Topic: Battle mechanics

it does not cancel ongoing fights. the soldier will still fight his current enemy, it just won't engage any more soldiers after that. so yeah, if you attack with 10 soldiers, the level 10 soldier kills 4, when it is fithing the 5th the building is dismantles, the soldier will finish fighting the 5th but won't engage anyone else and will retreat immediately afterwards. As for countering high level soldiers, it can be done defensively: if you have a great concentration of soldiers, like a fortress, a single high level soldier attacking has a high risk of getting swarmed; if there are many enemy soldiers around it, sometimes it fails to retreat when falling below 50% hp, and it will be killed. So you can hold your ground against one or two supersoldiers with numbers. against a half dozen, there is no defence.

EDIT: there is no static defence, but you can dismantle your buildings in sight of the enemy, and when he advances attack the newly made buildings, that won't have level 10 soldiers inside (generally). and then keep retreating, and you can slow down the enemy advance for quite a long time, which will allow you to make your won level 10 soldiers. Make a fortress in the rear and accumulate them there, using them one at a time will lose them. a good example of it is the game team A - whynstein. even if i had supersoldiers they could stall the game for pretty long and set up a line of their own supersoldiers. they still lost for a mix of three reasons: 1, I still had more supersoldiers than them; 2, barabrains supersoldiers are much weaker than emprie or atlanteans because of their lower evade; 3, the empire hadn't made a sheep farm and weaving mill so he could not make the higer level armor. But they did still manage, while severely outmatched, to stall long enough to set up a good defence. You will also notice, if you llook at the replay, that at some point i did lose a supersoldier attacking a fortress full of enemy weaklings, because my soldier got swarmed and coult not retreat, providing a good example of what I said before.

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Tino wrote:

If I attack a enemy building with 10 soldiers in my opinion the "ongoing fight" should end if either my 10 or the enemies soldiers are dead.

If that happened, that a level 10 soldiers would die to 5 or 6 evade 2 soldiers. And a level 10 soldier costs, like, 4 gold and 11 to 13 iron depending on the tribe. So it would not be worth doing them. so if we made the game the way you think it should be, we'd need to also sensibly lower the cost of soldier upgrades, or people wouldn't have a reason to make training sites anymore.

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In this particular case i had no chance to attack the building the hero is retreating to, because of the map. It was just to far away, no buildingspaces on my site to progress, just the space where the enemy builds a new military building each time, sends his hero to, and retreats before he dies.

Imagine a atlantean or empire hero here which are even stronger than barbarian soldiers there is no chance.

Perhaps it is this combination of the map (desert tournament) and the battle mechanics, but it is no fun at all.

And i still think soldiers should not run from the enemy when their building is destroyed. Or, if they run, the soldiers should follow them. Then they could be intercepted on enemy territory if there are additional military buildings. Of course upgraded soldiers should be so much stronger that it respects the build costs.

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Tino wrote:

.Or, if they run, the soldiers should follow them. Then they could be intercepted on enemy territory if there are additional military buildings.

I like that one, I totaly agree! That would be quite nice, since it would resemble real military strategy the best way possible. But I can imagine, that is not easy to implement.

einstein13 wrote:

That map (Desert Tournament) wasn't fair for all the strategies.

I think that is the point here. On other maps it is much easier to build a couple of military buildings near the enemy's frontier. If the "superhero" retrieves, the military building is destroyed or dismantled and you can advance, enlarge your territory or even attack immediately the next military building where he fled to.

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teppo wrote:

In my opinion, the biggest problem of the Desert tournament map is that sometimes especially the red-blue can build castles so, that it is possible to attack those only using small huts. And those small huts do not have the castle in their vision ranges - One has to build a scout, and constantly monitor the scout to be able to click the "attack" button during the few seconds the scout sees it.

Constantly monitoring the scout is a huge problem, as this makes it difficult to concentrate in improving economy.

IMO, if the enemy building prevents me from occupying new territory, that building should be attackable. Does any of the old guys here know if attacking a large building using small ones was intentionally made this difficult, or whether the current system is a result of some coding choices etc.?

I think the desert tournament map was made specifically with the idea that it is easier to defend than to attack. which i quite like, thematically. the idea that there is a middle strip of ground where both sides have to cross with small buildings attacking fortresses and making scout huts. that gives more chances for a balanced game, one that won't end at the first engagement. Incidentally, this also makes it a perfect map for the superoldier strategy, so what? different maps require different strategies. the best way to play in desert tournament is not the best way to play in another map. widelands would be a quite dull game if the terrain didn't influence the strategy.

So, sorry if I sound sarcastic, but tino's arguments seems to boil down to

1) the map wass such that defending was much easier than attacking

2) the enemy had more stronger soldiers (note: the cost of the defending soldiers was greater than the cost of the attacking soldiers)

3) he insisted on attacking, and he lost

4) that's not fair

Well, in my point of view, given the first three premises, it would not be fair the reverse. if one is on a good ground for defence, has a more expensive army, and he gets attacked, he should win. there would be a balancing issue if the reverse happened.

P.S. I had some 20 evade 2 soldiers in my warehouse, so I couldd have easily defended if the "keep attacking" mechanic had been implemented. I just saw no reason to use them, since my level 10 soldiers were enough to win the battle without losses with the current mechanic. Yeah, I admit I just wanted to show off and win without losing a single soldier. Which I did.

P.P.S. desert torunament has one minor balancing issue in that the yellow player doesn't have a space for a fortress near the gold mountain, while every other player do. also, in playing the map several times in all the positions to get acquainted with it, I had the impression that the yellow spot was the poorer one; I could always made one or two farrms less in that spot. the other spots are well balanced, but the green one has limited access to his iron, because there are no medium spots close to the mountains, so a non-atlantean player could not mine all of it. So, the map can be improved by

1) making a big slot in front of the gold mountain on the yellow player's side.

2) expanding a little bit the yellow player land, enough to build one additional farm

3) make room for one medium slot near the iron of the green player, so that he can build a tower there and access the mines

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