The Problem

You barely understood the concept of the dodge ball analogy, teams are going to have to attack anyway and the team with the more dodge balls are the ones who cannot be attacked, but if they don't throw the balls, they won't win either. Also, I think you're the one having the misconceptions of balance. Both teams start out with paralleled terrains and resources, and that my friend, is pure balance. However, certain factors may allow one team to strife in battle because their builders are more EXPERIENCED, that is not balanced but STRATEGIC ADVANTAGE. Strategic as in, the players themselves were able to put themselves in a better position, and that is the essence of a non scripted battle of endless possibilities.

I've mention this many blasted times, if you really detest the idea of defense, you should make a non build server and force the players to play on a standard horizontal ground.

 

i understood you analogy, it doesn't work. if you cant figure out why, i wont explain it to you.

And, if the best "Strategic advantage" is to defend, what happens when both teams try to take it?

 

Than we put ourselves in a new situation where each sides will expand their bases, and will eventually lead to close contact battle. You must not forget that expansion is a war mechanism, It'll be like a melting Popsicle with it's melting substances spreading throughout the table until it gets into contact with something. Like I've mentioned a few posts ago, I experienced a situation where both teams did decide to play defensive but the other team started to spread their structures all the way to more than half the map, forcing us to leave our bases and try to stop that spread from happening.

 

You're missing the point. Again you're talking about team balance, saying the resources and such are the same. We're not talking about TEAM balance we're talking about STRATEGY balance. Both teams have access to defending, of course that's true. But that cannot happen because two defending teams = a game that never ever ends. One team is forced to attack even though it is disadvantageous to them and is likely to get them nowhere. That's the problem with attacking, it's just not worth the effort you actually put into it, even if you use catapults or tunnel or skybridge or whatever, you're very likely to lose more units and get squashed in general.

I'm not saying defending should be harder than attacking but right now defense is everything. If you defended the whole game you can usually easily win, even regardless of skill level. If you took two teams with IDENTICAL skill level (I know this is statistically impossible but bear with me) and gave them the exact same castles and forced them to have the exact same resources and the same class balance... I'm almost positive that the one who ends up defending an attack is more likely to win on average because of the advantages of cover and height. This is bad. When discussing balance, you need to remember: If teams are exactly equal in a perfect world then that means that each team should have a roughly 50% chance of winning no matter what happens. Sometimes you'll get one team win more often sometimes the other, but on average the stats would come to half victories to one team and half to the other. Now you forced one team to attack and one team to defend i'm sure that the defending team would definitely win more than half their games on average and not just by a little but a lot more. If you ask me, the devs need to somehow work out a scenario where defending should confer no more than a slight advantage.

 

I pretty much knew what to say after you put the word balance next to STRATEGY. Like I've mentioned, more five posts ago, strategy is one of those things that works itself as a dynamic factor. There are many strategies but some are better than others. The most weak strategy is to saturate an attacking force when you can equally distribute that attacking force. I've been playing on defensive teams that get destroyed due to attacking points that were coming in from more than a few directions. Good example is tunnels with the combinations of offensive fortresses. At least you can understand that defense will always have slight advantages in different situations, and that the attacking one can break that defense through CUNNING.

Also, we can spent our entire night arguing over this issue but I can't argue the fact that battling rams and siege towers are at the midst of development, which will add more spice to both the attacking side and defensive sides of things. My point here was to discourage the nerfing of defenses. I won't fight any more ideas of increasing more attacking morale, knowing defense and attack are great ingredients for a perfect dish for warfare.

 

This problem is too much work. There are things i want to say yet I am too lazy to say but we still need an answer. i guess we should screen through all the ideas see the pros and cons of each one?

 

I think we should wait til the release of future material, before deciding factors that can be time consuming and pointless when it gets overshadowed by future content that will change scenarios and situations.

 

You may be interested to know, we talked with Geti about bombs in IRC awhile back.

He was interested in giving them a much larger block damage radius, but reducing the actual damage so that stone tiles need two bombs to break.

A larger damage radius means that when a bomb explodes, all the drawbridges become neutral and so the defensive positions will be a lot easier to breach if they used drawbridges in the front wall.

Walls should also become easier to demolish, since as you now can blow only one block in a straight wall, you should with these changes be able to blow e.g. 5 blocks with two bombs.

We also talked about the possibility of knights being able to break cracked stone blocks with the cost of knockback stun, which means a nerf to entombers too - once a builder cracks stone, you can begin to crunch it in pieces!

Although I am not sure at all when would these changes be implemented, I'm quite sure that they will find their way in at least after the zombie release.y

These should make defending much harder task to do, requiring constantly builders in the defending side to repair the damage. Perhaps they will also encourage defending team to counterattack, as keeping defensive would take too much resources :D

 

I wonder if you can bomb shield with the canopy/mantlet and if your speed/agility will change with holding it. The biggest problem for offensive builder is bomb flying everywhere on the battlefield and if you can't dodge or shield, you're pretty dead.

 

Yes but that's just true. In real life a good defense of your castle would also hold back the enemy, that's what castles are for. The idea is to use tactics. Retreat when you need to retreat, dig tunnels when you should dig tunnels. It's really possible to win by attacking, just use the right sort of attack.

 

Currently, there are no enough strategies to win a good defense. But that is a subject to change, how, is the point of this thread.

 

What about the vaulting ladders made of stone and teamdoor?

 

so far archers dont have a single way of causing a collapse unless through dirt, keg will probably change that. it wont be very practical however. possibly we need something like bomb arrows to be able for archers against buildings

 

Bomb Arrows? Are you clinical insane?

That would end into an endless archer bomb rain. Both teams camp in their castles and spam bombs all day long :D

We need to wait for wooden structures and then some kind of fire arrow for archers, but certainly not bomb arrows ..

 

i said something like bomb arrows "LIKE" if we do get bomb arrows make them weaker then reguler bombs , same damage against buildings as knights do, and only be able to carry 3-5 arrows at a time. also there is still spam with knights bomb it happens already.

 

This type of team-only ladder are far more difficult to convert or destroy. And if build next to a tree, it's far more harder to ladder up. If you want to nerf drawbridge ladder, you should nerf this type of ladder too.

 

I like it. Definitly a move in the right direction.

I hope he reads my post over in the suggestion forums lol.

Getting rid of door ladders might be tougher. I have been thinking about it for a while, and the only thing that comes to mind is placing restrictions on when a door can open.
IE: a door can only open if there are 2 pieces on top of each other and a stone over and under it.
But I feel that is far too strict... So il keep thinking till something better pops up.