Soliciting thoughts: Siege & Sally Forth

Where Illyriad really excels, though, is in not following that advice, and being one of the few (maybe only) browser games where complex, robust things are actually happening.

What that article discusses is probably focused more on efficiency than balance.  Balancing a more complex system may require more care, but isn't really harder--there are plenty of variables which can provide micro-adjustments until it's just right.  I think it has already been concluded, though, that for now at least siege is working fine as is.  (That's assuming Sally Forth operations can choose their target as intended.)

Edited by col0005 - 03 Aug 2010 at 05:17

GM Stormcrow wrote: Interesting, HM. If you don't mind sharing, what do you think your mistakes (by which I mean H?s generally) were - apart from impatience?

I think I gave away more sensitive information of tactical value in an earlier post, and the mistakes we made aren't really sensitive information at all, so I don't mind.

The biggest and most obvious screw-up was that we had some troops arrive hours early on what should have been our smallest yet most defended siege.  It was the diversionary camp, assigned to arrive last.  Instructions were not communicated as clearly as they might have been, and some of our trusted but less involved members inadvertently caused that siege to bounce from the most defensive square.  That also meant our intent to camp there was laid bare several hours in advance in the form of a weak and easily cleared pre-occupation.  Thus opportunity was paved to pick off the siege of easily-guessed destination with pre-occupation and keep Sally pointed at one of the two large sieges.  Although this opportunity was not taken, we did still take much higher siege losses elsewhere while this siege was being reset.

My own short-lived siege camp on the NW plains was also under-defended for the amount of diversionary power it carried.  I sent about 1k troops with no reinforcements and 8 siege engines, which were handily picked off by a single attack.  I should have made White's decision more difficult and balanced by either reinforcing with another thousand troops or so, or leaving more engines at home (or both).

Other (subjectively) mistakes:  sieges were all launched at once instead of for a shared target window, and as a result the defenders (which were very strong even just in that cluster) had opportunity to hit undefended sieges with timed speculative attacks, preoccupy squares, and attempt other early tactics at optimal opportunity.  No pre-clearing attacks were sent, and reinforcements were not tightly timed by many participants.  Those did not hurt us, but they could have been devastating.

This calls attention to the continued vulnerability of an incoming siege, when divided into camps.  Defenders know exactly when a siege is arriving (which is fine) and may have a relatively small number of tiles that can be the target (also fine).  There is still plenty of opportunity to stop a siege before it starts, and even more so when siege is split into multiple wings.  When the wings arrive all at once, the chance of catching one or two with defensive pre-occupation (which can be set up way faster than a siege takes to arrive) leaving non-siege-defending troops temporarily out of action is high.  When they don't all arrive at once, there's multiple chances, each subsequent one with better odds.  There's plenty that can be done to turn the tide from the defender's perspective if online activity and strength are even roughly comparable.  When reinforcements are not tightly timed, early direct assault will usually cut down siege numbers by 30%.  When pre-clearing attacks are not tightly timed, pre-occupation can be sloppy and just plunk down to wait, accruing more troops over time.

Without fail, timing and coordination (and information) are the cornerstones of any browser game.  Having to balance unit queues with equipment production and trade, design good army composition in contextually-sensitive manner, and speculatively fight for control of non-city territories all offer much greater depth and creativity, but do not shake this foundation.  I do not see any other game rules doing so either unless it is to render offensive timing moot through lack of results.  But that pretty much stalemates the whole game.

Some other mistakes I'm seeing in general revolve around kitchen-sink operations--throwing everything (offensive and defensive troops) into defensive operations, offensively throwing everything into one basket, and a general failure to minimize troop losses.  The larger forces get, the more I'm seeing that adding large amounts of poorly-suited troops only increases your own casualties of offensive and defensive troops alike.  Ill-suited troops actually drag down well-suited troops.  This also means that if you need one kind of troop to deal with something, you might as well find something else for the other kinds of troops to do.  Usually that something else can achieve a fair bit of synergy with the primary objective, but I'm a little bit reticent to be any clearer regarding this point.  After all, Harmless isn't as big as it looks, due to certain non-contributing aspects.  There's also matters of optimizing economic output/balance and getting the most out of barracks queue time, and I'm seeing a lot of inefficiencies within H in that regard...I've been putting off writing up a bunch of strategy-guide-like articles for our members, but I think we're going to kick the spies first anyway...let our enemies at least figure out that much on their own.

