Boring meatgrinder gameplay that needs to be fixed

[chadz]

So, the thing that bugs me the most about strategus is that it's not really thrilling. You slowly watch the army counter sink, there are no surprises. The first step to counter was the spawn flags, allowing you to defeat the enemy without killing everybody.

At first, this was overdone, then overnerfed, so we're back at meatgrinder again. So, while in that strat battle before, I had an idea:

Right now, the respawn timer is 1 per second. How about this number increases slowly, either based on
a. minutes passed,
b. troops killed
c. time of max_time passed

or something else.Either for both teams, or for every team individually. The idea is that it's getting easier to kill the enemy with a well timed rush. For the sake of arguing, say that halfway through a castle siege, the respawn timer is now at 30 seconds. So the attacking team prepares a siege tower and engages the enemy wall. 30 attackers vs 30 defenders, 5 attackers die, 15 defenders. This means it would now take the defenders 15*30=7.5 minutes seconds to fully reinforce. This means you should a) not die, and b) kill enemies in packs to get an advantage.

(I'd probably favor a death-based influence, on a per-team basis. So in the beginning you would try to kill more defenders than they kill of you. Say every 50 deaths the respawn timer increases by 1 second)

[sWalker]

I.E. the men are slow to rejoin/join the combat because of lower morale because of army losses...genius idea that actually has a basis in reality.  Well done chadz.  Did you and the balancing committee sleep at a holiday inn the last week, because you guys are really doing a great job lately.

Just make sure that you code it as a difference between the k:d of both teams and not a static number.  Most armies in history would not be demoralized by army losses if they were winning the battle or if it was close.  (example using your math...team 1--100 deaths  team 2--200 deaths.  The spawn of team 2 should be delayed by 2 seconds...not 4 seconds.  And, the spawn of team 1 should be unaffected).

[Matey]

bleh 30 seconds per respawn is way too much... then it would just be super boring for those who sit around waiting to spawn for 2 hours (it prioritizes the highest KDR players... so if you are 1:7 engineer then you dont get to spawn... ever). id say 3 seconds max. a 3 second delay on spawning would also make capping flags possible again... right now its almost impossible because if you are actively killing players then they spawn fast enough to make their flag uncapturable. if its 3 second delay then if you are killing em that bad you can take the spawn.

also; its not always so meat grinderish.. there were some epic battles during strat2.0 where there were some huge turn arounds as a result of different tactics being tried out... a great example is FCC vs Yruma Castle (Hospitallers). it was like 11500 vs 12300 or so, but half way through the fight FCC was down by 1800, but after we adjusted our tactics we ended up winning 41-0.
    yes it ended with one side losing all tickets... but it was a crazy castle defense where they fought to the last... it would have cheapened it if we had been able to cap the flags.
   something that could be experimented with though is making fief sieges actually act like crpg siege mode... have one or more capturable locations on the map that are captured by holding that ground for X time as opposed to hitting 'f' on it when no one is around. think of battlefield games on maps where there are no uncappable spawns.... open field battles could operate this way as well/instead.

[Shigeru]

Sounds like a fairly good idea to try and help sort things out, my only concern is you don't necessarily want it to become a waiting game. I'd say part of the fun is being able to get back into the action as fast as possible as I'm sure players from the siege maps on defender side can attest to the annoyance at sitting idle for thirty-ish seconds or so. But perhaps that's not too big of a deal just a suggestion.

What may provide a more interesting resolution could be a moral system, with armies moral slowly filtering down as they take heavy casualties or going up based on doing extremely well. I think a system like that would cover a lot of bases by ensuring that no one is having to wait out for an excessive amount of time, and at the same time providing a goal for people to do other than just run like lemmings at the enemy. It could help control battle times by slowly decaying no matter what until after a certain period the weaker team withdraws.

I also like it because it doesn't 100% destroy the opposing army, which could allow for shattered armies to retreat for a time but not lose everything. I feel this could make a more interesting mechanic than having folks just sweep in and wipe entire clans in quick battles.

