How to handle Mods with a view on unit tiers?

[Jolly Joker]

In his post in the unit diversity thread Tombles said:

I can't go into much detail right now, and obviously this will hopefully change in balancing, but our problem right now is the exact opposite of what you guys are worrying about. Essentially, people often don't bother making T3 units at all since modded T2s are so good that the transition doesn't feel worth it to them. We're currently buffing T3s to try and make them feel more valuable.

I'm not saying T3/4 spam won't be a problem (though I hope it won't) it's very hard to predict what the meta will be once the dust has settled afew months after release. But right now, we're not worrying about it in the same way a guy stuck in the desert doesn't worry about drowning

This has been confirming what I've been thinking all the time, especially after seeing that you can upgrade an existing unit to a (differently) modded unit "on the fly", within 1 turn, because that makes it rather convenient to mod existing lower-tier units.

One way to change this would obviously be to have bigger differences in unit stats from one tier to another, in order to encourage going for them, but that could have the effect that the spending for mods on lower-tier units is saved and the direct route to high-tier units is taken.

That leaves the mods themselves as a means to steer this.

From what I've seen in the streams so far it looks as if it's steered via cosmite cost of mods. Unit upkeep seems to be fairly low right now in general (in cosmite), while mods greatly increase BUILDING, but not upkeep costs. So the current situation is that building a T1 or T2 with a couple of mods will cost an arm and a leg, but there is no upkeep change involved - so a T2 with 3 mods will cost a ton of Cosmite to build, but just 4 Energy upkeep, while a T3 will be cheaper IN COSMITE to build, but will also cost cosmite upkeep.

Balancing this via economy alone may not be easy, but there might be a way to deal with mods in order to discourage a low-tier modded units spam race:

a) Mods might have a tier requirement;
this would limit the usefulness of low tier units insofar that you couldn't have the big mods on them - but I suppose this would also somewhat counter the purpose of mods altogether

b) PERCENTAGE gains for mods;
The disadvantage here is that percentage values are tricky to mix with flat bonusses. The advantage would be that a mod would be less effective on lower-tier units.
Example: An improved battlesuit mod might give +5 HP (favoring low-tiers), but it might also give +10% HP. A weapon mod might give +3 damage, but might also give +20%

c) negative mod effects;
Generally spoken, excessive mod equipment on low-tier units might slow a them down or come with other adverse effects.

d) The number of mod slots might differ for different tiers;
The exact way to do this would probably not be too easy to handle. What immediately comes to mind is # of mods = Tier - but that seems somewhat too restrictive for T1s, especially.
A better solution might be a combination of a) and d):

e) Every Mod might have a "Mod Value" with each tier being limited to a certain overall "Mod value";
This doesn't really have to be all that complicated. I could imagine mod values of, say, 2, 3 and 5 with T1s and T2s having 3 mods allowed of values 8 and 11, while T3s and T4s might have 4 mods allowed with values of 13 and 16, respectively, just to give an example.

I'm quite sure that there should be an element of frustration involved when combining units and mods that way, that low tier units may force you into compromises - that you cannot just equip your mobile T1 Scout with a heavy armor mod, a heavy weapon mod and a far-movement mod to make it basically a T3.
It sounds fair that two heavy mods would slow the unit down, while adding a movement mod to make up for it wasn't actually possible due to "Mod Value" limitation.

I'm also quite sure that there are other ways to tweak things, if necessary, that I don't see at the moment, but I wanted to get a debate going, maybe extract some info out of the devs, because this feature is untried and may prove somewhat stubborn to balance.

 

[HousePet]

I suspect the extra bonus health/damage on each mod isn't helping the situation here.

Based on no information, I'd go with a variation on a), d) and e): Each mod requires a certain amount of power to operate. Each unit tier supplies a limited amount of power.
eg. A T1 unit = 4 power, T2 = 6, T3 = 8, T4 = 10.
A T1 mod costs 1 power, T2 = 2, T3 = 3, T4 = 4.
So a T1 unit could equip three T1 mods, one T2 mod and two T1 mods, two T2 mods, one T3 and one T1 mod, or one T4 mod. (I probably didn't have to spell that all out...)

