Are Ghosts / Spectres TOO strong now?

[cornellian]

And thirdly this isn't about a vamp being x times faster then a human, cause if we were to take the stuff from those books then vampires would prob slaughter any human army during the night, and zombies could only be killed by shooting them in the head. Oh, and a Meteor Shower would annihilate both armies and everyone in quite a large area around the BF.

This is exactly my point, this is fantasy, and in this case we are in Nival's setting, so why not give them the freedom they require to come up with something refreshing. We have heroes III anyway, don't need another one, do we?

@DL: Really? So you weren't saying those... Hmmm, there, my memory fails me again... I wonder who it was then, TT as he just confessed? Then please regard my post as having TT's name instead of yours.. But I must still disagree with you on couple points in your post, however something of much greater importance must be dealt with first: hunger!

Still, I'll only write that tier system shouldn't necessarily change, a fast creature with only 35 HP will still lose to a relatively slower creature with 190 HP. The only practically immobile units we have are zombies and golems, and to a degree (as they are very powerful) minos and hydras; the rest are shooters or creatures that have good speed. As golems are invaluable in my tactics and can be extremely effective, much more than they should, with March of the Golems; zombies remain the only fairly useless creature of the game, but even they are useful as undead hordes' other creatures are the ones you send into fray, not hold back to defend your skellies or liches... Considering that one of the three melee fighters of the undead is tier7 and flying, the other regenerating and practically unstoppable in large numbers, and the last one averaging about 50+ HP as a tier 3 creature with an extremely annoying ability; I would say that if zombies had +2 speed and initiative, necromancers would be too powerful..

P.S: If vamps are faster than humans but not faster than trained humans, then what would trained vampires such as we have in HoMM V would be? I can't remember (may be b/c of my memory though) any famous vampire-hunter that was actually faster than vampires themselves (not including the travesty named Buffy)...

[ThunderTitan]

I haven't read the book, but in one of the movie adaptations Van Helsing shows Lucy's suitors a neat little trick where he appears to teleport. Then goes into how someone living forever might get to know even better tricks. So vampires aren't necesarly faster then humans.


But why should a zombie be useless just cause of his init. And why should any creature act 3 times more then another in 1 turn? Didn't you say

Still, I'll only write that tier system shouldn't necessarily change, a fast creature with only 35 HP will still lose to a relatively slower creature with 190 HP.

Not with an unlimited ammo hero on it's side.


And were you paying attention when i said my main gripe with the system is the "acting 2-3 times more" thing?! I was actualy against the init system before someone brought to my attention the fact that what i was complaining about could be fixed in other ways.

n fact I remember many battles (including MP games against humans) where I wiped out my enemies, not even giving them their chance to take a single turn to run away;

Yeah, and in H5 this can happen even more often and without you being clearly in the advantage armywise.

[DaemianLucifer]

Still, I'll only write that tier system shouldn't necessarily change, a fast creature with only 35 HP will still lose to a relatively slower creature with 190 HP. The only practically immobile units we have are zombies and golems, and to a degree (as they are very powerful) minos and hydras; the rest are shooters or creatures that have good speed. As golems are invaluable in my tactics and can be extremely effective, much more than they should, with March of the Golems; zombies remain the only fairly useless creature of the game, but even they are useful as undead hordes' other creatures are the ones you send into fray, not hold back to defend your skellies or liches... Considering that one of the three melee fighters of the undead is tier7 and flying, the other regenerating and practically unstoppable in large numbers, and the last one averaging about 50+ HP as a tier 3 creature with an extremely annoying ability; I would say that if zombies had +2 speed and initiative, necromancers would be too powerful..

The only grudge I have against the current system is that with a hero and a single blood witch,or a pixie you can kill virtually any amount of zombies,hydras or treants.Even colossi dont present a big danger.Now,there are three solutions out of this:

1)improve the AI,so that when hero is greatly outnumbered,neutrals split in order to compensate for their low initiative.
2)Lose the hero gods,either by shoving them back to BF,or by limmiting their shots.
3)Redistribute initiative values.

