Hello everyone,

in this post I want to discuss possible modifications around the uprank system. The goal is to bring the already existing but hidden unit variety of this glorious game to the screen.

It's an issue that has already been mentioned at some points in this forum, but please, let me introduce and analyze it properly:

Military endgame in SettlersII tends to look the same in almost every play. Each faction amasses fortresses, each filled up to the roof with generals just to decide the whole game in a single battle between the same soldiers in different colors.
The player who managed to produce the most weapons and coins wins. That is the goal of this game and in my opinion this is good and right. The battle(s) should mirror the efforts you put into your economy which is the true challenge for every player.

The Problem is, as spectacular as it might be at first, there is litte variation in tactical behavour as well as in unit graphics.

Why do we have armies only consisting of generals and zero footmen who could be under their command? Well, the reason is the high usefulness of gold coins.
First of all, let's compare the costs of upgrading soldiers versus recruiting new ones.
A new soldier costs a weapon and a shield if we neglect the beer. That sums up to 2 iron ore and 4 coal, so 6 ores in total. A gold coin is worth 1 gold ore and 1 coal, 2 ores in total.
The conclusion is: 1 new soldier is trice as expensive as 1 gold coin.
The coin itself can upgrade one soldier of the ranks (1-4) each. As a result, players try to use their coins as effectively as possible (4 upgrades per coin) by putting them into the largest military buildings. That way, you can get an average of about 3 rank ups per coin. Lets assume the only thing coins do is adding 1 HP to the soldier. That means each coin produces 3 Hitpoints of military power. That is equal to the power of one soldier. But remember! Coins are cheaper than soldiers. If you can get 3 coins worth one soldier, you get 9 extra Hitpoints. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, seems to be waay too powerful.
But besides the power there is another effect: The production of new recruits can't keep up with the uprank speed. That's why after some time the only remaining unit type is our fancy but far from unique general.

I often find myself rooting for the midrank units in battles, just because it's so rare to watch them.

Now to my proposal: Reduce the amount of upranks to 1 uprank per coin.

That way you can achieve balance between large poorly equipped armies, smaller elite troops and eyerything in between. Moreover, armies without low rank units are impossible to form unless you focus very heavily on gold production over iron.

For those who love the micromanagement about the process of gold optimization, think about this: You are no longer forced to uprank your troops in fortresses. Instead you could use your barracks in the backlands for safe training. For moving those soldiers to the frontlines you would easily need the same if not more micromanagement skills than before.

Still not enough?
Then how about: Make uprank prioritize the lowest rank availible.

With this you can decide the shape of your army. Rank up in barracks to get a quickly trained pair of generals. Rank up in a fortress to build a large army of rank 2 or 3 units.
Finally, the game can display its full variety of unit sprites and offers a much more cusomizable yet balanced playstyle for very little effort.

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Zitat:

Can't agree with that. This actually increases tactical plays as you have no other option. Like getting more soldiers to the front
(hight attack/defense potential), clever counter attacks, clever settings - there are quite a lot of options. This game is not only
about building an economy, it's about mixing both. Sadly most players tend to play the "turtle" tactic - 1 storehouse, 1 fortress and
then fight till any soldier is used.

In my opinion one of the reasons why the game is the way it is (currently): resources. Either you play with inexhaustible mines (Never
do that, as it breaks most map mechanics) or you fight for a specific spot with resources, whoever wins that spot, wins the game. Most
resources you have at your start point are only good for building the exact same army as your enemy and then it's all about tactics. If
you play maps like atomium, wagenradfin etc. this will never happen as those maps aren't designed for that.
In example my map starmy tries to force players to spread out, thus making faults or being slower and that way making the game more
dynamich, I think it worked but such maps are quite rare.

To change the problem we actually already have some options:
Change military strength (set it to weak = privates have more value)
Set maximum rank (If the maximum isn't general, privates have more value)
Enable battlefield promotion (if  all other addons are enabled this becomes quite handy for privates who kill an enemy)

Although I still agree that

Zitat:

Is a good idea for an addon although you wouldn't need a fortress anymore but a barracks is enough.

