Middle Earth: Battle For Arda - Official Thread

[redrum]

@hepps Someone has to keep you honest and keep up the expectations of perfection.

[Cernel]

@alkexr Then I would just call it "Middle Earth - The Battle for Arda". I don't think the map name, and even more so the game name, should have any references about how large the map is or is not, or there would be many games starting as "Large" or "Big" (I don't like names like "Big World", either, but at least that one uses exactly v2 or v3 rules in a bigger map; so it makes sense, as it is in direct comparison with Revised, etc.).

Of course, not a big deal.

The suggestion that Eagles and such should not crash to the ground an be destroyer if ending in a territory you just conquered (or liberated) was a general statement that the current TripleA air rules are really bad and silly at representing fantasy flyers, as they are based on the assumption that all flyers need airports to land on. Since it is you that are doing this stuff, you can tell ideally how the fliers should actually work, and, then, we can see if to open a feature request (for supporting bird-like flyers) and how close we can get to it with what you can currently do, using steps, conditions and triggers.

[alkexr]

Large Middle Earth - The Battle For Arda (version 2.0.3)
(Fixed a lot of stuff. Shrunk flags, air units no longer have to land, siege lasts 1 battle round only, tweaked some unit stats. Fortification now prevents charge, flank and trample by default. For full list of changes, visit GitHub.)

Most importantly, we now have awesome tooltips (kudos to @redrum!). For tooltips to be displayed properly, you need at least prerelease 10803. Now you can play knowing the abilities of your units... it certainly is going to be a refreshing experience!

Here is how it works. For targeted attacks and supports, the generated tooltips are used. The things that are appended to it: the type of the unit (melee, infantry, etc.), the abilities unseen and mountaineer (yes, I turned my back on MTG), and territory preferences. For territory preferences, only one keyword is found in the tooltip - a hastily done table in the game notes explains their meaning.

The idea behind territory preferences is that rangers and bowmen are both ranged infantry, but obviously rangers like forests, while bowmen hate it. So instead of using unit type as a base for calculating territory effects, each unit gets a fighting style of some sort. Most cavalry prefer open terrain, especially plains. Levies prefer to fight for their homes near their homes - they like settlements and plains while disliking the wilderness. Some other units prefer wilderness - forests, hills; but this comes at a cost of penalties to fighting in settlements, the opposite of the wilderness. Unyielding units are great at holding positions, while relentless units just keep attacking regardless of how unfavourable the terrain is. Etc. In general, all terrain favours the defender, except plains, which favors the attacker.

Short description of the abilities:

• armor: negative support to melee
• shield: negative support to ranged
• ranged: positive support to melee, attack only
• web: negative support to melee, defense only
• leadership: positive support (siege engines and fortifications are unaffected)
• terror: negative support (unseen units, siege engines and fortifications are unaffected)
• charge: offensive first strike vs infantry
• trample: offensive first strike vs infantry and cavalry
• flank: vs ranged infantry and siege engines
• formation: defensive first strike vs units that "charge"; can't roll more dices than there are valid targets
• siege: offensive first strike vs fortifications, kills instantly regardless of hitpoints
• antiair: defensive vs flying units
• duel: vs other units with "duel", kills instantly regardless of hitpoints
• mountaineer: can enter mountains (flying units can enter mountains too, of course)
• battlements: positive support to infantry AND negative support to non-flying non-siegeengine non-fortification

(Siege engines and fortifications are not considered "combat units", so they are unaffected by most things unless explicitly stated otherwise.)

Stuff not yet adressed:

• Halloween witches
• Game name
• Game notes
• Some unpolished unit images
• Move before or after purchase?
• Sea units
• placement picking
• balancing, balancing, balancing

PS. It's so awesome that the procedural tooltip generation knows LotR lore!

Or how else could it possibly know the name of the wizard? ;D

[Cernel]

@alkexr

Move before or after purchase?

You can have both, actually. Look at my WWIIv3 Move-Buy-Move in WWIIv3 Variants. Not necessarily advising it: probably better just before. But you can experiment that way and behold yourself that almost all movement will be made before (just speculating).

[redrum]

@alkexr Looking like some great updates! On remaining items, I'd vote for purchase after move.

[Cernel]

@alkexr Any input on how to address the flier issue? It makes some sense that an aeroplane cannot land in conquered territories, but it really makes no sense that an eagle cannot.

