Mildly Interesting Unit Cost Stats

Lord Thane

Just adding up some numbers from the guide book, if we took 1 of each unit (sans wiz) and added up their attributes and costs:

Note that for the iron/wood/gold costs I didn't specifically check it, just ran the numbers (unit + armory costs) through AI, maybe it miscalced idk but looks pretty accurate.

Xliest

Looks at this race, 10attack, 14defence, 15 range… good at magic though lol

I suppose this is why we are testing, obviously. A lot can be gleaned from this chart thank you. You could include their train rate into this somehow also?

Good info to have at hand though.

Lord Thane

Xliest train rate is another factor to consider in balancing, even armor building speed and other racial buffs. Also special attributes like the wolf master buffing short range which could make them dominant for the short range, while many other races have zero attack for short range - it's like free kills before melee ever starts. And I think humans don't get the short attack unless using Charge strat.

The elven stats are kinda skewed due to the caragous having basically no base line stats, it's all calced depending on quantities. Plus over 1/3 of the gold cost (almost half!) is just for mage.

So overall not a true picture of the balance, but good for some fuzzy estimating 🙂

Xliest

I am partial to balancing each race individually while keeping a fair and objective mindset. Then when you combine them against other races in battle we would do another pass.

Testing each race against the other race multiple times in multiple scenarios. If we are talking about gnomes vs elves. You wouldn’t just put 2000 of each unit on the battle field typically you would have significantly less numbers of cats and bals. And elves might only have a few elite archers but more tc units because untill they can get enough resources and tech their atc units are kind of shit . So put them in battles where you match off TC elf vs gnome and let them fight, using strats, no-strat at different technology levels etc see if one keeps coming out ahead after a certain point or before a certain point and adjust.

This is why it’s important for devs to be in charge of balance rather than players. We can all offer suggestions. But ultimately if the devs see something out of place in the testing they have to fix it so that it’s objectively good for the game.

Xliest

No doubt it’s a very complicated process we are here to help. But without some of the dev tools like the battle tests it’s a bit more tricky… we could run like 1000’s of battle tests per day, but some might not understand the data that it’s giving. So the input to balance discussion would be not based on good information. I would like to be able to test things and give feedback on what seems right or not. I like to think my objectivity could be maintained mostly

Lord Thane

Xliest yeah, that's why I pushed back on just giving Orcs free stuff lol, they'll need to lose some before they get some. An imbalance in orcs is really subtle and hard to flesh out, even a small change can tip the scales drastically, so I think it needs to be extra careful.

Some other imbalances are pretty obvious though, like elves having offensive magic capabilities diminished has made an interesting conundrum. At this point I'm not really worried about an elf fireballing me to hell - because I know I'll just retal back for land/castles/pop. Maybe the retal rule is a good counter to elven magic dominance, IDK, but it does make the elf race less attractive an option (but not for other players it seems, since they're really popular atm, so maybe the rule isn't a concern).

Meh we'll see what the polls say. It is important people get a voice in proposed changes, it does need to be fun for every after all 🙂

Xliest

Honestly I think orcs might be fine if we can tune hiding and ensure all the mechanics are functioning properly… they fall off a touch in the late game but as stated earlier mostly will have protection from selling resources… it does seems like their Econ advantage is their main selling point. Maybe there’s tweaks in training or weapon building that enable them late game viability

trupheus

Can’t balance anything until the attack mechanic is sound. Hopefully all the bugs are out.

TheKeeper

trupheus