Scripting demo release candidate

[EDMatt]

From Lewin's proposals I will suggest number 2 in paragraphs.

Instead of boosting crossbowmen... making archers less accurate. Because they shoot fast, and hit fast (from what I have seen).
Many times in replays you see the arrow "hitting the ground" but actually kills another swordman... gg.
And even knigths are taken down by archers with alarming speed.

It would be fun to watch archers spam killing own units from time to time because their aim is not so good compared to elite Crossbowmen.
A interesting price to pay if you backup your infantry with mass archers (instead of more accurate crossbowmen).

For Matt and Romo: The change you suggest, allowing better micro with Xbows won't have the impact that is needed.
Archers will keep ruling, because Swordmen/Knights eat Axemen easily... and even mass Pikemen do great vs leather.
Secondly... no matter how much micro you have, leather macro owns theorically (of course you need the building skills to do so).

Xbows are not useful not because of swords or axe fighters, but the micro possibilities , because xbow are out microed by bow men, and take rather long to shoot with little micro possibilities.

the main point here is micro.

[Jeronimo]

You are seeing the problem from only the tactical duel between Archers and Crossbowmen... but the issue is "deeper" to analyze.
There are economic aspects (+ bowmen quantity) , and the melee+ranged combo which you are understimating.

How much can last Axemen vs Swordmen during PT rush fights. Then who will cover your Crossbows of being crushed by mass melee iron?
Main problem in my opinion, is that archers are very good supporters... almost equally to crossbowmen since you barely see a disadvantage.

Even based on your POV, I can say... all iron melee own their leather equivalent in 1v1 (e.g. Knigth > Scout, Pikeman > Lancer).
However with Ranged... Crossbow = Archer, instead of Crossbow > Archer.

From point 2 of Lewin... I think balancing Ranged units DOWN is better than balancing UP.
Main reasons: Fights in bridges/narrow passages (worse camping)... and the little number of horses a player can afford (if army is mix).

[Romek]

Is it possible to allow units to shoot-back/forward but block shoot - halt ? Because that can be the best option to fix xbow and make then be useful once again.
The seccond idea comes from Pizzaisgood he proposed to decrease xbows aiming time - to make them shot almost immediately when someone will come to his range. It can be very useful thing at the battlefield. Changing xbows power or attack speed in my opinion can be problematic to balance it well.

[thunder]

Hey!
Some release ago the xbows were everywhere.maybe they were Op unit. But in the newer release with shield patch the swords are maybe the best choise. I think there isnt too much difference beetweeen the bows and xbows.but the prices dont have that little difference. I agree with Romek an Matt the good micro missed for xbows. I have an idea could give back a little quality for xbows. This is the zero to ten square shotdistance to xbows. Just an idea to somehow give a little advantage to xbow for their price. t

[pawel95]

when it comes to xbow vs swords, xbows must have quite a strong counter against swords while bow men will counter xbow in micro as swords are only directly countered (efficiently enough to be called counter) by swords themselves.

Like I already said, giving the shield units +1 defence point ONLY against bowmen and not against xbows would solve the problem(hopefully) that xbows "cant" kill strong melee units well.

But another good solution is shoot and go back, being able to shoot and go back with xbow but not with bow men, which is probably the best thing .

This would bring propably the old OP thingi back. Noone would make bowmen than, because you have no chance with your bowmen against xbows when you have 0 melee units as a "wall of meat".

The seccond idea comes from Pizzaisgood he proposed to decrease xbows aiming time - to make them shot almost immediately when someone will come to his range. It can be very useful thing at the battlefield. Changing xbows power or attack speed in my opinion can be problematic to balance it well.

This idea isn´t bad. However this would only work at the first attack, since the RC2/RC3, because the xbows will reload then in their next attack, so the bowmen are faster ready- to shoot while the xbows are reloading.

