TravlingCanuck wrote:

Fully agree that roads should not negate rivers on the tactical map.  Having them speed up movement on the strategic map makes perfect sense, but they shouldn't impact the tactical map.  Districts, yes, but not roads.  

+1: the logical choice

Everything I write was experienced on Humankind difficulty.

+1 to cities being too easy to take. Mainly because the defenders run out of their walls. You don't need to siege, the AI will rush into you when you assault the city, so you can easily take it even without siege weapons and only cavalry. If the AI is defending it should do just that, else it should sortie. But playing a city defense like a sortie is not smart.

+1 to retreating being super annoying. Enemy units flee right past your units into your own territory. Also they flee way further than they could usually move. The AI should take the direct route to their next city as their escape path, not run in a random direction.

+1 to Huns/Mongol unique unit being too strong. Double attacks are just super strong, even if the unit is of lower strength. It essentially doubles the number of units in one's army. Them ALSO being ranged (which means they don't have a health penalty for attacking a stronger target) pushes them over the edge. They are better than most units one era later. I would give them a ranged and a melee attack per turn, that would somewhat lift their incredible dominance.

My biggest complaint was a certain unit upgrade. Basically, I started as Egyptians and got their cool chariot archers, and later I switched to Mayans with their poison javelins. The chariots could move, fire, then move again, pretty neat. The javelins weren't any stronger, were slower, and only slightly decreased the speed and range of their targets. Why the bleep were they an "upgrade"? Being able to move away accomplished the same as slowing them down, except it would work on all the enemy units, not just the one.

Here are a few ways this could be fixed:

1. Make the chariots weaker or the javelins stronger. Bada bing bada boom, there's a benefit.
2. Make the poisoned units have their speeds and range reduced to 1 instead of by 1. Make it genuinely hard to move afterwards, although it should only last one round.
3. Replace the decrease in movement and range with a decrease in strength that stacks upon multiple attacks.

I'm going to group my combat, war and general zones of control here. My 2 cents

• Combat is generally very pleasant, enjoyable, fastpaced, and clearly explained.
• The new damage calculation is generally much better than in Lucy, I do feel now that bringing numbers matters instead of just 1 raid boss unit. However, see point below.
• The minimal damage done by a weaker unit (5-25) is, in my opinion, a bit too high and too random. It feels punitive to tactically engage an enemy and get killed by high RNG. It also makes ranged units, and especially large numbers of weak ones, very strong as they don't run the risk of retaliation damage.
  I advocate to change to minimal damage to 10-20; same on average but less random. However, this number should go down slightly the more disproportionate the strength differences become, e.g. at -5 CS -> 9-19, at -7 CS 8-18, and so on until bottoming out at 5-17 or 5-15. These numbers are based on no more than my gut feeling; I just think 5-25 makes everything very swingy.
• Troop movement points and zones of control; quite a bit to say here
  - I for one do not like that troops lose all movement when attacking; it can be abused easily and it pulls out a lot of potential from a single combat unit, especially when the other side is retreating.Isn't it possible to make troops lose 50% of their move, or a standard 1 or 2 move points? That would limit steamrolling but also not completely bear trap them
  - Retreating is a good concept, but it's really weird to move 5 tiles in a random direction when you just used all your move. It's even worse if you're the attacker and the enemy retreats 5 tiles over rivers and forests like it's nothing and you'll need 3 turns to catch them.
  - Zones of control: some of the implementation is weird. E.g. I had ships lose all movement because a coastal tile had an enemy unit on it. It shouldn't. Troops can only move 1 square along enemy troops even if there's a cliff in between them (I had the high ground) and I cannot attack them. They shouldn't; it's so easily abused. Troops can only move 1 tile when moving AWAY from enemy troops. They shouldn't. I've had scouts bump into another scout on their first move tile and only take 1 tile back. Couldn't we have double move cost for moving away and full move for moving 1 tile alongside enemy troops?
  Otherwise the concept is cool and works very well.

• Often, when rightclicking an enemy unit with my far away troop just to see the preview, the game bugs out, the combat zone is frozen and my troop becomes invisible. The preview tiles stay in combat mode even though there's no battle going on; no districts can be built on those tiles, sometimes no units can move into it, it's nasty. It can only be resolved by conducting actual combat, which resets only the tiles where the new combat was done and resolved. Other tiles stay frozen in the preview mode. My units would eventually turn visible again but I don't kow what triggers it (think it was attacking a mammoth or collecting a curiosity). -> This is the biggest bug in Victor that I encountered that needs priority attention.
• In my game, the Lighthouse of Alexandria wonder also gave a +1 CS bonus to land units instead of only naval units.

