Legion Arena Ladder

[IainMcNeil]

Hi guys,

we have a fully functioning Legion Arena ladder up and running! Assuming nothing goes wrong this will become the real live ladder after we've had a few days of testing.

http://www.slitherine.com/LadderFront.htm

We had to zero the results up to now, but this should not happen again unless we find a problem so your rankings will persist from today onwards.

To join the ladder sign up to the forum & use your username & password to log in to the ladder. You can only report results against other forum members & they must confirm them before they are aded to the database. Agree which of you will report the result & which will confirm it. Dont both do this or the result will get logged twice

Please let us have your feedback and we'll do what we can to improve it & fix bugs. We'll develop more help and guidelines as we go!

[sum1won]

It seems to need a bit more tweaking- JDM has played 3 games, losing twice to ehre, and beating lava once. Lava has played two games, losing to ehre and JDM. He lost to JDM but won one battle. All the other games were sweeps. Shouldnt JDM rank above lava? Right now he ranks below, because he has lost worse, even though he won one, and lava hasnt.

[IainMcNeil]

The ranking system is based on the Glicko system.

Basically this means the higher the ranking of the person you defeat the more points you gain. If someone is a long way below you you'll gain little for beating them. Also the degree you won or lost by is accounted for so a 4-0 defeat is much better than a 4-3 defeat. Maybe we should show total battles won & lost as well, or maybe summarise it as "goal difference"?

For more details chek out the formula at Marck Glickmans homepage http://math.bu.edu/people/mg/glicko/gli ... licko.html

It's pretty complicated but is tried & tested

[ste]

We could use the goal difference to seperate people with the same amount of points

[IainMcNeil]

The ladder has been updated to show total battles won & lost as well as matches to make the ranking points clearer. There is also a personal profile of each player, just click on the name in the ladder.

[okiotheman]

Just kidding about the title.
Well, I tried my hand at playing online against the top 2 tacticians.
sum1won - I lost both games
ehre - I lost both games plus 2 games more for fun.
It was fun. I did notice that my Romans have a hard time against the Celts. My heavy infantry seems to lose against theirs.
My calvary was blown away.
But I had a lot of fun trying to make a Roman army to match the Celts.

Hope to play someone else soon. I don't necessarily want to win(doh), I just want to learn how to win. Heh heh.

Enjoyed the games and am anxious to try again if I'm not too green to play against.

[*Lava*]

Indeed!

If you can figure out how to beat the Celts with the Romans, please lets us know how you did it.

Ray (alias Lava)

[sum1won]

Ive seen some interesting attempts. One thing the romans do have is disicp0lianed formations very early. Also, if you upgrade armor concuss, they become much better, and their archers arent bad in melee. Ive had my light cav routed by archers twice now.

[*Lava*]

Also, if you upgrade armor concuss

That is a major problem.

For the "price" there is no better unit in the game IMO than the celtic warrior mainly due to a huge difference in the "concuss" factor which it holds. Even upgrading, the only unit the Romans have that can come even close to matching it are upgraded nobles.

Ray (alias Lava)

[marcusthegreat]

I'm very tempted to Join but I prefer friendly games at the moment

[*Lava*]

Hi!

You know, I had a really great time playing through the single player campaign, but even while I was doing that, I kinda got the feeling that the pilium was really underpowered. In the first campaign I won, I got a second pilum for each unit, but in the second I did not because, I felt that during the "timed" battles, the tradeoff in time lost throwing the second pilum was not up to just getting my troops into hand-to-hand combat.

I remember reading about a battle in Gaul, don't remember the name, in which the Romans, when confronted by a large army withdrew to the far side of an open area. The Gauls attacked across this open area and the Romans let them have it with two volleys of pilum. That stopped their charge in its tracks, and the Romans then counter charged and destroyed the Gauls.

I remember in one battle in the single player campaign there was a fanatic unit well ahead of the rest of the Celts. I had two roman units pelt them with pilum and it didn't seem to do much damage, especially since these dudes didn't even have any armor. Seems to me that they should have taken terrible losses.

Dunno, but perhaps the imbalances we are finding in multi-player could be redressed by given a bigger hit value for the pila.

Just a thought.

Ray (alias Lava)

[Redpossum]

Hmmm, that's a very well thought-out and clearly written post there, Ray.

I can see a good deal of merit in your suggestion, as far as MP play, but how would it affect the SP campaign?

[*Lava*]

Hi Possum,

That's a good question, and one I've posted on many times in other forums.

The problem here is that the designer makes the "environment." From this environment he overlays his game. Screw with the environment and it messes up the game. Increasing the hitting power of the pila changes the environment. By doing that, it messes up everything else, especially game balance for the single player campaigns.

Changing the enviornment is what many "grogs" hang their hat on when they don't like a game. They talk about how it is not historically correct. When the designer caves into demands to change the environment, with a patch, for example, it changes the game.. and many times for the worse because the designer's team do not have the time to thoroughly test how that change effects gameplay.

