Primal Strike seems irredeemably bad

[Cellar_Cat]

I like playing barbarians but this thing is so weak that if it was deleted outright from the game I would not feel any worse off. A single 8 dmg per melee unit per battle is just terrible. It's not even powerful at the start of the match and only gets comparatively worse over time.

[CrUsHeR]

Backstab in AOW3 only gives +6 damage, only works with flanking, and half the targets in the game cannot be backstabbed (undead, dragon, etc)



Not sure if this Primal Strike is great game design, but it's certainly efficient. Keeping in mind that all your melee units get this via unit enchantment, including e.g. animals in a pure nature build.

Besides barbarian being probably the single strongest class anyways.

[Sovieticozasz]

early game barbarian, only has repeating attack units, in melee at least. Primal attack can be considered as an extra "attack" the first time they hit, since you wil probably attack 1-3 times per unit per combat early game, that anywhere from a 12.5% to a 25% increase in damage per fight. Quite a noticeable increase in the early game.

Yes mid game and late game it is not very important, but what the barbarian culture comboes well is the insane early game rushes, so it is a nice complement.

[CrUsHeR]

Also if you say this is weak - check all the other mechanics. It feels like the devs were super-angsty to add anything which could be somehow unbalanced.

Example, all your enchants only work with "base attacks". So any unit with a special skill attack, those poison arrows / blades don't work with that.



Which is especially weird when some effects only work conditionally; fiery weapons only deal extra damage when the target is already burning, like from being hit by flame arrows or a spell first.

Frost weapons only deal bonus damage if the target is slowed or frozen, though neither frost weapon/arrows are causing this effect.

Lightning and Poison weapons/arrows however do cause their own damage bonus through electrify / poisoned, which is a quite substantial 8 damage on the start of your next turn.



In that sense, try playing a barbarian with poison weapons, then you can see the primal strike as an extra free guaranteed poison tick on your very first attack.

[Fendelphi]

8 damage is just the initial value. Various modifiers can end up doubling it.

5 Strengthen: +50%
Flank: +25%
The common "Spawnkin" minor racial transformation: +20%

Then we have various hero buffs to the army, that add additional % damage. And critical hits.

As for the application of it. It is reliable damage no matter how much you have moved.
It helps with Alpha-striking troublesome units fast, without the need of outside factors(casting spells, nearby allies, Awakening, debuffing enemies).

[The Former]

I've found that bonus damage for free has never been detrimental to my strategy.

[sandman25dcsss]

İlk olarak badger vortex tarafından gönderildi:

İlk olarak sandman25dcsss tarafından gönderildi:

I guess the idea is to encourage alpha strike instead of building defensive formation and waiting for AI to attack first. Maybe it is not that bad if you take extra movement on first turn and ignore ZoC traits so you kill a few units and block the rest.

Extra move trait on first turn doesn't get you far enough, only really useful for mounted units due to starting distance being quite far

Ok, then it is a weak trait I guess.

[Cellar_Cat]

İlk olarak Lockfågel, Paradoxriddaren tarafından gönderildi:

I've found that bonus damage for free has never been detrimental to my strategy.

I mean it's not detrimental, I just don't find its effect worthwhile. From the sound of the replies so far some people think it's useless, some think it's amazing and some also think it's useless but don't care because it's on an otherwise good faction.

I'd be curious if we had a breakdown of under what circumstances all these people are using it. To me being able to theoretically affect your 8 dmg with a bunch of stacking modifiers does not at all translate to any realistic scenario I've encountered.

[suejak]

OP obviously just doesn't have enough experience to have an opinion. Everybody knows how easy it is to get flanking, strengthen, crit stacking etc. once you play the game past turn 30, to say nothing of the interaction with blight weakness on factions with lots of blight AND factions with no blight. "Bunch of stacking modifiers" is literally the midgame of AoW, as we all know.

Anyway, on to a more interesting topic.

İlk olarak sandman25dcsss tarafından gönderildi:

İlk olarak badger vortex tarafından gönderildi:

Extra move trait on first turn doesn't get you far enough, only really useful for mounted units due to starting distance being quite far

Ok, then it is a weak trait I guess.

I think this trait is more for ranged units and casters to be able to attack turn 1, not melee units rushing across the entire map turn 1.

[spoonygundam]

I think Primal Strike compares pretty favorably to most of the other cultural damage bonuses in a typical battle? It'll fall behind in long battles where you're significantly outnumbered, but you're Barbarians. Just outnumber the enemy instead.

Base attack on most of the Tier 1 units is ~10 damage, so a 20% boost is only getting you 2 points of damage. You'd need four hits to match Primal Strike, and most fights shouldn't last much longer than that. Primal Strike is also frontloaded damage, so you're killing off models and units earlier into the fight.

