Viability of Defense

I've noticed the developers mentioning that they wanted to increase the viability of defense.

Currently, sending hordes of knights/archers in a push for territory, slowly moving forwards with outposts and towers, seems to be the most popular (and most successful) strategy. I think the reason this is so is rather simple: As the game stands right now, you can't win by defending. Defending just means it takes longer to lose.

In order for defense to truly be effective, there needs to be some reward for stalling around and not attacking. Sometimes this will manifest in giving time to the builders to make a skybridge, but more often than not that will be destroyed. In addition to this, there is nothing preventing an attacking team that has advanced forwards to a center hill from creating a skybridge.

I'm not sure what the best way to make defense viable is, but as far as I can tell, if something is implimented to reward teams who stall by defending, it needs to do a few things:

• Give the defending team a way to win the game by stalling (either by waiting out an attack, or by giving them time to build some powerful tool that will let them win).
• Not be as effective when in the hands of builders who sit around unmolested behind the lines of an attacking team.
• Not drastically increase the amount of time the game takes (as it is there are some complaints about game length)
• Not be as fragile as a skybridge.

 

I really enjoy the idea of having your objective be mostly defense, I pitched a one sided capture the flag idea a while ago and feel this would meet some of what you are looking for but not address any of these problems in the standard 2 sided capture the flag.

 

A good way of figuring out how to do things is to look at the way other have accomplished the same thing.

Look at most RTSes. You don't attack all the time in most RTSes. How is this accomplished? (Be warned I will be mainly thinking of Starcraft and Age of Empires as I speak.)

• Units cost time and resources to build
• Dead units cost time and resources to replace
• Resources can be used for upgrades and to increase resource production
• Cost efficient static defense and defender bonuses

Attacking then becomes an investment and an event that you plan for. Attacking requires that you make units using resources which could have been used on tech and increased resource production. In simplified terms the resources spent on the ability to attack is dead weight until you use it.

Defending, like attacking, requires resources. However the ability to defend usually comes at a greatly reduced cost to attacking. For example static defense (towers) usually has high survivability and damage output for cost, making it cheaper to defend than attack. There are also other bonuses like terrain (which KAG is all about manipulating to your advantage) and the fact that depending you might be able to scout the enemy army moving out of its base and have the opportunity to make defending units at the last possible second (which is more economical than building units way ahead of time). However while financing defensive ability is more cost efficient than financing offensive ability, offensive ability can generally be used in offense and defense where as the more cost efficient defensive force can only be used in the defense.

This creates the common yomi cycle (in greatly simplified terms basically a rock paper scissors) of rush, boom, and turtle. Booming is to spend your immediate resources on long term advantages, like increased production ability and tech upgrades. This is beaten by rushing, meaning to attack. If you spend too much on long term advantages and not enough on short term defense, you will not survive to take advantage if those long term advantages if the enemy attacks. Rushing, in turn is beaten by turtling. As a defender you can spend less to defeat a larger investment by the enemy, and in turn have more resources to spend on long term advantages than your offensive opponent. And to close the cycle defending is beaten by booming. If you spend resources on defensive ability you cannot harm the booming in enemy in the short term, and he will have more advantages than you in the future.

In KAG nowadays stone and such are in fairly abundant supply, and you do not need it to attack and there are no long term upgrades to spend resources on. The only real resource worth talking about is time. Spending your time attacking and spending your time building. Attacking > building as theoretically if you devote all your force to attacking and the enemy devotes any less than that to attacking they will never see your base. Even if your opponent also commits their whole force to attacking theoretically that will only create stalemate. This is why games are constant attack. I mean in reality there is a bit of back and forth with the spawns and it can be effective to build quick little forward walls, as well as catapults, but in broad strokes attacking is the thing to do. Even if there were lots of good defensive options attacking would still be better as both of you relative offensive powers will be equal at all times so there's no use in stalling or having people commit resources to non offensive operations.

 

If I may suggest a possible solution:

Have the usual Capture the Flag mode, but once the opposing team touches your team's flag, a 10-15 minute timer starts. If the opposing team doesn't return the captured flag to their base within that time (multiple attempts allowed), your team wins by default.

What I think this would mean is, the more aggressive team that goes on the offensive rush, better be sure that they can return the flag, or the more defensive team will win by just having a strong defense for that last 10-15 minutes.

Or, instead of capturing the flag to trigger the countdown, it could be some kind of artifact, like the king's crown on a pedestal, or a flag, that is just outside each team's defenses. Capturing that artifact, may give that team some kind of a bonus or buff to reward the possible risk taken, but it would start the timer against them.

Oh, and touching the other team's artifact would cancel any timer you had to your advantage.

Maybe this artifact could even be moved by your team to anywhere on the field, possibly to tempt the enemy into taking it.

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The other possibility, as mentioned, is to alternate, every game, whose turn it is to defend. ie. only one team can capture the flag (within a sever set time limit).

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Making the walls stronger would be a good way to balance the game though. As it stands, I think knights can take down walls way too fast. Logically, this doesn't make too much sense either, as you wouldn't expect knights to be able to hack and slash at stone, tearing down an entire castle wall, at least, not that fast.

EDIT: spelling

 

"@utahraptor: so basically an INF (infiltration) gamemode? Could work, it'd be fairly simple to add. We can certainly think about it."

Yeah, that's pretty much what I had in mind. I think it would be a fun variant.

 

I'm not specifically saying that I want there to be a 'stall until the game says you win' tactic, just that if defending should be viable, there should be a reward for devoting the time spent stalling on something other than attacking.

