Data-driven decision making is the only way to go
The amazing 2003/2004 RTS by Big Huge Games (2014 Extended Edition available on Steam — though that version is riddled with gameplay bugs!)
Traditionally the Red Fort is used in a defensive role, or occasionally for comical rapid battlefield support if playing as Americans. These are perfectly viable uses, but the Red Fort can also be used much more offensively by making use of its rapid healing.
While wasting my life testing a unit that nobody builds in a game that nobody plays, I noticed the title occurring in some of my testing.
It turns out a +30% damage bonus generally doesn’t translate into actually killing units faster.
I realised long ago that late-game combat in RoN is less than stellar, but it turns out it’s even worse than I had already thought. 🫠
Continue reading “A couple more reasons why RoN’s late-game combat sucks”The Mongols have four unique Ranged Cavalry units: the Nomad (II), Steppe Nomad (III), Horde (IV), and Golden Horde (V). Their listed benefit is that “they’re particularly effective against enemy Light Infantry” and “effective against enemy Musket Infantry”. The game confers these advantages by giving all four units a +60% damage bonus against Light Infantry and a +45% damage bonus against Gunpowder Infantry.
In reality this ends up being a really weird bonus to have. Not only do they still normally lose in fights against those units, but those same units are supposed to be counters to Ranged Cavalry, making these bonuses unintuitive for both the attacker and the defender.
I previously posted about fight control in Rise of Nations, and briefly mentioned how the conventional wisdom regarding Age V combat (which I had also subscribed to until briefly before writing that article) was misguided. Age V combat is not “Age IV combat but with more guns” — it’s actually fundamentally different.
The Community Balance/Bugfix Patch has failed every evaluation category.
Also this starts off quite salty, because I think that there’s no honest explanation of why I’ve done this that doesn’t involve some level of disdain and disappointment.
This is a small bugfix patch, basically “Alpha 8c”. However, because these changes are not multiplayer-compatible with Alpha 8, they’re being released as Alpha 9.
This is just to ensure that this information is fully documented somewhere publicly – unless you’re a modder or just deeply curious about RoN quirks I’m not expecting you to bother reading this. It’s boring, poorly formated, has no images, and I basically haven’t posted it anywhere.
Knowing how fights are started and controlled is an invaluable but often poorly understood part of RoN’s combat.
Stemming from the above you end up with a broad category of units that can be considered the “backbone” of an army because they must exist for an army to be able to negotiate control of fights.
Continue reading “Fight Control and the Backbone of an Army”