What Conquest Game Mode Still Needs

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8 days ago
Jun 26, 2024, 2:23:23 AM

Dear CA,


Thanks SO MUCH for all your hard work making the Conquest game mode a reality. >40 high quality converted land battle maps and a system that fixes alot of the issues with quickbattle is a big step up and much appreciated.  And that’s on top of an incredibly promising balance patch.


Still, as you said in the patch notes, this launch is a “base to improve the experience in future updates” and there are two significant areas of improvement that our extensive testing with our mod and many land battle players we’ve spoken with point to as important.  


I’m hopeful that at least one of these recommendations and possibly both could be a pretty limited amount of work to update.


1. Contesting should stop the timer. The first and most important issue to address with Conquest is the way games end around the capture point.  Right now, when games go long, fairly often the timer will decide things before the battle is truly over. Long games are often among the funnest games, and players generally want those games to end based on the combat, rather than in frustration because you couldn’t dislodge someone quickly enough from a capture point time limit that rarely decides games but simply snuck up on you and takes a long time to take control with tattered units. Even worse is if fast units can gain victory over slow entities by cap weight but without engaging them.


To fix this, it’s really important that standing/fighting on an enemy held capture point - even before you retake it - pauses the timer. 


In our mod that was originally built using CA’s “Overthrow” system, this is how it worked, and it was great.  It forced players to engage in the center, but didn’t end the game prematurely so long as your units were still putting up a fight on the cap.  So almost always players can force a fight to the death or army losses, which is a satisfying way to end a long hard fought land battle.


This change alone will make a critical difference in whether land battle players accept and enjoy this mode, because no one wants games to end abruptly or without engagement after a long fight. It’s anticlimactic and unnecessary. The cap needs to force people to engage in the center but it doesn’t need to end games early to force that.


Your cap points are fortunately small enough that it should be very rare that players can contest endlessly, especially with army losses in play. If that is a concern, using even smaller cap points as we did would make it a zero chance.


2. Dynamic ticket accumulation rate makes for more engaging battles. Right now, you set the ticket threshold pretty low, which makes sense because you want to pressure players to actively engage, but also not make the tickets ignorable.  However, in playing and casting multiplayer battles, there will still be some lulls in the action - for example early on one player may spell kite without really engaging; or late game  if one player had no tickets but then has to slowly count up to 500 as another player barely engages in a similar way.  This is not great for players or viewers. 


To address this, a second improvement that would be very helpful is the use of a dynamic ticket accumulation rate as we did in our mod (script is there to crib off of). 


We made the game check every minute and had the ticket rate double to 2/s whenever players’ combined damage total was too low, such as around 1 units worth of hp per minute. But ticket rate goes back to 1/s when sufficient damage is dealt. 


This naturally accelerates the cap pressure when players don’t engage much or in the late game when very few units are left. You can set a higher total ticket limit, but still enforce active engagement even better.  


To implement something like this CA could:

1) use code like ours to make the single cap point tick 1 vs 2 tickets per second (or award extra tickets in some other way) depending on damage dealt in the prior minute;

2) write code to make some visual indicator (highlight color on the cap icon or flag?) to warn players when it has sped up versus slowed down.

3) set the ticket limit to win to be higher, like 700, confident that if players don’t actively engage that will actually be more like 350 seconds max thanks to this dynamic.


In our extensive testing of this feature, it produced the best viewing and playing experience for competitive gaming.  It would allow players to use more varied strategies (like slow and steady artillery or kiting) provided they are dealing good amounts of damage throughout. It is more popular with land battle players who used our mod and would facilitate wider embrace of the game mode.


Thanks so much for considering our input and we hope very much you can implement at least the first, if not both, pieces of this feedback!


Eumaies, Gojira, and Alfare


p.s. Agreeing with the general sentiment expressed in this thread that even if CA wants a tight game with some time pressure, increasing the lockout time by at least a minute and the game timer standard length to perhaps 600 would allow for a bit more time to breathe.
Second, and more fundamentally, contestation pausing the timer remains essential because games will always vary in ideal length.  We were able to successfully make a mod that implements this critical change, here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3279835907


This mod updates the mode to make "contesting" (i.e. standing still in or fighting in) a 15x15m square around the capture point pause the timer. This effectively means games don't end prematurely so long as both sides are willing to contest the center of the map. This ALSO has a nice side effect of allowing flying units on the ground to 'contest' enemy victory, even though they have no cap weight themselves.  This is important because otherwise flying units will be ignored at the end of games and even kited to avoid contact with them.