[Pizzaisgood]

The seccond idea comes from Pizzaisgood he proposed to decrease xbows aiming time - to make them shot almost immediately when someone will come to his range. It can be very useful thing at the battlefield. Changing xbows power or attack speed in my opinion can be problematic to balance it well.

This idea isn´t bad. However this would only work at the first attack, since the RC2/RC3, because the xbows will reload then in their next attack, so the bowmen are faster ready- to shoot while the xbows are reloading.

With this idea i want to make the micro of x-bow to be better. Their strentgh in full battle won´t be changed.
The idea is to make x-bow aim immediatly or at least faster than bowmen so that their micropotential becomes much better. Like this they will act as really good units for frontlines because they have an easy job at pushing or fighting against enemy bowmen , because the micro-moves : go forward, shoot, go back - or distracting enemy range with a knight and then go in range with x-bows for the kills - will work much better.
I think the idea of having this microadvantage is really nice because players will get rewarded for using microskills. At the moment you can micro as much as you want with x-bows but they won´t be really succesfull against bowmen unless you do some really crazy stuff.
So with this suggestion we would have x-bow > bowmen in microfights which makes them worth to spend iron again. But if x-bows would be stronger in total i could imagine that people mass x-bow , build towers and hide in their base. This would be really succesfull because it´ll be really hard and no fun to step into a base with units defending the base which are even more devastating than bowmen. Its already hard enough to kill enemys camping with mass bowmen.

I also think that the balance of units is quite nice at the moment. Swords and axefighters are the mainarmy ( swords are more used after pt but axefighters and militia step in after iron is depleted ) , bowmen make a great support for the mainarmy ( x-bows will be handy as microunits for frontlines which occur really often so its really good to have x-bows in those moments ) , Knights are really strong and important because people tend to mass archers, so its also reasonable to build some pike ( or lancers if you dont want to waste iron on pikes ) to protect your rangeunits. Scouts might seem underused but its quite logical because knights are stronger than scouts so why would you waste your horse on building scouts when you can have knights instead? But when iron depletes scouts step in because cavalry is still important to build.

I personally wouldn´t dare to change to much in this system anymore because the rock-paper-scissors-system is really good at the moment.
The armys look kind of the same at the moment ( swords+bows ) because its the most logical thing to do : Use the best mainarmytype + support . If you add some Knights and some militia for towers the army is complete. Axefighters + x-bow is no army to attack because the meleeunits are dying faster and loosing your meleetroops as attacker is really really bad for you. So Axefighters and x-bows are defensive army. That´s ok but i don´t think we should make defensive armys better because people should be encouraged to attack. Otherwise it will come to big camping games and im sure everyone is tired of those games.
Maybe KaM needs some more units included to get more variety but that´s another story.

Anyway if x-bows would get this change every unit would have its place in the game.

[Lewin]

I don't like the idea of making crossbowmen faster firing/better at being micromanaged. That makes them the same as bowmen, and we'd be back to the state where nobody ever makes bowmen. I think it's good to keep a different between the units, archers are good at being micromanaged, and crossbowmen aren't. This makes sense because crossbows are heavy and take longer to reload, bows are light and can be reloaded and fired very quickly by skilled soldiers.

So I think crossbowmen should be left as the slow firing and less manoeuvrable ranged units, but they should do much more damage than bowmen.

If we made crossbowmen fast firing and easy to micromanage why would anybody make bowmen? The only change we made to ranged units since the last public release was to make bowmen slightly faster at aiming/reloading. The purpose of that change was to make bowmen useful, since previously nobody used bowmen when crossbowmen were 2x better in every way. Maybe the best solution to this problem would be to slightly increase bowmen aiming time, to make them closer to what it was in the last release. Our initial change might have gone too far so we can scale it back slightly. That involves the minimum change from the last public release.

