The instant healing using dust is probably very important for the BL to compensate for the fact that they don't have ranged units (which often allow you to win fights with minor losses). (The necrophages probably deal with that by getting more from winning fights, and their support unit is supposed to resurrect dead units or something?)

Staub wrote:


The Palace city improvement doesn't negate expansion disapproval, if I understood the tool tip "x0 expansion disapproval on city" right.

I think this is supposed to reflect that you get -10 approval per city, except that your capital isn't counted for that purpose.

Staub wrote:
I would really recommend to make two Approval Bars or somehow separately log the different Approval % and penalty's. Since even with this clarification it will be hard to see which of the two Approval rating is on what %, since Approval buildings apply to both the same but separately.

The second approval bar is in the empire screen - which also lists the current and modifiers due to approval.

So you could just re-assign every single population to production, buy something, and then assign them back to what you want them doing.

Thought on this...



Rather than buyout costs being a function of how much Industry is remaining to complete the Improvement/Unit, maybe make it a function of the amount of turns required to complete. If a City has little Industry output, the buyout will be much more expensive...



Example (numbers are fake and formula is just for easy math purposes):



Sample formula.: Buyout = # remaining turns to produce X 20 Dust...



Item costs 800 production. City has 10 Industry, item would take 80 turns. -> Buyout would be 1600 Dust



Same item, but City has 80 Industry, item would take 10 turns -> Buyout would be 200 Dust.



This would require that cities have some production or the buyouts would be really high.

Staub wrote:
Thanks for the great feedback! Clears up many questions I had. I would really recommend to make two Approval Bars or somehow separately log the different Approval % and penalty's. Since even with this clarification it will be hard to see which of the two Approval rating is on what %, since Approval buildings apply to both the same but separately.

Also makes some of my feedback useless Dx since its based on wrong assumptions.



Having empire wide and city wide approval affect different areas makes sense in the context of making factions adopt different play style's.



This means as Broken Lord you want to build few but huge cities, going along with their lore and (I'm guessing) their intended role of being city builders and having small but focused empires(tall empires).

Wild Walkers though would build many smaller cities, meaning a reduced Dust/Research income but keeping their industry and food production high, to keep up in research you would need to put Population into it or try to have a wider empire (lot of small cities) then everybody else. (Having the ability to see your whole region makes much more sense to me now)



Since we have a bit more factions this is probably a bit more complicated but I guess that the Dev's will have put some though into it

The opposite is presently true. Currently "expansion disapproval" applies to the city-level happiness total. Because the city-level happiness total modifies food and industry production, it hits those values particularly hard once the empire expands beyond a certain limit. To see this in action, try running a Vaulters or WW game on a large map with small regions.



By contrast, the BL can expand rapidly without this malus hitting them with a double whammy. Because they can have more cites, they also stand a better chance of countering the empire-level happiness malus because one or more of those cities is likely to be in a region containing wine. PANCZASU's video helps explain it (see here).

Thanks for the great feedback! Clears up many questions I had. I would really recommend to make two Approval Bars or somehow separately log the different Approval % and penalty's. Since even with this clarification it will be hard to see which of the two Approval rating is on what %, since Approval buildings apply to both the same but separately.

Also makes some of my feedback useless Dx since its based on wrong assumptions.



Having empire wide and city wide approval affect different areas makes sense in the context of making factions adopt different play style's.



This means as Broken Lord you want to build few but huge cities, going along with their lore and (I'm guessing) their intended role of being city builders and having small but focused empires(tall empires).

Wild Walkers though would build many smaller cities, meaning a reduced Dust/Research income but keeping their industry and food production high, to keep up in research you would need to put Population into it or try to have a wider empire (lot of small cities) then everybody else. (Having the ability to see your whole region makes much more sense to me now)



Since we have a bit more factions this is probably a bit more complicated but I guess that the Dev's will have put some though into it

[QUOTEusername='Fifix[FR];173764']

Possible solution : Decrease ALL FIDS production by 20%, then 50%. This way, every faction will be punished. [/QUOTE]



Simple and nice solution

Chronodrax wrote:
Hi,

just passing through rapidly to confirm some points (sorry if some of these already have been explained above):



¤ There is a bug on Approval consequences, allowing old bonuses or maluses to stay, and making it difficult to read and understand. We're working on it.

