Unit Balancing

I am building up a rough conversion spreadsheet, trying to work in some of hte factors. I need to come up with a rough cost/attack.defence kind of sum that will give a balanced overall number. This will give me my base line to work from. It will throw up some daft values, but these can be manually changed. Cannon fodder units with a quarter of the power of say, a Bone Giant would not be a quarter of the cost. There will be a need to build higher buildings and special structures to make such things, and these costs are also a factor. These sorts of things will be manually adjusted.

So... we need to work out a rough approach to convert WH armour and attack values to something that will work in TW land, and also factor in the creation and upkeep costs. There will be some 'juggling' to get some of the less usual units done ... since I think things like Zombies and undead units would not necessarily be expensive to buy, but might require a lot more upkeep ( Necromancers don't work cheap! ) to keep them in the field. Likewise, the build times might be another factor to juggle. VC's could raise a swarm of undead from the graveyards in no time at all, and have them in combat.... but might have to pay a lot of gold to have the spells cast!

So..ladies and gentlemen, we need to come up with some ideas and calculations, plus think about a base 'unit' to work our values from... and come up with a starting point for some playtesting.

I have said it before... Use whatever modificaton King Kong uses in his Stainless Steal mod for a basic adjustment of the stats. And vary the diffrent units after this basic.

For example:

type Armored Sergeants
dictionary Armored_Sergeants ; Armoured Sergeants
category infantry
class spearmen
voice_type Heavy
banner faction main_spear
banner holy crusade
soldier Armored_Sergeants, 60, 0, 1
attributes sea_faring, hide_forest, can_withdraw, free_upkeep_unit
formation 1.0, 0, 2.0, 2.0, 4, square, schiltrom
stat_health 1, 0
stat_pri 5, 3, no, 0, 0, melee, melee_blade, piercing, spear, 25, 1
stat_pri_attr spear, spear_bonus_4
stat_sec 0, 0, no, 0, 0, no, melee_simple, blunt, none, 0, 1
stat_sec_attr no
stat_pri_armour 5, 2, 6, metal
stat_sec_armour 0, 0, flesh
stat_heat 4
stat_ground 1, -2, 3, 2
stat_mental 7, normal, trained
stat_charge_dist 5
stat_fire_delay 0
stat_food 60, 300
stat_cost 1, 340, 150, 85, 65, 340, 4, 130
armour_ug_levels 2, 3
armour_ug_models Armored_Sergeants, Armored_Sergeants_ug1

Here is a unit stat over armored sergants. A medicore spearmen unit.
Here is his stats:


-----------------
Atack: 5
Charge: 3
-----------------
Armor: 5
Defence: 2
Shield: 6
-----------------
Moral: 7.
Cost: 340
upkeep: 150.

From this basic, you can adjust after the skill of the spearmen in the warhammer world.

The skeleton Spearmen is a weak spearmen unit.
Here i use a little lower than the Sergants


frighten_foot
Frighten_horse
---------------
Attack: 3
Charge: 2
--------------
Armor: 0
Defence: 2
Shield: 6
--------------
Moral: ??
Cost: 100
Upkeep: 75

Imperial Spearmen is a medicore spearmen unit
Here i use about the same as the Sergants.

-----------------
Attack: 4
Charge: 3
-----------------
Armor: 6
Defence: 2
Shield: 5
-----------------
Moral: 6.
Cost: 250
upkeep: 150.

High Elf Spearmen is a Elite spearmen unit.
Here i use higher stats than the Sergant.

-----------------
Attack: 6
Charge: 2
-----------------
Armor: 6
Defence: 5
Shield: 6
-----------------
Moral: 9.
Cost: 400
upkeep: 200.

This is a sugestion to how you may do it. I hope you find the best solution.

Point Blank also made a mod for M2TW (Real Combat) that gave the units are more realisitic attack and defence. If you download his mod (http://www.twcenter.net/forums/downl...o=file&id=1520) it comes with a rft file that explains how he's calculating upkeep.

