[748] Weapons balance

This is my wall of text. Isn't it beautiful? I don't expect anyone to read my entire ranting and not have their head explode, so just read the numbered ones, where i make my main points, but even those may be too long if you have a short attention span. You have been warned, turn back now or face the wall of text consequences.​

Spoiler: spoilered as not to murder your eyes

In all of my experience playing the beta so far, I have learned one thing, and one thing only. well, two things, one being that the physics are broken, but that's another post. The main thing that I've learned, is that the war game mode is just a race to see which team can get a catapult on a boat first. Whoever can put a cata on a boat, man each, and defend the ship until the cata gets within range of the enemy's defenses, wins. period.

Catapults are an obscene destructive force, which, when combined with the messed up physics where breaking a single block of a well supported tower can bring the entire thing crashing down, makes them ludicrously powerful. If you let an enemy cata get within firing range of your tower, it's gone in one shot. The bright side is, you can shoot people while they're manning the cata (which is slow and clumsy to move), and it should only take 2 or so arrows, so you can kill them before that happens, HOWEVER, when on a fast (or shielded) boat, a cata can get within firing range either before you can stop it or (in a shielded boat) as slow as it wants and you can't do anything about it other than go and face the platoon of knights that is bound to be protecting it.

1)
So to sum it up, as soon as your team can get a cata in a boat, with people to man each, and to defend the boat from the other side, you win. You can just plow straight through ANY barriers that may get in your way, and obliterate your opponents base.

2)
This trend applies to a lot of the weapons in this game: the ballista, the mounted bow, the drill, all of them can do absurd amounts of damage in absolutely no time at all, but the person using them can be killed in an instant if there's no one/thing protecting them. This is supposed to make them balanced, i suppose, but it really doesn't, because there ARE ways to protect them, and once you enact them, you have all of the ridiculous power, and none of the danger of being killed before you can use it. So essentially, if you're using the weapons wrong, then they aren't worth ANYTHING, and if you're using them right, then you might as well have enabled god mode.

Spoiler: spoilered as not to murder your eyes

Another example: the mounted bow has insane firing speed and spam fully charged arrows at enemies like an entire squad of archers, but the person within it is extremely vulnerable, and if you build blocks in front of them to protect them, then you also block them from attacking. One way around this is to build them high up out of enemy archer's range, but gravity says that their range only gets longer, meaning that anyone trying to attack your tower is screwed, but since the weapon is stationary you can't use it as a WMD to plow through your enemies defenses. This mechanic, however, pushes the game towards an obnoxiously campy game play, where each team is locked inside towers with massive arrow spam coming down at anyone who tries to attack them, without anything they can do to stop it.

This isn't AS bad as the catapult, which can win a game in a matter of seconds, however, it gets worse. Like the catapult, the "stationary" bow can also be placed on a shielded war boat (I myself am not sure how, as I have just started playing beta, but I have seen it done on multiple occasions), where the user of said bow is free to release a storm of arrows upon his foes while the boat's shielding protects him from any returned fire, AND, instead of being confined to pick targets coming close to his tower, therefor being a solely defensive weapon, he can now go on the offensive with is sky darkening arrow spam, making him extremely powerful.

The drill is a much smaller scale of this, it isn't a game changer like the catapult, or a huge advantage, like the stationary bow, but it still follows the same mechanics. The drill can be used to plow straight through enemy towers and enemies alike, it has an overheating period, but if you're drilling at the water level then you can go as far through a tower as you like without having to stop, making it insanely powerful for a cheap handheld weapon, but while using it the player cannot shield, so they are extremely vulnerable to archers, and while they can drill spam knights to death, all the knight needs is two slashes to kill them, so once again it's an obscenely powerful weapon which is "balanced" by making its user extremely easy to kill.

3)
So in a nutshell; all of the weapons in beta are incredibly powerful, but really easy to destroy (or at least temporarily disable), which basically means if you're using them and none of your teammates defend you then you're catapult or ballista or whatever isn't worth anything, you'd be better off using your own bare hands, but if you're using them and your teammates are helping or only one guy on the other team seems to care then you have a weapon of epic proportions. I really do not see this as balanced, as it essentially means that the weapons are either worth all or nothing. Both of these situations are incredibly cheap though; what fun is going through all the time and resourced to make a cata if you can never use it before getting shot out, and it's absolutely ridiculous to get your entire tower destroyed in a single shot from a catapult that no one bothered to take down. Also, this "all or nothing" stance makes situations in which the "all" is guaranteed extremely overpowered; if you put a catapult in a shielded boat and just stay out of the range of enemy knights but close enough to the enemy tower for the cata to fire on it, then you can just sit there and destroy their tower and there's absolutely nothing that they can do about it.

