Slitherine

Infantry in this game survives such a short time, that its main purpose is just to get these victory hexes vehicles cannot. This results in anti infantry weapons being severly nerfed (RoF decrease in multiple heavy bolters, reduced RoF compared to the TT for many weapons), but to no avail, as units like the Leman Russ annihilator with its laser arrays just butcher infantry as well.
I think it is mainly due to the way the game represents infantry and vehicles :
One company of soldiers should be around 90 Space Marines, or 150 Imperial Guards (at least, these were the size in Space Marines). One tank company should be 10 tanks.
One vehicle unit is easy to "understand". Basically, each strength point represent one vehicle, with all its weapons.
On the other hand, infantry is represented in a more abstract way : each transport vehicle can only carry 2 points of infantry for instance (it should carry ten guys on average). So basically, one point of infantry should represent one squad.
That would be in line with the numbers of infantry units (otherwise, a Predator Unit represents 70% of a company, while a Space Marine unit represents 10%. Given that in Epic, they had a similar cost, no wonder the tanks outperform the infantry so greatly there).

So the problem is that one infantry squad is represented by a single srength point, but it also get to fire a single bolter shot, and gets killed by a single laser shot or heavy bolter shot.

If infantry units were more reasonably sized, this would not be a problem, but then, they could massacre tank formations (bolters and other personal weapons are way too effective against vehicles, and heavy infantry would have way too many anti tank units).
I think a possible fix (that would unfortunately require too much playtesting) would be to make Imperial infantry units much bigger, but in order to accomodate for limited heavy weapon capacitym they should not just be given more strength :

The first thing to decide should be the size of an unit. Given that vehicle are represented as 1:1 (1 point of Strength = 1 vehicle), infantry cannot be abstracted.
I would say having them be on par with their vehicle formation size would be a good start (ie around half a company to 70% of a company).
After it has been decided, the best way to represent them would be to make each poinr = 1 squad of infantry, with the relevant squad weapons.
for instance : 1 strenght of terminators would represent 5 terminators (so have 5 times more HP=15), and its weapons would be 4 StormBolters and 1 with assault cannon(instead of giving everyone heavy weapons which make zero sense), 4 power fists and 1 power sword.
That would also solve the Tactical Squad with Graviton cannon problem.
After that, we would need area of effect weapons to be implemented, so that artillery is more efficient against larger formations.
Then, high RoF weapons should be made less effective vs tanks, and get their RoF back to 40K level.
Then infantry would need a rule preventing any non AoE weapon to inflict more than one "kill", or each unit could have a maximum health lost per shot (and it would be equal for total health for vehicles).
That is not very elegant, but short of representing squads as a completely different entity than vehicles when it comes to weapons, I see no good way to do so.

Exemple :
Heavy Bolter Devastator Space Marine : Strength 10 units (half a company of Space Marines = 10 Squads.), HitPoints = 10 (2 per marine *5 marines for 1 Strength), weapons : 2 heavy bolter support, 8 bolters.

That would make infantry relevant again without making it completely overpowered.
And then, if unit size stops being a balancing factor, it becomes much easier to balance everything else(orks should have more units, not more grunts per unit, as it breaks the game on too many levels. Imperial tank unit should have 7 tanks, like Space Marine ones, so that they are not outclassed by Space Marine ones just because of this arbitrary unit number).

Note that heavy infantry (Terminators, Centurions, Mega armored Nobz) is a bit too resilient (Space Marines get shafted because of low unit count, but individually, they can take a lot of punishment : Does a centurion has better armor than a Predator Tank in the TT? ). So if unit count is increased, their defensive value needs to be toned down a bit.

I just think the handling of weapon power is skewed in this game.
A soft and a hard attack would go a long way instead of using rate of fire, power and armor penetration.

i also have no idea why infantry aren't the real force they maybe should be, as in the battles i have so far posted, i rarely use them apart from scouts and to take and hold, stuff, surrounded by tanks they took more fire than anything with 1 tank getting a hit...

now sitting back and thinking about it, i used to think the Orc's as thick and very stupid as they never want my tanks only the infantry, but look at if from there point of view, you're tanks and other units can't take victory points, only infantry can, so wipe out your infantry, and they have won, now matter how many of them you kill in any battle...

sorted, so use other units to keep them alive and worry less why they aren't a good as you may have hoped for, as like me who also used to think the same as you do now, now thinks i have the answer as well...