I'm also kind of confused about why this suddenly became a massive issue in the past few weeks, when the bowmen changes were made in early December, over 6 months ago

[pawel95]

I'm also kind of confused about why this suddenly became a massive issue in the past few weeks, when the bowmen changes were made in early December, over 6 months ago

Well after a change it takes some time after really all players find their really good tactic. After the Shield patch I also tried(and others) to make many Axefighters+Xbows but than just realized after many games that other players do better with Swordmen

[dicsoupcan]

I'm also kind of confused about why this suddenly became a massive issue in the past few weeks, when the bowmen changes were made in early December, over 6 months ago

Well when bowmen got buffed the shoot and halt glitch was not fixed yet so people used a related glitch called shoot and go back, which means shoot once, go one step back, shoot again. This was often used for an offensive retreat and to disencourage non mounted melee units from following the crossbowmen and killing them. But since the shoot and halt got fixed this manouveur also got patched which means people could not buff the fire rate manually anymore.

[Romek]

I don't like the idea of making crossbowmen faster firing/better at being micromanaged. That makes them the same as bowmen, and we'd be back to the state where nobody ever makes bowmen. I think it's good to keep a different between the units, archers are good at being micromanaged, and crossbowmen aren't. This makes sense because crossbows are heavy and take longer to reload, bows are light and can be reloaded and fired very quickly by skilled soldiers.

So I think crossbowmen should be left as the slow firing and less manoeuvrable ranged units, but they should do much more damage than bowmen.

If we made crossbowmen fast firing and easy to micromanage why would anybody make bowmen? The only change we made to ranged units since the last public release was to make bowmen slightly faster at aiming/reloading. The purpose of that change was to make bowmen useful, since previously nobody used bowmen when crossbowmen were 2x better in every way. Maybe the best solution to this problem would be to slightly increase bowmen aiming time, to make them closer to what it was in the last release. Our initial change might have gone too far so we can scale it back slightly. That involves the minimum change from the last public release.

I'm also kind of confused about why this suddenly became a massive issue in the past few weeks, when the bowmen changes were made in early December, over 6 months ago

But the main idea is to decrease only his aiming time to make him react faster. I agree that in fact he will also shoot faster but the difrence will be small. He still will need some time to reload his weapon. Maybe the best solution to keep his attack speed is decrease aiming time and increase reloading time.

[Bence791]

Guys...
What if the xbows were made double this accurate? Bolts missing the target also causes them to be less "useful" or powerful. Making them as manoeuvrable as bowmen isn't a solution, that way the latter would become useless again imo. "Why making something that is half that powerful and shoots just as fast as the one which deals damage on the double percentage?" Sorry if I have misunderstood something

[Jeronimo]

Guys...
What if the xbows were made double this accurate? Bolts missing the target also causes them to be less "useful" or powerful. Making them as manoeuvrable as bowmen isn't a solution, that way the latter would become useless again imo.

This has been my main point from beginning. Thanks Bence791 for understanding where the problem is.

However later I thought... Is it worth to keep strong archers and have new "strong crossbowmen"?
I foresee super effective camping if we choose this path.

Now I'm inclined to nerf archers... make them less effective in some point.
At the end, people in general would prefer Lewin's fix 1.

Having Archers aiming time between old/current value (because many oppose to decrease accuracy... the mother of microskills)

I hope Matt prefers this option. I'm worried.

[Pizzaisgood]

I don't like the idea of making crossbowmen faster firing/better at being micromanaged. That makes them the same as bowmen, and we'd be back to the state where nobody ever makes bowmen. I think it's good to keep a different between the units, archers are good at being micromanaged, and crossbowmen aren't. This makes sense because crossbows are heavy and take longer to reload, bows are light and can be reloaded and fired very quickly by skilled soldiers.

So I think crossbowmen should be left as the slow firing and less manoeuvrable ranged units, but they should do much more damage than bowmen.

