longer.
I would prefer champions that can barely defeat entire armies with a small amount of support and great expenditure of resources (something this game needs more of).
Also the realism argument does not fly with me. Those people who attack five times as much as an enemy in real life are not five times as fast. They are just more aggressive. Their opponents are using a guard ability over and over again.
This cap retains the importance of initiative, and gives the ability to move more frequently, which closed rounds do not. It's just meant to keep things reasonable.
A level 15 Army can wipe the floor with a level 15 hero. They have a huge amount of HP and can be upgraded with extremely powerful weapons.
I think that means we can agree that we don't want champions who are completely unstoppable at any point in the game? (late or early)
You bring up a valid point about high level armies. I experimented a bit with the life spell the levels everyone up w/ insane mana production, and I definitely could have won with the armies alone (albeit, after I had already won the game by conquering a single nation with my champions).
Should high level armies and high level champions be the only two things that matter then? Again, I don't think so. As I recall, the Disciples games (at least the first two, didn't play the third) used XP as its main resource. This lead to an odd scenario where an army was only as strong as how many battles it had fought. Once a player gained a sufficient advantage in xp, he could steamroll through everything, since he was able to fight more often, and gain xp at a faster rate. I don't think this is good gameplay. Again, the game is decided far before it is over, and external things such as gold and what you could get with it did not matter.
What about a peaceful, turtle-based player? He's not going to have high level armies or champions unless he quests hard, which is difficult when land gets gobbled up. Should this type of player have no chance at winning except at low difficulties? I don't think so. I would love to have city building and the economy matter. I think the developers would too, since they devoted a lot of resources to revamping the system twice, and have an entire tech tree devoted to it. That's not possible if ridiculousness is obtainable by constantly fighting.
So I guess the balance factor is (experienced units that have earned their power) and (the necessity for new units to be viable throughout the game). Initiative is just one aspect of this balance issue. I want to see more of beta 2 before I can say much more. Right now it seems that the Civilization Tree needs to offer some unit traits that can make low level units competitive.
I think this is a great idea. Hopefully someone takes notice.
Initiative is now somewhat unbalanced when combined with active status effects like poison and regeneration. Basically the higher you initiative the more bang the status effects have because they trigger whenever your turn comes up. Or maybe that was intentional?
I think the devs have superchamps and initiative firmly in their sights and I fully expect some big rebalancing in Thursday's beta - I'm guessing it will include higher base initiatives, quicker research times and empire development, and more xp required for champs to level up. I also reckon many of the stronger traits will be harder to acquire too. I read somewhere on these forums that the big spells are going to take longer to cast in tactical combat too (I think I'll just switch to using tac nuke strategic spells, although those won't get mana discounts though). I'm looking forward to trying out the next installment to see how things have developed.
I don't think Champs need any more XP to level up ... because of the split-champ-exp model.
Otherwise you might nerf champions into non-existence (and we will see more people crying to add Champions to units ... not that I would mind, mind you, but Warrior champs acting on their own would become obsolete)
I just had a game with a fairly high amount of battles, I was happy that I could end most of them quickly with just a fireball or I would have taken weeks and not just a few days to finish the game. Real tme in the real live is something to think about.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
