Thoughts on unit balance

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by WebBowser, Apr 7, 2019.

Tags:
  1. WebBowser

    WebBowser Poptop Tamer

    So I've been playing quite a bit of PVP lately and there are a few things I've noticed. First off, commanders are actually really well balanced. Ever since the most recent patch took Nuru down from triple S tier to still pretty strong (seriously, she's still one of the best commanders in the game) and made Ryoma's co power a bit less situational, there don't appear to be any commanders that are obviously too strong or too weak. However, I've noticed a few issues with unit balance, particularly with cheap ground units.

    1. Spearmen are just way too efficient at trading with other ground units, making it almost impossible to do cost-effective trades with them. Not only do they deal 50+% damage to literally every grounded unit except commanders and giants, but they have a really easy to fulfill crit condition that gives them a whopping 150% damage bonus, allowing spearmen to deal 75%+ if not outright 1 shot most grounded units. Pretty much the only way to deal with spearmen spam in a grounded battle is to setup an archer + some swordsmen to block, but that costs at least 600 gold to actually setup, while spearmen cost 150 a pop. Consider a situation where you have 3 spearmen vs an archer and 2 swordsmen, not only does the 3 spearmen cost only 450 vs the other side's 700, but the 3 spearmen are probably even if not favored against the archer and swordsmen depending on the exact terrain involved. The cost efficiency equation does not get any better when you try to throw in other units into the mix, just because 150 gold is just so cheap. They are just a go to unit in any map that features more then 1 barracks.

    So to resolve this issue, we need to make a ground unit that trades efficiently with spearmen. I think that their role in countering knights and dogs are important and should remain a defining feature of spearmen. I also think mages have a wide enough use case and making them better vs spearmen would just make them the new "best ground unit", except even worse because they have 5 move compared to spearmen's 3. Therefore, I vote that we make swordsmen match up better vs spearmen. Right now, the swordsmen vs spearmen matchup heavily favors spearmen by a 2 to 1 margin for no good reason(40% vs 80%). While I don't disagree that spears should beat swords in a 1 on 1 matchup, it should not be to this extent considering that spearmen only cost 50 more gold then swordsmen. Therefore, I propose increasing the damage swordsmen deal to spearmen to 55% (up from 40%) and decrease spearmen's damage to swordsmen to 65% (down from 80%). In addition, I propose decreasing spearmen's crit damage down to 130% (down from 150%), both to reduce their ground dominance and reflect the fact that it is much easier to line up a crit with spearmen then it is to line up a crit with swordsmen. This should give player's a way to contest spearmen in the early game and reduce their overall dominance without neutering their core strength as a cost efficient spammable defensive unit.

    2. Dogs right now don't really have a purpose outside of fog of war maps (where their ability to see into trees is really nice). They're supposed to counter early game village rushes by being really good against swordsmen, while also being effective flankers vs archers. The issue is that they are outclassed in pretty much every way by mages. For only 200 more gold, you can have the same movement, actually deal decent damage to wagons, an easier crit condition, can cap stuff, and you get to just beat all air units. I want them to actually be able to stop village rushes. So, what does one need to stop village rushes? three things mostly, high movement and a good matchup vs swordsmen and wagons. Right now, dogs do exactly one of those things, so I propose the following changes:

    First we increase the dog's move range from 5 to 7. This will enable dogs to somewhat keep pace with the ludicrous movement option that is wagons. This will also pretty much ensure that on most maps that if you rush dogs, they will be the first one to arrive at any contested building. This is super important if your goal is to stop your opponent from rushing the contested villages. Next, we increase the dog's damage to wagons to 85% (up from 35%). This is a drastic change, but wagons are by far the strongest unit in the game due to how little risk is involved in using them. By making dogs both able to catch wagons and threatening to wagons, this introduces a real risk to attempting to wagon cheese, and that's really important. Lastly, I would strongly consider buffing dog's damage to mages from 60% to 70%. Right now the mages are just too good in the general sense for a 400 gold unit (not quite to the same extent as spearmen, but close enough to warrant a bit of extra counterplay).

