Defend ability should last until defender's next turn

I'd even be okay if it lasted until the Defended unit attacked (not including a counter attack), or something like that.  Even if you had to Pass with the defended unit in order to keep it, at least it would have some use and you could plan around it.  Ending at the beginning of the unit's turn is too random and often useless.

I have lost track of the number of times people have said this very thing. I have a two part question:

1) where do you draw the line as a designer between players complaining that "this power doesn't work the way I think it should" and clear decision that the designer is going to stick with what they decided? What do you do when you sincerely believe that the design decision is a correct one, and that people who play the designed game are not used to puzzle solving games/ rogue like games where you don't know how things work until you figure it out? Have we lost an era of gaming where people don't like under the hood mechanics (I don't mean not moddable, just that hard numbers don't some into normal gameplay)

2) If you had an alternate ability available, defensive in nature, that was meant for a swift attacker rather than a slow, methodical one, what would it be ?

It's likely that people keep bringing it up for a reason...

When an ability works in a way that is inconsistent and not useful, that's a good place to start.  The ability sometimes is still in effect when the guarding unit takes his next turn (meaning he can't apply it again even if he wants to), and sometimes is over immediately as soon as his turn ends.  This is not consistent, and having it wear off immediately when cast is not useful in the slightest.  It's assumed that abilities in the game are meant to be useful.

I don't understand the question.  The defensive ability is meant to defend another unit.  If it worked in a way that was consistent with a slow, methodical defender (lasting until the defender's next turn instead of the unit's next turn), then we wouldn't have a problem.  If it worked in a way that was consistent with a unit needing to stay under protection (lasting until the unit attacked, or perhaps until the unit did something other than passed), then we wouldn't have a problem.  The issue is that it works in a way that is athematic, relies too much on abstract initiative order, and is less than useful.  When you talk about the "speed of the attacker," I don't know if you're talking about the unit that is defending, the unit that is being defended, or the unit that is attacking...   If you're talking about the "attacker", then it works slightly better, but still inconsistently, when the attacker is swift rather than slow.

I have to agree with EstyleS.

This has nothing to do with it. After the first time I used it, I perfectly understood how it works. It's not complicated. There's nothing puzzle or rogue-like about it. It's just almost useless as it is.

My alternate ability would be exactly what I said: the defensive bonus lasts until the defender moves again. (It could be negated if defendee moves instead of staying put and attacking/casting, as mentioned above.) Then the ability would be useful. As it is now it's a waste of a skill point.

How often do you use this ability?

the problem with this ability is that it puts the guarded units in defensive stance, and once their turn starts, that boost automatically goes away, like with the normal defensive stance (from passing the turn).

 i think it would be overpowered if the units could attack and still retain their defensive stance bonus. you can get that ability early on (level 4/5, possibly even sooner since at least one of the level 1 champions has it as a starting trait). just build some units with "defensive" trait, use them to attack and spam guard on them to permanently keep them in defensive mode. that would be pretty much unstoppable.

it's already quite good as it is. depending on the initiative list, you can attack with your soldiers, then get them back into def stance before the enemy attacks. and you also get the champion's base defense as a bonus on top of the def stance. it's not like the defender champs are any good at attacking - their only job is to be in def stance and soak damage. with this ability, they can use their high defense and simultaneously buff one or more friendly units with a big defense boost. doesn't seem useless to me. it's a free action, so why not use it. the alternative is to pass turns (or attack with the defender, which doesn't make much sense most of the time)

I'll admit this ability is bit quirky, but I agree with Azunai... it won't work if you try to make Guard stay in effect until the Defender's next turn; otherwise, you'd be giving your guys +30 defence and letting them attack and keeping the +30 defence even after they attacked.  Then we'd have to read a "Guard is OP'ed!!!!" post and I do not want to read another <Fill-in-the-Blank> is OP'ed!!!! post.

I didn't realize the ability could not be used again if the casters turn starts again and the protected unit has not gone yet, that is unfortunate. I quite agree with trojasmic that we don't want the ability to linger in effect for too long. I can only make one suggestion for the ability to be really effective but not too powerful. Instead of it ending at the beginning of the protect units turn, it should turn off at the end of the protected units turn.

This way I high initiative unit, which would usually be a sword type unit, given the initiave penalty of other weapons, would be protected from the counterattack damage.

Those are all fair points. From my limited experience, though, it was basically pointless. Let me explain:

I got Mausolus (or however you spell it) pretty early on and he came with it. Just about every battle I had with his army I'd try to use the ability. It would go: Mousolus is up; look at initiative list; nope, my spearmen/assassin/everyone else attack before the enemy; do something else. I think I successfully used it once throughout the entire game. I'll fully grant that I wasn't optimizing around it, but the other hero in that army was using Eviscerate constantly so it felt a bit lackluster.