So really, I guess I'm just making an observation here. Is it worth it to "change the environment" to balance multiplayer when the majority of the people perfer playing the single player campaigns. The answer is almost certainly ... no.

Ray (alias Lava)

[Redpossum]

Again, Ray, well said.

I have seen just this thing happen to Anarchy Online on several occasions, and the effects were ugly.

AO is a science-fiction MMORPG. I've been playing since retail launch in July 2001.

In AO, we speak of 2 types of combat, PVP or player vs player, and PVM or player versus monster.

What happened back in the early days of the game was the developers decided that the PVP combat was too fast and vicious, so they halved all damage in PVP.

Every since then, they have been hagridden by this one egregiously bad decision. On four major occasions and a score of minor ones, they have changed something to "balance" PVP, and in doing so thrown the PVM game totally out of whack. This really sucks when a good 50% of those who play have no interest in PVP, and indeed avoid it at all costs.

I believe the PVP/PVM aspects of AO are equivalent to the SP/MP aspects of Legion Arena, as far as the design decision issues here.

I am convinced that the Roman/Celt balance is out of whack for MP purposes.

But I'm not sure "fixing" it is worth the risk and effort. In fact, I suspect it is not.

Frankly, we just get around it by playing Romans vs Romans or Celts vs Celts.

You know one cheap easy fix I would like to see? The ability to set different Denarii and XP settings for the two sides. I'm not saying ditch the current setup, just saying add a fourth option labelled "Custom" and provide sliders or text entry boxes.

This doesn't change unit balance or anything, just lets us vary the scenario parameters, while also retaining the "Fixed value" settings.

[marcusthegreat]

Hi!

You know, I had a really great time playing through the single player campaign, but even while I was doing that, I kinda got the feeling that the pilium was really underpowered. In the first campaign I won, I got a second pilum for each unit, but in the second I did not because, I felt that during the "timed" battles, the tradeoff in time lost throwing the second pilum was not up to just getting my troops into hand-to-hand combat.

I remember reading about a battle in Gaul, don't remember the name, in which the Romans, when confronted by a large army withdrew to the far side of an open area. The Gauls attacked across this open area and the Romans let them have it with two volleys of pilum. That stopped their charge in its tracks, and the Romans then counter charged and destroyed the Gauls.

I remember in one battle in the single player campaign there was a fanatic unit well ahead of the rest of the Celts. I had two roman units pelt them with pilum and it didn't seem to do much damage, especially since these dudes didn't even have any armor. Seems to me that they should have taken terrible losses.

Dunno, but perhaps the imbalances we are finding in multi-player could be redressed by given a bigger hit value for the pila.

Just a thought.

Ray (alias Lava)

Hi

I've also noticed that and I feel Javelins and Pilums are underpowered.

[kyle]

I too, have noticed that the pilums are underpowered.

I know that there is a range for the pilum, at least I hope there is. The question then is to figure out what the hit% for every foot or so would be. After you find that out you could then play around with that factor a littel bit and see if that might solve your issue.


Say 10 legionaires fired a volley of pilum about 75 yards right. I would assume that the pilum would not fly in a true straight path, so some one could make a field of fire projection on where each pilum might land. I am assuming that there would be between 3 locations of hit. so you could have a 1/2-2 pixle box that the pilum would have to hit.

Please don't take these numbers as a precise guide this is just an example.


If that doesn't help, by all means tweak the damage a little bit at a time.

The problem I have with this idea, is I wouldn't know how this could be implemented? Do any of you have any suggestions?

[Redpossum]

bro, 75 yards (or ~70 meters) is way too far.

30 yards is a better estimate, as far as practical range for the pilum.

Let's not forget that a pilum was emphatically not a javelin. It was a much heavier throwing-spear.

[magobarca]

Republican Romans had 2 types of pilum per Legionaire, one light javelin-like pilum for long range and 1 heavier pilum for shorter range, and they were not like heavy throwing spears at all!!!! It seems that the Etruscans were the first to use the pilum, and the Iberians/Spainiards had a verion that was all iron. Usually the part of the shaft below the point or head was made of a softer less tempered iron in order for the shaft to bend unpon impacting an enemy shield or soldier, thus making the pilum harder to manually be withdrawn (pulled out of ) from the target and the bendingof the shaft made it useless to the enemy if they tried to reuse the bent pilum and throw it back at the Romans.

You are right, 75 yards is much too far of a range for either pilum, and the lighter one may just have reached 30 - 40 meters range, while the heavier one maybe half that range. Would have to check on approximate ranges, but you are very right, 75 yards is too great of a range by far.

Heavy throwing spears are what some Ancient period Gauls, Germans, Iberians, Belgae, and then latter Dark Age and Medieval peoples used.

Magobarca

[miki]

Iberians used the Saunion or Soliferrum, as Magobarca said, made entirely of iron. Vicious weapon it was

[IainMcNeil]

Lets try and stay on topic. If you want to talk about weaponry lets start a new thread!

This is about the Arena Ladder Hopefully we'll get some more games played now the patch is out!