Missile units overpowered?

[alpaca]

Well, in my opinion they are. I just played two hours with Rhûn, and both my archers and the rebel horse archers I was up against were by far overpowered in my opinion. Both their attack and the number of arrows in their quiver is far too high for my taste. This goes so far that two basic horse archer units were able to wreck a well-composed army of infantry which, alas, only featured two archer units itself (but outnumbered the foe by almost 4:1)
This means that you are forced to have armies that consist to at least 50% of archer units, simply because of the risk of meeting a few horse archers that you can't hunt down otherwise.
Otherwise, very good work. Especially the artistic content is first class.

[Arakorn]

Well early on we had these super archers that were able to rout the mumaks with like two volleys. I liked their effectiveness agains regular units, I hated it in RTW where only a few guys were killed. Then later on the effectiveness was fixed, but elite archers such as the White Company were too uneffective so I requested a increase in arrow attack on elite archers. Did it get too much? Remember that RK had great archers, RoI, WC and Rangers of the North (not included in CI). Though you played as Rhun, so I don't know why those are so effective..

[MasterOfNone]

We have done the best with unit stats that we could under the circumstances and hope we will get good feedback to help us improve them. Easterling Archers should not be that effective, but Khand Easterlings (horse archers) are extremely effective. Are they overpowered? Probably. This is an open beta and feedback and suggested stats are of course welcomed.

Unit balancing is extremely time consuming and simply not within the capacity of our team. Unfortunately the beta team did not attend to this and we had to resort to me and some complex formulae on an Excel spreadsheet. I spent a solid 3 weeks on this and many more hours since tweaking stats and costs for units. I am aware that the Easterling bodyguard (the Chieftain's Wains) become extremely effective when they gain high XP and armour/weapon upgrades, for example. This will need to be addressed also.

The factors are so many that it is difficult to see how stats can be satisfactorily balanced without either a lot of manpower or a tried and tested automated system.

Advice is welcomed.

[Fondor_Yards]

If you don't like easterling foot archers, just wait till you fight Gondor's. They are monsters.

Being able to recruit Variag noble HA with a crazy 23 missile attack was the only think keeping my Rhun campain going. Horse archers just destory anything and everything they fight. I had an army of 6 different types with 3 meele cav and 2 general hold off all of gondor for quite a while before retraining.

[alpaca]

If you don't like easterling foot archers, just wait till you fight Gondor's. They are monsters.

Being able to recruit Variag noble HA with a crazy 23 missile attack was the only think keeping my Rhun campain going. Horse archers just destory anything and everything they fight. I had an army of 6 different types with 3 meele cav and 2 general hold off all of gondor for quite a while before retraining.

Well do you think that this is good, or bad?

Of course, archers in Middle-Earth were overpowered (especially the elves), since Tolkien apparently liked them a lot
But in my opinion it's bad for the gameplay. Archers shouldn't win any fight all alone (neither should HA, that already was a problem in RTW vanilla).

By the way, I don't feel the Wains are too strong, because they are a) and elite unit and b) die instantly if caught in a melee and c) have far less shots than normal HA in one volley.

To wrap it up, I'd decrease both ammo and attack strength of the missile units, but that's just my personal feelings. If you feel they are fine, I'm completely comfortable with that, although I'll of course mod it a bit.

[Amroth]

After starting a Haradrian campaign, I agree that archers seem generally overpowered. If you do make some modifications to them, please make the files available to us so we can check them out.

[MasterOfNone]

Alpaca,

Glad you like it enough to mod

If you use autoresolve for Easterling generals who have only their XP'd bodyguard, you will see what I mean about overpowered. This is again another factor of unit balancing: autoresolve seems to produce results sometimes extremely at variance with battlemap battles even run on AI. I am of the opinion that the autoresolve is bugged (or at least very imbalanced) in some way, at least under certain circumstances, as I have gone into battles and it has been impossible to duplicate anywhere near the result of the autoresolve.

I will look into ammo & attk

Please do post any general stats you think relfect a greater balance. Thx.

