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Tournament Terrain

Printed From: Illyriad
Category: Miscellaneous
Forum Name: Suggestions & Game Enhancements
Forum Description: Got a great idea? A feature you'd like to see? Share it here!
URL: http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/forum_posts.asp?TID=10872
Printed Date: 29 Mar 2024 at 13:47
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.03 - http://www.webwizforums.com


Topic: Tournament Terrain
Posted By: Gry
Subject: Tournament Terrain
Date Posted: 22 Apr 2021 at 19:36

Please can Buildings be included among the tourney tiles? Part of what has been very interesting about tourneys is how differently they are fought on different tiles.




Replies:
Posted By: thor
Date Posted: 22 Apr 2021 at 22:27
good idea mix things up make it more of  a challenge


Posted By: Codger
Date Posted: 23 Apr 2021 at 01:28
Seconded. 


Posted By: stylesie
Date Posted: 23 Apr 2021 at 13:47
My Knights bump their helmets on the ceiling. 
They hate that.

Once a knight is never enough and I have spear, archer and infantry too.

Lets do this.



Posted By: DeliciousJosh
Date Posted: 23 Apr 2021 at 15:17
Yep, great idea indeed. Adding buildings can be done. Let the dwarfs reign a bit in those tiles 😁

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Posted By: Wartow
Date Posted: 23 Apr 2021 at 15:27
Put one in the ocean!

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Posted By: Frodo
Date Posted: 23 Apr 2021 at 17:44
impassable +1

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Posted By: CharonTransport
Date Posted: 26 Apr 2021 at 21:57
+1


Posted By: eowan the short
Date Posted: 28 Apr 2021 at 09:08
Sounds good

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Posted By: Solanar
Date Posted: 28 Apr 2021 at 18:37
This seems like a solid plan to me. 


Posted By: Captain Kindly
Date Posted: 23 Oct 2021 at 00:56
A City building or two to enhance tourney attack or defense would sure make it interesting.


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Posted By: Tensmoor
Date Posted: 23 Oct 2021 at 10:14
I've a feeling that the only tiles excluded from the random selection are:
  • Tiles you cannot camp on.
  • Tiles adjacent to Player cities.
  • Sov tiles.
The first one rules out all impassable /forbidden tiles and makes sense since the tournament needs you to be able to camp on the tile to get time.

The second one also makes sense since it would give a massive advantage to that player.

The final one I'm not certain about but I think if an enemy army camps on your sov they can reduce your claim which would then give a big dissadvantage to that player.

This is all guesswork on my part but it does make sense to my braincell.



Posted By: Gry
Date Posted: 28 Oct 2021 at 23:14
We've not seen tourney tiles land on Buildings. There's a real cav advantage generally, not least as plains are so common. So it would be nice to include them.


Posted By: Rill
Date Posted: 28 Oct 2021 at 23:48
I haven't played the new tourneys much, but the previous tourneys used to exclude resource spawn squares (the places where basic resources, gold and food show up such as ruined towers, dolmens, deserted monasteries, etc.). Those spawn squares are the only buildings squares in the game, so a placement mechanism that excludes those squares would exclude buildings squares.


