Latest Posts

Topic: give some bonus to the defender?

hessenfarmer
Avatar
Joined: 2014-12-11, 23:16
Posts: 2645
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Location: Bavaria
Posted at: 2019-07-11, 10:41

Hi these are the actual values of the chances to win as in r20.
https://www.widelands.org/forum/post/26265/

These values are calculated with the attacker listed in the first column striking first. So the difference is dependent on the level of soldiers for example for Level 0 this would mean quite a big change.

if someone wants to play around a bit with the algorithm my excel implementation (soldiers.xlsm) of einsteins algorithm can be found at
https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/1765746

https://github.com/widelands/widelands/issues/3269

Edited: 2020-03-03, 11:02

Top Quote
hessenfarmer
Avatar
Joined: 2014-12-11, 23:16
Posts: 2645
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Location: Bavaria
Posted at: 2019-07-11, 21:42

WorldSavior wrote:

hessenfarmer wrote:

did some calcualtions. Defence value can't be used as results are to tribe specific. But evade could be used

Yes, but why? One could also change "attacker hits first" into "defender hits first" - but is this really necessary? (If two attackers intercept each other the first hit could be randomly chosen.) Defenders already have the advantage that they are healed in the buildings, and attackers often have to walk long distances until they can be healed again. Furthermore the attackers usually don't exactly know who they will be facing, so players should often think twice or more if they really should attack.

Well we could always discuss necessity. perhaps we should do this first. But the thread strted by the feeling that we gave the attacker a bonus by being able to select attacking soldiers which we should compensate a bit on the defence site. So if we agree or at least get a majority for is not needed at all we could stop this.
But I have the feeling that most of discussing user feel that this might be needed.
Making the defender strike first is a rather big change in some situation I believe from the numbers.

(5% evade bonus reduces chance for the attacker by around 10%)

No matter how good the soldiers already evade? No matter how many hits they survive? I don't think so. By the way 10% seem to be too much... 10% substracted?

Yes 10 % subtracted from current values. but I checked this only for Level 0 vs Level 0 and Level 10 vs Level 10. I agree this is to much so we should add at max 0 to 4 evade depending on Military strength. Maybe max(4, floor (miltitary presence / 15)) would be a good starting point to find good values.

hessenfarmer wrote:

One different solution might be to increase the original defence capability of defending soldiers by a value dependent of the military presence (Military strength of soldiers) in the vicinity of the fight.
- This does not need micromanagement - It encourages having better trained soldiers and bigger military buildings
- The story behind is that the braveness/morale of a soldier is dependent on comradship
- With the formula we would have a clear measure to control the effect

Well... Why shouldn't attackers have the same effect if it's based on comradship? I think that we don't need this system.

Necessity see above. For the story behind we could enhance comradship with additional dedication by defending wife and children to explain this.

king_of_nowhere wrote:

the-x wrote:

Maybe we should make one building you cannot attack till 1 hour / till you build Lager /

i don't like that; too arbitrary.

Me neither

or the best way i think: make recruiting in the first steps much cheaper and faster and the latest steps much more expensive

how would that help the defender? if nothing else, it would actually encourage early rush with cheap soldiers rather than developing the economy.

Exactly, sounds just like a big boost for the-x's favorite strategy face-wink.png

Nordfriese wrote:

I think options to select how the building decides on the defenders would be too complicated since you´ll have to set this for every single building, possibly multiple times.

But maybe better than having no choice

IMHO an additional "weakest/strongest soldier always remains inside" button should be enough.

That would be a good button

Maybe the soldiers could regenerate simultaneously inside the military building at a very slow rate (they help each other or just sleep a bit) and one soldier is healed by the healer (faster)

this would not only help the defender as well it would be applicable for the attacker as well.

In addition, the algorithm that picks the soldier that chooses the next defender could be more intelligent, and could have a knowledge of the attacking soldier, and tune the decision based on that.