Just thought I would post up a link to the Statistical Conversion Thread as a refresher on the topic.

Gentlemen...please be assured, I know the basic mechanics ofthe stats and how all that works...and I know how to get a balance for units... what I need to sort out is a conversion from Warhammer values to M2TW stats, so the units have the correct relative values and a cost that represents the number of army points one unit would take up

we would need:

1) An army point - Unit cost conversion factor.

2) A base set of stats the reflect a units attack or defence value in Warhammer

3) A rough guide to how special attributes that cannot be shown in TW land would affect unit stats to beef up a unit that would not come out as relatively strong as it should ..and so on.

I can just go ahead and do it... but I want to involve the community so we can get a wider spread of suggestions and ideas.

I had planned to use the Empire as a baseline, since they are 'human normal' and probably the closest to an existing M2TW faction in terms of weapons and armour. Seems the easiest faction to start with!

I'd suggest the basis is to work out, what is a standard human value and work from there deciding the rest. It's not going to be definate but if I'm going at it we'll say take movement and inititive add those together for movement speed (with standard human I believe it's 4+3 so 7) and adding 1 to each point of either. I haven't really thought about this in depth so give me a couple of days with an old army book and I'll see if I can find some more ideas and expand on it. Just to find you've already got a better system :P

I suggest that you don´t take the stats too literally in WFB when converting... MTW2 and WFB are two very different combat systems, and some stats might not transfer between the games too well.
I suggest basing most units on basic units in MTW2 (spearmen, swordsmen etc), and then adjusting those stats, instead of trying to port over a six-sided dice based system...
Gah... a bit too tired to get to the point... will try later :)

I have only one favour to ask - please don`t forget about Custom/Multiplayer Battles costs of units. :)

Moral for undead and orcs etc, should be extremely high. to prevent them from retreating early, or if overpowered or charged into from a cavalry unit. even using 'lock_moral' for undead (meaning they will never retreat, they fight till slain. except for intelligent undead like vampires)

if your planning on factoring costs of spells to raise skeletons etc, then i would suggest possibly calling those units as 'untrained' but with higher attack values and moral to compensate. unless the unit being 'summoned' is like a legend or what ever...

before thinking of armor values you might want to think of which armour levels you want to use from the warhammer realm. and thus, how many buildings you will need for the upgrade levels. I dont have any warhammer reference books, otherwise id happily convert it all over to M2TW values for you. I dont doubt you are cpable of doing it all on your own, but if you want a little help, just let me know.

give me the values for warhammer and i'll have them converted to M2TW in no time!

base set of stats could be somthing like taking an untrained, unarmored and unarmed human, elf, dwarf, orc, skeleton, zombie, troll, giant etc. giving them unarmed attacke values corresponding to size and strength. armored values based on their agility, speed, size. keeping in mind these would be all untrained (Peasant-like) attributes. [Racial Mofifier]
then factor in what faction they would be recruited from and +/- a value based on the given faction. [Faction Modifier]
Then, once you have figured out the types of armour to use, associate a value to them. [Armor Value Modifier]

which gives you an untrained unit wearing that type of armour.

Similar to the armour rating you would decide what kind of shields you need, and base the shield rating on that. 1 thru 6 for example.

I think you would want to decide all the elements from warhammer you intend to use (even ones which may not work) before using mods like Real Combat and the various AI mods. because RC is not based on a human spearman up against a troll that is 3 times as large and 10 times as strong! so units like trolls, giants would have upwards of 5 or more hit points (in the M2TW world) and kill a shitload of human spearman with one connecting swipe of its barbed club! :)

one thing you said that sparked my interest is zombies being cheap to recruit but expensive upkeep wise... due to necromancers etc... i like the idea of that, but what about tying a resource to some units, meaning if you dont have access to the resource, you cant train them (i think that is possible to do, to some extent anyway)

Figuring in costs should be easy, a simple addition of Unit equipment, cost of spell components (if neccersary), etc

Anyway, as i said, give me the warhammer values you want converted and ill think of a way to convert it all over, or send me in the direction to find these values as i have no warhammer reference books.

