Slitherine

Upgrade costs for all units should be just the difference between old and new unit, that would be more realistic since ie. an outdated tank would have been still used and not scrapped, so it must be worth something .. An interesting option would be even to get some prestige back while downgrading a unit.

Currently a Bf110C Bomber will upgrade for just 11 prestige to Bf110D, but 280 prestige for a Ju87B, you should correct this in favor to the "difference", or "full price system".



I miss a pop up unit info window with the options to dismiss! and rename a unit and infos like date issued, victories gained, prestige earned ..

we have a large thread that discusses upgrade costs.

We have implemented a penalty, to prevent players from randomly switching back and forth.

In the case you mentioned... the penalty seems stiff. Probably should be 1/2 the cost to switch.

Try searching for that thread so we can consolidate all our discussions.

I agree we should get some prestige back for down grading, but not much.

Currently down grading serves no purpose as we do not have awards for of prestige for killing units.

I could see down grading your Tigers to PZIV's and buying more infantry etc.. in order to hold the line when you are loosing. But there is no hope for recovery as one can not gain extra prestige for killing units. So, no option to change composition of army in order to switch the iniative.

If you down grade... you are creating more cannon fodder.

I think a small cost is ok, but why do we want to stop the player switching back and forth? If they want to let them!

I cant see a problme with downgrading either - giving prestige back is ok for gameplay. Cheaper untis should be less effective - not ineffective. Otherwise you force the player to always have the best and there are no gameplay decisions to make.

I dont see the value in limiting the players options on this and ideally the gameplay would support it.

It works the other way around. If you don't lose money (or lose little) on upgrades, upgrade becomes a no brainer, and you will always upgrade all uour units as soon as better equipment becomes available. With existing scheme upgrade is a more responsible decision, because frequent upgrades, while improving effectiveness of your troops, cost much more prestige. So, it does not make sense to upgrade all of your units frequently, maybe only some of them, and the core becomes more varied.

As for switching back and forth, starting from 0.99 you have no limits on the number of units in reserve (you just can't deploy more than a certain number in any given scenario), and so you are free to have any number of special units in your core which you use from time to time. But you cannot "upgrade" your elite infantry and suddenly get a 5-star elite bridge engineer, pioneer or paratrooper. Or rather you CAN do that, but it will cost you.

As a tempoary fix this is ok for first release, but I think we're trying to solve the issue of too many upgraded units in the wrong way.

I think we need a solution that encourages the use of more varied units within a type. There are a number of ways we could try this. Here are some ideas.
* We need to make unupgraded units more viable so even though weaker still deal out damage proprtional to their cost.
* Limit the number of high tech units available. The simple way is hard limits per type. E.g. a max of 2 Tigers II units. Alternatively limit how many of the best units you can have overall - e.g. anything that is best in its class counts as "high tech". You can have a max of X high tech units in the game.
* Alternatively high tech unit closts can be another resource. You would somehow earn this resoruce and spend it on high tech units.
* Limit the strength points availabel in each unit category. E.g. you have available 30 string points of Tiger II's. They are prodcued at 10 per mission. If you run out of SP you can no longer repair and build them. Maybe do not limit repairs in mission for gameplay reasons, but if you use up resources the unit woudl not be available for the next mission and woudl have to be re-equipped.

There are probably many other interesting ideas on how to limit it that would work. I'd really like to see maps with lots of different units on and not lots of the same.

iainmcneil wrote: I think we need a solution that encourages the use of more varied units within a type. There are a number of ways we could try this. Here are some ideas.
* We need to make unupgraded units more viable so even though weaker still deal out damage proprtional to their cost.

This is exactly how it works now, but Tiger II or Panther G is always better than PzIV, and as long as you can afford all Tigers or Panthers, you will buy them. That is the reason why upgrading to Tiger II is very expensive, and any prestige invested into the unit prior to upgrade does not count.

iainmcneil wrote: * Limit the number of high tech units available. The simple way is hard limits per type. E.g. a max of 2 Tigers II units. Alternatively limit how many of the best units you can have overall - e.g. anything that is best in its class counts as "high tech". You can have a max of X high tech units in the game.

I disagree. This way you successfully avoid all-Tiger cores, but instead all cores will have exactly 2 Tigers and it will not give any more variety. This is how hard limits work. So instead, we balance all this on price level. You CAN have more Tigers if you so desire, just you will need to earn a lot of prestige for that, and you will need to sacrifice something else (e. g. Me262s) to do that.

iainmcneil wrote: * Alternatively high tech unit closts can be another resource. You would somehow earn this resoruce and spend it on high tech units.
* Limit the strength points availabel in each unit category. E.g. you have available 30 string points of Tiger II's. They are prodcued at 10 per mission. If you run out of SP you can no longer repair and build them. Maybe do not limit repairs in mission for gameplay reasons, but if you use up resources the unit woudl not be available for the next mission and woudl have to be re-equipped.

