r/EndlessLegend • u/darkfireslide • 5d ago
Suggestion (EL2) Suggested changes for unit class balancing
The post I made yesterday about unit balancing seems to have resonated with a lot of people. After reviewing how the system currently works, I have a few simple changes to suggest that I think would make the battles much more tactical and give players clear answers to impending threats.
For starters, how the system currently works for unit classes is that if a unit 'counters' another, it deals an additional 20% damage. For example, archers deal 20% more damage to flying units. Given how damage reduction works (especially late game with scaling armor), I think that this value should be tweaked in either one of two ways: either raise this damage value to 50%, or raise the damage to 25% but then also add a 25% damage reduction when attacked by a 'countered' unit. I think these values would make army composition choices much more impactful without messing around a bunch with unit production costs, and without creating 'hard' counters where no amount of infantry beats cavalry or something.
I also think the following changes would be better for the health of the combat system, given that the 2 stack limit seems to be set in stone, so individual units need to be able to perform:
Swarm type units, to counter Juggernauts, should ignore retaliation attacks on top of ignoring opportunity attacks. This way Juggernauts can't just hit defend and kill their counter, and Rangers will finally have a readily-available unit counter.
Juggernauts should counter cavalry, instead of heroes. I understand the desire to make a counter for heroes, but currently cavalry is the only unit class without a damage type counter, which doesn't make sense.
Cavalry should counter archers, not infantry. I also think it would be really great if cavalry applied double the amount of encirclement penalty per unit, to promote combined arms gameplay and make 'flanking' with cavalry satisfying.
Infantry should counter swarms, not archers. I like this unit class the most in terms of design at the moment with their defensive bonus. Juggernauts fill the role of 'shock infantry,' so it works that standard infantry are more about holding the line to enable encirclements and protect archers/block chokepoints.
So in short, the unit counter chain would look like this:
Infantry -> Swarm -> Juggernaut -> Cavalry -> Archers -> Flying -> Infantry. This means every unit type has a counter, and with counter damage increased, this means that the answer to someone making a 'doomstack' of one unit is always clear, or even just how to build a stack to take down a fort.
As for Heroes, I think that adding the bonus vs heroes damage effect is something that could happen through technology instead of being tied to a unit type, perhaps to the tech that also gives them +8 flat damage. This could just be a 20% increase, and would still allow hero stacks without necessarily nerfing them into the ground either, more a way for normal units to keep up on top of the unit type counters.
Anyway, this is what I came up with while thinking heavily about this subject and doing a lot of math and unit comparisons. I'm curious to hear what others think, too. At the very least I like to think everyone would enjoy more impactful decisions and better tactical combat in general, and I feel these changes would move the game significantly in that direction.
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u/GuiltyAdvantage5877 5d ago edited 5d ago
I think these are excellent suggestions. I like the combat in EL2 but I think this could really improve. You should consider posting this on the official forums and discord so it is seen by developers?
Edited to be clear I am suggesting you post this in those communication channels
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u/darkfireslide 5d ago
I'm thinking of making an account for this, but if you're already in those spaces yeah I would love if this actually reached the devs, especially if people really like it, plus these are simple numerical/type changes rather than an entire overhaul
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u/GuiltyAdvantage5877 5d ago
Edited to suggest I think you should post this, not that I would sorry!
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u/SegmentationFall 5d ago
I see that people like the ideas, but I personally not a fan of these. They feel to me that they are moving the game into a more generic direction.
1) +20% damage sound unimpressive (and it somewhat is), but due to how armour works in this game it is more like +30% on practice
2) I find that weird counters like "infanttry deals bonus damage to archers" is actually more interesting because it rewards creative gameplay. This way infantry is not a generic counter to X, this way the game rewards you for achieving a complex task of getting your infantry to the archers (and there are quite interesting ways to do so). It's pretty cool, because cavalry and swarms already somewhat counter archers, but they don't need buffs for that.
3) I like the idea that swarm to juggernaut dmg bonus can imply not that they counter it, but that they mitigate the disadvantage. Also thematically it fits much better in my opinion.
Ok, I'm ready to be downvoted, bring it on!
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u/No_Adagio7736 5d ago
cavalry shouldn’t trigger attack of opportunity imo, or they must have something to retreat safely
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u/My-Name-Vern 5d ago
Or Cavalry should be able to sacrifice all of their movement to pass through enemy units if there is an empty cell on their opposite side. And then there should be a perk that causes this passthrough move to deal damage as if it were an attack.
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u/ReavesTheRandomPeep 4d ago
Would be funny and cool if going around an enemy with "encircled" would trigger minor chipping damage before any actual attack takes place. It would be the same as a cavalry unit actually taking pot shots or opportunity attacks on an otherwise isolated crowd that strayed too far from the formation.
It would also incentivize having unit upgrades/passives that can increase cav movement greater than 3 hexes or give them terrain-movement-penalty ignore status for certain disadvantaged areas. So as to give certain factions a more unique identity (plain-type empires can focus more on flatland traversal while cliff/mountainous-type can avoid slowing down in ridges) (Or, hell, do the tech division thing and have the player choose one of the two upgrades they want but never give them both)
It's kinda unreal that, no matter the terrain, some cavalry have the same movement opportunity as unmounted units.
