Why such little reward for killing AI faction armies and champions?

from Elemental Forums

I have gotten to the point where I really don't enjoy fighting AI faction troops at all for the following reasons:

1) Even though the tooltip indicator may say "Strong" and they may have tough troops, you get a fraction of the experience after the battle with AI faction troops that you get when you fight mobs. Fighting 4 air shrills listed as "medium" for example, might net my army about 35XP each. However, fighting an AI sovereign and a few of his champions and troops rated 'medioum'will net you a whopping 8XP (or less) each. It's not much fun to do that much work for so little XP reward.

2) When you wipe out an AI faction by finally killing his sovereign and champions in that final battle, what do you get? Not only do you get crap experience, you get NONE of the items that they were carrying. They just all vanish from the game. This is frustrating and detracts from the fun of the game. I always looked forward to killing heroes in MoM, HoMM, AoW, Warlords, and just about any other of these types of games you can name just because of the loot they might be carrying.

These two things combined means that the battles with AI factions are far less rewarding and fun than fighting mobs on lairs and doing quests. I'm not sure why Stardock has balanced the game this way. The parts that arguably should be the most fun are the least. For me anyhow.

So I hope at some point they will consider the following adjustments to balance:

1) Give the same experience for fighting "medium", "strong", and "deadly" AI faction troops as you would get for fighting mob armies rated the same.

2) When you finally kill an AI champion or sovereign for good, their equipment should be dumped into your sovreign's inventory as a reward.

**A question for Heavenfall and other experienced modders here: Are these two things something we can implement ourselves in mods in case Stardock doesn't address it?

13,504 views 14 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

The devs intentionally tweaked the xp gain for killing AI faction units down a while (maybe before beta 4?) ago.  I agree it's a bit too low right now. 

I definitely don't want it to be at the same level as it is for mobs though.  There's more at stake when fighting factions, like control of the map (cities and resources), for instance.

 

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

In a binary war, any loss to your enemy is a sufficient bonus to your side. But lately wars have be in groups, where killing off one major army and Sov does not provide sufficient time to regroup and take the offensive. Given that, I would like to see more Gildar and XP from faction battles. But not as much as from monsters of course.

Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting seanw3, reply 2
In a binary war, any loss to your enemy is a sufficient bonus to your side. But lately wars have be in groups, where killing off one major army and Sov does not provide sufficient time to regroup and take the offensive. Given that, I would like to see more Gildar and XP from faction battles. But not as much as from monsters of course.

From a realism point of view, it's destroying humanoid armies that should net you the most gold, resources, and experience.  Speaking for myself, I intentionally leave monsters near my territory so I can level up my troops.  It makes no sense that in order to train your troops to be effective against armies, you make them kill monsters.

Currently, the experience from killing troops is negligible.  It's especially vexing on ridiculous, where it is far easier to take out a troll that a level 2 militia, but the troll gives you 30 times the experience. 

Experience should be a straight function of the enemy stats, and not of the enemy level.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

As i see it, the reason why AI armies yield so little XP compared to monsters is that there's an endless stream of AI armies to fight. If the XP would be the same, you could get to insane levels by leaving the enemy AI cities alone and just farming a bottleneck through which he keeps sending army after army. Monsters on the other hand are either an one-time deal, or a very slow spawn if you leave a lair alone, so the XP can be a lot higher without upsetting game balance.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

The balance would be to slow the level progression of sovereigns at higher levels. The increased experience would balance out from the troop perspective as they get half as much xp and tend to die in battle.

I say xp should be based off the stats of the unit as well, but we have to be careful not to raise up xp levels in the higher difficulties too much.

Increase xp from killing enemy troops.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

I don't know if increased xp is the answer, or perhaps gold, but you should definitely get something for slaughtering large AI armies. Right now it's far too easy to get deadlocked where you're fending off armies from several AIs, easily killing them but you just can't kill them fast enough to take the offensive. You don't gain anything meaningful from killing them, and the AIs replace them easily, so it just stagnates.

And since faction power rating - which seems to be 99% of diplomacy - isn't terribly accurate, i.e. biased towards sheer number of crap troops and not respecting how badass your level 20 sovereign is, AIs won't hesitate to dogpile against you and refuse to consider peace for less than 3000 gold.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Can we please have defeated heroes/sovs drop a piece of loot?  It could even be rationalized as that individual's "parole"(an item);

 or ransom (for gildar drop if the hero has no items) for freedom.  That is just fun.


Can we also have an artifact akin to the magic collar that lets us steal a hero during a battle.  Or an item that lets us steal a random item from an enemy sov/champ?

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

We don't need to add 10 new mechanics to the game. Just increase the XP to 50% of Monsters and give more gildar.

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

I fought a massive war with Lord Relias last night. A new level 9 champion I had just hired was involved in taking a tough city and then defending it against wave after wave of Relias' troops trying to retake it. It was brutal and each of the 6 stacks he threw at her were rated "strong". After that she went on to battles in 3 other cities at around a dozen battles overall.

How mamy levels did she get from all this fighting? Not one. Not a single level. To me that's just not right. How can you ever level your champions if you're at war all the time and don't have the luxury of running off to find monster lairs with them? I hope they balance this out some more.

Champions should give up at item when they die. If not the items they were carrying, then at least a random item based on their level similar to what you get in lairs or quests. I think they've nerfed loot to the point now where it just isn't very fun since most of what you get is just crap.

Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting C0LDsteel, reply 10

Champions should give up at item when they die. If not the items they were carrying, then at least a random item based on their level similar to what you get in lairs or quests. I think they've nerfed loot to the point now where it just isn't very fun since most of what you get is just crap.
\

 

Yup - they did. 

Reply #11 from Elemental Forums Top

I agree, it's annoying that XP pretty much has to come from monsters.  And that loot gained by the Ai is loot forever lost to the players.  To re-ask the question at the end of the original post;  would something like this be able to be modded in?

Reply #12 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Markon, reply 12
I agree, it's annoying that XP pretty much has to come from monsters.  And that loot gained by the Ai is loot forever lost to the players.  To re-ask the question at the end of the original post;  would something like this be able to be modded in?

Yes you can, but it may take a long time from the way I know how to do it. Basically it is a treasure attached to each unit (that is not currently there). Tedious but doable I think.

Reply #13 from Elemental Forums Top

Loot doesn't come from the items a unit has on them. It is a game modifier done in the xml. So you couldn't mod this in, no. Gildar and XP should be sufficient if the levels are right. But fixing this will open the hole they were trying to close when they implemented it. Winning a single battle in FE often determines the whole war. Since units newly trained are at such a level disparity, the ones that survived getting more XP just makes that worse. I still hope that at least the amount of XP gained from players is moddable, but I have never seen any code for it. It might be something we have to request.

Reply #14 from Elemental Forums Top

Not much (and too late) but still.

 

I agree with OP. There should be more endgame fun. Mopping the floor isn't fun. level advancing and item loot IS fun.

Also this should help AI. they do kill themseleves off. having the loot drop from champions equipment (or gold/metal/crystal from killed troops) will help them to finally stand against the player. Right now they throw loosily equipped champions with some occassional good item against well equipped champion, that individually is much better because of stacked gear then the bunch of them.

 

Had they fought with other AI, the good items would eventually travel to a champion that wins most of the time, making him stronger, just the way player does.

 

not modable, though and too late before the release. maybe for the expansion then...

FB do you read that?