Balancing upgrade cost

[alpaca]

Well i found a few quite interesting issues about unit experience in 1.6 (BI) which is the same as RTW 1.5

What I wanted to test is the effects of experience upgrades vs armor vs weapon upgrades in custom battles for balancing Chivalry: TW, so I made a simple test setup got someone to help me:
Test runs with Feudal Foot Knights, their stats are:

mount_effect     horse -8
attributes       sea_faring, hide_forest, hardy, cantabrian_circle 
formation        1.2, 1.8, 2.2, 2.6, 3, square
stat_health      1, 0
stat_pri         4, 5, no, 0, 0, melee, simple, piercing, sword, 10 ,0.6
stat_pri_attr    no
stat_sec         0, 0, no, 0, 0, no, no, no, none, 25 ,0.5
stat_sec_attr    no
stat_pri_armour  9, 6, 3, metal
stat_sec_armour  0, 0, flesh
stat_heat        0
stat_ground      0, 0, 0, 0
stat_mental      10, impetuous, highly_trained
stat_charge_dist 40

The test setup was the following (A=Armor upgrade, W=Weapon upgrade, E=Experience upgrade):
- Reference tests with 0 upgrades vs 1,2,3A
- 2,3E vs 1,2,3A
- 2,3W vs 1,2,3A

The results were quite insatisfying because the guys with the weapon upgrades won every encounter while the experience upgraded units even lost some of the fights against their armored opponents (namely 2,3E lost against 3A), the reference units lost all their fights.

What this means is that the effect of experience is, while not neglectable, not as large as you'd think. An armor upgrade of the same level is presumably just as strong (I didn't test often enough to be sure there) and a weapon upgrade is in this setup (attack small compared to defence) always better.


What's even worse is that I also tested this for archers (missile attack) and in that setup experience upgrade had NO effect at all (I am quite sure there because I tested this a lot).
I assume this is a bug because the details scroll states they become stronger.


Now what this means for balancing is that while experience upgrades have a fixed price, weapon upgrades should probably be quite a bit more expensive than xp and armor upgrades should cost about the same.
You're welcome to comment on that and test yourselves of course ;)

[KonstantinosXI]

yes weapon upgades should cost a bit more than xp and armour...where can i change the prices for units upgrades?

[alpaca]

In the edu cost entry the second and third but last entries are the cost for armor and weapon upgrades respectively.

[GiantMonkeyMan]

moved because it is more discussion than a question alpaca...

although it is a valid point and i was wondering what you would give for decent upgrade prices then? and also have you tested if the unit 'type' affects armour values in anyway? i doubt it tbh

GMM

[alpaca]

Well I only tested this for infantry so I can't be sure, and I didn't test any specific stats but overall performance with upgrades.
Btw, I did a few more tests with a bit more realistic situations where I pinned two (ai controlled) units of FFK with upgrades and charged them from behind with a unit of cavalry (light cav, huge charge bonus).
The result was that I was able to closely beat them when they had 3 exp or 3 armour and I usually lost when they had gold weapons (this was because I could only charge so often and a charge is more effective if you have an orderly cav line). They routed slightly earlier without the experience upgrades but it usually was a thing of around 15/46 whereas the other guys had 20 or so left when they routed.

I think sensible would be to make armor and experience about the same price (which is 24% of the unit price as a rule of thumb that applies to most units) or maybe the armor for about 22% and make weapon upgrades maybe 1.3 or 1.4 times as expensive so maybe 32-40% of the initial price.
The performance of weapon upgrades is considerably better in battles too (played two or three of them since the time).
And for archers I wouldn't suggest buying anything else than that because of the bug I mentioned ;)

There is however a balance problem between different kinds of units because obviously for units with low attack a weapon upgrade is even more worthwile. So I'd put them to the top of the scale with maybe 40% or even slightly more while the units with the highest attack could go a little cheaper.
Likewise for armour upgrades on low-armour units.

And yes, it is more a discussion than a question but I always have problems to put it somewhere because there's no real section to use for that kind of stuff (it's not a real tutorial either, more of an observation) :)