By the way, this mod affects Conquest cap dynamics without touching Domination cap dynamics at all. It is game-mode specific.



Updated 2 days ago.
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8 days ago
Jun 26, 2024, 2:59:08 AM

Really good suggestions! It would be nice to either expand the point to be larger or to be spread across 3 capture points. Ticket accumulation and the amount needed for a win could be tweaked to allow for longer games as you mentioned above. And also to make sure that the capture points are an *alternative* win condition that's meant to be subordinate to the usual wincons of Land Battle. That way the battle has the breathing room to be those long drawn out slugfests that can be so fun. Sent you a screenie of what I mean with an example in the VL discord. Could also just expand the capture point like in the second screenie, it's pretty small at the moment. That way there isn't an artificial shrinking of the map by having one small box in the center be so important.

Updated 8 days ago.
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8 days ago
Jun 26, 2024, 3:21:31 AM

TequilaSunset#1216 wrote:

Really good suggestions! It would be nice to either expand the point to be larger or to be spread across 3 capture points. Ticket accumulation and the amount needed for a win could be tweaked to allow for longer games as you mentioned above. And also to make sure that the capture points are an *alternative* win condition that's meant to be subordinate to the usual wincons of Land Battle. That way the battle has the breathing room to be those long drawn out slugfests that can be so fun. Sent you a screenie of what I mean with an example in the VL discord. Could also just expand the capture point like in the second screenie, it's pretty small at the moment. That way there isn't an artificial shrinking of the map by having one small box in the center be so important.

thanks for the feedback. Actually there’s real issues with larger cap point (though I get what you’re driving at) because it opens the door to draw kiting inside the cap point. Don’t want that degeneracy trust me ;). So ca was right to keep them small even though there are trade offs.

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8 days ago
Jun 26, 2024, 3:27:22 AM

one quality of life thing if possible is to make the caps in conquest be much faster to take than in domination. It’s important to not have to spend a ton of time sitting on a small point.

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8 days ago
Jun 26, 2024, 9:14:07 AM

I agree with Eumaies, Gojira and Alfare here. The capture point should just be a countermeasure to cheeses and unwillingness to fight, nothing more. This would help a lot quick play, and would help new players not getting frustrated because a Nurgle army was just blobing the point and you couldn't get through it quickly enough. It must be the continuity of land battles, or this mod will just split again the Multiplayer community and that would be truly harmful to the scene.

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8 days ago
Jun 26, 2024, 10:34:23 AM

ODM_Alfredino#5126 wrote:

I agree with Eumaies, Gojira and Alfare here. The capture point should just be a countermeasure to cheeses and unwillingness to fight, nothing more. This would help a lot quick play, and would help new players not getting frustrated because a Nurgle army was just blobing the point and you couldn't get through it quickly enough. It must be the continuity of land battles, or this mod will just split again the Multiplayer community and that would be truly harmful to the scene.

This is exactly what Conquest mode should be

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8 days ago
Jun 26, 2024, 10:40:48 AM

I definitely agree with a lot of the stuff that's been said here. Basically, it should be implemented in such a way that the main strategy should be to go and kill your opponent rather than the capture points that would be there only as a plan B for when your opponent plays abusively. Basically a land battle, but remove it's potential for poor sportsmanship. For the start, I think we need more tickets. Some factions have a great potential to sit on a spot and soak up a lot of DMG to outlast the timer, while others don't have the DPS to remove that faction in time. I definitely agree to stop the timer if the point is contested. What needed to be said has been said, so I have nothing more to add. To the dynamic ticket accumulation. It's definitely not a bad idea, but it needs to be done carefully so there're no loopholes around it and with some indicators so even new players understand it. Finally, for the more competitive side of the scene, if there would be a toggle that would allow us to set the number of tickets. Things might change in the future, and customizations for various reasons don't seem like a bad idea. 

 

With the right implementation, this is what domination should have been. 

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8 days ago
Jun 26, 2024, 11:25:59 AM

ODM_ChosenOne#6184 wrote:

I definitely agree with a lot of the stuff that's been said here. Basically, it should be implemented in such a way that the main strategy should be to go and kill your opponent rather than the capture points that would be there only as a plan B for when your opponent plays abusively. Basically a land battle, but remove it's potential for poor sportsmanship. For the start, I think we need more tickets. Some factions have a great potential to sit on a spot and soak up a lot of DMG to outlast the timer, while others don't have the DPS to remove that faction in time. I definitely agree to stop the timer if the point is contested. What needed to be said has been said, so I have nothing more to add. To the dynamic ticket accumulation. It's definitely not a bad idea, but it needs to be done carefully so there're no loopholes around it and with some indicators so even new players understand it. Finally, for the more competitive side of the scene, if there would be a toggle that would allow us to set the number of tickets. Things might change in the future, and customizations for various reasons don't seem like a bad idea. 