However the concern with that is a troop creep, where the numbers just get inflated heavily because it's easier to gain troops than to lose them, so it would need to be a careful balancing act.

Either way, I look forward to see what you come up with mate. ;)

[Phazey]

It's a good idea, i think.

Some sort of flexible spawn time might indeed help make things less 'grindy'. The trick will be to find the right balancing mechanism to prevent either excessively long battles and more importantly instant spawn caps or too much steamrolling.

My instinct tells me to make it subtle though. A few extra seconds of respawn time and spawn captures will become very common.

[Matey]

@shig: there is a morale system.. when one side starts losing their players often start lamenting about how doomed they are which further hurts morale and thus players start to feel they are fighting a losing battle and many of them will either put in less effort, or start making mistakes.

[Jarlek]

Yes, a good solution. Another way would be to increase the spawn time for every flag your team has lost. So the 1 secound if all falgs are up, and 15-20 if it's only one flag left. Would make it MUCH easier to capture walls and the like, and not just zerg rush.

Another way could also be to have all the defender spawns inside the courtyard and not the walls. Attackers have to run quite a bit to get to the fighting. This would of course heavily depend on the map.

I still find it very annoying that as an attacker, you jump down, manage to magically not get killed before you land, then fight people, killing someone, and then have them spawn RIGHT INSIDE the fighting. Would it be possible for people to not spawn where there are enemies close?

[Keshian]

Several things:

1.  Making it based on time is wrong way to go, otherwise smart/glitching clans just sit for 30-60 minutes doing nothing, then do zerg rush after zerg rush in order to minimize casualties - behavior like that would just be far more boring and would be even more meatgrinderish once the wait was long enough, very little strategy more room for abuse.

2.  Most strategus battles have always been over fiefs (80-90% every strat) so retreat for defender's side actually means you not only lose all your troops you put in the fief, but the attackers gains those troops along with a bunch of equipment.  If you implement this all the clans will do (similar to when one capturabe spawn flag first came out and it was retarded) is buy 1/5th of their troops elite gear, no gear for the other 4/5ths and then just do zerg rush after zerg rush to get high k/ds with elite gear and capture the spawns fairly quickly as defenders spawn slower and slower.  This favors bad/unrealistic strategies of giving no equipment to most of your army, while massively over-equipping a small group.

3.  Any big new feature like this should be looked at how it will in practical purposes be used (look at above examples for readily apparent glitching/abuse).  If you want to make it less meat grinderish then implment something like leaders - where the person who intitiates the battle and the guy who is attacked on the strat map are leaders and if they are present on the battlefield they give bonuses to all nearby fighters (think old radius of xp/gold for kills), probably armor related and to counter-balance, whena  leader dies they lose 5x as many tickets as other people do, so there is more strategy involved in protecting the leader and keeping him near the front.

4.  I don't like the changed spawn timer thing because it leaves so much room for abuse making battles really lame.  With the implementation of limited ammo for catapults, weapons racks that work and you can place closer to the front lines, it already is less meatgrinderish.  And to be honest most of us really enjoy the current model and organized strategy coordinating meatgrinderlike sorties.  Its the best things about strategus is the battles where we can have organized abttles and if you amke it too easy to cap spawns, forced retreat, etc.  those battles become too short and as rare as they are per clan it would really suck, unless it was counterbalanced by making gold and troops easier to obtain to field more battles.

5.  Another idea for those thinking more strategy and less meatgrinding is needed is capturable bonus locations where if you take a certain location (need say 5-10 peopel in radius to maintain) it grants bonus to ranged damage or bonus to armor (which wse script should be able to accomplish).  Things like this while possible for abuse, woudl eb nowhere near as abusable as reducing the spawn timers based on any kind of format.

