Vampires & Arena

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Cron
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I'm not sure if its a bug, oversight or simply bad design choice but if player puts 2 or more vampires together in arena then they will fight forever.


This basically dismisses entire effort needed to maintain them and gives player unbalanced way to gain "titan level" overpowered units.


They are always at 100% blood, they dont need to eat prisoners because player can just keep them forever in arena until he uses rally flag.

They quickly level to 10.

They dont take gold while fighting in arena so player can basically never pay them because they are either fighting at rally flag or in the arena.

They never get unhappy or rebel when fighting in the arena no matter how long they are there.


Proper fix would be to not allow them to fight in the arena (make them not droppable there) and only allow them to train in barracks so they still need to eat prisoners and pickup gold from treasury or rebalance vampires altogether.

Game Version:
Steam Public
Platform:
Windows
Replies 17
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anonymous
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We are not currently considering this but may revisit it in the future

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anonymous

Josh Bishop should we take another look for 1.6

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Stefan Furcht Programmer

Alright :)

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Josh Bishop Creative Director

Stefan Furcht Putting this on hold til I'm back then we'll have a meeting about it.

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Webbernever1

I have noticed this problem too. With respect, I think that this may be a solution worth considering too:


Change the vampire's healing ability entirely. The vampire NO LONGER heals every time it hits an opponent. This makes it vulnerable to other minions and means that a vampire v. vampire battle is not an ultimate stalemate (at the moment, a somewhat low-levelled vampire is able to match a titan, tested this with Bohser). Instead: vampires heal When they kill an enemy. They only receive 75% of the enemy's total health. Notice I used the word 'kill'. This means that any enemy which the vampire 'defeats' is killed. This mechanic would apply in arenas as well (solving the infinite training exploit). Thus, any enemy killed in the arena by the vampire would be Killed. So vampires could be trained but at this cost or with micromanaging.


I would also suggest reworking the blood mechanism. Instead of vampires rebelling (which is very annoying), what if vampires started to lose health constantly instead? Thus, they could be healed when not in war.


I agree that defences/constructs should not heal the vampire, nor should it reset its 'blood level'. However, if we consider the new healing mechanic and death mechanic I suggested, I see no reason why the arena cannot sustain a vampire per se. If I understand it correctly, at present one must be in constant war in order to keep a vampire happy. Given the sacrifices already required, this seems slightly onerous.


Whilst fixing the vampire, I think that the archon should be fixed too. As noted by Bohser, we noticed that the archon has an insane healing capacity. I think that a cap could be added to the maximum amount of health a vampire/archon may heal from a given action. I think that 2,500 health for an archon and 5,000 health for a vampire (given that it must kill to heal if this new mechanic is accepted) is reasonable. Thanks for reading.

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Stefan Furcht Programmer

Agreed.
Josh Bishop what shall we do about this?

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Biervampir [AUT]

Yes, Vampires will easily rebell against you, when they are unhappy for a long time. Rally Flag let ignor your minions needs to a certain point, then they will just move on and do their thing.


- I totally agree that the Vampirism Ability needs to be reworked/rebalanced (also true for the Archon, because he can heal him selfe from 3k to 20k with 1 hit).

- I do not dislike that the Vampire refuses to stay inside the Arena. But It takes away that you can test something in the Arena with an Vampire.

- About the Feeding problem, I think it's fine how it is, even that he refills it agaist defences, because of the riks of him getting inprisoned.


But we could make it that way that the Vampire do not refill it against his own kind? So that collecting Vampires and let them train just again Vamp's would be "solved", but an easy workaround would be, just get Beasts and Beast Master and then your Vamps are happy again.

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Cron

Well, the problem is that when vampires are in combat, they completely ignore all their needs. Player doesnt have to pay their wages, they dont eat prisoners anymore and they have no downtime so they level up constantly. Disabling their blood gain in arena would probably do nothing because they dont care at this point.


This can be done outside arena but then player is risking losing vampires because enemy player can grab them to his prison if they get beaten up, so its not entirely risk free.


You don't have to fulfill their needs so you can do extreme things like keep 20 or more vampires in the arena (I have done that, basically I turned all my own minions into vampires and put them into arena), level them all up and when you finally use rally flag against enemy player, they will leave arena on their own and move to rally flag immediately.


In my opinion possible fixes are:

- rebalance them so they dont heal faster than they deal damage in 1v1 situation (meeting another vampire 1vs1 outside arena is purely theoretical because chances of that are low but it would also fix that situation) The problem is, if you decide to nerf them then players may decide that vampires are simply too weak and not worth the effort

- disable their self healing in arena

- make it impossible to drop them in arena

- make them leave arena immediately after player drops them there (lets say that vampires dont like to be treated like animals)


There is also another question that needs answersing. Can vampires rebel against you when there is rally flag present, their needs are too low and they simply guard some place instead of fighting? I tried it few times and never had vampire rebel against me but maybe it wasnt long enough (I dont know how much time it takes for minion to rebel) so I can't really confirm this issue. If rally flag indeed makes minions ignore all their needs then this is also a big problem.



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Andrew "Nutter" Jaggar

This ticket refers specifically to the Arena. The interaction with the arena is the issue. Because they're able to constantly stay in the arena, players can effectively bypass the "feeding prisoners or minions" bit of the vampire's blood need because arena combat fills it. This means that Vampires can stay in the arena constantly until they reach level 10 without any of their intended downsides.


The problem you're referring to, which is 2 vampires fighting from different factions resulting in a stalemate, is a separate (and much less serious) issue. That issue can be resolved by either player dropping extra minions as support to break the stalemate.


This is ultimately a balance issue here, rather than a mechanic one.. the unintended interaction between Vampire and Arena is allowing them to level up too quickly without any negative consequences so we need to ensure that Vampires can't stay in the arena indefinitely to fix the problem in this ticket.