Jump to content

Suggestion/Discussion Regarding Soldier Casualties in Ground Battles


Alex
 Share

Recommended Posts

I mean it seems reasonable for solider and tank casualties to be in line with each other.

As for the rest of it, I will maintain that the war system is fine outside of things like you mentioned above, and its the economic side of the game that needs balancing.

Edited by The Mad Titan
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I feel like because soldiers are so cheap and expendable that there's no point to not slaughtering them at your opponents tanks because they cost close to nothing and you can build 1/3 of your max every update. 

I think a more pressing change is how absolutely broken aircraft currently is.

I've actually been thinking of a change that would be helpful with nerfing aircraft, without it being significant or damaging to the rest of the war system. I've talked to quite a few people about it and they all seem to agree.

So when you airstrike units other than aircraft, it would be balanced to take aircraft casualties, for the sake of this example, a random number between 1-5%. So if for example, you have 1,000 aircraft, you might lose 10-50 in your airstrike against tanks/ships.

The reason this number is generally pretty good is because it means airstrikes are still very much viable, but when you're blitzing 2-3 targets, you might withstand 50-150 aircraft casualties which means you're far easier to counter, and massive walls of nations with nothing but aircraft become less viable, hence ground/navy becomes semi-viable again where you can expect your attacker to take casualties while taking your tanks down.

Currently, in most cases you have no reason to build tanks other than to get a GC, and than as soon as you get rid of the opponents aircraft you can just delete your tanks and never use them again. Their use is very limited and they act as a support to aircraft, which is not realistic (if that even matters), but more importantly it just means you have a useless unit.

But, a problem arises with Navy. Spamming max navy means that your opponent will have to sacrifice a lot of aircraft taking down your ships, and because ships cause more resistance damage than aircraft, you can still beige them with your ships. To balance this issue out, you could simply reduce Naval resistance damage from 14 to 12, meaning they'd be even with aircraft.

So now your attacker takes aircraft damage while trying to take your ships down meaning it's easier for your alliance mates to counter, and you still do a shitload of infra damage and can beige him with your ships if you're faster than him. That's pretty balanced if you ask me.

 

Edited by Radoje
  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, Radoje said:

I think a more pressing change is how absolutely broken aircraft currently is.

I've actually been thinking of a change that would be helpful with nerfing aircraft, without it being significant or damaging to the rest of the war system. I've talked to quite a few people about it and they all seem to agree.
 

Aircraft are not broken. Going with an all airplanes strategy has several important downsides that make it balanced within the current war meta. If you go all aircraft you are guaranteed to be beiged, as it does the least amount of resistance damage of any attack outside of nukes and missiles. Going with all aircrafts mean you will take maximum infrastructure damage and be looted for resources. Losing every war from all aircraft makes it balanced to its important in combating other types of units.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So troop losses are too high that is for sure. There is also the fact that planes are OP. I believe a fix to this issue would be that a Pyrrhic victory ground battle destroys 1% of planes a moderate destroys 3% and an immense triumph destroys 5%, the actual percents could change a bit but this seems reasonable. Same with ships but a bit differently, ships count towards your planes defensively only, and one ship would be worth 2-4 planes.

1 minute ago, The Mad Titan said:

Aircraft are not broken. Going with an all airplanes strategy has several important downsides that make it balanced within the current war meta. If you go all aircraft you are guaranteed to be beiged, as it does the least amount of resistance damage of any attack outside of nukes and missiles. Going with all aircrafts mean you will take maximum infrastructure damage and be looted for resources. Losing every war from all aircraft makes it balanced to its important in combating other types of units.

Well, utter failure dogfights are broken for sure, it makes no logical sense that you could get a utter failure and lose significantly less planes than your opponent, this is true with pyrrhic victories to some extent as well. 

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, The Mad Titan said:

Aircraft are not broken. Going with an all airplanes strategy has several important downsides that make it balanced within the current war meta. If you go all aircraft you are guaranteed to be beiged, as it does the least amount of resistance damage of any attack outside of nukes and missiles. Going with all aircrafts mean you will take maximum infrastructure damage and be looted for resources. Losing every war from all aircraft makes it balanced to its important in combating other types of units.

You'll take some infra damage, but it's not significant in the long run and you won't get looted if you simply store your cash away.

But when you're running only aircraft, you won't lose any navy/tanks and even if you take aircraft casualties, it doesn't matter because you'll take all of your opponents air down and kill all of their tanks and navy without taking any of those casualties yourself. You can neutralize all of the opposing units (4) with only 1, and take very miniscule casualties yourself.

How is that balanced?

I also addressed a fix to being beiged even when you win a war with aircraft, simply reduce naval attack resistance damage from 14 to 12 and that problem is solved.