[Cernel]

@cernel In my opinion, games with flyers or helicopters are in need of a property allowing to land on any friendly territories, no matter if newly conquered. I also guess it should be something easy to do, as the matter would be just to ignore a check or something?

EDIT: Probably the best, rather than a property, would be having a unit option for allowing landing in newly acquired (conquered or liberated on the same turn) territories, in case a game wants to have, like, aeroplanes and helicopters.

However, as now, you can totally disable the crashing for planes. So you could do that and detail in notes what rules are supposed to apply for air, making it self-enforced.

[alkexr]

@cernel in the latest version flying units can end their turn wherever they like. They still can't conquer territories alone: it isn't supported by engine, and I won't ever include player enforced rules in any of my maps.

[Cernel]

@alkexr Well, this is surely better than dragons needing airports to land.
An alternative to user enforced, is trigger enforced. For example, you tell in notes that air cannot stay on water, and make a set of triggers to remove air units on water, preferably also with a set of notifications telling the players when they lost some flyers.

[Cernel]

@alkexr said in Large Middle Earth - official thread:

They still can't conquer territories alone: it isn't supported by engine

Theorically you could make a set of triggers that conquer the territories if attacking units are left and the territory is enemy owned. I don't know if that would take into account liberation, tho (if it doesn't, more triggers would be needed).

[Cernel]

@alkexr It would be good if you format the zip correctly, meaning:

1. Having it not double folder, but with the "map" as the first subfolder.
2. Having it called just "large_middle_earth".

Mostly because it's already hard enough to get regular users to manual install; without having to unzip, cut/paste and rename folders around... Failed to get a game going in lobby with a regular because of the above (he gave up).

[alkexr]

@cernel Everything is going to be fine once it is released in-game. Till then you have to deal with the way GitHub packages stuff.

Btw, having arrived home from the last vacation, I'll have more time for development once again. I hope it will be downloadable ingame before long.

[TheDog]

@alkexr
I would like to help with balancing your game, are you at this stage?

Some of your units need their PUs reviewing, but Im sure you know that.

Thanks to you and all who have brought it this far, it looks and feels awesome.

I did the coding and balancing for The Tyranids for the Original Dawn of War, so Im used to the repetitive cycle of testing.

[alkexr]

@thedog said in Large Middle Earth - official thread:

I would like to help with balancing your game, are you at this stage?

A couple of unit images need a facelift, sea units need to be added, placements picked (all in progress), and game notes written. After that, it's balancing time! (i.e. playing a ton of PBF with everyone, I suppose... I've never done serious balancing before)

Some of your units need their PUs reviewing, but Im sure you know that.

They looked good when I set them. When I started games, they didn't Turns out that the value of the unit is not only determined by it's effectiveness in large battles (yeah, I know, obvious... in hindsight).

But I'm curious. Which units do you think are too cheap/too expensive?

Actually, the unit cost/stat balancing can start right away; everything relevant about them is done.

[Cernel]

@thedog Looks like you are in the right place. Most TripleA maps have never been seriously balanced (NWO etc. are few major exceptions, and that doesn't even comprise a good half of the high quality ones, like WAW and TRS).

[TheDog]

@alkexr
My caveat, Im no expert at Triplea balancing and have come up with my own formula, it maybe naive, but here it is. It is based on spending about 100 TUV a side in the Battle Calculator and includes movement.

(Attack + Defence + Movement - Average_infantry_movement + Fudge_Factor) x Hit_Factor

Average infantry movement on your map is 2, so its a constant of -2.
Giving most infantry a movement cost of 0pu, a unit moving 3 costs 1pu, flying move of 5 gives 3pu.

Where Fudge_Factor also includes personal tastes/goals.

On your map its focus is a land battle so Air & sea units are +1

Most units have a bonus of some sort, gives or receives support, so this is the norm, where a unit does not have a bonus then -1, eg. bat, balchoth_tribesman, trollman, raven all have -1.

Play testing will increase or decrease the Fudge Factor.

As your map has terrain this adds a whole level of complexity that is is difficult to account for, so Im ignoring it.

For units with 1 Hit, the above is fine.
For 2 Hits x by 1.5
For 3 Hits x by 2
Modified by how they are repaired. These hit values are probably lower than most other mods, one reason is the AI does not try to protect its 2+ hit units and the other for players they are rarely cost effective.