Spoiler: ... you know

This weapons system goes hand in hand with the new combat system too; fast paced, no real strategy, when i first came on and tried to charge swings and attack at just the right time, i got killed every 5 seconds. When i started just bum rushing at jab spamming, I began getting tons of kills. Knights can't break blocks anymore, builders are incredibly weak, and all classes can jump/climb really high and it's really difficult to judge just where one must place blocks to make something unreachable, bombs are less controllable, movement speed has vastly increased, and there are no tickets. All of these factors force players to center around rushing into combat and spamming whatever they've got at the enemy when attacking, a fast paced system, but one that isn't really much fun unless you're the one winning. At least in classic kag, when you went into a fight and threw bombs with great accuracy and timed every slash and jab perfectly, if your opponent managed to outmaneuver you, at least there was a sense of dignity, and the process was still fun, but here if you rush into a bunch of jab arrow drill cata bomb spam and end up getting killed, it's really just frustrating.

In conclusion, I understand that kag beta is supposed to be more about giving a fast paced fight to those who want it on the front lines and a slow paced buildy thing to those who want it in the back, but it kind of eliminates most-all of the strategy involved. I would really like to see the weapons get some more reasonable balance, like the catapult has longer range (making it's firer safer from a distance) or giving it's firer more protection, but making it's shots MUCH less powerful, especially from a longer distance. That way you can sit back and be relatively safe, but not be able to do that much damage, or you can risk coming closer to obliterate the enemy defenses at the risk of being killed much more easily. Also, as much as I hate to say it (because using WMDs is fun as heck), I don't think that any of the seige weapons should be able to be used from a boat; no cata, no ballista, no stationary bow. Having said that, without these insanely over powered game changers, I think the games will tend to end in hour long draws with people camping at both sides, unable to organize a real strike against the enemy fortress.

Not to say that I don't applaud the dev's and all of the hard work and time that they've put into this, i just think there are still a lot of things that need tweaking.
</br>--- merged: May 5, 2013 5:36 AM ---</br>
lol, posted in wrong section, w/o build number and what not.... I'm sleep deprived, don't judge. It was initially just gonna be about how boat+cata=win, but an hour and a half later here i am with 2 1/2 microsoft word pages of text

//Moved it for you, and added build number, bro. ~ Hella

 

Agreed with all Alpaca, however, you opened this thread without introducing very many fixes for this problem, I agree there is a problem but this:

Isn't really a solution, because as you said:

So, if we remove seige equipment from boats this leaves two options:
Bring kegs on boats and try to collapse their tower, or use drills to either dig their tower or tunnel under the ocean.

Kegs are fairly easily shot down or destroyed by defending knights, and drills suffer the same fate. Now we have camping is OP again like we did in classic KAG.

What about a map with no water? I think more balance testing needs to be done on maps without water as well before anything drastically gets changed.

 

Fire - water = bad

 

Yeahh... I agree with that maybe I need to rephrase "no water" into "maps where water isn't the dominate feature". Small pools of water are ok, no huge lake in the middle.

 

there was one small thing hidden in the bricks along the wall of text, but yeah, i forgot to just flat out say:

I think seige weapons should give their user defense, and be harder to destroy, but not too hard, but also do a heck of a lot less damage, so say it would take 5-10 shots to stop someone in a catapult, but they could only take out 1 block of width with each shot (there's a tower, it's x high and y wide, your shot can take out a lot of x, but only 1 or 2 y, so cata's can't just one hit ko towers anymore)

 

Couldn't you mod in a structure that gives water to buckets?

 

I'm surprised you didn't mention the scroll of sudden gib.

Flamehaze used one of these today on all of our team on a ship, he then walked to our edge of the map and won the game.

 

The scroll of sudden gib is something that spawns per map. I believe any serious game would not have one. (By serious, I mean after the first few months of development are over and people are doing clan wars/tournaments on KAB). Good point though.

 

Basically a Well? That would be interesting though I would prefer just small lakes (below the lowest point that is above ground to prevent flooding) instead of having to build a special structure to get water. On topic, I usually just rush over to the enemy side to try and steal their trader, which basically wins you the entire game as they cannot get these OP/UP siege weapons. The enemy team should not be able to pick up your trader as this is kinda an easy win.

 

A bit of off topic, but how are you even HERE, in an area restricted to premiums, let alone play Beta?

 

I have my ways.

 

A construction built by humans, that provides water.
Isn't that the definition of "A well"?

 

Roughly, yes, in hindsight I feel really stupid.

 

do not forget that kegs can be put into your inventory. perhaps you could place an exploding keg into your inventory and become a suicider, having your body as a shield before a keg goes off.

also about the Scroll of carnage (former gib) i think it should be a countdown thing and the screen would shake for all people on screen, so they would know to get the hell out of there.