[947] Bomb Arrows are Ridiculous

Honestly why do we have these things?

They are the equivalent to Cannon shots but you get to spam them with a Archer with an grappling hook that it can repeatably fling out and never have to touch the ground while it fires.

I get your going for an arcade feel but why have catapults or kegs that are suppose to slow you down and leave you vulnerable when you can get better results from bomb arrow spam.

Fire arrow makes sense but the arc and flight distance on these bomb arrows needs nerfed into the ground or else Iunno but atm they are grossly OP.

Look at TTH servers the winning teams the one that gets bomb arrow spam going early allowing them to negate all defenses from a distance.

 

I was going to attack your arguments with great zeal, but then I noticed that you are mainly talking about TTH. I usually play CTF myself.

I don't know, Bomb Arrows are highly powerful, but it's not given that you get to position yourself properly to fire them at a wall. And in CTF they are quite expensive, unless you switch to another class to collect some gold first. At least this is the case with my mediocre Archer skills.

I'm not convinced that Bomb Arrows are that much more powerful than Kegs. Kegs can take down a wall too. I know Kegs need a bit more walking, but you also have a bit more durability.

 

The difference, to me, is in how you interpret the needs at the moment. For a precise strike into a flag's core, nothing tops a bomb arrow triple shot. (Smart people delay each shot when legolas shooting them to compensate for block lag) For raw destructive power, kegs all the way.

 

Bomb arrow spam can be pretty ridiculous if you get a whole hall devoted to it. But consider that bomb arrows are far down the tech tree and to get a critical mass of bomb arrows you need to sacrifice migrants that could be used for milsups or kegs.

 

@Contrary : Usually 3/4 of knights are dumb***es and they can't use a keg without 'accidentally' blow their own base. Once you unlock bomb arrow technology, again 3/4 of builders will make a ton of bombarrows factories. And then, there is a bombarrow spam. And you will win. It ALWAYS happen. It's the law of builders.

 

I think that this issue is more one of TTH balance than specifically one of bomb arrow balance. In TTH, the cost factor of the ammo is largely negated, as a single shop will endlessly make its items for free until destroyed, leading to what many would regard as an exploit in which you can stack your shops to make way more than the usual amount of a specific ammo type.

This can be done not just with bomb arrows, but with ballistae, kegs, bombs, water ammo, you name it. If you get an 'over the top' amount of any ammo/item type, the game balance can quickly go out the window, as the defending team can do little to turn the tide of battle when they are forced to constantly ward off kegs, bomb arrows, etc.

I believe any approach to balancing TTH will probably have to revolve around balancing the game mode itself, not the ammo/items.

One idea I had is limiting each hall to 1 or 2 of each shop to mitigate the spamming effect that arises. But, that is just one idea; I'm sure there are plenty of equally good or even better ideas out there.

 

TTH is broken and the devs dont know how to balance it, i suggest you just play ctf as it will probably get much more attention than tth in the future

 

Another idea would be to make shops cheaper for whichever side has less shops. Then if Red has 20 shops pumping out shit, the cost for making shops on blue's side decreases dramatically.

But then, you know, you have both sides spamming shit endlessly. I just hate TTH honestly.

 

I'm not even sure I'd consider bomb arrow spam to be overpowered in TTH when you consider what you have to give up. AFAIK bomb arrow factories only make one bomb arrow per factory as opposed to three for regular bombs and in addition they have a much slower turn out rate. I have fought against and on teams that spam bomb arrows and proper spam comes at a huge opportunity cost. By choosing to make bomb arrow factories instead of milsups or water ammo shops (ugh) you severely weaken your ground troops, and if you lose the ground fight it doesn't matter how effectively you can tear down buildings.

Also IMO TTH is far superior to CTF.

 

I would argue that.

I like the idea of TTH better, to be honest (CTF usually ends suddenly and stupidly, without even a fighting chance) but the one thing I really hate about TTH is the fact that no one gets rewarded for being good.

That is the reason I will always love CTF more - when you fight well, you get more stuff to use. In TTH, there's really no incentive to stay alive, or worry about dying since you're just another free respawn. You can throw yourself carelessly at the enemy over and over, losings bombs, special arrows, whatever... and they'll just pop back up in your factories given enough time.

I'd like to see a mixed-mode with the idea of TTH (capping halls) and the coin system of CTF.
THAT would be the best gamemode, in my opinion.


But let me try to avoid derailing this thread.
My stance on bomb arrows is this:
- I don't like to admit it, but their ability to break buildings is seriously OP.
- However... Archers don't really have many other useful tools. Their ability to blow humongous holes in things makes them way more effective at combating buildings than Knights will ever be, which balances out with their awful damage vs. Knights and other units.
- I dislike the fact that bomb arrow attacks can happen so suddenly and are so hard to counteract. I mean, yeah, you can kill every Archer you see, but can you really? No. There will always be an Archer that gets right within range and messes up your crap, and once that bomb arrow is let loose, it's practically impossible to stop.