The above 2+ hit modifiers would be higher say for ship units as there is fewer units in a battle and so hits are worth more.

To your question, "But I'm curious. Which units do you think are too cheap/too expensive?"
ent 7 5 2 with 2 hits (7+5+2-2=12) x 1.5 = 18 your value 24
bear 7 5 3 with 2 hits (7+5+3-2=13) x 1.5 = 20 your value 16
warg_rider 5 2 4 (5+2+4-2=9) x 1 = 9 your value 6

There are more units but you have my base formula what do you think?

As an aside here is worked example of a bat unit to show how the points build up. Flying units are really hard to balance as only a humans can really exploit their capabilities. There is a no bonus because it has no bonuses against ground units.
bat 6 2 4, flying +1, no ground bonuses -1, (6+2+4-2+1-1=10)

@Cernel
Thanks!

[redrum]

@thedog One thing to remember is that units don't necessarily need to be balanced across players just mostly within a single player. For example, you can have some small players that have low production but better units and having their allies help them grow could be part of an overall strategy.

Also the formula really won't work on this map because of all the targeted attacks, support values, and terrain. This complex of a unit set really requires playing through some games and see what players are tending to build and not build. You might be able to compare some units that are similar but the variety is pretty large.

[TheDog]

@redrum
I agree, the High Elves backup your points, they have no chaff and have specialised units so should be considered for a discount to allow for this.

But you need to baseline your units and then move from there..

[redrum]

@thedog Yeah, having some sort of baseline is useful. I just tend to look to apply it player by player rather than all units at once. As at the end of the day, the key is units being balanced within the players unit set so they have interesting choices to make and build a variety of units. Balance across the map as a whole can be achieved in many different ways even if some players have stronger unit sets.

[alkexr]

@thedog Yes, that is somthing along the lines of what I've done, and once you start playing, it will become obvious why this isn't what units are worth.

For example, a recurring tactical move is to attack a weakly defended territory with minimal forces to block the main force of the enemy (only makes sense because units move 2+). You can do this to slow down the advance of a superior army, or to screen your main force if it is heavily offense-oriented and bad at defense, or if it is on plains (favourable for the attacker), etc. In many cases, heavily armored units can achieve a 100% win ratio without numerical advantage. Or take the snaga skirmisher, which defends plains with a power of 1. Thanks to their shield, spearman can kill them without losses, 1v1. What all of this means is that

• armored / shielded units are very well suited to screening
• units with very low defense values are very exposed to armored / shielded units, and therefore not well suited to "weakly defend" territories, regardless of their cost-effectiveness (i.e. discourage the attacker from wasting forces on taking it / from trying to screen of your main force)
• and as a consequence, it doesn't matter how these units perform in massive battles, because maybe you never intended to send them into massive battles in the first place. Armored units could even be absolutely thrash in large battles, and have a terrible power-to-cost ratio, I would still buy them for tactical purposes other than winning large battles.

And when you have considered all of this, then comes the hard part. Because, for example, elven cavalry is pretty overpowered... but where on (Middle) Earth do you intend to send your cavalry to fight as the High Elves? Into the mountains? The caves? The High Elves have no strategic objective for which cavalry would be useful.

As for the Ents... they have siege. 5-6 Ents with some escort can tear down the otherwise impregnable fortifications of Moria. And suddenly, the defense power of the defenders falls from 200+ to 80. Of course this only works for a very limited number of tactical goals (the list of them being "taking Moria", and... yeah, that's about it); and that's basically why they only cost 24 and not 40.

BTW multiple-hit units essentially generate free hits when they participate in battle. The amount of free hits generated is independent of how strong the unit is, so it shouldn't be a multiplier. The only thing that affect the value of extra hits is how often you can bring that unit into combat, which is higher for units with higher movement, and higher for air units.

(I agree that warg riders and bears are underpriced, but for different reasons.)

TLDR: there are way too many tactical situations, and in a great number of them raw attack/defense is next to irrelevant. The value of the unit is measured by its tactical utility, which is not reducible to a formula due to the diversity of tactical objectives

---

Anyway... I tried to use similar heuristics, but it's just... not that simple. I think the costs will be fine-tuned during the balance playtesting period. Then you can try buying the units your formula calculates as most cost-effective, and prove me wrong by stomping me into the ground with those units.