More hard limits, see above.

I don't see a problem in the first place (except people complaining that upgrades are too expensive - well if you don't have enough prestige, earn more, or spend less, or play on an easier level), so I am not going to seek for a solution for it either. Only practice can prove that balancing scheme based on prestige does not work, and we haven't even finished balancing prestige yet (hopefully next version will be balanced in this respect more or less like we want). But in a simple game like this I would rather keep just one resource limiting your core, because it is simple and flexible at the same time. One of PG strength was that you could play the game any way you wanted. You could have all-aircraft core, or not use arcraft at all, use all-tank core, all-infantry core etc. Hard limits, on the other hand, never improve flexibility, they reduce it. We have seen this in PG series already.

The issue with Prestige as the balancing tool is that you have a grand campaign with 30 battles and its impossible to know how much presitge someone comes to a scenario with making it almost imposible to balance. It woudl be ok if you knew how much prestiage a user was goign to start the scenario with but it could be anything from almost 0 to thousands depending on how they played.

I think it is an issue but one to look at later when the we have more data.

I think the key is to getting older units to be more useful so they are not useles against high tech units. High tech units shodul have an advantage but good tactics should allow a weaker unit to defeat them. At the moment the stats seem to prevent low tech units having a chance.

How about we start to record how much prestige users have at the start of each battle? It will give us some useful balancing data? We could feed it direct to the server so epopel do not have to remember to report it?

iainmcneil wrote: The issue with Prestige as the balancing tool is that you have a grand campaign with 30 battles and its impossible to know how much presitge someone comes to a scenario with making it almost imposible to balance. It woudl be ok if you knew how much prestiage a user was goign to start the scenario with but it could be anything from almost 0 to thousands depending on how they played.

You are right, but that is what difficulty levels are for. They span a wide arrange of difficulties, and every player should be able to find his own sweat spot, where prestige is not excessive, but is not zero either.

Balancing the game so that all players have the same prestige in all scens is not difficult, but it has far-reaching implications: it is no longer required to play better to get more. Why bother if the game will "balance" things for you? That is the reason why i think existing scheme, while not without its problems, is better.

iainmcneil wrote: I think the key is to getting older units to be more useful so they are not useles against high tech units. High tech units shodul have an advantage but good tactics should allow a weaker unit to defeat them. At the moment the stats seem to prevent low tech units having a chance.

Well actually, my impression is that after I tweaked the formulas in 0.98 high tech units do not have so much an advantage any more. For example, average odds for T-34-85 against a Tiger I are 1-6. Not much, but hey - T-34 costs 167 and Tiger costs 760. So you can have 4 T-34s for the same price (and some reserve to replace them), and they will be a nice match to Tiger. In fact, veteran players are already complining that the game is balanced in favor on "zerg tactics", and having all Tigers might not even be an optimal core composition. But it is fun to play, and I don't want to detract this fun from the game.

iainmcneil wrote: How about we start to record how much prestige users have at the start of each battle? It will give us some useful balancing data? We could feed it direct to the server so epopel do not have to remember to report it?

Good idea.

Update: I tried that, and 4 T-34s defeated the Tiger I. The battle was close to equal. One T-34 was lost, the one Tiger shot at on his own turn. After two waves of attacks Tiger ran out of ammo and became an easy prey. And I did not even use any "advanced" tactics - just a direct head-to-head fight. So, a clever player would have a lot of options with lesser equipment.

I think we are close but can do much better as mentioned earlier the team needs to address other country's balance. Only Germany has been looked at throughly.

I can see the effects of top tier units and the cost. Very expensive to replace costs. It is much better now to use your resources on a variety of units otherwise 3 or 4 Tigers can not fight an army of 15 or more.

I see both sides choosing not to replace losses on top notch units due to prestige resources. So both players use damaged and lower echelon units.

If the scenario is balanced with correct prestige shortage, players use all types of units. And yes, the lower echelon units can now do some damage to the best units on the map. You just have to use strategy and combined arms.

Because of this shortage, I think we may want to look at some prestige return for down grading.

I think the upgrade costs are really way too high.

I agree that upgrading or side-grading of units should not be for free - but a "fee" of 10-20% or the unit prize should be more than sufficient to make players think about what they really want/need ? I mean I even think about NOT using any replacements unless necessary because of the prestige cost, not to talk about elite replacements.

Maybe even just a 10-20% "surplus" on the unit cost difference as an upgrade penalty could be sufficient. But I was really astonished when after my first battle in Poland I wanted to upgrade my HE-111 to JU-88 and saw that the cost is equal to just buying an additional JU-88.

Perhaps "downgrade" the total prestige gaining in between scenarios a little. After getting a decisive victory in Poland I had a starting prestige of ~3000 in Norway.