----

I'm giving away a fair bit of strategy to my own detriment, but I see myself "giving away strategy" long after I've become much less active in demonstrating it.  As H's position with its enemies becomes a little more safe, I'm thinking of soon unlocking my timer management utility to the public as I did my calculators tool, as well as considering some additions to the calculator's output which will highlight a better measure of success than generalized strength losses.

And just in case no one outside H realized (I never updated the description on the page), the calculator can now accept text copied from the "view military units" page, which is handy for assessing home/occupying armies, or summarizing troop counts for a census report.

It's not just a mantra: Information is power.

I have a lot to say on this but I'll start with the following and revisit later:

1) Your two main points seem contradictory - sieges cannot be both too easy or too hard, they could be either or neither.  I lean toward neither.

Executing a successful siege against any of the top alliances in the game *should* be difficult. It should require a lot of intense effort and co-ordination and it should reward those players and alliances who are willing to dedicate the effort to it. The satisfaction from making it work is proportional to that effort and dumbing it down is not going to encourage people to get heavily involved in the game.

There have been three major sieges since the Sally changes, if sieging was too easy you would expect them all to have succeeded, if it was too hard they should all have failed.  As it was there was a nice mix and the deciding factor was the skill and organization of the parties involved rather than the mechanics.   FYI there are potential counters to multiple siege's using existing mechanics. The fact that some think there are not does not make multiple sieges overpowered.

2) Potential changes from above:

a) Could work - while you're at it make the stats equal across siege engine types.  Something in the 30-35% range and fix the apparent bug where the accuracy does not actually improve as the siege goes on.

b) Completely agree with Selon, please don't.

c) Allow the player to choose which siege to hit, but no other changes.

d) What happened to (d)?

e) Meh, not a huge impact as far as I can see.  Travel time is already long enough.

f) Completely agree with Selon, please don't.

g) & h) while a minimum city size (500-1000 pop?) makes some sense to me, adding artificial limits to things just doesn't jive well.

i) Way too over powered.  Travel time to the target means it's easy to drop a load of defenders into the city, wait for the siege to arrive and blast it.

j) Could be OK.

k) Massively encourages blobbing, to be avoided.

l) Make the number of hits required proportional to the building level and the population loss from delevelling.  This would slow down the early stages of the siege but not impact the latter stages - could be ok.

3) Other ideas:

i) Avoid the ability to "outflank" the Sally Forth. Once the target population is reached the defenders are currently stuck. They cannot Sally forth any more since the siege army will simply storm the city while they are in the field. Making Sally Forth travel at speed 12 or making the armies meet in the field should fix this.

ii) Change the % participation in the Sally Forth battle (make it higher - 40-50%) and fix the bugs in the casualties algorithm.

iii)  @HM  lower target pop is also a good idea.

iv)

HonoredMule wrote: I suppose I could also reiterate my opinion that who's online within an alliance should be privileged information.

 

Agreed.  In addition. sending mail to alliance leaders that a member is under attack is good. It's then up to the alliance to ensure that they have sufficient leadership coverage.

Finally I agree with the closing statements of Zangi and HM.


Edited by KillerPoodle - 23 Jul 2010 at 05:49

This reply is going to be all over the place.  I blame these accursed widescreen monitors and difficulty reading as I reply.

From a perspective of relatively balanced opponents:

I like a), and l) look promising in the long term.  But most of the other options look too dramatic and turtle-friendly/anti-results.

Options like b), e), and especially c) all seem more focused on nerfing the benefit a party gains form the effective coordination and extra effort they invest, and b) even makes more effort for the defender while failing to impact certainly highly successful diversionary tactics (as mentioned near bottom of post).  That's not making anything easier or slower within the scope of siege, just less productive (in other words, way more draws and false starts).  That's a formula for more burnout, not less, and effectively started sieges conclude the same.  Multi-party sieges aren't much harder to execute, and brute-force single-party sieges are only viable for domineering forces that can afford to win at a loss.  If a combination of effort and cleverness make the swing vote either way between only marginally similar opponents, then good.  If the effort to succeed drastically overshadows the effort required to not fail, then smart people will sit back and not fail until they die of boredom.

