Satyr Saturday Replays Week 71 and up

[Ricky_Honejasi]

Yes, I am aware the tests weren't with heroes but wanted to mention things that if we include heroes MIGHT change considerably in practice. :p

You can try more tests and such to see but maybe you should just plain buff alliance instead of searching at great lengths on the orc side (especially if you don't see any real answers after more tests in the end).

So far the only thing that perphas could be changed otherwise is maybe to nerf Tauren's Pulverize or nerf Tauren Revival  just to see how it fares in such case.

[Mucky]

+1 to every unit spawn, +1 weapons/armor, +1 building health upgrade, all abilities researched:

Orcs won at 1:07:58. Top died first, and bottom died shortly after. Middle held strong, and Orcs never managed to kill the towers/archers at middle. I have no idea why middle does so well while the side lanes do so bad.

One thing I noticed is that Humans and Orcs had the same number of kills, but Orcs produced more units. This is because Humans have three units at the Workshop (slowest spawn rate) while Orc only has two there. I'm going to try moving the flying machine to the gryphon aviary, which would make the spawn rates totally even. Then I'll do another test at +2 upgrades, because +1 upgrades took waaaay too long. I spent 3/4 of the game alt-tabbed or afk.

[IskatuMesk]

Unit AI is critical in this, especially for pathing. Orc units are typically larger than humans and have a difficult time pathing around. When the humans get a critical number of ranged there is very little the Horde have to do major damage to them, especially with maxed out priests. The only thing would be devouring knights and the pulverize on the casters but the AI is not anywhere near smart enough to do that, and it's rare for kodo to ever reach their target.

A part of my suggestions would be to make Horde units smaller for one, and perhaps consider reducing the mana cost on healing ward to see if it encourages further use or base healing ward on a different spell like Spirit Beast that they'll use as soon as they enter combat.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

Kind of posted after Mesk's post :

I believe a potential reason that middle holds much better is because of the chokepoints. As you know, both top and bottom tend to have straight mini-lines into the base while the middle requires a turn rather at the last seconds. This can allow towers some extra rounds at enemies on top of the enemy lines being a bit "packed" up to properly fight.

It might be also possible that corpses does rack up more on the top "cliffs" of the middle (including tauren corpses) thus the Orc side has less change to revive taurens both to lack of visibility and due being more stuck behind due to the middle's chockpoint towards the human base.

I also suspect that somewhat close towers in a line might help in worse scenarios for the middle. For example, you kill the middle's towers then the troops tend to be more easily lured to the towers behind until reinforcements pop up while the catapults might be a bit stuck behind. However, for top and bottom, catapults are more likely to already shoot buildings as soon their front towers are down.

Ultimately, I think the fact that middle holds stronger might be fine after all. The issue still stay around the fact that orc are more likely to win for some reason or another.

[Mucky]

Earlier today I did another two tests, both with +2 upgrades to everything. This is also after having moved flying machines to the gryphon aviary.

First test, Humans won at around 50 minutes. They would've won earlier, around 30ish, but Laconius and I were playing around. In fact, Orc was losing in all lanes.

Second test, Orcs won at around the same time. Again, they would've won earlier if not for interference. Orcs killed the top lane, and Humans were in the process of killing the bottom lane, but Orcs were faster. Middle sustained little damage on both sides.

It's all about whether Humans can get a big enough blob of rifles/priests/mortars or not. Once they reach critical mass, there's no stopping them. That's why Humans won with full upgrades to everything at the start, because they spawn tons of priests and riflemen on the first wave and Humans have the advantage on the first wave.

Kodos are stupid, plain and simple. If they're not trying to devour something and getting melted by the riflemen/priest blob, they're running ahead of the wave, then turning around to attack and get shot.

These tests would give me more substantial information if so many factors didn't rely on luck. I think I'll go ahead and do what Mesk suggest on healing wards, and perhaps put a cooldown on their stasis traps. Maybe they'll act a little smarter with those changes.

By the way, flying machine buff did nothing. They die at the drop of a hat.

[Theia_Loki]

Just a rar with my collection of Dark Deeds replays.

Playing Possum, in particular, is rather amusing.

[Mucky]

I went ahead and juked Rokhan's serpent ward spell and made that into the new healing ward. Witch Doctors seem to be better about using them now. I did another test at +2 upgrades to everything with this latest change, and Orcs killed bottom in 15 minutes. Would probably have won in another 7-8 minutes, but with a lane dead the result was obvious.