Yes. It sounds harsh, but often the weakest soldier has to sacrifice himself for the heroes. Currently this already happens if the heroes are very wounded.

If there is only one attack, the situation is still simple. However, if the aggressor launches many attacks, picking the right guy can be difficult.

I could start with the following: - If there are non-wounded defender, start with weakest one that has higher promotion than attacker. If no such guy, use weakest.

Sounds clever to me

would be ok for me as well


Top Quote
king_of_nowhere
Avatar
Topic Opener
Joined: 2014-09-15, 18:35
Posts: 1668
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Posted at: 2019-07-12, 00:02

regarding necessity:

it is false that the defenders heal while the attackers are out. in fact, the defenders heal considerably worse. wounded attacking troops retreat to their home, if they can, and start healing immediately, and won't go attack again until the attacker calls for them specifically to go out.

defending troops do not go back in their buildings to heal as long as there is a single attacking soldier still fighting. when the attacker strikes again, all defending troops move out to intercept. including troops that are barely alive, that should have been left to heal. the defender effectively stops healing the moment it is attacked again. and those wounded troops are dead as soon as they meet an attacker, and they barely slow it. on the other hand, the attacker can handpick to only send fresh troops. the attacker could send rookies one at a time just to prevent the defender from healing.

that's why i think it is necessary to buff defender. I assumed it was straightfoward enough that there could be a strong consensus on it, but if somebody wants to argue this point, let's do it before going deeper into the details on how to do it.


Top Quote
the-x
Avatar
Joined: 2019-01-19, 13:23
Posts: 967
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Posted at: 2019-07-12, 16:17

In general its important to make units more balanced, so fights seem to be more fair to every player. I mean, if someone starts this game and plays vs atlanticians against us and we win 70,5% of the fights of lvl 0 soldiers, he will soon quit the game. In any case we should not make it more unbalanced and we should not speed up piggeries or little economic changes or detail in economy, as the problem is mainly a military balanced one. New players can not see all the stats that are behind, they only recognize they are constantly losing and therefore quit playing.

Edited: 2019-07-12, 16:45

Top Quote
hessenfarmer
Avatar
Joined: 2014-12-11, 23:16
Posts: 2645
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Location: Bavaria
Posted at: 2019-07-12, 16:36

we have made a lot of effort to balance the military strength of each tribe and we have a good program to test and evaluate this. Level 0 Atlanteans are a bit stronger then other tribes however you have less of them. So level 0 balance is intentionally a bit biased by the costs and availabilty of Level 0 soldiers. Level 10 soldiers are aimed to be more equal however frisians have a little higher overall chance to win against others when attacking. But this is ok as the results of each individual fight are more widespread then for other tribes. (this means in 10000 fights you have a chance of winning 58% but this could feel as only 30% in 10 fights due to randomness)


Top Quote
king_of_nowhere
Avatar
Topic Opener
Joined: 2014-09-15, 18:35
Posts: 1668
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Posted at: 2019-07-12, 17:06

the-x wrote:

In general its important to make units more balanced, so fights seem to be more fair to every player. I mean, if someone starts this game and plays vs atlanticians against us and we win 70,5% of the fights of lvl 0 soldiers, he will soon quit the game.

well, depends. if the weaker soldiers are cheaper enough that you can afford to lose 2 for every one you kill, then it's fine. see also the concept of zerg rush.

and changes to the economy are fundamental exactly because of that. this is not a game with major focus on combat. you do not get muuch benefit from devoting all your attention to the army. this is an economical game where you win by setting up the economy to make more and stronger soldiers. balancing the economy is the fundamental part.

