Enhanced Balance Mod for 3.x

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andrvaut
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Re: Enhanced Balance Mod for 3.x

Post by andrvaut »

Game with this mod:
https://youtu.be/XH-1JGYR4BY

Now machinegun is very strong.
vaut ΣΑ [GN], ru streamer.
Tournaments channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzusNa-54ydodtSz2TdHFww
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Re: Enhanced Balance Mod for 3.x

Post by MIH-XTC »

andrvaut wrote:Game with this mod:
https://youtu.be/XH-1JGYR4BY

Now machinegun is very strong.

Agreed. MG shouldn't be primary weapon. It's slightly too strong now.

Based on the games we played I would make the following adjustments

MG vs Propulsions
MG dmg vs Half Track -10%
MG dmg vs Cyborg -10%
MG dmg vs Hover +5%

MG vs Structures
MG dmg vs Bunker dmg -5%
MG dmg vs Medium Structure -5%
MG dmg vs Soft Structure -15%

In the editor it looks like

Image

This is line 10 in weaponmodifier.json and line 8 in structuremodifier.json.

But then I would increase the ammo load for VTOL heavy MG to keep it relevant. It's line 2651 in weapons.json. Maybe go 50 -->60 for numAttackRuns.
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Re: Enhanced Balance Mod for 3.x

Post by Forgon »

A major problem in current multiplayer games is that VTOL swarms are very hard to defend against. What are your thoughts on improving anti-VTOL weapons, MIH-XTC ?
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Re: Enhanced Balance Mod for 3.x

Post by MIH-XTC »

Forgon wrote:A major problem in current multiplayer games is that VTOL swarms are very hard to defend against. What are your thoughts on improving anti-VTOL weapons, MIH-XTC ?

Sort of. I think it’s better to say that there is a long period of time where many VTOL’s is a dominant strategy but eventually enough whirlwind hardpoints will work. The idea of a good balance is to constantly be changing what the best strategy is at any given time.

I do think AA needs to be improved, particularly flak cannon AA, sunburst emplacement, avenger SAM and vindicator SAM for each to be viable choices against whirlwind. I also think each VTOL body/weapon combination should be a viable choice instead of just panther/scorpion HEAP bomb.

The only way non-bomb VTOL’s can compete with bomb VTOL’s is if they have a speed advantage. I re-scaled the body/turret weights and propulsion speeds so that each VTOL weapon/body combination has a unique speed. I also raised the max speed from 5.45 to 10.00. I just did this a few days ago, I previously had it at 7.00.

That means VTOL’s can potentially fly almost twice as fast before but I’ve got it balanced. The only VTOL to achieve 10.00 is bug mini-pod or single mg. Each VTOL design is progressively heavier than that and flies slower. However as engine upgrades are obtained more VTOL’s start to top out at 10.00. All light and medium bodies are viable VTOL choices. Bombs still fly around the same speed 4 – 5 tiles per second but light bombs fly faster around 5 – 6.

All non-bomb VTOL weapons have been rebalanced. It’s mostly giving them more range, ammo and speed.
Phosphor and thermite bombs are more effective vs units than they are structures. Heap and cluster are more effective vs structures than units.

Helicopters have more HP, produce slightly faster and are much cheaper. They’re also available before VTOL. However they accelerate very slow and fly much slower.

This of course means completely redoing the AA too:
Sunburst gets more accuracy and more range.
Flak cannon gets little more damage, slightly bigger splash, slightly faster rate of fire but shorter range.
Vindicator and Avenger each get 25% more dmg and more range.

All AA emplacements have 50% more HP.
All hardpoints have 100% more HP and 2 tiles extra range but can take 2 - 3 times longer to build

I made VTOL’s 25 – 50% more expensive. This is key to balancing VTOL’s and giving them unique features. For example, if we make a VTOL that destroys everything on the map in one hit can we consider it to be unbalanced? Not necessarily because we can make it cost 1,000,000 power. I did make VTOL’s faster and better because it was necessary to make the different droid designs useful but they also cost a lot more too. A good way of measuring VTOL balance is to evaluate how much AA costs compared to VTOL’s. A 150 power hurricane turret can take out 1,500 power worth of VTOL so in that sense AA is very powerful. To counter balance, we just make it take longer to build the AA structure.