¤ City approval can give Food and Industry bonsues (or maluses).

¤ Empire approval can give Dust and Science bonsues (or maluses).

¤ Empire Approval is the average approval value of all your cities combined.

¤ Approval statuses are :

¤-| Strike/Rebellion (less than 10%)

¤-| Unhappy (between 10% and 40%)

¤-| Content (40% to 60%)

¤-| Happy (between 60% and 90%)

¤-| Ecstatic/Fervent (more than 90%)

¤-| ... each status giving different bonuses/maluses.

(we'll also work on ways to feedback this in-game in the future)



'Hope that helps



And thanks for your feedback on Broken Lords, we'll work on that too !

Out of curiosity, what was the design motivation for bifurcating the application of city-level approval (to food and production only) and empire-level approval (to dust & science only)? This mechanic strikes me as odd.

Edit:

I know its a bad pun, I followed general internet rules and put a smiley behind it so nobody gets offended.

Made another post on the second page rectifying some of the things I wrote and adding some stuff.



Some feedback for the Broken Lords and extra tidbits.



First of let me say I really love the whole feeling and the visuals of the game, played lots of Endless Space and love the familiarity and resemblance as well as the refreshing UI.

So far the Broken Lords are my favorite faction though no winter/summer city pop management and manually grow able population make their gameplay a bit static.

I really like the flavor of the faction old human Lords clinging to bygone life not being able to let go and embrace their new unlife, their whole culture, architecture and society frozen in time.





Now to the actual feedback:





No Lord cares for Approval



The basic problem lies with the fact that negative approval only impacts food and production.

The Broken Lord Faction completely ignores Food, so that part has no impact what so ever, which was the strongest growth penalty.

At a certain point the production doesn't bother you anymore too, since you just buy out anything.



Even if your city is in full rebellion, 0% Approval, it is productive and functioning.

Dust, Research, Influence aren't affected by low Approval and this is all that the Broken Lords need.



Ignoring approval allows you to build as many cities as you want and grow them as big as you want. Outclassing any other faction.

Its not hard to get 5-6 cities by Era II, buying whole armies 4-6 units in one turn and make any city as big as possible ignoring the extra district disapproval.

My usual Dust income ranges between 1k-2k at the end of Era II depending on how many cities I dedicate to science/influence (without even trying hard or being otherwise gamey, like taking advantage of the unfinished AI).



On a site note the Broken Lord start heavily depends on ruin yield, since 2-3 good Dust yields allow you too heavily boost your population, which is very luck based.



Other feedback:



The Borough Streets "+10 Approval per city level" seems to be either not working or the tool tip is wrong.

The Palace city improvement doesn't negate expansion disapproval, if I understood the tool tip "x0 expansion disapproval on city" right.



Also right now the city building rewards snaky cities which look really bad, are gamey and break immersion. Guess the +10 Approval bonus per city level was meant as a incentive to get people to build more compact cities.





If wanted I can upload pics or link a video as demonstration.

wyldmage wrote:
A one population town, situated with 3 tiles on a river, watched over by a broken lords hero with 2 points in the "bonus from rivers" tech, and buy out (or build) the era 1 building for +2 more dust per river tile?

Hero costs level 7 are -8 at most (not seen higher yet).

A level 5 hero (since if its 6+ you probably have more +dust abilities) is going to be -6 or less.

Can assign the 1 population to make Dust for +4.

The river tiles are all worth at least 6, for a total of 18.

The city produces 1 on its own.

City costs -10 to maintain.

The population costs -2 to maintain.



Total so far? We're +4 dust per turn. Even with the current 20% penalty and rounding down (not in our favor), the town is breaking even.



And when I played the Lords, I had a hero with at least +6 from river tiles (for at least 9 per tile), and towns on 4+ river tiles. I would be making money even with a -50% malus.

And that's not even accounting for the hero's NEXT tier ability that ups all tiles with dust by another 1 per rank, or having more population, or having built more than 1 building. Like the +5 and +20% that you start with researched.

Or once you hit era 3 and get 2 more buildings available :P Heaven forbid you have enough population to build a borough and get another tile or two of river!



Really, the happiness modifiers are nowhere near harsh enough considering how amped up towns can get from buildings, especially for the Broken Lords.

All very interesting and worth watching, but this is really a critique of the strength of heroes, isn't it--especially BL heroes? Remember that heroes are not faction-locked, so any other faction can make use of BL heroes.

