Tier problem, how can it be fixed? Opinions comments.?

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Tony6988

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Mar 6, 2023
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Tier units have been a problem for all RTS, 4X etc game since forever this is a mechanic that has been around forever and has never been improved upon to this day. this is not only for this game.

Problem is, all units need to find a niche. all units have different purposes when you don't have that then we start to see doomstacks TW: Warhammer has the same problem as do many other games."

There is a reason why in real life we have Special Forces and Regular troops. one is a Scalpel other is a sword. this is something that to this day has never been fixed in any strategy game I played. the most balanced I think would be Advance Wars, each unit had a purpose and niche as such you needed a well-balanced force.

It can be fixed but people don't want to do it. the easiest way is for units to have a rarity sticker(Core, Uncommon, Rare, legendary etc) and have a cap on said units. that way for example we don't end up cheesing and abusing the system by having armies composed only of higher-end units.

Now, besides the fact that the races here are not unique at all. one obvious problem I have seen in the last stream is Doomstacking and the usefulness of early tiers units in mid to late game.

I liked Planetfall but did not love it but one thing they did right was the early units could be useful even to late game depending on mods and research. Age of Wonders 4 seems to have ignored that completely.

This problem is not only on AoW4, By this era, I thought many more strategy games would break the mold and come up with a more balanced way to approach unit balance. This genre has not changed since the 90's. how to balance the unit without powercreep? It seems there has not been an innovative studio yet.... AoW4 seems to be going the same old route as most strategy games.

Besides the Racial blandness, this seems to me the most pressing concern of this game.

What ideas would you guys suggest to break this pattern that keeps repeating?
 
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I really don't think you can, and it's an issue that a lot of people have different opinions on. Total War Warhammer is a prime example, and there are many mods including a few complete game overhauls that approach it different ways. One common way that is popular in that game is unit caps, artificially limiting your access to a certain unit usually by letting you only recruit a certain number from each building or the like. Even Battle for Middle Earth 2 had a similar thing with the special units it added, only allowing you to make 1 or 3 depending on which one.
 
It can be fixed but people don't want to do it. the easiest way is for units to have a rarity sticker(Core, Uncommon, Rare, legendary etc) and have a cap on said units. that way for example we don't end up cheesing and abusing the system by having armies composed only of higher-end units.

Caps are also the worst way to do it. Caps don't produce interesting choices, you just always fill the cap with whatever the most effective unit it applies to is.

Planetfall's cosmite economy is a far better solution. A resource which doesn't freely scale with empire size because you can only get as much of it as is on the map and has multiple competing uses (in the case of Cosmite mods and higher tier units).

Even better is focusing the power of high tier units on support abiliites, abilities which scale with the presence of lower tier units, or making them need support because they have things like minimum attack ranges or vulnerable periods due to cooldowns. We know that AoW4 can do this (Tome of the Horde has a skill that buffs all tier 1 units for each tier 1 unit in the stack, you could have a tier 4 unit that scaled with the presence of tier 1s in its stack for instance).
 
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I think there are many solutions that have been applied:

In planetfall, but also many other games resource limitations prevent high tier spams.

Starcraft (among others) has specific niches that stay relevant throughout the game. It is perfectly valid to build zerglings for end game.

In dawn of war, but also games like civ they just don't care that early units become outdated. As long as higher tiers still offer an interesting selection it doesnt have to be a problem.

Many games also offer late game upgrades to keep early units in the game. This is the way that AoW4 seems to be trying. Whether it will be well balanced remains to be seen.
 
I defense of caps, they are kind of realistic. The number of tanks you have is limited by mechanic, fuel, armor, how many people you can support just to do maintenance. Caps are just a way to simplify that.

unfortunately caps are unfun to many people. The best method, in my opinion, is just to have enough endgame unites to fill up the ‘roles’ you want there to be. The problem with that is you generally don’t have a capstone unite. No big cool unite to strive for.
 