    3. Wagons are by far and away the most game-warping unit. They are so meta-warping that literally every map maker that creates a map with 300+ starting income has to ask themselves "ok, what happens if player 1 just makes a wagon on turn 1". For several of the built in 2 player maps, the answer is simply "player 1 wins". Take Muskox Mountains for example. If player 1 spawns a wagon above his southwest barracks and moves his infantry or commander towards it, then on turn 2 they can load up their guy and threaten to cap the neutral southeast barracks. Meanwhile, player 2's southeast barracks is positioned 8 spaced away from the nuetral southeast barracks, meaning that the earliest player 2 can interact with said barracks is on turn 3, immediately after player 1 captures it. Because the map is symmetrical, the same thing applies to the northwest neutral barracks. So both player 1 and player 2 can cap it on turn 3. Because player 1 goes first, this means that player 1 can cap both of the map's neutral barracks by turn 3, while player 2 is stuck with their 2 starting barracks, giving player 1 a nigh-insurmountable advantage. This is not a lone incident either. On Mottled Tarn, player 1 can threaten to capture either the northeast or southeast ports on turn 4, allowing them to start building warships that can threaten the opponent's only barracks with very little recourse for the opponent. Now granted, 1 turn makes all the difference, but due to how the map is structured, the only viable counterplay for player 2 here is to counter with their own turn 1 wagon and basically follow player 1's wagon, and that's no fun for anybody. In order to prevent degenerate gameplay like the examples described above, you need to conduct this exercise for every. single. map. and you often need to warp your mapmaking in order to properly accommodate for the existence of wagons.

    So, how do we address this? Unfortunately, wagons are by far the most complicated of the units I'm going to bring up here, so there's not an easy answer. Wagons have 3 big strengths that make them as dominating as they are. The first is their silly 12 movement, allowing them to cross almost any land-based map in a turn or 2. The other is their surprising durability. They take less then 50% damage from a shocking percentage of the cast, including harpies, archers, and swordsmen. This means that even if you do have some units to meet the wagon, chances are you will not be able to stop it from doing what it wants to do. The final strength is just the sheer variety of units they can transport, including not only swordsmen and spearmen, but also dogs, commanders, archers, mage's, and amphibians. Nerfing the movement of wagons is a very fine balancing act. If we nerf it too much, then wagons become worse then walking on many maps and effectively cease to exist, and I think this game would be a worse game if wagons stopped existing. If we keep it as is or nerf it too little however, then nothing changes and the very real issues described above still remain. For the time being, I propose nerfing wagons down to 9 movement (down from 12). Further movement nerfs may be considered if that proves to be too light of a touch. This should at least somewhat alleviate the map-warping implications of wagons existing. The dog buffs should help a lot with the durability issue, however a more broad nerf to the wagon's durability should also be considered. While the wagon's flexibility in the units it can carry is very relevant, I actually think that having that be the case improves the game, so I suggest no changes on that front.

    4. Turtles are basically what would happen if spearmen could fight while riding on a wagon. They are very fast and pretty much dominate the naval meta. However, I don't want to touch turtles because they need to be strong because warships are incredibly strong. And warships need to be incredibly strong because they are the only naval unit that can meaningfully impact land battles and turn naval superiority into land superiority, a "reward" for winning the naval fight if you will. What I want to do instead is give a small buff to harpoon ships to improve counterplay opportunity. Long story short, I propose increasing harpoon ship movement to 6 (up from 4). This will make it easier for harpoon ships to catch enemy turtles that overextend without backup and allow them to reach critical positions more quickly after being deployed. This will also make their crit condition of being on a reef tile a bit easier to fulfill (right now it can only enter a reef if it starts it's turn right next to one). In a world where everything else has 8-12 movement, I believe 6 movement on harpoon ships is actually pretty reasonable. Naval battles are actually pretty well balanced and I don't want to mess with that too much, but I think this relatively small adjustment will help make opponent's think twice before they just mass turtles for the win.

    5. Air units are perfectly balanced, if not a tiny bit on the weak side. The only change I'm going to propose for now is to increase the aeronaught's damage to structures to 55% (up from 50%). This is less to make them stronger and more to remove an obnoxiously common coin flip where an aeronaught may or may not kill a freshly captured building based on a luck roll, and that's no fun for anybody. If you want to give air unit's a meaningful buff, I would suggest increasing the cost of mages. However, I don't feel confident enough in the air meta to advocate for such a change.

    So yeah, a lot of changes proposed here, especially to the ground meta. The TL;DR here is that dogs should have a better defined role of "anti-village rush unit" and wagons are dumb. Hopefully this starts some useful discussion, and I look forward to getting feedback on the changes.