A couple things to note from my personal experiences so far.



I played the BL my first game, and while it took me until about turn 80 or so to realize how to buy population, even with my meager cities I was keeping up with exploring, healing/upgrading my troops, and generally conquering what I saw around me. This was only against 2 AI but they still were very little challenge once I realized how to grow out my cities. I recently just played a WW game against 6 AI and slaughtered them all, even with claiming every city my end game was still quiet manageable and I had over 20 cities. The point of this being, that at the moment, the factions are all quiet strong, and as a few others have mentioned without a stronger AI to pit against, it is hard to really say if something is broken or not.



Onto specific points about the BL, we've seen this sort of race before from Amplitude, in the Harmony from ES, only they were Anti-Dust. Yes they were one of the stronger factions (in my opinion) due to not having to worry about dust or moral, but that came with severe draw backs of no rushed production, ship upgrading, or heroes. Those negatives didn't play much of a factor on easier difficulties, or at the start of a game, but in the end game you really noticed them. I see the BL having these same sort of issues later on. IIRC the population purchase jumps go up significantly high in short order... I believe it was ~40, ~90, ~200, ~1000+. Maybe it was just my bad start with the BL but having most of your cities only be 4-5 population is enough for I believe 2 districts. That doesn't let you expand out your cities all that much to provide more resources (and more importantly Dust).



In comparison, I've had 12+ population in some of my WW cities, so while yes I had to burn population to feed everyone, I could easily do that and make as much/more money as the BL were to buy out things with.





Oh, it is also worth mentioned, that militarily the BL troops seem weaker than factions like the WW or vaulters who have strong ranged units.

Varadhon wrote:
Seems like a viable way of going.

A one population town, situated with 3 tiles on a river, watched over by a broken lords hero with 2 points in the "bonus from rivers" tech, and buy out (or build) the era 1 building for +2 more dust per river tile?

Hero costs level 7 are -8 at most (not seen higher yet).

A level 5 hero (since if its 6+ you probably have more +dust abilities) is going to be -6 or less.

Can assign the 1 population to make Dust for +4.

The river tiles are all worth at least 6, for a total of 18.

The city produces 1 on its own.

City costs -10 to maintain.

The population costs -2 to maintain.



Total so far? We're +4 dust per turn. Even with the current 20% penalty and rounding down (not in our favor), the town is breaking even.



And when I played the Lords, I had a hero with at least +6 from river tiles (for at least 9 per tile), and towns on 4+ river tiles. I would be making money even with a -50% malus.

And that's not even accounting for the hero's NEXT tier ability that ups all tiles with dust by another 1 per rank, or having more population, or having built more than 1 building. Like the +5 and +20% that you start with researched.

Or once you hit era 3 and get 2 more buildings available :P Heaven forbid you have enough population to build a borough and get another tile or two of river!



Really, the happiness modifiers are nowhere near harsh enough considering how amped up towns can get from buildings, especially for the Broken Lords.

Haha, oh yeah the BL AI with their stacks of Ryders lol

And not to mention their city placing, as BL I end up salting half or more of the captured AI cities because they are just so badly placed.



Hmm probably in this state you can really not compare directly.

And it might just be more that the Dust production of the BL Heroes is to high(+ accessory), the Approval penalty's are not harsh enough, I have seen a Wild Walker player with over 12 cities in turn 115, rather then the Broken Lords being overpowered.





What lies definitely with the BL:

• Their city population is usually not diminishing since it will never reduce because of missing resource and also doesn't need upkeep, you buy them once then you will have them forever(ignoring enemy AI captures your city). I think this is what creates a lot of the imbalance and will probably more often become an exploitable point that needs to be balanced out, also while being the BL's most unique mechanic
  
  
  
  
• Cheap instant healing anywhere, the price is balanced in the beginning until you have 2-3 good cities running, but later on it just gets way to cheap. Healing an almost dead army of 6 units with hero for about 200-300 Dust, its peanuts. You can do that 3 times in a row and slaughter yourself through enemy stacks.
  
  

Staub wrote:
While I'm writing here from my present experience of the game, I do realize this is the alpha stage and that changes will still be applied, but right now the Broken Lords are definitely imbalanced, and comparatively stronger then any other race.

