Lord Thane Oh I don't disagree with it being hard to implement, but you know what they say, nothing worth doing is ever easy.
Lord Thane the numbers aren't worked out right we might end up with Humans at insanely high KS with Dwarves right below them, then the rest of the races basically never able to interact with them militarily due to the vast difference.
I don't think you want a 1:1 scaling for this specific reason, also I think the race that would get screwed over the most (re: untouchable KS wise) would be undead. if it was linear scaling, x3ing the KS a legion gives would be outrageous. Finding out exactly what scaling to apply is the tricky part.
The way I think we should go about it should be based on combat usefulness. Ignoring GT's, strats and other tools that modify their effectiveness (because not everyone runs these things, so we want to have a good base to start with, then allow players to utilize tools like GTs to change effectiveness of units) I would say the order of effectiveness of military stats would be something like:
1) LR damage is most important, as it goes first
2) SR is 2nd most important, a tool only a couple races can really use
3) Defence and Melee are tied for 3rd.
Then you would figure out what to set the KS of each unit based on unit weightings of LR/SR/Melee/Defence. I wouldn't get quite into stuff like mage invisibility, or SW hiding ability, but perhaps there could be a "special KS bump" for those specific units for those items.
Now I realize that this would most likely require heavily modifying the code for a blanket calculation, or you could do the brute force method of applying modifications for techs into each unit individually (would allow for finer tweaking). I'm also just talking out of my ass here because I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag, but thats how I would envision the tweaks would need to be made.
Lets take elves as an example, as they are the weakest race militarily speaking.
Format will be Unit - LR/SR/Melee/Def
- Mage 3/0/7/2
- SM - 4/0/0/3
- LM - 3/0/0/3
- Cara - Would need a hard number coded in due to variability in its stats (Or just change the unit. Its a nice idea, but nobody has ever made it work really)
- Archer - 0/0/3/2
- EA - 0/0/5/3
Now mages don;t get affected by any techs, so they wouldnt have anything applied
SM and Lancemen are affected by SB/LA techs. SB affecting melee, LA affecting defence. Each tech gives +1 to the relative stat, for SM its a +25% increase, then +20% (net +50%), then +17% (net +76%) for sharper blades techs, then lancemen is +33%, +25% (net 66%), +20% (net 100%). Each level of LA gives both SM/LM +33% armour, +25% (net 66%) armor, +20% (net 100%) armour then +17% (net 133%)
For SM, full SB/LA results in a 76% increase in melee, and a 133% increase in defence. LM is 100% increase in melee, and 133% increase in defence.
I think a fair adjustment to their KS values, given that melee and defence in my vision are weighted equally on the last for effectiveness, would be each level of SB/LA increases the KS value of the unit by about 10% (start small, tweak upwards as needed for balance).
From the info we've been able to gather, a base SM/LM give 2.1ks per unit. A fully teched out lanceman is over double the effectiveness of a base LM, and a fully teched out SM is barely under double. We don't want to just made the adjustments for these specific units resulting in them giving 4.2ks each at full techs, as then the only benefit to getting military techs is guard house room (which is almost a good enough reason as it is, but last time I went on a rant about this people complained)
If we used my numbers, since we are using a 10% increase on each SB/LA tech then the KS curve for a SM would look like:
Base - 2.1
SB1 - 2.205
SB2 - 2.32
SB3 - 2.2.43
SB3/LA1 - 2.55
SB3/LA2 - 2.68
SB3/LA3 - 2.81
SB3/LA4 - 2.95
If you wanted to be more granular, you could apply the KS increase based on the % increase in power to the unit. It would be more work in the back end, but I believe that it could simplify the process overall. Using a rough calculation based somewhat on the above numbers, for each 5% increase in power (melee/defence) I would add 1% increase in KS.
That would result in fully teched out SM looking like
SM - Base - 2.1ks, SB3 - 2.4192, LA4 - 2.659, (SB3 + LA4) = 2.9782 (net increase in KS from SB3 plus net increase in KS from LA4)
Now these don't seem like massive changes, and they intentionally are not. But currently, having SB3/LA4 gives +7000ks
For smaller kingdoms, that's a huge number to have artificially boosted when you've been zeroed. With this, SB3/LA4 wouldn't add 7000KS to your base value until you've trained something like 8200 SM (or some combination of units that are affected by the techs). Which would mean when you get smoked, you drop out of range of larger kingdoms more effectively in relation to your drop in military power projection, which allows better rebuilds because the big boys can't hit you again quite as quickly.
Now, lets look at Caragous. I have no idea what the scaling is on the units, and in previous topics either Keeper or thane alluded to sharper blades not affecting them (do the HA techs affect them either?) Either way, since the devs want to keep their secrets on how this magical useless unit works, only they would be able to spitball ideas on how to change the KS values. Though, if I were to give my snarky input, for their cost and actual military power, I'd change them from 9ks per unit to -5ks (yes, negative 5) because of the absolute drain they are on everything. /cara rant #500
Archer and EA are simple. They are only affected by bowtech. We assume bowtech adds +50% ranged damage, and there is only 1 of them, so I would propose the following
Archer - Base 3 LR, 4.5 with bowtech. Thats a 50% increase. Base 2.4ks
EA - Base 5 LR, 7.5 with bowtech, also a 50% increase. Base 3.9 ks
Therefore, given that LR is the most important damage type, I would say that a 50% increase in LR power projection should give a 30% increase in KS per unit. Bringing archers from 2.4 to 3.1 and EA from 3.9 to 5.07.
A similar process would have to be applied to the other races.
Now people will instantly go and say how this would be unfair to elves, increasing their KS values yadda yadda. But the thing is, if applied and balanced correctly, there should be a corresponding increase in the "fairness" of hits. No longer will someone with 10k EA get the same level of KS increase as someone with 10k RT's, given that the EA get a much larger increase percentage wise to power projection. Similarly, losing those 10k EA would affect how much a person drops in KS based on units lost, hopefully making them land more in a region where they could potentially stand a chance to not get rekt immediately OOP.
Thats the basics of my thoughts on it.
