Difficulty curve and unit tactical value trouble.

[soldatmesteren]

Hello.
First, I am happy I am not the one that have to balance this game.

The campaign from the start of act1 have a very good difficulty curve on normal difficulty, in my opinion.
I think it was when the campaign moved into act2 trouble came along.

You now have access to a lot of imperial guard units and a lot of space marine units, but you also have access to titans. My army instantly became a 15 titan army and the game becomes too easy.

Why would you purchase a unit of Space Marines? They have no real value other than capturing a victory hex.
Titans seem to have no downside.
A standard unit of Space Marines seem to be almost nothing but downsides.

It is neat that all these different units are available, and I can see custom maps where only infantry is available.
I understand what this game is, and I understand what amount of work It would take to give every single unit its own tactical purpose.

[lordzimoa]

Tuning and balancing never stops, also in this front there is plenty to do and feedback like this is helpful for us.

[TheGrayMouser]

Havnt played enough to really give a fair opinion on balance issues like the OP mentions but some thoughts:

*leg infantry maybe should have greater defensive bonus/cover in rough ground
*vehicles should have penalties assaulting into rough terrain
*infantry: ability to entrench?
****Ammo: if ammo were reintroduced, seems that mega big units ie titans/big tanks etc would have smaller loads which means you will always need grunts and "normal tanks" to keep your momentum going
Same with artillery, the big stuff would have less ammo and thus heavy weapons teams w morters would have more tactical value.

BTW, I have yet to play any scenarious w aircraft. Are they "normal units" or , like PK, can they occupy the same hex as a land unit?

[bram1979]

Hello.
First, I am happy I am not the one that have to balance this game.

The campaign from the start of act1 have a very good difficulty curve on normal difficulty, in my opinion.
I think it was when the campaign moved into act2 trouble came along.

You now have access to a lot of imperial guard units and a lot of space marine units, but you also have access to titans. My army instantly became a 15 titan army and the game becomes too easy.

Why would you purchase a unit of Space Marines? They have no real value other than capturing a victory hex.
Titans seem to have no downside.
A standard unit of Space Marines seem to be almost nothing but downsides.

It is neat that all these different units are available, and I can see custom maps where only infantry is available.
I understand what this game is, and I understand what amount of work It would take to give every single unit its own tactical purpose.

Don't buy that many Titans
Like on the tabletop it is really "cheesy"

[soldatmesteren]

Hello.
First, I am happy I am not the one that have to balance this game.

The campaign from the start of act1 have a very good difficulty curve on normal difficulty, in my opinion.
I think it was when the campaign moved into act2 trouble came along.

You now have access to a lot of imperial guard units and a lot of space marine units, but you also have access to titans. My army instantly became a 15 titan army and the game becomes too easy.

Why would you purchase a unit of Space Marines? They have no real value other than capturing a victory hex.
Titans seem to have no downside.
A standard unit of Space Marines seem to be almost nothing but downsides.

It is neat that all these different units are available, and I can see custom maps where only infantry is available.
I understand what this game is, and I understand what amount of work It would take to give every single unit its own tactical purpose.

Don't buy that many Titans
Like on the tabletop it is really "cheesy"

Sure

I would like to make an army made up of almost only Space Marine infantry, but they would get completely murdered in a couple of turns.
I have yet to see a titan fall. I can't on purpose play tacticly stupid, that would be the counter-purpose of the game.

[rezaf]

Don't buy that many Titans
Like on the tabletop it is really "cheesy"

I kinda agree with soldatmesteren on this one. Several things become apparent when the first act comes to a close.
One of which is that you now have access to an ocean of unit choices, with no free slots in your core.
I have to wonder, why the separation between the size of the core (which was basically unlimited in PzC) and the size of the actual deployment (which could and usually would vary from mission to mission) got the boot. Cause now, I have to disband my forces to make room for something better.

Another thing that is really emphasised at this point in the campaign is that it's too hard to really judge about the different units. I reckon intimate knowledge of Wh40k lore will give you a decisive edge, but for those of us with no or merely passing knowledge, it's a time consuming task, at the end of which you have to come to soldatmesteren's ultimate conclusion.
What could "save" some of your core units would be XP ... but most units barely gain any to this point - I just posted a seperate thread about this.
In the end, even with XP, if you buy a dozen titans, the rest of your core, in more sense than one, will literally be unable to keep pace with these colossi.

