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Topic: Amazons balancing

hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2023-09-14, 10:29

but I agree that costs (especially in term of needed economy) might be too low for amazons.


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tothxa
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Posted at: 2023-09-14, 11:04

@Nordfriese:

Re Soldier strengths

ama7 beating fri10 should be a rare exception (94% chance for fri10 in the simulator). Or by manual calculation: fri10 attack: 7340 to 7640, health*defense: 28375 vs. ama7 attack: 2800 to 3200, h*d: 20059. Hits required to defeat enemy: fri10: 3, ama7: 9 to 11 (10.13). With the much better evade of 60% ama7 vs 35% fri factored in, it becomes 6.7 strikes on average vs. 14.62.

In any case, Frisian soldiers are the strongest both among the level 0 soldiers and the max level soldiers, but only with very small margins. This part (not considering costs) seems pretty well balanced, except maybe Barbarians needing a little boost.

Re Rare tree kiln

OK, my idea for explanation/lore text is: Ironwood burns at very high temperature, turning rubber into charcoal, but is hard to ignite, so balsa is the starter, and of course, arranging and lighting the stack is an art in itself that requires the skill of a charcoal master. face-smile.png

But obviously, it's mostly about requiring all rare trees. face-smile.png

edit: If you like, I may throw in one granite (the fire is so hot that even the kiln needs regular repairs) to make it more comparable to Frisians face-wink.png and maybe even increase the time a little. The demand for granite should be increased too anyway. I've just realised that they only need 2 for a fully trained warrior.


@the-x:

I expected that you wouldn't like this, because you like to avoid charcoal burners and food preservers. But you can see that since you have demonstrated the strength of the Amazons in last year's tournament, you started a trend of most players using them almost exclusively by now, if you discount for old habits of using old strongest tribe of Atlanteans (and other player preferences not based on pure strength) and quick games where Empire still has some advantage.

So please, just accept that it will be a little harder.


Some afterthought to my afterthought in the PR description: I'm now more confident about requiring more bread and less fish/meat, also to increase cost, because unlike Empire, fish always remains cheap for Amazons. My only remaining reservation is that maybe this way it will become too annoying to build all those cassava farms.

But obviously more detailed calculation is needed to better compare required economy sizes between tribes. @gpalinos's work on performance calculations will be essential for this though.

Edited: 2023-09-14, 12:31

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the-x
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Posted at: 2023-09-14, 11:19

Nordfriese wrote:

I think in additions to making amazons more expensive, Frisian soldiers should also be strengthened – they are still the most expensive even with these changes and should therefore also be strongest, and a level 7 amazon having equal chances against a level 10 frisian is therefore badly unbalanced. Or make the amazons weaker.

Making Frisians better is very good in balancing -> the hardest problem they have that without gold they are heavily disadantaged, i would suggest lowering the needed gold for Training.

Atm Fri can only reach lvl 1 (of 6) attack -> moreover they need more gold than they have for trainingscamp, arena and harbor expeditions. There many problems appear with gold

Putting pratical work in balance always ends in critics so i think i will leave it with suggestions that way, but what im saying is maybe keep a look at it again and think what really solves it - and balance in the fight simulator and finally solve all the gold stuck problems (with 1.fri, 2.bar 3.atl) and take a look at the algorithm of the trainingssites

tothxa wrote:

the-x:

I expected that you wouldn't like this, because you like to avoid charcoal burners and food preservers. But you can see that since you have demonstrated the strength of the Amazons in last year's tournament, you started a trend of most players using them almost exclusively by now

Thanks : -) i have those builds for Amazon, Empire and Atlantean, they all have very strong economic things to optimize. In Atlantean f.e. the optimum is the opposite: There i focus on food very early and Amazons, of course "i like" to make charcoal & food - but: also always look at the Optimum and the Output (and that what we need when look at Balancing, the output, the Game, the product (not only see the input=) : )


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tothxa
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Posted at: 2023-09-14, 12:41

the-x wrote:

Making Frisians better is very good in balancing -> the hardest problem they have that without gold they are heavily disadantaged, i would suggest lowering the needed gold for Training.