[alpaca]

Well the problem with auto-resolve is in my opinion threefold:
1. It takes the "on-paper" attack and defence values, i.e. it doesn't distinguish armor vs defensive skill, base attack vs experience, etc. Further, elite units that have a relatively small unit size don't fare too well against larger, but weaker units
2. It doesn't work well with units like chariots where multiple soldiers die when one entity is killed, this is probably the main problem with the war wains
3. It distributes casualties in an unrealistic way, i.e. most of the units take considerable damage, elite units as much as peasants

So I personally decided to completely ignore auto-resolve in any balancing decision. You probably can't have both a great battle balance and a good auto-resolve balance in R:TW

Here's an experimental edu, with considerably lower attack and a lot less ammo. This means that you can often sit out HA and the like, although under great casualties. It's not properly balanced, because I got some work to do for the university now, but check it out if you like

[Boosh]

I wonder, when elves are introduced, what will their skills in archery be reduced to? From the books and movie I have seen and also determined for myself that Elven archers are very likely to hit their targets 99% of the time, 100% at close range. Will Elven archers be more accurate in "Fourth Age: TW?"

[alpaca]

You could give them insane attack but low unit size and ammo. I don't think you can actually do something about the accuracy.

How did you determine that though, do you know any elves by chance? :tooth:

[Gelgoog]

well if your going to do a super powered unit especially like elves with a super high arrow damage and pretty high melee the only real thing you can do is make their build time extremely high. like 6 turns ( since you know, like the spartans , they're were never that many at any one time). this way they are almost prohibitively expensive to build in money and time. i would imagine that would balance them out, and pretty much restrict their usage.

[Boosh]

How did you determine that though, do you know any elves by chance? :tooth:

*Boosh hides his pointy ears*

[Hanny]

Archery as a battle winner?, well probaly not in IRL of ME life either, missiles rarely kill, they debilitate and allow you to be killed easier later on.

How to model it in ME, if you look at the attack/defence you get a % of a hit, then you have a % chance to turn that hit into a kill, combine the two to get a %chance of a hit and kill, rather than redo the firts part, ie to hit in the first place, tinker with the kill % to reduce the to hit and kill %. Also avoids having unreslsitc running out of ammo during battles, something rarely heard of in reality, along with the massive missile expenditure, 300K or arrows produced and taken for use in a 3 month period in the Crecy campaign.

Best thing is to do an excell spreadsheet to see the likly effects of any changes first and get all archers in a pecking order of lethality.

ie individual archer attack value compared to average defense value of all other factions, yields & chance of a hit per factions archer unit, next, the % chance of weapon causing a kill, combine the two to get a to hit and kill % chance, addjust up/down the to kill % to get the balance you want of archerys lethality on the field.


make the cost of archers comenserate with their effect, since thye sprreadsheet lists all units % chance of hitting and killing if you bother to create one, you can find a cost per soldier very easily, especialy if its based on the sodiers chance of killing and staying alive in the process. Animation speed also plays a part, try using a slower animation, this means less arrows being fired by slower units, and needs to be a part of any cost per unit because of the speed of animation determines the speed of attacks.

[alpaca]

The problem with that would be that we can't affect nor know the formula for hit-calculation, so the only thing we can do is change the attack values...
And it's not unrealistic to run out of arrows during a fight, because you can't usually access the baggage train in a battle.
Plus it offers a nice tactical option for the game which is to just wait out the missile attacks in a shield wall to minimize casualties.

[MasterOfNone]

Lethality stats do not seem to do anything for missiles, arrows at least, as far as I have observed. I have set it between 1 and 10 and the kills do not seem to change. Darth, btw, says that acrhers should be kept at 1 lethality (vanilla) if I remember rightly.

[Hanny]

Lethality stats do not seem to do anything for missiles, arrows at least, as far as I have observed. I have set it between 1 and 10 and the kills do not seem to change. Darth, btw, says that acrhers should be kept at 1 lethality (vanilla) if I remember rightly.

% to kill for missile archery is a uniform value, (25 iirc) the weapon chance to kill for missile thrown can be changed the same as close combat kill %, but missile/archery has to be set at a uniform rate and effects globally all missile archery. Kill of 1 to 10 is a 1% to 10% chance of lethality after scoring a hit in the first place, so you would be lucky to spot any difference by using that range, as a ru;le of thumb i prefer a 30% chance of lethality from miisle fire archery, which from my observations, is about 15% at long range, using the vanila settings for lethality which while on the high side are not overpowering effective, and besides personaly i hike up the defense values to make combat lasty longer to even out random effects for combat.

[Hanny]

Just looked at what darth uses, he uses 15 as the default archery value, i gather thats 15% at long range expected kills, which is about what recall being the case when useing his mod, roughly double that at close range.

[Hanny]

The problem with that would be that we can't affect nor know the formula for hit-calculation, so the only thing we can do is change the attack values....

Its not a problem, every units chance of hitting is the product of its attack v defense stats, for missile archery/thrown the calcs are different to close combat stood, which is different from close combat charged into contact. All are known values derived from the unit stats, so every concievable combat can be aduced as a mathamatical expresion.

