You mean like protoss zealots?
I'm hoping they'll be in an expansion. Could be amazing.
Why the HP gap between low and high tier units are so little?
- Thread starter Tomipapa
- Start date
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
You mean like protoss zealots?
I'm hoping they'll be in an expansion. Could be amazing.
I don't find it odd, because otherwise what would the difference between shields and armour be?
From a physics perspective, a skin tight forcefield is an immovable cage without a lot of careful design. Making it a bubble around you just hampers your movement, as you can't get near anything without effectively walking into it. So having shields deflecting incoming ranged projectiles makes a lot of sense.
I wouldn't rule out psionic melee attacks. The combat is more ranged focused in this one, so getting into melee will be rarer and therefore harder. It may not be affected by armour or shields, but there is still psionic resistance and it could just have lower base damage than other attacks to balance it.
I feel we might be talking past one another.
"Metal Shields strapped to the arm" will most likely count as armor. I see no reason it would help against Psionic attacks inherently.
"Shields the unit Stat" will be something like Star Trek bubble shields. Or dune shields. Both of wich can be countered by getting really close. "Getting under their shields".
"Energy shields strapped to the arm" like the Amazon T2 Cavarly: basically that is the "Exposed Flank" variant of Shields. Now the shield might still offer a seperate bonus to Melee combat. Something like old AoW "Melee Block". Maybe even a plain +2 Melee Armor as it is used for blocking Melee attacks.
That is one of the more tricky details that comes later in balancing.
Aside from the balance it might poorly interact with other mechanics. Like a melee block chance or armor bonus from energy/metal shields strapped to the arm. It could raise a ton of questions or require a ton of special case handling.
I've always simply thought of the Goa'uld shields from Stargate, which worked by countering attacks made above a certain velocity(and were bypassed with relatively slower-projectile throwing knives on at least one occasion).
As for Psionic melee attackers, the first thing that comes to mind is that monstrosity from the Psynumbra.
(Yes, it could simply deal Kinetic melee damage, though.)
Aside from that, consider the following Void Blades provided by the VoidTech Secret Tech, and which I personally imagine are Kinetic damage which bypasses Armor(and being melee, also bypasses Shields). I mean, it's called VoidTech, so really:
(They even look somewhat like the weapons of the Zealot units BBB mentioned.)
As for Psionic melee attackers, the first thing that comes to mind is that monstrosity from the Psynumbra.
(Yes, it could simply deal Kinetic melee damage, though.)
Aside from that, consider the following Void Blades provided by the VoidTech Secret Tech, and which I personally imagine are Kinetic damage which bypasses Armor(and being melee, also bypasses Shields). I mean, it's called VoidTech, so really:
(They even look somewhat like the weapons of the Zealot units BBB mentioned.)
The shown damage type for those Void Blades is Kinetic. Like Firearms.Aside from that, consider the following Void Blades provided by the VoidTech Secret Tech, and which I personally imagine are Kinetic damage which bypasses Armor(and being melee, also bypasses Shields). I mean, it's called VoidTech, so really:
(They even look somewhat like the weapons of the Zealot units BBB mentioned.)
Of coruse that could have jsut been a early itteration.
If it bypasses all mater and energy, it would do 0 damage. Kind of an issue with any weapon System
As long as it affects the target, someone will invent a defense against it. It might not be a very effective or cheap one, but it can be done.
I have a idea for a mod that could allow Psychic Melee Weapons in a somewhat balanced fashion:
Anti-Psionic Armor: Unit gains Psi Resistance equal to it's Armor value
That way the shield bypass in Melee would not mater so much, as strong melee units (more armor then shields) could just turn their primary defense into effective Psionic Resistance. Might be a huge balance issue for Ranged Psionic Units however (as they do still have to contend with shields).
Okay, a slight improovement to hopefully solve the whole "overly resistant" issue:
Anti-Psionic Armor: Unit gains Psi Resistance equal to it's Armor value, but looses shields equal to armor value
Having something like "ranged weakness" would be ideal. But lacking that, just negating shields would be a good tradeoff. It creates a weakness to ranged attacks and anything else negating armor.
