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Hi guys,
Just thought I’d pop in and have a read after getting several hours of the US arty under my belt. I’m sorry about the wall of text, there’s a TL;DR at the bottom.
Obviously US arty are little too powerful in their current form and will need toning down a little bit. I’m sure you guys have thoroughly discussed that so I won’t waste time thinking or talking about specific changes. Please remember this moving forward, I am in agreement that US arty is a tad on the strong side right now, but maybe not as much as some people are saying.
I want to mention a couple of things for us to keep in mind when discussing this, just to provide some extra perspective when thinking about the overall health of the game long term.
[quote quote=6243]After playing some games with the new patch, I feel like I’m seeing so much AB and arty from US. I feel like these doctrines can do too much. AB has so much great infantry, engines with shotguns (this NEEDS to go), old crock, easy company… in addition to having 2 nukes (rocket run and Mitchel) Arty is similar: great arty, proximity priest, long tom/BD, jacksons, captured 88, great infantry in the form of the engineers. Inf and armor are seldom seen I feel. Could we actually reduce the manpower rate for arty and AB?[/quote]
This is what I wanted to mention, sort of. Something that really needs to be clear moving forward is the long term power level goals of each doctrine in Wikinger. I wrote about it extensively in my other big post where I talked about the “3 point system” that helps to visualise the relative strength of doctrines.
I am not talking about small tweaks. Small tweaks to the cost of things has nothing to do with macro level, long term relative power level of each doctrine. It’s about the options as a doctrine has and how effective they are at doing certain types of things while still only being one doctrine. Armour, Infantry and Indirect Firepower are the main categories.
What we’re seeing here with US arty is a doctrine that is capable of going toe to toe with the best OKW has to offer, because of how blatantly powerful it is. Like Death_Kitty mentioned, they have access to a lot. They have indirect firepower options coming out of their ears. If we apply the 3 point system to them I would say 1 infantry point, 0 armour points and 3 or even 4 indirect points. They do fall well above what I would consider “strong enough”. However, that pretty much falls exactly inline with 3 of the 4 OKW doctrines.
Therefore: Even after small tweaks to the cost of certain parts, are they really overpowered? Or is it possible that they are just the most powerful doctrine on the US and they can compete with wunderwaffe regarding overall power level, thus making them feel overly strong for a US doctrine?
The issue of “number of powerful options” might not be completely with US Artillery alone. The Armour and Infantry doctrines falling short might be a better place to look and start thinking on a “4 point system” instead. As soon as a 4 point system is adopted, only 3 doctrines in the game fall short (US Amour, US Infantry and OKW Panzer Artillery).
Indirect fire doctrines are huge pain in the bum to balance though. At the same time, I’ve heard from you guys that you don’t want to go around in circles buffing things so they’re inline with everything else, until we have DOTA 2 where everything is so overpowered that it becomes balanced. Which is obviously a good policy, however it means you need to have a very clear idea of when a doctrine is “strong enough”.
TL;DR:
Regarding macro level design, just like US Airborne, the US Artillery doctrine seems perfectly inline with OKW’s relative strength.
Is that a problem with US Arty?
Or is it that Armour and Infantry fall short?
Or is OKW’s high power level is forcing the US doctrines to become stronger over time when trying to balance the game from a macro level?
Thanks, Nyvre.
Beautiful piece of literature. This was not condescending once. I’m not sure what else to say except thank you.
A lot of this match I was ignoring the top and bot because I didn’t want the game to end quickly. I play like that a lot with new players of the mod. A 10 minute stomp is unlikely to bring a player back so I always go easy when I think they’re new. Took me too long to realise there was actually a threat out in the fog of war.
No one’s used this in over a month? Weird.
Alright, regarding our little discussion, here is the replay. Please, you don’t have to bother watching the first half. Just skip to the part where we have less VP than them and go from there.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9EC3J4DuspcSXEtbDcwaFY5ZmM/view?usp=sharing
Hi Olhausen,
Thank you for the replies.
Not having enough time to make these changes right now is perfectly fine, of course. The other unfinished doctrines take priority, of course.
However, it is still nice to note and discuss these imperfections in the current finished doctrines. Maybe moving forward, we could avoid making doctrines that have access to extremely strong abilities and units in every aspect of the mechanics.
That sort of environment ruins the dynamic game-to-game system you have created where you could pick your doctrine based on what your team and the enemy is doing. At the moment if you only care about winning, there’s no reason to pick infantry unless the map is really small. On the opposite end of that spectrum, there’s no reason not to pick luftwaffe because you will be extremely powerful at every phase of the game (early-mid-late-superlate). You will only be less advantaged as Luftwaffe in comparison to Wunderwaffe at the point where you would be able to call in a king tiger, but only if sacrificing all that time and map influence it takes to save up that 2100 mp doesn’t cause you to lose anyway.
Regarding the examples you gave Olhausen, I don’t think I mentioned removing Panthers. I understand historically they used them and the Panthers, by themselves are not an issue. The indirect fire, by itself, is not an issue. The infinite variety of elite infantry is not an issue. The issue appears when you put all of them into the same doctrine. I did say maybe remove the JU-87 abilities. Maybe you could argue to leave the support guns, there is a debate left there. But not the planes.
I note that OKW Wunderwaffe also has access to all of these things. I haven’t had a deep enough look at that doctrine yet, I’ll hold my opinion on that. But if it turns out that they have blatant access to elite infantry, awesome indirect firepower and the whole heavy tank line up, we’re going to have a problem. Why a problem?
Because the US Armor don’t get elite infantry. The US Airborne doesn’t get a Pershing. The US Infantry doesn’t get any armor or indirect firepower to deal with anything efficiently that comes from the panzer truck (please note that soft counters such as smoke grenades or attempting to white phosphorous doesn’t count). Which are all good things. They make sacrifices to gain strengths and specialise.
But then if you look at the line up for OKW.
You should notice that Luftwaffe get access to an anti tank cluster bomb, other JU-87 strafes and panthers and the best infantry. Then look at Wunderwaffe, access to elite infantry, amazing call in abilities, an MG42 ability that would make more sense gameplay wise on artillery, and then heavy tanks as well.
On OKW you always have access to elite infantry, amazing call in abilities that have immediate, hard, map changing influence and heavy tanks. Unless you’re silly enough to pick artillery which is the only balanced doctrine. You lose access to heavy tanks. Perfect!
Nyvre,
That example I used was just an example of the “assign 3 points system” I was putting forward. Obviously there almost always units that go outside that system, but those cases are usually not the greatest in that mechanic. US Armor would definitely be 2 point armor, 1 point indirect firepower and 0 infantry. The issue comes up when you do the same thing for OKW Wunderwaffe, which I’ve recently discovered is more like 2 point armor 2 point indirect and 1 point infantry. Please note this is only a way to visualise my point. I’m not saying it is or should be how to balance doctrines as versatility is also good, if done correctly.
US having access to the calliope does not make up for anything when comparing it to Wunderwaffe. Calliope does nothing to heavy tanks usually and the wunderwaffe get access to the V1 Rocket and Ardo. Then there’s the elite infantry to remember and then there’s the king tiger that crushes Pershings and Jacksons, demolishing any hope that a US Armor player would have.
Can no one see this imbalance?
Quick note to anyone that hasn’t replied yet and is thinking about replying should be aware that the topic is very specifically:
Overall strengths of doctrines vs overall strengths of other doctrines, at each phase of the game early mid late and superlate.