Posted By: Tensmoor
Date Posted: 31 Oct 2021 at 04:54
From the data gathered over the years the terrains that are spawn locations are:
Standing Stones (Plains), Barrow (Small Hill), Abandoned Mineshaft (Large Mountain), Ruined Tower (Buildings), Ancient Forest (Large Forest), Dolmen (Plains), Ice cave (Small Mountain), Ice Holes (Plains), Petrified Forest (Small Forest), Geyser (Plains), Faerie Ring (Plains), Stone Circle (Plains), Mountain Cave (Large Mountain), Pyramids (Buildings), Sphinx (Plains), Obelisk (Plains), Heroic Human Statue (Plains), Blessed Oak (Large Forest), Mausoleum (Buildings), Dark Forest (Large Forest), Ancient Lair (Small Mountain), Abandoned Lodge (Buildings), Deserted Wayhouse (Buildings), Rockhewn Monastery (Buildings), House of the Spirits (Buildings), Forgotten Temple (Buildings), Hidden Temple (Buildings), Place of High Sacrifice (Buildings), Crooked House (Buildings), Deserted Monastery (Buildings), Gypsy Campsite (Plains), Abandoned Campsite (Plains), Abandoned Lair (Buildings), Ancient Graveyard (Buildings), Broken Tower (Buildings), Dormant Portal (Buildings), Fallen Dwarfhold (Buildings), Fortified Hostel (Buildings), Lawstones (Buildings), Sacrificial Altar (Buildings), Tiki Pole (Small Forest), Weeping Willow (Small Forest), Crumbling Lighthouse (Buildings), Fisherman's Hut (Buildings), Ferry Post (Buildings), Head Statue (Buildings), Jungle Standing Stones (Buildings), Shattered Head (Buildings)
But not every tile with one of those terrain types will be a spawn loc.



Posted By: Gry
Date Posted: 04 Feb 2022 at 21:32
Bump! Approximately Half of all tourney tiles this month are Plains squares. The cav advantage is imbalanced. Discouraging troop diversity limits strategy, and makes combat less interesting overall.


Posted By: GM Stormcrow
Date Posted: 05 Feb 2022 at 08:05
Hi everyone,

As Tensmoor has indicated in his post above, buildings squares are indeed considered as spawn locations, and have been assigned in the past.

The server tournament square rotation assignment is from a Random Number Generator (RNG), with an exclusion list (eg not sov, not impassable, not a hub, not water, not a town etc).  

The fact is simply that there are a lot more plains squares on the map than any other type, so when the RNG runs, it's more likely that there will be plains squares than other types.

I *guess* we could put our hands on the scales of the RNG to get a more diverse square type selection, but the idea makes me a bit uneasy...  

Our RNG has always been independent of weighting influence, however it's possible that we could implement the idea of quotas (eg random assignment but roll until X Plains, Y Hills, Z Buildings etc).  Or we could say that "whatever the combat terrain type was last time (for this region), make it different this time".

I'd be interested to hear thoughts and/or alternative suggestions, though.  We certainly want to keep tournie combat interesting.

SC


Posted By: Tensmoor
Date Posted: 05 Feb 2022 at 12:10
I'm just in the process of updating the Terrain By Region page on IllyStuff to also give a breakdown of the combat terrains for the selected region. I'm also updating the list of regions to reflect that nearly all of the regions with no name now have no tiles allocated to them.

Just a quickie for SC - there are still 2 tiles on the world map that don't belong to a named region. http://elgea.illyriad.co.uk/#/World/Map/-954/-2666 & http://elgea.illyriad.co.uk/#/World/Map/-954/-2665 They are the little island over near the west edge of the map level(ish) with the top edge of Kingslands. They currently are allocated to region id 60.

On the changes to the RNG - setting it to select a set number of plains, hills etc could be problematic if say the number of plains tiles is reached but the region currently being set is nearly all plains. Checking to make sure a region has a different cbt terrain selected from last time sounds like a more workable option to me but since I don't play any more I don't really have any say on it Tongue


Posted By: Nubcake
Date Posted: 05 Feb 2022 at 19:39
i like the idea of maybe doing a change terrain from last but is that just going to rotate it on the tile meaning one time is plains next something different then next back to plains? im no programmer so i have no idea if rng would keep it mixed. The idea of setting x number of a terrain before its stopped for other terrain sounds viable but rng would have to imho be truly random as in has to start picking randomly on regions so that it would not just do such and such of a terrain every time in certain areas hope that makes sense and hope that a method thats fair can be found. Im a human player so i love my cav but overall the current systems imbalance is not attractive to much of the player base that takes part in tournaments.


Posted By: GM Stormcrow
Date Posted: 05 Feb 2022 at 19:41
Heyya Tens,

Good lord, yes!

