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Join Date 05/2006

Further suggestion for Unit Groups.

Hi,

I and others have mentioned, it kind of stinks how you cannot upgrade your units from 3 unit group to 5, etc.

I've came up with a compromise, should the devs be against the idea:

Have the larger unit groups, have an initiation and movement penalty.

This should give the Veteran smaller groups to have some benefits to keep around, rather than having to delete a level 5 troop simply because it is no longer competitive against a much less experienced level 2.

Other solutions include:

1. Just have them upgradable, like sean's mod.

2. Have a GalCiv's upgrade system, where you can pick between unit types, have increased costs, and a time delay depending on how complex is the upgrade.

3. Remove the Groups all together.

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Am I the only one who thinks upgrading groups is a bad idea? To quote myself from another thread:

Quoting Kalin,

reply 2

While the idea may seem nice, I fear that this would be a huge imbalance for the players if it gets implemented. That's because players tend to keep their units alive way better than the AI does. As a result, you'd get super powerful stack of troops (high leveled) if you let them upgrade everything. Worse yet, the player would only build a couple of troops and pretty much never need to build more.

As it is right now, you want some squads to help exploration in early game, then another set of troops when you're ready to take on the really big stuff. This at least makes the player decide on what they build in their cities. If you can go without troops until much later, power to you.

I'm not sure how Sean handles it in his mod, but I just can't see the players building one troop and keeping it alive & useful via upgrades is going to be fair to the AI who keeps having to build more and more troops?

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I agree with both of you, I think the solution can be paying the upgrade with gildar AND XP.

You need gildar for the new people training and equipment BUT this new people are rookie, so we need also a XP drain to compensate their lack of experience in the new formed unit

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Extra training time could be included (requiring the upgrading unit to be immobilised in a city until it is finished - if city is attacked it will defend as the non-upgraded unit).

There was this solution that I've mentioned a few times:

It could be, for experience of the new unit, and the amount of building turns (as percentage of new unit):

New Experience = (Original Size/New Size) x Old Experience

Training Time = (Original Size/New Size) x Normal Training Time for new unit of bigger size at the current city

which would take care of the new units needing training, and also starting with no experience. I don't think they should be also able to upgrade equipment at the same time though.

Also, maybe the upgrading shouldn't be able to be rushed (not sure about Call to Arms though).

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Quoting Kalin,

reply 1

Am I the only one who thinks upgrading groups is a bad idea? To quote myself from another thread:

Quoting Kalin,
reply 2
While the idea may seem nice, I fear that this would be a huge imbalance for the players if it gets implemented. That's because players tend to keep their units alive way better than the AI does. As a result, you'd get super powerful stack of troops (high leveled) if you let them upgrade everything. Worse yet, the player would only build a couple of troops and pretty much never need to build more.

As it is right now, you want some squads to help exploration in early game, then another set of troops when you're ready to take on the really big stuff. This at least makes the player decide on what they build in their cities. If you can go without troops until much later, power to you.

I'm not sure how Sean handles it in his mod, but I just can't see the players building one troop and keeping it alive & useful via upgrades is going to be fair to the AI who keeps having to build more and more troops?

Yes you are. I see no reason why upgrading units would be a bad thing. I would like upgrading to cost les then building the new unit depending on how much the unit has to be upgraded. It should just cost what ever the differance of the two units are. For example: If you had a 3 man unit with a dager costing 10gold and you want to upgrade it to a 5 man with leather armor and a sword which cost 200 gold then the upgrad should cost 190 gold.

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Your math... it scares me so much. Almost like your ability to read... seeing as how I said why it would be bad RIGHT IN WHAT YOU QUOTED.

3 man unit x 10 gold dagger = 30 gold. 5 sword x 200 gold = 1000 gold. That's not including the 2 guys and the leather armors. You want the upgrade to cost 190 gold?

Seriously... just activate some cheats.

Edit: Just to be clear, I considered the alternative, where you're saying a unit cost 10 gold, and thought... that can't possibly what you meant.

But to respond to your point, the difference in price might not seem to make sense until you go into the trade screen and try to trade for resources. Differing resources have differing gold costs.

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Just look @ Stardock's previous game guys.

GalCiv2 allowed for full ship upgrading. I.e. you can upgrade from Constructor mk5 to a Colonizer Mk1 [Yes, going down, but sometimes you need it].

It didn't upset the balance of the game, instead it made obsolete units... useful, at a price of course.

The price IIRC, was the difference in default cost of the different parts of the unit. [I.e., ignore cost of similar parts, add cost of new parts)

So, yes, expect an upgrade cost to be 500 ish. But stardock knew many players won't be able to afford this outright, so they also implemented a "payment" system. You get to choose to pay outright, or a portion of it, then a weekly amount (with interest of course).

I see no reason not to implement this.

--------------------------------------------

As a side note, GalCiv2 had a problem where, when you unlocked the capital ship hull, there was no need to build tiny hull anymore because the of way the armor/weapon system work being subtractive rather than a ratio.

