Anyone want to try out my "mod"?

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Russell
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Anyone want to try out my "mod"?

Postby Russell » Sun Apr 25, 2010 5:04 am

So I've been trying over time to re-balance vanilla EFS (1.4) to better suit how I view the roles of units. I tried to create a very counter-based balance that kept the distinction between direct and close combat and the types of units they hit. For example, an armored unit, the heavy tank killer, really annihilates other armored units. An infantry unit, the xyll warbeast, really annihilates other infantry units. Assault legions are an infantry that annihilate armored units, and anti-infantry tanks are armored units that annihilate infantry units. This means if you have only one type of unit in your stack (infantry or armored) there will be a strict counter to them. But there will always be counters to counters. Assault legions beat heavy tank killers, heavy tank killers beat anti-infantry tanks, anti-infantry tanks beat xyll warbeasts, xyll warbeasts beat assault legions. So all four have their own direct counter. Other units are more balanced, for example, the mega tank and shock legion units. I've made the basic units you can build anywhere fairly weak, but maybe too weak, it's hard to tell.

I also changed space dynamics a bit more. Frigates and fighters are basically the only effective counter to fighters and bombers. This keeps frigates as a more useful spaceship throughout the game because they have a more defined role, and it creates a more 'counter' system where there isn't an ultimate, unstoppable group of units (like 20 dreadnoughts).

I reduced the cost of engineers in half and reduced turns to build to 3. Why? I felt the pace of the game was too slow, especially in the beginning. This speeds it up some without having to put in more starships or bases elsewhere.

It's by no means complete, since it's hard to try to find the right balance between units while keeping the 'flavor' of EFS 1.4 (I don't want to add or subtract units or change their fundamental nature). I haven't messed with anything but the dat files. Replace your dat files in EFS 1.4 with these if you want to try it out and give any feedback:

http://s235607088.onlinehome.us/whote/stuff/dat.zip


Problems that need addressing:

I made officer/noble type units virtually impossible to hit except by assassin types. This was primarily a multiplayer balancing technique - assassins become absolutely needed, and more effective, for killing officers and nobles. This would have given them a more important role in regular battles and not just Byzantium II. But it makes it impossible to kill officers to non-assassin units, and seems to bewilder the AI.

Symbiots - finding the right balance between too powerful and taking over, and too weak and never being a threat to anyone.

The house AI seems slow/weak for some reason.

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tot_kto_v_bredu
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Re: Anyone want to try out my "mod"?

Postby tot_kto_v_bredu » Sun Apr 25, 2010 6:05 am

Russell wrote:I made officer/noble type units virtually impossible to hit except by assassin types. This was primarily a multiplayer balancing technique - assassins become absolutely needed, and more effective, for killing officers and nobles. This would have given them a more important role in regular battles and not just Byzantium II. But it makes it impossible to kill officers to non-assassin units, and seems to bewilder the AI.


Does that mean that during a battle with group of units that have officer this officer will survive the battle and not retreat ant not be harmed but could kill other infantry units as he pleases?

Russell
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Postby Russell » Sun Apr 25, 2010 6:50 am

Not quite, because I gave officers no combat ability (but the nobles have combat ability). It's like the Nova problem when you have an air unit attack a noble and you get the infinite loop and nothing happens. Except at least in Nova there are easier alternatives (especially for the AI). I'm not sure how I'm going to address that problem, perhaps make scout tanks able to kill them as well? Or some other common unit an AI and player have easy access to.

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tot_kto_v_bredu
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Postby tot_kto_v_bredu » Sun Apr 25, 2010 11:18 am

The idea of Officer/Noble being invincible for other combat units I think is too much. There has to be some sense of reality here.
Regarding their attack type how about give them psychic and close? After all they are not ordinary units.
And they moving type still be foot but their armor should be increased. Again, speaking of reality sense - officers and noble are rich people and should have some high powered armor, shouldn't they?

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Postby Garison » Sun Apr 25, 2010 1:53 pm

I think that is the solution to the problem.

Have nobles and officers easier to hit, but give them alot of armor. This will allow for the "real" threat of a combine force doing damage to them in the long term, provided they can't reinforce their position. The assasin can then be designed to do alot of damage with its attack and be very or moderately accurate when targeting a noble/officer. have it require a small squad of assassins (prehaps 3 or 5) to 100% effectively kill a noble when "assasinating". This would force the player to either amasss a small squad of noble killers, or use tradional forces to overwhelm and run down the noble. This would make sense in a historic way, a nobleman is either destoryed by poison in a back room, or he is killed by a grand-army at his gates in a public display of new-leadership. you can scale your assasins down to compensate the need to use more then 1, and also allow a more effective counter-assasin tactic, because a single assasin from a house might be able to kill the 1 of 3 assasins attempt to kill the noble.