To the first point, Kinetic is analogous to "Physical" damage, and has nothing to do with firearms. Remember that Weapon Groups and Damage channels are not straight lines of type. While most of them are fairly straight, Laser-type weapons deal Thermal damage, not 'Laser' damage. Heck, the Explosive Weapon Group of the Dvar(and potentially several other weapons, such as the Gunship's and Walker's missiles which are explosive in effect and deal Kinetic damage) deals damage primarily on the Kinetic damage channel. Or as another example, Promethean units and operations deal Thermal damage, but have nothing to do with the Laser damage channel.The shown damage type for those Void Blades is Kinetic. Like Firearms.
Of coruse that could have jsut been a early itteration.
If it bypasses all mater and energy, it would do 0 damage. Kind of an issue with any weapon System
As long as it affects the target, someone will invent a defense against it. It might not be a very effective or cheap one, but it can be done.
Most melee attacks we've seen so far have dealt Kinetic damage, with some dealing other types, such as Thermal and Biochemical. Frenzied, Ravenous, Hopperhounds, and such units, and Void Blades for a Hero all deal Kinetic with their direct melee attacks.
To your second point, I never said anything about 'bypass[ing] all matter and energy," though, and was merely thinking of the classic fantasy concept of a 'phase blade'. Which ignores armor(typically inorganic armor or nonliving matter, specifically, but still) on a target, but otherwise deals direct impact (Physical/Kinetic) damage to the target.
Also, consider this paraphrased inversion of your statement on defenses:
"As long as a form of protection affects a target, someone will invent a means to overcome it. It might not be a very effective or cheap one, but it can be done."
Anyway, as to the main point being discussed, I don't particularly believe that Psionic(or armor-bypassing such as if VoidTech does so) melee to be inherently a distinct concern. First, they will need to reach the target safely through potential overwatch, which may be quite painful. Perhaps in order to more safely reach their target, and for a melee unit in general, they need to invest in mobility unit mods, thus sacrificing potential offensive mods compared to ranged units which might more safely select a full suite of offensive mods.
Then one needs to consider that it's largely a numbers-tuning matter. From what we've seen, Psionic attacks already deal less damage relative to unit tier than non-Psionic attacks. Heck, that 11 for Void Blades is also lower even than a T2 Amazon Lancer. Any Psionic damage unit could also easily be designed as a relatively soft target. Heck, of the Psionic damage units we've seen, were two T2 units(a Hidden Sniper and a Transcendent Support) each with 1 Armor, no Shields, and a T3 unit(a Tormented... something) with 2 Armor and 2 Shields(thus only 2 Armor against Melee or shield-ignoring-modded Laser weapons).
None of them even had any Resistance to anything, aside from Stagger Resistance on the Tormented.
If a particular player has reliable means to reduce enemy Armor ratings(such as with Battle Vomit's armor shred), then it's entirely possible that Psionic attacks might simply be a suboptimal choice for their given strategy anyway. Especially if the enemy is also using a primarily Mechanical army on top of that, at which point attacks on the Psionic damage channel will simply deal at least 19% less damage that their other attacks would, even aside from their lower base damage values. Lower base values which, on a side note, means they have slightly reduced value from the percentage damage bonus portion of offensive unit mods.
I am pretty sure this sentence from Hitchikers Guide applies:
“The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a trillion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it.”
It comes up surprisingly often in RL engineering.
Those are limits all Melee weapons face.
What is the Limit the Psionic Melee Weapons would face for ignoring armor, something they would have on every other Melee atack?
Melee Damage that ignores Armor > Melee Damage that does not ignore armor
I though Fenraellis covered the possible reasons that Psi Melee could be sub optimal pretty well?
They are all reasons why Melee is suboptimal.
It would not change that Melee that skips Armor&Sields > Melee that skips Shields.
It's balanced in the same way psi damage is balanced, by having lower damage than a similar non-psi attack, with a less aggressive unit build.
All these concerns only make sense if psi melee is abundant. If it's only on a few units and a rare hero item it's fine as a splashy ability if the damage is low.
And that just sounds like a balancing nightmare to happen.
Now you need to balance attacks not only to be balanced on their damage channel, you also need to include a reduction if they are melee (and thus also skip shields).
"Simplicity is the highest for of Sophistication".
Not that much of a nightmare. The devs will have to know what reasonable damage for a melee attack is at various tiers and they also know how much less damage a psi attack has to do compared to a ranged attack with a different damage channel, because there are a large number of units that have either melee attacks or psi damage attacks. So why is reducing the average melee attack damage by the factor they use to reduce psi attacks not going to be balanced or close to balanced?