Many strategy games, if you defend, it lets you build up resources/infrastructure to overwhelm your opponent, quickly killing them once you've reached a certain threshold. An example of this might be in Starcraft, where if you wait until you have 5 bases and Ultralisks, you can crush your 3-basing opponent who's spent all his resources pummeling at your front door the entire game.

KAG doesn't have anything to stall for. I was just using an auto-win as an example, it could just be something that gets built up to, and then very likely means victory for the team that makes it, but not necessarily so.

An example might be a structure that requires a lot of resources (10 gold, 20 stone, 40 wood for each tile, 15 tiles to make, or something else absurd), and can be claimed sort of like an outpost. Whichever team would control this structure (perhaps represented as a throne, or a magical statue) would deal double damage. This would reward sitting back, defending, while builders spent time mining resources for this thing.

 

Maybe if this double-damage outpost is only effective if the players are within a screen's distance to it. So once you leave that area, your knights and archers are at their normal strength again. That would be fair.

 

That would completely defeat the purpose of stalling for long periods of time while the required resources can be mined and built, as that way would only really work on defense.

 

I would suggest stalling for a long time allows you to build state of the art siege equipment, and a building which upgrades everyone's weapons, to yes, do double damage. I'm not sure about a building that just gives you double damage alone. At least you can explain it by having upgraded equipment. Said building could also produce stuff like: lighter but tougher armour, allowing you to move faster yet have the same amount of defence, better wheels and defence of siege equipment, making them faster to get to the castle to destroy without being set on fire. Even the blueprints to stronger outposts with mechanical arrow firing would give the stalled team a significant edge.

At the end of the day though, if you do this, they still have to attack in the end. If you want purely defensive victory, you'll need a threshold, such as the timer finishing or reaching a certain amount of gold or a limited number of enemy soldiers are all killed.

 

Yeah, but see, the problem is that it would only take one or two builders on the "more offensive" team to get the same double-damage bonus. Think about it. How many builders does it take to make an expensive construct, like an OP? Usually it only takes one! So you've spent all your time defending just to get this bonus, meanwhile being overwhelmed by knights, and then they get the very same bonus, and you are summarily defeated.

Hence, I suggest it only works in your area. That way, the tide is turned. Your knights and archers do twice the damage. You can drive back the now weaker enemy. Build an OP at midpoint, and work your way to victory.

An alternative to double-damage would be every player get a little shield icon above their character, indicating they can take an extra hit.

 

I don't believe in damage buffs, or shield buffs. Or buffs. (K)eep (I)t (S)imple (S)tupid

 

Lawl. You've been hiding under a rock for the past month then. Geti and Contrary had a fat off conversation last night about the methods of making defense viable and the new systems currency and the ability to assign bots to do jobs and such. None of this is going to be as simple as it can get.

 

I agree. I believe the worst thing about staying defensive is that your side of the map will be gradually destroyed by bombs of both attacking and defending knights, regardless of how well you defend. Not to mention that rushing requires no resources, but repairing the damage they do does.
If only knights didn't blow up the terrain and hack every wall so easily, defending would be viable.
Maybe the features coming will help: workshops will benefit the players in towers/bases/ops by giving them more tools. The rushing players would have to return to a base when they need more. Additionally, offensive buildings (the mini-bases in enemy territory) will probably be made out of wood because of the hurry, giving yet another advantage to the stone-base defenders.

 

<3

 

If you make life a depleteable resource then defenses would become viable again. My reasoning stems from my belief that no defense can stand up to an infinite mass human wave tactic if there is no consequence upon death. The basis of defense is to reduce damage upon oneself whilst inflicting damage upon the enemy so that the enemy is unable to retaliate for a set amount of time. Having an endless horde of suicide knights renders nearly every conventional defense as useless after the first wave of suicide knights. You have to be a complete ninja to repair a structure as a builder in the middle of a battle. Everyone I know has problems with it. The "pros" do too. Everyone just inherently attacks the builder. You might argue that you should build a structure that allows for ease in repair... But no one ever builds those. Everyone thinks the bigger the thicker the better... Which makes sense in reality... But not in KAG... This of course most likely will change once geti and mm implement the reduced character damage and the necessity for mechanical devices... Well anyways if it still doesn't work too well, my suggestion would be a respawn system where you have a set number of lives for timed intervals. After each timed interval the number of lives you have would reset to the original number.

For example. You have ten minute intervals with three lives. If you lose all of your lives you will not be able to respawn until the timed interval resets. If this becomes reality, being able to donate your own lives to another player would seem like an interesting mechanic.

Ps... Should I start a thread about this in the suggestion section? Because if enough of y'all agree with me I might.

 

3 lives over 10 minutes? That seems awfully harsh.

I'd say just make a team life pool. If people deliberately start to kill themselves to reduce the life pool then they can be kicked for griefing.

 

To be honest I think stalemates could be solved far easier by making defending be a possible route to victory. Much better than forcing either team to use the cheap method of using Skybridges >_>

 

Then increase the number of lives per person. It was just an example of course. So five for ten minutes? Ten for ten? The main idea of the suggestion was that there would be a set pool of lives per person. But person's death would not directly affect the team until all of their lives were gone. It would integrate life as a personal resource. Based on the fact that your life is yours and you should be responsible for it. Someone else should not be able to affect the number of lives you have from their own abuse of life being a resource.
My opinion about deliberately killing oneself to reduce the life pool is that; life would be too important of a resource to waste even one. This is of course if you are suggesting that the team life pool wouldn't reset after a certain interval of time.