If I just could find the old XML file that RtG made... I think I still have it somewhere. I'll give you a PM if I find it...

Cause I guess RTW stats are pretty similar to those of M2TW, with a little modifying, right?

Thanks Zapp ... I think the M2TW and RTW stats are virtually identical..r at least near enough so that only minor tweaking would be required.

As far as custom battle costs go, those ar ehe easy ones!

I can simply look at the stats in the Army Books, and see what...say... 1000 army points buys you. A simple conversion factor of...I don;t know... 5 Florins=1 Army point, and the prices will create themselves for me. It will ensure that a balance is created for costs.

Of course..that requires that first we get the correct relative balance of the units in terms of combat power. That is the primary task... and the unit cost will naturally follow.

Playtesting will be needed to make sure that our conversion factors actually do yield good battles in game...since, as has been pointed out, an accurate conversion of stats could result in stagnant battles. Not always a bad thing...but when units like Bone Giants, Trolls and Chaos Knights hit the battlefield, I expect to see the bodycount rise!

I was just thinking, rather than do all complex formulae and crazy things like that, why not make up the stats as you go along according to how powerful the unit's in question would be on M2TW?
That way you can probably have an advantage that GW don't, in that you can have minor stat differences while the Table Top has no such luxury, what with weapons like swords and axes that should have an effect, not do anything statwise as 1 strength point is very valuable in Warhammer.
Just my two cents...

The trouble with just 'guessing it' is that it then becomes just out opinion ...and there are LOTS of opinions in Warhammer! IF we base it on some solid factual base, we are beginning from a solid foundation. We will tweak it from there to get a good game balance, and to allow for factors that we cannot directly duplicate in M2TW, and then we will playtest to make sure that no faction is overpowered or badly unbalanced.

Some factions should be easier than others...just as it is in the real game campaign...but all MUST be fair for the custom battles and online type games.

This is such an iportant thing for us that we MUST involve as many peole as possible and get as many opinions as we can before we start on the major stat work.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bwian

The trouble with just 'guessing it' is that it then becomes just out opinion ...and there are LOTS of opinions in Warhammer! IF we base it on some solid factual base, we are beginning from a solid foundation. We will tweak it from there to get a good game balance, and to allow for factors that we cannot directly duplicate in M2TW, and then we will playtest to make sure that no faction is overpowered or badly unbalanced.

Some factions should be easier than others...just as it is in the real game campaign...but all MUST be fair for the custom battles and online type games.

This is such an iportant thing for us that we MUST involve as many peole as possible and get as many opinions as we can before we start on the major stat work.

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Yeah I suppose your right...

Is the goal to recreate the Warhammer universe in MTW2, or is it to recreate the tabletop game within the MTW2 engine, or something inbetween?

Whilst being quite similar approaches, I think there is a difference...

im not quite sure about this, but i think we're aiming to recreate the Warhammer universe on the campaign map, and recreate the tabletop game on the battle map. No idea what the difference is though :clown:

The difference is (and I'm having a hard time explaining this :) :
Either you adjust WHFB to fit into MTW2, or you adjust MTW2 to fit into WHFB.
Is it important to recreate stats, rules, special abilities and point costs from WHFB, or will MTW2 be used as the basis, and units will be compared to each other according to how units behave in MTW2?

I believe this mod is fitting WHFB stats to M2TW.

We want to create the tabletop game in the M2TW engine ... with a campaign based in the Warhammer world ... to allow us to enjoy it to the full.

The stats need to reflect the Warhammer stats and abilities as far as possible, so that the units combat power and cost reflect as accurately as possible the tabletop ones.