I really like your analysis in toto. The point in bold is the only point I disagree with. I do think it's worth signaling that there's a potential, game-skewing imbalance inherent in the BL. Right now, though, there is no meaningful comparison because of the state of the AI and the unavailability of MP. I've tried starting them on an arctic world . . . it was a distinctly troublesome experience compared to starting in a desert. The AI certainly has no idea what to do with the BL and they feel like one of the easiest factions to conquer.



The amount of dust assignable to the hero is an important point. The BL reliance on dust gives them an early game flexibility that some of the other factions don't have because the BL can achieve a reasonable dust total at the temporary cost of not buying improvements, not buying or healing troops, etc. As a result, the BL have an easier time acquiring heroes early on. That's an important advantage that's easy to overlook. Your analysis points out their unique value. If this advantage turns out to be too strong as testing progresses and the AI improves, it might be worth adding a specific negative faction modifier to the BL. It could be something like "Miserly overlords," which would increase the cost of heroes to the faction because nobody wants to work for them. Alternatively, maybe BL heroes (not heroes purchased by the BL, but heroes that are from the BL faction) should be more expensive--maybe they're just greedier?

uriak wrote:
Indeed, it seems skipping a "stat" could lead to some issues, but I think it's rather the ubiquitous usage of dust that's aggravating. For dust to be interesting for normal factions it allows :



instant production of units/buildings

refitting, buying other units or goods needed.

and in the case of the Broken Lord it's aggravated by instant pop and healing.



The keyword is instant. Whatever are the methods used by other means than dust they need some proper place or pace to be achieved. It wouldn't be an issue because often you burn quickly through your dust stash but if the race gears you toward going all dust production it can spiral out of control. For instance, provided enough dust, you can settle a city, buyout a decent pop, the first essential buildings and even some defenders in a single turn. Other factions can do this with dust and stacks too, but that still means preparing this effort, whereas a all dust strategy doesnt require as much planning.

I dunno if it will be balanced in the end, it's likely to be of course, and you certainly want to keep whats make the lords unique. I'm just a bit afraid it could lead to a somewhat boring ans straightforward management of them.



For me a solution could be to have people pay for "hastyness" : eg : increasing pop being higher just after the last increase until it settles back to a more normal cost, and for healing, have healing be higher the farther you are from friendly lands, in increasing cost : friendly city, friendly region, neutral region, enemy region. But it needs to be correctly displayed to the players of course.

Population purchases currently work this way, though they don't settle back to a "normal" cost. I wouldn't be opposed to this mechanic--the one you describe for population--being imposed for multiple single-turn buyouts. When you're able to produce enough dust as one of the other factions, buying lots of stuff out feels just as OP as with the BL. I also like the rationale: you're paying a premium for the haste. What's the saying? "Haste makes waste!"

Indeed, it seems skipping a "stat" could lead to some issues, but I think it's rather the ubiquitous usage of dust that's aggravating. For dust to be interesting for normal factions it allows :



instant production of units/buildings

refitting, buying other units or goods needed.

and in the case of the Broken Lord it's aggravated by instant pop and healing.



The keyword is instant. Whatever are the methods used by other means than dust they need some proper place or pace to be achieved. It wouldn't be an issue because often you burn quickly through your dust stash but if the race gears you toward going all dust production it can spiral out of control. For instance, provided enough dust, you can settle a city, buyout a decent pop, the first essential buildings and even some defenders in a single turn. Other factions can do this with dust and stacks too, but that still means preparing this effort, whereas a all dust strategy doesnt require as much planning.

I dunno if it will be balanced in the end, it's likely to be of course, and you certainly want to keep whats make the lords unique. I'm just a bit afraid it could lead to a somewhat boring ans straightforward management of them.



For me a solution could be to have people pay for "hastyness" : eg : increasing pop being higher just after the last increase until it settles back to a more normal cost, and for healing, have healing be higher the farther you are from friendly lands, in increasing cost : friendly city, friendly region, neutral region, enemy region. But it needs to be correctly displayed to the players of course.

Thank you all for the feedback, the title may be a bit ill chosen, plus being a bad pun.



Yes there seems to be something wrong with the Approval system, if it is only the tool tip or if there are actually discrepancy's between expansion disapproval and local disapproval or if it is a big misunderstanding caused by the lack of insight on our side I don't know. So this is a bit of muddy terrain where a lot of false stuff can be written just by the lack of understanding on our side.





