[Suggestion] Raise the troop limit ... a lot

By sweatyboatman on February 1, 2012 7:49:41 PM from

sweatyboatman

Join Date 08/2006

+50

Part of the reason that heroes are so OP is that they can do massive amounts of damage. And I think that is awesome. Heroes should do massive damage (Someone keeps posting that animated gif of Sauron smashing people into next tuesday, please feel free to do so in reply to this post as well). Because the stack is so limited, any unit that isn't a hero is wasting space in the stack.

In fact, I think this is one reason why the beginning of the game is so good. You haven't had time to recruit enough heroes to fill the stack. So you have to rely on dinky mundane units to hopefully absorb some punishment. Scrapping against low level monsters with two heroes and a couple spearmen can be really hairy!

Later on, when your Sov has mastered three different elements and you have all 5 of your other level 15 heroes in your stack, you're basically unstoppable. Any units you add to the stack are basically meat shields to buy time for you to blast the crap out of the enemy. Because your heroes are totally badass and the units you're facing are not.

But watch that clip of Sauron. He is surrounded by thousands of soldiers! Sure he's in full butt-kicking mode, but is he going to be able to kill all those legions? Maybe not.

In FE, currently, heroes have to worry about 8-9 units of soldiers. Hardly the hordes that Sauron faced. So a couple big smashes and a fireball and the battle's over. That's not impressive; any hero that can't hold his own against 2-3 units isn't worth mentioning. If the opposing forces had 15-20 soldiers the situation would be far dicier. Get the hero to regular unit up to 5 or 7 to 1 and now you're talking! You'll need a couple first round fireballs just to have a hope of surviving.

If the tactical battle engine can handle it, why not let the unit count get a little out of control? A little epic tactical battle in the late game never hurt nobody.

Quoting Sethai,

reply 23

Are we even sure the game can display units bigger than the current maximum, without a serious art revision?

Nope. We're not. There could be some technical reason why FE can only support ~18 units on the screen at the same time. That would seem to me to be an enormous flaw in their game engine, but it's certainly possible.

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Quoting sweatyboatman,

reply 25

In chess the queen is the most powerful, but she's not all powerful. The pawns are the weakest, but they are often pivotal in determining victory or loss.

In chess you don't get to choose to have only queens.

Checkmate.

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Quoting sweatyboatman,

reply 25

Quoting Creslin321,
reply 21
If you have like 20 units per side, that's FORTY moves per turn. This can really slow a tactical battle down to the point where it becomes a chore.

How many units are on a chessboard? How many in Stratego? Games are not a chore because they have too many pieces, they're a chore because they aren't interesting. Adding units doesn't magically make any game better or worse. In my opinion, adding pieces to FE's tactical battle would make it more interesting. I think the major difference between FE's tense and challenging early game and it's less compelling late game is that battles do not scale at all.

A few major differences here...

First, in both Chess and Stratego, you only move ONE PIECE A TURN. In FE, you move every single piece, every turn. Therefore, the length of your turns increases linearly with the amount of units.

Second, Chess and Stratego are all about the "tactical" battle, it composes the entire game. But in FE, a battle is just a small part of the overall campaign. I don't think you want to spend 40 minutes in every single tactical battle because you will never finish a game and will probably get bored.

Third, Chess and Stratego are completely balanced at the start of each "battle." The tactical battle system in FE is not balanced by design. In any one tactical battle, you may be significantly overpowered, underpowered, or around even...all depending on what's going on in the campaign map. While playing a long-term balanced battle may be enjoyable...it will be just painful to have to spend 10 minutes giving units orders in a battle that you know you are going to win. Think about how many battles you engage in that are actually "balanced" at the start...

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The limit from a design perspective is to make sure the lowest common denominator of supported computers can play every battle. I have a great computer, so expect me to push the limit.

I once casted obscuring mist 20 times to win the Arena quest. That pushed my comp to the limit. I also used like 400 mana.

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Quoting Sythion,

reply 27

In chess you don't get to choose to have only queens.

So you're going to round up 20 heroes? More power to you! I'm pretty sure that stack should be absolutely epic and should not be simply countered by a comparable stack of 20 mundane units.

