OK.
Go ahead people. Make maps yourself. It's not that hard after all. Joker, go ahead and code your conquest mode. Seems fips have gotten something similar to work for siege, so maybe hook up with him.
Anyway.
Unless someone actually starts DOING something, I consider all talk about maps and conquest dreams diverting from the matter at hand.
The point of my post was to show WHY infantry must be more attractive to play compared to ranged and cav, and this should be reflected by item balance. Why ranged (and cav) should be perpetually kept down in power. Because if infantry becomes unbearable to play, the mod very quickly dies.
"If cRPG is an aquarium or a lake, cav and ranged are the sharks and the piranhas. Infantry is the food. When food runs out, predators will also die (leave mod), albeit a bit later. This is why infantry requires good conditions for having fun, more so than cav and ranged. "
And NO. I'm not talking about extreme nerfs or eradicating classes. And yes, I understand the inherent flaws in battle, but to be honest, it cannot be THAT flawed. It has been the most popular mode for the better part of 4 years..
Balancing things also involves actually doing something. You are right, infantry must be more attractive to play, but balance is NOT capable of achieving this. You will ALWAYS have to run after your target, you will ALWAYS have to be in weapon reach to your target, and the other classes will ALWAYS not be restricted in that regard, and this is why infantry will ALWAYS suck on battle mode.
And battle mode is INCREDIBLY flawed, people are just unable or unwilling to see this. It was the most popular mode because it was the closest you could get to represent a real battle. But this doesn't work in a game, which is supposed to be balanced, whereas battles were supposed to be won by any means possible!
Seriously, for me the problem is so clear, I can't believe that everyone who wants a balanced game doesn't stand up and shouts "Stop the nerfs, give us another game mode!", because it is the root of all problems we have in the game (besides the shitty upkeep system).
Just imagine what will happen if you nerf archers and cavalry yet another time. Many of those will either quit playing or change their class, just to notice that they will STILL get shot (unless you lower archer damage or accuracy to 0), and they will STILL get trampled and backstabbed, even with slower, weaker horses and less damaging lances, and it will STILL suck unproportionally more than killing someone in melee after running around most of the time. And eventually they will get back to their initial class, and the complaints will grow again, and in the end nothing will have changed, apart from infantry still having a shitty game, but archers and cavaly having a shittier game than they had before.
There is NOTHING balance can do to stop you from running over the battlefield 95% of the time, trying to reach an enemy with your petty 0.5-3m weapon, who doesn't want to be reached. It is so obvious, and I honestly can not believe how you can assume that 5 points less damage or accuracy or a slower rate of fire or slower or weaker horses or whatever can seriously change how it feels to be infantry in an open map and having to kill archers, cavalry and - worst of all - horse archers. They simply can't!
People in general think very little about what they do in online games. And they have little understanding of how balance works, or why certain features work the way they do. And not many people would relate getting killed repeatedly by the same classes to problems with the game mode, rather than simply claiming the other class would be OP and requesting a nerf for it. And usually that's the case, but not in cRPG! It's a special case, since the classes were not created with some balance in mind, but origin from a game which wanted to resemble medieval warfare pretty accurately.
Let's just summarize what we have:
- a large map
- two teams
- the objective to kill all enemies
- a class which can pick their targets on long range
- a class which engages in melee but is so fast that it can also pick targets
- and finally a class which is neither fast nor can pick targets
So does it sound logic to make that last class which sounds so incredibly shitty stronger by giving them better stats? Would the class sound less shitty to play with? I guess not, it would still be slow and it still would not be able to pick targets.
Another approach would be to change the classes, but since this is medieval warfare we can't simply make up a new class with a less shitty mechanic
So the only, THE ONLY approach left is to change the focus on the classes. Find other aspects than mobility and choice of targets to determine what a class does and how well it does it, and you will fix the problem. If target choice and flexibility become less of an advantage, the issues are gone!
Now once for all: balance is not the solution, nor will it ever be! Compare ranged now to the ranged which was possible before the upkeep! You had plated archers with pinpoint accuracy, automatic fire and causing high damage! Compare that to the slow ass, low ammo, low accuracy low rate of fire archers with crappy melee weapons, and estimate for yourself if the extent of the archer problem lowered proportionally to the lowered power of that class. It did not.
This is not a matter of opinion, whether you want nerfs or not, it's not a general game design question, it is a matter of fact. Infantry does not have the same flexibility like the other classes, but has to play in a game more which relies upon being flexible.
I am not derailing this topic because I am talking about something nobody is working on. I am directing this topic to the ONLY solution possible, although the topic started into the wrong direction, and the only question left is: why is nobody working on that single, possible, only solution we have for that problem?
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