[MrShovelFace]

Your ticket amount in relation to the enemy's should determine both how fast you spawn and how many mercs can be hired

Lives should be a number scaled by the square root of troop totals distributed to either team based on their respective army size

so for a battle of 1000 troops (team 1) vs 3000 troops (team 2)
the ratio would be 1:3

30 seconds being the base spawn time
team 1: (30*(T1/(T1+T2)))
team 2: (30*(T2/(T1+T2)))


150 being the base player limit
team 1: (150*(T1/(T1+T2)))
team 2: (150*(T2/(T1+T2)))

(10*(T1+T2)^(1/3))+150) being the base value of lives called LIVES 
Team 1: (LIVES*(T1/(T1+T2)))
Team 2: (LIVES*(T2/(T1+T2)))

with this method even if there are 100,000 troops on each side there are only a total of 734.8035 lives
BUT
if there are only 1000 on each side the total lives goes to 275.992


What this says is that even with 1/5 of a million troops the life count is only 700 and no matter how low the troop count there is always at least 151.2599 lives

(also a battle of 1 million troops, 500,000 on each side amounts to 1150 total lives)

unless some of my math is wrong and i can almost guarantee you it is

[[ptx]]

Initial spawning speed dependent on ticket ratio and then changes, depenging on the total K:D ratio of the teams. So, if you get one smaller army fighting a larger one, the larger one spawns faster initially, but if the smaller one does a good job at killing their opposition, they can shift the respawn speed in their favour.
Hopefully, this way doing tactics and winning engagements away from spawns actually has some effect on the battle as a whole.

[Cicero]

back to spawnrape version 1.0 at summer
If you gonna make that 1 second thing people will rush through spawn in the start of battles...

[Shigeru]

Aye I agree absolutely with you Matey, I suppose Moral may not be the best word to capture it. It's more of a system really than anything else. Anyway 'tis just mid-day at work ramblings.

[PhantomZero]

It is a boring meatgrinder but that is mainly due to the style of combat 40 people can have, you cant exactly have flanking maneuvers since that would leave your center too weak to hold theirs back.

Sometimes battles will have good moments where one team can be up by 1-2k tickets, and then have it swing right back again.

Anything that isn't "boring meatgrinder" gameplay would just be "boring wait around while not spawning in as your remaining teammates get raped and you start getting spawncamped"

I think the "FOB" mechanic or the ability to place extra spawning zones will make the battles more interesting, but for full effect the maps would need to be larger.

Also, I think field battles will be rare, as it would be very silly for both armies to be out on the field and engaged, since they would both be suffering double the upkeep as opposed to just keeping your army in the towns and awaiting an attack.

[SPQR]

It is a boring meatgrinder but that is mainly due to the style of combat 40 people can have, you cant exactly have flanking maneuvers since that would leave your center too weak to hold theirs back.

Gotta agree with this. When you only have a couple dozen people per side your options in terms of strategy are pretty limited since you need just about everyone on the front line. The amount of mercs each side was drastically cut in the most recent patches, this needs to be raised back up again to somewhere approaching 60vs60 if we want to see things like cavalry charges, flanking maneuvers, or anything suitably interesting, in my opinion.

That being said, I think the flags have a lot of potential to make things interesting, but a couple things need to be done with them:

1) Spread them out more in village/field fights - In most (not all) cases all the flags are clumped together in a little blob and it becomes "all or nothing" to take them. If they were spread out more it would be possible to deny some of them to the enemy and change the shape of the battle
2) Make a button other than "F" to interact with flags. Using the same button that picks up equipment off the ground to interact with flags is maddening. Usually there are bodies and weapons all over the goddamn place and trying to knock down a flag and picking up all sorts of junk instead is really annoying. It would be alot easier if flag interaction was just an entirely different button.
3) Change knocking down flags from enemy proximity sensitive to a 1-2 second action ala opening gates/operating catapults, so if an enemy (or teammate) is near you hitting you  it will interrupt you but some loser spawning a couple feet away and getting hacked to death instantly shouldn't stop you.

I think some changes like those would shift focus onto fighting over flags as a form of field dominance.

Either that or just have a couple flags at each spawn point, then flags throughout the map that if captured by your team would allow you to spawn there.

[ManOfWar]

What SPQR said