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Topic: Fix Barbarians' early training disadvantage

hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2017-12-03, 20:53

WorldSavior wrote:

Are you sure that this question makes sense? face-wink.png

in my opiniuon it made totally sense, cause I was hoping you could retest this behaviour to confirm if there might be a bug in the code. This request was just politely put into a question. As you haven't answered to this could you please confirm whether the small brewery ignores economy settings if the worker needs experience.


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2017-12-04, 08:30

teppo wrote:

GunChleoc wrote:

The problem is that the other tribes are faster. So, we can slow down the other tribes, or speed up the Barbarians.

There are more innovative ways to slow down other tribes than there is to speed up barbarians.

Anyway, the tribes do not have to be equal; they should be approximately in balance. If we aim to make them equally easy on all maps, some of the fun might go away.

I agree that they don't have to be equal. The reason I raised this point is that if I'm playing a small map against a good player who is playing another tribe, I won't be able to play Barbarians if they play a rush strategy, because I will have no chance no matter what I do.

We should do some playtesting to see how long it takes until every tribe can start training if they build just the basic essentials to get a trainingsite going, and then maybe give the master brewer a little less XP requirements.


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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2017-12-04, 18:05

GunChleoc wrote:

What we really need here is an easy modding system, so that you can have your own version of the tribe where the "or workers need experience" is dropped.

A modding system would be great - as long it wouldn't be bad for multiplayer matches and tournaments.

I already have taken the first steps on the backend for a modding system, but I have run into a really weird bug that I don't understand, so that is stalled for now while we fix more important bugs (i.e. the crashes in trunk).

Okay

teppo wrote:

Is it really a problem that barbarians have to work a bit before getting promoted soldiers, or is it a problem that other tribes get those much faster ?

Well, Barbarians can immediately build a trainingscamp which can immediately start to train soldiers in attack (2) and health (2 or even 3), and those soldiers are clearly stronger than every soldier who is only evade-trained.

The problem is rather that those soldiers have to wait a lot until they can be further trained

GunChleoc wrote:

The problem is that the other tribes are faster. So, we can slow down the other tribes, or speed up the Barbarians.

If there has to be a change, I would vote for speeding up the Barbarians. Maybe king_of_nowhere's idea of decreasing the experience amounts of the master-smiths is too good to not be implemented, and also the brewers could need lower experience.

teppo wrote:

GunChleoc wrote:

The problem is that the other tribes are faster. So, we can slow down the other tribes, or speed up the Barbarians.

There are more innovative ways to slow down other tribes than there is to speed up barbarians.

Anyway, the tribes do not have to be equal; they should be approximately in balance. If we aim to make them equally easy on all maps, some of the fun might go away.

And I still think that it's practically impossible to balance them perfectly on all maps. The maps are just too different. But trying to approach to a good balance is a good aim

hessenfarmer wrote:

WorldSavior wrote:

Are you sure that this question makes sense? face-wink.png

in my opiniuon it made totally sense, cause I was hoping you could retest this behaviour to confirm if there might be a bug in the code. This request was just politely put into a question. As you haven't answered to this could you please confirm whether the small brewery ignores economy settings if the worker needs experience.

I've (very) often played barbarians, so I've been absolutely sure in this case. If I'm not sure, I signalize that in most cases. And now I tested it in b19: I was right. I even took a look at the code of trunk, and it has not been changed.

GunChleoc wrote:

teppo wrote:

GunChleoc wrote:

The problem is that the other tribes are faster. So, we can slow down the other tribes, or speed up the Barbarians.

There are more innovative ways to slow down other tribes than there is to speed up barbarians.

Anyway, the tribes do not have to be equal; they should be approximately in balance. If we aim to make them equally easy on all maps, some of the fun might go away.

I agree that they don't have to be equal. The reason I raised this point is that if I'm playing a small map against a good player who is playing another tribe, I won't be able to play Barbarians if they play a rush strategy, because I will have no chance no matter what I do.

If they rush you with rookies or evade-trained soldiers, you could use an early trainings camp. But if they rush you with atlantean soldiers with ev2health1+ some attack promotions, you've got a problem. And evade1 would not really help... So maybe the experience requirements of brewers and smiths are too big...

We should do some playtesting to see how long it takes until every tribe can start training if they build just the basic essentials to get a trainingsite going, and then maybe give the master brewer a little less XP requirements.

I've already tested a lot.

Fastest tribes are the empire and the atlanteans (empire with arena, but that is not always very effective. and with atlanteans it doesn't make much sense to start only with a dungeon).

Only few minutes slower are the atlantean labyrinth and the trainingscamps of the other tribes. The imperial trainingscamp is not the best trainingsside for an early game strategy, but also not the worst.

The colosseum takes more than twice as much time to be build than the imperial arena, and the barbarian arena takes more than three times as much time to start than the imperial arena. But this one is not effective anyway. If your suggestion with the normal beer will be implemented, this arena can begin as fast as the trainingscamp to work.


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teppo

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Posted at: 2017-12-06, 07:21

WorldSavior wrote:

And I still think that it's practically impossible to balance them perfectly on all maps. The maps are just too different. But trying to approach to a good balance is a good aim

I still think that making the tribes too similar would be a pity.

I agree that they don't have to be equal. The reason I raised this point is that if I'm playing a small map against a good player who is playing another tribe, I won't be able to play Barbarians if they play a rush strategy, because I will have no chance no matter what I do.