Edited: 2019-07-12, 17:10

Top Quote
WorldSavior
Avatar
Joined: 2016-10-15, 04:10
Posts: 2091
OS: Linux
Version: Recent tournament version
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Location: Germany
Posted at: 2019-07-16, 19:45

king_of_nowhere wrote:

the-x wrote:

In general its important to make units more balanced, so fights seem to be more fair to every player. I mean, if someone starts this game and plays vs atlanticians against us and we win 70,5% of the fights of lvl 0 soldiers, he will soon quit the game.

well, depends. if the weaker soldiers are cheaper enough that you can afford to lose 2 for every one you kill, then it's fine. see also the concept of zerg rush.

I also think that it's not bad that barbarian rookies are weak but cheap, it increases the strategical depth of the game.

the-x wrote:

In any case we should not make it more unbalanced and we should not speed up piggeries or little economic changes or detail in economy, as the problem is mainly a military balanced one.

I disagree

New players can not see all the stats that are behind, they only recognize they are constantly losing and therefore quit playing.

Maybe inside of the game there should be more informations.

king_of_nowhere wrote:

regarding necessity:

it is false that the defenders heal while the attackers are out. in fact, the defenders heal considerably worse. wounded attacking troops retreat to their home, if they can, and start healing immediately, and won't go attack again until the attacker calls for them specifically to go out.

defending troops do not go back in their buildings to heal as long as there is a single attacking soldier still fighting. when the attacker strikes again, all defending troops move out to intercept.

Not if the building is directly at the border

including troops that are barely alive, that should have been left to heal.

True, but I suggested that one could tell them to stay. And one can send wounded defenders simply away by clicking on them, so they don't stay in the building, so they will not fight.

the defender effectively stops healing the moment it is attacked again. and those wounded troops are dead as soon as they meet an attacker, and they barely slow it. on the other hand, the attacker can handpick to only send fresh troops. the attacker could send rookies one at a time just to prevent the defender from healing.

But how should it be guaranteed that this rookie-sending strategy works?

that's why i think it is necessary to buff defender. I assumed it was straightfoward enough that there could be a strong consensus on it, but if somebody wants to argue this point, let's do it before going deeper into the details on how to do it.

Would it be enough for you if "attacker hits first" gets transformed into "defender hits first"?

hessenfarmer wrote:

WorldSavior wrote:

hessenfarmer wrote:

did some calcualtions. Defence value can't be used as results are to tribe specific. But evade could be used

Yes, but why? One could also change "attacker hits first" into "defender hits first" - but is this really necessary? (If two attackers intercept each other the first hit could be randomly chosen.) Defenders already have the advantage that they are healed in the buildings, and attackers often have to walk long distances until they can be healed again. Furthermore the attackers usually don't exactly know who they will be facing, so players should often think twice or more if they really should attack.

Well we could always discuss necessity. perhaps we should do this first. But the thread strted by the feeling that we gave the attacker a bonus by being able to select attacking soldiers which we should compensate a bit on the defence site.

What about compensating it by more possible orders for defending troops?

Making the defender strike first is a rather big change in some situation I believe from the numbers.

But smaller than complicated evade bonuses or group bonuses, right?

(5% evade bonus reduces chance for the attacker by around 10%)

No matter how good the soldiers already evade? No matter how many hits they survive? I don't think so. By the way 10% seem to be too much... 10% substracted?

Yes 10 % subtracted from current values.

This is in almost all cases a bigger difference than just letting the defender striking first. And much more complicated.

but I checked this only for Level 0 vs Level 0 and Level 10 vs Level 10. I agree this is to much so we should add at max 0 to 4 evade depending on Military strength. Maybe max(4, floor (miltitary presence / 15)) would be a good starting point to find good values.

Why so very complicated?

hessenfarmer wrote:

One different solution might be to increase the original defence capability of defending soldiers by a value dependent of the military presence (Military strength of soldiers) in the vicinity of the fight. - This does not need micromanagement - It encourages having better trained soldiers and bigger military buildings - The story behind is that the braveness/morale of a soldier is dependent on comradship - With the formula we would have a clear measure to control the effect

Well... Why shouldn't attackers have the same effect if it's based on comradship? I think that we don't need this system.

