Archer targeting

[Gabanus family]

@Medron, to the best of my knowledge even at the end we received very little financial support? Then I assume this was after I paused? Till then we always survived without aid.

I should add that in total we've spent atleast 60k+ family wealth to support Oligarch. We were running at improved taxes for almost the entire duration of the war.

As to inf vs archers. Keep in mind that a while ago the archer bug that reduced archer damaged by factor 3 was fixes. So archers now are much stronger than in the past.

[Anaris]

Oligarch abused no rules.

You abused no rules. They abused no rules. However, you used some broken tactics to keep Oligarch alive long after it should have fallen if the game were more properly balanced. Therefore, when they did break it, it makes sense that it was also with a broken tactic.

The broken tactic they used is one that is easy to see in a single battle, which makes it easy to criticize. However, all the broken tactics described in this threadâ€"on both sidesâ€"need to be reined in. Off the top of my head, those are:

• Drawing infantry out from behind walls with an archer-only attacking force
• Peasant militias being too powerful, too easy to spawn, and too little damaging to the region/realm
• Militia in general being too strong and too reliable
• Magic on the EC

I'd be happy to have others remind me of any that I've missed.

I want to be absolutely clear that I do not consider either Oligarch and its allies, nor Sirion and its allies, to have done anything wrong in this. The fault, to the extent that there is fault here, lies with us, the developers, who allowed these imbalances to continue to exist, and the way forward lies not in trying to assign blame or decide whose behaviour was less acceptable, but in determining how we can make things better balanced and more fun for the future.

[feyeleanor]

Basically, I take notice of tactics that change the way entire wars are fought.  Some of them are just smart tactics.  Some of them are abuses of unintended side-effects.  And just like we need to find a way of balancing militias against the new, smaller player base.

The Southern Alliance ran into that issue actually.  We could smash Northern armies again and again in the field, but taking a city was nearly impossible even with our entire army.  And then 5k and 10k militia units started appearing out of no where when we marched into their regions, and that made things difficult for us.  Basically, militia is an issue we need to deal with.  It is too powerful for the present player base.  And if we're being honest, many very small realms with three or four nobles are basically depending on militia to survive.  I don't think that was ever the intention of the militia system.

They didn't appear out of nowhere. That was the result of weeks/months of hard work which put Brigdha at great personal risk for an outcome that's far from reliable. And the main benefit of those militia wasn't that they held territory but rather that they broke up the coordination of SA advances and greatly diminished the stability of those regions if they were captured.

The thing to remember with militia is that gold spent on maintaining them can't be spent on mobile force so a realm which places all its emphasis on a strong defensive position sacrifices mobility. Yes that can stop a city from being captured as easily as attackers might want - though note that Oligarch fell and in spectacular fashion - but it also makes the defending realm fairly irrelevant.

[Medron Pryde]

I agree with all the points Anaris made.

Those are the issues I think should be addressed.

There are probably others, but those would stick high on my list right now.

8)

Would it be possible to make militia archers go scattergories when it comes to targeting enemies while noble-led archers are more accurate and focused?  I don't know how the code handles them, so don't know if they can be separated in that way, but if they can that may be a good idea.

[Zakky]

Anaris's four points are a great place to start.

I understand the concept behind hateful spawning peasants but with peasant militias being too strong, they can stop small realms from leaving their border at all. Basing the number of peasants purely based on population is a bad design as numbers of each region are too high compared to what normal realms can field unless you are entering wastelands.

I don't remember who mentioned it but someone mentioned an idea involving a garrison. Instead of having militias maybe we should have that. Give each region a maximum number of garrison and make it not based on region's population or gold. Just set it to maybe at most 3k CS except maybe border regions to 5k CS.

As for archer drawing out infantry, we have to approach this carefully. If you let infantry just sit in the front row, archers in the back can just shoot them down until they wipe infantry out. Same for R5 SF shooting them down. Maybe fortification level lowering the range of enemy archers might help to force archers to move forward (maybe lv of fort / 3 rounding down might be good. That will reduce R4 archer's range against fort 5 to R3 so they will shoot from the middle which is within your defending archers' range). Infantry not leaving the wall until the number of men drops to a certain level might help too.

But in general, there needs to be more ways to siege a city. Can't just frontal assault all the time. I wish there was a way to implement supply lines. So you can literally starve a city. Kinda hard when you can just buy food and bringing them instantaneously.