It felt like the defender+assassin partnership should have been perfect, but instead it was the assassin doing all the work and taking all the damage and poor little Mausy plinking away for 5-10 damage per turn.

I would call this an opportunistic type ability. If the characters get to move, then they should remove their defense, kind of hard to guard someone when they keep moving. I wouldn't say the skill is useless either. If you model your play style around turtle, where you build a large group of high defense characters, then this guard ability will not be wasted in that group. But a turtle cannot protect a rabbit type character. The strategy for this ability is different than what people would intend for the ability. I wouldn't like to see a change to the base system, but try your hand at changing the ability. Switch the duration on the other individual to be 2 instead of 1, and that will keep the spell working for another turn, see if that works the way you intend.

Some skills should cause strategic choices to be made. It is not like this skill has to be chosen by any means, and if chosen you need to model how you play around that style. This is a theme throughout this game, on the play style of people. Things seem weak and other seem strong, but in the right hands and strategy each of these can be rather strong. I've used the turtle units, a group of very HIGH defense units, and turtle my way up to the enemy use guard on top of the high defense and the other units can only do critical damage for 2 points. Needless to say you win when they can't penetrate your defenses. The simple counter to this is the spell curse, or a very rabbit high attack units.

The developers have encompassed a large variety of play styles into one game, which makes it seem like some spells are useless while others overpowers, when in some sense this might not be the case. I do like my turtle troops... I always ask them if they are "turtle enough for the turtle club"... (movie reference)

I think I'm starting to come around on this ability. I still think it should last until the defender's next turn, but agree that units shouldn't retain the bonus if they move. Maybe have the defender fortify the tiles, instead of the units?

But I'll agree that it would have been more useful if I'd had a different style army. I had some rabbits and some turtles, and the rabbits moved frequently enough that the ability was quite impractical. And the enemy (rightfully) would prioritize the rabbits as targets. If I'd had turtles and archers (not sure what those are in the animal analogy) it would probably have been better.

I still think the ability might not be as useful as it should be in more heavily turtle-oriented armies. It would still only work if the correct enemy struck between your defender's move and your turtles' moves.

(Finally I will note that Mausolus starts with this ability so I did not "choose" it, but hey, can't complain about a free hero.)

I think the main thing I'm having with this ability is that it would be so awesome in the right circumstance and I'm frustrated that this circumstance never appeared for me.

One issue to be aware, is that the enemy could potentially kill a unit then move to this newly defended spot from your units if you turtle didn't move yet. That would be a problem.

I would say porcupine (they shoot quills)

Yes, this frustrates me with some things as well, but if you build around with this in mind, well planned uses of haste can change some of the dynamic in the initiative seen. Also, if you have enough turtles with this ability, you can utilize this ability effectively in those cases. It's really a direct counter to a rabbit enemy, or against porcupines. It can also be effective against rhinos as well, for that initial charge up.

Animal analogies are fun... don't know if they actually help with explanations though.

Well I think once you've defined what animals are what they help, as shorthand.

True, but as long as we're changing things in imaginary land we might as well make that bonus only apply to friendly units.

That would be a far more clever use of haste than I'd ever be able to pull off. I think the problem is that when you're using this ability, all of a sudden what you want to happen is inverted: normally you want to always go faster, faster, and before the enemy, but now you want to slow down and let the enemy go first. As a general mechanic this can certainly be great when done right, but I'm not sure this is the case.

I think this is what I was missing--you really should apply it to other slow-moving units. It still seems a somewhat limited use case as it's really finicky about whether your hero goes before or after your other troops, etc. I just think that's not something that's fun to have to manipulate. Faster or heavier than enemies, sure, definitely that's a good tradeoff. Faster or slower than your allies? Not so much. (Also, are there troops with that ability? I can't imagine having more than one defender with that ability in an army.)

Anyway, I've now put way too much thought into this.

Think henchmen

Eh, agree to disagree I suppose, but when I saw this complaint first (unlike Glowing_Ember, I have kept count - 3 times so far), after playing the game, it was the farthest thing from my mind that this could be working as intended.  It just doesn't make any sense to me.

Would it be overpowered for a unit to be able to attack and keep its defense bonus?  I don't think so.  You say that otherwise the Defender would just be pinging away for 5 damage, so since he might as well do nothing anyway, it doesn't waste his attack.  But that's because he's built to give up offensive power in exchange for defending others.  You could have built a strong offensive hero, but instead you built a defensive hero - instead of attacking with him, you give up his attack in order to defend another unit.  That defense boost should last until he gets a chance to act again.  You might say, "well, he can defend more than one unit", but usually only one of those units gets attacked anyway, and the slight chance to be more useful than just defending the one who gets attacked is offset by defensive play being generally inferior to offensive.  If you had built an offensive champion, he'd just destroy an enemy unit that thus wouldn't get to attack.  When you build a defensive one, you hope to reduce the damage done by the enemy's attacks - as long as they don't have elemental damage.  If half of the time your defensive champion is unable to do either one, that seems like a problem.