 

With the right implementation, this is what domination should have been. 

Great points and very well said.

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7 days ago
Jun 26, 2024, 2:02:23 PM

Great points Eumaies! I believe these changes could greatly increase the viability and reception of the new mode. 

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7 days ago
Jun 26, 2024, 4:16:00 PM

It's really great the multiplayer is finally getting some attention. I would like to agree with the wish that this patch was only the first step in a series of improvements.

What about testing a larger point with dynamic ticket accumulation?

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7 days ago
Jun 26, 2024, 5:03:38 PM

VM_MorS#3918 wrote:

It's really great the multiplayer is finally getting some attention. I would like to agree with the wish that this patch was only the first step in a series of improvements.

What about testing a larger point with dynamic ticket accumulation?

the challenge with larger points is they open up the possibility of fast units not engaging with slow units but still capturing the point and winning without engaging.

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7 days ago
Jun 26, 2024, 6:08:21 PM

 Good points! I see that a lot of worries among community members are kinda simliar to the problems mentioned in my own thread too.
As for the dynamic tickets, I was thinking that their faster generation should either occur post certain moment of time, or it may use system that may be simliar to Waagh mechanic, where every unit that is casting spells, fighting in melee, or shooting is generating points. If not enough of the points are being generated per 1 min (it has to adjust to the size of the army obviously), then obviously the system triggers. The delayed activation would also help to stop the cheese rush of the point capture (mentioned below)


  Restricting the point restriction to units that are in melee/are using ranged would also be beneficial to stop the problem mentioned above, where unit runs around cap point refusing to engage yet it blocks the capture.


    Now as to why the mentioned above has to happen?
Imagine a situation where a group of 3 fast and small single entities supported by 2 fast or flying SEM have captured the point. You must rather quickly try to stop them but it becomes very problematic. Why? 
Toxic build with Archaon, Exalted Hero of Nurgle, Wizard of Nurgle on Rot beast supported by 2 Cockatrices can effectively stop the point from being taken over by most factions. 

You try to attack them with ranged? Huge majority of the shots will be missing if the player is just constantly dodging the projectiles. Even bullet - based units will not find it easy to shoot at them effectively unless they are very close which makes them super easy to be obliterated with burning head or just charged at by the stack. If you send any infantry to contest, it cannot be multiple units because they will just use spells to defeat them with ease. You send 1 unit? They insta-rout it because of very high burst damage potential.


    Ranged fire will not help much since Archaon and Heroes are too small to be efficiently hit when they are in middle of enemy unit while the Cockatrices can just go down, hit once and then go up or cycle charge straight from the ground + abuse the barrier mechanic and their own missle resistance + speed to avoid recieving any real damage.  So infantry in reality can't do anything and most of the ranged will definitely struggle unless you use a net or there is literal army of ranged units which is pretty easy to counter.


   You send monsters or cavalry? Searing doom will very easily deal with them + the stack mentioned before is very strong in melee. Only real easy way to stop this would be to have your own strong SEM stack or to send a monster blob against them. The mentioned build leaves about 4k gold for the other units which gives a considerable potential to recruit skirmish units/cheap infantry/rot knights/chaos warhounds or even another SEM.


    Why is all of this important? Because they will cap the point very fast as you can't really deal damage to them quickly enough meanwhile they continue to dish out considerable damage to anything that even tries to come close to the point. The chaos player may simply recruit fast, good units like rot knights, hide them in nearby forest and only engage when there is direct danger of the single entity stack being overwhelmed. Same strategy applies for skirmishers spam hiding in forest. The builds like the one mentioned above can just rush the capture with the dynamic ticket system based on damage dealt in 1 min and it can be hard to counter for many factions.


A Nurgle debuff + regen blob based army can also bring damage of non ranged focused factions with weak magic so low that they can rush the capture time of the point pretty easily.

  I still would support the point activation time to be delayed to a time between 3 to 5 minutes, with more tickets being required to win to make it not so focused on the capture the flag aspect + to not make wizards with WOM recharge speed abilities obligatory and also to make the battles a bit longer, more tactical and less rush focused. The game should not revolve around point capture, I support the point made by other users that the capture the flag is there as a mechanic to stop the exploits like corner camping or draw kiting.