Edited by Radoje
  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, BOYCE THE GREAT said:

Well, utter failure dogfights are broken for sure, it makes no logical sense that you could get a utter failure and lose significantly less planes than your opponent, this is true with pyrrhic victories to some extent as well. 

Sure, but that goes into things like troop losses where the rng is fixed, but the actual unit mechanics are not altered.

Just now, Radoje said:

You'll take some infra damage, but it's not significant in the long run and you won't get looted if you simply store your cash away.

But when you're running only aircraft, you won't lose any navy/tanks and even if you take aircraft casualties, it doesn't matter because you'll take all of your opponents air down and kill all of their tanks and navy without taking any of those casualties yourself. You can neutralize all of the opposing units (4) with only 1, and take very miniscule casualties yourself.

How is that balanced?

The whole points of war is to reduce infra levels of the opposing side, so losing the maximum amount of infra is pretty consequential in war. If the other side also wants to run no planes, they can minimize their ground/naval losses as well, thats part of the cost/benefit ratio a nation has to decide on when fighting a war.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, The Mad Titan said:

Sure, but that goes into things like troop losses where the rng is fixed, but the actual unit mechanics are not altered.

The whole points of war is to reduce infra levels of the opposing side, so losing the maximum amount of infra is pretty consequential in war. If the other side also wants to run no planes, they can minimize their ground/naval losses as well, thats part of the cost/benefit ratio a nation has to decide on when fighting a war.

No, I heavily disagree. The point of a war is not to reduce the other side's infra levels. That's the point of a war if you're heavily favored to win or drawing out the conflict as a loser.
The immediate goals of your blitz and the subsequent rounds after it is to reduce your opponent's units to 0. Infra levels are largely irrelevant to your war effort.
If infra levels were more important than units, than you'd beige every opponent no matter what instead of expiring them to keep killing their units, which is obviously not the strategy everyone uses.

Edited by Radoje
  • Upvote 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The soldier change makes sense. 

To nerf aircraft in a general sense makes it pointless to fight anyone bigger than you. The large updec range was put in to facilitate a situation where larger players could lose and not have it be like other games where they are OP. The reason updec works is because the aircraft rebuy takes the longest. To impact that means there is no point in having a large updec range and whoever can field the most units/has the highest rebuy wins absolutely and is untouchable unless they go out of their way to fight similarly sized nations.

50-150 planes being lost when rebuys are limited is problematic given if you're fighting someone or several people with a significant city advantage, a double buy ends up being a killer. The other proposal of losing 10% of air to 2 IT ground battles also is as ground is easy to win for bigger nations. It would be extremely risky to declare on more than one person in that scenario.

As Thanos pointed out, using aircraft means you lose copious amounts of infra and usually some resources via beiging so it's already fairly balanced. In a previous war, the opposing coalition touted the loot stats from beiging. The morale aspect of people associating beiging with being good also plays a role. Unit damage is important but it's not usually viable to completely wipe everyone's units if they're smaller than you, so the goal is typically to get rid of the units of people that can get into range and make them  lose more money than you by continuing the conflict.

Edited by Roquentin
  • Like 1
  • Upvote 1
  • Downvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 minutes ago, Roquentin said:

The soldier change makes sense. 

To nerf aircraft in a general sense makes it pointless to fight anyone bigger than you. The large updec range was put in to facilitate a situation where larger players could lose and not have it be like other games where they are OP. The reason updec works is because the aircraft rebuy takes the longest. To impact that means there is no point in having a large updec range and whoever can field the most units/has the highest rebuy wins absolutely and is untouchable unless they go out of their way to fight similarly sized nations.

50-150 planes being lost when rebuys are limited is problematic given if you're fighting someone or several people with a significant city advantage, a double buy ends up being a killer. The other proposal of losing 10% of air to 2 IT ground battles also is as ground is easy to win for bigger nations. It would be extremely risky to declare on more than one person in that scenario.

As Thanos pointed out, using aircraft means you lose copious amounts of infra and usually some resources via beiging so it's already fairly balanced. In a previous war, the opposing coalition touted the loot stats from beiging. The morale aspect of people associating beiging with being good also plays a role.

The proposal I made only impacts airstrikes on units other than aircraft. In which scenario, it wouldn't make updeclaring any different.

When you're updeclaring on an opponent, the objective of the updeclare is to take down their aircraft, in which case, you'll be airstriking aircraft. In that case, you wouldn't take any extra casualties on your air, and only would if you were airstriking their tanks/ships afterwards. It wouldn't change updeclaring at all.