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tot_kto_v_bredu
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Postby tot_kto_v_bredu » Sun Apr 25, 2010 2:24 pm

Another idea: Assassins to be able to attack noble directly without being hit by any other infantry except by noble, officer, assassin, clergy, seal.
I mean that if my single assassin is attacking your noble surrounded by your support troops then he (assasin) is attacking only noble and is being hit only by noble .

Question: in vanilla EFS 1.4 do you use noble in stacks? I usually just keep them in the palace.

Russell
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Postby Russell » Sun Apr 25, 2010 5:20 pm

The problem with greater armor is it makes the assassin types have to have strong attacks as well. Right now I have officers at 20 agility, nobles at 35, blademasters at 45. But their armor is 10, 5, 25, respectively. This was in an attempt to force players to use spies more regularly. So I gave the spy 25/10 close, the assassin 33/10, and the doppleganger 45/20. Very weak, but accurate attacks, and this gave them a completely different role. And the problem becomes, the early units a player starts with are going to have lower accuracy in general. Some of the more powerful units later on are able to kill officers and nobles (anti-infantry tank), but a player does not start with those. So if I make the beginning units more effective at killing an officer, then the later units will be very effective at it, and I've now pushed assassins off the map.

I wanted each unit to have its own particular use and role, so that you couldn't definitively say "there isn't any reason to use this later in the game".

So the Xyll Warbeast has 20/400 close attack and nothing else, to make it the most effective anti-infantry infantry unit, but very low psy defense.

Gen warrior legion has 15/250 close attack, and some air/direct attack and higher psy defense to make it a more balanced anti-infantry unit.

The anti-infantry tank has 30/500 close attack, to signify it is the most effective anti-infantry unit in the game (I did this because direct combat comes before close combat). It virtually has no other use. I probably would need to reduce its accuracy some, or else these would be used as the anti-officer unit.

These high values have forced me to create high value armors for some units. For example, a heavy tank killer has 500 armor, so does a violator assault gun. Marauder legions have 400 armor.

Now the way I was trying to make assassins work was that their main role would be to kill officers and nobles, killing officers and nobles would be very, very difficult to do without at least the basic spy. The problem is the infinite loop and the fact of higher tech units you don't start the game with would be much better than anything the early units could do, so if the early units can kill officers, then everything will. If I just give nobles high armor, but low agility, then units like the anti-infantry tank, xyll warbeast, etc, would be much better for killing officers than assassins, and assassins would have to become just another anti-infantry unit that can attack on Byzantium II, this just feels like an overlapping of roles.


My possible solutions (using the current EFS mechanics) are as follows:

1) Make one of the starting units have a very accurate, weak close attack. Like a scout tank, to signify it can infiltrate behind enemy lines and destroy the opposing headquarters. This could give the scout tank a more common role in the game.

2) Give each house several spies to start the game.

3) Try to tinker with the agility/accuracy more, but this will diminish the distinct roles I was trying to come up with.

Of course if it was possible to edit combat algorithms all together, this would be very easy to implement what I want to do. Unfortunately I must work with what's there.

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tot_kto_v_bredu
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Postby tot_kto_v_bredu » Sun Apr 25, 2010 5:56 pm

wow.
what are specs of your gunship?

Russell
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Postby Russell » Sun Apr 25, 2010 6:04 pm

10/300 water, 3/40 air, 6/100 direct, 6/100 close. It costs 100 metal and 50 electronics to make now. I wanted to give it a permanent role in the game.

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tot_kto_v_bredu
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Postby tot_kto_v_bredu » Sun Apr 25, 2010 6:26 pm

armor, agility, spot, camo?

Russell
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Postby Russell » Sun Apr 25, 2010 7:07 pm

It can all be viewed in the unit.dat file from the above link.

armor: 200
agility: 7
spot: 5
camo: 4

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Eightball Maniac
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Re: Anyone want to try out my "mod"?

Postby Eightball Maniac » Mon Apr 26, 2010 1:57 am

Russell wrote:Problems that need addressing:

I made officer/noble type units virtually impossible to hit except by assassin types. This was primarily a multiplayer balancing technique - assassins become absolutely needed, and more effective, for killing officers and nobles. This would have given them a more important role in regular battles and not just Byzantium II. But it makes it impossible to kill officers to non-assassin units, and seems to bewilder the AI.


