Topic: Economic Part versus Heroes

the-x wrote:

king_of_nowhere wrote:

the-x wrote:

One important question with I bet the answer is the more complex:

"How do I win against a hero"

with two heroes.

yes this is obvious. I mean by which strategy?

what do you mean by strategy? that's the strategy. have more heroes than the enemy. there are a few things you can do with strategy in this game, but not much, as you don't have much control over the fight anyway.

the whole point of the economy is to make more heroes. the whole game is based on making a better economy so you can have better soldiers. heroes are not too strong.

This depends from player to player. For me I think heroes are too strong escpecially with healing in towers.

a hero costs as much as 30 unpromoted soldiers. Plus an even greater starting cost to set up all the training economy. It really is ridiculously expensive to train one, which is the reason on crater neither me nor worldsavior will attempt to train one for a long time.

Make the hero weaker, and what's the point of making one?

And if you're no longer making a hero because they can be countered by a swarm of lesser soldiers, then you can skip making the training camp. And you don't need advanced weapons, so you can skip the gold mines. and the armor smith. if you want to encourage players to make economy, making heroes weaker would do exactly the opposide.

I also like this kind of "economy" you prefer to manually do the prodecure to raise a hero, though its a bit against the founding Idea of Sir Ver or Settler II

yes, I would be in favor of simplifying the procedure to make a hero. As I established that micromaanging one is the baseline to play competitively, it shouldn't be needlessly hard.

However, that's not that easy to streamline. The problem is that often, in small maps, you don't want to train heroes straight away. you want to send some half-promoted soldier to the front immediately. so this option should remain. merely keeping soldiers inside the training buildings until they are fully promoted won't do the trick.

I think the major problem is that half-promoted soldiers tend to go to the front, instead of getting more training from the second training building. this could perhaps be improved if we added an option for the training site itself to prioritize soldiers which already have some promotions. Perhaps give it a working option ("train heroes" or "finish training") where it would call the highest level soldiers available, even pulling them out of military buildings. but that would be complex to code, because buildings can only request wares from the warehouses, and a tower is not a warehouse.

but anyway, this is a point where I agree with you in principle. it's just hard to implement.

there is no "my economy was stronger but he made an hero so he won, that's unfair". No! if he made and hero and you didn't, then your economy was NOT stronger. If your opponent has heroes and you don't, then the game mechanics should NOT allow you to survive.

To see that statistically and reliable we should add a "Economy" statistics

Maybe this is only my personal opinion, but I like an economy that flows, where wares are produced and the aim is it to grow the highest you can do.

and what would this "economy" statistic measure, exactly?

We already have some statistics that try to do that. One is "wares", shows how many wares you have around. but this is flawed, because having 1000 buckets of water in your warehouse will improve your score, when in fact it is a waste. You may notice that stronger players tend to have a lower ware count in the early game. But in large economies you are bound to have lots of wares, so you can't just say that less wares is better.

then we have "productivity". it measures average productivity % of all buildings. Again, having 20 wells working at 100% will artificially increase that performance, so this is unreliable. Also, the productivity % is not completely functional in the first place.

we also have "buildings", which measures how many buildings you have. that one is also strongly correlated to actual skill; you may notice how me and worldsavior tend to grow faster in this field than other players, and worldsavior tends to grow a bit faster than me. In our oft-quoted match on fjords, you can see how the game would develop from there; he always had a few buildings more than me, because he was a bit ahead. but this one is also unreliable, because one well counts as one building just like one training camp. also, military buildings count, so you may have 100 guardhouses pumping your building count while being completely unproductive, and a waste of space. Construction sites also contribute to this statistic, so if you start a dozen different buildings and you don't have the wares to finish them, it will still show you growing when you are not.

And we have "power", which measures the number of promotions of your soldiers. Also unreliable, because one hero counts as much as 9 or 10 rookies (depending on tribe), while in fact it is as expensive as 30.

Ultimately, there is only one good measure of your economy: how many heroes you are making. an economy that flows is also my goal, but this means that food flows to mines which flows to smelting economy which flows to training, and is ultimately converted to heroes. if your economy is not producing heroes, then you have a bottleneck in it.

I mean, I could ask the same question "how do I win against a soldier". well, with other soldiers.

Nah, i mean for every stragety your enemy plays there should be a counter. Isnt this even in non computer games like chess like this?

in every strategy game - or even real world situation - there is a level of power above which no strategy can possibly succeed. in chess, if your opponent is attacking you with 2 rooks and all you have is a bishop, there's nothing you can do to avoid losing. In starcraft, if your opponent is attacking with 3 ultralisks and all you have is 10 marines, you can't avoid losing. in real life, if a tank division attacks your infantry platoon, you can't succeed. barring obvious, terrible blunders from the side with the advantage, but if your opponent was skilled enough to get to such an advantage, he's also skilled enough to not do anything too stupid with it.

which is the reason chess games are surrendered when one side has too much advantage. and wars are surrendered. and widelands games are surrendered.

And I think you fail to realize how much a hero is expensive, because you always say how strong an hero is compared to regular soldiers. Repeat with me again: one single hero costs as much as 30 rookies. Maybe even 40.

So you think a hero killing 6 or 7 rookies is bad mechanics. But you would never expect 6-7 rookies to have any chance against 30. Well, a hero is those 30, just combined into one. if the hero had a realistic chance of getting killed by a handful of rookies, that would be the bad mechanic.

if you want to consider this with any kind of fairness, you must compare a hero to 30 rookies. and in this case you'll discover the fight is much more balanced, because sure, the hero may attack and kill 4-5 before retreating, but while it is busy your rookies can attack somewhere else unprotected and pillage your economy. or, they can attack all together and force the hero to stay out and not get healed, so he will die by attrition eventually.

You ask for balance, while you are comparing some completely different powers. it would be like asking that the queen would be balanced to fight equally against 3 pawns.

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