War and Defense - General Observations

So, Bers mentioned in CC about some upcoming changes to the war dynamics.  I had hoped he would post something in the forum we could all discuss but so far not.  So I have started this thread to post any thoughts you all have bout the current state.

1)  War in early ages

Seige are far too weak.  Bers stated that nothing has changed since the early days when treb war was common.  I have since found out this is not true.

1a)  Greeks

 Greeks were intrroduced and their power is much too great.  a few greeks can wipe out an army of trebs and are hard to kill.  Greeks have a large bonus against constructs.  Even Ren age seige are marked as constructs.  This make seige from ren age down near pointless against a simple defense mechanism.

1b) Seige Power

I am told that the hero stat for army attack (intelligence) previously increased the power of seige.  This was changed to be army only.  This has significanlty decreased the power of seige.  An army of 120 trebs can only do something in the range of 20-30k damage against a collect. A promoted house level 3 is 4200 hit points.  This results in only a few buildings being destroyed when 1 person attacks.

1c) Damaged structure rebuild bonus

The introduced bonus to rebuild damaged structures at half the time and cost.  Rebuilding the 3 or so buildings destroyed would take less time than the attack.

1d) Travel times, Doves and Lada's

With the above issues, te only way to make any significant damage to a town is to take very large numbers of players against 1 town.  Even then i think defense is not so hard, we have tried this in the last few years and were easily wiped out by a meagre defense with greeks.  To have a large amount of people join an attack from all over the map means the attack time is very long.  It may be 3-4 hours to arrive and 2 hours to get home.  With a dove activated, you cannot send your army until the dove has worn off and it is 12 hours until the next dove can be active.  So dove wears off, 4 hours later you arrive, 2 hours later you return home.  4 hours after that you can maybe arrive again.  and then its another 12 hours of truce + 4 hours travel time - 16 hours for recovery.  2 attacks maximum per day which can be recovered fully within the 12 hours in many cases.  Use a Lada and recovery is assured.

These factors make the destruction of a single town next to imposible.

2) War in later ages

Is the most ballanced currently with the massive time and effort to research and construct rewearded with decent power armies.  Please can you provide details on how you are thinking to reduce this so we can discuss.

We always took our own Greek fire to neutralize or at least keep busy the defender Greek fire.  Since Greek fire is a construct unit they tended to shoot more at each other than the other siege so more damage could be done.  I do think their range is rather long even though in real life it was exactly that long range that had it used against incoming ships etc.  That probably contributes to their overall effectiveness in defense if there are no offensive Greek fire to draw their attention.  

While later war may be more expensive and thus harder to do, people tend to wait for it now with planes etc.    

I agree that early war, and especially PVP needs tweaking.  PVP has been rendered all but impossible in earlier ages requiring large numbers of players to attack one town as Brianna pointed out.    I'm looking forward to hearing how war in earlier ages is going to be tweaked and what the plans are for later war as well.  Thanks Bers.

1d)  Building Armor.

The introduction of building armor greatly reduced the effectiveness of seige.  Especially against ages higher than the army.  

Promoted lvl 10 classical resource field has 40 armor and 16500 health, to drop it to lvl9, 3000 health reduction is needed.  A catapult (13 attack) hits 13²/(13+40)*0.3= 0.9566 damage.  In default 55 rounds (lets assume, no artifacts with extra charges for the attacker, and all catapults sent survive til the end).  if hero sent along, best classical gloves affect 8%...  no veles or BC is taken into consideration, as they roughly cancel out each other.  You would need 57 catapults to drop lvl10 to lvl9.

A report from an attack after the changes made (last 2 days).  Attacker with:

90 catapults

54 rams

43 trebs

9 cannons

10 Mortars

Damage done: 67k.   Buildings damaged:  Moat 10 -> 8.  Runway no level lost.  Military Base, No level lost.  Shrapnel Tower 4->0.

Now, why would anyone, attacker OR defender want to remain in an earlier age?