  Or, we put the point activation time at 10 minutes but the amount of tickets required to win drops, just not that much to prevent strategies where a forest camping blob army suddenly decides that it's good idea to win through capture and you can't do much against it. (A good point made by eumaies in other thread!)
As for the increase of the point capture area, it will definitely nerf the blobbing strats which are much stronger here (in land battles they weren't that hard to counter). If the requirement for the contesting is unit being in melee or shooting then it can't exactly draw kite. Skirmishers would be unable to contest with shooting to prevent abusive strategies.
 
  I think that the minimum time that the game can end overall, as enforced by the rules should not be shorter than the time required for the wizard to generate all of their WoM without use of arcane conduit. (otherwise it's an instapick ability)

Updated 7 days ago.
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7 days ago
Jun 27, 2024, 11:08:18 AM

increasing the initial unlock time by a bit definitely would help (just doesn’t help to increase it by a ton); increasing tickets also would ensure more time for shooting strats and keep the tickets as more of a fail safe against draw kite and corner camp.

but ca seems to want a qb game with some time pressure so if they can make the cap timer dynamic then you can have the best of both worlds - more time pressure if people aren’t engaging but less time pressure if they are.

Re: the sem blob you mentioned right now (hope they could fix this but haven’t) flyers have no cap weight even when landed. But the main thing is preventing extreme time pressure vs it. If you can shoot it you want time to use all your ammo; if you can’t shoot it anyway then contestation pausing the timer will give you unlimited time to melee it. You could still lose to it of course but that’s true in vanilla land battles anyway.

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7 days ago
Jun 27, 2024, 11:34:14 AM

BeastmenPlayer#5381 wrote:


Imagine a situation where a group of 3 fast and small single entities supported by 2 fast or flying SEM have captured the point. You must rather quickly try to stop them but it becomes very problematic. Why? 
Toxic build with Archaon, Exalted Hero of Nurgle, Wizard of Nurgle on Rot beast supported by 2 Cockatrices can effectively stop the point from being taken over by most factions.

Archaon + Exalted Hero + Nurgle Sorceror + 2xCockatrice will eat three quarters of your funds and leave you with a very small army. Any shooty faction can very easily punish you for camping on the capture point because you are sacrificing most of the means to deal with ranged attacks with this build and with this sort of strategy.

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4 days ago
Jun 29, 2024, 6:03:28 PM

eumaies#1128 wrote:

increasing the initial unlock time by a bit definitely would help (just doesn’t help to increase it by a ton); increasing tickets also would ensure more time for shooting strats and keep the tickets as more of a fail safe against draw kite and corner camp.

but ca seems to want a qb game with some time pressure so if they can make the cap timer dynamic then you can have the best of both worlds - more time pressure if people aren’t engaging but less time pressure if they are.

Re: the sem blob you mentioned right now (hope they could fix this but haven’t) flyers have no cap weight even when landed. But the main thing is preventing extreme time pressure vs it. If you can shoot it you want time to use all your ammo; if you can’t shoot it anyway then contestation pausing the timer will give you unlimited time to melee it. You could still lose to it of course but that’s true in vanilla land battles anyway.

The purpose of the flying SEM is to provide melee support and to use the slowdown debuff to make Searing Doom more effective against cavalry units or monsters.

TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:

BeastmenPlayer#5381 wrote:


Imagine a situation where a group of 3 fast and small single entities supported by 2 fast or flying SEM have captured the point. You must rather quickly try to stop them but it becomes very problematic. Why? 
Toxic build with Archaon, Exalted Hero of Nurgle, Wizard of Nurgle on Rot beast supported by 2 Cockatrices can effectively stop the point from being taken over by most factions.

Archaon + Exalted Hero + Nurgle Sorceror + 2xCockatrice will eat three quarters of your funds and leave you with a very small army. Any shooty faction can very easily punish you for camping on the capture point because you are sacrificing most of the means to deal with ranged attacks with this build and with this sort of strategy.

I would agree, if not the fact that most of the shots can be dodged without either usage of nets or without mass spamming ranged units that have fast projectile speed (that is still possible to dodge, just harder). If you try to setup a crossfire to make dodging harder, that may result in pretty severe case of friendly fire. 