If we made crossbowmen fast firing and easy to micromanage why would anybody make bowmen? The only change we made to ranged units since the last public release was to make bowmen slightly faster at aiming/reloading. The purpose of that change was to make bowmen useful, since previously nobody used bowmen when crossbowmen were 2x better in every way. Maybe the best solution to this problem would be to slightly increase bowmen aiming time, to make them closer to what it was in the last release. Our initial change might have gone too far so we can scale it back slightly. That involves the minimum change from the last public release.

I'm also kind of confused about why this suddenly became a massive issue in the past few weeks, when the bowmen changes were made in early December, over 6 months ago

I wouldn´t say noone would build bowmen anymore because the bowmen-sword combo is still better than the axefighter-x-bow combo . The swordfighters are durable enough to stand the damage of all the x-bow, while the bowmen and the swords in the first row kill the axefighters really fast , which results in x-bow without protection which offer some really nice freekills. And i think its good like this because the offensive army should always be stronger than the defensive one to encourage people to go attack.
Since x-bows are more expencive and take the precious iron which could be used for swords , they should have an advantage over bowmen. But this advantage shouldn´t make defensive armys better ( by increasing x-bow damage or decreasing bowmen damage ) . So since x-bow would be better than bowmen in microfights they are worth to build because microfights are always about attacking . Sitting in the base without doing anything won´t make the x-bows stronger , but if you put some effort into trying to outmicro the enemy with x-bows this will give you chances to push back the enemy and give your more chances to get a nice position to attack the enemy.
So bowmen would make a better support in big battles while x-bow show their potential in microfights like pushing or rangeexchanges .

Who said that x-bow just have to be a better version of bowmen? I think they can have two different jobs .

And i think its not so unlogical that x-bows are better in microfights because if the x-bow is loaded the soldier doesn´t have to aim much because he knows how far and how fast the bolt will fly because its always about the same. But its still a game so not everything has to be logical , the most important thing is to have a great balance and a place for every unit in the battlefield.

And the proof that it works this way was already there : Since the early December people made mostly bowmen because they were a better support than x-bow but x-bow also still were build in smaller amounts because they provided a nice micropossibility ( Go back/forward - shoot - go back/forward - shoot ... ) . Ofcourse this was kind of abusable because you made x-bow faster shooting like this so it got fixed . So since that fix x-bow weren´t usable as microunits anymore and since bowmen took over the best supportrole they had no place in the battlefield anymore.

And pls keep remembering , if x-bows get stronger / bowmen get weaker defensive armys will get stronger and camping will get more rewarded as attacking.

[dicsoupcan]

I have spoken with romek, and i think the point that pizza tried to make is not really clear. since crossbowmen are a really inflexible unit at the moment the standard better choice is archers because the shoot and halt glitch fix. right now bowmen are always one step ahead of crosbowmen, even if it is a head on attack. For exmaple, the bowmen can step into range, shoot and go back before the crossbow bolts even landed. By the time archers move back to shoot again, crossbowmen are most likely still reloading, which does nothing else but force the crossbwomen to retreat.

The suggestion that they tried to make is to decrease the aiming time so they will have a chance to hit bowmen that try to step in shoot and evade the bolts. But since this makes the crossbowmen fire faster, and there is no need for that, the reloading time should be increased to compensate for the decrease of aiming time. this way the crossbowmen are still the slow and sturdy units but at least they have a chance to stop bowmen from pushing them back. Bowmen shall still be the faster more flexible unit, and the corssbowmen stay the not so flexible slow units that just packs more punch.

[Romek]

Guys...
What if the xbows were made double this accurate? Bolts missing the target also causes them to be less "useful" or powerful. Making them as manoeuvrable as bowmen isn't a solution, that way the latter would become useless again imo. "Why making something that is half that powerful and shoots just as fast as the one which deals damage on the double percentage?" Sorry if I have misunderstood something

They wont be manoeuvrable because shoot-forward/back option for xbow is blocked - you can do it only with archers now. So you will get only one fast shot from xbows - attack speed and attack power will be the same.