FreeGameDev

Hi there,

Now we have a much more configurable game, thanks mostly to the efforts of hwoarangmy.
It's time to smooth the rough corners seen on the game balance.

Hence, I'm officially creating this topic and request everyone to write down specific annoying points in game regarding game balance and fights, such as:
"Kobolds are too strong and take ages to be beaten" or "Cave hornets are too fast."
We'll then be able to discuss, drift a bit, do the usual mumbo jumbo and eventually fix those issues.

Also, as a first step, Danimal has uploaded new creatures.cfg and equipment.cfg files there:
viewtopic.php?p=60647#p60647

@Danimal: could you describe your changes there and why you made them?
If ok with everybody, I'll merge that back to the development branch.

Best regards,

Firstly i made the hunger and sleep lower (0.15 to 0.10) so the creatures arent endlessly going from farm to dormitory, some of them had it increased to made them big eaters and/or sleepyheads (just to give some personality).

Then, i tried to balance creature hitpoints, weaker creatures belonging to tier 1, have low initial hp and growth, this part was easy.
(i classified them into 4 tiers, T1 weak starter creatures, T2 common creatures, T3 strong creatures, T4 Epic creatures)

After that the hardest came; Attack ,defense and its growth. Initially increasing attack was easy, but after adding armor everything went downhill, weapon effect was even more game breaking.
The main issue is that a T1 creature should be able to damage a T3 creature even if very poorly (an orc T2 proved to be inmune to a horde of spiders T1) so i increased Attack for everyone and lowered Defense as well. This made combats faster, but attack/armor growth effect per creatures is untested.

Weapons/shield had a huge effect, so i had to downscale their values a lot (a +5 def from shield is like being almost invencible joined with natural armor of a knigth) so they now range from 1 to 3.

Most creatures have pure physical damage, some pure magical (slime, wizard), and a few mixed damage(Dwarf3, bigknitgh, demon).


My main concerns are:
- Creatures should be able to damage the next two tiers T1 >T3
- Growths may inbalance everything
- Figths should be fast paced, not eternal or instant, even among same level species; but allow them to survive the attacks of a tier above them and put up some figth.

For now i would like to hear what you think of the current balance

Ok, I'll test the game with the new balance asap. Is there an official list of T1 -> T4 somewhere for the two factions (Hero/Keeper)?

I have used this for the default configuration file :
viewtopic.php?f=37&t=5851&p=59697&hilit=tier#p59643

Don't know if it is final but it seems not bad

Ah good. We need to port this to the wiki somehow... Too bad the sourceforge wiki is sooo slow...

I've tried to let some games play to test game stability and balancing on skirmish 2v2. First interesting thing is that when I build the buildings then I leave the game play alone, my ally always get killed. Which seems to show that the AI creature management (by dropping) seems not to be bad.

But I think that defense is really too high. My level 20+ bigknight can fight loads of units (including level 15+ pit demons) during a while without dying (and I just let him, I don't pick him up). Concerning balance, IMHO, we should lower much defense as I think it is easier to increase it when we will feel that a high level creature is too weak. From what I've seen in creature def file, for most creatures, the attack increases 50% faster than the defense. I think we should increase this rate.

Moreover, since the first balance attempts are pretty hard to do, I think we should aim for a fight length for similar creatures (like BigKnight and PitDemon) and create a map with such 1v1 fight (at different levels) to ensure fights are not too long

WDYT ?

Looks relevant. We may indeed have to test creature in "arenas" maps I guess.
We might want to decrease the defense growth instead also. I'm not sure so just saying.