That island has no region, and the current occupant (freeman of [HECU]) clearly has a prime spot!  

I will speak with our loremaster and we will work out where we think those tiles should belong, in terms of NPC Faction regional claim.

On the RNG front... the problem with making sure a terrain is always different from the last (in a region) means that (over time, with reversion to the mean) we'll pretty much well end up with a perfect balance (across regions) between all the terrain types: plains/hills/mountains/buildings etc throughout the entire map for every tournament - despite the fact that there are many more plains than hills etc.  

I think I need to come up with a different algorithmic approach to the whole assignment procedure - one that respects the randomness, but also takes into account regional terrain variances, and also looks after a global picture that isn't quite so cavalry-centric (coz, y'know, lots of plains!)

I just can't work out what that ideal formula is right now, unless it's a hand-on-the-scale-type thing :)

Best,

SC




Posted By: Gry
Date Posted: 05 Feb 2022 at 19:53
There is already a weighted advantage to cav and to humans. It's huge. It also permeates all aspects of the game, if you consider the terraforming efforts over the years, and all guides to combat and city placement. Plains and cav, ergo humans. Some of us still make accounts in other races, and attempt to employ different troop types. But the motivation for this is limited.

One of the best things about the regular tourney implementation is that it provides a chance for smaller alliances to participate (especially with regional medals, though that's another topic). And it also gives a chance to experiment: with gear, and with different strategies against different opponents, using different troop types. Plains combat is unique, rather tedious, and almost exclusively cav. There is little chance to defend.

Buildings are the only terrain that really excludes cav. Note there are only a couple of Mountain squares this tourney as well. I think placing a limit at 1/4 of the total tiles for any terrain type, plus a requirement that all terrains have some minimum representation, should help a lot.


Posted By: eowan the short
Date Posted: 06 Feb 2022 at 02:13
What about, for each region, something along the lines of the electoral college in the US? (does this count as talking about politics?)
Each terrain starts with a weighting based on the number of tiles of each type within a region, then a flat number is added to each region to level out the weighting a bit.

To give an example, let's say in Middle Kingdom there are 20 plains tiles, 15 forest, 5 mountains, and a levelling constant of 5 is used. The weighting for the probability of each region would be 25 for plains, 20 for forest, and 10 for mountains.
If there are none of a tile in a region, then they don't get a boost.

The most common terrain in each region would still be the most likely, but the difference would be reduced. 


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Posted By: Tensmoor
Date Posted: 06 Feb 2022 at 10:12
I've updated the Terrains By Region page on IllyStuff to give a count of each of the combat terrains in the selected region and also removed any of the 'Unkown' regions that have no tiles in them.
This should help folks to get a better picture of what terrains are available in each region and why sometimes it seems that all the Tourney Squares are plains. Note that only those combat terrains found in the region are listed.

Hope this helps folks come up with some suggestions for SC on how the Tourney Square selector could be updated.


Posted By: Hyrdmoth
Date Posted: 12 Feb 2022 at 11:24
I think an advantage of the tourney square selection being entirely random is that, if there are lots of plains squares in Illyriad as a whole, then lots of tourney squares will be plains, and this means people get to practise on the tiles that PvP combat will take place on.

If you bias the selection of tourney squares away from plains, then this means it becomes a type of combat even more different to that in the rest of the game. Not sure if that is a great idea.

So, if we think that there are too many Plains squares in the tournaments, and that plains combat is not so much fun, then maybe there is something that needs to be done about plains combat across the board?

One tweak that might make Plains tourney squares a bit more interesting, and would change the dynamic on tourney squares more generally, would be to change the calculation of occupation time so that it only counts occupation time after the first x hours. This mirrors the experience of running a siege, where it takes some number of hours before the siege engines start firing at the city, and it would mean that the tactics for tournaments would have to change away from the Clear Square -> Occupy with nominal force paradigm.