Atm Fri can only reach lvl 1 (of 6) attack -> moreover they need more gold than they have for trainingscamp, arena and harbor expeditions. There many problems appear with gold

The problem is that it's hard to do with their current system, but that system has very nice internal logic so it should be kept. The only item where gold could be spared is the broad sword, but the main problem with that is not as much gold as that it requires an advanced production building.

edit: After some more thinking and reviewing my calculations, I now think it makes sense to remove the gold from the broad sword. So the broad sword would use the same materials as the long sword, only require the advanced smithy. This way there would be no more mixed scrap metal, and total gold requirement would be simply 4. Iron is still much more than other tribes while coal is the same without recycling, so recycling is still needed and trades in some coal for iron.

Also honey bread and mead make higher level training expensive enough, so Frisians still wouldn't be easy.

But let's concentrate on Amazons in this thread.

Edited: 2023-09-14, 13:31

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the-x
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Posted at: 2023-09-14, 12:52

Yes, i also often thought about the frisian system with this nice internal logic, in a balancing update i put the gold away from both swords and put it instead to the 2 other upgrades, this way it was quite nice to level up and add those 2(+2) later


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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2023-09-15, 18:08

The chance of a level7-amazon to defeat a level10-Frisian is like 25% which isn't very good. If the level 7 means that the amazon isn't fully evade-trained, the chances are below 5%.


Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

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tothxa
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Posted at: 2023-09-15, 18:26

WorldSavior wrote:

The chance of a level7-amazon to defeat a level10-Frisian is like 25% which isn't very good. If the level 7 means that the amazon isn't fully evade-trained, the chances are below 5%.

Yes, we meant level 7 as the max level possible without gold, so no full evade.

But now that you mention that the final evade level of Amazons is that strong, that justifies my changes in the PR that make one gold required already for evade 2, and increases gold to 2 for evade 3.


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2023-09-15, 20:27

tothxa wrote:

But now that you mention that the final evade level of Amazons is that strong, that justifies my changes in the PR that make one gold required already for evade 2, and increases gold to 2 for evade 3.

I believe the advantage was that you could train to l7 without a third of the economy, and especially the expensive part of it. making training of the upper levels more expensive might overdo if the lower levels are more expensive.

Using rations for training might help here as they require coal.
However we might consider having a new ware only to be obtained from stone mines as a second or as a byproduct, named flintstone and use this for making spearheads. maybe we might require a flint for something else (to ignite a fire).
It might even be ok to have some flint from a quarry but in a ratio comparable to empire marble.
I agree there is currently an advantage but not that big that it might be easy to overdo the correction.


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tothxa
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Posted at: 2023-09-15, 21:23

I don't think I overdid it. They should genuinely require more gold than other tribes, because that's the only non-renewable resource they need. (they can mine granite with 20% chance from empty mines and they only need 2 for a max level soldier) Also their level 3 evade is so strong (75%1) that 2 gold is warranted for it in itself.

And I compensated for the increased demands by easing a little both gold and charcoal production.

New idea: Maybe empty gold chance could also be increased to 7% to compensate for the high cost and small work area.

Have you checked the PR?

edit: Sorry, forgot to reply to the idea of flint: That's an interesting possibility too. Although I'm not sure we can make it different enough from granite and create high enough demand for it to make it matter much. Or if we make it too scarce then that may make it too hard for Amazons.


  1. Or put another way, chance to hit them goes from 40% to 25%, making them effectively 1.6x stronger. Only first attack training makes that big difference for all other training levels of all tribes. 

Edited: 2023-09-16, 00:03

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Nordfriese
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Posted at: 2023-09-16, 12:35

+1 for a different stone type from mines.

However, speaking as the Low German translator here, please can we come up with a different name than Flint? This will cause endless confusion in translating because the Low German word for "granite" is – "Flint". It's a generic term for several types of rock, and there are no separate words to differentiate between Granite and "real" Flint.

How about using quartz like Atlanteans (I assume even Amazon miners should be able to mine it) and requiring it for some of the dresses instead of ironwood, plus for some advanced buildings?


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