I have an idea to fix buildings armor. I plan to greatly reduce base armor of buildings, but will makes walls increase building armor of peaceful buildings (1 per level of the wall per age). With this update, buildings will have even higher armor than before (if town has walls), but that armor can be removed by destroying walls. This will make town destruction easier as a whole, but will add a strategic aspect to it (you have to take down walls first). Additionally, with this change towers will become more important, because the more towers you have, the harder it is to hit the wall.

We used to need a lot of towers so this is a pretty decent resolution and sort of a return to what once was.  However, towers increase build times significantly which makes people reluctant to build them.  Is there something that can be done with the housing to offset what will surely mean a huge increase in build times in order to protect towns?  Or can the towers house fewer people?  

Please note that Military base was TOTALLY DESTROYED. Most of the hit points were done on that same MB (around 50k)

Personally, I don't see problems with buildings armor here. The attacked player had maxed wall and lots of strong towers. And it seems normal that Military base is hard to destroy i.e. has a lot of hitpoints.

I am with destroying the wall before buildings, not totally because I always wanted to start hitting the peaceful buildings after the fight is done with units, I once was defending against a large army of destructive units, I lost less than 2% of my army but the town was turned to ruins (from 1500 population to 33 population in 40 losing rounds, in info age)

Please note that Military base was TOTALLY DESTROYED. Most of the hit points were done on that same MB (around 50k)

Personally, I don't see problems with buildings armor here. The attacked player had maxed wall and lots of strong towers. And it seems normal that Military base is hard to destroy i.e. has a lot of hitpoints.

One building destroyed for such a large attack is definitely not enough, it can be rebuilt way too easily comparing to the effort put into making such a large attacker army. Right now warfare definitely is too boring, which makes the game more boring as a whole.

Bers, it's your game and you will do what you want. I was merely stating a fact with MB cause initially it was said that no levels were taken down. However, I still think the issue is in siege power, not in buildings armor. And true, the attacking army was impressively large, but please bear in mind it was large because of the huge number of fighting army, not because of the huge number of destroying army. 

Could you clarify something for me that I'm confused about. When you say "peaceful buildings," do you mean non-troop and non-defense buildings? 

There is still one problem : with a big medieval army, even with 1 wool you can't attack very far. To fix this, some time ago you were thinking about adding perk(s) that greatly increase storage (maybe food only) where the hero is, sounds very good to me, could you do that please ?

How far can you attack the most right now approximately? (In % of continent width)

That was more than a year ago so I don't remember exactly (I'm in fact preparing myself to do that again with a future hero), but I took notes so I can tell you with math:

- Time to reach furthest target: I noticed that if I'm at the bottom right of the continent and trade with the top right one, it can take 2h30 to reach him, speed of traders being 150 cells per hour. Trebuchet speed a year ago was 50 cells per hour so it would take thrice more time, 7.5 hours, to go there but I'm okay with the idea that it's mandatory to take the 6 whirlwind perks that increase speed by 30%, and also have some boots, the medieval boots level 0 give 6% (I know I could be at least level 10 but trust me, I spent hundreds ores at the idol of crafting and while I wanted boots and helmet that are both medieval and require level 10 20 or 30, I was always getting something else, so yes it is possible to be that unlucky and have to use the level 0 ones), since there is also about 1 hour of snail and that the army also need to come back after the attack (and pay food for that), that's (7.5+7.5+1)/(1.3+0.06)=11.76, 11h45 that is.

- Maximum storage: In medieval with a crop pantry 18 and crops storage 18 (you're unlikely to have a wool because of high corruption and many military buildings reducing culture) you have 27480, it could be slightly increased by using blueprints but not by a lot and it's desirable to use them to have more trebuchets/catapults instead.

- Army consumption: I had an army that was using more than 7000 food per hour, and I had no animals, mercenaries, slaves, units found from POIs, just units made in towns.

So: this army would need to pay 7000*11.76=82353 food to get there, which is almost perfectly 3 times more than maximum storage, so it would be possible to attack someone only at 33% of that distance. While it may seems like a lot, that would mean the perks should increase the food storage by 200% more, now I know the trebuchet speed got increased but while I don't know by how much yet, looking at earlier age units like battering rams I guess it's not a lot, not 3 times faster anyway, and as I said I didn't even had animals or something else so that balance that back.