Unit Healing/ Unit HP on level-up problems

from Elemental Forums

This is sort of a bug and a request rolled into one, but I thought the idea forum might be the best place for it.

There are a lot of things that drive me nuts about this game, but it has such potential that I'd love to see it keep improving and become the game it can be.

One of the items that's driven me up a wall lately is how unit HP increases are treated at level up. I guess just for terminology clarification, I'll refer to HP as "full" if they are positive and "empty" if they are negative (like 12/16 HP means a unit has 12 full and 4 empty).

I'm not positive on how the mechanic is coded, but at level up I would think that any added HP would be added as full, so that said unit above with 12/16 would, if it gained 3 HP at level-up, be at 15/19.  Instead, the game codes this increase as a raise to 12/19.  That would be somewhat acceptable if it wasn't also the case that a unit that was 16/16 (totally healed) would go to 19/19 with a 3 HP gain, instead of 16/19 if HP were added as empty. 

This isn't a huge deal with heros/sovs/single units.  Usually the HP increase increment is small enough that a couple of turns in a town will take care of the healing.  No biggie.  I'd prefer consistency between fully healed and wounded units on level-up, but I can deal with this eccentricity. 

It does become a huge pain in the keister when you are dealing with a stack, though.  Because then the unit is in a situation where, worst case scenario, you have a stack of 12 that goes into battle as a level 1 (out hunting with your Sov, for example), and gets 2-3 level-ups in one battle.  This happens to me pretty frequently since I will try to level up my units against wild monsters instead of against other factions, and I'm often dragging level 1 units/champions in with my sov to get xp.  When a big unit gets 2-3 levels, it usually sees a huge increase in HP (I saw a Zealot Team today go from 94 max HP to 1228 max HP in two battles when it went from level 1 to level 5).  The problem with a unit gaining HP that rapidly is that if they don't have full HP when they gain the level up, they get all the new HP as "empty." 

That unit I just referred to took a 1 HP wound in the first battle.  By the end of the second battle, that 1 HP wound had become a 1100 HP catastrophe because of the addition of empty HP.  That unit will have to sit in town for 220 turns to heal fully because there's not faster healing available to me than the 5 HP at a time for sitting in town.  I might as well have lost the unit, instead of managing to get it 4 levels.  By the time the 220 turns are over, it will be totally obsolete because I will have researched it into oblivion.

Quite frankly, this is incredibly stupid.  Please fix this behavior. 

Two items that could use addressing immediately come to mind:

*First is the addition of empty HP.  Please get rid of this behavior.  I don't understand why this would be desirable, unless you want to preserve the ratio of empty to full in a leveled unit.  If that's the desired behavior, then do it that way.  I could see a case for saying that my 93/94 HP unit should become something like 1214/1228 HP to preserve the ratio.  I cannot see a case where a 93/94 HP unit becomes a 93/1228 HP unit.

*Second is the woeful options for healing.  Please let us research a building to allow faster healing, or allow Oasis spaces to act like hot springs and heal units faster, or allow the level of the city to determine healing speed, or link healing to training benefits (like the -25% training speeds healing by 25% too), or make healing progress exponentially in a resting unit so that first turn in town is 5, then 10, then 20, then 40, then 80, then 160... anything would be an improvement over the flat 5 per turn that we've got now.  Even if you get rid of the empty HP addition, I've still had instances where a unit takes forever to heal after a deadly battle, and at some point it just isn't worth it anymore.

8,620 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I don't understand. Just buy a health pack for heroes, 5hp/turn in the wild and +10 overall. Then research "Triage" from the civic tree to get the Healer's guild and all your level 3 cities can build a healer's temple, which gives +25hp/turn. Why have you not done this? :'(

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Something healing +x HP can never work in a game like Elemental where unit HP can range from 10 to 1000.

That's 2 orders of magnitude so until you include +100 and +200 HP per turn healing options, it's not working out.

With that kind of scale, the only healing that works is a factor.
Friendly territory:   5% per turn
Garrisoned in a city:  10% per turn
Healer's Temple:  +15 % per turn

That works for all units at all stages of the game. Because it scales.

 

Elemental: Reforged
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Robert, reply 2

With that kind of scale, the only healing that works is a factor.
Friendly territory:   5% per turn
Garrisoned in a city:  10% per turn
Healer's Temple:  +15 % per turn
 
End of Robert's quote

 

I would also very much like to see these healing rates implemented.

 

I was initially thinking more like 10% in the wild, and 25% in the cities, but I like the separation with the Healer's Guild being a significant improvement for combat-prone cities.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting seanw3, reply 1
I don't understand. Just buy a health pack for heroes, 5hp/turn in the wild and +10 overall. Then research "Triage" from the civic tree to get the Healer's guild and all your level 3 cities can build a healer's temple, which gives +25hp/turn. Why have you not done this?
End of seanw3's quote

 

I think that must be a mod.  I don't have those options, and I don't see them in the Homnomnomnom.

 

Quoting Malsqueek, reply 3

Quoting Robert Hentschke, reply 2
With that kind of scale, the only healing that works is a factor.
Friendly territory:   5% per turn
Garrisoned in a city:  10% per turn
Healer's Temple:  +15 % per turn
 
 

I would also very much like to see these healing rates implemented.

 

I was initially thinking more like 10% in the wild, and 25% in the cities, but I like the separation with the Healer's Guild being a significant improvement for combat-prone cities.
End of Malsqueek's quote

 

I like this line of thought.  I'd even go 10/25/50. 

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Well, write a proper bug report with less than a wall of text and suggest the solution.

The actual percentages are irrelevant. I just made them up on the spot.
Healing too well out in the boonies would devalue magical healing so I wouldn't overdo it with the %.

Maybe make it so that fortified units heal as well as in a city. Then they are resting and not running around...
Healing, yes, but with a tradeoff.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

The problem here isn't necessarily the healing problem... the problem is that a bit of XP causes a unit's hit points to balloon insanely.  Increase the amount of hit points at level 1, reduce the amount of hit points gained from leveling up, problem solved.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Healing was not the cause of the first bug.

The problem with healing was just the next domino stone.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

Another thing that could be done is have healer/medic units that help an army get back to full health quicker.

AoW has the heal ability usable once a turn either in or out of battle that units can have. Because the easily obtained healers are slow, you have to chose between a fast army or one that can do a sustained push... which can lead to specializing your forces between the two. Unless you are undead (most of who have the ability to fully regain hp every turn and are nearly all slow) or Draconians who get same ability (with a special structure, and have more fast units).

Adding healers / other support units to the game would result in more decisions when building an army.