Is it? Maybe it's just me, but i love when some big monster(like a dragon) beat the crap out of a bunch of t1. That's why they called T3-4 after all. Sure, make low tier units more usefull, but keep a clear power gap between the tiers, otherwise the tier system is just a meaningless title. As you said there is a loot of room between closer gap and useless high tiers, but currently im a bit sceptical for a couple of reasons:
1.New armor system. It favours low damage units(aka lower tiers) and it feels "less powerful". Having +5 armor in AoW 3 often meant that lower tier units did only minimal damage to you(like 1-2), while in planetfall +5 armor have smaller impact, especially against low/mid tier units. Generally speaking armor is only usefull against higher damage units.
2.Cosmite. High tier units need this special resource. It's tempting to call this planetfall's "mana" but according to the dev journals it's much rarer and harder to get. Rightly balanced this means less doomstacks which is a good thing. On the other hand if cosmite turns out too hard to get then you might forget those high tiers at all, especially since unit mods needs cosmite to produce.
3. Those high tiers need to be researched first(well every "non basic" unit). This is the most important change regarding higher tiers.
So if i wait 132 turn for that tank, spend my precious cosmite on it, then yes, i want to see it wreak havoc among those low tier marines or others which are available from turn one.
Btw the Phoenix Walker base armor is 4 not 8. On that screen the walker is heavily modified. In the promethean dev journal you can see a screenshoot from the basic version
A 30 damage attack is +50% stronger then a 20 damage attack. If both take the same amount of AP, wich one would be better?
So wich unit would be better, the T1 with 20 damage or the T3 with 30 damage + a rocket launcher?
The devs already explained why substractive armor was a problem. It actually limited the range of damage values and abilities they could field, because it had to be balanced agaisnt the armor values+HP. Rather then just HP.
You also underestimate just how much effect that +5 Armor will have.
Armor 0: 100% Damage
Armor 5: 59.049% Damage
Apparently Mana/Spellcasting has been split into 3 parts:
Strategic Operations/Policies - Global Spells
Tactical Operations - Tactical Spess
Cosmite - permanent Unit resource
Making them 3 resoruces allows the devs to balance each income seperately. They can now give you plenty of Cosmite without accidentally giving you abundant useage of Tactical and Strategic Operations.
And this is not the first time. AoW 3 already split Knowledge gain from Mana income to make those easier to balance.
Didn't AoW 2 had units gated behind Population Levels (because you could not upgrade the Production building without the right counts?)
Also AoW 3 required you to reserach your class units already. So it is not a totally new thing for the Devs to balance.
Yet ironically those hp values are pretty same for most unit. All the units they introduces to us have one of these: 35hp, 40, 45, 50, 55. With around 20+ showed units this is not a great variety.
If a unit doing 8 damage which system is more favourable to it:
5 armor means 5 less damage so 8-5= 3 damage
5 armor means around 41% reduction so 8-3,28= 4,72 rounded up to 5.
If it's doing 20 damage:
20-5=15
20-8,2=11,8 rounded up to 12.
Armor is "less usefull" against low damage units because you barely notice the difference. Of courser against 20-30 or more it will be much more noticable.It's the same 41 percent in both case but reducing that 8 with 41% is not on the same level as reducing 20 or 30. While the old system was the opposite. 5 or even 8-10 armor wasnt that big when something did 30 damage against you, but against lower tiers like archers? You immediately noticed the differences when those 1 damage notifications popped up. And that was my whole point. This system favours lower damage units. So devs wanted to make low tiers more usefull? They did it already with changing the damage calculation.
Yes class units, but not racial units. In Planetfall you have to research even your racial units. You could field T3(racial) without research, now you cant even train T2. That's a big difference is you ask me, especially since there are much more things to research than in the previous games.
.png){kind=avatar}
Even though they split them out like that, all operations apparently will be costing Energy for every use it seemed. It will be interesting to see how those costs end up balancing out since previously, gold did not really need to be saved for other uses besides large purchases.