Since there is no such a thing as "hulls" for fallen enchantress, this wouldn't be an issue.

Although, this would make for an interesting development in fallen enchantress.

You can have 3 groups of "hulls".

1. The Mercenary [High cost, high Maintenance, low production time, 1.0 skill modifier]

2. The Conscript [Low cost, Low maintenance, Medium production time, 0.75 skill modifier]

3. The Professional [Medium cost, Medium Maintenance, Long production time, 1.0 skill modifier]

And that you can only upgrade troops from within the same "hull".

Just a thought guys,

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I want groups removed from the game. Make armies all one size.

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My solution was simple. Let there be unit size upgrades. Then add several buildings to each tech tree to make trained units start at higher levels later in the game.

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Quoting Kalin,

reply 5

Your math... it scares me so much. Almost like your ability to read... seeing as how I said why it would be bad RIGHT IN WHAT YOU QUOTED.

3 man unit x 10 gold dagger = 30 gold. 5 sword x 200 gold = 1000 gold. That's not including the 2 guys and the leather armors. You want the upgrade to cost 190 gold?

Seriously... just activate some cheats.

Edit: Just to be clear, I considered the alternative, where you're saying a unit cost 10 gold, and thought... that can't possibly what you meant.

But to respond to your point, the difference in price might not seem to make sense until you go into the trade screen and try to trade for resources. Differing resources have differing gold costs.

One I don't agree with your AI assessment and two my prices were just examples I was using that price as the TOTAL PRICE not per man for ease to illustrate my suggestion. So lets break it down shall we this is the statement below:

"example: If you had a 3 man unit with a dagger costing 10 gold and you want to upgrade it to a 5 man with leather armor and a sword which cost 200 gold then the upgrade should cost 190 gold."

Here is the break down (these are not the actual price)

3 man unit with dagger = 10 gold TOTAL

5 man unit with leather armor and a sword (no perks) = 200 gold TOTAL

Now lets do the math:

200 - 10 is what class.............................190. I use total cost to simplify my point.

Now the other cost can be adjusted the same way.

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DsRaider

Join Date 11/2008

+70

Quoting seanw3,

reply 8

My solution was simple. Let there be unit size upgrades. Then add several buildings to each tech tree to make trained units start at higher levels later in the game.

This is an interesting idea. However we already have 1 building that does that and more might be repetitive and harmful to city specialization. Maybe there should be a tech on the military tree that boosts trained unit levels by 1, or even a trait for Governors or Sovereigns. A global unique improvement wouldn't hurt either.

Also the real problem with the leveling of troops is how effective it is. It isn't that hard to level a group to be 3 to 4 times as powerful as a level 1 unit. This is quite frankly way too much. If leveled troops weren't so OP then upgrading them wouldn't be such a problem.

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Quoting DsRaider,

reply 10

Quoting seanw3,
reply 8
My solution was simple. Let there be unit size upgrades. Then add several buildings to each tech tree to make trained units start at higher levels later in the game.

This is an interesting idea. However we already have 1 building that does that and more might be repetitive and harmful to city specialization. Maybe there should be a tech on the military tree that boosts trained unit levels by 1, or even a trait for Governors or Sovereigns. A global unique improvement wouldn't hurt either.

Also the real problem with the leveling of troops is how effective it is. It isn't that hard to level a group to be 3 to 4 times as powerful as a level 1 unit. This is quite frankly way too much. If leveled troops weren't so OP then upgrading them wouldn't be such a problem.

That... requires such a trivial fix that it should be obvious...

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Quoting DsRaider,

reply 10

This

I would like to seea tiny (-1) initiative penalty per group size over 3 and an exp cost when upgrading, though just lowering hp per lv could easily be balanced.

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Of course my mod had better Hp balance than the .913 vanilla. Basically each tree had a +1 level at the midgame level and endgame level. Warfare got an additional building. In the early game everyone gets level 1 units. In the midgame you can either go for groups or higher levels and the late game is an extremely complex combination of those choices. Levels give roughly 30% more Hp per level, but there are also magical items and traits that can boost unit level or Hp. Tank units would generally have 20hp +5 per level for each soldier in the unit. An attacker unit would likely have 10hp +4 per level, but a much higher attack. Increasing unit size is important, but it scales with other quality factors when there is this much Hp on the table. Of course in most games the human player ends up being superior in all categories which spells steamroll for the AI.

My version got really close to great unit balance, but without the AI there to back it up, it was moot. That is why I have begun working on content instead of balance.

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DsRaider

Join Date 11/2008

+70

Just remembered that in the Lords of Magic game champions could hang out in cities in order to boost the experience of troops produced in that city. Thus the higher the level and the longer a warrior champion hung out in the barracks the higher the level of warrior troops produced in that barracks.

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Since we have two threads going on this topic, I'll post in both.

How about putting the troop size upgrades in the Civ tech tree. That could make for more interesting choices. Do you quantity (Civ) or quality (Warfare/Magic)?

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