My main concern is that Cosmite will fail in its role of "t4 limiter" since, as of now at least, it has a pretty wide presence in the economy like every single mod requiring Cosmite. If it was required for t4 and highest tier mods only then its income could be balanced to provide such small amounts that sustained t4 production is simply impossible but if there's enough of it to be used for all the mods and multiple tiers of units (and maybe other things) then the door is opened for players to stockpile it and ignore other Cosmite-priced stuff in favor of more t4s. Afaik the idea here is that stockpiling Cosmite and not using it for mods puts you at a disadvantage early on meaning you'll lose if you wait for the late(r) game but I'm not confident such balancing will work out, especially in single player. Players tend to find a way to game the game.
I have a very strong feeling this is one of the main things they'll have a beta for.
I'm hoping for a mid game tech that makes it so that tier 1 units only takes 1/2 spot in a stack. A late game tech could do the same for tier 2. This would help both the clumsiness of maneuvering/starting battles with large numbers of low tier units and help them stay relevant in late game.
I think it is a good idea, and would make for an interesting tradeoff if it comes down to researching larger or better armies.
Really? I found potential candidate.
Thanks for that.
However,
look at the defence value. Only 2.shields. And look at the health. Not very high. Remember how quickly that Abyssian died.
Lastly, we don;t know what effect those mods are having.
Basically,
@Zaskow, you *may* be right, an it is good to raise these concerns, but I think you're being premature here, given everything else we've seen about the game design,.
If anything t4 spam was much worse in the older 8 stack games and AoW3 was the first in the series to truly address the problem.
Yes it was far worse, as I keep telling people.
The 6 unit stack issue boils down to the player needing to click at least 3 times as much to bring an effective counter to bear against a stack of t4 units, which tend to be more mobile than the units that should counter them.
Manticores versus Pikes is a classic example.
In theory the same cost in Pikes will more than handle Manticores, infact I ran some autocombat tests a while ago (to be fair, a long while ago, and before manticores got specialised like now.)
In reality, it's more cost efficient to run a stack of Manticores and just avoid the, relatively speaking, rather static counter.
Now arguably that's the entire point of a flying unit, to be able to make surgical strikes and run rings around land bound units, but it kind of led to the situation where once you had manticores, you had no real choice but to keep building them.
Add in bonuses which made the cost of them irrelevant for the AI, and you get more Manticores than you "should."
Having a larger stack size limit was one solution (of many) proposed to deal with this. Assuming the costs stayed the same, you'd now be able to move 36 Pikes as easily as 6 manticores (iirc, 6 manticores cost the same as 36 Pikes)
Another was requiring a specific MCU (e.g. a dungeon, or monsters den) for Manticores, which would make specific cities much more militarily (as opposed to simply economically) important. This would in effect be quite similar to how aow1 handled things, whereby t4 units could come from t4 cities only, and those were rare.
Another was variable unit sizes, the idea being that you'd never be able to have more than 6 super large units in a stack, e.g. Manticores, but that the same stack could hold x Pikes or y Cavalry etc. This last I'm fond off because it could open the door for truly crazy large monsters. Let's say a Manticore +Rider is size 4. And the desired max Manticore number is 6. That gives us a stack size limit of 24. Assume an Infantry unit is size 1.
That means 24 Pikes or 6 Manticores, as opposed to right now the choice realistically being 6 Pikes or 6 manticores.
For extra fun, assume a Goblin/Hafling/Frostling is 0.8 (so you get more of them) and an Orc is size 1.2 (so you have fewer of them) and you start to get very different army compositions.
Now add in a size 24 Unit... :O
Anyway, many ways to skin a cat. Just remember that the idea behind these suggestions was to make t4 units less of an obvious choice.
1) We've been getting a lot of feedback from internal testers that unit production is far too slow. It's alctually about the same as AoW3, but there are lots more things to build in colonies now, so build time feels more precious. As a test we recently halved the production cost of all units, which is what you're seeing in the screenshot Zaskow posted. Those values are defintely not final, I expect that they're too low right now
This may be sacrilege, but have you guys ever toyed with the idea of multiple production queues? Gladius handled this remarkably well imho. The more barracks you built the faster units from there were produced. Tradeoff was that buildings required upkeep, and each tile on the strategic map having limited building slots.
3) With Cosmite, to confirm what BBB said:
i) All unit mods costs some cosmite
ii) All T3 and T4 unit cost some cosmite
iii) T3 and T4 units also have cosmite upkeep
This means that producing a lot of T3 and T4 units will strangle your cosmite income, meaning you can only build unupgraded T1 and T2 units. The idea is that players find a balance between high tech units and high tech mods. Once again, this is subject to balance, but cosmite is NOT common, you only have a few nodes on the world map and limited upgardes to build in colonies to produce it yourself. Note that the cosmite producing upgrade is a sector upgarde (it goes into a research sector right now I think, and is limited to one per colony), which means it's not very easy to just spam colonies everywhere to produce extra cosmite.
Good to know!
Also, I think alot of the issues regarding people feeling t4 "spam" are, like
@Jean-Luc said, economical at the root, by which I mean slightly over abundant resources and too many production centres, both of which seem to have been resolved.
4) As we see how testing goes, I'm not against putting in some kind of cap on units counts. Perhaps a limit on the number of T4s, or perhaps on total unit count (i.e. like how supply works in star craft) but I'm hoping that energy and cosmite upkeep will mean that's not needed.
I'd strongly favour soft caps, or other ways to strategically (i.e. within the game's framework) nudge the player here.
The Shrine of smiting is a good example imho.
5) Hopefully, most units have flaws that encourage mixed armies. Right now, the biggest flaw of most T3 and T4 units is that they have slow move speed. An Army of T1/T2 units moves 33% faster on the world map than one which contains a tank. Once again though, as JJ says, we'll need a lot of testing to get this right. PF is far more complex than AoW3, units have more abilities and moving parts, and balance is going to be pretty hard to achieve!
Well, the good thing is you have a bigger team and budget now, and more recent experience. The first 2 community tournaments resulted in some good quality feedback and adjustments, so you guys have past form here. AoW3 is actually quite well balanced in it's current, unmodded state imho. Yes there are "exploits," but the definition over what is an exploit and what is a fun trick will never end, and alot depends on the playing context.
What's imba in pbem duels is vastly different to XL AI maps and vastly different to live 4 player games.
I do think you guys would benefit HUGELY from having a tactical battles only mode, which could be a quick and easy to use tool to run various battles for yourself, to get a sense of what is good and not.
PLUS it'd make an awesome game mode in it's own right, adding 'legs' to the game.