Orc's aren't that thick, in fact taking out infantry targets in range first is smart, as that's what i would do if i was defending...

so good call script writers on second thought on the matter, sorry it took me so long to realize it, but it's a good smart move for dumb Orc's

last mission of act 2, so soon be ready to post some more, but atm i'm going dark bye bye

There are also more expensive infantry units available to buy.

Galangalad wrote:There are also more expensive infantry units available to buy.

forget what i said above, i was wrong

viewtopic.php?f=321&t=53933

and posted my reasons in the way only i can do

needed more sleep, lots more biscuits and another 8 hours again today playing / testing it to find out and realize it in the end....

Galangalad wrote:There are also more expensive infantry units available to buy.

Still, some armored vehicles who should only be effective against armor rip through them.
No talking about the heaviest infantry (termies and so on), but this needs further tweaking.

Indeed, separate strength for AP and AT would help much, or each individual soldier needs to be represented (logically with its own equipment, not graphically of course). The current system is in between (each vehicle is represented, and attacks mimick the tabletop, but infantry is abstracted) is problematic : some infantry weapons end up being too good against tanks(Artillery), while anti tank weapons can devastate infantry (anihilator versions of the Leman Russ and Predator). Epic used an abstracted system with separate values to hit infantry and vehicles (you certainly did not roll several dice for each heavy bolter, you rolled 2 attack dice for a heavy squad, and had to roll over the anti personal score of the weapon to hit a squad, and anihilate it if it had no armor save), so lasers rocked against tanks, but were not very useful against infantry.
Maybe just giving different accuracy against infantry and vehicles could be enough.

On Infantry. Yes, they are very vulnerable and expendable, but they are also incredibly cheap. 100 Points gets you one unit of 20 count Steel Legion Infantry. 1090 points gets you one unit of 2 count Upgraded Shadowsword tanks. So you can have 1 unit of 2 shadowsword tanks, or 200 infantry units divided into 10 units with 90 points still left over. Literally 100 times more infantry than super tanks in raw count.

With that in mind, aggressive price balancing (This was specifically mentioned as hugely critical item we are actively working on in the stickies!) and scenario deployment limits should greatly bring the campaign into line and further promote infantry usefulness.

To repeat what someone else has said on this topic:
Should we make infantry even cheaper to make them more cost effective. I don’t think we can make them more powerful so yes you may lose them but you just buy more. That’s very WH40k!

But then why cap the unit number? It s not like getting 20 slots worth of useless infantry was a good idea. Either up the unit size to 50 or make them not count in the unit limit. The very short ranges also play against infantry : they not only take a slot, they also take a hex in range of the target. Given that you can only get a limited number of units around the opponents because of traffic jam(the maps are hardly very open...), lots of infantry would only get in each other way.
Note that the infantry/tank ratio is much more reasonable in act 1 than in 2 and 3 :
Predators are better than Leman Russ and you can get 7, so now, you have to chose between 10 Space marines or 7 predators instead of 5 Leman Russes and 20 guards. There are not many situations where you should prefer 10 marines (terminators and centurions are a particular case, given they have good survivability and firepower), let alone 20 grunts.
Infantry is on the weak side in act 1, but it is still reasonable to take some, while in act 2 , even Centurions, which are badly overpowered compared to all other infantry, pale in comparison to tanks (too slow, shorter effective range).

Scenario caps serve a real purpose that is far too dangerous to remove. Deploy zones must be a certain size, they cannot just be infinitely huge. Gameplay significantly slows down as the pool of player units expands past 30 CORE units. Units lose their individual uniqueness when you have too many of them, especially too many repeats of the same unit. Maps have size limits that must be observed. It would take map size past 50x50 to fit such an overabundance of units, and there are many technical reasons this is not feasible to do. Player turns on such gargantuan maps take too long. AI turns take too long. Memory issues on non-PC devices becomes a serious concern.