Summoning peasant militia should be your last option. You shouldn't be able to use it more than once per war I feel. Once you press that you should pretty much be out of the war. Devastating your regions(preventing regions from recovering lost stats until they disband) + disabling RCs(emptying+not refilling) until peasants disappear might be a good start.

As for magic, please for the love of god, let's not do more portal events on EC. So sick of so called random events that screw a certain realm over. If portal events are going to stay then they should purely be RP stuff. No in game impact whatsoever. Scrolls need to be reduced on EC so we don't see people spamming 10 scrolls before a battle. I don't mind seeing magic steed/weapon/armor ones but other ones are just crazy. Reviving dead heroes, severely injuring nobles etc... those got to go from EC at least.

[Anaris]

Would it be possible to make militia archers go scattergories when it comes to targeting enemies while noble-led archers are more accurate and focused?  I don't know how the code handles them, so don't know if they can be separated in that way, but if they can that may be a good idea.

It's possibleâ€"and I like the idea, and possibly also increasing the focus-fire for higher-training unitsâ€"but not as trivial as just adjusting the ratios.

[Zakky]

I think it is just better to make all archers do that instead of just militia units but assign the ratio 3 ways - units closeby, units farther away, and the ground(missed arrows). Depending on training, maybe adjust the ratio so there are less ratio leaning toward missed. I'd just slash militia unit's morale(cap at 50 and set to police) and CS in general. Maybe upon becoming militia units they lose 50% of their stats or something while pay is doubled.

[Chenier]

I still don't really see "archers drawing out infantry" as being a problem. What else are they to do? If the infantry stays behind the walls, they get hammered without retaliating. But if they reach the archers in melee, they can quickly make ground meat out of them. If you just end the battle there after a turn or two, it doesn't change anything, it just makes the battles take more days instead of battle turns.

But seriously, if 20k CS archers attack a city with 10k CS of archer militia and 10k CS of infantry militia, with lvl 5 walls, I fully expect the militia to win. From what I was described, I'd still expect it to win.

If 50k CS of archers attack a city that has the same composition, though, then yea, the militia should lose. But you know what, if 50k CS of infantry attack the same thing, they should win too.

All in all, though, the main issue was that militia would not rally right away.

If a realm is afraid of enemies drawing out infantry with pure archer armies, there's a number of really simple fixes. First of all is: don't rely on militia so much. Second is: be mindful of your militia composition. Archer militia would shine behind walls in an archery duel. lvl 5 walls reduce incoming damage significantly. A smallish archer garrison could fend off much larger forces.

It's all kind of rock-paper-scissors, though. And thus, in the end, player choices, and mistakes. A purely archer army is in no way invincible.

[Medron Pryde]

Then you've obviously never seen it in action.

::)

[Ketchum]

As to inf vs archers. Keep in mind that a while ago the archer bug that reduced archer damaged by factor 3 was fixes. So archers now are much stronger than in the past.

So the only strategy is for infantry to reach archers lines faster, aggressive front setting. Still have to do something with range 5 but maybe in future if we have Speed statistics to track for the unit types(cavalry, infantry, archer, mixed infantry, special force) to determine who can move faster in battles.

I think it is just better to make all archers do that instead of just militia units but assign the ratio 3 ways - units closeby, units farther away, and the ground(missed arrows). Depending on training, maybe adjust the ratio so there are less ratio leaning toward missed. I'd just slash militia unit's morale(cap at 50 and set to police) and CS in general. Maybe upon becoming militia units they lose 50% of their stats or something while pay is doubled.

I agree, better reduce the efficiency. Maybe make the efficiency of unit correlated with character Leadership skill. The higher your Leadership skill, the more better performance your unit will act in battles. Militia unit without leaders or unit commander should have some missed arrows.

@Chenier. The lone or few infantry units who act as tank to take in all damages that archers give, so that his team archers can fight back. Perhaps with cavalry horse riders at back ready to pounce in to finish the rest of the opposing side. This method was utilized by Kurlock(Thanks Zakky) when Sandalak won the War Islands 2 rounds ago. It was further utilized or improved  in Sirion and allies versus Oligarch battles.

[Chenier]

Then you've obviously never seen it in action.

::)

I haven't, but if you've got battle reports to share...