Yet another issue emphasized at this point is the very disappointing and - to me - utterly incomprehensible decision to go for the same very limited force limitation method used in PG and PzC after it: You're allowed x units. Over the years, the limitations imposed by this simplistic approach were discussed several times by PzC players and modders - going for few bestest units just comes with the package, so to speak.
And now, we're talking about a digital incarnation of a tabletop system that's notorious for it's intricate point-value-based force limitation system. I would go so far that in the tabletop, it's an ever recurring and extremely crucial decision when designing your core: Am I going for many cheap units or for a few high class units, or somewhere in between? Yet Armageddon has none of that.
To me, the best solution to this dilemma is to finally implement a REAL, sensible system with a warhammer-like approach.
The second best is to go for availability limits, like in Panzer General III. The worst, unfortunately most likely solution, is to just prevent titans from being purchased and make them units granted via scenario scripting.

But until that happens, at least we can have some lame fun blowing crap up and can rack up some actual XP - a titan is hard to kill...
_____
rezaf

[larryed112]

I enjoyed panzer corp but am struggling with armageddon. These are my impressions on the units, i'm still playing act 1 in the campaign. (normal difficulty)

Steel Legion Infantry doesnt seem very useful. I had a lot in the army at first but they are very easily killed (even in cover) and i replaced them with vehicles as battles went on. It doesnt seem worth having more than a couple to cap victory hexes.

Conversely vehicles seem too powerful and they are able to use terrain as cover? This doesnt seem right to me, if anything i think they should get a penalty if they are in forests and rough as they cant maneuver easily. I havent figured out the mechanics by any means but it seemed to me that a vehicle on a trench hex got a benefit ?

Artillery seems extremely destructive and difficult to avoid when advancing. My best salamander scouts have a range of 4 spotting, the good artillery has a range of 5 so when i scout out the enemy usually that means getting obliterated once the enemy is spotted. It would be nice to spot the enemy dispositions and plan an attack without the spotter being blown to pieces in the process. Is the Panzercorp mechanic of moving recon units again after spotting been removed as i havent noticed that i could do that?

Im losing a lot of core units. This was never a problem in panzercorps and i try to be careful with my core force and use the right units against the right enemies. I think because of the different game mechanics its very easy for units to be repeatedly attacked. In my last mission i had leman russ tanks being hit by unseen artillery many times in one turn until they evaporate. Of course I shouldnt be dumb enough to get them in range of multiple enemy artillery pieces but as i say above, they can fire farther than i can see and they are very strong.

Finally aircraft. Ive only got access to the vulture atm but it seems very easy to bring down even from normal infantry fire. So i take it this means any unit can fire on it (with a penalty) not just special AA units?

[Kerensky]

We really price hiked the Titans already, but it's probably not enough considering their power. We'll see what we can't do additional to keep them useful and interesting, but under control so players can only afford 10+ Titans on only the easiest difficulty settings.

[rezaf]

Having played some more, I begin to feel like balancing just totally and utterly falls apart in Act 2. It's ridiculous.
Pricing titans out of the game would require them to at least triple in price, and even then ... like the later soviet DLCs for PzC, the scenarios appear to be balanced around the player having a core of titans. Because, honestly, I can't see anyone win otherwise. Yeah, that's my limited imagination, granted, but it's extemely hard. In fact, I've hit a mission I currently consider impossble to win even WITH almost only titans - Defending Tartarus Industry.

The amount of orcs thrown at you is just so out of touch with the strength any reasonably balanced player core (i.e., most units are not titans) would have, it isn't even funny.
_____
rezaf

[soldatmesteren]

I don't feel that the titans themselves is the problem, but more that a lot of the other units feel underpowered and when you start to spend resources on reinforcing your whole army (which titans do not need), it starts to costs a great deal more than titans, is often slower, have less firepower and range, have downtown due to being reinforced.
Titans should be very powerful. And if they just become insanely expensive, then we will have sort of the same problem again, they will just be another unit that have no purpose because it is so overpriced.

If titans was not in the game, I would probably still never buy a bog-standard ultramarine Space Marine infantry unit. They are a close range fragile unit, so attacking with them, they would most likely take some losses and ending the turn, they will be so close to the ork horde that they will get smashed in one turn.

If I was facing extreme amounts of gretchin and sluggaboys, a lot of Space Marine infantry could be nice to cover a large area. But we face a large amount of heavily armored and armed orks and ork vehicles and a bog-standard Space Marine unit seem obsolete right from the get go.'

In most of the missions you are pressed for time, so heavily armored and armed unit that can do a quick and dirty job seem to be the only viable and logical approach.

There seem to lack any sort of fitness, cunning, maneuvering, thinking out of the box tactics. Impenetrable balls of death seem to be the approach that will trump everything else.

I know this is not a 100 million dollar game, but an Ipad game.

