Trample balance discussion

[K]

Originally Posted by llamabeast

I think they're just not very fun to fight. Unless you can muster paralyze or something, you're basically stuffed. I've always found them to be quite unfun for that reason.

Really? I've always found them super fun to fight because once they break they take out the enemy army/mages.

I mean, regular elephants only need to be countered with archers of Fire Large Monster and chaff (like PD) to die for the cause, while super armored elephants need something more exotic to get them to flee.

Blessed troops will do, but I favor the Water bless for it's high defense and additional attacks.

I suppose most people default to magery, but it seems a waste for units that break spectacularly with minimal damage.

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

Why is six sizes too restrictive? Its not as if a slight difference in size will allow one unit to trample the other. There has to be a really large difference. Any size can have many units of many different sizes but for trample the only thing that needs to be reflected by two sizes in Dom is a really large difference. Trample isnt the same as just being able to roll over a creature.

I could write several pages on why 6 sizes is insufficient to encompass the range of size among combat-worthy creatures in a (real or) mythical world.

I will sum it up thusly - you can easily fit more than 3 combat functional people in the space that an elephant fills.

I can go into much greater detail if you like, but I think that unless that point can be adequately discounted, then the premise stands.


(EDIT- Bear in mind, the size mechanic impact many other impacts of the game besides trampling, personally I think something like a range from 2-10 would provide greater functionality.)

[HoneyBadger]

If it were up to me, sizes in the game would range from 1 to 12, and combat squares would hold 64 spaces. The sizes themselves wouldn't correspond exactly to their numerical order-while size 1 would equal 1 space, size 12 wouldn't equal 12 spaces on a square. Instead, they'd have these values:

(Size)=(Spaces occupied).
1=1 (dragonfly, Aboleth Polyp.)
2=2 (hoburg, goblin, imp)
3=3 (human sized)
4=4 (shambler, troll, Warhammer ogre)
5=6 (Jotun, unridden horse, shark, Living Pillar, giant eagle)
6=8 (heavy calvalry, unridden moose, unridden drake)
7=12 (Niefel sized, moose + troll rider)
8=16 (Basalt King, Cyclops)
9=24 (monster fish, Aboleth, Titan)
10=36 (elephant, mammoth, earth mother, Aboleth Mind-lord)
11=48 (Dagon, Baluchitherium, Colossal Fetish, Ziz, dragon)
12=64 (filling an entire square: Ancient Kraken, Sphinx, Asp turtle, whale, larger dinosaurs)

[JimMorrison]

So ummmm. You could fit 21 humans in a square, or....?

[HoneyBadger]

Yep, exactly.

I said 12 sizes was a good idea, I never suggested it wouldn't dramatically alter combat in Dominions.

[Endoperez]

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

LOUD NOISES!

Oh, that reminds me. Elephants used to have a really, REALLY annoying sound. Then Ballbarian saved our ears with his Mod Sound Pack.

[HoneyBadger]

Yeah, now they play the 'Dukes of Hazard' car horn, it's great!

[Agema]

Originally Posted by Sombre

Agema: Completely ignoring graphics when it comes to the size of units is counter-intuitive and silly. They are there for a reason.

No. It's the size stat that is there for a reason. The reason for the graphics is they make everything look prettier: you could do the battles with ASCII symbols representing everything (like Nethack) and get as much information out of it. Similarly WRT the sphinx, I know it's a statue in-game. My point is that the Egypt statue is not reflective of what sphinx has to be: there are statues and bas-reliefs of sphinxes from India to Europe, many (all?) of which are much smaller.

What I'm getting at is that I think people are applying too much logic and reality to it all. It's a game. It's about the interplay between various statistics, attributes and effects, where the designers put a lot of time and effort into making it work. Hence if elephants should be nerfed to size 5 you should make the case with whether they are unbalanced or not.

When you start basing arguments on the fact you can fit more than 3 humans into the area an elephant takes up, or that a mammoth was 20% larger than an elephant is in real life, guessing that Niefel giants were supposed to be 15, 20 or 30 feet tall according to Nordic myth, or that the in-game graphical dragon has 28% more pixels than the in-game graphical elephant, it's all missing the point.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Agema

No. It's the size stat that is there for a reason. The reason for the graphics is they make everything look prettier: you could do the battles with ASCII symbols representing everything (like Nethack) and get as much information out of it. Similarly WRT the sphinx, I know it's a statue in-game. My point is that the Egypt statue is not reflective of what sphinx has to be: there are statues and bas-reliefs of sphinxes from India to Europe, many (all?) of which are much smaller.

What I'm getting at is that I think people are applying too much logic and reality to it all. It's a game. It's about the interplay between various statistics, attributes and effects, where the designers put a lot of time and effort into making it work. Hence if elephants should be nerfed to size 5 you should make the case with whether they are unbalanced or not.

When you start basing arguments on the fact you can fit more than 3 humans into the area an elephant takes up, or that a mammoth was 20% larger than an elephant is in real life, guessing that Niefel giants were supposed to be 15, 20 or 30 feet tall according to Nordic myth, or that the in-game graphical dragon has 28% more pixels than the in-game graphical elephant, it's all missing the point.

No, I think it is you who is missing the point. For one, saying the graphics are just there to look pretty is ludicrous. They are a massive boon to play - you can at a glance tell what sort of unit it is, what weapons and armour it might have, even guess at resistances and other attributes. Of course you might want to know more, in which case you can look over the stats, but to have /just/ the stats would make the game virtually impenetrable.

Realism can serve a similar purpose. When you call a weapon a sword or a short bow or 'fire breath' people immediately have some idea of what it will do. They can still go and look at the stats (which are 'hidden' for a /reason/) if they want to know exactly how it works, but believe me people would enjoy the game far less if a unit called a 'knight' with a heavily armoured powerful looking graphic was actuall a hoburg with a pitchfork. According to your logic there wouldn't be a problem there - It would still be just as pretty, in terms of gameplay people would only need to look at the stats to know. Yet it's clearly absurd and counterintuitive.

You're also putting far too much emphasis on the design decisions of the devs. I'm willing to bet KO doesn't even remember why krakens are whatever size they are. He's said numerous times he isn't even very concerned about balance and he's often very surprised at how things actually work in terms of gameplay. I'm not criticising him here, it's just the way he is.

People have already, many, many times discussed the balance of elephants and tramplers more generally. When people talk about size and graphics and so on, they are considering the other effects a change in size has - besides graphics. Whether it will make the game less intuitive, or has a 'wrong' feeling about it. That's precisely the sort of thing KO thinks about, not so much balance and stats. He primarily wants an elephant to be an elephant (as he envisions), not unit X to do Y or Nation A to be stronger than nation B at point C in the game.

[Agema]

Your first two paragraphs are the worst act of reductio ad absurdam I've seen in a long time. Please at least try to view my argument with at least some reasonable spirit.

I'm not going to second-guess KO or assume I know his motives. But to me the elephant graphic looks damn large enough to be size 5 or 6. I don't honestly see what the problem with its representation is, or with Titans, krakens, and the rest of it. You know there are 6 sizes. If they look big, you check the size stat to make sure, just like you see a knight and check to see quite how nasty it is. The "feeling" is fine to me, and I suspect most other Dom3 users.