I don't know if they should be nerfed, but if they are, some other aspects of Archer better as hell get buffed, because they're bordering on useless without that anti-structure aspect.

 

How about making factories require coins per ammo production? This would require adding coins to TTH but it's an interesting idea, take this as an example:

Players now earn coins similar to CTF. When a shop is made, it will make one item every minute or so, such as a bomb every minute. However, walking up to it and pressing E will bring up an "Upgrade Production" option, which increases it to one every 45 seconds or so. This would max out at 1 every 15 seconds or something similar depending on the ammo type.

The cost for upgrading to the next tier would increase exponentially. An example tree would look like this:

Bomb Ammo Shop:
Original Cost: 250 wood, plus 50 wood to change shop to specific type. Produces one bomb every minute. Max bomb lying on ground: 1.
Tier 2: 100 coins, makes one bomb every 45 seconds. Max bomb on ground: 1.
Tier 3: 200 coins, makes one bomb every 30 seconds. Max bomb on ground: 2.
Tier 4: 400 coins, makes one bomb every 20 seconds. Max bomb on ground: 2.
Tier 5: 1,000 coins, makes one bomb every 15 seconds. Max bomb on ground: 3.

Note that the max on ground would indicate how many it would produce before stopping production until those bombs are taken. You could alter this tree to your liking, but this is basically what I'm talking about for a cost tree, similar to a RTS. (Because TTH is more of a slower paced strategy warfare simulation than CTF)

I like how you ninja'd me right as I was making a post about this lol.

 

I would argue that TTH rewards skill more than CTF since CTF is generally one big clusterfuck in the middle where skill doesn't matter. Plus the coins system is really arbitrary and probably couldn't ever properly reward people proportionate to their performance. Even aside from that I think that everyone should get equal access to materials, regardless of skill.

Anyways I think the solution is to make archer a good class on its own so we don't need to hang on to dumb shit like bomb arrows as justification for gimping one third of the playable classes.

 

So True! Giving the archer class a single OP feature like bomb arrows does increase their usefulness, but at the expense of the builder. A more sound strategy is to balance each class on its own merits, rather than on individual exceptionally useful items.

I think that a good approach to balance in a game like this is to balance each class vs. the others completely absent of special items, like bombs, kegs, bomb arrows, etc. Once you've got that balance established, you can then close the book on that chapter of game balance, and attack the ammo as a self-contained system. You can balance archers' special ammo vs. knights' special ammo, without concern about unrelated aspects of those classes.

 

And to make the archer good on its own doesn't mean to make it as effective at killing as the knight! The archer should just have his own purpose. Builders = Building/Helping knights get over walls. Knights = Destroys and kills stuff. Archers = Can blow stuff up late game - can help one knight up a large wall insanely slowly. They need to do their own thing!

 

Archers need a good buff and a small nerf.

They need something that will make them effective at killing from range, whether it be arrows that do 1.5 hearts or fly faster/father or what ever.

Also i say bomb arrows AND kegs should cost more in ctf, with bombjumping and keg spamming buildings dont stand a chance

 

I've been working on tweaks for Aphelion's modded variant server (The one with mages) and bomb-type things will cost more, water ammo will be removed in most forms (Archers retain water arrows, but mages and knights lose them) and each class will specialize in one thing but retain the individual unit's capabilities, etc.

I just think the game still needs some significant rebalancing, but for an over-the-top wargame kag is still lots of fun.

 

Reduce the damage they do to blocks. Twice as much damage as a thrown bomb maybe. Right now they are absolutely ridiculous.

Played a game of TTH today where the enemy team rushed bomb arrows, they had them at round start. It was impossible to defend against. The bomb arrows destroy stone blocks 2 blocks deep in one shot and to say they're overpowered is an understatement. They do SIGNIFICANTLY more damage than catapaults do, and that is unacceptable.

Bomb arrows do almost as much damage as kegs do. Well, actually, they do just as much damage it seems, but the radius is one block smaller. You can see a keg coming a mile away, you have to get right next to what you want to destroy while you are defenseless, and you have to keep it next to what you want to destroy (or time it correctly).

Bomb arrow? Get within firing distance. Profit. Bomb arrows are much, much more powerful than kegs are.

Edit:

And yes, they cost a lot of gold in CTF. Reduce the damage they do and reduce the cost in CTF. Problem solved.

 

Well, I suppose bomb arrows could be taken away without making Archers too weak if they were given something else that was useful for demolition, e.g. satchel charges, explosives with some sort of fuse (dynamite!), etc.

 

You do realize that Bomb Arrows are one of the few actual things that make an archer useful? Fire arrows and Bomb Arrows are basically it. Without them they really can't do anything on their own.

If you are saying to reduce the damage, instead of removing them, while then also decreasing the cost, then why change anything? Now there will be more bomb arrow spam. Before only players in CTF usually could only buy 1 bomb arrow, which doesn't do enough dmg TBH. Now they will be able to buy 2-3 and do more damage, more spam, and make the game way more unbalanced.