Vallu751

My wish list: 1) Special abilities for units. Not just activated, but passive too 2) Gaussian function for damage. Doesn't have to be MoM exactly 3a) Magic resistance as a separate value and/or 3b) Spells that specify what they will be resisted with: Confusion with magic resistance / intelligence, magically hurled rocks with DEF, etc. 4) Estimated damage indicator when hovering mouse over an enemy unit 5) Display squad stats better. Right now AT

I'd like to see the MoM approach. Every school has more than one book. You can either take all the books from one school or a collection from several schools. The more books you have from one school, the greater the amount of rare spells you get from that school. And definitely make the schools more unique and varied. Again referring to MoM, it was a very rare occasion that I used a direct damage spell in combat. I mostly started with combat-wide enchantments like prayer, unholy praye

You can't do a scholars mate without your queen [e digicons];)[/e] Other than that, I fully agree with your response.

The channelers happened. Gameplay has changed since the betas, so it isn't as obvious anymore. It was originally designed that only channelers are powerful enough to create fertile land, but that wasn't ideal in terms of gameplay.

Finally! With 1.08 I might actually start playing again.

Interesting. I've avoided the later AoW games after the AI of the first one was a disappointment. There wasn't much fight in it. After you established a decent stack, you could just walk all over the map with it. Maybe you're just playing too defensively? To anyone who can offer help to the original poster, can you comment on how good the AI of AoW SM is?

Nice work p22! [e digicons]k1[/e]

[quote who="aerowreck" reply="5" id="2763401"] - Stacking archer units, and melee for that matter, as unit of consisting more than one being should be handled as MoM did. Hitpoints got added together, and when the unit was hit, figures perished and when the unit was healed, they came back. Damage should be handled something like, if the unit 4 figures each with attack power 6, it would shoot 4 arrows each with 6 attack power and "rolled" separately against defending armor. If a figure ha

Thanks for the save p22. I posted a link to your post in the other thread too, so the devs don't miss it.

In another thread , the dev LikeTheWhirlwind said: "ATK goes down as squads lose troops. So 0 - ATK/NumTroops is still correct. I agree with you though that the currently displayed ATK and DEF for squads is misleading and unintuitive."

[quote who="Gravedancer" reply="3" id="2760317"]I haven't played enough games to get a feel for it, but seems like it's best to create a bunch of cities before going up in the tech that spawns new resources. Pick your location and the resources will come. Am I right in my thinking that the resources only spawn around your cities? I do wish it was more Civ like (I'm sure they're tired of hearing that by now).[/quote] The amount of resources spawned by the techs is con

Yeah, I made a request to display the individual ATK and DEF on the units here . The individual values should be used for calculations as well, the game is going through an unnecessary loop now. And that loop appears to be buggy as well. If you want to up the urgency, go make a short comment on that thread. Stardock prioritizes their work according to the amount of people asking for stuff.

Glad to hear the calculations are correct. Several people are reporting abnormally high damage or surprisingly resilient defenders when troop count is reduced in a unit. I wonder if there's a bug somewhere, perhaps caused by the same calculations that are causing squad troop counts to diminish in certain conditions. Level-ups after combat if the squad was damaged, stationing in cities with hp bonuses and such. The remaining trooper becomes the sole soldier of the unit and retains the summed u

Oh, and by the way. As Tanafres pointed out in the above thread, hopefully the engine is using (0-ATK)/MaxSquadSize instead of (0-ATK/NumTroops) like the dev suggested.

According to a developer response here , squads roll (0-ATK/NumTroops) against (0-DEF/NumTroops) in combat. The current way of showing a sum of ATK and DEF on the unit cards is very misleading. Those numbers are never used for anything and require knowledge not available in the game to understand. Let's take an example of an 8 man squad with 64 ATK and 64 DEF fighting against a giant with 50 ATK 40 DEF. It looks li

[quote who="Lfseeney" reply="21" id="2760144"] Hopefully this is what is happening but as of yet I have found no info, form the devs to support it. [/quote] Like p22 said, it's the second option. Please read the whole thread, especially the post from LikeTheWhirlwind. He's a dev.

Gene: Well said. I think the most important point in your post is the ending. "It's a game an all". A game is an entertainment product. The combat system that brings out the greatest entertainment is therefore the best. I suggest you find Sid Meier's research on game combat, it's predictability and how it affects gamer experience. There was an excellent article in this months Pelit - magazine. Gamers don't find it enjoyable if the randomizing causes them losses that were not p

Faster typing and good points from MxM111 :-)

I guess that's an advantage. More predictable is generally better. I wouldn't necessarily call it a big strength. I think the biggest strengths of squads involve being able to place more men into the same space, everyone getting healed if only one survives and buffing spells like haste affecting more men at the cost of a single spell. I wouldn't mind if the 1-N rolls were made a bit more predictable too. Champions are at a disadvantage because the rolls vary so much. It isn't so bad t

Thank you very much LikeTheWhirlwind. It's great news that the system is almost like my guess number 4. The only difference here is that damage after reducing defense is applied in it's entirety. That's something that I can live with. It would be very, very nice to have the actual numbers displayed on the UI! Right now we see the sum of all members of the unit, even though that number is never actually used in the calculation! Very misleading. p22: Let's take an example of wha

Did I phrase my question poorly or doesn't anyone know how squad combat works? Isn't this a rather central aspect of the game?

Warfare tech level as such doesn't matter. What matters is the choices you make when the technology levels up. You need to choose better equipment and when making the choice you can see which items should become available. If you have chosen the equipment techs, then there might be a bug involved. Are you trying to custom design units or choosing the automatically generated units? The auto-generation doesn't always offer new unit types when you get a new tech level.

Despite reading these forums a lot, I still don't know how tactical combat works when squads are involved. With single man units it's really straightforward. Roll attack, roll defense. Deduct defense roll from attack roll and reduce leftover from hitpoints. With squads, what's the calculation? From the 1.07 update notes, I gather that members of a squad attack individually. Well what about defense? Is one of these guesses accurate: 1) Attacking squad rolls attack rolls

One more advantage of squad units versus individuals is that combat spells would affect all the members of the squad. Haste and such.

Great summary of the most important issues. 100% agreement, especially with #1. According to Frogboy, the squad members already roll damage separately, even though this isn't shown in the UI. However, it seems that defense is just a sum of all members of the defending unit, which is bad. Combined with #1 I would call it crippling.