Also agree on sieges being far too easy because of the AI sallying out.

Another issue is that because of ranged units, the attacker in a siege has an advantage, which is odd. Sometimes (or very often when playing huns/mongols), you can win the siege with ranged units before the defenders got their first turn and therefore without taking any damage. Apart from ranged units needing a rebalance (at least the maximum minimum damage should be much lower, more like 10 or 15 instead of 25), I'd suggest that defenders in a siege get the first turn.

Hunnic/mongolian horsearchers are still OP. Their ability to attack twice needs to be nerfed. All other special units encountered seem fine. 

Combat system is very good, working perfect for small battles with at least 1 reinforcement. But with many reinforcements units are starting to block each other cuz combat field is pretty small.

I loved the battles, only fought with Egyptian archers and earlier but that felt good. The UI confused me slightly, I often clicked the wrong mouse button and moved all my units before adding reinforcements which auto-ended my turn and I was not able to add reinforcements that round. I also reinforced a siege with a boat which was useless and I did not find a way to leave combat with the boat so it was just stuck - no harm done. Finally I clicked a resource or something else while in combat mode which made me leave combat mode early. I don't think the strategic resources have any effect on a battle and if so the markers could be removed, obscured or non-clickable as this was quite annoying when fighting on top of them. I would love to see the turns not auto-ending and some ui improvement so I do not leave combat mode so often. 

Except for that I loved the units, movements, reinforcements! I had my first playthrough now and understood reinforcements and most combat mechanics in just a few battles. The siege was fantastic, the militia felt great on both sides. Archers felt very strong early when in a siege as I did not have to attack through the walls a single time. Maybe add a slight negative modifier when firing into a city? 

So far I like the changes from Lucy OpenDev... However there are still a few minor things that need attention.

When attacking, the fort was included not only in the combat zone, but also in the deployment zone.

My units were not only able to stand on the fort, but also get +1 combat strength bonus from district.

I think at least it should be impossible to benefit from defensive districts which belong to hostile players. No combat strength bonus and no occupation of such districts.

Only after shared logistics (diplomatic pact) is declared, should players be able to utilize others' districts in a combat with another player or independent people.

3) Movement point display in combat

Normally, units' movement points are always displayed on the panel, but if they are in a combat, it is neither displayed nor explained. I suppose units have the same amount of movement points as in the non-combat environment, but it would be nice to have transparency. If it exists in non-combat environment, then why not also in combat environment?
(only after experimentation with Assyrian's trait, which gives +1 movement point to all units, I was able to deduce that moving inside enemy's ZOC in a combat costs 4 movement points.)

4) little balancing tweaks in ransacking

I understand that ransacking has been weakened when compared to Lucy OpenDev. Back then it was powerfully exploitable. But at current state it has become far too slow. I guess making the turns required to ransack scalable to the number of participating units should suffice. (nevertheless not as fast as in Lucy OpenDev, obviously...)

I'm also suspicious about ransacking. If it's stable and requires 7 turns for any army it's pretty weak, if it's scales with amount of units or their quality then it's good.

A few reflections from sadly limited play time:

+ I think the depth of the combat system fits the overall game very well and it's broadly well executed. I look forward to seeing more of it and exploring how it's extended in modern eras.

- During combat, I wasn't sure what counts as crossing a river. Any move attacking from or into a river?  One of the drawbacks of having rivers as tiles, rather than borders.

- During the one bigger battle I had in my game, I added a unit from outside the battlefield into it to become a reinforcement. So far so good. But when asked to deploy, I just could not find my deployment point. I think it needs to be shown more prominently on the battle map.

- Not strictly combat, but warfare, I found it sort of interesting that armies on the map cannot pass through full armies already on the map. The pathfinding can go a bit crazy then. I don't have an issue with it and that can make sense, but should maybe be included in one of the beginner tool tips. Unless it is and I just missed it.

Aside from some UI glitches where defeated units would not disappear visually, I really liked the combat mechanics overall.  Victor was my first opendev, so I'm unsure as to what it was like before, but now it feels really solid.  There was a learning curve with reinforcements, terrain mechanics, and zone of control, but I'm used to that from civ and similar games.  Anti-cavalry felt like a noticeable threat when I would otherwise dominate from horseback.  Heavy cavalry charge was an interesting mechanic, although it resulted in me often retreating through my troops (to avoid zone of control) only to turn right back around for a charge bonus (having moved "more than 1 space" to attack the same target).  I'm mixed overall on that, as it felt like an odd tactic but did result in a lot more possibilities for strategic formations mid combat.  All in all, I really appreciated all of the battle mechanics in this game.