 

[Jolly Joker]

It might actually be a good idea to make the mods troop-type specific. You know, unit diversity in combat groups is the result of the fact that units which excel in something will invariably suck in something else, so, for example, anti-air mods for tanks would be a bad idea because they would make DEDICATED anti-air units unnecessary.

 

[Leyrann]

It might actually be a good idea to make the mods troop-type specific. You know, unit diversity in combat groups is the result of the fact that units which excel in something will invariably suck in something else, so, for example, anti-air mods for tanks would be a bad idea because they would make DEDICATED anti-air units unnecessary.

Specialization should be key. The reason an army has infantry, snipers, tanks, bombers, fighting planes, drones, etc is because they're all good at something else.

I'm afraid I haven't been around enough to know how the unit classes in Planetfall work, but to use AoW 3 as an example instead, this is arguably how it should be (doesn't mean this is how it was):

An army made up of Infantry should always produce acceptable results, but never roll over the opposing army and always suffer losses.
An army made up of Archers should decimate an army of pikemen, struggle against an army of infantry, and get obliterated by an army of cavalry.
An army made up of Pikemen should decimate an army of cavalry, struggle against an army of infantry, and get obliterated by an army of archers.
An army made up of Cavalry should decimate an army of archers, struggle against an army of infantry, and get obliterated by an army of pikemen.
A mixed army should be able to try and field it's units in locations where they're strong; cavalry will attempt to take care of archers, pikemen will attempt to take care of cavalry, archers will attempt to take care of pikemen, infantry will offensively shore up problematic points, supports will defensively shore up problematic points, irregulars reinforce losses.

Of course, this doesn't need to be quite as simple a rock-paper-scissors as above. It would make sense, for example, for a cavalry army to be objectively more useful than a pikemen army due to their higher mobility and somewhat better stats than infantry. In return, however, the player needs to pay for that with higher production (and perhaps upkeep) costs.

An argument could be made, in fact, that perhaps infantry should be a little weaker than any of the others, but should also be the cheapest to train; they are, after all, the general combat unit, and it makes sense for them to make up the bulk of the army - expendable without any strong weaknesses. Then, you'd throw in some pikemen, archers, cavalry, etc to use where they're strongest. With the limited stack size, however, I don't know how viable of an option something like this should be.

Of course, the same would extend to flying units. They should be fast units that are extremely strong against melee, but are dropped by ranged units quickly.

And I was just about to press post when I realized I also have a part two: Tiers.

With the above, I haven't taken into account unit tiers yet, which are of course a fundamental part of the series. In general, a higher tier means a stronger, but more costly unit, but with the idea that the increased cost is worth the improvement. At the same time, the problem that we're discussing is that we don't want tier 4 units to completely take over.

So, how to achieve that? If higher tier units become stronger, they also need to have more pronounced weaknesses. A tier 2 cavalry might have trouble with a tier 1 pikeman, but a tier 4 cavalry shouldn't stand a chance against a tier 3 pikeman. The one thing to note, of course, is that infantry, being the most general units, wouldn't have any pronounced weaknesses at higher tiers. Therefore, following the above reasoning at least (which is of course but one way to look at it), there shouldn't be any tier 4 infantry units, and perhaps no tier 3 infantry units either (though you can probably get away with those).

 

[Jolly Joker]

Good post with a view on unit diversity - but the thread is about MODS. Is this basically a post agreeing with the idea of making mods "troop-type specific" in order to prevent units to excel in something and be quite good in everything else?

To keep with the AoW 3 example - a Cavalry should never be able to equip a mod that gives Overwhelm and First Strike.

 

[Leyrann]

Good post with a view on unit diversity - but the thread is about MODS. Is this basically a post agreeing with the idea of making mods "troop-type specific" in order to prevent units to excel in something and be quite good in everything else?

To keep with the AoW 3 example - a Cavalry should never be able to equip a mod that gives Overwhelm and First Strike.