Zitat:

If you use barracks to upgrade, that won't change much ;)

Also I'd like to add a s4 like behavior for mines, you could still win, even when you don't occupy any tactical spot as those are just
"boosts" for a short period.

I also think, that adding a variety with soldiers which are actually all the same just with better dices and more hp is quite hard.
It'd be better to add other classes like a bowmen or cavalry or something like that. Hard to balance and would change the game quite a
lot just to become "rock, paper, scissors" at the end.

And please don't missunderstand my post, those are just my thoughts ;)

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Zitat:

I agree with you.
What I meant with "little variation in tactical behavour" was, that there is generally one way to get the strongest army - having as many generals as possible. I didn't think about actual fighting tactics but just the way, the army is economically build up.
I wished for more alternatives for the player to choose his favourite units and being able to play with them without suffering military disadvantages. Think of it like different build strategies like there are in most RTS games.

Zitat:

In my opinion, the map has the biggest influence on gameplay. Since RTTR offers a lot of strongly game changing addons, most maps designed for the original game naturally wouldn't work well. The best example is a map with many mountains but inexhaustable ressources. I think, new maps specially designed for this addon would solve the mismatch. Futhermore, if my suggestions were to be added as well, its possible to rethink mapdesigns for it. You could for example have high iron regions fighting with high gold regions on equal terms.

Zitat:

These options do in fact change the power issue with gold and I really appreciate the battlefield promotions. Although there is one thing that could not be changed with them. That is the overwhelming speed of promotions compared to the speed of recruiting new privates. If you get an average of 9 promotions per new private, in the end most soldiers will be at their maximum rank whichever it may be. This is killing unit variety and in my opinion isn't neccesary.

Zitat:

For ranking up, you truly wouldn't need a fortress, but it can still be convenient since barracks have just one space for a coin which further reduces the uprank speed. Moreover, fortresses are still a must-have for allocating many troops to the froniers or delaying large attacks.

Zitat:

Indeed, but it changes everything if you use larger buildings since you would get an equal distribution of coins. This could lead to strong armies that won't essentially need generals at all.

Zitat:

I'm not very familiar with S4. Please explain in detail how the mines work there ;)

Zitat:

I cannot see how it could be hard to allow all already existing units participating equally in the game. I agree, that it wouldn't change most battle tactics because they truly just have more HP and a higher hit chance. At least I expect them to make the game a litte more colorful. I also agree, that a rock, paper, scissor system with new units would bring more work than reward. That's exactly why I chose to suggest a small addon which should be easily implemented without the need of new fancy graphics and animations.

One last word about the balance: I can imagine low rank armies and high rank squads each having their benefits and disadvantages. In direct combat and smaller battles, generals and officers have the advantage due to the higer hit chances and the ability to regenerate taken damage. On the other hand, they would be worth much more coins than before which makes them being hit by catapults all the more hurtful.

Thanks for your quick and honest reply! I'm very impressed by your dedication to S2 and it's community ^^

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This was an unintended double post. I'm sorry for that

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I wont comment on any suggestion as I think those are quite good ideas and totally reasonable.

Zitat:

Well, mines never fully depleated.
They just became less efficient with each ore mined. Means at the beginning you had a 100% chance to get 1 resource for 1 food. As you
mined more ores, they became less efficient, means you had to pay 2 food for 1 resource etc.

So my idea was: never mine all ores (means 1 is always left), then count all ores in reach for a mine (2 nodes) and then check the
amount.

Base:
__X_X_X
_X_X_X_X
X_X_M_X_X
_X_X_X_X
__X_X_X

Lets say its an iron mine and some iron is around

__0_1_3
_0_2_5_7
0_1_3_5_7
_0_2_3_2
__0_1_0

Means: 19 spots, maximum 19*7 = 133 iron, min 19 iron, actually 42 iron
min chance: 19/133 => 14.3%, max chance = 133/133 = 100.0%, current: 31.6%

Means with this setup you need ~3 food for one iron at the moment. Maybe stone is produces when no ore is mined.

It'd be also good to add more food options (just like in settlers 4), Coalmines like bread and work with 100% efficiency, Ironmines
like meat, goldmines like fish, stonemines like bread. This way there wouldn't be only mills and bakerys. Also economy becomes less
stable.

