Well it seems Attacking troops were doing MAX-Damage for some time. Now that I've changed them back to doing MIN-MAX damage, some have pointed out (Sage6), that the randomness in the MIN-MAX can have a huge impact on the outcome of combat, especially in Battles.

So is the MIN-MAX to large a range, or should it be removed totally?

What if we didnt have MIN-MAX damage??
This would mean you could plan attacks more accurately.

What if instead we just had a set damage figure for each troop. eg.. spearmen-4, swordsmen-5, scouts-6, etc...

Then we could have each troop do +/-5% in battle.
Then with techs, we could lower it to +/-4%, +/-3%,etc
Perhaps Battles would assume +/-1%.

The +/- % would be on the total damage by the army...

Any thoughts?

I like the idea of each troop only doing one number of damage. Spearmen 4, ect....

Req, you've always said that luck is bad

yeah i see no point for the range of min max cause i always planed for max damage, now i dont know, so yeah keep it a constant number...

i like min-max... it makes battles more realistic... and gives the lowly spearmen a chance to overwhelm the HC....

It also gives a randomness to battles yes... and thats what you want.... it will also lesten that (First) attack bonus that the one who makes the first strike

DoRW, no...its bad.

When you attack something, you shouldn't know you're going to kill between 1 and 4 of that troop. That's waaaaaaay too big. I wouldn't even want it to be between 2 and 3. I want to know exactly that way I can plan my moves.

Realism doesn't mean good.

nor does knowing exactly what your going to do everytime. takes the fun outof battle... it comes down to who hits what first, it also levels the playing field in a few ways, in campaigns it also helps with people who log in hundreds of times, giving at least SOME kind of chance that your first attack will blow... and attacks in Battles should NOT be so set that they are predictable, ask boe or me or you, how many Knights will a HC unit kill in a single attack? ... it gives too much power to the one who makes the first move (or you can be like me and let the ohter person usualyl make the first move and just set up a damn good defense)

In battles I would say having a set number wouldn't be bad. In the campaigns though the min/max should be left. The very nature of campaigns leaves them more open for luck. After all a player either has a strong or a week start, all depending on the decisions they make. The min/max damage could offset the difference and give a person with a poor start a more even chance. Of course it could go the other way and totally devestate them as well.

Skill will always beat out this minimal range of luck. You should recognize that sage . How many times has it been claimed on these boards that battles are games of luck (prior to the existance of auto-battles). Every high level battler knows that is not the case. The current ranges for damage are fine - leaving a small bit of leeway for things to go not quite how you had hoped, but not so much that a player will be devastated by it.

I like haveing a damage range. Luck is part of everything. Why should it not be a part of this too??

Last Edited : Tuesday, 5 October 2004 - 08:32

Ok, seems everyone is thinking only of the 'attacking' army...do you propose to change the retal damage as well?

The origianl question of whether the min-max should be abandoned or changed...I think if it was a smaller range of possibilities it would add some unpredictabilty to battles, which is ok. Too large a range of possibilities does what sage doesn't like, you don't really know what kind of damage you are going to do. Find a lower value for min-max is my suggestion. Have this apply to retaliation attacks, too.

Well, were not here to please Sage.

In real war there is much non-predictable issues. The range represents the units moral and determination with a bit of luck too. You take away alot of the decision making of the game and make it a simple computation simulation.

All games and simulations involve randomness (it is not luck).

Otherwise it is predictable, you need to plan (and simulate) all kinds of issues (troop morale, bad day for the army, etc.).

Nothing in this life that involves humans is predictable, otherwise the olimpics will be very boring, the guy with the least time already won, and it ain't so, sometimes the underdog pulls up something.

I do not want to imply that randomness should be so that we get results that are aberrant. Randomness should be set for a managable range.

Now the proposal from req, is that your stakcs are fixed damage, and that this is assigned during troop creation given some randomness.

I think this is nice, but during attack there should be randomness.