It even holds up in the later parts of the game, with larger base damage values. A Warbreed does 27 base damage on its charge, and you get +60% damage on a three tile charge. With Primal Strike, that's 35 * 1.6 = 56 damage. With Cull the Weak, that's 27 * 1.8 = 48.6 damage. Dunno which way it rounds. Add in a Power Cleave next turn, and you have 56 + 33 = 89 for Primal Strike and 48.6 + 33 * 1.2 = 88.2 for Cull the Weak. If both hits for the latter round up, the damage is equal.

If you start adding in more +damage%, Primal Strike will compare even more favorably. Spawnkin, some racial traits, various support hero perks, Strengthen, crits, etc. Adding more flat damage through enchantments will benefit Cull the Weak/Stand Together more. But there are more sources of +damage% available in the game.

Other traits will pull ahead after that, but you should just be in the cleanup phase at that point anyway unless you're massively outnumbered. Which you shouldn't be because, again, Barbarians.

There's also something to be said about it being unconditional damage. Sometimes you'll lose Stand Together when going for flanks, or you might not want to spend a spell or action Awakening weaker units, or the AI might be spamming Strengthen and status heals to hard counter Cull the Weak, but Barbarian units just get Primal Strike. Assuming you have Primal Mark researched and enabled, even your crappy throwaway summon or bonus units will have it. Warhounds, zombies, floral stingers, etc. Things that aren't expected or intended to last more than a turn can still run in to do a big chunk of damage while bogging enemies down. It's the most impactful of the traits for a swarm army comp by far.

[Mozgoth]

How do You play industrious? What tomes do You pick early?
I'm suck with them.

Primal strike is not bad...
It's all about alpha strike. Like artillery battleships on stellaris.
Primal strike dmg allows to one shot squad.
If You stack +%xx dmg buffs your shock units can deal 80-100 dmg.
Thanks god that there isn't a minor conversión to give shock units sentinel...

[snuggleform]

To the OP, you're forgetting something extremely important in this game which is that most units actually lose damage the lower the hp they have. Thus, doing damage up front is worth more than you are giving it credit for. If that extra primal strike damage breaks the threshold to cause them to lose units out of their stack, that means they lose 33% of their damage output.

[DuskQuill]

I recently did a game where I was Barbarian, gave my units Strong, managed to nab a Warbreed, and transformed my race with Supergrowth. Every engagement I got with a single entity massive Warbreed pretty much resulted in the target dying after a single solid charge hit.

[Cellar_Cat]

re: outnumbering, I find the 3 army limit usually means that to outnumber the enemy I'd have to be wasting waves of units on them. Maybe in short games against a player it works, but with the AI I tend to find they use a high volume of... very mixed units, and in higher difficulties actively resource cheat, so they'll have a lot of armies. So typically I'm relying on high quality units rather than numbers for most of the game.

I wonder if the people getting good value out of this are fighting quicker matches in small maps or something. Over 4 turns in a battle doesn't sound uncommon to me, nor fighting outnumbered (in the sense that my armies must win several battles, not that I don't cap out 3 armies most of the time).

Regarding a lot of stacking bonuses, flanking, warbreed special attack, etc. I find the big issue with that is not getting the stacks or positioning but rather doing it before the first melee attack. The AI likes to stop short, so a charge and primal strike is one thing but getting buffed and behind things before even a retaliation gets triggered is not something I care to rely on. Same as stopping ahead of them to do a power cleave. They're going to hit it and get retaliated instead. I guess maybe you could build for the retaliation, to some extent. Might be interesting.

And keep in mind a lot of the other damage bonuses will also apply to ranged units.

İlk olarak snuggleform tarafından gönderildi:

To the OP, you're forgetting something extremely important in this game which is that most units actually lose damage the lower the hp they have. Thus, doing damage up front is worth more than you are giving it credit for. If that extra primal strike damage breaks the threshold to cause them to lose units out of their stack, that means they lose 33% of their damage output.

I mean I will concede it can help against weak units, because it might push you over the threshold of killing another member or two of their squad, but I guess they've never been that great of an issue for me anyway.

İlk olarak Mozgoth tarafından gönderildi:

How do You play industrious? What tomes do You pick early?
I'm suck with them.

I went with cavalry and uh... overwhelm tactics I think? Merged their (now mounted) tier III shield units with a mounted hero and tyrant knights and had stupidly tanky, fast moving squads with a decent damage output. It was very easy to play because I had so few casualties and also they have a strong economy.

Per tomes I think I was mostly going with thematic materium ones that grant weapon enchantments, just because.

[spoonygundam]

İlk olarak Cellar_Cat tarafından gönderildi:

re: outnumbering, I find the 3 army limit usually means that to outnumber the enemy I'd have to be wasting waves of units on them. Maybe in short games against a player it works, but with the AI I tend to find they use a high volume of... very mixed units, and in higher difficulties actively resource cheat, so they'll have a lot of armies. So typically I'm relying on high quality units rather than numbers for most of the game.

