Balancing Stacks Ideas

from Elemental Forums

Ive been thinking hard about what can be done to make stacks less ridiculous and came up with a few workable ideas.

*Firstly stacks shouldn't have a defense bonus for being stacks except maybe a small one if they have shields for some kind of shield wall effect.

*Secondly all infantry gain way too much hp and other stats too quickly. 5 to 8 hp from lv1 to 2, lv 2 should give like +1 hp not +3. Champions dont get the bonuses per level that soldiers do.

*Stack members should not attack from beyond the grave. Dead stackies should have their damage taken from the group so if only 1 guy is left in the stack then only his personal damage is dealt.

*Damage Multipliers. Stacks are guys shoved together like sardines and they should receive damage from spells and abilities to reflect this. Hit a stack with a flame dart and it should take normal damage as only one guy gets hit, a fireball however should deal like 2X damage because fire would burn the guy it smoked plus his friends next to him. This goes double for spells like chain lightning where it's supposed to hit all guys in an area but ignores dudes holding hands like they are one guy. Chain lightning type spells should do damage multiplied by the number of units in a stack. to balance you could lower its damage however. To take it one step further you could make giant monsters and volleys of arrows deal extra damage to stacks too. I think this would go a long way to balancing the game, giving a reason to not stack guys and make monsters more threatening late game.

 

elemental
2,718 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I just don't feel the sentiment that stacks are overpowered & ridiculous. They only "seem" ridiculous because the AI doesn't effectively counter them. Stacks are capped at 12, and most units operate singly (summoned monsters in particular). Eventually, summoned monsters become obsolete as squad & warfare tech increases, but they're effective early in the game (like the first 100 turns). I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of leadership trait though that defines a max stack size (instead of the arbitrary 12). Some non-adventure leaders should be more limited as to maximum stack size (say half of 12), only champions with very good leadership would get the full 12 units per stack. Units without leaders, say, are limited to 4 per stack.

.. something like that anyway.

Of course, the AI should arbitrarily be given an increased stack size, say by 3 on "ridiculous" setting, 2 on "hard", one on "average" none on easy.

Most TB wargames usually have some kind of command & control mechanism that defines how many units a general type leader can influence. In this game, it would be very easy to have a "leadership" trait that can leveled up just like any other trait but defines how many units can be included in the leader's stack. Only a couple of very strong units would could have very large stacks (just like there's only a couple of 5 or 4 star generals in real life).

But, I don't think you're talking about "stacks" as much as "squad" size. The attacks & defense of "squads" are just added together. i.e. a 4-man squad with attack 16 defence 20 and 24 hitpoints really has 4 individual guys each with 4 atk, 5 def, and 6 hp. From what I understand, the system just calculates 4 seperate attacks (each of the four guys) and adds the end result. In other words, it's not multiplicative but additive. The end result is that you can cram more guys into a "stack" (not squad). So, instead of 12 single guys capped (as it is before you get 4man squad tech) you can have 48 guys capped (12 groups of 4-men), and later 8 man squads once that tech is unlocked (12 groups of 8 or 96 men in a "stack").

I can understand what you're saying with the spells, but you're realling paying a lot more for the squads than for singles (a well equiped 4-man archer team of mine costs 300 gold in addition to other resources & crystal). That's quite expensive, so I would expect to see my money's worth on the battlefield .. this is like paying for a tiger tank instead of a sherman.

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

Dittos to the stack members not attacking from beyond the grave (EWoM seems to have this as a feature, like Janusk giving advice from beyond the grave as mentioned in another thread :-p). Not only that, say the stack is down to 1 out of 12, station him in a city, or cast Mass Heal and they are back from the grave to 12 strength, lol. It should be like Heroes of Might & Magic, where the number of units is unlimited in a stack, but once a unit dies, it doesnt get replaced (but there were two spells in HoM&M, one which brought back dead units for duration of battle, and one which brought back permanently, and you never lost units once you learned the second spell)

Another unbalanced feature (mentioned in another thread) is the first strike thingy. If you attack, then the archers usually mow down other units before  they even have a chance to hit once. In my last game, my total strength was 472 or such, I attacked a city and found that the combined strength of defenders was like 4800. I went whoa! but then the battle screen came up and there are like 30 or 40 individual units. The area of effect spell took them down 9 at a time, and I finished some more off with archers. By the time they had a chance to move, they were down to about 8 individual units.

Mentioned in yet another thread, where are the different types of units, like say flying units which would be out of reach of any except archers and magical spells.

I havent played multiplayer yet, where these issues should not be a factor. Still, lots of things we hope will get fixed in the future along with further improvements (does not include the things listed in "Ridiculous Requests.." thread, lol)

Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

*Stack members should not attack from beyond the grave. Dead stackies should have their damage taken from the group so if only 1 guy is left in the stack then only his personal damage is dealt.
End of quote

In one of my latest games I think I saw the damage of a party drop as it lost men.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

The problem with stacks is they grow exponentially more powerful as their size increases.  A four-man stack is more than four-times as powerful as a four singleton stacks.  This is made worse by the fact that you actually get a considerable training-time bonus for making bigger stacks.  Once you get rolling, there's really no reason to build anything but the largest stack available, because it completely decimates the smaller stacks.

Archers are another issue altogether, but I totally agree; they're dominating the battlefield currently.  I mass nothing but archers; don't even need melee units, the archers just kill everything on the first or second turn.  The "Master Archer" kingdom trait is essentially broken; I can bee-line economy to get my gold production up, get one tech for groups, and then dominate the entire game.

Totally agree on unit hit points.  A 60% increase in hit points going from level 1 to 2 is totally unacceptable.  The problem is that base hit points are pathetic, so even the relatively miniscule 3 hit points is proportionally way out of line.  I've had archers (single archers) with nearly 20 hit points before.  This puts their hit points at the level of champions, which as mentioned don't get hit points from levels (they NEED to)