If they rush you with rookies or evade-trained soldiers, you could use an early trainings camp. But if they rush you with atlantean soldiers with ev2health1+ some attack promotions, you've got a problem. And evade1 would not really help... So maybe the experience requirements of brewers and smiths are too big...

I would like to push this even more: Make the barbarian trainingscamp to be an upgradeable building: Bootcamp (for example) -> Trainingscamp, where the "bootcamp" would be cheaper to build (no gold needed etc.), but would only train the first steps (2 attack, 2 health, for example).

This would, of course, push the tribes even more off balance on some maps. If the target is to have them equal in all conditions, this would be a wrong way to go.


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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2017-12-06, 15:06

teppo wrote:

I would like to push this even more: Make the barbarian trainingscamp to be an upgradeable building: Bootcamp (for example) -> Trainingscamp, where the "bootcamp" would be cheaper to build (no gold needed etc.), but would only train the first steps (2 attack, 2 health, for example).

This would, of course, push the tribes even more off balance on some maps. If the target is to have them equal in all conditions, this would be a wrong way to go.

the first time you suggested this I was against it, because barbarians were stronger in early game and this would make them even stronger. Now, improved strategies with the other tribes showed that barbarians are actually weaker, so I am in favor of it.

Incidentally, a boot camp that can churn out passably strong soldiers early would also be a viable balance factor against the 35-minute supersoldier. While not as strong as an atlantean with full attack and evade, two or three of those barbarian soldiers would be strong enough that they could kill the atlantean by ganging up on him. which will happen if the atlantean tries to attack alone.


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2017-12-08, 11:36

Merge Request: https://code.launchpad.net/~widelands-dev/widelands/bug-1662425-training-balancing/+merge/334893

AppVeyor builds: https://ci.appveyor.com/project/widelands-dev/widelands


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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2017-12-09, 02:16

teppo wrote:

WorldSavior wrote:

And I still think that it's practically impossible to balance them perfectly on all maps. The maps are just too different. But trying to approach to a good balance is a good aim

I still think that making the tribes too similar would be a pity.

If they are too similar, we have got another problem. But aren't they far away from being similar? I think that balance is more important as long as they are not too similar

I agree that they don't have to be equal. The reason I raised this point is that if I'm playing a small map against a good player who is playing another tribe, I won't be able to play Barbarians if they play a rush strategy, because I will have no chance no matter what I do.

If they rush you with rookies or evade-trained soldiers, you could use an early trainings camp. But if they rush you with atlantean soldiers with ev2health1+ some attack promotions, you've got a problem. And evade1 would not really help... So maybe the experience requirements of brewers and smiths are too big...

I would like to push this even more: Make the barbarian trainingscamp to be an upgradeable building: Bootcamp (for example) -> Trainingscamp, where the "bootcamp" would be cheaper to build (no gold needed etc.), but would only train the first steps (2 attack, 2 health, for example).

This would be an interesting improvement for the barbarians

This would, of course, push the tribes even more off balance on some maps. If the target is to have them equal in all conditions, this would be a wrong way to go.y

It could still cost some gold... But even in that case, it could change the balance. Well, I haven't thought about it that much yet...

king_of_nowhere wrote:

WorldSavior wrote: Oh, sorry. I've never realized that the change is that huge.

it looks huge, but it's actually 10% at full promotion. it won't affect how many hits it takes to kill a soldier in most circumstances, it will merely require one more shield/armor to survive that fourth blow.

Okay, 10% are not that huge, that's right. But Barbarians don't even get 3% more healthpoints...

GunChleoc wrote:

Values are fixed now.

And don't worry about the commit message. There will be a different message when the branch gets merged.

GunChleoc wrote:

Let's continue the balancing discussion at https://wl.widelands.org/forum/topic/4155/

It's off-topic for the thread and will be impossible to find in the future.

Okay


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teppo

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Posted at: 2017-12-10, 12:47

WorldSavior wrote:

This would, of course, push the tribes even more off balance on some maps. If the target is to have them equal in all conditions, this would be a wrong way to go.y

It could still cost some gold... But even in that case, it could change the balance. Well, I haven't thought about it that much yet...

Barbarians can already build trainingscamp, weapon smith and helmsmith right away.

If the "bootcamp" would cost no gold, then it would still be possible to start training a microbrewery, and know that battle arena is behind the corner.

If the training needs of master brewer is also reduced: Do the barbarians become too good?


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2017-12-10, 15:01

Teppo has a point, we should playtest the proposed branch first to make sure that we won't overcompensate.


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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2017-12-11, 19:10

teppo wrote:

WorldSavior wrote:

This would, of course, push the tribes even more off balance on some maps. If the target is to have them equal in all conditions, this would be a wrong way to go.y

It could still cost some gold... But even in that case, it could change the balance. Well, I haven't thought about it that much yet...

Barbarians can already build trainingscamp, weapon smith and helmsmith right away.

If the "bootcamp" would cost no gold, then it would still be possible to start training a microbrewery, and know that battle arena is behind the corner.

If the training needs of master brewer is also reduced: Do the barbarians become too good?

If the bootcamp would cost no gold, it could be unfair: The only trainingssite which costs no gold is the imperial arena and it can do only one promotion.

But if the bootcamp would cost gold, it wouldn't make barbarians too strong, I guess. Supplying the bootcamp fully will be not that cheap...

GunChleoc wrote:

Teppo has a point, we should playtest the proposed branch first to make sure that we won't overcompensate.

Yes. The bootcamp could be a big change... And the other stuff should be tested, too


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