How does everyone feel about Combat Balance these days?

from Elemental Forums

Back in the E:WOM days, there were a few of us (notably Kenata and Werewindlefr) that felt that the Combat values span was much to vast.  This is a side effect of the Square mechanic that atack versus defense uses.  According to the most recent post I could find on the subject, this works as follows:

     Max Damage = Attack*Attack/(Attack+Defense)

     Min Damage = Max Attack/2,

 

Attack values are still squared to determine damage, so a 9 attack = 81 damage, while a 3 attack = 9 damage (minus defense of course).  This gets worse as the values climb higher, and we have at least one 66 attack weapon (potential of up to 4360 damage assuming a defender with 0 attack/defense) in E:LH.

Why is this an issue for me?  Because low level units are quickly outclassed to the point of irrelevancy.  Sure, they should be weaker, but some of us still think that even a lone slinger should stand a (small) chance against a mid/late game armored juggernaut.  Mainly, the juggernaut should at least have a CHANCE of getting scratched, so if he is facing a horde of 'cheap' units, he shouldn't walk away completely unscathed all the time.  There should at least be a little damage...

So, one of the things I've been tinkering with for several Elemental iterations now is adjusting combat values upward slightly on the low end and significantly down on the upper end, with appropriate hit point adjustments as well.  While some people like one shot kills, I'm more of a fan of multi round affairs, so this generally falls along the lines of providing a 'base' level of armor (0 defense is just insane in a squared environment), a base level of attacks (so all weapons add to the base value, not start at their base value), and massively scaling back the higher values, both on the attack and defense end.

Elemental has been rather frustrating to me in this regard.  I had an idea on the 'base defense' value, involving Con/3, but of course stats have been pretty much abandoned, so I have to hard code that into the base unit stats of each unit, based on what I think the Con might be.  Hit point ranges need to be tweaked accordingly as well, and I'm still experiimenting along those lines.  But I'm sort of rambling here.

I tend to do 'drive by' modding when releasing Elemental mods, as the deeper concepts don't seem to work out the way I intended due to the mechanics not being in place for them, so I get frustrated after a while.  I tend to have very specific goals in mind, and don't like to setlle...

I tinker with the more involved stuff from time to time, but I tend to wander from concept to concept, to allow a fresh perspective to emerge.  Also, other games tend to distract me, and finally some mechanisms were flat out removed from Elemental that some of my concepts were built around (which gets a little aggravating after a while, which is why I find it is better to wait until the various patches play out).  But again I am digressing here...

My personal current build has the tweaked base values in place, and the early game seems to be playing out well.  I haven't tackled the later game values yet (waiting for 1.6 to play out before I tackle the weapons and armor values).

 

My question is: Is there still anyone out there still interested in a 'scaled back' combat model for Elemental, where the high end values are in, say, the 20's (maybe 30+ in extreme cases), with weapons scaling upwards at a lower rate, along with armors?  Where even 'unarmed' Pioneers can still whack you upside the head for your insolence?  If there is interest, I can focus on fleshing this out, and wouldn't mind a robust discussion to help arrive at the proper balance along these lines.  Just trying to feel out the interest amongst the collective here... Kenata and Werewindlefr are pretty much out of the picture at this point, and there are a lot of other things to focus on r.e. modding Elemental.

I'd love to get this discussion rolling again, if there is interest!

3,745 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I think that would be a good idea.   While Stardock games have always been heavily about quality> quantity, I think it went a bit too far in the Elemental games.

 

 

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Look at the formulae again.  9 attack = 9 damage. 3 attack = 3 damage. (minus defence of course). This thing is very OK.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

least one 66 attack weapon (potential of up to 4360 damage assuming a defender with 0 attack/defense)

This is wrong. The attack rating of the target does not matter; the attack value in the denominator is the attacker's attack rating, not the defender's. Thus, no weapon can deal more damage than its attack rating unless you make a critical hit, which will normally deal double damage but may deal more if your unit has modifiers to critical damage. Beyond that, it's poor math. If you take a number x and divide it by t, and you let t go to zero, the result of the division goes to infinity regardless of what x is; unless they set up a special case for 'attack score X is divided by zero', the result of the computation is either going to be an error or a maximum value for the data type used, or a bit pattern which was defined to represent infinity.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting joeball123, reply 3


least one 66 attack weapon (potential of up to 4360 damage assuming a defender with 0 attack/defense)

This is wrong. The attack rating of the target does not matter; the attack value in the denominator is the attacker's attack rating, not the defender's. Thus, no weapon can deal more damage than its attack rating unless you make a critical hit, which will normally deal double damage but may deal more if your unit has modifiers to critical damage. Beyond that, it's poor math. If you take a number x and divide it by t, and you let t go to zero, the result of the division goes to infinity regardless of what x is; unless they set up a special case for 'attack score X is divided by zero', the result of the computation is either going to be an error or a maximum value for the data type used, or a bit pattern which was defined to represent infinity.

That may change things a bit, but that's not quite what I've seen ingame at times.  I hope you are indeed right about that (attackers attack value instead of defenders), because that would be a little better... Of course, if you have a 6-man unit with said weapons, well you essentially multiply all damage by 6, before any bash modifiers, etc.. 