Necessity see above. For the story behind we could enhance comradship with additional dedication by defending wife and children to explain this.

This could change the game a lot...

hessenfarmer wrote:

Hi these are the actual values of the chances to win as in r20. https://www.widelands.org/forum/post/26265/

These values are calculated with the attacker listed in the first column striking first. So the difference is dependent on the level of soldiers for example for Level 0 this would mean quite a big change.

One of the highest difference would be that some 57% success rate turns into 43% (bar vs bar), which looks like 14% difference. But most other duels look more like 10% difference. And it's very uncomplicated, and don't you want that the defender gets a bonus? face-wink.png

BoeseKaiser wrote:

Nordfriese wrote:

Defining that the soldier of the player who initiated the attack always strikes second might be an easy way to give the defender a modest bonus

might be a big deal for supersoldiers though, no? the less hits -> the more impact this change has

Actually only in one case: Fri vs Fri. All other fights are a smaller deal than in the level0-fights.

king_of_nowhere wrote:

the-x wrote:

I tryd it with many savegames from the last games I played on different maps The best solution would be a techtree, I think which should be not much harder to implememt than the other changes. Tell soldiers individually makes many boring / technical stuff. You can chose military +10% strengh per soldier / economy / a third, etc see in tech tree, important is that the offensive strengh gets stronger the longer the games goes.

soldiers fight with the same stats in attack when attacking or defending, so this would really do nothing. except perhaps discourage players from developing expanded economies by making them even more expensive to start, and so encourage rushing even more.

Given that all your suggestions had that as a likely result, I'm thinking you are doing it intentionallly face-tongue.png

Lol

king_of_nowhere wrote:

WorldSavior wrote:

Conclusion: A good bonus for defenders would be the possibility to tell soldiers individually if they should stay or not. Or if one could control defenders even better it could also be an improvement for the game.

that's kinda situational. the attacker can choose to launch the attack and can pick all the soldiers that will go calmly, but the defender will be called on a moment's notice. I agree that having controls in every military building to tell individual soldiers to go out intercepting attackers or staying inside to heal would actually be the boost defence needs, but it is dependent upon the defender's skill at micromanaging fast. And I don't like to make speed an important factor.

One of the ideas would be that one could do settings even before getting attacked at all.

I disagree. For example, if both players have exactly one supersoldier (and if they are thinking that), they might not risk to lose him by attacking, so it's rather a stalemate situation.

Time flows on, and one of the players gains new military power faster.. Besides, one could launch few rookies first, to wound the hero and only then use the own supersoldier?

Sounds clever, but how to assure that they succeed in wounding the hero?

there is never any certainty, but the attacker has higher odds of making it work. if the attacker sends out rookie soldiiers first to wound a bit the enemy hero, send out a soldier at a time to keep enemies from retreating to heal, and then sends his hero to attack at the right moment, then the attacker has better than 50% chances, starting from parity.

But who says that the rookies will find the hero?


Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

Top Quote
king_of_nowhere
Avatar
Topic Opener
Joined: 2014-09-15, 18:35
Posts: 1668
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Posted at: 2019-07-16, 22:46

WorldSavior wrote:

king_of_nowhere wrote:

defending troops do not go back in their buildings to heal as long as there is a single attacking soldier still fighting. when the attacker strikes again, all defending troops move out to intercept.

including troops that are barely alive, that should have been left to heal.

True, but I suggested that one could tell them to stay. And one can send wounded defenders simply away by clicking on them, so they don't stay in the building, so they will not fight.

well, it's a bit more complicated. you click on a wounded soldier to send it away, if it's a rookie all if fine. if the soldier has some promotion, then generally a rookie will be sent in its place. and then once the rookie gets in, another soldier is generally sent to substitute it. and then maybe the very soldier you kicked out of the building is sent back because it has more promotions. messing around by manually removing wounded soldiers can backfire in spectacular ways.

