@TungstenBoar had a great idea in one of the many infantry-related threads and I think it deserves it’s own thread. Basically repair rates need to be staggered by age in some way to fix the fundamental problems with (quick) walling and perpetually zoning out melee military with buildings in feudal age.
It’s clear the devs have been working on making non-stone walls (like walls made of houses and palisades) less able to stone-wall an opponent. However the fixes so far don’t address the main problem with the ‘wood-walls’ of dark and feudal age, namely that villagers can repair basically just as fast as 4 MAA can take out a building. I’m pretty sure we’ve all seen 1 villager zone out a group of infantry perpetually until the enemy gives up. Even if the added villagers repair at half the rate that first villager is fixing up the relatively low-health buildings in feudal age like hes got power tools.
So I think the natural conclusion is to stagger repair rates to something like 375 (188) hp/min for dark and feudal, and 750 (325) hp/min for castle and imperial age. Now building rates are still the same so you can still house-wall behind things, which is reasonable for those long stretches of walls that are planned out ahead of time. But it heavily nerfs the ability to hastily quick-wall and perpetually zone out melee units in tight spaces like next to berries or a woodline with something that isn’t a stone wall.
Some other implications:
What once took 1 villager takes 3, what once took 2 villagers takes 5, etc. It punishes doing things like walling in villagers in tight spaces and not building military for defense. It also strongly limits the ability to repair palisades because their footprint is so small (which is good IMO).
Overall the benefit of quick-walling is restricted to buying time. Instead of being able to keep out 4 FU Man at arms for like 3 minutes with 1 villager you now only get 30s. Ability to get in without repairing is unchanged.
Stone walls may take the place of palisades when quick-walling but this is already possible. The fact that players so rarely use this indicates a problem still exists with palisades.
Cumans (and to a lesser extent goths) are going to need to be looked at, maybe giving them stone walls.
Tower rushes are going to be nerfed unless you bring military along to assist. What once could be repaired by 1 villager hopping in and out must now be done by 3. This is a fairly large advantage to the defender because it means the attackers villagers will be more exposed than before in tower v tower fights. Similarly rushing a dropped tower with villagers will be more effective. So maybe tower rush buffs can make their way back into the game with this change.
Repairing ships is going to be affected if it’s a scalar multiple of this. This will need to be avoided somehow.
Overall I think the advantages out-weight the disadvantages in terms of balancing things and it certainly fixes a lot more problems than nerfing HP alone does. It certainly fits Occam’s Razor when it comes to being able to affect a lot of the feudal dynamics that are constantly being rebalanced.
Post any critiques or edge-cases you might have thought of.
Many buildings have different HP per age. For example, a Barracks has 1200 HP in Dark Age, 1500 in Feudal Age, 1800 in Castle Age and 2100 in Imperial Age. For a House, it is 550/750/900/900, for a Mill, it is 600/800/1000/1000, et cetera.
I think it would make sense to adjust repair rate so these buildings would take more or less the same time to repair from 1% to 100% in every age. More or less, because the rates are still different for every building (TC always has the same HP for example).
I also think other things can be addressed, such as the ridiculously long repair time for stone walls or the fact that repairing a TC from 1 HP costs an insane 550 Wood and for no reason you need 1 Stone to start repairing.
I think it’s enough to buff the militia anti-building damage to a level a standard rush can outperform a single vill repairing?
This proposed change has way too much implictations to strats like trush, douche etc. And it’s also very close to getting efficiency from maa by jus knocking on palisades/houses which are repaired, just by the value of the forced idle time.
Why even make a wall if the opponent can force more damage to your eco than he invested in his maa? By just attacking a defence which has no other purpose than buying time?
I do like nerfs for walling, but dont go to far at once. In the end it is about finding a sweetspot. You said that was previously 1 vill now requires 3. That seems to much to me. Just slightly tweak the numbers.
I also dont really know if other things besides walls needs to be affected. For example we dont need another nerf to tower rushes. They are already completely nerfed into the ground.
And in total defence have already be nerfed way too much. You see it in the winrates of civ with no early eco bonusses.
The game just needs defences, without efficient defences it will become a pure raiding party, boring as hell.
Hmm after readin those comments I’m not so sure I’m on board with all this anymore But I think it’s still pretty safe to assume whatever nerfs quickwalling appropriately should allow to reverse some nerfs to palissades.
I’ve seen this argument brought up for walls, for towers and for laming, but I still don’t get how a strat that is available to all civs favours weak civs more than strong ones. You would think that a stronger civ would outdo a weaker one using the same strat anyway.
I think you can buff slightly walls in exchsnge of this. The problem we are trying to fix is the ability of vills to keep buildings up against multiple melee units
So you don’t see why it can be advantageous to buy time or a civ which has a way better lategame but practically no early bonus?