The recent siege that resolved so quickly was not actually a well-planned or executed maneuver, but was handled hastily and sloppily, and made several mistakes that did NOT slow it down the least but did increase attacker losses substantially.  The opponent actually had considerable opportunity to further alter the outcome, however.  If I were to identify one thing that has hurt players more than any other so far, it would not be any in-game mechanic, but lack of patience.  Things like launching on assumptions and other hasty, uninformed and/or uncommunicated actions have been the most costly.  These are issues that will work themselves out with tweaking of the community instead of the game--i.e. learning more of the game as it is now, and holding back one's cards until comfortable with the odds.  The efforts that have been most in vain have been those that were least considered.  Maybe all this is a little off topic, except for one major factor that impacted that recent battle.  All the defenders were sitting in a city totally depending upon Sally Forth instead of using a more balanced strategy, testing different angles, or at least waiting to see what was really going on.  Diversification won, and if particular tactics of a single battle get nerfed, the next version is just a wider net of distribution, which won't fare much worse.  I'm not denying the possibility of a problem, but it's hard to tell when so much can be attributed to strategy even more than coordination...and yet that's exactly the way I think it should be.)

Options like i), k) aren't slowing siege but nerfing the ability to start one, and its that kind of barrier to entry that takes the itch out of everyone's trigger fingers.  k) especially...  Clustering already rules the roost, and an option like this is guaranteed eternal stalemate between even the most bitter of foes.

There's a factor in place already that deserves some attention.  A siege engine takes 11 hours to produce.  One engine.  That's a lot of troop production that aggressors have to sacrifice to partake in a siege.  A marginally outnumbered defender--economically speaking--can bridge the gap by building those troops instead and waiting for the attack.  It means operating on the enemy's timing, but your turf and with you better prepared yet economically matching pace.  Furthermore, if you're building mostly offensive troops, even imbalanced skirmishes will come out in the attacker's favor, which in Sally's case is actually the defender.  Where relatively equal parties are concerned, I don't see a problem.  I think the balance is already pretty close.  Where I do see room for improvement is in slowing the rate of destruction, but by landing fewer hits (maybe averaging about half as many as now).  Making them less frequent only takes more action out of the game.

Siege may still be too fast now, but even as it stands large wars will still wage unresolved for months.  That's not exactly a high level of volatility, and eventually even "winners" will start looking for games that are more productive and rewarding of effort, because the amount of effort invested isn't a wildcard variable.  It's generally dictated by AFK concerns, so players tend not to meter what they invest nearly as much as measure what they get back, emotionally speaking.

There are some unmentioned options that I do like, however, which bring fairness to some of the recently tested tactics:  a) is good, but I think the real major failing is the targeting of Sally Forth.  It hits the last siege.  If the last siege is the smallest yet best defended--or even a token one landing every few hours with just the right defense--then Sally Forth is almost completely wasted, and attackers are allowed to control every aspect of the battlefield (IF they manage to land).  Defenders should be allowed to chose the camp they hit for reasonable benefit from that one tactic.  That would at least force distributed attacks to be more carefully balanced and reward the defender with greater chance at removing plenty of teeth on the way down.  Defenders should also have the sense to try direct hits (they never did work out as badly as some claimed), but that's perhaps "political" territory.  I'm inclined to think this detail alone would drastically slow down siege resolution by more effectively cutting down the number of siege engines in play (whether they're all gooned into a single party or not).

From the viewpoint of unbalanced opponents:

My opinion on bullies is fairly well known, I think, but I don't begrudge them the right to exist--and to also face the enemies of their own making, as they oft do.  That's part of the spice of the game.  I don't think options like g) or h) make any useful difference for anyone.  They upset the social balance with applying deterrent anywhere that will matter.  Every bully hampered is also a victim protected from even bigger bullies.  And not every tale of imbalanced forces is one of bullying.  In larger wars, eventually someone is supposed to win.  Sometimes that means kissing and making up, and others it means teaching a stern lesson and preventing near future comeback.  And in more local terms, there are still sometimes justification for wanting to send your neighbors to live elsewhere.  Eventually a tipping point is expected, and conclusion shouldn't take forever after that.  There are currently mitigating factors in play, and I feel that they are sufficient to protect targets unworthy of the Galactic Empire's attention.  Small population cities take as long to siege as big ones (maybe even longer), and the effort gains far less...except when motivations are not opportunistic.  Yet the effort itself is not much reduce, and in fact is not reduce one whit if said small player still has big friends.

Further still, some of those players started out large, and their deflation was hard earned.  Why should it be even harder to finish the job and part ways?

So, sieges against much smaller helpless players are already pointless and yet unstoppable due to sheer strength (and it has to be that way at some point), so I don't see anything that can be fixed and I'm not convinced anything's broken, because appropriate counters all work.  Coalitions of small players can still easily overpower a larger foe through greater aggregate industrial output and/or more distributed effort that cannot be matched by a fewer craniums.  For all the added complexity and tactical maneuvering this game enables, the most basic mechanics of browser gaming are working exactly like they do everywhere else.