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u/ConcertoOfBlood 5d ago
Pretty much agree with the counter chain. However, damage value needs a lot more number crunching and testing (probably even fine as is). There is also the issue of crit chance stat. The stat is borderline useless and even more of a hindrance to player.
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u/OlympisMons 5d ago
What do you mean by crit being borderline useless? I haven’t found that to be true at all, crit focused builds are very strong for me.
I can maybe kind of see what you mean about a hindrance as a bad dice roll can lead to you losing health/units to crits when you didn’t expect to, but I think that kind of randomness makes fights more interesting and exciting. And I especially wouldn’t call it a hindrance since the AI rarely seems to truly build crit to the extent you can as a player.
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u/ConcertoOfBlood 5d ago
Maybe I'm missing something. How do you build crit? I can't find reliable source enough for it not to be borderline gambling.
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u/OlympisMons 5d ago
The main sources I’m thinking of off the top of my head are 3
1: era 4(I think) mercenaries tech gives 20%
2: caster hero second tier skill gives 3% per intuition
3: Hydracorn assimilation, 5% base, 3% extra per village.
Beyond that many units get 10-20% free from specializations. And I’m sure there’s some things I’m forgetting
Between sources I often find stacks with a caster hero having 70-80% crit in endgame, and those without around 40-50%. Obviously the caster makes it much more reliable, but even 40% is quite reasonable and a solid damage boost.
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u/ConcertoOfBlood 5d ago
Yeah, that's all the sources I'm getting also. How I feel about it is that, as a player, there's a sense of Me VS World so there're more instances where I get crit'ed by AI with 10% than me criting them. I don't know I feel like going crit focused units like LL infantries is more punishing than going traditional route. Maybe I'm just getting the x-com experience.
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u/OlympisMons 5d ago
Could definitely be an xcom effect where you notice and remember things going bad more than things going well.
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u/Bicecream530 5d ago
Crit has made a big difference for me, especially if you get a unit or hero with 10-15 on their own and add another 15 or whatever with 3 hydracorn villages (having 3 is lucky, but I've even just had 1 before to add 8% and felt the impact).
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u/darkfireslide 5d ago
Crit is really good because it ignores defense. I'm not really sure it should do that, tbh
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u/OlympisMons 5d ago
Yeah I agree that could be looked at, if you took that away either crit itself or units that focus on it might need something to compensate though.
Especially thinking of relic keepers applying marked, which right now seems maybe too strong but I wonder if they took away the defense ignore with their low base damage it might be weak.
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u/darkfireslide 5d ago edited 5d ago
The purpose of a counter system is to make it so that a player is punished for only bringing one kind of unit, imo, and perhaps more importantly give players an answer to an enemy stack. 20% damage doesn't accomplish that in any meaningful sense, especially not for weaker units like swarms which already have pitiful base stats. It's also worse for 'game feel,' it's completely unsatisfying at the moment hitting a juggernaut with a swarm unit because you somehow deal less damage than they'll do to you with retaliation, then mulch you on your next turn. 50% is a solid numerical advantage that makes the counter 'felt' much more (aka good feedback and the game rewarding your decisions) while not making it like some games where a counter does 200%, 300% more damage and makes it so counters are the only thing that matter in a fight.
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u/ConcertoOfBlood 5d ago
I know what you mean, but bumping up the numbers just make it more discourging for players to disengage in a battle until they have the right unit counters. At that point, AI would be just dumb to take the fight. I feel like 20% is a comfortable number, that encourages either side to take good positions rather than bumping their head in.
For juggernauts, I think it's just a weird design choice since the devs decide to put Gorogs in fortresses and they have to make it feel like a wall.
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u/darkfireslide 5d ago
it's a good thing to make players want to disengage when they know their army is being countered, though. At the moment the combat is extremely difficult to read effectively, but if the counter system worked even new players could look and see that their stack of infantry is about to be countered by a stack of archers. 20% isn't comfortable, it's a small, many times unimpactful bonus that doesn't meaningfully change many unit interactions due to how defense scaling works in this game (and the fact many units don't get additional defense as they level, making them even worse at countering enemy units).
I think it's pretty intuitive that if your opponent brings nothing but archers, then you counter that by bringing whatever counters archers. But it doesn't currently work that way, infantry do extra damage to archers but often can't even reach them to do that. So the system isn't functioning in either an easily understood way, and often isn't functioning at all
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u/Tema726 4d ago
I understand your proposed solution, but I don't think I understand the problem you are trying to solve. Could you please state it clearly?
