I’m coming from Hera’s critique of this design in Microsoft is Trying to Re-Invent the Wheel | AoE2
Someone already made a thread discussing that video. I note that neither in that thread, nor in the comments for Hera’s video, does anyone mention the likely design intent, which is that part of the power spike for the three kingdoms in Imperial age is the aura from their hero.
This is what I’m focusing on here: how to make heroes more viable.
The aura is the important part of the hero from the perspective of ‘balancing the unique units by letting them benefit from an aura’. Compare to Warcraft III, the most popular RTS game in Western countries that uses heroes: most heroes don’t have an aura. They are individually powerful, but because of the XP mechanic, it can be better to have only a single hero than two. The drawback is that a lot of gameplay ends up revolving around the XP mechanic; to introduce this to AoE2 would completely change the game, and is exactly what a lot of people don’t want.
Even though heroes are the most valuable unit in Warcraft III, combat is still interesting because units take a long time to kill. As army sizes get larger, heroes also level up and become harder to kill. Focusing damage on a hero has a risk: if the hero is not killed, the damage inflicted may be wasted, especially if healing abilities negate a more favorable ratio of pre-armor damage.
So the decision of when to target a hero is interesting because of this uncertainty about whether the hero can be killed. Using heroes is also interesting because of their timed abilities, limited not only by cooldown in the short term but by mana in the long term.
Using the 3K heroes in AoE2 is not interesting in the same way. They are either tossed into battle and checked occasionally, or stood in the back of an army, providing only their aura.
Personally, I have only played the AoK and AoC campaigns, and not even all of them. I played a lot more Warcraft III custom scenarios where you only control one or a few heroes (similar to DotA, the inspiration for LoL). I do think AoE2 would benefit from a specific interface for heroes, similar to WC3, where a unit frame for heroes shows up in a certain place and flashes red when the hero is taking damage. I know TheViper had a reputation for killing his heroes when playing campaigns, but I haven’t watched enough of those videos to understand the circumstances in which it happened.
But even if the lack of such an interface is fine for some campaigns, in which the player only has to look at one part of the screen at a time or can keep important units (like Joan of Arc) out of the fight, the 3K heroes in ranked are 1) not free, and 2) only valuable if they participate in battles or are close enough to be sniped. So if it’s too easy for them to die, it’s better not to train them in the first place.
Due to that one time when DauT was in a Rage Forest game where ACCM had Spartans, I know that Spartans basically have a ‘free hero unit that is trained from TC’. Making heroes free is one option to ensure they can be used; but this might just encourage treating the unit as expendable, which should die instead of other units.
So: with a cost that balances its usefulness, 3K heroes make sense if their aura affects enough units to balance their cost. Train an army, then summon the hero. But in the same way, it makes sense for an opponent to focus-fire on the hero if the army the hero supports is large enough, and to focus on killing other units if the army is small.
And AoE2, played with 200 pop instead of the 75 pop limit of the campaigns in AoC, has lots of overkill from ranged units and a rapid pace of units dying. It is not uncommon for a player’s population to decrease from 190, to 150, in just 10 seconds (17 game sec) during a battle, or 4 units dying per sec on average.
In comparison, battles in WC3 can easily go 5~10 sec without any unit dying.
So, if it makes sense to try to kill a hero, it’s often easy to do so. Unlike WC3, there is often little risk the hero will escape and cause inflicted damage to be wasted.
What I’m suggesting is a damage mitigation system that encourages players not to focus-fire on an enemy hero in large battles.
If heroes had 5000 HP and 1 attack, this might trivially accomplish that. Although a certain player did have difficulty keeping alive a hero with 5000 HP and 80 attack in a custom scenario, Battle for Middle Earth. But this system works with the current stats of heroes, making them tougher against focus fire without changing their effectiveness in a series of 1v1s.
