Hi all
Just wondering is there going to a mechanism to stop steamrolling? Something like unhappiness in Civ and the Total war series of games? (ie if unhappiness drops too low the city revolts etc)
I just feel like currently once you have a stack of doom u can steamroll all the AI cities leaving them no time to build up any defenses or armies to fight you... does anyone else get into that kind of situation?
Agree
Unrest already exists but I don't think its affected by anything but taxes and buildings/spells. Basically it drops gildar and production in cities.
It would be awesome if unrest was temporarily increased in captured cities by like 20% and having to much unrest caused an armed uprising battle to take place vs the garrisoned troops.
These changes would be fairly simple but add so much too the game.
Same here and same as in WoM, very agressive play gets you the main or all cities of most of your opponents in the first 50-100 turns and a huge advantage over the rest of the AI players (playing on a large map).
But it is better than in WoM, because your troops are not moving as quickly as in WoM (2(-3) instead of 3-5 Movement points for a regular hero).
I assume with a higher difficulty setting the number of residential troops is bigger in cities making it more difficult to steamrole, therefore I think there are already some good ideas providing an enhancement over WoM.
Suggestion: Difficulty should definitely control the number of automatic residential troops (or militia). Maybe especially having more in level 1 and level 2 cities would really make steamrolling more difficult. Another option would be to have some catapult like tower defenses in cities which provide defense value independent percentage damages to aggressors.... ?
I think that the new "high-level" lands offer another opportunity for extended play, but it seems for winning I do not require to conquer them, do I?
On the side note: After a hard day at work steam rolling some opponents can also be quite nice
Conquered cities should have higher unrest, or city spam should lead to unrest. I do think something needs to be done here.
Maybe militia numbers increase as cities get conquered?
Militia help with steamrolling but they far from prevent it. More needs to be done. I would rather not end up with 20 militia shoved in a city, especially since you could just magic them to death.
I would like to see a small permanent unrest penalty in annexed cities, in order to provide a trade off with raising and founding a new city. Right now conquering is a no brainer with no downside. Conquering a city gives you a huge boost to population and thus research and gold which in turn makes conquering the next city even easier, and etc... As others have said a temporary unrest penalty in conquered cities would be good idea especially if it forced you to actually garrison the city, lest you lose control of it, and not just move on to the next one immediately.
In another thread I discussed a system with a unrest penalty that increases the more cities you have. This penalty was offset by techs and researchable improvements from a new military tech tree branch. This forced players going for a conquest victory to plan ahead and acquire specific techs and improvements just like all the other victory conditions. It also split tech trees up into different branches for different situations so every game you wouldn't get every tech.
What difficulty level and map size are you playing with how many AI? These settings drastically change how the game plays.
Doesn't matter. We are discussing how if you manage to beat one AI's main army or take one of his cities you can then steam roll his entire kingdom. Effectively increasing your power immediately by 50%. Then it becomes much easier to take out the next AI, and etc.... The problem is that an early victory decides the entire war and even the entire game, the problem is not how hard it is to get that single victory.
Conquest victory is by far the easiest victory to get, it requires no tech. All it really takes is a single battle and you have a huge advantage because your power quickly snowballs. No matter the map size the best and quickest way to earn more gold and research is to conquer an opponent for a huge boost. Playing peacefully or diplomatically is pointless and provides no bonuses when compared to early rushing. Thus early aggressive rushing is the way to play the game.
I agree that there should be some way to prevent players from taking out the main AI stack and then steamrolling all the AI cities. The fact that you also assimilate those cities into your own kingdom without any real resistance is just
Agreed with OP. I'm on "challenging" on 0.91 and once I got an awesome sword from easy quest (and 3 heroes all about 8th level), I just steamrolled two opponents with little to no effort.
The AI just doesn't seem capable of defending well at all.
Mozo
Part of the problem is that human players seem to be much better than the AI when it comes to collecting loot. Currently you can get killer weapons without even fighting by just luring the guard away. If you get a high-end weapon in the early game it is pretty much impossible to stop you after that.
