Armor feedback needed

I'm going to investigate this ASAP (Martin Luther King days helps), but I was wondering: wouldn't it be more simple to make some change to the Attack vs. Damage formula ? For a simple formula, would this be too complicated to implement ? I've seen an example of such a formula that would probably give decent results with minimal changes to the rest of the game, or so it seems.

I don't think the problem is with monster or AI player armor being too high. Rather, the problem is the player having too much armor on his units and champions. This can create invincible units that can steamroll anything.

If I were you, I would hard-cap the mitigation of armor at 80%, 75% being the marker for armor equal to damage, and 80% being mitigation where armor*2 = damage.

In addition, currently the AI never uses shields or helms. As a player, I can get above 40 defense using a shield. So there is an overlap of problems here, where - if the AI starts using shields in the future - you could end up in a potentially devastating situation for players.

Yes, I agree with Heavefall, although instead of capping at 80%, I would think that the formula I've seen -  Max Damage=Attack*(Attack/(Attack+Armor))  -   seems to actually be quite good, and shouldn't be too hard to implement. The good part ? I would work quite okay with current armor/weapon values.

Edit: Credit goes to Pax Terminus.

It's both.  We can adjust the formula to make it so we dont get in invulnerable situations.  But we also want to make sure the defense values are reasonable.  If the info we get back is all normal/expected defense values then the formula tweak is all we need.  If we get data back with soem huge defense values thats coming from a place we aren't expecting then we may need to adjust those as well.

Since we're kind of on the subject, are you going to increase health on units across the board?

Health increase would be good, I don't like one shot kills (even late game). Though if it were done I'd like to see it as an increase to base health with no change to health gained per level. It's personal preference but I prefer experienced units to have an edge rather than dominate.

If we can suggest pie in the sky changes then I'd like to see health split into lethal and stun damage. If a weapon is not strong enough to bypass armour to do lethal damage then it does stun damage instead. Where stun damage can incapacitate units which can later be ransomed/indentured/etc. Doesn't even need to be two discreet bars of "health", it can be last damage type results in either death or unconsciousness. Where all stun damage it temporary and regained after the fight. That way you can have units that are hard to kill, but can still be removed from the fight.

Heavenfall was discussing a change that was withing the reach of 1.2. Also, I like this change. Maybe increase the power of training slightly, too ? I mean, x3 health will not help you against a 12-squad of glass cannons.

Here is an idea: 

You can have you're heavy, light, medium armor and what have you but what if we included a new attribute: SIZE.

• If  a small being is trying to hit something larger, the small being gets a bonus to hit.
• If a big being is trying to hit something smaller, the bigger being gets a penalty to hit.

Real world example: an elephant would have a pretty hard time stepping on a mouse but a mouse would have a pretty easy time biting an elephant.

Derailment successful.

Back to topic:

Haven't seen any invulnerable units (besides my own champions ofc) yet, but will keep an eye out.

Back to derailment:

I still don't think that's a good design, to have weapons that can do triple the damage of a regular units hp, armour or not. It will always force you to make armour very powerful, to avoid fights only to be about oneshots.

So, while a cap on damage absorption may help to make units not invulnerable anymore, as long as an unit can oneshot another unit without enough armour there won't be any fun balance imo.

Should our focus be on seeing if monsters spawned in the world have high defence or enemy units in general? As the more the AI is tweaked the more likely it will build units similar to the user, which will then be similarly invulnerable.

Monsters. AI will have the same gear as players. The idea is that they want to see if there are any 80 armor monsters leftover.

This. Also things might go better if everything just had more health in addition to much less protection from armor. This would help to alleviate the massive imbalance between quality vs quantity. My personal opinion is that even the lowliest peasant should have an affect on the battlefield, even if its minuscule, but I doubt that will happen without mods >_>

I dont see a problem with armor really, just the ease of getting legendary armor.

I have not had trouble with finding monsters too hard to kill.    There are a range of monsters some easy and some otherwise to deal with.   I would rather we had the ability to select frequency of monster spawning and degree of difficulty for monsters in the game set up.   But that is not the question you asked.