I find option 3 the most likelly to happen,so thats why I mentioned it,although all three options should be implemented imo.

P.S: If vamps are faster than humans but not faster than trained humans, then what would trained vampires such as we have in HoMM V would be? I can't remember (may be b/c of my memory though) any famous vampire-hunter that was actually faster than vampires themselves (not including the travesty named Buffy)...

Touche.

[Sir_Toejam]

A better way to put it is that the init values need tweaking.

like...which?

it's really not hard to do.

if ya all are too lazy to figure out how to do it yourself (takes about a half hour), then post something specific, and it will take me about 10 minutes to kick out init or hp changes for any given critter.

[ThunderTitan]

like...which?

All of them. But for the Zombie at least.

[Sir_Toejam]

so.. be specific (exact init figures), and see if others agree, and I'll do it.

if you have an entire list of changes, I would suggest making a post in the modcrafting guild area to get further feedback.

[DaemianLucifer]

like...which?

it's really not hard to do.

if ya all are too lazy to figure out how to do it yourself (takes about a half hour), then post something specific, and it will take me about 10 minutes to kick out init or hp changes for any given critter.

Slowest creatures initiative 10,fastest creature initiative 25.Thats it.Though,if it wont break the game,having it between 100 and 250 would be even better.

[Sir_Toejam]

well the average creature has 10 init, so that would make too many critters having the same init, wouldn't it?

for a max of 25, would that only apply to ones that have the highest init already (16, IIRC)?

like i said, you have a bigger list than you know there.

you should open it up for discussion in the modcrafting guild if you want to change the entire scale of inits for all creatures.

that's not a minor tweak.

a minor tweak would be say, changing a zombies init from 5 to 8, say.

[DaemianLucifer]

Well now the slowest creature is 5,while the fastes ones are about 16-20,and thats too much.Heres what I was thinking about:

Zombies - 100
Hydras - 130
Swordmen - 165
Angels - 185
Sprites - 200,210
Blood witches - 200,210
Etc.

[Sir_Toejam]

it would be kinda interesting to see what effect such huge numbers have.

I don't see where changing the scale changes the relative rates of action, though.

last time... for a change of this magnitude, you should post a discussion over in the modcrafting guild section.

[DaemianLucifer]

I proposed numbers between 100 and 200 just because there would be more different numbers to asign to creatures.What would be important is to change the difference between the fastest and the slowest creature.It should never go beyond twice as fast(except,maybe,for phoenix),unless spells are included.

[Arqane]

Ermm... do you know how the initiative formula works? If you've got double initiative, you go twice as many times. So:

Init 8 Squires vs. Init 16 Blood Furies
=
Init 100 Squires vs. Init 200 Blood Furies

Putting higher numbers would change very little. 100 vs. 101 would mean that every 100 turns, one of the units would get one extra turn. Even 1 in 10 usually doesn't make a difference besides the beginning initiative.

I don't find the problem to be the initiative at all. It's all the AI. Like people mentioned, if a human was controlling a horde of zombies vs. one sprite, who do you think would win?

Simply having 2 different AI choices for neutrals, and randomizing which they chose each turn would make everything much more dangerous in general. Half of intelligence is the ability to act stupid. The fact that the AI is so straightforward makes it extremely easy.

The funny thing is, if you added a Stupidity ability like in Warhammer, where half the time the unit would wait instead of attacking, it would make zombies more dangerous, and therefore smarter .

[DaemianLucifer]

Ermm... do you know how the initiative formula works? If you've got double initiative, you go twice as many times. So:

Init 8 Squires vs. Init 16 Blood Furies
=
Init 100 Squires vs. Init 200 Blood Furies

Putting higher numbers would change very little. 100 vs. 101 would mean that every 100 turns, one of the units would get one extra turn. Even 1 in 10 usually doesn't make a difference besides the beginning initiative.

Yes,I know that.My problem lies in the fact that its not 16 against 8,but 16 against 5,and thats not the same as 20 against 10.

I don't find the problem to be the initiative at all. It's all the AI. Like people mentioned, if a human was controlling a horde of zombies vs. one sprite, who do you think would win?