Obviousely, the build trees have an influence, and add an extra layer of complexity ... but we want to end up with a situation where 5 units of XXX in our mod would fare the same if pitched against 5 units of YYY in our modas they would in a warhammer tabletop game.

I read something very interesting that a guy (sorry, don't remember your name:sweatdrop: ) mentioned in the Bretonnia thread.

It's about the number of units per faction. Dwarves have about 11 units, Empire about 10, and Bretonnia about 8, compared 20+ units per faction in the vanilla.
I'm not quite sure this is the right thread to post this, but it did say "Unit BALANCING", and I'm pretty sure this has something to do with the balance of the game. Will you add some other units that isn't mentioned in the Army Books, or will it be as before? :idea2:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Bwian

We want to create the tabletop game in the M2TW engine ... with a campaign based in the Warhammer world ... to allow us to enjoy it to the full.

The stats need to reflect the Warhammer stats and abilities as far as possible, so that the units combat power and cost reflect as accurately as possible the tabletop ones.

Obviousely, the build trees have an influence, and add an extra layer of complexity ... but we want to end up with a situation where 5 units of XXX in our mod would fare the same if pitched against 5 units of YYY in our modas they would in a warhammer tabletop game.

---

only problem with the table top game is that there isont alot of dieing when crap units fight each other and most of the killing is done by running down a unit. i personally would like to see a little bit more of a fight in METW :egypt:

Big fan of warhammer, but would have one comment to make on this point.

It seems to me many of the unit values in the army books are linked to things like magic, special unit abilities etc on the battlefield. And even in some cases the fact these troops are especially rare in a given race and would be unbalancing without being made very expensive.

Also, simple things, like the limited turns in Warhammer made running out of ammunition for ranged troops irrelevant, but this is important in Total War, Wood Elf archers with a great many armour piercing arrows for example might be comparatively more deadly than they would be on the tabletop and therefore should be made more expensive in that case.

ie, a straight point for point conversion only works if you are also able to draw all these outside factors into the equation, which isnt straightfoward I wouldnt have thought? :juggle2:

Maybe instead of a straight point for point stat conversion, you should do it in "ranges". As an example I'll use WS and have it translate to attack.

WS ATT
1 0-5
2 6-11
3 12-15
4 16-20

Well, you get the idea. This way you can look at special abilities from the Warhammer world that don't translate well into M2TW and use them like pluses and minuses for the stats they would most likely affect. Also with this method you won't have a fairly set bunch of numbers for all the stats in all the units, which leads to the nice variants we get from both the vanilla and modded versions of the game. Hope that explanation made sense.

I'm gonna vote against specific charts or formulas. I'd prefer to see the units in the mod perform similarly to how they would in the tabletop game if matched against each other, and do what it takes to make that happen.

Furthermore, we can't just imagine what effect things like moral or special abilities will have in the mod. Leadership is a huge advantage on the tabletop game, what if it's not quite so useful in the mod? Initiative isn't even a factor, with simultaneous combat.

Doubtless, in the end, some things just won't work. Undead crumble when they lose combats, demons might get sucked back into the warp. How could you code that? I don't know if it's possible or not, but I suspect that some aspects will simply have to be fudged.

Greetings all,

This is my first post, so I figure I should give a bit of info on why I'm making it here. I signed up because of this and the religions topic, and because I love the Warhammer universe, although I'm a long-time player of 40k, rather than Fantasy, which is strange as this is the genre I prefer. I suppose it was because 40k was what all my friends played.

Basically, I think this mod has great potential, and I'd like to help in any way I can.

I've played plenty of mods for Medieval 2, and made sub-mods based entirely around unit balance, because I'm never satisfied with the inconsistencies inherent in them.

The Stainless Steel mod was great, but archer balance was poor. The Kingdoms Grand Campaign mod was okay, but the exasperating disparity between units of exactly the same calibre (for example, Alamanoi attack 11, Zweihander/Ulster Swordsman etc attack 15) irked me immensely.