In fact, in my opinion, larger nations are far stronger in the current meta, where they can freely downdeclare with 0 tanks and 0 navy and just crush everything in front of them, while taking almost no aircraft damage themselves. If they lost aircraft while airstriking soldiers/tank/navy, it would nerf them and make the smaller nations have a better chance at countering.
 

Edited by Radoje
  • Like 1
  • Upvote 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, Radoje said:

The proposal I made only impacts airstrikes on units other than aircraft. In which scenario, it wouldn't make updeclaring any different.

When you're updeclaring on an opponent, the objective of the updeclare is to take down their aircraft, in which case, you'll be airstriking aircraft. In that case, you wouldn't take any extra casualties on your air, and only would if you were airstriking their tanks/ships afterwards. It wouldn't change updeclaring at all.
 

Except it would, as aircraft are not the only thing that needs to be destroyed when engaging larger nations. Sometimes one needs to target certain units to get the scores to work and this limits that capability.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 minutes ago, The Mad Titan said:

Except it would, as aircraft are not the only thing that needs to be destroyed when engaging larger nations. Sometimes one needs to target certain units to get the scores to work and this limits that capability.

But at which point, if your goal was to (for example) also take down the opponents tanks with your air, you would have to kill their air first, meaning you have no threat of them buying aircraft again to take you down. You'd first take down all of their aircraft and than proceed to airstrike their tanks, which wouldn't make it any different.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, Radoje said:

The proposal I made only impacts airstrikes on units other than aircraft. In which scenario, it wouldn't make updeclaring any different.

When you're updeclaring on an opponent, the objective of the updeclare is to take down their aircraft, in which case, you'll be airstriking aircraft. In that case, you wouldn't take any extra casualties on your air, and only would if you were airstriking their tanks/ships afterwards. It wouldn't change updeclaring at all.
 

If you're not able to take the tanks/ships down to a significant level, people can double buy out of range of even updecs depending on city counts. It happened fairly often in Trail of Tiers. So there end up being a few ways to rebalance it: increase updec range and decrease max  buy capacity and make a mandatory gap between rebuys of units.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, Roquentin said:

increase updec range and decrease max  buy capacity and make a mandatory gap between rebuys of units.

This could be viable. Buys could "recharge", with you getting a certain amount each turn to rebuy, capping out at a full days buy. So first rebuy you get 100% but the turn after would be one turns worth of resources. This has the double advantage of decreasing dependence on the update time and you could increase the strategic times alliances they could use. 

Alternatively could open the amount of war slots to 8 and 4 allowing alliances more flexibility there, plus it indirectly buffs raiding.

  • Downvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest Frawley

I'll post my thoughts on war mechanics a bit later, but I certainly don't think that planes are broken.  The all planes strategy has a tonne of weaknesses, you have to get the drop on your opponent, because if you don't its very easy for them to GC and kick your ass, it causes you to lose infra at a crazy rate in short wars, and means you almost never beige.  But if executed well, with other people on side, those limitations can be arrested, if you use different return timelines for conflicts.

17 hours ago, Radoje said:

No, I heavily disagree. The point of a war is not to reduce the other side's infra levels. That's the point of a war if you're heavily favored to win or drawing out the conflict as a loser.
The immediate goals of your blitz and the subsequent rounds after it is to reduce your opponent's units to 0. Infra levels are largely irrelevant to your war effort.
If infra levels were more important than units, than you'd beige every opponent no matter what instead of expiring them to keep killing their units, which is obviously not the strategy everyone uses.

I heavily disagree, war generally has a singular objective:

  • Increase the relative gap between coalitions post-war

Infra is the single most expensive asset that can be destroyed in most wars, if you want to increase the gap size, you need to destroy as much expensive infra as possible.  In Knightfall, a long war where you would expect units to make up more and more of the total losses, Infra losses represented 47.3% of all losses, the single largest loss category.  (Total Units: 24%, Gas/Muni: 13%,Total Loot: 15%).
Infra during war provides continuous income, the faster you remove it, the more time the opponent spends at lower incomes. I did some indicative math, and the reduction in incomes during the war probably took some 95b cash out of the game (I didn't run any calcs for resources).

Given the above, its pretty clear that infra destruction necessarily is the most relevant aspect of waging war in P&W.  

When evenly tiered, it almost never makes sense to use the all-planes strategy when you outnumber the opponent, as you can minimize your own damage and speed the opponents damage by using all available forces.
When facing higher tiered opponents, even with numerical advantage you can almost never win on land, sea and air at the same time, so the optimum strategy for a long war is to win in one sphere, then move onto the next, and finish on infra.  You trade-off is that you take additional damage in the first 3-5 rounds of war, and then play catch up as the war progresses.  Beiging in an all air strategy just means you go back to hitting units, not expensive infra, and draws out wars.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well I'd say that IQ's responses ITT were pretty predictable ?