Ah yeah, sorry, I got a little carried away.

I completely agree with the idea to limit mods to certain classes; they shouldn't be able to shore up weaknesses, only amplify strengths. So while overwhelm and first strike shouldn't be options, movement speed, a better charge or a straight damage upgrade (which probably doesn't need to be tied to specific classes) can be.

 

[BloodyBattleBrain]

I think instead of messing with moids themselves, it may be more useful to have an abstracted logistics system whereby fitting mods becomes progressively more expensive/takes more time the further away one is from friendly territory.

 

[Technogremlin]

Why not just make mods have an upkeep, so that a T2 that is equivalent to a T3 in strength as the same cost. Or they could do the same thing make the tier of the unit increase based on the mods, and continuing to have upkeep be based on tier.

 

[Fenraellis]

The flat bonus + percent bonus idea has some merit, I believe, as a way to address scaling between tiers. It would also mean that the higher tier units themselves may not need base stat increases quite so much as Tombles post might suggest, as the very mods themselves are scaling them up. Of course, that runs into the issue, or not, of a T3 dedicated to offense likely being very squishy, if the base stats stay at (relatively) lower values.

It's an interesting idea, though, and very promising, that Tombles implied T1 and T2 units were actually interesting enough, to avoid going to T3s, too. Because people do like to have fun, even at the cost of efficiency, and it suggests that the lower tier units are also quite fun to use.

 

[Leyrann]

Of course, that runs into the issue, or not, of a T3 dedicated to offense likely being very squishy, if the base stats stay at (relatively) lower values.

That's not an issue, in fact it would magnify the "strengths and weaknesses" that I talked about earlier.

 

[Fenraellis]

Thus my "or not" part of that sentence.

 

[Dr_K]

I think instead of messing with moids themselves, it may be more useful to have an abstracted logistics system whereby fitting mods becomes progressively more expensive/takes more time the further away one is from friendly territory.

In this scenario, you likely wouldn't want to retro-fit existing units with mods, but you still might favor creating new fully-modded T2 units instead of T3 units depending on where each falls cost-wise.

Why not just make mods have an upkeep, so that a T2 that is equivalent to a T3 in strength as the same cost. Or they could do the same thing make the tier of the unit increase based on the mods, and continuing to have upkeep be based on tier.

Along the same lines would be increasing the cost of mods with the number/tiers of existing mods applied to the unit (and possibly tier of the unit). You would hopefully end up with the situation where a fully-modded T2 is about as powerful than a base or lightly-modded T3, but is costlier by a significant margin.



I haven't quite convinced myself of the feasibility of this yet as it seems like an unstable balancing point, but another idea that might work for certain mods is to increase their bonus by unit tier. This could very easily snowball into exacerbating T3/T4 spam-fest if there are too many, but if limited to a few mods per faction/secret tech/etc., especially in conjunction with more limited mod usage by troop type, it might present a bit of an incentive to bring out more higher tier units instead of sticking with fully-modded T1/2 units. Still seems

 

[Technogremlin]

Along the same lines would be increasing the cost of mods with the number/tiers of existing mods applied to the unit (and possibly tier of the unit). You would hopefully end up with the situation where a fully-modded T2 is about as powerful than a base or lightly-modded T3, but is costlier by a significant margin.

The point of the mod system is to keep low tier units useful throughout the game, so a highly modded tier 2 shouldn't be just worse than a tier 3. That will get us back to the problem of high tier unit spam. I think the solution is to have every unit have a weakness, so that an entire army of them can easily be killed by an entire army of something that the enemy definitely has access to, and make sure that mods cannot negate that weakness. That way the player will have to use a variety of units, so researching new units will always be attractive.

 

[AC1632]

I don't know how successful these more straightforward measures would be. I imagine even if higher tier and lower tier units were perfectly balanced, the average player would still exhibit some bias towards lower tier units, since their earlier successes would be built around tactics, leader skills etc, geared towards the early-game units.

I don't think you need such an aggressive solution to this problem, though. I can think of two alternatives not yet mentioned, as an example of how else you can change player behaviour.