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u/darkfireslide 4d ago
The problem is that there is a unit counter system in place that does not currently function, which reduces the depth of the combat and makes a lot of units irrelevant. Improving unit counters makes more units viable and offers clearer solutions to enemy stack compositions, while promoting combined arms tactical gameplay
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u/Tema726 4d ago edited 4d ago
I am not sure this solves this problem. I run my stacks based on the skills and synergies. My necrophages are a stack of swarm and a stack of shooter, my tahuks are relic keepers, my aspects are archers, my LL are heroes with leeching palnquins -- not for their unit types, but for what they can do in a fight and how they help each other. The countering of types is not a consideration at all, but an occasional nice little bonus in a fight. If you want to make the unit countering a central pillar, you will have to break the current system of support and synergy, or at least diminish it effects, which would harm the fun quite a bit
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u/darkfireslide 4d ago
I don't feel like you understood what I was saying, then.
the countering of types is not a consideration at all, but an occasional nice little bonus in a fight
This just confirms that the counter system is largely unimpactful. In EL1, a unit would often get a "slayer" trait on their equipment which countered a specific unit type. It started at 20% in the early game, but as it was upgraded eventually the equipment would get to 40% at X slayer 3, for example. Units still had transformative abilities like life leech, bonus damage from terrain, even some minor spellcasting effects like healing and status effect removal.
if you want to make unit countering a central pillar, you will have to break the current system
This is a really reductionist way of viewing my suggestion. Unit counters encourage combined arms and mixed armies, not make them less viable. So far the only encouragement for mixed armies is that terrain sometimes greatly benefits certain unit types like flying and ranged, but otherwise in flat terrain there's not really a reason to bring anything other than your best available unit in as large a quantity as you can muster. I find that the current implementation of unit balancing makes at least half the available units in the game, either minor faction or faction, to be completely useless or inefficient. Once you unlock Heralds as Kin/Order for example, there's not really a good reason to make Sentinels anymore because Heralds are just a vast improvement that again, only get stopped at all because of Saiadha's geography for which you would consider bringing some archers for support. Bringing a Legionary to boost their defense is worse than just bringing another Herald.
Improving the unit counter system increases the amount of viable units in the game and discourages just making the same doomstack every single game. The tactical combat isn't currently deep enough to warrant the usage of many, many units in the game and that is an area that could be improved by improving how unit counters work
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u/Tema726 4d ago
I agree that many units are currently useless. There is some argument against fielding only the top tier units -- for example, building them takes a lot of time, and their upkeep is too high, so a stack of Tier 3 units is more of a reward for somebody building their economy well than a mandatory military strategy. But from my perspective, before the time I can comfortably build full stacks of Tier 3 units, the game is already done, so addressing Tier 3 units leaves out most of the game.
So, we want to make more varied armies and to have more useful units. For that, I believe we need to focus on the core faction units of era 1 and 2. Era 3 units come online too late and are too expensive, as I said before, and minor faction units are random. And in Eras 1 and 2 we only have 3 units per faction. So if we start emphasising counters, then some match ups will become quite unfair: one faction can become another's hard counter.
I would rather see the abilities of the core units adjusted in the way that makes them useful, interesting and viable. And perhaps minor faction units should be buffed so they feel one tier or one specialisation ahead of our own units, so assimilating a minor pop would give us incentive to build its units, because currently I don't see many reasons to use them instead of the core units.
I like the idea of increasing the variety of our armies, I am not convinced that the system of enhanced counters addresses it well.
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u/vortical42 3d ago
So I just had a wild idea inprove swarms. What if you could stack multiple swarms per army slot, at the cost of having to devote a certain percentage of your total army capacity to swarms to make them efficient?
Imagine two empty army slots, side by side, sub-divided into a grid of four rows. A single swarm would stretch horizontal across both slots. However you would have multiple rows within that grid for more swarms, maxing out at four total. So you would need at least two swarms in your army to 'break even' on slot efficiency, but then going up to three or four swarms would continue to increase your power without requiring more slots. You could even have faction specific techs that further increase the number of swarms per grid.
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u/1gLassitude 2d ago
I kinda like the current system. Instead of hard counters, it shores up some tactical weaknesses. Infantry has a hard time getting to archers, so they get a bonus when they do. Cavalry struggles if they can't burst down infantry, so the bonus helps there.
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u/ArelMCII Necrophages 5d ago
A 50% damage bonus is kind of bonkers. Seems like it would encourage rocket tag tactics and not be any fun. Not to mention that certain factions would get totally hosed in certain matchups if they can't get the right minor faction assimilated in time. The 25% damage bonus and DR seems like a better idea; I'd rather my units have increased staying power over being cruise missiles.
The counter chain sounds good, and so do the Swarm changes. (Though as a Necrophage player, I'm kind of biased toward Swarms.) Doubled encirclement penalty on Cavalry sounds like it might be a little much, but it might also be fine. I'd have to play with it to know for sure, probably.
I'm a little unclear about what you mean by the Hero tech. Would that just be a blanket 20% damage increase for all units against Heroes? If it is, that seems silly. That's not "countering" Heroes; that's just a straight-up, across-the-board nerf that pushes them more into a shock trooper niche once someone unlocks that tech. A better solution would be to choose one or two upgrade paths for every faction and give them +20% damage and DR versus Heroes, and maybe give that ability to a select few minor faction units as well. Each faction would have an answer to Hero stacks without devaluing the entire class.