Maxima?

WOK for Advanced Players

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korexus
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Maxima?

Post by korexus » Mon Dec 03, 2007 12:10 pm

We've finally finished the Advanced WoK test. I'd like to share a few thoughts and see what the community thinks.

The first thing is maximum values for various things.
  • Armies. At the start of the game, the maximum value for each troop type in a province was set to 99. This was then changed to 999. For armies I feel this was the right thing to do
  • Upgraded troops. These were also set to max at 999. I'm wondering if this makes them too strong (I hit BigJ with 246 archers in the final showdown) maybe upgrades should be capped at 99
  • Bank Balance. The manual says this should cap out at 9999, but I found no such limit. However I was quite happy about this as it allowed me to get loads of gold, paying off the investment I made in the early game.
  • MRES. This maxed out at 999, which I felt was too low. Particularly when I was sitting with tech 30 and 19 mages (I had to do something while I made all those upgrades...) MRES 9999 or even unlimited would be more satisfying.
This last point could allow players to become immune to spells, so I would also suggest a change in the way MRES is knocked down. Instead of a constant amount for each spell, have a value based on #mages and tech level and then a multiplier for different spells. But that's a thought for another thread.

Any feedback?

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Post by Egbert » Mon Dec 03, 2007 1:12 pm

It's been quite awhile since I thought about Advanced WOK. I agree with most of your points, but I do not see a good reason for capping the number of upgraded troops you can have. That unfairly limits one type of strategy in the game.
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Post by Duke » Mon Dec 03, 2007 1:17 pm

I'm with Egbert on that point and agree with you on the others.
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Post by Xarfei » Mon Dec 03, 2007 3:51 pm

I agree with Egbert+Duke with regards to the upgrades.

With regards to MRES being no longer capped at 999 (and thus the possibility of accumulating enormously high MRES levels):

I don't think we should counteract this by making it to easy to knock MRES down, afterall investing into a high MRES should also pay off.
Maybe an extra 2.5% damage for every tech level you have? (i.e. a spell doing normaly a damage of 100, removes 125 MRES at tech level 10).

Alternative suggestion:
New (expensive) spell that just does high damage to MRES with no other effect (or how about a "STEAL MRES" (e.g. removes 80 points of your victims MRES ands 40 to your own) spell?).

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Post by korexus » Mon Dec 03, 2007 4:16 pm

I'll start a new thread for the spells thing as I have a lot of thoughts (sounds like others do too :D ) and don't want the the other things to get lost.

Capping upgrades: - I would agree, except that upgrades are currently by far the strongest thing on the board. I'm not averse to keeping them strong as they make the game interesting, but capping at 99 still allows a PATT of 88 for level 1 troops attacking a mountain, not massively limiting...

High MRES. I'm not saying it should be easy to knock down a high level that someone else has built up. Just possible. Remember that you can cast 1 spell per magician per turn, but with a maximum of three. I increase my MRES for each magician each turn, with no limit. My theory was that if lots of high tech mages can build a better shield, they can also have more success pushing a spell through someone else's shield. For now though, the question is: Should MRES be capped? - If we decide no, then we can figure out how to balance it elsewhere :wink:

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Post by Xarfei » Mon Dec 03, 2007 7:18 pm

When I looked at an old turn report of mine, I discovered the following:

#ID Name_____POP___ARM_LEVEL_PIK _ARC _KNI_CAT_CREA_MAG
===================================================================
20 Harlindon___262____0__2.171__0___36___119__22__#24___0
===================================================================
22 Provinces 1282 0 0.000a 0 39 119 22 1 4

The point I want to raise (apart from the fact that I had a decent army) is that upgrades were in fact never capped at 99!

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Post by korexus » Mon Dec 03, 2007 7:35 pm

Well, I'm happy leaving it like that, I was just wondering if they should be. I seem to remember some players complaining that upgrades were too strong back when WoK V was being played a lot, I didn't mind as I was one of the players using them, but I thought this might be a way to tone them down a bit.

It's all GM editable anyway, so I'm happy to leave the max at 999 by default if everyone else is.


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Post by Dameon » Tue Dec 04, 2007 12:34 am

Regarding the upgrades, I don't have an opinion one way or another at this point. It's been too long since I've played, but I don't remember upgrades being too ridiculously strong for the amount of resources that went into building them. I don't think I can ever recall having more than 99 upgraded troops in one province at any given time, actually, but maybe that's just my playstyle. Regarding the bank, I see no good reason to cap the amount of gold you can earn.

I'll drop my thoughts about MRES and spells into the other thread.
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