Also not every map works well with mass ranged +  ranged builds will not be as effective against normal army. With some optimisations you can bring quite a lot of anti ranged units with that stack; if they see your bring an army that is full of gunpowder units/you have nets they may simply decide to charge at you with 5 single entities + a swarm of fast units. Even if you manage to destroy most of their rush force, as long as the 5 single entities are alive and they managed to cause considerable harm to your ranged forces, the battle is basically lost. 


The final transmutation - like spells do not counter it well since all of those units are fast and they can just disperse quickly when the spell is cast.

What they may do is also rush - cap the point and then stay at distance that lets them dodge your shots well, forcing you to send some units to capture the point; at which case they may simply terror - rout them and then use the unit as a cover that blocks your own ranged from shooting (while flying units will just move away)


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4 days ago
Jun 29, 2024, 7:47:43 PM

BeastmenPlayer#5381 wrote:

​​

I would agree, if not the fact that most of the shots can be dodged without either usage of nets or without mass spamming ranged units that have fast projectile speed (that is still possible to dodge, just harder). If you try to setup a crossfire to make dodging harder, that may result in pretty severe case of friendly fire. 

Also not every map works well with mass ranged +  ranged builds will not be as effective against normal army. With some optimisations you can bring quite a lot of anti ranged units with that stack; if they see your bring an army that is full of gunpowder units/you have nets they may simply decide to charge at you with 5 single entities + a swarm of fast units. Even if you manage to destroy most of their rush force, as long as the 5 single entities are alive and they managed to cause considerable harm to your ranged forces, the battle is basically lost. 


The final transmutation - like spells do not counter it well since all of those units are fast and they can just disperse quickly when the spell is cast.

What they may do is also rush - cap the point and then stay at distance that lets them dodge your shots well, forcing you to send some units to capture the point; at which case they may simply terror - rout them and then use the unit as a cover that blocks your own ranged from shooting (while flying units will just move away)


No, it will in fact not work out that way because the ranged fire will come in staggered salvos or from multiple sides since you surrendered the rest of the battlefield to your enemy so there's no dodging. The capture point area is also small enough that this isn't feasible in the first place.

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4 days ago
Jun 29, 2024, 9:16:11 PM

TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:

BeastmenPlayer#5381 wrote:

​​

I would agree, if not the fact that most of the shots can be dodged without either usage of nets or without mass spamming ranged units that have fast projectile speed (that is still possible to dodge, just harder). If you try to setup a crossfire to make dodging harder, that may result in pretty severe case of friendly fire. 

Also not every map works well with mass ranged +  ranged builds will not be as effective against normal army. With some optimisations you can bring quite a lot of anti ranged units with that stack; if they see your bring an army that is full of gunpowder units/you have nets they may simply decide to charge at you with 5 single entities + a swarm of fast units. Even if you manage to destroy most of their rush force, as long as the 5 single entities are alive and they managed to cause considerable harm to your ranged forces, the battle is basically lost. 


The final transmutation - like spells do not counter it well since all of those units are fast and they can just disperse quickly when the spell is cast.

What they may do is also rush - cap the point and then stay at distance that lets them dodge your shots well, forcing you to send some units to capture the point; at which case they may simply terror - rout them and then use the unit as a cover that blocks your own ranged from shooting (while flying units will just move away)


No, it will in fact not work out that way because the ranged fire will come in staggered salvos or from multiple sides since you surrendered the rest of the battlefield to your enemy so there's no dodging. The capture point area is also small enough that this isn't feasible in the first place.

If you speak about mass gunpowder units ranged attacks, then yeah I will agree, from close range and multiple sides that may be pretty hard to dodge. A net spell will obviously stop this from happening too.

Archers/axes/javelins/crossbows won't hit anything as they have poor accuracy and too slow projectile speed to hit a small fast target easily. LegendOfTotalWar on his multiple videos (especially before the AI updates) has dodged literal ranged spam armies made by AI, with units shooting at different intervals , from many sides at same time so clearly this point only applies to something that is fast and accurate enough.


Situation where the player with ranged majority army is in perfect position implies the Chaos player passively waiting for the situation to happen, which is unlikely; the rest of army will not wait and the 5 - 6 single entities will definitely try to engage the ranged units. It's going to be hard to block about 15 fast units from attacking your army full of ranged attacks.

Even with such crossfire setup, Archaon and heroes may choose to charge at the shooters which will stop the other units from shooting; if you try to claim the point in same time with something else they may engage that unit and effectively hide inside it to stop recieving any serious ranged damage. 

 Making mostly ranged build is risky towards a faction which is pretty well known for rushing effectively.

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