Absolute costs and relative benefits - Is it what we want?

from Elemental Forums

Hey,

I was considering recently the implication of having an absolute cost (say +10 cost to an unit so it can have more attack rating) or a relative benefits (say an outpost gives +25% defence rating).

 

Is it really what the designers wanted? To favor each time the strongest units, in a kind of snowballing effect aka Darwinesque approach 'the strong becomes stronger, the weak will be weaker' etc. ?

 

Because think about that. For lousy unit you build, like some club equipped militia, even a +5 cost is significant. But for a knight wearing a plate, a +10 cost is not that significant, when you factor the cost of his equipment. Bottom line, the weak units will never have perks generally, the ones which are expensive will have 3... Min-max if you want.

 

Let's take the other point, giving a bonus as a %. Typically outpost bonus. +25% defence means nothing if you have low quality units, because you'll get between 0 and 2 bonus point in defence. For a strong unit, that's a very big bonus on the contrary. So again here, a gameplay consisting of a few super units is again privileged...

 

Is it what the designers wanted in the first hand? I'm not too sure, because we all know about a game 'lock' called 'stack of doom', basically, a stack strong enough to crush anything in its path without loss.

Or alternatively, we know that players have a tendency to prefer high quality over quantity, because this is a way to win against AI with production advantages, as you want to avoid a war of attrition against such AI. You want to lose at most 1 unit when the AI loses 10... I think you get what I mean. The natural tendency is to try having the units that will allow 0 loss most of the time.

 

And so, if the game mechanics themselves lend to this style of gameplay, then chances are that the 'stack of doom' syndrom appears quite easily.

So... conclusion, should we not have costs with % (like 'strong: +25% cost') and bonus with absolute values (like: outpost defence: +3 defence to all units). And not the reverse?

 

8,490 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

The brain-work here is good, I have thought the same (but didn't say anything for reasons unspoken).

So atleast its a good post to make people think about it ;)

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Something to bear in mind though is that if you have a Death mage then all defence can become irrelevant (Curse, Mass Curse).  If you're packing a bunch of Frost Mages then defence is completely useless to your opponent and Dodge quickly becomes king.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Outposts (starbases) gave flat bonuses in Galciv2, which allowed you to min max weak units in the outpost AoE. I think that regardless of the chosen mechanics, a player will find a way to stretch it as much as possible. The game does have ways to deal with stacks of doom, it's just unfortunate that the AI doesnt use them.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

 

Quoting DGB246, reply 3
The game does have ways to deal with stacks of doom, it's just unfortunate that the AI doesnt use them.

No, its unfortunate that there is no way to deal with them, I would prefer if there were a way to deal with stacks of doom, and a way to deal with people massing slaves, a way to deal with juggernauts, but each of these were specific to certain unit setups, you would have to build an entire regiment to counter one stack of doom, and the enemy would in such case try to build a whole regiment with a different tactic in mind.

like a rock-paper-scissors-shotgun-dynamite approach.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

To play devil's advocate:

The problem with only using absolute bonus values is that weak units basically gain at least one level of quality, whereas strong units gain nearly nothing.  To continue your example, if outposts give +5 defense to all defending units, any unit with 5 or less defense becomes vastly better than what it was, where high armor units gain significantly less from the bonus.  The problem with this situation then becomes: why build high armor units at all?

Maybe a better solution would be something like +2 and +10% defense.  Here both newb units and higher armor units gain a moderate amount from the bonus.