That said, I would indeed have to agree with them on the point that aircraft aren't really broken. Very little really is. I'd honestly have to say that, other than bringing back fortify to pre-nerf conditions (purely selfish and entirely broken suggestion there but nobody here ISN'T engaging in that), nothing should be changed.

That means @Alex don't buff IQ, don't buff Arrgh, don't buff TGH, don't listen to anyone with a clear conflict of interest since their suggestions are 100% influenced by their personal biases. And yes, that darn well includes me, so don't really bring back fortify.

What you gotta do is look for the suggestions and discussion that's actually echoed across political lines and are considered viable by multiple playstyles; in this case one sphere is knee-jerking against the idea of a *very* minor change that nerfs their pet tactics slightly, while their enemies are pushing for that very change. As far as I can see, every single time changes to the war system are brought up this exact same thing happens, and until everyone sets aside their personal biases and pet tactics we're not going to get a consensus, and no actions should be taken until we do.

8 hours ago, Frawley said:

When facing higher tiered opponents, even with numerical advantage you can almost never win on land, sea and air at the same time

Sure you can; doublebuy tanks and ships. (Though your own sphere's suggestion would break that.) Get GC, and airstrike ships. Do this with 3 nations on 1, and you've won every single front at once. AS kills enemy tanks, ship losses can't break your new ships, GC kills the air, and your expanded forces are sturdy enough to withstand attempted attacks from the pinned opponents.

Score range mechanics being what they are, this is an expensive but viable way to hit anyone that you can actually hit. I'm not saying it's without its counters, like, well, counters, but with 3 on 1 the attrition on the enemy's forces will add up.

Another option is to mil up, declare, and immediately airstrike and fortify, or ground battle and fortify. Then your opponents have to use their own action points to do damage to you while you have at least one form of control, at a huge deficit. Fortify is useless once you're zeroed, but it's *not* useless if you have military to back it up. You *will* need tanks to make this useful though, so both of these tactics are very expensive. But with the resource market being what it is, tanks are now in style.

Edited by Sir Scarfalot
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest Frawley
17 minutes ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

Well I'd say that IQ's responses ITT were pretty predictable ?

What so defending a mechanic that we don't think is broken is wrong because we use it?

For the record I'm im full support of undoing the fortify nerf, I think it was a very poor change, that limited playstyles amd encourages bank AAs. I might make it cost 1 more MAP however.

17 minutes ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

Sure you can; doublebuy tanks and ships. (Though your own sphere's suggestion would break that.) Get GC, and airstrike ships. Do this with 3 nations on 1, and you've won every single front at once. AS kills enemy tanks, ship losses can't break your new ships, GC kills the air, and your expanded forces are sturdy enough to withstand attempted attacks from the pinned opponents.

My maximum tanks/soldiers would be less than 60% of some of the standing militaries of the people we were plane hitting last war. That tactic wouldn't have worked and would have made an already expensive war longer. There is almost no way we would have got GC, and then the 700 plane gap would have done the rest of the work on us.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 minutes ago, Frawley said:

What so defending a mechanic that we don't think is broken is wrong because we use it?

You use it, heavily, and benefit by it, and thus your opinions on the matter should be considered with that fact in mind. I'm not saying it's wrong; you're just defending your own interests, which is understandable. But you're defending your own interests, and since you have a considerable interest in the matter you cannot avoid the conflict of interest between what's best for your sphere and what's most balanced for the game.

10 minutes ago, Frawley said:

For the record I'm im full support of undoing the fortify nerf, I think it was a very poor change, that limited playstyles amd encourages bank AAs. I might make it cost 1 more MAP however.

... I'd have to run the numbers on that, but if anything it'd make bank AAs even more powerful since the banker can fortify themselves into a situation where they have to be beiged for a very long time. It's not a bad idea though, but I'd really rather it added 5 resistance for 3 actions instead of 10 resistance for 5 actions. 5 actions is a LOT of actions to spend on fortification and makes it way less flexible, but that's just my initial reaction.

14 minutes ago, Frawley said:

My maximum tanks/soldiers would be less than 60% of some of the standing militaries of the people we were plane hitting last war. That tactic wouldn't have worked and would have made an already expensive war longer. There is almost no way we would have got GC, and then the 700 plane gap would have done the rest of the work on us.

<redacted>

....wait, am I giving you strategic advice that could work against my sphere? Shiho is gonna kill me if I do that again >_<

 

Edited by Sir Scarfalot
  • Downvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
 Share

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use and the Guidelines of the game and community.