How to nerf heroes and make armies count!

from Elemental Forums

 

Use Romance of the Three Kingdoms Army System in this Game!

Any one ever played this great series? Armies are 10s of thousands of men not 3 or 4. Heroes depending on there level can lead thousands more troops. Cities populations and heroes levels supply how many troops you can recruit.

As of now:

Troops don't matter.

Population does not matter.

Heroes are just tank units grouped together with other heroes wiping the map.

 

Make all of these things useful with ROTK system!

 

How cool would it be to see each hero leading different armies of 10,000 men?

Would not be too hard to implement! Just shrink and change the soldier icons to a large groups of a bunch of little soldiers. Give the heroes a leveling ability to lead these armies! Armies cannot move without heroes leading them! Heroes cannot defeat large armies on their own they actually need their own armies to do so!

7,229 views 10 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

No one else ever played this game? Opinions? Think it would work?

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Game features are already locked.  There's just some balancing, lots of bug fixes, maybe some UI changes.  That's all that will happen.

 

If you don't like it, my best advice to you is to learn to mod.  Lots of things you can do, that way, and Brad's promised us some very nice modding tools upon game release.  Even now, there are some modders out there who do very interesting work.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Glazunov1, reply 2
Game features are already locked.  There's just some balancing, lots of bug fixes, maybe some UI changes.  That's all that will happen.

 

If you don't like it, my best advice to you is to learn to mod.  Lots of things you can do, that way, and Brad's promised us some very nice modding tools upon game release.  Even now, there are some modders out there who do very interesting work.
End of Glazunov1's quote

 

Yeah I just figured it would not be too hard to change as it would be just more of an tweak or adjustment:

Just shrink and change the soldier icons to a large groups of a bunch of little soldiers and change the stats to army levels. Give the heroes a leveling ability to lead these armies! Armies cannot move without heroes leading them! Heroes cannot defeat large armies on their own they actually need their own armies to do so!

Thought it would be a great way to change the current problem of never needing to build units and just using heroes to wipe the map...

I will definitely be modding this game but I doubt this is something I could mod into the game?

 

 

 

 

 

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Correct, I can't think of any way to limit army movement to champion movement.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

The hero/army problem is something that can definitely be worked out in Beta 5.  It's all about finding the balance between leveling, troop-dependent research, gear, and maintenance costs.  

There are plenty of very simple (and very bad) ways to make armies more desirable than heroes.  It's not a problem that requires new systems to solve.  The difficulty will be in balancing the two existing systems so that they feel like a real choice.  Right now there's no reason to choose troops unless you're just determined to play with troops.  In nearly any situation, properly leveled/geared heroes will get the job done and get it done sooner in the game.  

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Heavenfall, reply 5
Correct, I can't think of any way to limit army movement to champion movement.
End of Heavenfall's quote

It's not possible to give a unit 0 movement?  So that it's only movement points come when its combined with a champion who has +2 moves or whatever?

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

That's a small change that would have huge implications. I don't think you'll get anywhere with it, mostly the ai will just break down.. 

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Heavenfall, reply 8
That's a small change that would have huge implications. I don't think you'll get anywhere with it, mostly the ai will just break down.. 
End of Heavenfall's quote

 

fair enough. though hopefully modders will have the tools to teach the ai how to play the mod. otherwise modding will be limited to skinning and tweaking. that would be disappointing.

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

Well, there is a difference between what you are asking it to do and what most mods will ask it to do. I can tell the AI to revalue techs in my mod, but I can't tell it to use a technology that does something incomprehensible to the AI. I can tell the AI to use mostly bows, but I can't teach the AI to choose new weapons based on a battles situation and then equip them ingame. A human can do that. The AI currently can't. You have to get in there with both hands and get dirty before you really understand what can be done.

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

I personally find troops to be relatively useful as damage soaks and distractions for roaming enemies.  This may be because I generally only find two or three champions to recruit in a given game - champion density seems amazingly sparse - and some of these have absolutely ridiculous recruitment fees (I once found one who wanted more than 3000 gildar for his signing bonus).

That being said, I think that troops could feel more useful if the level-up bonus was switched from +accuracy and +health to being +accuracy and +dodge, with a lower limit enforced for the hit-chance.  You could still end up with high-level units that are essentially unkillable by low-level units, but you would at least do some harm when you successfully hit the target.  The way it is now, you have a champion or two with a lot of health who usually dodge attacks and also usually only take hits for three or four points of damage, which can basically be ignored.  This is then compounded by the fact that the champions should usually hit their targets, and if they have weapons like the lightning hammers, they are going to be hitting for much more damage than they will receive - although this is an imbalance in the weapon.

Despite the above, I don't think Stardock is going to switch the +health on level-up for +dodge on level-up - this is simply something that I feel would be better, mainly because you can set a limit on the hit chance and then balance for an average number of hits to kill for certain ratios of attacker accuracy and defender dodge, whereas units which have constantly growing health pools simply take longer to kill.