And it's not unrealistic to run out of arrows during a fight, because you can't usually access the baggage train in a battle..

historicaly/realsiticly speaking your just plain wrong, would you like examples of munition supply in its historical context?.

Plus it offers a nice tactical option for the game which is to just wait out the missile attacks in a shield wall to minimize casualties..

Great for the player, but the ai is the one being penalised by munition expenditure limits, more so if you lock them into certain fixed cpurses of actions as per the darth formation flags.

[Fondor_Yards]

historicaly/realsiticly speaking your just plain wrong, would you like examples of munition supply in its historical context?.

Well foot archer's couldn't access the baggage train. Horse archers could most of the time. But horse archers already have as much ammo as they need, any more and they would be even more unbalanced.

[Hanny]

Well foot archer's couldn't access the baggage train. Horse archers could most of the time. But horse archers already have as much ammo as they need, any more and they would be even more unbalanced.

Which foot archer?, 100YW english L-Bow had 2 quivers with 24 arrows in each, and were fed from the baggage train with resupply, crecy iirc saw the french kill those baggage handlers and were in turn executed for what was considered a war crime back then, and of course they could reuse arrows fired at them, Towton for instance saw the use of a minium of 30,000 arrows acording to the density of found bodkin heads.

History aside, the ai does not understand ammo supply or fatigue, so giving it less ammo simply means they do not act as intended, or sensible.

Hanny please use the 'EDIT'-button! This is now the second time you've posted 3 posts in a row!

Doh, sorry its a bad habit i have!!.

Hanny,

I don't have Darth's files accessible at present but I believe you are looking at the speed stat and not the lethality (though they are obviously connected); the lethality is the last stat (despite what the vanilla file header says). I believe all the archers are set to 1 in Darth's files.

I do not believe that to be the case.


But yes, if it is that your correct, the only parameter you can change is the odds for a hit, perhaps you could approch from another angle, one of unit size being dependednt of city size producing the unit, so archers could come in 2 sizes, depending on the city size, the larger unit replacing the smaller when the city grows, that way you could halve the unit size at present, and introduce double sized ones from citys of the appriprate size during the game. After watching the ai unit builds, ie if the ai does not build many archer during the game, the problem is rather moot, from a limited observation i dont see RK building too many l-bow units for instance.

Exactly, the 25 in the stat line is the cycle time between two attack animations, the lethality (usually 1) is the vrey last figure of that line. And, by the way, lethality only means the chance to inflict actual damage when it´s been determined the attack was sucessful (i.e. the defense has been breached and the armour pierced by the attack). The 1 means that if this condition is met, the chance for the attacked unit to lose one HP is 1 (i.e. a sucessful attack will always cost its target one HP). It´s got nothing to do at all with the chance of performing a sucessful attack.

Exactly not. Darth uniformly uses 15 as the deafault missle last line entry, with El being about the only exception at .5.

type barb peltast celt
dictionary barb_peltast_celt_2 ; Skirmisher Warband
category infantry
class missile
voice_type Light_1
soldier barb_peltast_celt, 20, 0, 0.3
mount_effect elephant +15, chariot +15
attributes sea_faring, hide_improved_forest, hide_long_grass, very_hardy, can_sap, can_swim, warcry
formation 1.6, 2, 3.2, 4, 3, square, shield_wall
stat_health 1, 0
stat_pri 9, 4, javelin, 55, 9, thrown, archery, piercing, spear, 0 ,15
stat_pri_attr thrown, ap


type numidian javelinmen
stat_pri 8, 2, javelin, 55, 9, thrown, archery, piercing, spear, 0 ,15
stat_pri_attr thrown, ap


type carthaginian elephant forest1

attributes sea_faring, frighten_foot, frighten_mounted, power_charge, can_swim
formation 7, 9, 13,13, 1, square
stat_health 1, 15
stat_pri 0, 0, no, 0, 0, no, no, no, none, 0 ,1
stat_pri_attr no
stat_sec 3, 20, no, 0, 0, melee, other, blunt, none, 0 ,0.5
stat_sec_attr area, ap, launching, spear, spear_bonus_12, bp

type carthaginian peltast

stat_pri 8, 4, javelin, 55, 9, thrown, archery, piercing, spear, 0 ,15
stat_pri_attr thrown, ap
stat_sec 5, 2, no, 0, 0, melee, simple, piercing,



As you see, darth uses 0 for all as abase for animations, relying on base animation speed set in the models files for attack animation of units.