    Oh yeah, on the off chance you all are still reading, here's a couple of QoL changes I would like to suggest that has absolutely nothing to do with game balance:

    The dog's tile info page description should be changed to include the fact that dogs can see into trees in fog of war. This is a really big deal and is one of the main reasons to use dogs in the first place.

    The amphibian tile info page should be changed to show that they are vulnerable to turtles, as turtles are by far the biggest threat to amphibians due to the turtle's ability to roll in from halfway across the map and 1 shot them fairly easily. They are certainly more relevant then say, spearmen(if your frogman actuall gets attacked by a spearman, then you're not frogmanning right)
     
      Last edited by a moderator: Apr 8, 2019
    • ttv_will1v1

      ttv_will1v1 Tentacle Wrangler

      Last edited by a moderator: Apr 11, 2019
    • WebBowser

      WebBowser Poptop Tamer

      The fact that wagons need to be taken into consideration in the design every single map means that they are by definition meta warping. Your argument is effectively the equivalent of saying "turtles are garbage because they can only travel on water tiles", which is not a good argument for or against a unit's balance. The two examples I gave are built in maps that are borderline unplayable because player 1 has literally all the initiative due to wagons. While you could potentially brush the examples off due to poor map design, I argue that the fact that it happens repeatedly indicates an issue with the unit as opposed to an issue with the overall map design. Even if we're ok with the wagon's mobility, I still argue that wagon durability is a huge issue. It shouldn't take 3 hits to down something that costs 300 gold and has 12 movement.

      Thanks for the thread link though, I'll have to look into it later.
       
      • ttv_will1v1

        ttv_will1v1 Tentacle Wrangler

        muskox mountains and mottled tarn aren't in the quickplay pool though

        if we're talking about "quickplay" meta, they aren't that meta defining. Rambling Range has a very strong wagon opener, however. But again, that's the map's problem. If wagons only had 6 movement on the map, it'd be either viable or useless.

        It's hard to think of maps that properly use wagons in balanced manner. Rarari River (in quickplay) comes to mind, since there's only 1 barracks it's quite useful to wagon spears back and forth. And it doesn't completely break the map. TikTak is also similar to this (though p1 can do some unfair things)

        Main issue with the terrain tiles in this game is that you can't design for wagons without indirectly buffing Trebuchets/Ballistas. Same with flagstone tiles. There should be more tile options, but that's a lot to ask for.

        also check out /r/wargroovecompetitive
         
          Last edited by a moderator: Apr 11, 2019
          WebBowser likes this.
        • WebBowser

          WebBowser Poptop Tamer

          I actually didn't know there was a quickplay pool. I'll have to look that up before I continue the discussion on wagons (not that there's a whole lot else to say, as we've both made our points and understand eachother's positions fairly well). I'm still not particularly ok with how difficult it is to destroy wagons. Imo, something shouldn't be cheap, fast, and durable as a matter of principle. 2 out of 3 is fine, but putting all three together makes for a unit that does what it wants with little counterplay.

          I actually did poke through the reddit thread you posted earlier this week. I noticed that trebs actually get brought up fairly often as a potential problem unit. Out of curiosity, do you have any strong thoughts on my proposed dog changes? I feel like if dogs had more move, they could function as a pretty solid soft counter to indirect like trebuchets (for reference, dogs deal 40% to them, which is more then they deal to wagons for reasons that I still don't quite understand).
           
          • Pangaea

            Pangaea Forum Moderator

            @ttv_will1v1 Double posting is frowned upon under the forum rules. Please use the edit function to add to your posts. Thanks.
             
              ttv_will1v1 likes this.
            • ttv_will1v1

              ttv_will1v1 Tentacle Wrangler

              I think wagons as cheap/durable is fine. Fast is arguable since on plains it will only have 6 move, same as a Knight. And clearly wagons don't do damage, so it's best utility is to bring pikemen back and forth. I'd say if it can only move 6 tiles, it'd have to deliver 3 pikemen or more to fully realize it's "value" in movement.

              For sure dogs need a buff. But I don't think buffing dog's move will help a lot (unless you're talking like 8+ move). You'd first have to clear the pikemen wall in front of the trebuchets for the dog to breach. And even if you got the dog in, it will have to do way more damage to the treb to be worth all the units you just sacrificed to break the wall.