Another part of the problem is that the attacker has an advantage in the early game. Create a killer stack and surprise attack the strongest city of your enemy. Game over for that enemy. Even if he had enough troops to defeat your stack, he has no chance to actually react to your actions. Maybe the early-game militia should be somewhat stronger for level 2+ cities? This way the early game steamrolling could be prevented, but you still need some guards to expand. But I guess this part is mostly about balancing.
I am sure most human players would be very easy to surprise attack in the early game. It would be fun to see the comments if the AI did that. If I would need to be constantly prepared for surprise attacks from the AI my play style would be very different. As is, the human player can gather all available troops and attack the enemy without much risk of getting counter attacked.
Perhaps the armour city militias have should depend on the city level and the weapon on your tech level, or have both dependent on your tech level - either way, the militias need armour as the game progresses
Just throwing out ideas here: Maybe it should cost you a lot of g to convert the citizens? Something like 10g for each conquered citizen (distributed over multiple turns). Only the proportion of the population that is converted produces anything. You will need a strong economy to conquer a city. Conquering the city will initially make your economy weaker, not stronger. So, the steam-roller is slowed down.
That could work, and you could add an enchantment spell that slowly "brainwashes" the locals into liking you.
Exactly .. conquering cities has no downside when there is a huge upside. Really kills the mood of the game...
After people who are conquered do usually form some sort resistance right!
I feel linking it to some Techs/magic would definitely much more dept...
The ideal situation in my mind is one where a player with a military advantage has to think to themselves will taking this next city really benefit me or should I just leave it even though I could take it, instead of always thinking yeah free research and gold. So having a large blob doesn't mean game over. I would like it if military powers could amass a large empire but it would be possible to overextend if they weren't careful, and for it to be possible to play a relatively peaceful game instead of always having to race around to conquer as many cities as possible, you know just for variety. The person with the most cities shouldn't always win.
I am wondering how are the developers looking to control this steamrolling...
Just played a game as Yithril and steamrolled hard. Its a huge problem how easy it is too beat an AI early game and use his cities to conquer the rest of the map. Some ideas:
1) Militia need to upgrade better. Maybe its just how tough leather armor is but they dont do enough.
2) Newly conquered cities should require a garrison of some sort. If you conquer a city and just leave, it should return to the original owner or at the very least have rediculous unrest. Unwilling and unwatched new citzens rarely pay taxes on time or train new soldiers for the cause.
3) If you grow too strong than people should ally against you or work against you. When I played once I had taken out an AI, the rest all tried to recruit me too their wars, allowing me to take the cities of another weakened AI and make friends doing it.
4) Monsters do not threaten you enough, by like turn 30 I usually have destroyed all nearby lairs allowing me to attack other players with my entire army. Lairs should be harder to destroy and should actually threaten nearby cities. Only Death demons, drakes, obsidian golems and umberdoths last more than 40 turns but they dont spawn threatening monsters so you can ignore them.
Strongly agree with points 1 and 2...
Not sure how to implement point 3 though... something like Shogun Total War 's "Realm Divide" event that causes everyone to attack you might not be really that fun for many people...
I think higher rank of city, more stronger militia, militia could get leather 3 level city and done reseached, 5 level city could had plate militia with very good (not had to be best) weapon and had a good resist spell. just a though. It's kind of annyod if monster raze your highest city to ground and unable to resettle that spot again, (reason it's could don't had a money to had army guard city and army had to be somewhere ect?)
1. Distance to capital. As your empire get larger and larger, the higher the unrest is in relation to your capital. Research, Magic, Garrison, and Infrastructure should help with this.
2. Unrest causes revolts in towns
3. The larger your stack, the slower your movement speed.
4. Allow multiple stacks to engage one stack. Take Mount and Blade's reinforcement system(I'll explain below). This will with out a doubt assist with killing off the stack of doom(Faster stacks can reinforce against slower stacks, but not vise versa)
5. Add a very expensive strategic spell that summons demons/dragons to attack the strongest faction. If the demons capture a city, they then begin to spawn darklings, etc.