So yeah, in a search to find the overpowered aspect of Orcs, I ended up making their AI slightly better. Thing is though, how am I supposed to interpret these tests when each one I find that the games can honestly go either way? I'm reluctant to nerf anything on Orc side if all Humans need to form a strong push is a big blob of riflemen/priests/mortars.

I may buff flying machine stats, though. They are really terrible units.

[IskatuMesk]

The only way of really telling is to average it I guess, or to break the testing down into individual tiers (melee vs melee, caster vs caster), and see if you can identify which aspect is the most powerful. Although we already know the two most pivotal Orc abilities - Pulverize and Bloodlust, the latter of which is fairly ridiculous that it lasts so long on heroes.

This is the challenge in developing opposing creep spawns that are totally different like they were in LoL. So, in LoL, I made sure each division had units whose "potential" effectiveness was equal or similar to that of their opposing sides. For example, turtles had more health but warriors had stronger shield block. But, Knights vs Tauren, Knights have no redeeming qualities. They just suck, flat out.

[Mucky]

Knights vs. Tauren aren't equal sides anyway, since Knights spawn 3x as often as Tauren. There will still always be Tauren though, thanks to Ancestral Spirit.

I can say as far as tiers go, Humans have the better casters and Orcs have the better melee. TGS units aren't organized in any coherent fashion, though. Especially before I started moving units around; Demolishers spawned at the barracks which meant they would spawn EVERY SINGLE WAVE, whereas Human siege didn't spawn nearly as often. Many units aren't well suited to AoS gameplay either; Raiders are meant to be hit-and-run, not front-line melee. Flying Machines are meant to be massed, costing only one food and practically no resources, but in TGS only a few of them will spawn. Every unit was just taken from melee and dropped into the AoS format. As a result units can either be dead weight or ridiculously strong.

[IskatuMesk]

Then they just see significant changes if you are to have any hope of balancing them out properly.

[Mucky]

Time for some DOCUMENTARY

• Many minor movement speed adjustments to keep armies together. Namely, Raiders shouldn't be running ahead of everything else anymore.
• Armor upgrades now provide a 10% HP bonus to all affected units, instead of the static amounts they previously gave.
• I was searching through upgrades and noticed Pulverize also gave Taurens a 150 health bonus. Yeah. That's gone.
• In fact there are a LOT of undocumented health bonuses all over the place. I went ahead and fixed the tooltips for upgrades, especially Orcs.
• Flying Machine's health is now 425, up from 225; damage for both attack types have been increased.
• Siege Engine's health is now 1300, up from 700; armor type changed from fortified to heavy; base armor and upgrade armor amount increased from 2 to 5; primary damage type changed from siege to normal; range is now 250, up from 192; barrage now based off primary attack.
• Gryphon Rider's damage type changed from piercing to magic; attack cooldown is now 2.0, down from 2.2.
• Knight's health is now 850, up from 800; base damage is now 30-40, up from 27-35.
• Raider's armor has been changed from medium to heavy; damage type changed from siege to normal; now use the Berserker Strength upgrade.
• Kodo Rider's armor has been changed from light to medium; Devour has been removed from Kodo Riders. This is for the best.

After several test runs with these changes, I've found the following:

Knights/Footmen have a slight edge against Grunts/Raiders.
Human air flat out owns Orc air.
Kodos are basically gigantic Trolls now. Their DPS is about the same, too, so Orc's ranged/anti-air is fairly strong now.
Siege Engines are god damned insane. I've actually nerfed them a couple times after all of the changes I made to them. Orc could be pushing up against Human towers, then the siege engines would come up and shred EVERYTHING. Then Humans would push all the way up to Orc towers. It's awesome. I totally broke them.
Also, I haven't adjusted gold prices for anything.

[IskatuMesk]

The reason human AA is so strong is because A.) Wyverns suck and B.) all of the batriders usually suicide one guy (Do you even get bats in TGS?) and their damage is wasted, everything else gets CC'd by hawkfaggots. Their poison was never any good in wc3 and in TGS with high-dps battles it's even less useful. Perhaps an NPC-only slow poison?

Can you make Net give a silencing effect? Might make raiders a bit more useful.

[Mucky]

Can you make Net give a silencing effect? Might make raiders a bit more useful.

Not really. Every form of silence is used one way or another, so there would be buff conflicts. Raiders don't really net casters anyway, unless you're talking about the hawkfaggots but they'll usually have already burned their CC when a raider nets them.

[IskatuMesk]

ya

Hmm... maybe Raiders need another ability instead of net?

[Mucky]

SUICIDE