              Here are some example treb walls:

              https://i.imgur.com/ihXPBbB.png , https://i.imgur.com/S9xcn8x.png , https://i.imgur.com/pUYHloj.jpg (extreme, happened in tournament)
               
              • Midnight Tea

                Midnight Tea Phantasmal Quasar

                Wagons I think are OK, you kinda need to be judicious with how many road tiles you place and how often or how closely those road tiles approach the center of the map. Pikes I don't see an easy answer for because I do think they are meant to be very very good units. I think my main issue with them is that they can catch up to archers on their own, whereas I think archers should be able to kite them. I would give them a movement nerf just so positioning them for crits takes a bit more planning and so that yes, even just one archer could do severe damage to them with impunity. I do want to suggest that if pikes are nerfed, to readjust turn timer requirements on some campaign maps to compensate.

                As to dogs, one thought I had is that maybe their crit requirement could be eased a little. Maybe let them do their extra damage if any friendly unit is next to the enemy, even if it's a wagon or something. I think the main problem with dogs is that they take a lot of counterattack damage, which makes them a poor investment in terms of how much damage they do before they die. It's not an easy thing to fix. All that said I'm not opposed to dogs being useless outside of fog of war as their AW equivalent certainly didn't have much use outside it either.
                 
                • WebBowser

                  WebBowser Poptop Tamer

                  I would argue that matching the speed of the second fastest ground unit is still pretty fast, and as you mentioned that's the worst case scenario for wagon movement (barring impassible tiles such as forests, sea, mountains, etc). However there's another point that we need to factor into the discussion of wagon movement, and that's the movement of the unit being transported. As I'm sure you already know, you very rarely park your wagon directly next to the unit you're planning on picking up. Instead, you position the wagon such that the unit can take advantage of it's own movement, enter the wagon, and then take advantage of the wagon's movement. So, if we use a rather idealistic scenario of transporting pikemen on a plains-only map, a wagon-assisted pikeman gets to move a whole 11 spaces(the pikeman's 3 move, +1 to board the wagon, and then the wagon moves 6 spaces and drops the pikeman one space further), compered to the knight's measly 6. Furthermore, the wagon's drop action completely ignores terrain penalty, so the wagon can drop the pikeman off into forests or mountains with impunity, while our poor knight has to spend half his turn if he wishes to take advantage of good cover (or use a balloon, but those are far more expensive and vulnerable due to lower speed). With this kind of mobility option available, is it any wonder why pikemen almost completely outclass knights in the highly mobile offensive ground unit department?(while also serving as a highly efficient defensive ground unit to boot)

                  So outside of wagon-pikes, the reason why I dislike their durability is that as fast as they are, they shouldn't be getting hit in the first place, because there's literally nothing in the game that can catch them and at 300 gp they're not worth the effort of trapping. Using a transport vehicle has always balanced giving slow units way more mobility then they could ever achieve on their own (see wagon-pike above) with the risk that if the transport is destroyed, you lose the unit with it. With wagon's speed and durability, you should pretty much never lose a wagon unless you grossly misplay or are purposely using them as a wall (which, while not especially busted in itself, is yet another bit of utility you get to throw onto an already killer 300 gold do-whatever-your-heart-imagines utility package). That's why I introduced such a drastic vs wagons buff in my dog change, to try and introduce some kind of risk to using wagons.

                  Speaking of dogs, I think you're badly underestimating the power of movement on a grounded foot unit. 7 movement hits a ton of benchmarks that 5 move doesn't, including 2 move over mountains and 3 movement over forests and rivers(while still having 1 point of movement left over!). This extra movement over difficult terrain is huge for beating your opponent to important chokepoints and making sure you draw the lines of battle in your favor, which is pretty much the point of the first 3 turns of any Wargroove game. The extra movement also helps both reduce the difficulty in setting up their crits (more move = more flexibility in setting up crits) and offset their low defense (kinda like how wagon's movement helps ensure that they never have to take a hit they don't want to). 40% damage means that 2 dogs makes for a dead trebuchet (crits are fun), and their superior movement over difficult terrain means that the opponent will have to put more effort into making their wall, delaying its completion. While the same can be said for harpies(or aero-whatevers), at 200 gold dogs come online far sooner then harpies ever could, and that makes all the difference when it comes to effective counterplay (this doesn't really apply in maps with a high starting income, but I've found that pikemen aren't great on maps with super high income anyway). Obviously, I cannot say for certain whether or not this will be enough without some play-testing, but I think that dogs actually serving their purpose as flankers and anti-greed units and soldiers no longer losing in hilarious fashion to pikemen has a decent shot of shaking up the meta. The changes are obviously more aimed at preventing stalemates from happening in the first place as opposed to breaking them (I feel like golems were sorta meant to break stalemates. If that was the case then I'm not sure why they were made to be so weak to trebs, considering that trebs are what makes stalemates happen) and honestly I think I'd prefer that over creating a meta where people just set up walls and knock them down repeatedly.

