Hi!
As most of you know for sure, the complaints about archery have increased again lately, at least that is what I have experienced in the forum. Infantry complains about archery, archers defend themselves and both complain about cavalry. Both archers and cavalry have been nerfed to oblivion by the devs, and yet they couldn't really deal with the hatred between the different classes, and the basic problems are still existant, although not to the extend they used to once, but still.
Smoothrich already suggested it, but his topic didn't even get over one page, so here is my try to finally get the attention of the devs.
Why we need conquest game mode:- Infantry complains about cavalry and especially archers all the time
- On one hand the complaints are justified, on the other they are not
- Infantry requires much more teamplay and coordination to maximize their potential, which archers and cav do not require. If infs used more tactics, they would suffer less.
- Cavalry and archers enjoy a higher "flexibility" in a few aspects. What sounds like something very blurry and abstract has a massive impact on your gameplay and especially on your perception of fun when it comes to the objective of killing all enemies. Short: in battle mode infantry is the idiot because of missing flexibility and higher teamplay requirements
- As a result of these borked mechanics and the following complaints, archers and cavalry got nerfed again and again, without really fixing the source of the problems
Solution:
Implement conquest mode, with the following important conditions:1. It REPLACES battle mode (at least for some time)
2. It is still round based, which means everyone has only ONE life
3. The maps need to be designed carefully, and it is much better to have a few good maps than a shitload of random, unbalanced maps
It works this way:- Every team has a "battlefield control"-ressource you can name any other way you like. Each team starts with 10.000 units of that ressource
- On each map there is an uneven amount of flags. The more flags, the more small skirmishes you have, the less flags the bigger the central battle. Either 3 or 5 flags sounds reasonable to me.
- These flags need to be placed absolutely evenly on the map, which means that both teams need the same time to reach the same amount of flags.
- Once players enter a certain, rather wide area around a flag (25-50m radius?), they start capping. As soon as enemies enter the area, the flag starts getting uncapped again. You need the double amount of own troops to "ignore" enemies in your flag area and restart capping/keeping it capped.
- As soon as one team owns less completely captured flags than the enemy, they start losing the battlefield ressource. The bigger the difference of the captured flags, the faster the ressource drains.
- Next to this the ressource drain is increasing exponentially. So the longer you need to capture a flag, the more likely you will lose.
- Perhaps the amount of remaining players could also be taken into account, but I am not sure about this one and how it could be implemented. But hey, I don't have an answer for everything.
Once a team reaches 0 ressource points or has no players left, it loses. If one team loses, the other team - who would have guessed it - wins. If the time limit is reached before one team reaches 0 ressources or loses all players, the team with the higher amount of ressources wins. Only if both teams have exactly the same number of ressources, it's a draw. This has the nice sice effect that draws will be something really rare in the future.
There could be even room for buffing archers and cavalry again!Now why do I want those 3 conditions I listed up at the beginning?1. The game mode has to replace battle, because otherwise...
... we would split up the community too much
... classes which have more advantages in battle mode would still stick to it (probably), turning conquest into a boring infantry only spamfest
... people should be forced to actually try the game mode and adapt to it, so we can have a representative result. If people try it, but for some reason many say "naah, that's not for me, it's so unfamiliar", the game mode would be dead before it even had a chance to fix things
... we would not have a unique game mode which would be the core gameplay element of identification for cRPG
2. It has to be round based, because one problem infantry always had was missing teamplay. With the new focus on the flags infantry will hopefully play together more, instead of everybody chasing after his target of choice, scattering infantry all over the place and provoking all the problems infantry is constantly complaining about. But if you had several respawns, death wouldn't be so much of a problem, and the advantage of the game mode - encouraging teamplay - would be negated again.
3. The maps need to be designed carefully, so that ALL classes have a chance to influence the battle at ANY flag on the map. Which means, at least in my opinion, that the area around each flag has to contain one half which is open, plain ground, and another half, which offers cover and protection. That way cavalry, archers and infantry can all participate to the same extend in capturing a flag. On the other hand the area AROUND the capturing area needs to contain both open plains and "difficult terrain" at the same extend, to allow the enemies to attack effectively. On the other hand, the widest areas around the flags, let's call it something like the "third circle" around the flag (first circle is capturing area, second is "attacking area"), needs to be open plains, so that archers and cavalry have a chance to interrupt or stop enemy movement between the flags.
I think it is pretty obvious that it is pretty much borked up if the closest flag to your spawn would be on an open field next to a small castle on a hill which will always be reached by your enemy first. This would move archers and cavalry more into the acting roles, while infantry would again be only playing the easy targets on open terrain. And even if on the other side of the map you have another castle on a hill next to a flag with the roles switched, it would still be a shitty map, because infantry players would have less fun than the others. That's what I mean with "carefully designed maps".
To put a little bit of voice behind this topic I will add a poll, and feel free to vote on this post as well, if you like.
Poll