Fix flakking

[Ridiculous_Lee]

By fix, I mean, don't let 100% of one unit get distracted/disabled/killed before 1% of the same type of unit is affected.

The common example is gardener/geo, where all your units target every last gardener before they go after 1 geo. I believe the game would be better if the two units got affected at the same ratio.

If you aren't with me, this means in a mob of 100k gardeners and 1000 geos, instead of your units killing 99k gards and no geos, they may kill 98k gards and 980 geos.

To me this is the most fundamental problem with combat. Will it require many changes to the stats of units? Yes. Piss people off (those attack dog guys)? yes. Make the game better because all of your rpgs don't die before 1 of your humvees does? Definitely.

Flame on!

 

[Iamsmart]

i hate to break it to you, but it already works like that.

Hi Ridiculous Multi, btw.

 

[Ridiculous_Lee]

Hey Im!

Actually it doesn't work that way

[range] 1,133,020 hostile Hooligan attacked, disabling 589,849 allied staff.
[range] 500,000 hostile Hippy Van attacked, distracting 329,433 allied staff.
[range] 500,000 hostile Loudspeaker Protestor shouted in the ears of and distracted 634,050 allied staff.
[range] 400,000 hostile Ninja attacked, killing 349,433 allied staff.
[range] 409,617 allied Ninja attacked, killing 1,069,968 hostile staff.

This BR looks pretty good, except that I had the same amount of political bribers as ninjas. If 40% of the ninjas fire at the end, I would expect 40% of the political bribers to be untouched at the end as well, but 100% of them have been distracted already. The weak are getting targeted first.

 

[Alcibiades]

I was always under the impression that the whole reason we had different unit stats was so that sort of thing didn't happen. Flakking is a fundamental part of this game and should not be removed.

In your BR example, PoBs are very weak and so they didn't survive. Units with differing stats will have different survival rates. This is the foundation of this game and I dont think it's a good idea to just throw it all away. You're not talking about fixing flaking, you are talking about an entire rewrite of the game code, so I do not support this at all.

 

[CFalcon]

If you aren't with me, this means in a mob of 100k gardeners and 1000 geos, instead of your units killing 99k gards and no geos, they may kill 98k gards and 980 geos.

In order for this to happen, gardeners and geos would have to have *exactly* the same stats. And if you want to extrapolate that to other units, what you're suggesting is completely scrapping unit stats, so everything is exactly the same as everything else.

Doesn't sound like a very fun game tbh.

 

[Ridiculous_Lee]

Cfalcon: They would not have to have the same stats, merely a different amount of firepower would have to be directed at them. Perhaps a more accurate example would be 90k and 900.

And alcibiades: I'm not talking about removing the concept of flakking, just changing it so that stronger flak units can shield weaker units. The flak concept right now is merely based on a fodder method, knowing that the enemy troops will target your weakest units first, before any of your important troops get damaged.

What I'm talking about is adding the entire health of your army together, then adding the entire health damage of the enemy, and dividing to see the percentage of troops you lose.

Perhaps this is too big of a change as it would require most flakking units to be changed, and I understand that. I maintain that combat would benefit from it though.

 

[timthetyrant]

i think it is good the way it is, and maybe im not understanding you view, but i thought that if you had 9.9m gardners and 100k geos that 99% of the firepower (against INNs) would hit the gardners 'cause gardners are 99% of you army, and then that 1% of firepower that hits the geos would have to deal with the increased health and armour the geos have thus giving the geos more survivabilty.

And yeh i guess it is like fodder, but is that a problem?

so flakking is mostly about directing the the firepower away from your damaging units(thieves/TLs) and letting the massed units take the damage as it is more efficient as they are either cheaper(gardners) or can take a beating(jeeps).

you arent able to choose which units you want to shoot, as your units will give more of a blanket effect on the targets

 

[Souls]

Targeting pools everyone of the same unit type together, then distributes the appropriate % to whatever % of that type a unit makes up. If 500k PoM fire at 1m gards and 1m geos, 250k will target gards and 250k will target geos. All the gardeners get distracted, and whatever firepower the PoM didn't have to use get wasted, but 250k PoM won't distract all 1m geos and thus, landage occurs. The targeting system works exactly the way you want it to.

 

[Ridiculous_Lee]

I'm saying exactly that the firepower shouldn't be proportional to the number of units of each different unit, but rather that the firepower should be proportional to the amount of health in each units group of units.

so if there are 1m gardeners, lets say with 1m health, and 1m geos with 10m health, then the firepower gets split to 10/11 on geos and 1/11 on gardeners. See what I'm saying? That way firepower doesn't get wasted.

Timmythetyrant, yes, fodder flakking does benefit you when you use cheap units(dogs, gardeners etc) because they protect your better units, but in the case of humvees and shield androids, they really don't do much for the rest of your army.

 

[tobapopalos]

Sounds like somebody needs to learn how to play the game properly.

 

[Charlie_B]

Units like humvees can still be effective flak, you just have to sacrifice more offensive power to use them. On the upside, they're very hardy and can survive countless battles while protecting your units. Cheap flak like dogs means you can afford a more potent attacking force, but they are going to die off every time you use them, mostly on the first tick. If you don't clear out dangerous LETs in one you're going to suffer afterwards, and even if you do you'll have to buy up more flak.

It's a nice contrast and works well as it is.