The AI doesn't really understand units that can only be damaged by specific units or damage types. If it sees a unit, it generally just sends in whatever it has available to attack, regardless of whether the units can actually hit the target. I'm afraid you'll have to allow the nobles and officers to be damaged by more conventional means if you want the AI to function properly around them.

Symbiots - finding the right balance between too powerful and taking over, and too weak and never being a threat to anyone.


As you know, Symbiots aren't much of a threat in vanilla because they can't replace ship losses (or is it all units?), meaning they can't transport ground units to other worlds when their starting transports are down. The only real solution to this is using Matt's modified EXE from Hyperion, which allows the Symbiots to build all their units and spread like a plague.
This is the solution I used in my mod, along with an increase in Symbiot numbers and durability. They're a significant threat now, happily overrunning Stigmata and spreading to nearby worlds if not halted. For a less extreme Symbiot threat, simply using that modded EXE should be a good start.

The house AI seems slow/weak for some reason.


Any specific problems you've noticed? Is it just slow to expand and build up?

Russell
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Postby Russell » Mon Apr 26, 2010 3:16 am

Slow to expand/build up. Maybe I've just forgot how generally weak they are. I'm not concerned with how well the AI plays, because I want to balance this specifically for multiplayer (playing with some of my friends or others). The problem isn't just the AI but whether the human players would be able to exploit this noble/officer invulnerability too much. My temporary solution made scout tanks able to kill officers/nobles, so the AI has no issue with that (since they build a lot of scout tanks).


I don't want symbiots to be able to mass spread, because then it becomes not a question of stopping them, but eliminating them. I've pondered giving their transport ships extreme levels of armor or agility, so they take entire fleets to destroy. Making their transport ships will cause them to expand through the galaxy, but I'm not sure it's the solution I want. I want their transport ships to be destroyed, permanently, but not very easily or quickly by the fleet.

Russell
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Postby Russell » Mon Apr 26, 2010 5:00 am

I've made some changes to more or less come to the best 'resolution' I could come up with. The AI would still be very exploitable, but not completely. But the AI isn't the ultimate consideration here, and they seem to 'recover' from any slow start and really pick up the pace later on.

I gave nobles 20 agility, 5/50 indirect, 5/50 direct, 5/50 close. They stack up well against most units, but a unit with 9 or 10 accuracy in close combat is able to hit them. The same thing with officers, except I gave them 5/5 direct, 5/5 close. This makes it so they're able to repel say, a single scout tank, part of the time (instead of always dying). I may increase their cost to compensate.

I gave blademasters 30 agility. This means only units with 20+ accuracy can damage them, and the only units with this accuracy are assassins and doppelgangers. Nobles can repel spies (or can die to them), but cannot repel assassins or doppelgangers. Blademasters always repel spies, sometimes assassins, never doppelgangers. You'll need other assassins or doppelgangers to kill them. The only unit capable of killing another doppelganger is another doppelganger, due to their 40 agility. Their cost is high to reflect this - 150 biochems, 200 electronics, 50 wetware.

I gave inquitors extremely powerful stats, perhaps too powerful. On the other hand, I may need to give inquisitors higher accuracy, because they have trouble attacking labs that have officer corps in them.

I made some minor edits to the galaxy.gal to let each house start with a spy on their home planet and added an agora to Bannockburn (to represent the fact lore wise it's a league controlled planet).

By beefing up the symbiots, I made them break free and take over half of Bannockburn by 5050. They had begun to take Stigmata over, but were beaten back. 75% of their ships are still alive by 5050. I probably need to nerf the symbiot units a little bit due to the fact they can come out of ruins.

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Eightball Maniac
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Postby Eightball Maniac » Wed Apr 28, 2010 6:34 am

The AI is incompetent no matter how you look at it. You're probably better off just ignoring it if you want the mod to be specifically multiplayer, else you'll probably have to make some sacrifices for the AI to cooperate.

I gave inquitors extremely powerful stats, perhaps too powerful. On the other hand, I may need to give inquisitors higher accuracy, because they have trouble attacking labs that have officer corps in them.


If there's a limited number of Inquisitors, you might want them to be both powerful and accurate so they can pose genuine threats to most units. Not much of an Inquisition if it isn't feared! :wink:

By beefing up the symbiots, I made them break free and take over half of Bannockburn by 5050. They had begun to take Stigmata over, but were beaten back. 75% of their ships are still alive by 5050. I probably need to nerf the symbiot units a little bit due to the fact they can come out of ruins.


Nice! They love to invade Bannockburn in my games, which is always cause for headaches when I want it for myself.

How do the Imperial fleets manage at Stigmata? Are they easily defeated, or do they provide a tough obstacle for the Symbiots?


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