Besides, multiplayer testing already shows that infantry is hugely important. Multiplayer scenarios with very strict point limits, and multiplayer by its very nature meaning that tossing away units carries no lasting penalties (unlike campaign play), gives infantry a new lease on life. But that's to be expected.

Panzer Corps behaved very similar. Infantry struggled in the campaign because the campaign values long lasting units who can retain high experience scenario after scenario after scenario. Those same infantry are borderline overpowered in multiplayer environments where long term survivability is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is the short term victory at all costs.

Well this is an exciting thread! I think Galdred may really be on to something. Of course we may be too close to the release date for it to matter...

I kind of like the idea of the squad concept. Despite the points made, infantry is way too fragile. Of course this is worse because the orks won't shoot at much of anything else. I could see reducing the infantry strength, increase hit points, change the weapons up some and increase the cost. One problem with units costing vastly differnt amounts is that the limitation on total numbers of the core force results in more expensive units being much more valuable. If you can only have 10 units, would you want 10 200 point units of 10 1000 point units? If the units were more balanced with a tighter point range, that could be eliminated.

I really think this could be considered.

Thanks,
Duncan

Wc_Eend wrote:I just think the handling of weapon power is skewed in this game.
A soft and a hard attack would go a long way instead of using rate of fire, power and armor penetration.

Yeah, that's right. Panzercorps has AT and AI values right? That would have been good for this game. (They had AA to, which could have been melee potentially?) I wonder why these are not included here since the games use a similar base engine.
Thanks,
Duncan

Actually, I think larger squad sizes with reduced accuracy would make sense for infantry. But really, I think a system where 1 squad = 1 Strength, and 1 HP = 1 guy (terminators would lose a lot of HP, but they are currently more durable than Leman Russes, which makes no sense at all, so 1 HP would be reasonnable), with a max of 1 HP lost per shot (make it an infantry trait), so that lasers do not destroy infantry would make it work much better : If the special weapons allocation was not all over the place, there would be little problem having more soldiers per unit (I doubt it is the regular lasgunsand bolters that cause problem. Now if every squaddie did not carry a heavy bolter or missile launcher, it would be possible to have large squads without breaking balance), hence my suggestion.
I don't see why having reduced accuracy for troopers would be a problem. I currently find the way ork tankbustas, big shootas and mega armored nobz work much more satisfying than Imperial infantry.
In early epic versions, heavy squads(missile launchers) used to hit tanks (ie, cause them to make a save) on 5+ on a D6(it became 6+ in Armageddon). That is 2(they had 2 shots per 5 men squad)*1/3 chance to hit for a whole squad, no one complained that trooper accuracy was too low. I would much prefer infantry to be able to sustain damage, and have its own damage toned down, than laser tanks chewing threw infantry as it is now.
Tank secondary weapons should have their accuracy toned do(so that we don't have nonsensical tables for multiple heavy bolters, but a more consistent system), but except for duplicating all weapons between primary and secondary, that would be hard to do.

It may make sense to you, and it may have even made sense to me when I tried it, but ultimately it got overruled as a viable option because it apparently interfered too much with other game systems, such as how experience and cover interacts with single digit or extremely low accuracy ratings.

Actually, the current xp system does not work too well either :
It overly favors strong units. I suppose the xp gained depend on the damage inflicted (ie the point cost of the units destroyed). It results in DeathStrikes and Shadowsords getting very high XP levels, compared to other units which survive too(even without casualties), but don't deal as much damage (Titans for instance).

EXP Gain system is a little bit different from EXP Effects system. That said, EXP gain is in a good place for 1.0 and it really helps contribute to make our game great, so anything we do after 1.0 will only make it better.

Do you plan on putting traits back in, as in Panzer Corps? That helped make the units a bit more distinct. Here, the effect of experience seem less tangible.

I think infantry being weak is a much bigger problem than in Panzer Corps, because WW2 appeal is mostly playing German tanks vs Soviet tanks, while a good part of WH40k appeal as an Imperial player is playing Space Marine elite soldiers. But in this implementation, it is not worthwhile to do so, as their tanks have a much higher efficiency (that said, Space Marines in final liberation were also pretty lackluster, having only tactical Squad available, but at leat, you could pull cool moves disembarking them from a thunderhawk gunship).