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A major factor is cost difference between tiers. If a single stack of tier 4 units would cost about the same as 6-8 stacks of balanced units, dumping everything you own on a single doom stack would not be worth it.
Another important thing that can limit high-tier units, is that as their relative strength goes up, they have to be given higher areas of vulnerability to make them counterable. This would force the player to mix them with other regular units to cover the high tier unit's weaknesses.
 
Problem is, all units need to find a niche. all units have different purposes when you don't have that then we start to see doomstacks TW: Warhammer has the same problem as do many other games."

I'm fine with the niche of Tier 1 units being early game exploration and warfare. In a game with five tiers of unit strength I don't particularly think it's an issue if the very lowest tier of units has difficulty contributing in the end game.

It can be fixed but people don't want to do it. the easiest way is for units to have a rarity sticker(Core, Uncommon, Rare, legendary etc) and have a cap on said units. that way for example we don't end up cheesing and abusing the system by having armies composed only of higher-end units.

We already effectively have a soft cap on high tier units by having an upkeep cost in Imperium, a heavily limited resource that is only gained from wonders and the capital city. I don't think there's any reason to explicitly add a cap on top of that.

Now, besides the fact that the races here are not unique at all. one obvious problem I have seen in the last stream is Doomstacking and the usefulness of early tiers units in mid to late game.

When was there any doomstacking in the stream? The whole thing was in the early game, I don't think any of their opponents even got to T4/T5 units by that point. Are you referring to the Ancient Wonder fight? That was a late-game wonder that they were attacking with a stack mostly comprised of their starting units - of course it didn't go well! The starting units were also mostly unenchanted and I believe didn't even have any transformations, which a player would slowly accumulate over the course of researching their tomes. I don't see any reason to think a lopsided ancient wonder battle is any indication of what late game balance will look like.
 
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The thing about starcraft is, it only works if you try to play well. When you've got a protoss deathball, it's often still a good tactic to summon zealots to harass the enemy's base when their army is trying to check your deathball. That means that the zealot is viable late game, but not as a way to wipe out your opponents main army (unless they've got a particular composition). This will not work if both players do not attack for 60 minutes and all the bases have a lot of cannons defending them.

Age of Wonders has checks and balances against high tier units: they require a long developed city to produce and they have a lot of upkeep. So you can't just build them everywhere and if you have a lot it means all your power is in one spot, or they get outnumbered.
But this doesn't work if you expect low tier units to not die and work in small numbers. It also won't work if all cities have been fully developed half a game ago. At that point you're post end game and limiting the max tier units will only draw things out more and will make people complain they can't use their money.
Some map settings in AoW3 also really broke the balance. If your opponent can make a T4 doomstack before you even meet him, you're playing outside of the scope that's balanced for.
There's also the problem that at some point, you'll spend so much time just moving the reinforcement train, that getting the right amount of low tier units in your army for these tactics becomes unappealing.
I'm hoping that the addition of the draft queue will help a lot with getting more low tier units on the field, as it promotes building units before your city is maxed.
 
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The Disciples franchise had a system where units evolved into new units of the same role as they gained experience. Experience was so valuable that you generally didn't discard your surviving units. That seemed to work!
 
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One thought I've had is that unit classes (like archer, fighter, pikeman, mounted & priest) could be determined more by swappable upgrades, training & equipment. As opposed to a permanent, initial choice. An evolution of Planetfall's unit mods. This would make individual units more unique and in line with their desire to increase race customisation/variety. They could become sort of like mini-heroes.

I think it's good to have some base training and I wouldn't want to make it convoluted or with a lot of micro-management. A priest just turning into a skilled fighter mid-game might be silly. I think turning a priest into a warrior-priest (muscular, heavy armour) or a healer-priest (slimmer, light/cloth armour) could work as different specialisations, though. Pikemen and fighters could share the same base class (with muscular physique) but could re-equip at an armoury, same with archers and rogues (slimmer physique, bows or knives). And then any unit could be mounted.