Posted By: Thirion
Date Posted: 14 Feb 2022 at 16:00
Originally posted by Hyrdmoth Hyrdmoth wrote:

I think an advantage of the tourney square selection being entirely random is that, if there are lots of plains squares in Illyriad as a whole, then lots of tourney squares will be plains, and this means people get to practise on the tiles that PvP combat will take place on.


Most of the players that actively participate in tournaments do not want to do PVP. Tournaments are an alternative to PVP and hunting - thus in my opinion tournaments and PVP should be balanced each on their own.

Originally posted by Hyrdmoth Hyrdmoth wrote:

If you bias the selection of tourney squares away from plains, then this means it becomes a type of combat even more different to that in the rest of the game. Not sure if that is a great idea.


Tournaments are by design different to PVP and hunting. In tournaments your region gets a random square. In PVP and hunting you know the terrain in advance and can act according to that. In addition the distance is random and the timeframe is a lot longer (~1d for a siege compared to 30d tournaments).

In my opinion having different options or even different ways of combat is a good thing though - as long as it is balanced decently well. You do what you enjoy most.

Originally posted by Hyrdmoth Hyrdmoth wrote:

So, if we think that there are too many Plains squares in the tournaments, and that plains combat is not so much fun, then maybe there is something that needs to be done about plains combat across the board?


I think the developers designed Illyriad to be played for a long time (in contrast to other browser games with servers). Thus they made defending a city easy and attacking a city hard. Which is in my opinion a valid design choice - but it should not affect tournaments as much as it does (and at the moment it does).

I do think both PVP and tournaments need balance improvements. Doubling the movement speed for all units would be a good start in my opinion.

Originally posted by Hyrdmoth Hyrdmoth wrote:

One tweak that might make Plains tourney squares a bit more interesting, and would change the dynamic on tourney squares more generally, would be to change the calculation of occupation time so that it only counts occupation time after the first x hours.


In my opinion this would be a horrible idea. Currently small players or players with little troops can make a difference by sending small attacks and getting time this way - which is good. That would be gone. In addition it would make tournaments a lot more dependant on luck - wether you catch a timeframe were the enemy is sending enough clear/attacks or not.

Defending is really expensive - thus your suggestion would probably have the opposite effect. You make one big defense to get some time and send big clears else to keep the opponent from getting time.


Posted By: Thirion
Date Posted: 14 Feb 2022 at 16:27
In my opinion plains should be removed from the tournament tiles and buildings should be added.

Cav in tournaments is by far the most powerful attack unit (because of its speed) and it is already good on at least hills (and usually forest and small mountains too - depending on whats there).

Defense in Illyriad has 2 major disadvantages compared to attack: First the enemy usually knows what troops are used in big defenses and can send a counter unit. Second you do not know what attack units are coming - thus its a lot harder to skill commanders (in contrast to the heroism+division+Prestige attack for attack commanders).

In its current state it is expensive to defend on all terrain and it is hard to get efficient combats as defender.

Removing plains means the best case for attacks gets removed and with adding buildings a defendable (against cav) terrain is added. I would not completely change the current state but weaken the advantage the attacker has a bit.


Posted By: Tensmoor
Date Posted: 14 Feb 2022 at 19:14
If plains are removed from the equation then there is a very real risk that tournaments will become the plaything of the large players only.

I agree that buildings would be a good adittion to the tournament terrains. The danger of any occupying force being destroyed by NPCs spawning on the tile would add a certain amount of random danger to the play.

Currently small players can capture a tile and start to accumulate time on that tile. The chances of them being able to get enough time to win a region on their own is almost non-existant however a small alliance will be competing for bragging rights against other similar sized alliances.Perhaps the devs could implement some sort of ranking system to win medals that would allow those small alliances to get a medal however such a system is not easy to design as I learned when trying to design the hunting tournament system.



Posted By: Thirion
Date Posted: 14 Feb 2022 at 23:22
Originally posted by Tensmoor Tensmoor wrote:

If plains are removed from the equation then there is a very real risk that tournaments will become the plaything of the large players only.