I wonder if the people getting good value out of this are fighting quicker matches in small maps or something. Over 4 turns in a battle doesn't sound uncommon to me, nor fighting outnumbered (in the sense that my armies must win several battles, not that I don't cap out 3 armies most of the time).

I'm playing on Brutal with standard game speed and map size. Over 4 turns in a battle isn't uncommon, but that's not really what I said. IMO, most battles are effectively over two or three turns after the initial engagement. At that point you should have killed enough enemy units that the rest aren't really a threat even if the battle lasts another couple of turns of cleanup, and I don't really think any traits that only surpass Primal Strike in damage output during the easiest phase of a fight are appreciably better. The initial engagement could happen on Turn 2, but should probably happen later as you pull back to heal/buff/summon while you lead the AI into a bad position. The exceptions are when you're massively outnumbered or outgunned and have to play a slower game of attrition. That can happen if you end up in an early war on Brutal, but it shouldn't happen with Barbarians.

I'm also not talking about just having more stacks of units, though that's part of it. With Prolific Swarmers and an early Chaos affinity skill, Sunderers are down to IIRC 4 gold upkeep, so you can run around with multiple stacks extremely early. They also have affinity skills to get units for free in multiple ways to fill out even more stacks, so you could send multiple triple stacks in different directions if you want.

They also have access to a lot of ways to get bonus units beyond those stacks. Houndmasters are solid archers that come with a free Warhound, Wildspeakers can summon an animal unit, Animate Flora lets you summon Floral Stingers in battle, there's a totem spell that summons a Tier 1 animal unit every turn for five turns, there's another spell that summons up to five Gremlins every battle in a city's domain, there's a siege project that gives you six Warhounds, in the very late game Balors and Horned Gods can also summon units on their own. Heroes can summon elementals, animals, or undead. There are probably more things that I'm forgetting here. You can literally swarm enemies despite the six units per stack, three stack limit.

All this stuff works with Primal Strike (Unless you get a Razorback or Magma Elemental), and they're completely disposable because they aren't real units. You can throw them into risky situations or use them to bait the AI into dumb positions and get them killed with impunity. They'll get their one big Primal Strike hit off, die after a couple of hits, then come back next battle with full HP ready to do it again.

Other cultures can get this stuff too, but it stands out for Barbarians because they match the culture's affinity and work so well with their trait without you needing to do anything. You'd need to expend effort trying to keep them alive to get much value out of Stand Together or Cull the Weak, you'd need to use spells or skills to Awaken them, and they'd need time to ramp up for Star Blades to probably still do less damage.

Flanking also isn't actually much trouble. There's a Tier 1 Nature spell that makes every attack against the target flank, and Gremlins can turn enemies around with their ranged attack.

I'll also say I don't think Primal Strike is the best trait or anything, that's Awaken. It adds more damage per hit than everything but Primal Strike, works on all units, is extremely easy to keep up on everything important, and adds powerful additional effects to certain unit types. The worst IMO is Cull the Weak, simply because the AI loves spamming Strengthen and status clearing effects so it can be difficult to maintain Weaken, and it only affects melee units despite the hoops you need to jump through to enable it.

[Cellar_Cat]

Okay that makes more sense, I know my play style is slow but when you said fights I thought you meant the battle itself and 4 seemed crazy fast.

I would not say I am usually outnumbered in a battle—I try very hard not to be. Against AI factions it tends to be 3v3 until their initial armies break. I try to make them come to me unless I see a good opening, and use staggered shield walls where some units attack while others stun/defend. Behind them are either ranged firing over the top or supports warding the shield wall if I foresee a lot of magic damage incoming. Skirmishers and/or assaults stay behind the wall until the enemy engage, and if anything jumps it they clear that, otherwise they run out to flank.

So battles for me are pretty gradual, the initial contact is more about trying to stun and tie them up rather than inflict serious damage. But the upside is that I rely on high rank low maintenance units for quite a while and spend more money on upgrading my cities.

I did experiment with armies of wildspeakers and houndmasters at one point, just as throw-away units. It wasn't awful for its cost but it did struggle sometimes with more durable enemies or heavy AOE. Sometimes I still do it if I want to autoresolve a battle and can afford losses because I don't care a lot about the experience level of those units.

That said I do also find stand together really easy to use, and it goes well with a lot of other adjacency bonuses or even just abilities like shield wall or having archers close behind your lines.

Cull the weak is... I'm not really sure. Not strong exactly but I do enjoy using it. I think my biggest struggle with Dark is the relative absence of staying power. They do have a number of ways to apply weak and if you take wolf mounts your cavalry have an emergency one too but the offensive focus in every aspect of their units can make them costly. I think with them more than Barbarian I really rely on dealing damage and lowering morale quickly to get every fight over with.

However their outfits look better than High so I'm willing to deal with it.