6. Severely nerf the god-like weapons and spells so that one hero cannot wipe out an army by himself. (At best, a Hero should be as strong as 2-3X the strongest unit currently buildable by the player)
7. My Split-city idea. This should make larger cities progressively harder to defend as they get larger, by dividing the cities into sections based on tile placements, and each section can be captured individually. See: https://forums.elementalgame.com/420896/page/6
8. Factions can recruit Mercenary[men]/slave[fallen] designs from each other. I.e. if the player has access to far better technology, the enemy AI could hire a limited number of some of the designs from the player to gain access to some of these equipment to even the odds a bit. The player can do the same. Mercs should cost significant amount of gold, and Slaves should cost a resource called [slaves], gained by killing non-monsters.
9. Give a large bonus to Back Attacks. This should prevent a few super heavily armored soldiers to take on hordes of incoming weaker soldiers if they manage to "Flank".
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Reinforcement system explanation.
1. ONLY Faster Stacks can reinforce Adjacent stacks(to the defenders) against slower stacks in both offense and defense. This give some usefulness to cavalry, and smaller stacks, as to discourage stacks of doom.
2. Slower stacks cannot reinforce any stacks against a faster stack attack. This not only discourages bigger stacks, but also gives some advantage to a more maneuverable, lightly armored force.
3. Reinforcement works by, calculating ratio between Attacker and Defenders. If say there are 18 [A]ttackers and 9 [D]efenders, then the battle will have a maximum of 9 attackers, and 5 defenders, as well as starting with that many. Either side can call reinforcements during the battle from the pool that didn't make it to the initial fight until they reach the max.[9 attacker, 5 defenders].
This should allow the strategy of overwhelming numbers to actually work, also too would the strategy to funnel enemy stacks into a thinner pathway to minimize the effects of overwhelming numbers.
Ya I have noticed this as well. The new armor values allow you to kill basically every monster in the game with just your sovereign. So I have basically stopped building troops.
Wow - some really good ideas here! I hope Brad and co. are reading...
Brad and CO!!
Agree with Dsraider and Replicator. the unrest/garrison mechanism sounds really nice and would stop steamrolling.
Maybe the developers have something else up their sleeves?
More counters would help prevent steamrolling. For instance, right now there's no real counter to powerful heroes. Specialized units/equipment or spells could help with that, or you could add more subtle counters like lowering maximum combat impact compared to trained units.
"Ritual of Banishment - Target unit is sent back to the capital and immobilized for 10 turns, 50 mana, 5 turn cast time".
"Assassin's dagger - Target character loses 50% of their current health when hit"
I actually don't like the "unrest" idea, or a revolt idea, because they both seem a bit... hard to notice. That was actually something I disliked in Civ games. I felt like a dog with a shock collar + invisible fence on a 1 hour delay.
Besides, an economic hampering may not even make a difference so long as games continue to be determined by champions alone. I mean, I don't really need any "steam" to help with my roll.
I'd prefer something less subtle to stop steamrolling, and there might be lots of lore to help with that. I've heard there are random events, but haven't seen much of them. Maybe the chance for negative/position random events could increase relative to their ranking compared to the AI?
There's also a solution around diplomacy: the AI should try to steamroll YOU! If you are steamrolling an AI, it should do all it can to make another AI, closer to you go to war with you (it's dead anyway so it can promise gold, techs, women, whatever...). Because movement is slow now, it's going to make it difficult for the player to defend a second front.
Same thing for when the AI declares war: now it declares war when it's pissed off with your stack of doom being close to its border. But it basically means that your strongest army is close to their cities when they declare, while they are years away of your own cities. The AI should prepare a bit before declaring war: getting some of their unit closer to your cities, preparing to intercept your stack of doom (did anybody see a global spell cast on your stacks BTW? tactical, tons, but global none).
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