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3 hours ago, Cute Chao said:

I agree, though. This mode is really not my favourite. I'll put up with it, though, since everyone's bound to have modes they don't like in the game ^.^

What don't you like about it? Are there things you'd like to see changed that would make it more fun for you?

Also your Roy boy was quite fun to bring along, hope my Cain helped if you tried him out.

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This mode just needs a few tweaks:

1. Units should not be able to teleport and attack on the same turn,

2. The player should be able to spawn units they lose during the enemy phase on the next turn,

3. I guess make it less zerg rushy

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7 hours ago, Rezzy said:

I hope my Titania has been helpful for people.  Cavalry week is really her time to shine.

If only the auto-battle AI wasn’t so fond of gleefully sending her at everything red.

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I had an ~80% cavalry battalion, and autobattled Infernal.

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Of course, enemies are completely random so it could've just as easily gone a lot better or a lot worse.

Edited by Raven
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5 hours ago, Johann said:

What don't you like about it? Are there things you'd like to see changed that would make it more fun for you?

Also your Roy boy was quite fun to bring along, hope my Cain helped if you tried him out.

Thanks. I hoped he would be :D

Cain was awesome, too. I've always enjoyed using him - I think I've used him in the VG before. So lovingly made - I have a +2 one who is jealous of your boy xD

For me... I love using friend's units, but I don't love the size and blandness of the maps. It just feels dull to me - more of a slog than anything. I feel like there are lots of improvements to make, but I wouldn't know what to start suggesting, so hoping people far more clever than me will know what to do.

It doesn't help that the scoring always feels tight and that it can be luck based - so much so they even advise autobattle as a strategy. Though watching the units autobattle was a bit more fun - if only they could be done with scoring in mind so I dared use it for Infernal. I think your Cain took out several blue units quite happily xD

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After two seasons of this game mode (with the two least mobile movement types as bonus units), I can now definitely pin down exactly what I don't like about this mode.

The ability to teleport to any marked tile around a base and attack in the same turn removes all sense of strategy from capturing a base, and simply turns it into a meat grinder where you throw your units in and hope they can take the enemy phase of every enemy unit teleporting in. It's quite a mess and is what makes this mode feel the most like attack-moving 300 Zerglings at an enemy base.

I think this could be alleviated by restricting teleportation after the base has taken damage. For example, if the base is no longer at full health, the marked tiles around the base would no longer be able to be used for teleportation. Or at the very least, teleporting to those tiles would not allow the unit to attack (but teleporting to the base itself would allow an attack).

 

Additionally, I think the time restriction of 10 turns feels too short and should be bumped up to 12 so that I can have the satisfaction of ending the map by seize instead of by time.

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Each unit's danger zone takes teleporting into account, as long as you check what enemy units are on the base it's easy to anticipate who will attack if you move within range of the base and position your units in the best way.

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I think the size of the maps are less of an attraction when your units can simply teleport through half of it.

I would prefer it if there were simply well-defended points to capture throughout the map without them also serving as teleportation points - instead serving as new spawn points for your new units as current ones die.

Also, a more lenient turn limit would be nice. Or even no turn limit at all, and you either capture the final point or lose all your units trying. It would probably be more challenging, but it may help with making the map feel bigger.

A simple 8 vs 8 would also be nice, with the objective to either route or capture the point(s) with what you've got.

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5 hours ago, Baldrick said:

Each unit's danger zone takes teleporting into account, as long as you check what enemy units are on the base it's easy to anticipate who will attack if you move within range of the base and position your units in the best way.

The problem is not approaching the base, but when you're standing on top of it because you didn't have enough units to fully capture it after taking out the person standing on it. Once you're standing on the base, if you don't have enough of the sigils covered, you find yourself with every unit previously standing on your opponent's main fortress on top of your army immediately and able to attack anyone.

 

4 hours ago, Raven said:

A simple 8 vs 8 would also be nice, with the objective to either route or capture the point(s) with what you've got.

Rout is too much easier than capture without enemy reinforcements.

 

I do agree that teleportation takes away the interesting points about having a large map. I like the idea of simply having the camps be points of reinforcement instead of teleportation points. For example, on turns where you receive new units, you get the option to move the new units around in the same way as you can at the beginning of the first turn.

I think things would be interesting to have the maps be 8 v. 12 without teleportation. It would also be interesting to have enemy units' movement types themed for each camp, for example have the closer camps spawn armors and the farther camps spawn cavalry.

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4 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

The problem is not approaching the base, but when you're standing on top of it because you didn't have enough units to fully capture it after taking out the person standing on it

That's how FE works in general. If you don't take out the threats on PP, they'll hurt you on EP. The difference is this case is rather than a unit, the "threat" is a base you need to hit twice.