Why?

I completely disagree with that statement and in my experience i would even say that it is the other way around.

You win plains (and most other squares) by sending cav clearing armies at regular intervals and small holds in between. The more attacks you can send the more time you get. Thus the limiting factor is usually the amount of commanders and clearing armies - more cities makes a huge difference there. You cannot occupy/attack when all your commanders are dead.

And yes, defense on non-plains is a bit less expensive - with good play (counter elite units) you can break those though. I have been sending to a lot of squares over the last years and when 2 alliances are fighting for squares big holds rarely hold longer than a few days. In my experience squares are usually decided by how many attacks were sent.




Posted By: Tensmoor
Date Posted: 15 Feb 2022 at 16:42
I'm not talking about small players WINNING the tile. They do however have an opportunity to sneak in the odd few minutes of occupation by defeating a very small occupying army. By changing the structure of the tournaments so that it becomes more usual to hold a tile with larger armies you greatly reduce the chance for small players to do anything but send their troops to die with no chance of being able to get any occupation time. That in my opinion removes one aspect of the game from small players.


Posted By: Thirion
Date Posted: 15 Feb 2022 at 22:54
This tournament there are 2 (!) squares that you can defend with only slight losses as a defender (Small Mountain). Most of the other squares are "spam" squares that usually only have a small amount of troops on them or get cleared fast.

Originally posted by Tensmoor Tensmoor wrote:

By changing the structure of the tournaments so that it becomes more usual to hold a tile with larger armies


That would not be the case though. Instead of maybe 2-5 (out of 68?) defendable squares you would have probably around ~10-15 (out of 68) defendable squares - there would still be enough squares you can attack as a small player. A lot of small players participate in SMA/ITG - and there is a lot of other stuff to do (training commanders, getting military experience, scouting, reporting, ...)

Defending Forests and Hills is still inefficient and expensive. Just not as crazy bad as on plains.

I would even argue it would be the opposite. At the moment some players stack Plains - as there are not many good alternatives for defense troops. Giving some good alternatives would focus more troops on those squares and would probably reduce the numbers of big armies on inefficient terrain.




Posted By: demdigs
Date Posted: 30 Apr 2022 at 01:24
I think that a simple fix would be that the terrain change every tourny, it would add some changes without seriously affecting the tourny integrity. At the very least it would allow other troops other than knights a chance to shine.


Posted By: Alred Reylynn
Date Posted: 14 Jun 2022 at 16:08
Originally posted by GM Stormcrow GM Stormcrow wrote:

Hi everyone,

As Tensmoor has indicated in his post above, buildings squares are indeed considered as spawn locations, and have been assigned in the past.

The server tournament square rotation assignment is from a Random Number Generator (RNG), with an exclusion list (eg not sov, not impassable, not a hub, not water, not a town etc).  

The fact is simply that there are a lot more plains squares on the map than any other type, so when the RNG runs, it's more likely that there will be plains squares than other types.

I *guess* we could put our hands on the scales of the RNG to get a more diverse square type selection, but the idea makes me a bit uneasy...  

Our RNG has always been independent of weighting influence, however it's possible that we could implement the idea of quotas (eg random assignment but roll until X Plains, Y Hills, Z Buildings etc).  Or we could say that "whatever the combat terrain type was last time (for this region), make it different this time".

I'd be interested to hear thoughts and/or alternative suggestions, though.  We certainly want to keep tournie combat interesting.

SC



GM Stormcrow [[ The fact is simply that there are a lot more plains squares on the map than any other type, so when the RNG runs, it's more likely that there will be plains squares than other types.
Our RNG has always been independent of weighting influence. ]]


I find the 2 statements above, rather at odds with one another. The RNG runs and picks plains because there are more plains squares, however the RNG is not weighted?? Of course it is weighted, and weighed exclusively by the terrain type, it appears.

I mostly use Cav. so this is more or less, shooting myself in the foot here, to argue for a different approach.

