[Feedback] Combat Survey

[Borotaur]

Random adventures would be harder, but nothing impossible. For two reasons:

1) It would be slightly harder to prepare for the adventure, so you'd be forced to keep a larger army on standby to be prepared for anything. Get your max pop up high enough and this extra difficulty disappears completely. I'm pretty sure 3000+ max pop fits all the K, XB, E, C you might need for any camp, with a vast army of R/B/M as fodder. If adventure has 7-10 days time to complete, you can easily train anything you miss.

2) You can't use guide, so you have to calculate your own blocks and sim your own optimal setups. This is where the real extra difficulty is. Weakest players just send recruits on a hunch and pay the price. Best players know how to calculate perfectly safe blocks and end up saving lot of troops. Rest end up somewhere in between, making mistakes on blocks they thought were safe, suffering unexpected losses. That's real difficulty. Best players get rewarded for the extra skill and effort they put in, keeping them interested in the game. Meanwhile, weakest players might feel this adventure is too difficult for them to handle, so they simply avoid the random adventures. Overall, nobody should be forced to do a random adventure unless they feel it's worth their effort. Calculating the perfect setups and blocks isn't easy even for best players, so adventure should naturally have high rewards to compensate for the effort.

Requiring skill is real difficulty. Requiring you to send 3000R 3000B and 2000M to their deaths in order to beat enemy following a guide where nothing can go wrong is NOT.

[SirLegalot]

I see this more of a game of strategy and economics than domination, you need the correct strategy and economics to succeed, where the games fall massively on its backside is the whole combat senarios.
Giving a "Bandit Leader" 90000 hit points is IMO, preposterous, if you get past the "men/soldiers" protecting him, he isn't going to put up much of a fight against the 42 Cavalry, 53 Soldiers, and 22 longbowmen you have left.
If you must make it harder to get him, then do, but once he is alone, capturing the camp should be piece of cake, a la Settlers I

On another point, how easy would it be once you occupy a zone to get rid of the border bollards between your captured zones, not a biggie, but it does my OCD no good whatsoever.

[Rafnir]

Yes, adventures would be a challenge. Will be awful for you that

They wouldn't be more "challenging" than they are today. It just would require more time spent with combat simulators. That's how the vast majority would do them, I guarantee that.

The "challenge", if there would be any, would be to make enough required units after determining what you need, which isn't much of a problem for players with a high lvl barracks and lots of resources, but which could be a disaster for others if the numbers are high and they don't have a high reserve of troops of most kinds.

So no need for that rude elitist tone.

[Borotaur]

They wouldn't be more "challenging" than they are today. It just would require more time spent with combat simulators. That's how the vast majority would do them, I guarantee that.

The "challenge", if there would be any, would be to make enough required units after determining what you need, which isn't much of a problem for players with a high lvl barracks and lots of resources, but which could be a disaster for others if the numbers are high and they don't have a high reserve of troops of most kinds.

So it would be more challenging to have enough troops to be able to handle any situation. Plus you'd have to sim your own combinations, which isn't a huge challenge, but certainly harder than following a guide, especially when multiple waves are required. The real challenge would be calculating your own blocks. There's no need to dismiss the huge extra challenge that random adventures would bring. We're just asking for an option to have randoms, not to force everyone to do them.

Simple proof of how much more difficult simming and setting up blocks yourself is: even the really good people who make the current guides come up with HUGELY different setups, with HUGE differences in losses. Search for guides for Valiant Little Tailor and you'll find dozen guides where best guide can save thousands of R/B/M over the worst. And this is the difference among the most experienced players, the guide makers. Or look at one of the best players around here, Tage: he recently updated his guide for WotS with more blocks. Why weren't the blocks in the original guide for over a year? Because designing them was not easy and posed a challenge even for Tage.

For a random adventure, I'd prefer something much smaller than Fairy Tale adventures, at least to begin with. If it works well and people like it, then make bigger and harder maps. To me near perfect examples include Horseback and Roaring Bull - on both adventures the choice of attack route plays a very big role, both can be done with several very smart blocks or with brute force. On the other end of the scale, something as linear as Nords would not work that well: even if you randomize the camps a bit, there's barely any choice on route to take. Even then, you'd have more challenge than doing a perfectly identical adventure every time.

[Dragavon]

So no need for that rude elitist tone.

It has nothing to do with elitist. I just think some variation would be good for replayability. After doing an adventure a few times today we could just as well assign the troops we would loose to an adventure then click on complete and get our rewards instantly. We know exactly what to expect, and what it will cost us. That is boring.

[King-Fero]

Would you like to build a puzzle where each piece is numbered and you just place them in order?

Would you be interested in solving a labyrinth where the route to finish has been already marked?

Would you enjoy knowing the entire plot of a movie from start to finish before watching it?

It is hard for me to understand the opposition many people in this thread have against adding random elements to adventures. Following a step-by-step guide completely defeats the purpose of a game. Even choosing not to use guides won't help avoid the issue. It takes hundreds of adventures to reach lv50, so one is bound to keep repeating the same thing over and over again. Depending on your level and what you like, there's some 10-20 viable adventures to play in TSO. This means you end up playing the same map tens if not hundreds of times. Repeating the identical map over and over would be considered a negative thing in any other game I can think of. So why someone thinks it's desirable in this game is beyond me.

The only remotely acceptable argument I can see is that it would be more difficult. Yes, it most certainly is more difficult to think what the best way to attack is, rather than copy a ready-made solution from a guide. However, the combat system is not actually that complicated in this game if you just bothered to take a moment to understand it. I learned the combat system by watching battle reports and felt I grasped the main points of composing an optimized troop mix before I had my home island cleared. I use the combat sim even to this day, but it's only for tweaking the numbers, not for figuring out the battle strategy. I could, in theory, do the same attacks without the sim but 10-20% higher losses as I'd be playing safe on the number of cannon fodder I send. I'm not trying to brag that I'm a super-intelligent TSO master who can figure out everything on my own; actually my point is just the opposite since I am confident that anyone who tries to play without guides will learn and will succeed in battles on their own.

I completely disagree that it would become impossible for newer players to play adventures. Sure, you would need to have a bigger stock of troops before starting an adventure since there's no telling exactly which units you will need. This doesn't even have to mean everyone needs to invest in a ton of noble deeds to increase their pop cap. They'll simply need to step down to easier ones until they're up to the challenge. Those currently doing DB might need to switch to VtV, those currently managing Outlaws might switch to Traitors, and so on. I'm not saying that the already existing adventures necessarily need be randomized, I'm simply referring to existing ones to illustrate the point I'm making. If SftR is too hard for a new player you tell them to try DP instead. Same thing applies here. If the combat system isn't in your blood just yet, do easier randomized adventures until you start to get the idea, then move on to harder ones and try to excel those as well. It will be more difficult. It will also be fun.

[Splotch]

I've not read anything, wont do either.

Make all camps random and make the camp troops only capable of being scouted by sending in a wave that triggers the combat within the wave in order of combat initiative.

That is all.

[Dorotheus]

Come on people lets get real here. It's been a about a year since they announced PvP with no delivery in sight using the mechanics we already have. So ask your self one simple question, how long do you think it's going to take if they have to go back to the blackboard and start working on combat from scratch, based upon what we have seen on their current progress.

The only way we are going to see PvP before 2015 is if they do not do anything to change the adventures we have already. If you want randomness in combat that will come with PvP when your opponent decides what you will be facing.

[Letsnow]

Repeating the identical map over and over would be considered a negative thing in any other game I can think of

+1

[topgearfan]

im just going to say one thing. if there were no guides i wouldnt have bothered with combat at all.