                  Yeah, you can (and should) account for wagons in your map design. As I've explained above though, "just use plains" really doesn't nerf wagons all that much. Or rather it brings them from "crossing the entire map in a single turn" to "cross half the map in a single turn", and half the map is usually good enough unless your going for some turn 3 capture cheese. There's just no real counterplay to wagons being wagons.

                  I don't really want to hit Pike's movement. Not only would that not actually fix a whole lot, it would make the game even slower, stalemate even harder and just be all around more painful. Instead I would balance the ease of which pikemen get crits with lower crit damage. Take it from 1.5 to, like, 1.2 or something. It'd also help if swordsmen didn't outright lose to pikemen in a 1v1 almost regardless of circumstances (see op). As stated above, I think improving dog movement will actually make their crit condition a lot easier, though I'm not fully opposed to your idea either (I think strong dogs would actually be very healthy for the game). Some kind of archer buff may be warranted as well (at the very least a damage vs pikemen and crit buff would be appreciated).
                   
                    Midnight Tea likes this.
                  • ttv_will1v1

                    ttv_will1v1 Tentacle Wrangler

                    A lot of the competitive maps make it not very viable to use wagons (and balloons are actually fairly viable with the amount of terrain being used, along with it carrying 2 units and being able to carry trebs/ballista/golems)

                    I agree it's more like 11 spaces + ignoring terrain penalty for dropping the pike which is still very strong, but with certain terrain it's just not that necessary.

                    Dogs with 7 movement could break the entire opening/capture phase on a lot of maps, I agree. But it would be weird since they can't cap houses, meaning a lot of starts will just be buying dogs to deny/threaten areas, meaning slower economy and possibly slower games. You can probably easily mod it with the modpacker on nexus mods and playtest some maps, but I'm not too keen on changing any units yet, I like how competitive maps currently play out. There are a couple base-trade maps that rarely result in walls/stalemates, and dogs are even arguably viable in some (Shangri-la, where archers are prevalant).

                    bit.ly/GOWMapPool
                     
                      Last edited: Apr 23, 2019
                      Midnight Tea and WebBowser like this.
                    • WebBowser

                      WebBowser Poptop Tamer

                      There's definitely an argument for taking it slow with balance changes, I agree. Wargroove is a complicated game with a lot of moving parts, of which we've discussed a relatively small fraction of. I think it's fine for Dogs to be good at contesting houses without being to cap them, it provides an early game decision of "do I hinder my economy in exchange for early game map control or do I stick with standard opening of soldiers into pikemen?"(kinda like AW recons, which did largely the same thing), and giving the players meaningful decisions in the early game is a good thing (I mean, meaningful decisions are just good in general, it's just that early game tends to have fewer of them).

                      For the record, I certainly don't think balloons are weak. On the contrary, I consider them to be the strongest air unit, and a very solid unit overall. It's just that I consider wagons to be the strongest, most cost efficient unit in the game (still), and balloons are not that. It's pretty rare that I would consider using a balloon over a wagon, and when I do it's probably because it's an ocean map and I need my ports open dangit. I've found that aside from island maps (where most ground units are hot garbage, including wagons), the reason why wagons aren't great has less to do with map terrain and more to do with map size. Why bother using a wagon to get your unit over to the front lines in one turn when your unit can probably do it in two or three?

                      Thanks for the link btw.
                       
                        Midnight Tea likes this.
                      • Midnight Tea

                        Midnight Tea Phantasmal Quasar

                        I have to agree that all balance changes have to be made with the idea of keeping the game's pacing up. In that regard my suggestion to pikes is pretty weak. If there's one thing Wargroove absolutely KILLS Advance Wars in, is having a reasonable and fun pace to the battles.