But changes nothing to the fact that city sieges are too hard to begin with anyways. If they found a way to make an overwhelming army win when it wouldn't have, kudos to them. Overwhelming armies should win. If a realm gets ganked by all of its neighbors, it SHOULD die. And I really loathe that all of the game's changes over the last few years seem to make it so that this is the ONLY way to kill a realm, or even just take a city in general.

[Medron Pryde]

Yeah...I can see an overwhelming army winning.

But..30k defenses versus 30k to maybe 40k attackers does not an overwhelming attacking army make.  Especially when the defenders are behind level 5 walls.

That makes them a suicide squad, not an overwhelming army.

Remember the standard rule of needing DOUBLE the CS to take a city.

If your alliance of four or five nations has to take advantage of weaknesses in the combat AI and rains of magic to wound the defending nobility and stop their players from being able to play the game at all, just to beat a single nation, then you need to find a better way to play the game.

(Though I will grant once again that Oligarch was receiving support from outside which allowed us to work at a higher peak efficiency than a single nation, truly alone, could have.  That did make us much more resilient to the normal attrition of war.  Also, only one of Sirion's allies had a truly impressive mobile force.  The others were also rans which wouldn't have meant much on their own.)

Oligarch was sending a 10k to 20k army into the field during the Sirion Civil War.
Sirion could normally deploy a 10k to 20k army of their own, which Oligarch handily trounced again and again.

Epollyon could do 10k to 20k as I remember when Sirion called them in and made it a more general war.
The rest maybe provided 5k or 6k each.

It was enough to push Oligarch back, but it wasn't an overwhelming advantage when the city walls were factored in.


Now once again, I do agree that militias need to be toned back.  Right now they are handled, and recruited like, standard military units.  They simply don't have leaders.  They cost a similar amount to train and deploy as noble-led units.  They are...the same.  That makes it easy for a very small realm to deploy a lot of militia to hold city walls.

What if, instead of treating them like organized, and trained soldiers that simply act like normal military units, we treated the militia as a more untrained reserve?  Remember that the modern militia idea of trained soldiers with firearms that can fight and win against a trained military is...well...very modern American in style.  But in the medieval world, no peasant had the time to learn how to use a bow and arrow.  Only trained men at arms did.  And they followed a noble, or were lesser nobility themselves.

What if we treated militia units more like peasant armies?  Make them based on the population of the region, with each region lord able to increase or decrease the size of the militia by shifting a setting that would increase or decrease their impact on the economy, but with a finite limit to how large they can be based on that population.  And limit them to more infantry-style tactics.  Like the peasant armies.

Also, we already have the peasant armies in the code, so I'm thinking that might not be too difficult to implement as coding goes.

[Zakky]

Yeah...I can see an overwhelming army winning.

But..30k defenses versus 30k to maybe 40k attackers does not an overwhelming attacking army make.  Especially when the defenders are behind level 5 walls.

That makes them a suicide squad, not an overwhelming army.

Remember the standard rule of needing DOUBLE the CS to take a city.

If your alliance of four or five nations has to take advantage of weaknesses in the combat AI and rains of magic to wound the defending nobility and stop their players from being able to play the game at all, just to beat a single nation, then you need to find a better way to play the game.

(Though I will grant once again that Oligarch was receiving support from outside which allowed us to work at a higher peak efficiency than a single nation, truly alone, could have.  That did make us much more resilient to the normal attrition of war.  Also, only one of Sirion's allies had a truly impressive mobile force.  The others were also rans which wouldn't have meant much on their own.)

But you are making a statement based on a flawed assumption. You don't need x2 to siege a city. That is to siege a city safely and that tactic was used when people mostly fielded infantry. Like I said multiple times (yet you don't seem to understand why your statement is flawed), we no longer have enough people to field 60k CS. Even with many realms putting together their armies they can hardly field anything close to it. Yet it is easy to put 20-30k CS of militia in a city granted the city is rich enough. That is why we are having this discussion of fixing the problem. From Anaris' comment, he clearly understands the flaw of the current system and will most likely work on a solution that will at least lessen some of the issues. You are constantly talking about how Oligarch's fall was unfair but it is the other way around. It was unfair for the realm to last so long behind the walls relying on militias. It was okay when Oligarch had 20+ nobles, fielding 20k CS army but once the realm was down to 12 nobles with 10k CS, it should have fallen relatively quickly. Yet thanks to the broken militia system and the addition of poorly thought out peasant militia system in an attempt to forcely keep realms alive, it just turned the whole thing into a !@#$ show that dragged on for too many months. I am just grateful that all the problems are finally being recognized and will be worked on. Maybe by the time this year, we will no longer see people relying too heavily on militias to keep them alive.