So I'd like to add a few points that I have, for your consideration.

1. Hooligan04 mentioned this, and I'd just like to reinforce: The Warhammer system is based on D6's, so this means there is not much available difference between weak and elite units. In Medieval, there is quite a bit of flexibility here, so we should really reflect the spirit of the unit rather than the hardcore stance of "look, it had a 4+ save, so it MUST have 12 defense value, despite it's shield!".

2. Relative skill bonuses/penalties should be related via a consistent chart to the stats of the warrior type in question. I don't have a chart like this planned out, but it could basically look something like this, example for the defence value of a unit:

Save Armour Bonus
None None
6+ 2
5+ 4
4+ 6
3+ 8
2+ 10

Shield Armour Bonus
None None
Small 4
Medium 6
Large 8

WS Armour Bonus
1 None
2 None
3 1
4 2
5 3
6 4
7 5
8 6
9 7
10 8

So a Chaos Knight might be WS4, 3+ Save, Large shield and have a defence of 2(WS) + 8(Shield) + 8 (save) = 18. The same should naturally be done with the weapons as well.

3. Unit size and upkeep should again reflect the spirit of the game combined with practical considerations, and anything point-wise we can glean from the rules. For example, what is the actual upkeep on a squad of skeleton warriors going to be? Absolutely zero. They don't cost much to make, and they should come in large numbers, but conversely they have terrible stats, equipment and organisational skills (I.E. the standard group is the Rome-style peasant circle), whereas some Bretonnian knights with massive warhorses are going to have quite small group sizes, extortionately high upkeeps and the rest, but will be battle-winners if used right.


Okay, if you're still with me, I'll idle over some of the first things that strike me.


Undead. They should have really really low upkeep costs and should come in big groups. Low-level zombie-skeleton types should be in the largest squad size. From a general's point of view, you don't have to feed or pay them, which is an armies biggest area of expenditure.

There are a couple of ways of doing the morale for them, depending on ease of manipulation of the game engine. I haven't modded the core code, so I don't know.

You could make non-sentient undead unbreakable and of poor quality. I think they should be of poor quality anyway, and the unbreakable thing would be an easy way out, as Tsarsies said, there is the "lock_morale" option.

Alternatively, you could tie non-sentient undead heavily in with the general, so that if he dies or breaks, the non-sentient undead almost automatically break, by giving them 1 morale, but giving the general ridiculous morale boosts for non-sentient undead units. As I said, I don't know how easy this would be to code, but I think it should be quite achievable.


Large Creatures. Will they be in? How will they be handled? I assume you can basically use the elephant code and adapt it. Naturally I think these should have very high upkeep costs, and low squad sizes, with multiple hit points per unit, based on a similar scale as mentioned above, perhaps 1 for 3 would be reasonable. So a four hit point giant would have 12 hit points in game. As I recall, the armoured elephants in Rome had quite a few each.


As my brain is sizzling a bit now, I'll wrap this up, let me know what you think all, because I think this mod has the potential to be, frankly, awesome.

hi, i am a DLV mod player that has become some sort of modder.

i still have some limitations but i am working my way out of darkness...

anyway, EDU is what i have worked with the most, and i built a calculator that can be used by any mod.

it just helps units become standardized so values are result of several formulas.



right now it is under "OLD" tag because i am almost finishing a new one that will make lots of stuff with EDU calculations.

check my thread in a week or two and it will probably be finished.

you can "preview" by downloading old one and checking out the main logic of its work.

new one will allow to enter ANY EDU, edit it by certain fixed values input by yourself, then export it again without typos. it will also have more factors calculated... and they are more each day so thats delaying publishing a little lol




hope it helps.

sorry, link here: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=152756

Ivan, i hope that you come out of the darkness, that way it'll be easier for the dark elves to see and assassinate you. Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaaa!!!! But i guess i should check out that link bye!