Games like Starcraft, AoE2, or AoE4 use linear values for defense. For example: if you have 4 defense and the enemy has 10 attack, you subtract 4 from 10, resulting in the enemy causing you 6 damage.
Classical AoM has defense values based on relative percentages. For example, you ignore 35% of damage.
When using absolute defense values, it is easier to balance and calculate damage quickly. For example, what’s 35% of 6 damage? The majority of players can’t perform this mathematical operation quickly.
What do you think about that? Should AoM Retold replace percentage-based defense with linear defense like other competitive games?
I personally think percentage based armour is more intuitive.
Most people encounter percentages a lot in their daily lives, even if it’s just at the grocery store.
It doesn’t really matter how much damage an individual arrow makes, since you will very likely have more then one archer anyway.
But it’s easy to figure out how much less damage you can expect to make when the enemy has 35% armour.
In AoE1/2/4 with the absolute values it can be very tricky to get a feeling of how much damage actually goes though.
Arbalesters have 6+4 attack and Champions have 1+5 armour resulting in 4 damage while Elite Skirmishers with 3+4 attack only do 1 damage.
Not very intuitive in my eyes.
There are a bunch of advantages with an absolute value based system but that’s another discussion.
The simple reason why AoM won’t change the armour system is because it would mean that every single unit and every single technology would have to be completely rebalanced from scratch.
Not going to happen.
Same as with AoE3DE keeping the percentage based system.
I think myth units comlecate things for absolute value.
Myth units should be always effective vs all human units, but with an absolute value it will be hard to make them effective vs armored human units without obliterating the unarmored ones and verse versa.
The bad of percentages is that they often result in decimals, making it difficult to quickly determine how much life you’re taking away or how many hits you’ll survive.
Operations involving decimals are always slower than simple addition and subtraction. When it comes to balancing changes, it’s much simpler to work with absolute values.
That’s why all competitive strategy games (AoE, Starcraft, total war…) use absolute values.
The problem with this reasoning stems from the premise that AoM has ever been balanced. AoM is such a horribly unbalanced game. In addition to this, so many things are going to be changed, new mechanics added… so the balance going to be built from the begining anyway
Devs have never attempted to bring AoE3 into competitive escene. But with AoM (from what I’ve read) they going to try that.
The reason mythic units are good against humans is not because of any bonuses (in general). Their strength lies in the fact that their base stats are much higher.
So… Changing the defense to absolute (from percentage %) values would not harm the mythic units, it would actually benefit them. Since they have generally higher attack, they are going to be more harmed by percentage defenses
But in how many cases do you want to only know how many hits one specific unit does against one other specific unit?
If you are that much of a pro in the game you will likely already remember how many hits what units does after which armour upgrade.
On a larger scale (like 10v10 units) percentages make it easier to guess.
No I don’t think so.
The reason for that is completely different.
There is a very big massive difference how linear armour works compared to percentage armour.
Linear armour favours units that have a lot of damage per hit because they basically negate the armour completely, while for percentage based armour it doesn’t make a difference if you attack in one big hit or many small hits.
For example the AoM and AoE3 ChoKuNu attack in many small arrows that all do the same damage. Effectively it would be the same as one big arrow.
In AoE2 the ChoKuNu does one arrow with a lot of damage and a lot of arrows with small damage.
AoE4 on the other hand does something interesting. It uses the AoE2 armour system but the Zhuge Nu attacks with multiple arrows that all do the same damage. That means the unit is very good against unarmoured targets but very bad against armoured ones.
This is one advantage of linear armour.
In Starcraft 2 Space Marines attack very fast but with low damage per shot, the same logic applies here.
You are sure that Total War uses this kind of armour system?
No it was not that bad.
Yes it was never as balanced as AoE2DE is now, but it wasn’t awful.
But the game has been in development for 2 years now. They have invested time and effort into balancing it for a while now they can’t just completely scrap everything just to redo everything from scratch now, the game is supposed to release this year.
They have balanced AoE3DE pretty well and now they can use that experience to balance AoM.
AoM is probably easier to balance then AoE3DE. The home city gives a lot of potential combinations of bonuses that all have to be balanced and on top of that every map offers different minor civilisations and mercenaries.
AoM only has 3 major gods with only 2 minor gods for each age up. A lot less variables.
It’s definitely to late for a suggestion like that.
And even if you would have made that in October 2022, they still would have likely decided to not implement that system because they want to be as close to the original as possible.
AoMR is not a new game, it’s a remaster.
What you are suggesting would have made AoMR more different from AoM then AoE4 is different from AoE2(DE).
So it’s the same as the settlement system.
If they would make an AoM2 it would be worth considering changing it.
Neither of the armour systems are perfect. The best solution would be to have an armour and armour piercing system that is independent of damage.
That would allow high damage attacks with low armour piercing and low damage attacks with high armour piercing (without doing the full armour ignoring thing that AoE2DE does).
Between civs may be.
But between some units and others, powers, others… The difference is very big.
Like AoE3 the game may be more or less balanced between civilizations. But internally, it’s not. And even if it were… as I’ve said, many things are going to change, the balance will practically have to be done from the begining.