I thought of this system for World of Warcraft, which coincidentally is a game that Microsoft now owns. (WoW never used this system.) The basic mechanic is that if a unit takes too burst damage in a short window, it gains resistance to further damage. The analogy is supposed to be like, if too many people are trying to hit one person with their swords, their weapons will get in the way of each other, although this analogy is less relevant when the focus fire in AoE2 often comes from 30+ ranged units.
So, before I explain the math: the mechanic is basically the opposite of the Shrivamsha rider’s shield. With Shrivamshas, 4 units attacking do more than double the damage of 2 units: with this anti-burst mechanic, 20 units attacking would do less than double the damage of 10 units.
For a reasonable rate of incoming damage, let’s say “the damage dealt by two halberdiers on a cav unit”, or about 25 dps. The burst window is a bit more than both halberdiers hitting at the same time, which is about 75 damage. For WoW, I suggested that this burst window be scaled to a player’s HP; for AoE2 heroes, some have like 70 HP and others have 500+, and it would be weird if the burst window kicked in at 20 HP for the 70 HP hero. So more likely, it would be a statistic for heroes which by default is just set to the same value, around 80.
So the mechanic reduces damage greater than the burst window that arrives within a short period of time, which could be a few seconds. This increases effective HP. I think it would be balanced if this burst mitigation could give a hero with 500 HP, an effective HP value as high as 1500 HP, against burst damage.
50 mangudai shooting at Cao Cao: 7 damage per hit, 350 per volley, dead in two volleys without burst protection; dead in 5 volleys or less if effective HP is 1500 HP, because 5 volleys = ~7 game sec, enough time not to count as a single burst event.
40 mamelukes focusing on Cao Cao with 3+6 armor: 17 damage per hit, 680 per volley, dead in one volley without burst protection, dead in 3 volleys if effective HP is 1500.
6 siege onagers: ~70 damage per hit, ~420 per volley, almost dead in one volley without burst protection.
Sanity check: two halberdiers, dealing 25 dps to Cao Cao, would kill him in 20 game sec (counting final reload after killing him) or 12 real sec. In any situation where burst mitigation activates, he is taking damage faster than this and (unless it’s like a single trebuchet hit, with a long pause afterwards) will die in less than 12 real sec. Might be better to make the burst window even smaller, like 60 burst damage and 15 constant incoming dps.
Calculating burst mitigation
Again, this is just the system I thought of for WoW. It can be thought of as a drain: thin on top, then slanted sides leading to a fat section.
The fat section is the burst window, where no burst mitigation occurs. Arriving damage fills up the pipe, starting from the bottom. … trying to remember the details … the key point is that more incoming damage should always lead to more post-mitigation damage, which would not be the case if there was a sharp decrease in incoming damage at a certain point.
Let’s just call damage water: water empties from the pipe at a constant rate. So, if only the fat part is full, the level decreases more slowly; if water fills the thin part, the level decreases more quickly. The marginal damage mitigation is based on the width of the pipe at the current water level.
I think this means that incoming water, aka damage, fills the pipe by a certain height, regardless of the width of the pipe, instead of the damage filling a certain area of this 2D pipe.
So, if we make the slanted section arbitrarily short, and just have a fat section and a thin section, then we would make the thin section 1/3 the width to get a maximum 3x effective HP. Incoming damage raises the water level by a certain height, and the damage taken is the increase in area from this increased height. The water level’s height is constrained after calculating damage, so that the time taken to return to normal levels (water falls to the level of the fat part of the pipe) has a maximum value. Again, the fact that the water level falls faster when in the thin part of the pipe is important, to prevent incoming damage from being good to have (imagine a 1% thickness pipe in which the water level fell slowly; better to keep its level high always even if it meant taking unnecessary damage).
Not bothering with polls, but these are two distinct suggestions:
1) Should there be extra UI to make it easier to track the health of heroes? (Campaigns might give you 5+ heroes at once.)
2) Should heroes have burst mitigation?