Yet an other problem is, that borders aren't that borders don't change that often. To change that problem, it should become less easy
to hold big areas. How to solve that, I have no idea. Maybe military buildings should also need food/beer to boost defenders/attackers
a bit, if you dont have food/beer the moral decreases and soldiers may have -1 hp or -1 chance to hit. Soldiers may use those resources
while doing nothing. barracks slower, fortresses faster, depending on soldiers in the building.

One more idea is: gold doesn't upgrade soldiers, gold increases a stat, like dices are increases by 0.01% for each gold stored. But
also add a maximum for gold stored in any building (maybe depending on mapsize or setting). That way an enemy could attack storehouses
to decrease your strength. Basically add more tactical points you can attack.

And my last idea for now: Privates have less armor (not regarding the shield) and have to carry less, thats why they should attack on a
greater distance, maybe, as they aren't that cocky like a general, they could disguise themselves and trick defenders to not defend.
That way weak soldiers could attack buildings in the inland which aren't that good defended. A general has heavy armor and could not
attack over such a distance.

Well, just an other idea came into my minds:
Cap ranks by lowest ranks. Like if you have 5 privates, one can promote to a private first class, if you have 5 privates first class
(means 25 privates and 5 privates first class) you can have one sergeant etc.
That way gold becomes quite useless unless... there is something else you could do with gold.

But all thoses changes share the same problem: the game isn't that easy to understand anymore.

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Zitat:

I like the idea of exhausted mines not being completely depleted. The same mechanics could be used for fishery and water prouction from wells. This could actually increase the worth of water a lot and besides that, making the seach for it with geologists more meaningful but not totally essential, as it would be with complete depletion.

Zitat:

I'm not fully convinced by the concept of favourite food for miners because it seems to be very arbitrary. (Why would a gold miner prefer fish over bread?) However, in terms of breaking the monotony in food production it would definetely be beneficial. Maybe a direct scaling of productivity with general food variety for all mines could also be possible. For example, miners can suffer from production penalty if they ate the same food twice.

Zitat:

I had a similar idea about that. If you would make beer in military buildings responsible for health recuperation, borderlands which are easy to cut of from supplies should become harder to defend.

Zitat:

I do remember that S4 had the option to build decorative buildings with gold to increase the general combat strength of all units in defense. I loved that concept because it rewarded the player for trying to make the homeland more beautiful.

Zitat:

Thats certainly a good idea to counter "hard shell, soft core" defenses. Since I don't have much pvp experience yet, I cannot estimate how neccesary it would be though. Another explanation could be that generals are taunting and holding the enemies attention while the privates slip through the ranks. (Everyone wants the fame for slaying the dude with the golden helmet and heroic cape ;)

Zitat:

I wouldn't mind any increase in complexity as long as it remains reasonable and optional. The high degree of optionality is by the way the trait of RTTR that makes me admire this project the most.

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@Sasa1709: I very much like your idea.

I am also not a fan of those everyone-for-gold-hunting battles, but like more importance on the whole economy.


@Spike: I like that food diversity improves mining, but I like the way that mining efficiency gets depleted for any mine if the miner had to heat the same food in a row. Not to specialise some mines on some food.

Having a lack of control which food gets delivered where, it forces the player to spatially balance food production, which is nice idea.

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Spike wrote on 21.07.2016 at 15:44:
> Well, mines never fully depleated.
> They just became less efficient with each ore mined.
> Means at the beginning you had a 100% chance to get
> 1 resource for 1 food. As you mined more ores, they
> became less efficient, means you had to pay 2 food
> for 1 resource etc.

> So my idea was: never mine all ores (means 1 is always left)
> [...]

Why is it necessary to always have one ore left if you want mines to get less and less efficient? I mean, one ore left if it never can never be mined away is just equivalent as "nothing", so you could also change the maths such that you can mine everything away but keep the decaying probability of success per ore.

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And how do you keep track of the original resource? Your idea only works if you can always mine any ore at the least
efficient rate - that's not what I intended here as even a tiny spot of gold is worth a fight but if I could mine gold anyway - why
should I fight?

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