One reason I want this is that I don't like all units looking the same. For example, I may not want all my archers to be female, or all my priests male. I really like the aesthetic of having archers and a proper looking army vs. just a bunch of big monsters. Perhaps there could be a limit of 1 or 2 elite units per stack. Elite units being a hero or a large monster. But that might be too arbitrary. Either way I think archers and fighters should be upgradeable and trainable to be powerful/useful in the late game.
 
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It seems they use racial transformations and enchantments to improve lower tier units in AOW 4. Tier 3 cultural units can get fairly strong since minor transformations stack along with enchantments.

Lets have a look at a industry Bastion unit with various tier 1 tomes and racial transformations from tier 1 tomes.

First lets give the physical trait mounted x. for +10 HP. Add 3 transformations +1 armor,+10% damage+10% crit+20% damage. Add attack enchantments + 18 magical -8 physical damage.

With only the 3 transformations and the elemental damage the bastions will go from 12 damage to have 22x1,3= 28,6 damage. The upkeep cost will also increase to 20 gold and 10 mana. (do you now see why runesmiths can be good?)

you can also get 2 defensive enchantments in tier 1 tomes as well as +5 HP while enchanted from the industry stream. Also remenber that research cost of tier 1 tomes is roughly half of tier 2 tomes. That is to say that you can have 2 tier 1 tomes for each tier 2 tome.

It is best to wait for the game to be released before we put a final say on if cultural units can be valuable. I sincerly doubt there was any youtube playtesters that tried to stack cost reductions to mana upkeep while researching multiple low tier tomes. They all probably rushed high tier tomes.
 
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Transformations and enchantments - I hope - will reduce the gap between tier I and tier V units to at least a competitive space. I imagine selecting the right tomes will be important here, but I do want the playstyle of spamming lower tier units to be viable into the endgame if I make the right tome choices.

Diverse army composition across tiers makes the combat much more interesting in my mind.

My first playthrough will be trying to make my culture units as viable as possible. It will be something we'll need to explore after release as Knut said above, then we can make some more informed suggestions.
 
I think your premise is wrong, OP. Tiers are only a way to quickly evaluate the power budget of units, in terms of expected impact, required resources and technology timing before they are accessible.

There are indeed 5 tiers so yes it's expected early units won't be able to challenge late game threats, but that doesn't mean they don't have a niche, it's a symptom of possible other problems. T1 and T2 niches are

- early military expansion and resource control : this is important, in most 4X the early phase can be critical (and in RTS too) and this is where these units shine. Time and resource invested in mid tier units may be crippling and robbing you of opportunities.
- Buff multipliers : by sheer numbers they are perfect for army wide buffs, from spells or commanders
- chaff : they offer bodies to draw away dangerous abilities, and counter strike. If enemies are strong on target debuffs etc, they can sponge up all those nasty things you don't want landing on elites
- cheap garrisoning and army reinforcing

Some stuff they will never be good at : high level exploration, survivability and depending on circumstances, heavy damage dealing. (ie vs units with high defense)

Of course if you reach the point where your stacks are fully fielded with T3+ some of the points above don't stand, but we come back to the issues I was alluding to : by the time this happens the game must have transitionned to warfare vs major powers ideally. I've been culprit of playing PF games in "relaxed" and in general any game mode/map that leaves you alone too long is not really what the balance should strive for : those early units should have been put to good use, created and killed in droves already.

Another point that we'll need to see in the game : it's possible the high tier units create a pretty heavy mana/resource tax, and each lower tier unit that only cost a bit of gold could mean more spells/enchants for you.

In the end, if the T3/T4/T5 you may fight in the end are still varied there is no big issue. And think about it : in games where early units may be the most efficient, it can create awful balance issues, consider the ashigaru Yari in Shogun

PS : buffs can enhance units but there is no reason to believe we won't be able to buff high tier units too... it's possible however that for several reasons, buffing culture units will yield more returns.
 
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