For a main series example, take Radiant Dawn 3-13. You might want to defeat Ike to end the chapter. If your units aren't in position so that you can finish him in one turn, he and the allies will swarm you ((for the purposes of this example, they weren't weakened in the last GM chapter). You need to wait until you can bring enough force on the target.

4 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

. Once you're standing on the base, if you don't have enough of the sigils covered, you find yourself with every unit previously standing on your opponent's main fortress on top of your army immediately and able to attack anyone.

So, if you're unable to neutralise the base on that turn, you shouldn't charge in anyway and get cleaned up. You should approach the base so that the only ways the enemy can attack you are favourable to you. The basic principles of bait and switch still apply.

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40 minutes ago, Baldrick said:

That's how FE works in general. If you don't take out the threats on PP, they'll hurt you on EP. The difference is this case is rather than a unit, the "threat" is a base you need to hit twice.

For a main series example, take Radiant Dawn 3-13. You might want to defeat Ike to end the chapter. If your units aren't in position so that you can finish him in one turn, he and the allies will swarm you ((for the purposes of this example, they weren't weakened in the last GM chapter). You need to wait until you can bring enough force on the target.

So, if you're unable to neutralise the base on that turn, you shouldn't charge in anyway and get cleaned up. You should approach the base so that the only ways the enemy can attack you are favourable to you. The basic principles of bait and switch still apply.

It's physically impossible to do this with a team of mostly melee units because your own units end up blocking off all of the attack routes to the base. This is a direct result of the fact that units in Heroes have very small movement ranges, making it nearly impossible to go around to the other side of a tile you cannot walk over.

You need a minimum of one unit to kill the unit sitting on the base itself and two units to attack, which means you need to occupy three of the four tiles adjacent to the base simply to take the base in one turn. Then, there's the fact that you need to clean up enemy units sitting around the base that came from teleporting in on the previous turn, which tends to result in attack channels to the base being blocked off. Because it's virtually impossible to move around the base to attack it from the fourth side, you're stuck with a base that cannot be finished in one turn.

Additionally, in order to avoid being targeted by ranged units teleporting onto the tiles adjacent to the base, your units must necessarily stand 4 squares away from the base on the previous turn. This means that it is, in fact, physically impossible to target the base in a single turn at all using melee units with 2 movement range, forcing you to either eat a turn of teleporting reinforcements or run ranged or cavalry units. Furthermore, ranged units with 2 movement range necessarily need to be in the front line in order to hit the base, meaning they will be taking all of the hits on enemy phase from units already at the base, and taking hits is typically not what they're supposed to do. This is poor design.

Coupled with the time restriction, the best strategy is to zerg rush the base, at which point why are we playing a strategy game at all?

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44 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

It's physically impossible to do this with a team of mostly melee units because your own units end up blocking off all of the attack routes to the base. This is a direct result of the fact that units in Heroes have very small movement ranges, making it nearly impossible to go around to the other side of a tile you cannot walk over.

You need a minimum of one unit to kill the unit sitting on the base itself and two units to attack, which means you need to occupy three of the four tiles adjacent to the base simply to take the base in one turn. Then, there's the fact that you need to clean up enemy units sitting around the base that came from teleporting in on the previous turn, which tends to result in attack channels to the base being blocked off. Because it's virtually impossible to move around the base to attack it from the fourth side, you're stuck with a base that cannot be finished in one turn.

Ranged units and dancers are usually very useful units in Heroes (like horses, they are generally given lower BST scores) and this mode is no exception. They increase the amount of tiles you can attack from, and how many attacks you can launch from a single square.

You should be using mostly ranged units. If you can remove the enemy units on the portals using only ranged units, you have three-five extra tiles to assault the base from. I'd say a good ratio for your initial force is 5 ranged/2 melee, with 1 dancer as support.

 

44 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Additionally, in order to avoid being targeted by ranged units teleporting onto the tiles adjacent to the base, your units must necessarily stand 4 squares away from the base on the previous turn. This means that it is, in fact, physically impossible to target the base in a single turn at all using melee units with 2 movement range, forcing you to either eat a turn of teleporting reinforcements or run ranged or cavalry units.

Do you know why they call FE4 (and FE6 and FE9 to some extent) Horse Emblem? It's because movement is indeed quite a good stat when the maps are big and you have an enforced turn limit. Even if cavalry aren't the bonus, your top 8 should be mostly horses to blitz the base, then make your reinforcements the bonus units and they can teleport in and rack up the kills.

And ftr, it obviously depends on the incoming units, but I would definitely expect a melee infantry mixed tank to be able to take some hits (even a f2player should have access to a SB/QR/Aether dragon or two through their friends list).

 

44 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Furthermore, ranged units with 2 movement range necessarily need to be in the front line in order to hit the base, meaning they will be taking all of the hits on enemy phase from units already at the base, and taking hits is typically not what they're supposed to do. This is poor design.

