Middle Earth: Battle For Arda - Official Thread

[alkexr]

Hi everyone! I forgot to post it here, but there is a new video where I talk about upcoming changes, mostly to unit abilities. Some abilities were removed, some are now affected by territory effects, and there are also some entirely new abilities, too.

[Shorogyth]

Hi @alkexr, thanks for the update!

Hope things are going well for you and you can spend a bit of time on the map

One question on the removal of mechanical variety. You are planning to remove flanking vs ranged but you want to introduce/keep/adapt charge vs. spearwall. This seems a little weird to me. I think I understand where you are coming from but charge is very similar to flanking in that it's mechanically different but not strategically (in your sense of the word).

"Ambush" seems like an interesting idea to add a strategic option. It seems to be delivering what you want to achieve. "Scouting" on the other hand has the problem that there is no upside to it. It is purely a reaction while ambush has no downside. (And please don't buff the elven rangers even more by giving them another ability, they are already arguably the best unit in your map.)

Retreating heroes might work well. I don't think it will make bringing a mage or a balrog the right move but it can make it less of a bad investement (in particular if the balrog can finally affect the foes it will actually be fighting). If dragons can retreat like submarines, though, they will be way too strong/unkillable imho.

The changes to charge seem a mixed bag. I might be thin ice to comment without having seen/tested the prototyp but ithe new charge seems overly complicated for a mechanic that was very weak and easy to counter in the past (the targeted attack against them meant "charge" was a liability and it was better not to build chargers at all in many circumstances). The new charge is a lot stronger just by not making formation/spearwall a targeted attack (excellent change) but the rest seems very hard to keep in mind/consider when doing some rough calculations. It just does not seem to add much in terms of depth to balance it out.

Siege was/is an excellent ability from a mechanical point of view imho. I would not make it weaker in caves and so on. It just adds complexity without much benefit. It seems this is targeting very niche scenarios or no scenarios at all.

I hope you had a chance to look at my explanation on how to simplify the user interface/nomenclature for terrain effect and "tactic" modifiers without loosing any functionality. Some house keeping would really help on that front.

[mortetvie]

@alkexr I primarily play evil on the map. Currently, it seems to have too much of an advantage because of the multi-hit units and more units than in prior version. I suppose some balance changes are coming?

Also, do ranged units still do a hit on flying units like they used to? If so, I think keeping flank is a must because that is pretty much one of the main strategies for evil to counter massed archers responding to flying nazgul/dragons. Also, having cheap goblin archers in a stack is probably one of evil's best ways to deal with eagle spam.

[alkexr]

@shorogyth Your solution to territory effects is certainly simpler and it would work fine if every territory had exactly one territory effect, but it's important that territories with multiple effects stacked (i.e. Caras Galadhon) should be easier to defend. Also I can't incorporate these bonuses into the baseline stats, because the plains bonus is attack only, while the rest are defense only. A 4/4 unit with excellent tactics acts as a 6/4 on plains and 4/6 on hills, I could technically make it a 5/5 but then the territory effects would need to be +1/-1 and -1/+1 and that's hardly a simplification. Maybe versatility is a better name than tactics though.

I admit the strategic role of charge is not very unique, it's essentially just "very good at attacking on plains, with a twist". But if I see my opponent buy charging units, I'm not worried for my cities, I'm worried that I'll be forced to retreat from open terrain and keep my army behind the lines because exposing them is a death sentence. I know what to be worried about, so my opponent has made a strategic choice.

Dragons can't evade, but the winged nazgul can, and yes, they are very scary.

As for complicated calculations, the battle calculator will do that for you if you need the exact numbers, but most of the time simple heuristics are enough. Charge is very good in plains, less so in hills or if there is a river etc., you don't need to memorize the every single number.

@mortetvie Anti-air attacks are still a thing. The balance obviously went out the window a long time ago, pretty much every unit will need to be rebalanced. There will also be quite a few new units, while some others will be retired. In general, it's too early to worry about balance at this stage.

[Shorogyth]

@alkexr

Sorry for missing that you have an exception for plains! This changes things a bit but I think my thoughts still hold:

Stacking bonuses: stacking different bonuses is unaffected by the simplification I am proposing. It is still posible in exactly the same way, it is just easier because there are fewer categories.

Cleaning up the table: let us look at a 4/5 "poor" unit. If you change it to a 4/6 “poor” unit, to keep everything the same, you would need to change the river modifier to -1 and the plains modifier to -1 as well but all the other (defence) modifiers would be zero. If you do this for all units you get much cleaner stats. “Poor” units would have only one modifier (-1) for two terrain types and the rest would be zero. You are correct that it would not improve the situation for rivers and plains would be worse of (1/-1 instead of 1/0) but it would be much better for ever other terrain type.

Getting Rid of unit types part one: you are correct in that you cannot simply get rid of “excellent” and “good” unit classes if you make a special case for plains. But you can (and should) still get rid of both classes. You just need a tag that improves (or worsens) a unit in plains by 1. That would be a lot cleaner than introducing to separate classes of units which only differ in exactly this one thing from already existing classes. It would even be the same modifier. Formerly “excellent” and “good” units would receive a tag “maneuverable” (or something nicer sounding) which give them +1 to their defence on plains. Afterwards my original approach works again. Which was:

You do not need "excellent" units at all. Let us take your example: an excellent unit with 4/4 stats. You could give it a +1 baseline stat instead (making it a 4/5) and it would get a +1 bonus everywhere but on plains and rivers which makes it (almost) identical to a "poor" unit. You do this with all "excellent" units (and give them “maneuverable”) and you get rid of the whole category of "excellent" units and your matrix shortens by a whole row/line! With minimal changes to your logic. It would be a "poor" 4/5 unit (or a 4/6 “poor” unit if you implement the first change).

Getting Rid of unit types part two: you do the same for “good” units. You don’t even need a new tag, maneuverable works here as well.

This would be the resulting table changes:

(This includes merging territories that are identical.)

Sorry for coming back to this, I am a mathematician and these kind of things are just fun