Simply having 2 different AI choices for neutrals, and randomizing which they chose each turn would make everything much more dangerous in general. Half of intelligence is the ability to act stupid. The fact that the AI is so straightforward makes it extremely easy.

The funny thing is, if you added a Stupidity ability like in Warhammer, where half the time the unit would wait instead of attacking, it would make zombies more dangerous, and therefore smarter .

Indeed so.But,as I said,there are three solutions here:Fixing AI,fixing heroes,and fixing initiative.And fixing initiative is the easiest way to do it.

[ThunderTitan]

I don't find the problem to be the initiative at all. It's all the AI. Like people mentioned, if a human was controlling a horde of zombies vs. one sprite, who do you think would win?

If the zombie are in 1 stack and the enemy hero can't shoot?! The Sprites. Maybe even with 2 stacks of zombies, not sure. A sprite can just run circles around the zombies.

[Alamar]

I don't find the problem to be the initiative at all. It's all the AI. Like people mentioned, if a human was controlling a horde of zombies vs. one sprite, who do you think would win?

If the zombie are in 1 stack and the enemy hero can't shoot?! The Sprites. Maybe even with 2 stacks of zombies, not sure. A sprite can just run circles around the zombies.

Assuming there are enough Zombies to go around I would assume a human would split them into 7 stacks and try to cover the whole field as much as possible.

Now if this tactic is proved to be impossible and a human playing well will always win then there's an issue that needs to be addressed.

NOTE: My preference would have been for heroes not to be able to attack and multiple [lets say 4] "defends" in a row to basically allow the defenders a free attack at anything that comes within range. Of course that's too big of a change to implement now but it would have eliminated the 1000 zombie vs. 1 sprite issue nicely

[ThunderTitan]

Assuming there are enough Zombies to go around I would assume a human would split them into 7 stacks and try to cover the whole field as much as possible.

It's still stupid. Why should the only way of winning be to split a huge amount of zombie into 7 stack just to get 1 damn pixie? Not to mention that he'd still lose alot of zombie to someone that knows what he's doing.

[Arqane]

Well, if you're really talking about a player controlling both the Pixie and Zombies, the Pixie goes down as soon as their hero's turn comes up.

So the non-hero AI is really the problem. Zombies have it about the worst, because they can't get good morale. Treants move fairly far and can get good morale, their main problem is damage. Horned Demons, if split into at least 2 stacks, will get good morale from time to time, which can be deadly to the high Init units.

The reason why I mentioned the random AI code is that it's the easiest way to change the AI. You'd have to put in a maximum of one other scripted function (like guarding archers), and then just let them free and make it random. Sure, sometimes it will make certain creatures a bit easier, but overall being unpredictable will make everything harder.

[ThunderTitan]

Well, if you're really talking about a player controlling both the Pixie and Zombies, the Pixie goes down as soon as their hero's turn comes up.

Yeah, a damn external fix. Don't like those either.

Still something does need to be done about the Zombies, as you can get alot of XP from such a battle against the AI.

[Sir_Toejam]

as DL suggested, increasing the initiative on the zombies might fix that issue.

on a side note, the more i think about it, the more i tend to agree with DL that compressing the range of initiatives might be an interesting thing to experiment with.

currently the range is 3:1 (slowest is 5 and fastest 16, IIRC).

compressing that to 2:1 seems to make a bit of sense, and increasing the absolute values by an order of magnitude would allow for finer tweaking.

DL:

why don't you try experimenting with it and see what happens?

could be a lot of fun, if a bit tedious at times.

If you decide to do this, I think you should create a thread over in the modcrafting guild to post results and get feedback.

could result in a great mod.

[DaemianLucifer]

why don't you try experimenting with it and see what happens?

could be a lot of fun, if a bit tedious at times.

If you decide to do this, I think you should create a thread over in the modcrafting guild to post results and get feedback.

could result in a great mod.

Becase that would require me to start the game and test the modifications,and I dont have the will to do that now.Im experimenting with civ tweaks right now.Thats more fun