"You can't defend a unit that moves too fast?"  I still don't get this one.  You'd think that a defender would be more interested in defending weaker units, who tend to have a higher initiative, rather than slow units, who are usually slow because they're wearing a lot of armor.  Even if the buff only lasted until the unit attacked or moved away, it would be more useful, because you could defend a unit that was drinking a potion or also trying to defend themselves.  "Don't worry, I'll protect you..."  *thwack* "Hey what happened?"  "Sorry, you moved your shield slightly.  I didn't know how to continue to protect you."  Even if you are using it to defend a slow unit, you have to play the weird game of matching initiative levels and hoping for the monsters to fall in between your units - the initiative mechanic is just an abstraction of weapon speed, it just feels wrong for there to be too much emphasis on the additional subgame of playing the order (going first, going more often, trying to wear lighter equipment to get better initiative - all makes sense; trying to move slower to keep buffs from wearing off - breaks immersion for me).

I suppose I could mod it to work for 2 of the defendee's turns, but that's not really how it should work either.  It should work until the defender stops defending or until the unit moves away, and I don't think you can mod that (although maybe adding a defense bonus to the square for a turn would work, like someone mentioned above).  Also, I'm not sure if allowing it to work for two turns would allow it to be stacked (you can't re-apply the effect to just one unit, but if there is one unit in the AoE that has the buff and one unit that doesn't have the buff, you can apply it - don't know what happens to the one that was already buffed, though I'm assuming it doesn't stack)...

that's a matter of perspective. a unit that keeps its defense while attacking would be overpowered (imo), especially in the early game. when you start out, your units have 0 defense, and about 6-8 defense with leather armor (+wooden shield if one handed weapon). with defensive bonuses, you get +15 (and another +5 from shield). that's a big difference. a 8 defense unit will take a lot more damage then a 28 defense unit. and that's not even counting the defense bonus of the guard ability itself (which adds the base defense of the champion on top of the def stance bonus)

also, i think you misunderstand the purpose of the defender. his main job is not buffing others. his main job is to soak damage himself. the defender gets big bonuses to defense while in defense mode, so it makes no sense to use him for attacking. in other words, the default action of the defender is "pass", to preserve the huge defense bonus. with the guard ability, he can actively buff one or more allies without giving up his defense stance, so he does his job and buffs other guys on top of it. the defender is actually the guy who takes the blows, guard is really just there to protect fellow melee units that have to get into melee range of the enemy to deal damage.

Yeah, I get this, but without any sort of aggro mechanic (and generally I find aggro mechanics debatable at best) there's no reason to attack a defender. Sure there are a couple situations where he can block off access to archers/mages, but if you rely on melee damage at all (and I think probably 75% of the time you will) then the enemy can hit those melee'ers without worrying about the defender, because said melee unit is already adjacent to the enemy. I could understand tying down one particular enemy while the rest of your army circles round to hit others, but that's also a pretty rare case. (Contrast with warrior, assassin, mage, who are guaranteed to be useful in every battle (excepting the occasional magic-immune/physical-immune etc).)

in my games, defenders tend to be the core of the army (either defender champions or defense units). majority of the enemies are melee, so there's always stuff you can safely tank while the damage specced units kill the rest of the enemies. if the defender champ tanks 2-3 units (which is very common), those units will not deal any significant damage while the rest of my army overwhelms the remaining enemies. 

even if you rely heavily on melee units, there's nothing wrong with sending in the defender first and holding the damage dealers back for a turn. the enemy attacks the defender, which means they basically waste their attacks and lose their defensive bonus, which is very significant in the early game (not so much later). attacking an enemy unit that is still in def stance is not very efficient when your units are something like 8x3 attack (finesse spearmen or basic axemen for example). when the enemy loses their def stance by attacking your tank, they take a lot more damage, so this is the perfect time to strike hard with impale/cleave. even if the defender just tanks for 1-2 turns, the result can be a decisive victory with no losses (other than a handful of HP on the tank that will be regenerated quckly), whereas an uncoordinated zerg charge can easily end with several dead or severely wounded units on your side, which means wasted seasons for healing and rebuilding lost units.

so yeah, defense has its place and it's a very powerful mechanic once you get used to it and learn when to strike and when to defend.