                        Relatedly, this is why I defend Wargroove's having lesser-influential commanders. AW needed highly specialized COs because the game was very easy to stalemate and drag on, so stuff like Sami's super capture speed or Eagle's uber air units were meant to help address a problem Wargroove does not have. I would not dream of introducing that problem back to the game, so I'm glad my suggestion got scrutinized.
                         
                          ttv_will1v1 and WebBowser like this.
                        • ttv_will1v1

                          ttv_will1v1 Tentacle Wrangler

                          So what do you think of the maps I linked?

                          Personally I think it's hard to value buying a wagon on any of the maps except Hinterland
                           
                          • WebBowser

                            WebBowser Poptop Tamer

                            Sorry about the late reply. I've had a really busy week and I wanted to wait until I had time to think this through before making a post. So I've played a fair bit of wargroove over the weekend (offline single player because no wifi, so take this with a grain of salt) and just did some testing. I've come to the conclusion that what makes or breaks wagons on any given map is whether or not there are any contested unit producers, especially barracks and ports because those can make units that directly contest more stuff. If the only thing you're doing with your wagon is reaching a contested village a turn or two faster, sure your forcing your opponent to contest them while you grab your own not-so-contested villages, but you're also delaying the capping of your nearby villages by taking a valuable barracks cycle to build your wagon AND taking a valuable early swordsman/commander away from grabbing stuff for at least a full turn. And while there is certainly an argument to be made that a village in a contested area is more valuable then a village near your base, how much more valuable is it? Is it 300 gold more valuable? 400? I would value the -1 barracks cycle, the wagon, and -1 turn capping something at around 500 gold total, which is a lot of gold in the early game, so the thing you're rushing better be worth it. In most cases, a lone contested village is not worth it. There may be maps where you can deposit a swordsman in some distant, village rich land that is difficult for your opponent to contest without his own wagon, but that doesn't seem to exist in this map pool so for the sake of this post, let's just focus on the maps with contested unit producing buildings.

                            So let's go ahead and start with the one you brought up, good ole Hinterland Hijinks (takes a moment to put on DKC Tropical Freeze music on). So the two main buildings of interest are the two ports on the north and south ends of the map. The interesting thing here is that the wagon situation really benefits player two more then player one, due to that super crucial swordsman that player 2 has. Player 1 will almost certainly open with swordsman and capping something with commander. Meanwhile, player 2 has the ability to open with moving his swordsman towards his second barracks, capping something with commander and building a wagon. This puts player 1 in a pretty awful position. If he ignores the wagon and keeps capping stuff, then player 2 can take his barracks, move the wagon towards player 2 stronghold and threaten to capture the southern port as early as turn 4, putting player 1 in an awful position (as this map is merfolk heaven). If he starts whacking at the gate, I'm pretty sure commander needs 3 turns to break through (granted, I couldn't find gate damage calcs online and was too lazy to test them in game), so player 1 wouldn't be able to react and stop the wagon rush, and that's a huge deal. Assuming player 1 knew that player 2 was going to go for this and start whacking the gate on turn 1, he's giving up quite a bit of gold as a commander whacking the gate is a commander that's not contesting or capping stuff. Even more glaringly, player 2 can just send his wagon northward with commander in tow, even capping a village along the way. Therefore, at best, player 1 "counters" the wagon rush with the same number of unit producing buildings, but at a pretty significant gold income disadvantage. Honestly, I'm not sure how player 1 is supposed to win on this map (unless my gate calcs are off).

                            The other one with noteworthy contested unit producing property is Emberwing Bay. After a great deal of squinting, I see that this map doesn't even have 300 starting income, which actually eliminates, or at least lessens the impact of a lot of potential wagon cheese (every turn matters when you have 8+ move). Like before, my main focus is on those two ports, as spawning merfolk in a contested area is a pretty good way to ensure you get to keep that area. This time around, I see player 1 as having the best shot pulling off wagon cheese, but unlike the player 2 scenario, the cost of trying it here is a lot higher and it takes a few more turns. As stated before, the starting income is 200, not 300, and player 1 doesn't even have any conveniently located capturing units to abuse turn 1 wagon with anyway (what is up with the commander placements on some of these maps? Is it to slow down the game?), so we'll do what I imagine is a fairly standard opener of having player 1 cap the village to the right of his commander and making 2 swordsmen. On turn 2 commander starts heading northward while lefthand swordsman caps the A-18 village and righthand swordsman caps the one on the right and builds a wagon on his left barracks. On turn 3 the wagon grabs the swordsman and plops him on the mountain near the port, allowing player 1 to get that fort on turn 4. Now, player 2 can do the exact same thing, but the difference is that the player 1 commander can reach the port on turn 5. While this is too late to prevent player 2 from capping the port, it does prevent him from building merfolk there, while your port is guaranteed at least 1 merfolk before player 2 can effectively contest it. A single merfolk can make a pretty substantial difference. Granted, these merfolk do not start in the water, and that's actually a pretty big deal because that means that ground units can spawn gank them. Still not sure what player 2 can do to effectively contest this port on turn 4 without giving up the other port though. Testing would be needed on this map.

