On Game Progression

[Feli]

I've found the difficulty and game-progression to be incredibly slow and is altered too heavily by how you play the game regardless of your intentions.

First off, I just played through the goblin challenge event going on so for the first time I actually recorded how slow progression is sometimes, and I got to 27 battles before attaining 20k gold. My 27th battle consisted of fighting 2 basic zombies and 2 skeleton warriors and a basic skeleton.

This, probably because I kept my army to 3 goblin assassins, 1 orc warrior, and 2 goblin sappers, a total gold value of around 2000 gold. It seems the game progression is far too heavily weighted based on your unit choices, which is annoying when no matter how many battles you go through the enemies fail to come close to threatening the army you have which gives you no incentive to raise a larger army to counter them with when you're still making great gold and experience income from fighting with a small band of units anyways with no danger.

I keep my army small because A: I get more exp and gold faster, and B: The battles never increase in difficulty enough to make me feel the need to recruit more units to win with. and C: I know that if I do recruit more units the enemy will likely also have more units to fight them with inviting potential losses and slower battles with no extra rewards.

I'd like to see the game give less reward for fighting with small armies, and more reward for fighting with large armies. As is I find myself re-loading a save if I find myself on a 1v1v1 or 1v1v1v1 battle, knowing that I could easily finish 3 or 4 other fights for the same rewards in the time it would take to complete while it's much more dangerous and time consuming especially if you end up at a start point near the middle of the fight. In the same sense, having a bigger army gives the opponent more units which might focus-fire one of your units thus risking losses, but the reward for winning the battle seems no larger for dealing with more enemies. The battle even will generally take much longer unless you possess a stupidly large number of AoE units.

I also don't feel the game should base its difficulty so heavily on what price of your army is. Many unit prices aren't even accurate to their functional impact on the battle (Dwarf Gunner vs Dwarf Engineer for example both cost 600) and it often leads to battles being far too easy or far too hard for what you're actually prepared to deal with if you make the wrong choice of recruiting specific units in the early game. It also makes it hard to want to recruit more units when you know that doing so directly will improve the opponent's army as well, far too often more so than it benefits you. It would be much nicer to have a more traditional and obvious means of progression so you don't feel you're choosing to up the difficulty setting by buying new units when that should feel like you're empowering your team. Naturally this isn't as much of an issue in the late game but in the early game it really hurts the experience.

[Dwarfurious]

So its the cost of the unit that dictates the 'power' of your army, and thus your opponents ?

[Feli]

Originally posted by Dwarfurious:

So its the cost of the unit that dictates the 'power' of your army, and thus your opponents ?

To be perfectly honest I'm not 100% sure how it's calculated, and I'm basing everything off of experience of actively observing the variations in army sizes and strength relative to when I invest a large amount of gold into buying expanding my army. I know it eventually creeps up if you play enough missions, and the game information implies your hero's rank and invested experience largely impacts the matchmaking too, but I know I can go 30+ battles without seeing a major increase in enemy team difficulty if I keep a minimally-sized army, but then have it suddenly jump to double the size if I start buying some high cost units like Siege Weapons or Mages. I've also noticed your hero's gold value seems to be counted too which seems to have a big impact on the first few battles.

If you're interested to see how much your army value impacts things, just try disbanding all your units from a late-game savefile. Not only will the enemy army be smaller but it will mostly consist of low-price units from what I've seen. You can even try recruiting an army of 100-cost units and see how little they matter in determining the enemy army.

[Dwarfurious]

So wait it doesnt even matter who i bring, just who is available? If i got a couple cannons im not even using its just gonna make the random battle that much harder? yeesh

[werdi-eh]

Yes, because you have deploy turn and you could switch your weakelings with those cannons.

[Dwarfurious]

Originally posted by werdi-eh:

Yes, because you have deploy turn and you could switch your weakelings with those cannons.

but the opposite applies; if i can only bring 9 guys and i have a warband of 15, im fighting an enemy scaled to 15 units? Or just my strongest 9? Either way thats bad!

[Les]

Hi there,

AI army power is determined what you are bringing to battle (i.e. derived from their cost) and also your hero power (i.e. experience).

While it’s not ideal it holds pretty well for majority of players who will try to get more units and upgrade them throughout the campaign.

The unit’s price should roughly matching its usefulness, but it’s sometimes hard to determine whenever specific skills are involved. We have arena test where unit fights vs. other units to normalise their cost - that works pretty well for melee, but not that great for ranged and spellscasters.

Maybe we should start another post where we try to find the undervalued / overvalued units.

However, I see from this post there should be some minimum baseline based on game progress, i.e. at 50% of game progress, AI shouldn’t have less that x units which cost no less than y. I will try to patch it soon.

Switching weaklings for canons is an exploit, but it’s difficult to solve actually. Btw, if someone wants to exploit game, there are few more ways ^^

Take care,
Les

[Dwarfurious]

So to reiterate; its based on your INITIAL troop lineup

[Les]

Hi again,

I have just patched Free World to address raised issues:

(i) there is a baseline now setting the lowest possible AI team size and its cost based on game-progress;

(ii) the team cost will be computed based on the most expensive units in a whole team, therefore switching weaklings with powerful units won't work;

(iii) player's team power will be also computed considering the items that heroes carry.


Please let me know how that works.

I have also started a post about prices of units - please comment:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/882410/discussions/0/1812044473309125913/

Take care,
Les

[Dwarfurious]

Are units recovering from wounds left out of this?

[Les]

Originally posted by Dwarfurious:

Are units recovering from wounds left out of this?

No, they count as well - I was thinking of excluding them, but it could cause spikes/lows in difficulty.

[Dwarfurious]

Hm. And is it just a units initial cost, does it include upgrades? Because machine types using gold for upgrades can really inflate their power

[Les]

It's just default unit cost. AI experience is handled separately (based on game progress).

[Les]

Btw - something else sneaked in this patch.
Floating units like Hellbat, Banshee, etc. can now fly over allies ^^

[Dwarfurious]

Oh wow thats gonna be huge. I hope we can see some other units get this ability; goblin assassins perhaps cloud slink between them

[Feli]

Originally posted by Les:

Btw - something else sneaked in this patch.
Floating units like Hellbat, Banshee, etc. can now fly over allies ^^

This, and you're adding Faeries to forest folk faction? I'll be waiting on a Faerie Dust Spell to make allies fly all peter-pan style. I DO BELIEVE IN FAERIES!