That being said, AI strategy is very lackluster.  As others have said, they would often completely ignore height advantage/disadvantage, and on more than one occasion they would retreat downhill and leave their base (which actually WAS uphill) undefended.  Assuming the AI for combat improves, the base mechanics for combat feel pretty solid to me so far.  Poor AI just meant that I would often dominate any battle, regardless of whether I had an actual advantage in terms of unit type/numbers.

Still, my most memorable moment was actually my very first/second fight with an AI civ where they outnumbered me and attacked me as I ran downhill, only to survive the three rounds of combat and run to a more defensible position.  When they attacked the next turn I was able to beat them through a choke-point with a single weakened unit.  This was neolithic era still, and the possibility to "lose" a battle only to survive and win a second one really left an impression on me.

Overall, I really liked combat, especially in the early eras. Afterwards, I think it is too easy to just spam units to the point there is no strategy beyond keeping your units together and rush towards the ennemy. The root of this problem is that nothing really dissuade you from building loads and loads of units: the maintenance cost is negligible, and the pop consumed leads to unnatural strategies, such as constructing units in cities which are approaching their food surplus limit in order to increase your military with basically no cost because your city quickly regain this pop and would not have grown more anyway. I really like a suggestion made on this thread which is to make military units count as a pop of their original city, preventing this kind of strategy and adding a real economic cost to have huge military. It also seems more realistic - after all, these soldiers need to eat too. Maybe it would even be possible to unlock at some point the ability to share the burden of feeding the military between all your cities and not just the one who built it, in order to not penalize too much your most productive city.

It is also right that it feels strange that your unit lose all its movement after entering in combat, even if the opponent retreat. I mean, they should not be tired if they did not fight. I hope it is possible to code something that remove the movement after the battle and only if the units really took part in the fight: it could also be used to prevent you to lose your movement on reinforcements if you did not even deployed them. That way, you would have to make a choice between increasing your military presence on the battlefield, for exemple if the battle goes wrong, and keep your reinforcements fresh so that they can continue to push afterwards.

Finally, another final thing that troubles me in battle is that the gunner's line of sight is very difficult to predict. I must admit that I have to rely solely on the red tooltip to find good shooting ground. However, this red marker is not here during the deployment (because there is no ennemy units to highlight) and sometimes a position that looke good can't fire anywhere. It also happens sometimes that I do not understand why a movement is not allowed. A good way to fix it would be to add an info on the tooltip that says why this action is impossible.

But overall, I found the battles very enjoyable, great work!

At one point post-battle, I was unable to take any actions. I was able to reload an autosave and this was fixed. This was a similar bug to the one in diplomacy where if you receive multiple offers, you are unable to move etc.

1. combat is immensely more gratifying than CIV. Going against what I had anticipated, it not only made the combat proper more immersive and strategic, being able to see the battlefield boundaries beforehand also takes combat to an unseen meta-level: where do I position my units so as to get the high ground drop on my opponents? where can reinforcements come from, both for me as for my opponent, this turn and next turns? do I risk capturing the flag, or do I turtle up?
2. taking combat units directly from city pop keeps things balanced enough
3. I really like how you can sack cities before engaging in peace treaties. This makes both domination and diplomacy more impactful.
4. buyouts seemed to scale well enough
5. both on hard and very hard and from the medieval era onward, the AI seemed disinterested in properly defending / making sound tactical decisions. The game became a cakewalk.

1. having played as the Huns at one point, I do feel other cultures are lacking of a similarly impactful game-changing-meta. Rather than nerfing the Huns, please consider ways to make military similarly distinct for other cultures as well (eg, military osmosis events, giving active abilities instead of just passives, adopt a more engaging levelling up mechanic, send units for training in barracks to attain unique abilities, ...)
2. you should be to drag your vassals / allies into combat if they're within a combat zone with a common enemy - ideally agree on convergence points through diplomacy
3. RNG seems overpowered - odds of natural 20s are too high
4. going through the ages (pun intended), combat strength does not scale properly. There was hardly any reason to ditch my ancient era UU
5. some UU are carbon copies of others (Huns, Mongols)
6. in both campaigns, the AI could have steamrolled me had they only banded together / lured my vassals to backstab me.

I like the changes, although regular cavalry feels very weak, and anti-cavalry too strong with no obvious downsides.