In regards to the damage and durability discussion, I'll just direct towards my first post in this thread: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...er-units-are-so-little.1121713/#post-24703358
Also, @Tomipapa , you can still produce at least two T2 units (along with 2 or 3 T1 units, counting the Secret Tech as one) without research. For the Vanguard, thats:
T1: OWL, Trooper
(*T1 Promethean Plasmoid might be able to be produced, but also may be a combat summon. Either way, it wasn't in the live stream in any apparent way, including the tech tree)
T2: PUG (requires Specialist Training Center), Assault Bike (requires Military Skirmisher Barracks)
The T2s essentially require what might be considered a Shrine and a Barracks(except both cost the same), based on apparent building costs, with both T1 units being available without building anything. Well, that's a guess as to the purpose of the structures, of course, as in the live stream, even after the research cheat, he couldn't build any extra units until after building those structures. Further Research, as known, is required for the Engineer and Gunship, which presumably are a Specialist and Skirmisher, respectively.
The T3 units were unlocked by building the Elite Military Facility. This also unlocked the T4 unit, which although it might technically require both of the other two buildings as well, the video doesn't show either way. Heck, the T3 units might be subdivided by Skirmisher/Specialist designations as well(I doubt it, or else the Military Engineering Guild bonuses would logically stack, although stacking the Armor bonus would go a ways to alleviating your concern about T3+ durability), but again the Elite building was built after, so at this time we don't know. I do doubt the +3 Armor, and especially the reduced production cost, stack, though, and rather presume that Elites are simply classified as Elites only.
Anyway, the main benefit of T3 and T4 units will be a combination of higher defensive stats increasing force concentration capability, yes, but mostly due to their likely more powerful and exotic special traits and abilities.
Also, @Tomipapa , you can still produce at least two T2 units (along with 2 or 3 T1 units, counting the Secret Tech as one) without research. For the Vanguard, thats:
T1: OWL, Trooper
(*T1 Promethean Plasmoid might be able to be produced, but also may be a combat summon. Either way, it wasn't in the live stream in any apparent way, including the tech tree)
T2: PUG (requires Specialist Training Center), Assault Bike (requires Military Skirmisher Barracks)
The T2s essentially require what might be considered a Shrine and a Barracks(except both cost the same), based on apparent building costs, with both T1 units being available without building anything. Well, that's a guess as to the purpose of the structures, of course, as in the live stream, even after the research cheat, he couldn't build any extra units until after building those structures. Further Research, as known, is required for the Engineer and Gunship, which presumably are a Specialist and Skirmisher, respectively.
The T3 units were unlocked by building the Elite Military Facility. This also unlocked the T4 unit, which although it might technically require both of the other two buildings as well, the video doesn't show either way. Heck, the T3 units might be subdivided by Skirmisher/Specialist designations as well(I doubt it, or else the Military Engineering Guild bonuses would logically stack, although stacking the Armor bonus would go a ways to alleviating your concern about T3+ durability), but again the Elite building was built after, so at this time we don't know. I do doubt the +3 Armor, and especially the reduced production cost, stack, though, and rather presume that Elites are simply classified as Elites only.
Anyway, the main benefit of T3 and T4 units will be a combination of higher defensive stats increasing force concentration capability, yes, but mostly due to their likely more powerful and exotic special traits and abilities.
Last edited:
Not doubt you're aware that secret tech (specialisation + class) is much less central than race this time around, so it makes a certain sense to have the higher tier racial units unlocked via research.
They could have unlocked it through requiring specific landmarks (encourages map control but you might be out of luck and possibly lose a game because of he unreliable access) or buildings (like in previous games, although presumably more interlinked, e.g. requiring civic district 2 plus military district 3 to unlock unit x) or simply city size.
Or even a required racial level of happiness, or a required reputation.
They chose research!
I'm quietly hopeful expansion races will explore the concept of assymetrical racial unlocks in more depth.
Case A has a higher absolute reduction. If a high absolute reduction on that scale is intended, the unit will be given appropirate defenses in the new System.
You jsut prooved that the old System lacks granularity and is highly volatile. A 5 armor could mean anything from 100% damge reduction to 25% damage reduction, depending on the attack. Wich also applies to every +5 Defensive Bonus.
There are 4 basic defense model:
Extra HP bar
Damage avoidance
Percentile reduction
Flat Substraction
Each of them has very specific advantages and drawbacks. They tried Flat reduction for AoW3. I think AoW2 used Damage Avoidance, it has been a decade since I played it.
My point was that they already have experience with gating units behind research.
Personally I prefer tech unlocks over population Unlocks. That way the tech/tier Rush and Population Rush strategies are not siamese twins.