Quoting Creslin321,

reply 28

First, in both Chess and Stratego, you only move ONE PIECE A TURN.

I'm pretty sure that's how FE's tactical battles are. The innovation of initiative allowing units to skip ahead of others. WoM was each side moves all its pieces and then the other side does, but they got rid of that system.

Quoting Creslin321,

reply 28

While playing a long-term balanced battle may be enjoyable...it will be just painful to have to spend 10 minutes giving units orders in a battle that you know you are going to win. Think about how many battles you engage in that are actually "balanced" at the start...

Which is why the autocalc button is there.

edit: I'm pretty sure.

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Quoting sweatyboatman,

reply 30

So you're going to round up 20 heroes? More power to you! I'm pretty sure that stack should be absolutely epic and should not be simply countered by a comparable stack of 20 mundane units.

You're implying that there is some sort of trade-off to getting powerful champions. There is not.

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Quoting sweatyboatman,

reply 30

Quoting Creslin321,
reply 28
First, in both Chess and Stratego, you only move ONE PIECE A TURN.

I'm pretty sure that's how FE's tactical battles are. The innovation of initiative allowing units to skip ahead of others. WoM was each side moves all its pieces and then the other side does, but they got rid of that system.

It's not the same. In Chess, you have a turn, you can decide whatever unit to move in that turn that you want. Giving you lots of strategic options.

In FE, your UNIT gets a turn and you can move it. That's it, you can only move the unit when its turn comes up. It essentially means that in order for a unit to move twice, you have to wait (on average) for every other unit on the board to move in between moves. It can take forever.

In contrast, in Chess I could move the same pawn in two consecutive turns.

Quoting sweatyboatman,

reply 30

Quoting Creslin321,
reply 28
While playing a long-term balanced battle may be enjoyable...it will be just painful to have to spend 10 minutes giving units orders in a battle that you know you are going to win. Think about how many battles you engage in that are actually "balanced" at the start...

Which is why the autocalc button is there.

edit: I'm pretty sure.

If the tactical battle system is so lengthy that you are forced to autocalc all but the most potentially interesting tactical battles...then I don't really see that as a good thing.

Sometimes you want to drive an easy tactical battle just to conserve resources or optimize.

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Quoting Lord Reliant,

reply 20

I was just about to bring Age of Mythology in as an example. In there, heroes were awesome against mythical units (beasts, special units, etc.), but a large army could defeat a single hero or another, smaller army. Heroes being great against monsters seems good, but being weak versus large armies would seem like a good balance mechanism.

I think that is a better solution and it would work if a single unit can not kill multiple units with one attack, but some creatures should have the special ability to kill multiple units with one attack.

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Quoting Creslin321,

reply 32

In Chess, you have a turn, you can decide whatever unit to move in that turn that you want. Giving you lots of strategic options.

OK. But this is a new objection, quite different from the one in your post and to which I was replying. Yes, chess and FE are not exactly the same.

I understand that theoretically, you might end up waiting a long time between the moves for one particular piece. but while you're waiting, all the other pieces are moving and doing interesting things. The game is not made more boring because there are more pieces. Yes, it might take a couple turns before your unit gets close enough to do damage, but the same is true in many games.

Quoting Creslin321,

reply 32

If the tactical battle system is so lengthy that you are forced to autocalc all but the most potentially interesting tactical battles...then I don't really see that as a good thing.

This is not responding to what I said. My point was that suggesting that adding units might make some tactical battles boring is not a valid criticism. There's already an autocalc feature which suggests that even the developers recognized that the tactical battles are not always going to be interesting.

The truth is that uninteresting, lopsided battles are a given in turn-based tactical combat. The number of units involved in the uninteresting, lopsided battles is irrelevant. Instead of taking 2 minutes to pointlessly march your units over and wack the wolfs, it takes 2.5 minutes, the horror! If you want to "drive an easy tactical battle just to conserve resources or optimize" then that's what you want to do.

And you want to talk about boring: in the current game, take your stack of doom and go and fight 3+ stacks of enemy units on the same turn then attack the city that those stacks were marching out of. The same exact battle fought four times! Just in case you didn't get enough excitement the first three times. That's how battles work in the end-game currently, because you can generate far more units than can be in a stack.

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