                            It is worth noting that the wagon is not done after the initial cheese. Due to it's movement and durability, it will almost certainly make the return trip to the barracks to pick up a new unit and get it to wherever it needs to be very quickly. Even if all it's doing is helping a slow unit save a turn by bypassing some terrain, after the initial success of getting an important unit production advantage, everything else a wagon does is really just extra credit.

                            I would argue that in both of these scenarios, one player has a substantial advantage over the other for no reason other then wagons have way too much movement. Heck at first glance, emberwing bay looks downright hostile to wagons, but there's just enough there to give a player a potentially commanding lead over the other, essentially dictating the pace of the game.
                             
                            • ttv_will1v1

                              ttv_will1v1 Tentacle Wrangler

                              p1 can cap the port on turn 3 or turn 4 with a mage. usually it's captured turn 4 or 5 as naval is really important on this map. the only issue with wagon is that spear can neutralize the turn4 port the next turn, but it's not really an issue as the spear will get lost in the process.

                              EDIT: also I think I'm missing something with your emberwing example, the wagon on the left can't get the sword to the enemy port that fast: https://i.imgur.com/it5jYX2.png
                               
                                Last edited: Apr 29, 2019
                              • WebBowser

                                WebBowser Poptop Tamer

                                off by one errors are fun. That's what I get for trying to manually count movement instead of just booting up the game. Yeah, that extra turn is pretty huge, probably enough to make the gambit not worth it if P2 shows any early interest in that port (which he should lol).

                                I imagine that my mistake on the Hinterlands example was due to a mistake on gate calcs?(seriously, why are gate calcs so hard to find in a game that documents almost everything?) Cuz there's no way P1 is getting the south port on turn 3 unless commander takes out the gate on turn 2. I have no idea how mage is supposed to get there by turn 4 considering P1 only has 300 starting income, so they wouldn't be able to mage until turn 2.

                                Regardless, kudos to the map designers for thinking all of this through. I still question whether or not wagons place excessive constraints on mapmaking by simply existing(see: entirely too many of the built in 2 player maps), but I cannot dispute the fact that they can be balanced around with creative tile usage and general good mapmaking. Indeed, I would say that the sheer amount of community freedom this game provides is its greatest strength (and that's pretty significant considering that there's no shortage of things this game gets right). This does beg the question on whether or not it is worthwhile to make any balance changes to units at all? Changing numbers on a unit has substantially more consequences then adjusting a commander's groove, not only in terms of multiplayer interaction (which is the only possible justification for any balance changes), but also requires potential rebalancing of single player content like puzzle mode. A single unit is way more complicated then any commander because everyone has access to them and everyone can make a lot of them, increasing the number of game states each unit can meaningfully influence. Therefore, any adjustments to units would require substantial testing and a great deal of thought, probably more then what I've given to this topic. Naturally, this topic's very existence is predicated on the answer to the above question being "yes, it is worthwhile to make balance changes to units if it would improve the overall health of the game", but there is definitely a very real discussion to be had there.
                                 
                                • Midnight Tea

                                  Midnight Tea Phantasmal Quasar

                                  If I had to guess why wagons are as fast as they are, it's probably that it's the intended design for infantry units to be the ones doing the most fighting and they wanted them to be very attractive to use despite much more powerful units being... if not cheap, then pretty competitively priced in proportion. Because a lot of the heaviest units are pretty cheap by comparison to Advance Wars, they probably thought they needed to counterbalance that to keep soldiers attractive a purchasing decision. The sheer range on wagons might be a bit of an overcorrection, but I get the sense that Chucklefish errs on the side of making the game go faster. (not a bad decision considering AW's tendency to get extremely bogged down and deadlocked)
                                   

                                  Share This Page