I don't sense that armor is overpowered as I have had some monsters kill well armored units.  The low level monsters have a great deal of difficulty killing heavily armored units and that is as it should be.

I have very early on had units that mobs don't have much if any chance of killing. This may be partly a tech tree issue as decent armour seems to be available very quickly.

I think the key thing that should come out of this is a robust formula to prevent the possibilities of becoming invulnerable. A well balanced set of armour values is desirable but not necessarily essential. So long as all the modding tools are there so the Modding comunity can rectify any perceved imbalances, or alter the ballance entirely.

and more hp for eveyone

NPC monsters have not been too tough.  They tend to be heavily weighted towards attack, anyway.  I've had a few cases where the AI will wind up with units with similar attack and defense values (10/9 in my last game), but nothing that I couldn't punch through.  The AI seems to prioritize attack over defense, and it may also under-prioritize military tech compared to players who know that they can become invincible.

Anyway, Kael, as far as I can see, it looks like there aren't any monsters with excessive (50+) armor.

• Not seeing any high defense creatures.
• Agree that formula needs to be modified to eliminate invulnerability.
• If HP's get buffed to accommodate higher damage, need to consider modifying health regen rates. For example, it takes 5 years for a unit to heal 100 hp by sitting in a city (5 hp per season = 20 hp per year = 5 years for 100 hp). 25 years if sitting in your ZOC outside of a city. Unrealistic to the point of absurdity.
• As long as I have enough gold, I can buy a stack of 20 salted porks or nectars for champions and instant heal for 100 hp either in or outside of combat (another reason to spam champions over normal units).

Thanks for listening, Derek. That's my two pairs of pants, one with pockets. Credit to Wintersong.

As other people have said it's high armor units and champions that are the problem. Just race up the tech tree to equipment and then armor. It's easy to build high armor units and champions that are basically immune to attack from monsters and badly designed AI units. I mean even half a suit of padded armor makes you practically immune to spiders and other tier one and two monsters.

Armor is just to good. It constantly sits around the same value as dmg. Since there is so little difference between the two even 2-3 armor makes a huge diffrence in a fight. This makes makes weapons that do even 1 less dmg much worse even if they grant another attack. It also makes dodge useless. 1 dodge will make you 1% more likely to dodge but 1 armor always reduces the dmg you take substantially or makes you invincible because the difference between dmg and defense is usaully very small.

I know that it would be difficult to reduce armor any more without going into fractions because armor is divided into so many parts, and most of those parts already only have a 1 point difference over their older versions. Heavenfall suggested capping dmg but I disagree, thats a artificial solution. I think just reducing the effectiveness of armor to dmg from a 1:1 ratio to .5:1 or something would be better. That way armor still works the same but 2-3 armor wouldn't make the difference between weakness and total invincibility. Health could also to be increased to compensate for the reduced survivability of units.

Good ideas. Another way to deal with invulnerability would be to keep the current system but add critical hits that ignore armor. Chance of a critical hit could be based on some underdog stat like dexterity. Actually it could be made as a difference between attacker's and defenders dexterity. Higher the difference in favor of attacker, the greater is the chance of a critical hit.

None of the armor / defense / dodge really bother me that much.

What armor defends against the vastly over-powered Out-Of-Memory-Error ?

 I think just reducing the effectiveness of armor to dmg from a 1:1 ratio to .5:1 or something would be better. That way armor still works the same but 2-3 armor wouldn't make the difference between weakness and total invincibility. Health could also to be increased to compensate for the reduced survivability of units.

That would not change the problem, I think (mostly because of the 12-stacks issue, which makes armor very difficult to balance in the current system). The whole attack vs. armor formula has to change.

In the last fight of the quest of mastery you have to fight a guy with 100!!! defense. He is immune to almost anything except for magic. Even my sovereign with his sword of wrath couldnt hit him.

Just to second this :

The only ways to damage the Hermit are:

- Use direct damage spells

- Dragons using their breath attack

- Savage strike heroes

- Rock golems area effect attack etc

The Hermit is totally immune to any trainable unit.