So maybe you have spear_1:
Health: 19 (assigned at creation from a range of 18-22)
DmgMin: 2 (assigned at creation from 2-4)
DmgMax: 6 (assigned at creationg from 4-6)

and spear_2:
Health: 21 (assigned at creation from a range of 18-22)
DmgMin: 4 (assigned at creation from 2-4)
DmgMax: 4 (assigned at creationg from 4-6)

This way not all your spears are the same, and you can choose which of your spear stacks is best suited for what and there is also randomness in the attack.

how about, for each guy in the stack, would have a chance of hitting, like 1/2 chance or somthing,and a guy should cause as much damage as he can, anyway this would keep it a bit random and still cause pretty much a constant amount of damage

Last Edited : Tuesday, 5 October 2004 - 12:17

I didn't read that into what Req said at all gueritol. What I read was that troops would have a fixed damage amount.

e.g. Scouts would have a damage output of say 7 damage. Then when damage is rolled you would take the 7 damage, multiply by, say, 50 scouts and get 350 damage. To this then would be a random +/-5% of damage.

Req I don't see how this would really be different than the current random damage range in the game other than that it would insure that ALL troops have a uniform range determinate on their base damage. e.g. currently scouts do 5-8 while marks do 11-18, so marks have a slightly higher variance of their average damage. Except that +/-5% would make for such a trivial increase/decrease in damage output that it could just as well be ignored. As for a tech that changes the +/-5% down to +/-3% etc. Such a tech would be useless. Average damage output over time would be unchanged. The only thing that would happen is you could better guess how many enemy troops you are going to kill. But you would be less likely to get lucky and kill extra troops. I wouldn't pay more than 50 gold for such a tech - if that. Now if it only removed the lower end of the damage variance then there would be some worth - but essentially that is what weapons/armor techs already do.

If we can't all agree on taking away the randomness, at least lets make the randomness smaller. The difference between killing 1 and killing 4 is so huge....

The game SHOULD be able to be calculated. And the person who calculates the best should win.

A battle should NEVER be decided based solely on luck. With the min-max system, there's going to be battles where it all comes down to "will my marksmen do enough damage to make a ZoC hole or not?" And if you get screwed by the random damage, you lose the battle. And there's no way to know if you'll do enough damage or not...

well, i dont think it should be a static number.
its not realistic and not fun IMO. there needs to be some randomness otherwise the game is static and predictable.

i think the easiest thing is just to have 1 set damage value for each troop (no MIN-MAX).

then at the end, apply +/- 10%.

10 troops do 10 damage each = 100 damage +/- 10% = 90-110 damage.

Its a 20% damage spread, easy to calculate, no MIN-MAX to confuse, and all troops have the same consistant randomness.

the current damage spread is about +/- 25%. Some a little more some a little less.

Yes Req! Give us that!

my question is this: in our current system, does the random effect work on each pop individually, like:

2 pop marks attack, one gets an 12, the other gets a 15...

or is it that the stack picks a number and universally aplies it to each pop:

a 5 pop mark and it randomly chooses 11-18, it chooses 11, so 11*5 = 55.

cause if its a universal multiplier, please DO reduce the % from what it now is... if its not, it shouldnt matter too much out side of battles, because the larger the troops, the more the randomness would go away. which would be accurate as to real life with things like droping your arrow, or losing balance... with a large enough number it'll even out to average every time, but this would not account for things like moral.

a universal multiplier through the pop would account for random moral, but like I said, please reduce it if thats what we currently have. I don't want my 10 pop marks (now that they don't do max damage) to sometimes only do 110 damage, and sometimes do 180... cause thats too much. 110 is 69% of 180... thats an awful lot of dropped arrows, and it doesn't make sense to say its a random loss of moral... moral isn't random. moral is caused by things. you see an army twice as large as yours come at you, and your men get scared, thats moral... training counters the negative affect of moral. i wouldn't mind seeing moral in this game, but not as a random effect.