It’s usually the tradeoff, most civs with good early eco bonusses have bad lategame and vice versa. And the recent wall nerfs have lead to even more dominance of the civs with good early eco.
And I think this can be done by just slightly improve the militia line against buildings. It’s a minor change but is justified and the recent wall nerfs could be taken back so the civs with bad early bonusses have a liitle bit more time to make use of their better mid or lategame.
Well to “buy time” you can’t just remain in your base, you have to attack at some point unless you get a good FC map. So the “strong civ” will have an easier time walling out the rush of the “weak” one. And anyway you might think I overestimate palissades but I don’t think they can buy you time until castle age. And that’s not quite late game.
I would prefer this solution as well, but I think making repair rates dynamic like this is much harder on the back end. Currently its the same for every building which from a software design standpoint is very likely to coincide with a static variable. Even having it change dynamically with age might be tricky.
The problem is this makes more than a few Man at arms absolutely broken and it changes the value of the palisades base health. This leaves the dynamic of an undefended palisade unaffected and only changes it in certain scenarios.
MAA cost basically 80 resources for most of feudal (unless you make more than ~15). Currently 1 villager can idle for 12m before thats paid back. At half the repair rate it would mean 4m before that’s paid back (the wood cost is negligible)
Sure I’m open to tweaking the numbers, they’re not that important compared the general mechanic.
But they’re nerfed into the ground because they don’t allow for strategic counter-play. With nerfing repair rates you can actually justify buffing certain civs tower rushes.
Do wall HPs need to be buffed? We’re only affecting the dynamic of repair speed, not build speed. You can still quick-wall, build behind at the same speed as before, etc. Sure they could use a 10% buff or something if needed but we could also just lower the nerf to repair speed.
And you can’t move out if your walls can’t buy you the time to do so ;). Do you see, what this would lead to?
Right now 3 maa can basically permaidle one vill, which is quite reasonable. It’s basically equivalent to a vill kill. by making a drush you would consider this a netto win. For maa it’s not the best tradeoff, but it’s also not the worst.
with that change you could idle 2-3 vills, and getting 2 vills for 3 maa is actually totally worth it.
It would be enough if 3 maa would be able to just slightly outperform a single repair vil. Thus you need only +2 anti building damage for.
I agree with this and repair speed nerfs actually make this easier to balance. You can buff the HP of palisades or houses (if needed) because you want to encourage people to place walls in advance. So you want it to be strategically useful to plan ahead, leave room behind the walls so you can re-wall if needed with stone walls or other buildings. It just makes planning ahead more important.
This is not very good analysis. A villager kill doesn’t pay back the cost of the military units for at least a few minutes. It takes ~80 resources to make MAA (unless slavs or goths) or scouts and a villager gathers about 20 resources a minute. Even if you idle that villager the entire feudal age of 12 minutes you barely pay back.
Well, if you change the repair rate too drastically, it just changes the play from repairing buildings to layering buildings. It’s important to keep that in mind, and unless there’s a comparable change to early build rate (which will have an enormous wealth of other implications) it’ll just sway the defensive meta in favor of rewalling behind.
The main change here is the reduction of time bought with quickwalling limited spaces, like woodlines, mines, and berry bushes, where walling behind such a location may prove difficult or impossible. It’s not going to make getting into bases any easier.
right, actually. Beside it is usually a bigger investment than just repairing the attacked palisade.
YOu usually do it nowatdays because you expect archers to come.
Nevertheless I would like to see a reasonable investment infeudal being able to break in, even if it’s only the first layer of walls. But not all units should be able to, just the militia line which is designed to deal reasonably well against buildings.
Scouts and Archers are raiding units and walls are designed to stop them from too easily get into the eco without any support.
Even if you have 0 eco bonus you don’t need that much more time to get army out. Heck at most elos a counter attack can throw of your opponent and make them run their scouts in your TC 11
tbh it’s already pretty meta to spam houses behind damaged palissades since foundations are just so strong.
Yes the main objective is to punish the limited space walling far more than anything else.
Changes I could see coming about would be: more layering, more strategic stone-wall placement, defensive tower placements, more defensive military, etc.
The whole point is to make strategic walling much more important because you have to plan that you’re going to lose ground if it gets attacked and you have no military or towers. Palisades could have their build time reduced if needed to balance this out. Halving the speed also creates a breakpoint. Previously you could repair a house fully in about 60s for ~12 wood which is almost identical to the cost of building a new one (~33w). Halving the repair speed makes the repair cost about 52 in total idle time + 12 wood.
Overall I think encouraging layering and lose ground slowly is much preferred to the ability to perpetually defend a line by repairing or just building a single house-wall behind.
But I think it’s still pretty safe to assume whatever nerfs quickwalling appropriately should allow to reverse some nerfs to palissades.