It’s hard to explain and be brief at the same time. Use the attached mod to see for yourself. Do cheat on, alt+a, deity, ctrl+o make some VTOL’s and evaluate their speed with engine upgrades. Alt+x to instantly finish the research. Select a unit and clone wars! to make 25 copies of that droid.
Attachments
EB.wz
New VTOL speeds and rebalance heavy MG
(124.68 KiB) Downloaded 158 times
Forgon
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Re: Enhanced Balance Mod for 3.x

Post by Forgon »

The file you attached is incompatible with Github's current master branch. Could you fix that?
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Re: Enhanced Balance Mod for 3.x

Post by MIH-XTC »

Forgon wrote:The file you attached is incompatible with Github's current master branch. Could you fix that?

That's a bummer. No honestly I don't have time. I forgot that there was some HP calculation change in master. What's attached above is compatible with 3.2.3.

EDIT: and disregard the strength of whirlwind in the rare chance that someone tests that. Changing ROF upgrades from -10 to -15 is visually appealing but too strong. Still working on that.
Last edited by MIH-XTC on 14 Oct 2017, 06:23, edited 1 time in total.
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Berserk Cyborg
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Re: Enhanced Balance Mod for 3.x

Post by Berserk Cyborg »

e760917fef73e172f0149a632a7505303b25080b
b1cb129247bca05fb35e50b15e8bedee2d6f4a8a
490b91d4420ba0985289955520229a1b8b022096

I think those are the commits that have changes you would need to adjust to when you have time.
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JimmyJack
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Re: Enhanced Balance Mod for 3.x

Post by JimmyJack »

Just downloaded EB wz and have played it 4 times now. It dose this little thing that is a deal breaker for me. The A. I. takes over my trucks and starts building my base for me. What is up with that?

I like to play low oil maps/no bases. Some maps have so little oil on them and such small bases that I have to start building oil wells and a power gen first off so I can start getting up power. But this "auto-build" thing thinks it knows what I should build first and where to build it better than I do. This is wasting what little power (and space) that I have as it builds a research center where it don't belong and I have to take it down and move it. But as soon as I take it down one of the trucks tries to build it back using up more power. :stressed: Then another truck starts to build a cyborg factory, again, where it don't belong and burns up more power.

Is this a glitch in the A.I? A new way to play?

Or has the evil one :twisted: climbed out of the fiery pit to take over the world ... starting with my laptop?
Transmission ends ...
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Re: Enhanced Balance Mod for 3.x

Post by Forgon »

JimmyJack wrote:Just downloaded EB wz and have played it 4 times now. It dose this little thing that is a deal breaker for me. The A. I. takes over my trucks and starts building my base for me. What is up with that?
Please provide precise instructions on how to reproduce this bug, and I will attempt to fix it.
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Re: Enhanced Balance Mod for 3.x

Post by JimmyJack »

3.2.3

Start a low oil map with no bases. A map that starts with more than 2 trucks. I was testing map TLB2_61_T1. It starts with 4 trucks. I grab the 2 trucks on the right and move them 2 squares to the right so I can get the 2 trucks on the left to build the 4 oil wells that are right there without the 2 right hand trucks jumping in to help. Then I grab the 2 trucks on the right again and tell them to build a power gen but before they can start one of them will break off and start building a research center on it's own. That is if I move fast enough. If I don't then one truck will build the research center and the other one will build the cyborg factory.

It dose this with the mod file in both the mods/autoload folder and in the the mods/global folger. (not at the same time)

It also did it on SK-HighGround. 2 trucks, no bases. First thing I did was to turn on debug mode and use the deity command and went over to base #1 to see what the AI was doing first. When I came back to base #0 there was one research center and one cyborg factory already there. The trucks didn't even move from there starting position they just built them right where they were parked. They will also build a VTOL factory as soon as you research them if you don't build one first.

No bases is key to this glitch. It seems to build what you don't have but it hasn't built a tank factory or a power generator yet.
Transmission ends ...
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Re: Enhanced Balance Mod for 3.x

Post by MIH-XTC »

JimmyJack wrote:Just downloaded EB wz and have played it 4 times now. It dose this little thing that is a deal breaker for me. The A. I. takes over my trucks and starts building my base for me. What is up with that?

I like to play low oil maps/no bases. Some maps have so little oil on them and such small bases that I have to start building oil wells and a power gen first off so I can start getting up power. But this "auto-build" thing thinks it knows what I should build first and where to build it better than I do. This is wasting what little power (and space) that I have as it builds a research center where it don't belong and I have to take it down and move it. But as soon as I take it down one of the trucks tries to build it back using up more power. :stressed: Then another truck starts to build a cyborg factory, again, where it don't belong and burns up more power.

