So I’ve spent much of my afternoon today watching Beastyqt and his subathon up through the now-infamous Puppypaw game where Beasty played as HRE. I am, by all means, a noob in general, but I still think I can point some stuff out regarding some balance issues raised.
Issue: Manors
Too much passive income from manors and also that they are too defendable with arrowslits and all that jazz.
Thoughts: Now, I’d like to see first if there are any solutions to be had without removing any mechanics from the design of this civ as they do make it more unique. But it seems quite clear that manors are too defensible and give too much income…so how to fix that without changing game mechanics? Here’s some thoughts.
-1: Reduce Manor health. The castle influence that gives them arrowslits and +500 health. Just have it give them arrowslits to keep that uniqueness (personally they probably shouldn’t have arrowslits, but it seems fair to say that we’re trying to avoid feeling like we’re “taking away” something, even if it’s just in preview) but no extra health at all, or literally just +1 health if it’s necessary for the code.
-2: Aoe2 had this issue with Feitorias granting too much passive income for the Portuguese, and while they did have to tweak the numbers, there was one tradeoff that I think this game needs to carry over to Manors.
THEY SHOULD COST POPULATION.
One thing that was seen in the game with Puppypaw was that while many times his army was inferior, he was able to push and overwhelm with 140+ military compared to beasty’s 80-90. Now, you don’t want them to feel too punishing, but I think around 6-8 population is a good starting point; and so at 9 manors, that would restrict 54-72 unit population slots. At 6 population per manor, I think Beasty’s and Puppypaw’s armies would have been about equal in size per the aforementioned game. You could just nerf Manor generation into the ground, but I think making Lancaster a unique civ in that it only requires 35-50 villagers to micro and macro is a neat idea, but it does have to come at a cost.
Issue: Synchronized shot
Again, without digging into code and mechanics, at the very least this should have a cooldown of about 65 seconds. As beasty pointed out, you don’t know it’s coming and it comes fast, but having a longer cooldown time now only lowers actual dps over time, but if kept around a minute or so, it also allows for easier anticipation from the opponent on when the next volley could arrive, dictating timings for pushes etc.
Issue: Wynguard-Seemed like it had too much value for stuff. I’m not playing the preview so this seems more like a straightforward numbers game to tweak and I wouldn’t have a clue on specifics.
Just some quick thoughts to share as I watched the preview games of today.
Thanks for making and working on the game.