If you're using ranged units to hit the base, you should be in a position to take the base which means you don't have to worry about reinforcements from the other bases/can teleport reinforcements of your own to handle enemies still around the base. If you're moving a single ranged unit in to hit the base, and not having a Swap/Reposition/Pivot tank in position to shield them from the heat, that's poor strategy.

 

44 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Coupled with the time restriction, the best strategy is to zerg rush the base, at which point why are we playing a strategy game at all?

The aim of the game is territory. If you zerg mindlessly, your units will die and you will lose territory. The best strategy is to gain as much ground as possible while minimising the amount of ground your opponent gains. If you make no distinction between auto-battle zerg and a methodical, calculated blitz, whatever.

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1 hour ago, Baldrick said:

Ranged units and dancers are usually very useful units in Heroes (like horses, they are generally given lower BST scores) and this mode is no exception. They increase the amount of tiles you can attack from, and how many attacks you can launch from a single square.

You should be using mostly ranged units. If you can remove the enemy units on the portals using only ranged units, you have three-five extra tiles to assault the base from. I'd say a good ratio for your initial force is 5 ranged/2 melee, with 1 dancer as support.

Ranged units typically have horrible enemy phases and my play style is geared towards enemy phase. Forcing the use of specific play styles not by making the play style the most efficient but my making all other play styles nearly unusable is poor design.

 

1 hour ago, Baldrick said:

Do you know why they call FE4 (and FE6 and FE9 to some extent) Horse Emblem? It's because movement is indeed quite a good stat when the maps are big and you have an enforced turn limit. Even if cavalry aren't the bonus, your top 8 should be mostly horses to blitz the base, then make your reinforcements the bonus units and they can teleport in and rack up the kills.

Moving across a big map is not the issue here. You're getting to the first enemy base in two turns regardless of your movement type.

The problem is actually attacking said base. It is physically impossible to move from outside of the teleportation attack range to hit the base using melee infantry, and even when you do get your melee infantry there on the next turn, it is generally impossible to actually capture the base because there are not enough squares to attack from.

 

1 hour ago, Baldrick said:

and FE9 to some extent

Last I checked, the main reason why cavalry was good in FE9 was because all of them got axes on promotion and because they could use the remainder of their movement to reposition themselves after performing an action. Their actual movement range didn't matter quite as much as these two abilities.

 

1 hour ago, Baldrick said:

And ftr, it obviously depends on the incoming units, but I would definitely expect a melee infantry mixed tank to be able to take some hits (even a f2player should have access to a SB/QR/Aether dragon or two through their friends list).

Please count the number of melee infantry mixed tanks there are in the game. Now count how many of them have access to Distant Counter on their weapon.

 

1 hour ago, Baldrick said:

If you're using ranged units to hit the base, you should be in a position to take the base which means you don't have to worry about reinforcements from the other bases/can teleport reinforcements of your own to handle enemies still around the base. If you're moving a single ranged unit in to hit the base, and not having a Swap/Reposition/Pivot tank in position to shield them from the heat, that's poor strategy.

I'm talking about the turn of setup used to position your units to take the base on the next turn. Not the turn of actually attacking the base.

In order for a ranged infantry unit to hit the base, they need to be 4 squares away from the base at the end of the previous turn without a tank in front of them, which means any enemy units currently at the base when you end your turn are capable of attacking your front line of ranged units.

 

1 hour ago, Baldrick said:

The aim of the game is territory. If you zerg mindlessly, your units will die and you will lose territory. The best strategy is to gain as much ground as possible while minimising the amount of ground your opponent gains. If you make no distinction between auto-battle zerg and a methodical, calculated blitz, whatever.

And yet the moment this week's season started, we immediately got a bunch of players saying that they auto-battled Infernal difficulty with enough points gained to acquire the reward on the first try.

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It's not like there aren't any modes where EP-focused units are good. If you don't care for a playstyle, fair enough, but don't imply that people who enjoy a different playstyle to you shouldn't be catered to.

Incidentally, I don't know what you mean by "nearly unusable". Later in your post, you consider a playstyle good if it can reach the reward threshold, which is easy to do with a defensive playstyle. An offensive playstyle is only really necessary if you want to capture all the camps.

 

I said that FE9 was Horse Emblem to a smaller extent than FE4, where the former isn't true, and the latter is far less relevant compared to movement range; fliers have canto but less movement than horses due to how terrain cost works in that game, and so Fury/Fee are less meta compared to other first fliers in the series.

Don't selectively respond to my arguments.

