[0.95]Armor and Encumbrance

First of all let me say I love 0.95 and that every update so far has been a huge improvement.

That said, of course there are some issues with it.

1) Armor OP

I play as Yithril and Gilden mostly, teams good with armor, but the protection granted by each tier of armor seems rediculous.

I can easily dominate any nearby players and any monster smaller than a forest Drake once i build two groups of leather armor spearmen. Troops with leather armor take almost no damage from most monsters or weapons of around the same level. Sovs just laugh at everything once I buy them leather armor + random loot.

I can conquer small/medium maps just on the huge difference between leather armor and unarmored troops.

2)Monsters are Terrible

The vast majority of monsters have no defense and seem to exist to die in one shot. Darklings/Spiders/Bandits/Syndicate/Wildlings/Wolves/Banished Ogres and many tougher monsters need a large buff. They are only threatning to unarmored low level troops. Even a lv 3 Sov can just wade through them. A basic group of 3 troops with spears could kill around 6 darkling warriors. Any unit with leather armor is totally immune to attacks by all the above, and it's now a level one tech. Most Sovs at Lv 3 could probably decimate them in the Dozens. Monsters need to scale better so that even the weakest lairs can challange you over the course of the game, it takes a lot of the fun out of the game when I can just leave my cities unguarded and roam have my Sov roam around the map 1 shotting 90% of stuff.

The weakness of monsters also affects the ones you build. Darklings and Ogres are utterly terrible when built by players. Armor is just super important and they don't have it. Same with the units created through binding. Mid-game anything without at least leather levels of armor is just fodder.

Also Lair guardians should never leave their lairs and lairs should spawn weaker roaming monsters more often.

When you kill a Lair you should be eliminating a threat, not feeding your Sov loot and exp.

3)Encumbrance Should be Expanded

I feel that encumbrance as stands is a little shallow. It seems odd that strength traits generally only raise Initiative by 2, the same as most Inititaive bonuses from traits like fast. Ive thought up two ideas that could work.

A)Make Initiative lower dodge as well. This makes sense and expands dodge, a shallow and little used stat.

B)Make the initiative penalty from encumbrance a % of total Initiative. This would would make it so that fast heroes cant ignore encumbrance penalties, making strength more necessary for heavy gear.

Also encumbrance traits seem a little uninspired, the game could benefit from a cheap encumbrance trait like, Bulky: +15 Strength, -5 dodge, -5 accuracy.

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DsRaider

Join Date 11/2008

+70

You bring up a lot of good points here. I also find that while leather armor is a first level tech it allows you to stomp any unarmored units using say clubs or even spears. Maybe nerf leather a bit and increase the armor penetration of spears by a bit so they are more of a hard counter. Armor does make beating the AI much easier, since it tends to build a fair amount of unarmored units. Part of the problem is the available unit designs. Pretty much every unit should have a encumbrance trait and be able to upgrade their armor.

I also find that armor allows players to easily farm all but the toughest monsters. More armor penetrating attacks for monsters and making them gain more attack and armor as they level would help with this. As it stands the bonus for leveling monsters is not nearly good enough. This is especially true for Binding. Binding starts off good but the units from it quickly lose their effectiveness. When you get chainmail they are pretty much wasted space. The fix for this would be a simple increase the to level of bound elementals produced by higher level shards, and make the bonus for leveling bound elementals higher. Even burning wraiths should have some armor at high levels. It's common sense that unless monsters have comparable stats to groups of 5 with chainmail and maces they won't be effective midgame.

I also would like to see more diversity and choice in armor when designing troops. It takes a fair amount of time to get chainmail and once you get it it basically completely replaces leather. This is very very boring and leaves you with no choices. I would like to see a heavier set of armor available early game so you have to choose between the two. Even a simple heavy iron breastplate. You should be choosing between heavy and light armors all game not just gradually getting better armor.

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I believe the next major changes will include balancing, but it never hurts to get a head start, heh. Good points to consider, though I feel the AI opponents should ultimately provide a tougher challenge than most monsters; the wilderness critters exist because you have not come along to clean them out yet (and should not be on par with the might of another developing nation).

Once our dedicated devs get the gameplay mechanics just right, they can focus on these kinds of balancing tricks, and, once they know how everything works, they can beef up the AI (how the game plays against the player). Then we'll have a true contest.

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