I have to rectify some of my earlier statements:

• Yes disapproval seems to reduce Dust and Tech income.
  
  
  
  
• The +10 approval per lvl 2 district seems to actually work, seems like I did a calculation mistake earlier or miscounted the districts of my city.
  
  You see I have a city with the central square and 9 extra districts 3 of them (the ones with 4 influence stars) are lvl 2 and the rest 6 are lvl 1, my city gives me -60 approval, so lvl 2 boroughs result in a +-0 approval and don't count towards the cities total disapproval by having too many street boroughs.
  
  I think my earlier assumption that doesn't work was that to the fact that the main square/city center doesn't give happiness if you level it up to lvl 2.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• While I'm writing here from my present experience of the game, I do realize this is the alpha stage and that changes will still be applied, but right now the Broken Lords are definitely imbalanced, and comparatively stronger then any other race.
  
  

So I did some more testing and playing and some actual number crunching, which I dare not present here since its full of assumptions and therefore might be utterly wrong.

But I will share my in game testing here. Disclaimer: Approval labeling (content, happy, fervent, rebellion) seems to not update properly at all.



So I have the earlier shown city with 18 Population 9 extra districts 3 of them lvl 2.

Which is my capital and produces a bit over 1k Dust per turn.

So how does negative approval affect my Dust income.

Even with the disapproval affecting Dust the difference from 1% Approval(Rebellion) and a 31% Approval (unhappy, I think it was) is about a 100 Dust.



The high Dust yield is partly because the Broken Lord heroes which give insane amount of bonus dust from anything that already produces Dust "+1 Dust on terrain with Dust" to a maximum of +3 and +Dust on rivers to a maximum of +6 Dust from river tiles (rivers being very common) and then the + % at the end of the tree. Also their extra yield doesn't seem to be affected from Approval at least not the % bonus.

Without the hero my Dust yield is about 520.





The two pictures for reference.

Also this is almost turn 200, which is fairly late in the game but this state of a city can be achieved a lot earlier, just picked up one of my saved games out of convenience. And again I know this game is alpha and a lot will still change but I think its still worth to report on what you found is wrong or imbalanced.

ArtoriasX wrote:
From my experience in role playing games when a character replaces the use of one stat for another he becomes overpowered. For example i was playing a game called apocalypse world (like a simple dnd that focuses more on storytelling) and i had a gunlugger (something like a gunslinger) with 3 hard (something like strength but for all attacks) and i took an ability that makes me use hard instead of cool (Dexterity used for avoiding stuff and being stealthy) of which i had 1 and that immediately made me overpowered and i could not loose no matter what the GM threw at me. Lesson here, you need to nerf their ability to produce dust since you only need to make dust producing cities, create more people and place them in other positions and with that you have a huge power in your hands.

A reasonably balanced system in an RPG would lead overuse of one stat to create significant exposure in deficient stats--a basic opportunity cost. Creating that balance is a constant design problem because either (1) player failure to exploit the exposed weakness occurs, or (2) some design flaw prevents players from doing so. "Nerfing" one stat typically leads some other stat to become the new OP stat. So described, the problem is typically not that said stat is OP, but that there's a lack of effective countermeasures thereto.



Even accepting the major premise here, I don't see how the conclusion necessarily follows. To overcome the problem presented (BL population), simply increasing the rate of increase of population cost would solve any population distribution advantage the BL might have. As it stands, current population costs seem fine to me. When, as BL, I have conquered other factions' cities, they usually have as many if not more population units distributed in non-food producing resource categories than I do, and their cities invariably have more districts (except the Necrophages, which either spam districts or don't build any at all). Raising individual costs on other items, such as healing and unit/building buyouts, also offers an alternative means for targeted balancing.



Overall, however, the question is really what counters exist against any BL "advantage." We are presently examining this largely in a vacuum because (1) the AI is not yet strong enough to be a real threat, and (2) MP is not yet implemented to see how one faction truly fares against another. If the WW, for example, are able to produce just as many units as the BL can buy and both are able to dedicate equal population and resources to other areas, then I don't see the problem. The only means currently available to replicate MP would be to track progress by someone who typically plays BL against progress, turn-by-turn, made by people who typically play one of the other factions.



For these reasons, we are getting ahead of ourselves in thinking that the BL are especially "broken."