End result is still the same.  Attack values are vastly outstripping defense values and hit points, hence the significant number of one hit kills I am still seeing.  This is why the term 'glass hammers' has been applied so often in many critiques of this game.

As for the 'divide by 0', a min divisor of 1 is easy to code in.  As I don't have access to the code, I can neither confirm or deny, just comment on what I've seen ingame.  And it seems to me that there is still a good amount of cheese in the game, but that may just be me.  Hence my inquiry here.

Early units are still very quickly massively outclassed in this game, however, so that point still stands regardless.  There isn't really a 'increased hit point' mechanism that parallels weapon development.  Even a bump from level 1 to 2 isn't going to make much difference as it currently stands, so fresh/untrained units are very much glass hammers in the later game.  Experience helps some, but all this does is essentially reward the uber stacks that are earning experience, while replacement defending forces essentially have no such experience to fall back on, once the more experienced defenders (if any) are taken out.  Hence the steamroller effect we hear talked about so often.

In a number of other 4x games, I see 'lightly armed/underclassed' units making a much better account of themselves against heavier/stronger foes than they do in Elemental.  Personal preference, I guess...

 

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting tjashen, reply 4
That may change things a bit, but that's not quite what I've seen ingame at times. I hope you are indeed right about that (attackers attack value instead of defenders), because that would be a little better... Of course, if you have a 6-man unit with said weapons, well you essentially multiply all damage by 6, before any bash modifiers, etc..

It should be rather easy to test. All you need to do is build something with low attack and 0 defense and throw it away against a random monster with high attack. If you see something that doesn't fit in the rand(0.5, 1)*A^2/(A+D) range when using A = attacker's attack, D = defender's defense, check the attacker to see if it has Overpower (multiply damage by number of figures in target unit), Bloodthirsty (+25% damage to damaged targets), Enmity (+25% damage to opposite-alignment targets), or any similar traits, or see if it has a weapon which gives +X% damage per successive successful attack. Also make sure to include armor penetration, and make certain it wasn't a critical hit, and preferably use a single-figure monster for this test, because individual figures can miss even if the unit as a whole makes a hit, which could screw with keeping things in your damage ranges. Also also make certain that this monster's attack was a physical attack rather than an elemental attack (fire, cold, lightning, poison), because elemental attacks are unaffected by defense, and if it has mixed damage types, you'll have to try to separate it out - elemental damage does rand(0.5,1)*A damage, but it gets reduced by the target's resistance to the appropriate element (or increased, if the resistance is negative), so you can at least get an idea of how much of the damage comes from where, but it's more of a pain than with the pure physical attack case.

An alternative test to the above would be to mod one of the starting sovereign weapons to have a very high attack, and use that and see if you ever get ludicrously high damage numbers out of it (on the order of A^2 rather than A) when attacking low-attack 0-defense enemies.

I will say that I've never seen anything that even remotely looked to me like the damage function goes to A^2 rather than to A as defense goes to 0.

Quoting tjashen, reply 4
End result is still the same. Attack values are vastly outstripping defense values and hit points, hence the significant number of one hit kills I am still seeing. This is why the term 'glass hammers' has been applied so often in many critiques of this game.

I wasn't disagreeing with the point of your post. I was explaining that, to the best of my knowledge, your description of the damage mechanics is inaccurate, and providing a correction.

Quoting tjashen, reply 4
Early units are still very quickly massively outclassed in this game, however, so that point still stands regardless. There isn't really a 'increased hit point' mechanism that parallels weapon development. Even a bump from level 1 to 2 isn't going to make much difference as it currently stands, so fresh/untrained units are very much glass hammers in the later game. Experience helps some, but all this does is essentially reward the uber stacks that are earning experience, while replacement defending forces essentially have no such experience to fall back on, once the more experienced defenders (if any) are taken out. Hence the steamroller effect we hear talked about so often.

I feel that this is more a problem of including health as one of the level bonuses, rather than leaving everyone at a fixed health that you can balance the weapons around and improving the survivability of higher-level units by, say, granting +1 dodge per level. At least that way, the high-level units can't just shrug off successful attacks made by low-level units. I think you'd probably also want to change the health recovery mechanic; healing at 1 health per level per turn makes it even harder for low-level units to successfully pile enough damage on a high-level unit to seriously threaten its existence, and makes the Infirmary improvement much less interesting.

Quoting tjashen, reply 4
In a number of other 4x games, I see 'lightly armed/underclassed' units making a much better account of themselves against heavier/stronger foes than they do in Elemental. Personal preference, I guess...

I think this is an issue with the set of technologies that Elemental provides. Regular units only really have 3 choices in armor sets, and those choices offer enormously different protective qualities, with variably painful initiative penalties that can be largely ignored with appropriate trait or weapon choices, and negated by a city enchantment. I would certainly have liked for elemental to provide a real set of light/medium/heavy armor options at different stages in the tech tree rather than what we've got, but I don't know that that boat was ever on Elemental's horizon.