[zakblood]

I know this is not a 100 million dollar game, but an Ipad game.

it's a pc game!

if it comes out on the ipad thats all fair and well, but as it was designed for the pc, it works for the pc, and tbh works very well, so isn't a port, isn't a clone and isn't a ipad low cost version either or any thing else, it's a pc game

i have no idea where half of this stuff of the forum atm comes from, mars for a guess, steam for another, either way it's wrong information and very misleading...

[soldatmesteren]

Having played some more, I begin to feel like balancing just totally and utterly falls apart in Act 2. It's ridiculous.
Pricing titans out of the game would require them to at least triple in price, and even then ... like the later soviet DLCs for PzC, the scenarios appear to be balanced around the player having a core of titans. Because, honestly, I can't see anyone win otherwise. Yeah, that's my limited imagination, granted, but it's extemely hard. In fact, I've hit a mission I currently consider impossble to win even WITH almost only titans - Defending Tartarus Industry.

The amount of orcs thrown at you is just so out of touch with the strength any reasonably balanced player core (i.e., most units are not titans) would have, it isn't even funny.
_____
rezaf

Defending Tartarus industry, I had 15 titans on that one, 2 of them scout Titans. 1 assault terminator. I rush half my titans south. The other half I split up in 2 portions to clear the middle and the north. The north seem to require least attention. Titans standing in the middle can quickly come to the aid of units in the north or south.
Try get as many good shots with the motor units scattered about. Otherwise reinforce and try and hold on to them for as long as possible.

On this mission it could be nice with some centurions with their 75armor to defend the hottest victory hexes, but not at all nececcary.
I put my assault terminators and Tycho at the south eastern Victory hexes, there is mostly only ork infantry there.
The hottest Victory hexes seem to be the southern one, the western one and north western one
Worked on my second try. Good luck

[soldatmesteren]

I know this is not a 100 million dollar game, but an Ipad game.

it's a pc game!

if it comes out on the ipad thats all fair and well, but as it was designed for the pc, it works for the pc, and tbh works very well, so isn't a port, isn't a clone and isn't a ipad low cost version either or any thing else, it's a pc game

i have no idea where half of this stuff of the forum atm comes from, mars for a guess, steam for another, either way it's wrong information and very misleading...

Sure it is a PC game also. I have my version on steam

But when it comes to gaming, the lowest common denominator will often be boss, in thise case the Ipad.
If it works on Ipad it will be go for PC also. If something works for PC but not the Ipad, it will be no go.
The Ipad will always get highest billing because the PC can do so much more than the Ipad. The Ipad would not be able to follow the PC but the PC can follow the Ipad easily, so the Ipad side of the game will always come first.
I wouldn't mind a billion dollar in depths Warhammer 40,000 Armageddon game, but that is not how things are. So we can just try and voice our concerns

Or did I misunderstand something, this is on Ipad right? They have said that ever since I started to hear about this game back in 2013.

[rezaf]

Thanks soldatmesteren. Maybe I'll try again, but right now I'm pretty burnt out on the scenario (tried it thrice so far).

I believe you the scenario is winnable, but it requires a fair amount of luck. When at the wrong time two or even more of the more powerful ork units with assault decide to take on an objective defended by some of the pre-placed infantry, you can kiss the scenario goodbye. Even if somebody manages to win - like you did ... do you think it would have even been possible with a mixed force with leman russ, baneblades and space marines?
I think this scenarios design is a disaster and REQUIRES an extremely titan-heavy core.
_____
rezaf

[Kerensky]

I don't think anything requires a titan heavy core, especially not that ultra dense terrain map. On my 'normal' difficulty playthroughs I only have 3 titans and 4 baneblade class tanks. In fact this map was a virtual playground for my Space Marine infantry while my titans struggled to get proper positioning for optimal firing ranges amongst the abundance of factory tiles.

Titans just appear to be the viable strategy because they are so easy to use. They are low risk/low reward units who are very difficult for the AI to destroy, where infantry are high risk/high reward units that scale much better in efficiency.

When I see players with titan heavy forces and simultaneously stressing over the short mission timers... that's working as intended. Using all titans and not even filling your entire CORE roster slot allotment is going to make your CORE fight pretty inefficiently. Infantry units inflict does far more damage for their price compared to Titans, so you kill more Orks faster while spending less points, but they are harder to use there's no arguing that.

I just rechecked my final scenario CORE force.

I use...
4 Baneblades (or some variant there of)
3 Titans (2 reaver 1 scout. I actually had 1 reaver 2 scouts, but the new AI actually killed one of my scout Titans in mission 22, I was impressed!)