 

[CFalcon]

Cfalcon: They would not have to have the same stats, merely a different amount of firepower would have to be directed at them. Perhaps a more accurate example would be 90k and 900.

In the kindest way possible: you're just wrong.

so if there are 1m gardeners, lets say with 1m health, and 1m geos with 10m health, then the firepower gets split to 10/11 on geos and 1/11 on gardeners. See what I'm saying? That way firepower doesn't get wasted.

Doing things like this is effectively the same as having no unit stats. All *you've* done is make it more complicated by giving units stats and then negating the stats again with this distribution of firepower.

 

[Cheese]

All units should have the same stat and not kill anything.

In other words bushtarion should be a game where you take your anger out on somebody with a rubber bat!

 

[Elevnos]

The attacking is spread out evenly, as it should be and I hope will stay. The reason you get more geos surviving is because they have more health/armour. If what you're saying takes effect then there would be no way to flak f-117s, harriers, rpgs, strikers, apaches, shock troopers, snipers, bunkers, sentry turrets, recruitment officers, puppet masters...
Need I continue?

 

[tomtree]

this is an awefull idea as everyone else seems to have already pointed out.

 

[Ezekiel]

Lee, once you learn the battle mechanics a little better, you won't get this 'problem'.

And, you're example isn't even that bad. Look at this:

News from your sources is that in 5 ticks, 5,192,952 people from xxxx will arrive to attack you.

[close] 1,006,288 allied Hippy attacked, distracting 833,763 hostile staff.
[close] 10,000 hostile Serf attacked, killing 8,657 allied staff.
[close] 1,062,407 allied Yob attacked, disabling 1,527,787 hostile staff.
[close] 3,173,854 allied Small Droid made some funny beeps and disabled 2,824,093 hostile staff.
[close] 2,083 hostile Geo-Phys Thief stole 192 land. [88] tree. [104] bush. [0] flower. [0] grass. [0] uncultivated.

Distracted: 833,763 [£1,890,339,400] enemies distracted.
Disabled: 4,351,880 [£10,905,294,000] enemies disabled.
Died: 8,657 [£59,782,000] friendlies dead.

so 5,242,549 blockers ( made up of SDs, which get crazy ratios on flak the rest of time, apart from when I uses them) couldn't stop 5,192,952 flak (minus the few geos). But thats just me not knowing what ratios to use. Even if it looked like i had a good one. We just suck

 

[tobapopalos]

The problem there is that you're trying to use SDs as your main blockers with nothing sweeping up for them. You need to use your basics as the flak stoppers and the SDs as the geos stoppers unless you have something firing after the SDs (like stunbots). You will only need a few hundred thousand SDs to sweep for hippies and yobs.

 

[willymchilybily]

my advice is listen to souls, for the technical explanation of how it works, listen to toby's post above for an insight into how you can negate the affect of flakking (layers of lethal killers or / inn stoppers) and know that you must strip the armour off a unit before the health can be damaged (it can die)

Lee, once you learn the battle mechanics a little better, you won't get this 'problem'.

And, you're example isn't even that bad. Look at this:


[close] 1,006,288 allied Hippy attacked, distracting 833,763 hostile staff.
[close] 10,000 hostile Serf attacked, killing 8,657 allied staff.
[close] 1,062,407 allied Yob attacked, disabling 1,527,787 hostile staff.
[close] 3,173,854 allied Small Droid made some funny beeps and disabled 2,824,093 hostile staff.
[close] 2,083 hostile Geo-Phys Thief stole 192 land. [88] tree. [104] bush. [0] flower. [0] grass. [0] uncultivated.

[tweaked example of system]
and what souls said even explains why you lost land Ezekiel. the hippys took out some targeted gardeners and geos, so 5mil troops 25k geos let say.,that means only 0.5% of the hippys are targeting geos so thats. 5,000 targeting geos, be lucky to have any affect stoping <500.

next yobs fire.

1m yobs targeting aprox 4.17m gardeners and 24.5k geos. you now have 0.6% of the yobs hitting the geos. 5,759 yobs stop 570 geos approx.

you now have

2.6mill gardenes and 24k geos

SOOO now for the big finale. lets be generous and say 1% of the sd's target the geos.
thats 31k sd's vs 24k geos. id guess 3-4 sd's around + or - 1 sd per geo [complete guess]. you still have 10k geos left standing able to land. You're short by a significant amount

and thats 3.14million sd's vs 2.6million gardeners. which would only take about 0.6 sd's on a bad day. so your wasting over 2.5 million sd's fire power.

And that is the beauty of the game. and the benefit of multiple layers of unit classes. and targeting classes. something it takes a bit of knowledge to get use to.
[/tweaked example of system]

what you propose lee would have made it take around 25million flak instead of 5million flak as none of the fire power is wasted by layered flaking. In my opinion this change.... its not going to happen as it would make the units that fire first overpowered. and change a core foundation of the game

 

[saint1d]

The suggestion you have made is pretty much how the game already works, stronger health and armoured units will survive better than weaker units. For your bribers to fire you need to be sending more flak so that the % of defensive units firing at them is less. The only problem this might have is the ninjas killing stuff you want to bribe, however, against a PoM this wont be a problem cos they arent LET.

 

[Ezekiel]

Yeah I just never played robo's from round start, was posting as an example of just me playing wrong, which is what lee is doing.