 

Depends on how you define mixed tank. My infantry squad uses Tiki, Fjorm, and Brave Ike for that role, and DC would hurt the latter's ability to tank magic users. If you want to run 20 melee infantry mixed tanks, you'll definitely be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

 

2-move ranged units are just as capable of being covered by tanks in that situation, the tanks just have to be closer to the base, and so naturally they will be less useful compared to cavalry ranged when trying to take the base.

 

The bonus for horses makes that a far easier achievement. Raven's clear only took one camp and literally the minimum points needed, so there's plenty of room for optimisation.

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This mode is like super easy in my opinion, although that is probably due to the amount of 5*+10 units that are on my friends list. Both Enemy Phase and Player Phase are viable, or at least I seem to need both for my strategy.

For this season and last, I run armor units on the left division with a healer as support and they slow push towards the left camp. Everyone else is in the right division and try to rush the right camp. After I end my first turn, enemies usually teleport to the left side to try and attack my armor units. The right side maybe has like one enemy who teleports there, so it is pretty easy to just take over that base on the second turn.

My armor division usually takes over the left camp by turn four or five, so all they have to do is move slightly forward to draw some aggro while my right division starts to spawn kill the enemies at the fortress.

By turn eight my armor units start pushing forward even more to choke off the enemies' any remaining mobility while my right division snipe any enemies that spawn on the unoccupied teleport tiles.

Edited by XRay
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55 minutes ago, Baldrick said:

It's not like there aren't any modes where EP-focused units are good. If you don't care for a playstyle, fair enough, but don't imply that people who enjoy a different playstyle to you shouldn't be catered to.

It's not a matter of the fact that player-phase characters are being catered to in this game mode. I don't mind if one play style has an advantage as long as other play styles are near each other in difficulty. The problem is that enemy-phase team compositions are severely below baseline.

 

58 minutes ago, Baldrick said:

Incidentally, I don't know what you mean by "nearly unusable". Later in your post, you consider a playstyle good if it can reach the reward threshold, which is easy to do with a defensive playstyle. An offensive playstyle is only really necessary if you want to capture all the camps.

If memory serves, you had to hit the enemy main base at least once in order to obtain the Infernal rewards in the first season. Do correct me if I'm wrong about that, though.

 

1 hour ago, Baldrick said:

Don't selectively respond to my arguments.

If I don't respond to something, you can safely assume that I either concede the point or don't care enough about it to care whether I concede the point.

 

1 hour ago, Baldrick said:

Depends on how you define mixed tank. My infantry squad uses Tiki, Fjorm, and Brave Ike for that role, and DC would hurt the latter's ability to tank magic users. If you want to run 20 melee infantry mixed tanks, you'll definitely be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

No, but I definitely want to be running around 12.

 

1 hour ago, Baldrick said:

2-move ranged units are just as capable of being covered by tanks in that situation, the tanks just have to be closer to the base, and so naturally they will be less useful compared to cavalry ranged when trying to take the base.

Which requires each of your walls to spend their turn using Reposition or Swap to move the ranged unit behind it into a position where the base can be attacked by it. Which costs you 3-4 rounds of combat on player phase.

 

1 hour ago, Baldrick said:

The bonus for horses makes that a far easier achievement.

You don't say.

However, it's still rather telling that it's possible at all to do. If you can throw together a team of whatever and tell the AI to do play the game for you and still adequately clear the hardest difficulty of a game mode designed to be at least somewhat difficult, something went wrong in the design process.

 

1 hour ago, Baldrick said:

Raven's clear only took one camp and literally the minimum points needed, so there's plenty of room for optimisation.

What's the point of optimizing when there is no reward for scoring higher? Unlike challenge maps like Grand Hero Battles which have fixed opponents and therefore fixed difficulty and reproducible strategies, this mode is largely randomized, making a high score less meaningful.

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If you don't care to optimise beyond getting the rewards, what does it matter that EP units aren't as optimal?

If that was the case for the first week, the score threshold was lowered, since Raven's autoplay clear didn't hit the main base at all and got the Infernal reward.

Infantry ranged need to be 4 squares away, and the tanks 3, compared to 5-4 if you're using cavalry.

I don't think getting the rewards are meant to be challenging. Like Tap Battle, you don't need a perfect score and it doesn't cost any Stamina.

Because it's fun?

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2 hours ago, Baldrick said:

Infantry ranged need to be 4 squares away, and the tanks 3, compared to 5-4 if you're using cavalry.

If the tanks are 3 squares away, they get hit by ranged units teleporting in, and the AI will do its best to have weapon triangle advantage, which is exactly how player-controlled tanks are not supposed to be used.

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I found this one to be quite easy compared to the others, i was able to beat it on the second attempt compared to the 10th attempt on some of the other maps. I think its becuase of my love of fliers and the fact tgat fliers are the bonus this week. Didnt get to use too many friend units though, not many of my friends had fliers as their lead :(

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