One, ensure each player has mid-game or late-game options that are strong against lower tier units. This doesn't need to be something direct, like a damage bonus vs certain tiers, it might just be an efficient weapon against the sort of weaknesses that lower-tier units tend to have, such as low armour. An 'off the top of my head' example of this might be an ammo mod that does a ton of damage but is weaker than usual against armour.

Two (and this one is a little out there, I admit), take the units with multiple models (typically the lower tier ones), and split their HP up into visible segments. Each missing segment not only kills off one unit model in that unit's squad, it reduces damage by a fraction. For example, a unit with 5 models has 5 HP segments, and each missing segment reduces damage by 20 percent. This would mean lower tier units do more damage at the outset of a battle but quickly become less efficient than higher tier units if they take a bunch of damage.

Now, I'm not saying either of these options are better than the others mentioned, or anything like that. But you can get pretty subtle about how you control the way people play, without necessarily straight-up buffing or nerfing the most obvious factors.

 

[Fluksen]

the average player would still exhibit some bias towards lower tier units

Funny I think it's quite the opposite. Tanky high tier units are usually much more tolerant to small errors in tactical combat. And since every unit takes the same space in your stack I'd assume the average player (me included) will strongly lean towards high tier units (if the economy allows it of course). You can barely ever bring more than 18 units to a fight anyway and higher Tiers will usually just pack more punch/army spot.
If I'm not mistaken one of the big reasons to introduce the mod system was and is meant to give tier 1 units the chance to keep some kind of relevance in lategame. Because the further the game progresses the more valuable a space in your 6er stack becomes. And even if tombles mentioned somewhere that atm in "internal play testing" T2 with mods seem to outperform the T3 and T4s. I really think they'll manage with balancing mod and/or unit costs. Making T1 worse seems counterproductive.

 

[Jolly Joker]

Guys, in AoW 3 the whole issue about usefulness of low-tier units is ENTIRELY dependent on the map settings (and in part on the mods) you play with. For exampl, the current game I play is at turn 89, and excluding heroes and builders I've 125 units on the map, 73 of which are tier 1 or 2, while the 52 higher tiers are for most part ghoul-cursed and Dungeon rewards.
In AoW 3, the longer it takes you to research the higher tiers (game speed setting), the more lower tiers you will have, and those get experience. A champion 3 Ghoul Dwarven Axemen with 93 HP and Defensive Strike 20 is useful in battle, no matter what, especially since a simple T2 Reanimator can reanimate them easily, if they fall (as opposed to a T3 or T4), and you'll have difficulties to find a better Archer than a T1 Elven Hunter produced in a town with a Focus Chamber (with or without the benefit of Elven Race Governance)

Additionally, depending on moral (there are moral-decreasing victory conditions that can further toughen the game; try 5 beacons), even if your economy is flourishing yo may want to get the rich empire bonus and keep a 1000 gold reserve, motivating low-tier builds.

Now, that's AoW 3, not Planetfall. With production carryover, things take a kick in favor of low-tiers, while a diminished importance of upgrades is a kick back to higher ones.The way I understand this, the same mod will be cheaper for low-tier units, which means, if a high-tier is supposed to really kick, it will cost you.

Now, the thing is, therefore, that a stack of modded low-tiers will be beatable only by very expensive high-tiers, and you can produce the former way faster than the latter.

So the lower tiers must not be "too handy", otherwise there isn't much reason to go for the big guns.

 

[Fenraellis]

And even if tombles mentioned somewhere that atm in "internal play testing" T2 with mods seem to outperform the T3 and T4s.

I believe the comment had been implying more that T1s/T2s with mods were cost effective enough, that testers were simply researching unit mod and operations techs instead of bothering to unlock T3+ units. T3 units are still stronger, by base stats(then further modified by mods), but as of the time of that comment, were not stronger enough, or perhaps necessary enough(?), to justify the relative costs to research and produce them.

 

[Calm]

Thought this might be useful:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...keep-low-tier-units-viable-late-game.1121359/