16 infantry (4 death company assault, 1 sanguine guard, 5 rough riders, 2 Salamander Terminators, 4 ultramarine sternguards)

The rest is an assortment. 2 Command vehicles, 2 dreadnaughts, 2 land raiders, 2 destroyer tanks, and 5 artillery.

After all that, I only have 5.8k points left over for replacements. I wanted to have more spare points, considering how massive the final battle is, but I didn't want to sacrifice unit quality too much. Difficulty mode challenging BTW, which is 100% of point setting.

[Kerensky]

Titan trying to clear out Ork infantry... this Titan costs well over 1k points and would need at least 4 if not more combat actions to destroy this one Ork infantry unit.



This Terminator squad can potentially clear them out in a single combat action at a fraction of the cost of the Titan unit.



Another assault infantry option, again far more efficient at killing Orks at a much lower price than the Titan by far.

[rezaf]

That's nice, but who in their right mind would have a lot of infantry in their cores when there's gargants abound? And all those huge @ss ork tank and artillery vehicles.
In a game with no reserves, do you seriously expect the player to regularly disband his core units to make room for other units he doesn't know ahead of time will be needed?
Also, as discussed elsewhere, gaining xp with anything else but artillery (and titans) is currently ... problematic. Even without being expected to constantly disband ones units and get other units with 0 skulls as replacements...

Finally, like I already mentioned, my main problem is with the weakings that have been pre-placed as defenders in the remote factories. If the orks decide to attack one of them in force, the scenario is over.
_____
rezaf

[Kerensky]

Because 100% of ork units are all Gargants.

Funny enough, there are some pretty amazing space marine infantry who are especially good at countering heavy ork artillery. You'd be surprised how well an assault unit does when it can actually get under the minimum range of Lobba equipped units!

If I open up the editor and start counting ork infantry presence on maps, even late game maps, and compare to that to Ork Gargant totals... I think you'll be disappointed. That Factory map we are using as example in this thread... There are about 39 Ork infantry units and 0 Ork titan units (gargants and stompa units).

Second to last battle of the game has 1 Gargant and 1 Stompa and something like 36 Ork infantry units.

It all sounds right to me. If you buy all Titans to counter Gargants and Infantry, you are going to suffer. If you buy all infantry to fight infantry and Gargants, you are going to suffer. If you buy a diverse and well mixed CORE to fight a diverse and well mixed enemy force, you will have the best success in the end.

[soldatmesteren]

Titan trying to clear out Ork infantry... this Titan costs well over 1k points and would need at least 4 if not more combat actions to destroy this one Ork infantry unit.



This Terminator squad can potentially clear them out in a single combat action at a fraction of the cost of the Titan unit.



Another assault infantry option, again far more efficient at killing Orks at a much lower price than the Titan by far.

Ineed assault units works well once you get them into build up areas. And they clear out lighter ork infantry very well.
Once you have walked the unit all the way up to the orks, you assault unit will most likely take some loses, especially against the more heavy ork infantry that is featured prominently.
You infantry will get weaker and weaker, and if the AI choose to focus fire your infantry, they will be lost.
You have to spend resources + a turn or more to reinforce them to make them effective again.

I have not said that Titans is a must to achieve victory, but what I have tried to say is:
I am presented with a challenging tactical game, and I am going to use all my smarts to beat this challenge. Why would I not use only titans? they are very effective against everything, have superior range and can avoid any return fire. Does not need to spend resources or turns to be reinforced. In missions that does not require blowing up everything, ignoring ork infantry in build up areas is an easy choice with Titans. If the orks shoot at my titans, they have barely any chance to damage it and they will get return fired to death.

I would love to fly around with assault marines hacking down orks. Sneaking around with scouts sniping orks and locating ork army bulks. But at the moment there is no incentive to use anything else than titans.

When I have finished the campaign, I will most likely do another no-titan run, but I will feel weird about purposefully using worse tactical options than what is available to me.

[Kerensky]

Finally, like I already mentioned, my main problem is with the weakings that have been pre-placed as defenders in the remote factories. If the orks decide to attack one of them in force, the scenario is over.
_____
rezaf

Well, you just have to attack the Orks more efficiently and destroy them faster so don't have the opportunity to destroy the factory victory hexes... I believe that is the theme of the lore behind the scenario, isn't it?

Besides, that's why this scenario has a protection layer. The loss of a single VH is not game ending, I believe it takes at least three lost VH to end the scenario in defeat. So if you are struggling on this map, it might be a good idea to concentrate your forces more on protecting only the required amount of Victory Hexes instead of thinning out your forces to cover them all.