1 million % agree.
This would avoid situations like in aoe4, armored age3 units completely ignoring archers.
Like maa fast castle of HRE, just running it down and hunting archers under tc
A sword can do a slashing attack. This can easily be blocked by even relatively weak armour like chainmail, but it’s very devastating vs. none armoured targets.
A war hammer can only do piercing attacks. They can go through thicker armour but it’s a lot harder to injure a none armoured person with that, compared with the sword.
AoE2 can only simulate that indirectly by making units ignore armour or with the Obuch reduce armour with every attack.
But anyway, I agree with you that linear armour has a lot of advantages over multiplicative armour (percentage based) but AoMR wants to be very close to the original AoM so this change will not happen.
The fact that you suggest it that late in development just adds to it, a change like that would mean having to delay the games release for months.
So what to do with Titan attack? make unit has 35 solid defend or make Titan 20 hand attack? How about Titan vs Titan? Unit vs Titan?
Now Titan is 70 hand attack, in case unit A is 50% hand defense, unit will get 35 damage from Titan.
If you change defense to number value, this unit A needs to be 35 defense to keep the same result. This is making other units deal only 1 damage to this unit A.
This suggestion is just making the game existing balance complicated, dev needs to redesign full states for all units. Also existing AOM full balance system will be changed.
I can’t see what is the problem with percentage defense. I also can’t see AOM has balance issue due to percentage defense.
Percentage-based (multiplicative) systems vs. integer-based (additive) systems is a long, long, long topic*.
I don’t know where I sit for a new game. For an existing game, I think keeping what it was already using is the best move, because otherwise you’re biting off more than you can chew by basically redefining every single engagement in the game.
The thing is, it’s not just mechanical. Nothing ever is. Player psychology is a big part of it as well. If you have an ability (or upgrade) that “buffs all damage a unit does by 50%”, it feels big. Even if the damage is 4, and you’re buffing it to 6. Even if you take an integer-heavy system, and bump all the values up by 10, 100, or even 1000 . . . all you’re doing is making the visual number bigger. There’s no change mechanically there. So multiplicative feels better nomatter the numbers involved, because multiplication feels like “bigger” maths than addition. That’s just a psych thing.
Mechanics-wise there are advantages and disadvantages to both. A lot of the arguments in here basically boil down to player preference on realism in their weapon systems (arrows not damaging walls, piercing attacks and their effectiveness against armour, etc). The problem is that’s far too detailed at the RTS level when deciding on weapon attacks. You have to have a unified system, and that unified system will work better for some kinds of attacks (e.g. siege) than it will for others (e.g. melee, or vice versa).
*percentage-based systems aren’t purely multiplicative, and additive systems don’t always rely on integers, but that’s how they’re often used. Generally-speaking, multiplication gives you better scaling ability (and more positive reactions from gamers who like big numbers), but additive gives you more control and ease of use. Some games even use both, and normally end up needing more UI work to effectively communicate that to players.
If you want to maintain the same strenght with units with a larger values of damage when you transitioning to linear armor values, you should reduce their damage. In such a way that they end up producing a similar amount of damage in the end
*(Thats why larger values of damage are more harmed by porcentual defense)
AoM has not balance issues due to percentaje defense.
But like AoE3, AoE4,… AoM going to have many balance issues and many balance will be needed. Is more easy for the devs to balance the game with linear values than with percentaje values.
oh i never payed attention to this that much. i would give my vote in the council of defenses to the linear defense over the percentage one. thanks for pointing this out.
You all should remember that AoM’s attack value is shown as dps, not as an absolute value. So Titans 70 attack is actually 70dmg/s. So no, it will completely eradicate every balance aspect of this game.
I think you are mixing up the discussion over a completely integer based and a completely percentage based system.
Every AoE game has some percentage based things, like civilisation bonuses and technologies giving n% more HP/Attack/collection rate/etc.
So you can have 2x attack damage vs. cavalry and then also +3 armour.
That would probably be pretty confusing unless it’s done in the classic AoE3 style.
AoE3 uses the the armour system that is technically the same as AoM in a very different way.
Every unit only has one type or armour (called resistance) and everything else is just done with HP.
AoE3DE kinda changed that a little by introducing units with dual resistance but that only applies to very few units.
The reasoning being:
Having 20% armour against every damage type is equivalent to having 20% more HP.
Since almost every unit has 0% siege resistance every unit should also have either 0% ranged or 0% melee resistance.
Resistance is only used to make a unit either good against melee or good against ranged units.
How armoured a unit is is entirely simulated by the HP.
Since last week it should be pretty obvious that the developers want to make AoMR very close to the original.
It is “just” AoMDE with a different name.
I assume the talks about it being more then an AoMDE are likely only related to Single Player content. So the campaign likely had a bigger rework compared to AoE1/2/3 campaigns.
I agree with you that linear armour would be better and I would also love to see a bigger rework of AoM but I am afraid we will have to wait for AoM2 for that to happen.
If AoMR becomes popular the chances for an AoM2 aren’t that bad.