This approach works for most thing Illy, however for Tourneys, not so much. The game was designed with four races, and all four have the same 4 types of military available to them. Although each, has only one or two military types that are optimized for them.

I would suggest that assigning tourney squares based on the ratio of the military type of the cities in each region, instead of by the ratio of terrain types. A scan could be run just before a tourney of each city in a region, and then based on that ratio, run the RNG to first determine the tourney terrain of each region. Then another run of RNG to select the exact square. In selecting to settle a city, the ratio of terrains in a region is irrelevant. I do not know of anyone who selects where to settle by the ratio of an entire region, more likely the ratio of what's in the very near proximity. i.e. if a particular region had an allocation of 25% each; Spear, Infantry, Ranged, Cav cities in it, the RNG should be weighted evenly, for that region. If an imaginary region, had forests on one edge, connected to forest from the adjacent region, and similar situation for mountains on the other side, 25% forest, 25% mountains, 50% plains, and the forests & mountains due to proximity to the adjacent same terrains were heavily populated, with Non-Cav cities but for whatever reason the plains were mostly vacant, why would plains get the best chance of being selected, as with the current approach?? There's no cav there.

With this approach, a region where the RNG selection comes up for example: Infantry; the RNG would only be given Infantry favorable squares, in that region to select from, as the final process. Additionally, if Buildings would be part of that military type, Buildings might require a bit of modification to ensure, some were selected. Might be good to ensure at least 1 or 2 Buildings in the North, and same in Badlands, each tourney, was selected.

Additionally due to the relative speeds of each type of military unit type, Cav has a much easier time, going to an alternative tourney square, if the closest one in unfavorable.

With the current 8 valid terrain types, plains should not always be the majority of tourney squares every tourney. 8 as in hills=2, mountains=2, forest=2, plains, buildings.

Other Thoughts:

There's way to many Tourney squares within 5sq of cities, which leads to a huge advantage. Additionally, for those players who do not participate at all on tourneys, this is taking their prime hunting, herb/mineral spots. Many started sending spies with a military unit withing 4 sq viability range, and those are now considered targets. Therefore players with a tourney square this close would not want to risk getting their gathers destroyed due to someone assuming their collecting encampment is someone attempted to collect information on the tourney square.

If "non-ocean" water squares were also included, even with the current setup, this would water down "pun intended!!", the current high plains ratio. There's nothing preventing water combat? Assuming it's completely neutral stats, attack/defense/military type.

There was some comment in a later post, regarding the possibility of excluding plains. Don't see why that would be necessary. However another thought would be "if and only if" the previous tourney square was plains, then exclude plains, just for the current tourney, and for that region. Also it was suggested that would cause a full rotation of every terrain type, which should not be the case.






Posted By: Gry
Date Posted: 14 Jun 2022 at 19:35
Overabundance of plains is definitely still a problem in tourney, and I agree this is in effect weighted distribution of tourney tiles already. The main reason it is a problem is that plains are fought differently: they can't be defended and the cav advantage outweighs everything else. It's hard to defend anything, really, but that's what could make a more interesting tournament.

This is worth fixing because regular tourneys can be a driver of game economy. Millions of troops are spent, plus gear gets produced and redistributed. PvP doesn't have the same potential for diversity of materials consumed.

However, it's sort of iterative to address by troop types produced, as a lot of people hunt with cav, npcs land on plains, etc.. But I do think weighting regional differences is a good approach. I would suggest as an alternative filtering the tourney tile candidates with more restrictions, such as a hard cap on the number of plains tiles allowed in the final selection, e.g. 25% of the total regions. Regions containing the highest number of plains tiles could be assigned first, so substitution of a non-plains square would be more likely to affect regions that already have more diversity.

I'm not really bothered by proximity to towns, because it encourages participation (though I would really rather not defend a plains tile next to one of my infantry towns again), but this is another reasonable filter. In addition to the max cap on plains, providing a minimum representation for other terrain types could also help, especially buildings and large mountains, which offer the best chance to defend.



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