Oligarch was sending a 10k to 20k army into the field during the Sirion Civil War.
Sirion could normally deploy a 10k to 20k army of their own, which Oligarch handily trounced again and again.

Epollyon could do 10k to 20k as I remember when Sirion called them in and made it a more general war.
The rest maybe provided 5k or 6k each.

It was enough to push Oligarch back, but it wasn't an overwhelming advantage when the city walls were factored in.


Now once again, I do agree that militias need to be toned back.  Right now they are handled, and recruited like, standard military units.  They simply don't have leaders.  They cost a similar amount to train and deploy as noble-led units.  They are...the same.  That makes it easy for a very small realm to deploy a lot of militia to hold city walls.

That is what kept Oligarch longer than it should have. Hopefully this problem will be fixed so small realms die when they should.

What if, instead of treating them like organized, and trained soldiers that simply act like normal military units, we treated the militia as a more untrained reserve?  Remember that the modern militia idea of trained soldiers with firearms that can fight and win against a trained military is...well...very modern American in style.  But in the medieval world, no peasant had the time to learn how to use a bow and arrow.  Only trained men at arms did.  And they followed a noble, or were lesser nobility themselves.

What if we treated militia units more like peasant armies?  Make them based on the population of the region, with each region lord able to increase or decrease the size of the militia by shifting a setting that would increase or decrease their impact on the economy, but with a finite limit to how large they can be based on that population.  And limit them to more infantry-style tactics.  Like the peasant armies.

Also, we already have the peasant armies in the code, so I'm thinking that might not be too difficult to implement as coding goes.

I think units set to militia should be treated like retired soldiers. Maybe they should become weaker every passing weak and after about 21~42 days (which is a year in BM time) they all disappear. But until they disappear, they are paid the same despite them becoming weaker over time to discourage people from putting too many of them. Or maybe there should be something like CS limit based on your mobile CS or noble count.

If devs really want small realms that are active and full of people, basing it on # of nobles will certainly help them survive. But again, militias need to be weakened considerably.

[Medron Pryde]

You are accurate that 60k armies are rather hard to get together.

I've never seen one in all my years.  The largest armies I've ever seen are the 40k armies that Sirion's Northern Alliance has been pushing around over the last year.  And I've been in a lot of wars.  Most large armies in my experience are around 20k, and that has stayed true for the last decade.

The difference is that those armies are increasingly being made up of smaller numbers of larger units as the player base shrinks.  I remember a time when 30 men was a good standard unit.  Now if you can't recruit to 60 men you are a poor piker.  The income is simply going to fewer people so each unit is getting stronger.  But at the same time, less money is going to the nobles now since regions don't generate as much income for small numbers of nobles.  So a lot of gold is lost to inefficiency.  But it still results in smaller numbers of more powerful units.

What you've failed to notice is that I've agreed that militias are a problem.  They've been a major issue for most wars of conquest for at least the last couple years.  The only way to break a realm is to surround and starve it out, but if it has allies selling it food and sending money, you can't do that.  Oligarch ran into that issue while trying to take the Sirion City near it during the Sirion Civil War.  Oligarch could beat the Sirions every day of the week in the field but couldn't break the city.  Then Sirion ran into it when they tried to break Oligarch.  The Southern Alliance ran into it while they were rolling over everything north of Highmarch.  And Sirion is probably going to run into it soon with Perdan.  Lots of wars over the last couple years at least have seen this problem.

I don't agree that it is unfair for the militias to do what they do.  They've done it for every realm for years now.  That's an equal fairness.  Or perhaps an equal unfairness.

What I want is the game mechanics fixed so realms don't abuse them, while fixing the militia issue so it balances things better for all nations.  I want equal fairness for all so everybody can have fun playing without unreasonable or unrealistic battles being fought that tug at the willing sense of belief we all put into this game.

[Anaris]

about 21~42 days (which is a year in BM time)

That's not a year, it's a season or two.