Is this a glitch in the A.I? A new way to play?

Or has the evil one :twisted: climbed out of the fiery pit to take over the world ... starting with my laptop?
Yes I'm aware of this glitch and fixed it. See attachment. It has to do with the code I wrote for Nexus incidentally applying to human players too. I'm not really sure why that is... it only happens with cyborg factories and research centers even though the other structures use the exact same code. If you play T1 full base and take down all of your structures, the trucks start to automatically rebuild the research centers and cyborg factories. I can see why WZscript is a little glitchy now :lol2:

It's a simple fix to check if the player is human or named "Nexus" before building a structure. That solved the problem so that AI doesn't build structures for you but then autogame only works if the human player is named "Nexus".

The fix is at line 1811 in Nexus.slo
Spoiler:
Although this doesn't really address the underlying problem... why is Nexus.slo being applied to human players in the first place??? (Nvm, let's not investigate this lol)

I also fixed another glitch I found when playing with Vaut. Both games I played with him became de-synced. Thanks to his video recordings at the top of this page I found both games became desynced at exactly the 15 minute mark so it was easy to pinpoint what function was causing it. Turns out it was some old base build function that wasn't even being used anymore so I deleted it. No more desyncs or AI building structures for you.
Attachments
EB.wz
Fixed AI building structures for human and desync problem
(125.39 KiB) Downloaded 152 times
Last edited by MIH-XTC on 29 Oct 2017, 19:34, edited 6 times in total.
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Re: Enhanced Balance Mod for 3.x

Post by MIH-XTC »

Berserk Cyborg wrote:e760917fef73e172f0149a632a7505303b25080b
b1cb129247bca05fb35e50b15e8bedee2d6f4a8a
490b91d4420ba0985289955520229a1b8b022096

I think those are the commits that have changes you would need to adjust to when you have time.
Thanks, that helps a lot. I don't dev off of master because I use windows and I'm not sure how to go about building an .exe. I use a linux VM for testing changes against master but for general development I like windows. Since the stats are moddable and don't require changes to source I just use the latest release for development. This Christmas break I plan to get more involved with git/master so I'll need to reference the commits above.
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Re: Enhanced Balance Mod for 3.x

Post by NoQ »

MIH-XTC wrote:Thanks, that helps a lot. I don't dev off of master because I use windows and I'm not sure how to go about building an .exe.
http://buildbot.wz2100.net/files/ ?
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Re: Enhanced Balance Mod for 3.x

Post by MIH-XTC »

NoQ wrote:
MIH-XTC wrote:Thanks, that helps a lot. I don't dev off of master because I use windows and I'm not sure how to go about building an .exe.
http://buildbot.wz2100.net/files/ ?

Oh???? What a gem.
warzone2100-master-20171025-003850-1b60377.exe 24-Oct-2017 23:19 104M

I didn't know about this. This will help a lot because it's time consuming to switch between environments. Thanks for looking out!
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Re: Enhanced Balance Mod for 3.x

Post by MIH-XTC »

Just uploading the latest. I tried this balance on Alpha campaign, only played first 2 missions. They were a lot harder and challenging.

Some of this I changed awhile ago but figured I would communicate as FYI.

• Made VTOL’s more likely to attack droids than bases
• Start building mass defense and artillery endlessly if more than 6,000 power to prevent power accumulation
• Made flamer stronger vs half track, weaker vs wheel, much weaker vs hover, slightly longer incendiary time.
• Made Nexus acquire new target after destroying an opponent base
• Made cyborg mechanic and engineer run faster
• Tweaked terrain modifiers, namely made wheel and cyborg faster on roads
• Made Nexus truck rush on smaller maps (build MG tower in your base and around your derricks)
• Updated experience modifier in rules.js to accumulate ranks slightly faster…
• Made Wide sensor and CB sensor more costly
• Made wheel produce faster and gave more HP
• Made Nexus not steal ally oil anymore in first 7 minutes
• Nexus plays zone defense as a team 40 tiles out from ally bases
• Reduced beacon frequency, kind of annoying when repeated.
• Increased scav factory production rates

I think the low oil maps on the high power setting have enough power to sustain interesting game play.

EDIT: Building a full base in autogame only works if you're named Nexus. It's the only temporary fix I can think of to prevent Nexus.slo from applying the base building functions to human players too.
Attachments
EB.wz
compatible with 3.2.x (not master though)
(125.44 KiB) Downloaded 138 times
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