Would it be enough for you if "attacker hits first" gets transformed into "defender hits first"?

that's a possibility. I would not want to put big walls in front of an attack, just make it inconvenient to strike unless you have some advantage.

What about compensating it by more possible orders for defending troops?

that could be an even better solution. since the problem is "the attacker has more control and can use it to advantage", making things even by giving control to the defender would work. the only problem is that the attacker strike first, the defender will react, so we need options that will work assuming the defending player will look at the battlefield some ten seconds later.

I think making it so that you can still see a shadow version of soldiers from a building when they are out, and you can manually recall them back - or send them out to intercept an attacker, or order them to not get out until they are healed - would be enough. that way, both attacker and defender have a similar lever of control over picking soldiers that go to battle.

I'd like to build consensus around that idea then.

Edited: 2019-07-16, 22:46

Top Quote
JanO
Avatar
Joined: 2015-08-02, 11:56
Posts: 177
Ranking
At home in WL-forums
Posted at: 2019-07-16, 23:16

What is the current way how widelands picks the defenders? Could it be set to something like "form left to right" in the list of soldiers inside a building? Then all problems may be solved by the possibility to drag and drop them into desired positions and set a limit, how many of them are allowed to leave.

Helpful other options could be automatic sorting by heath status (%), promotions or current hitpoints.

Still I would prefer a menu similar to the one from settlers2 face-wink.png


Top Quote
hessenfarmer
Avatar
Joined: 2014-12-11, 23:16
Posts: 2645
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Location: Bavaria
Posted at: 2019-07-17, 09:16

WorldSavior wrote:

hessenfarmer wrote:

WorldSavior wrote:

hessenfarmer wrote:

did some calcualtions. Defence value can't be used as results are to tribe specific. But evade could be used

Yes, but why? One could also change "attacker hits first" into "defender hits first" - but is this really necessary? (If two attackers intercept each other the first hit could be randomly chosen.) Defenders already have the advantage that they are healed in the buildings, and attackers often have to walk long distances until they can be healed again. Furthermore the attackers usually don't exactly know who they will be facing, so players should often think twice or more if they really should attack.

Well we could always discuss necessity. perhaps we should do this first. But the thread strted by the feeling that we gave the attacker a bonus by being able to select attacking soldiers which we should compensate a bit on the defence site.

What about compensating it by more possible orders for defending troops?

May I conclude from this answer that you agree on the necessity to help the defender a bit due to the new options we made for the attacker? From your last posts I was unsure about that. If yes we can discuss implementation details.

Giving the defender a bonus by giving him more orders is difficult imho, as one might might miss to react to a specific attack in case a well orchestrated multiple attack at different borders is launched. So only general settings might help, which might fail as there is no such thing as a general setting helpful in any case.

Making the defender strike first is a rather big change in some situation I believe from the numbers.

But smaller than complicated evade bonuses or group bonuses, right?

Yes my first idea was to overambitioned for this task. I now beleive that just adding 2 to the current defender evade value will decrease the attackers chance over all levels (checked for L10 vs L10 and L0 vs L0) by 5% (e.g. 68% instead of 73% for fri L0 vs bar L0). This will be just a very minor coding issue and easy to implement. If this proves to be to much then we could try just using 1.

hessenfarmer wrote:

Hi these are the actual values of the chances to win as in r20. https://www.widelands.org/forum/post/26265/

These values are calculated with the attacker listed in the first column striking first. So the difference is dependent on the level of soldiers for example for Level 0 this would mean quite a big change.

One of the highest difference would be that some 57% success rate turns into 43% (bar vs bar), which looks like 14% difference. But most other duels look more like 10% difference. And it's very uncomplicated, and don't you want that the defender gets a bonus? face-wink.png

Yes but 10 % or even more would be too high as you correctly stated before.


Top Quote