Level Restriction for equipment really needed?

Community Feedback
#1

Right now, equipment has level restriction. I’m not sure if this should really be the case. Here are some arguments against it:

  1. Availability of equiment is already restricted by the jobs producing the equipment. You need a lvl 6 smith to be able to produce steel armor and two handed swords and a lvl 6 carpenter to produce the Recurve Bow. And lets not forget that you need for example a lvl 3 Mason to produce the smith hammer.

  2. When a soldier dies, you will have to promote a new one. But this guy will be a lvl 0 footman and won’t be able to equip anything useful at all. In late game, enemies will literally destroy this guy, since he can’t equip anything and if he doesn’t participate in fights, he will not level up. So if there is one enemy raid that kills nearly all your soldiers, it’s game over, since there is no chance to make a comeback without decent equipped soldiers. Lets not forget that promoting a new soldier already comes with the disadvantage of not being an advanced class (knight/archer/cleric) and not having the job abilities.

  3. Another problem is, if you promote a footman to knight, he will be a lvl 0 knight and won’t be able to equip good knight stuff. It’s quite possible that the equipment will be worse then the equipment he had as a footman.

All in all it takes alot of playtime to get a lvl 6 smith, so the level restriction doesn’t make so much sense, especially when it means game over in late game if your soldiers get wiped out once.

I hope this is convincing enough to show, that the level restriction should be removed or at least changed somehow.

Greetings,

Aaron

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Detailed Feedback: Hard Mode
Combat needs a knockout state
#2

I disagree I like the level requirements, it stops the old problem of a totally inexperienced footman bossing it out against untold numbers of enemies without consequence,

3 is invalid as the knights base equipment is better than a footman level 6’s equipment bar the sword. And you can’t compare an archer and footman.
Kinght has 4,6,4 armour at lvl 0. (helmet, torso, shield)
footman has 4,6,3 armour at lvl 6 or just 4,6 if they has a 2 handed weapon.

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#3

If anything, I hope in the future they raise the level caps and give us new armor! Also legendary armors!

#4

It’s not like I totally disagree that it’s kinda unrealistic that a lvl 0 footman kills high level monsters. But like I said:

  • a lvl 0 footman does not have the +40% damage increasement like a leveled up footmen and no double damage ability and ofc does not have the abilities from a knight/archer and therefore will be MUCH weaker then any leveled soldier, even if he has high level equipment
  • if your soldiers get wiped out once, you have no way for a comeback except abusing stone walls to keep monsters away from you (which is kinda cheating, because monsters are not allowed yet to break walls/fences).

So how would you solve the problem that there’s nearly no chance for a comeback? Removing the level restriction would be the easiest way. But ofc I’m open to other suggestions as well.

edit:

Maybe I should put it another way: Right now, Stonehearth works like this: You have your starter soldiers which can easily level up and will be your main force against any endgame enemies. If you lose those guys in the early/mid game, you will never make it into the end game. So if they die, you have to either reload and try to save them or restart the game. So we need to find a way to make it possible, that soldiers can die without resulting in a game over. Removing the level restriction allows that, because a fredhly promoted footman can equip useful equiipment from a high level smith, even if he is lvl 0. He will be weaker then leveled soldiers, but not bug meat at least. If you have a better suggestion that can keep the level restriction AND allows for soldiers dying without game over, I’m all for it. But if that’s not the case, it may be better to remove that restriction until it can be solved in a better way. Don’t forget that there are players out there who are not used to these kind of games and also want to enjoy it. Losing all your soldiers and then having to restart is no fun for some (maybe many) players.

#5

That’s part of the point, specially in hard mode. That’s part of the fun of the game. If you lose your eldest soldiers you need to strategize a way to recover. Also, with my current city of Torrik, I managed to encase myself on an island of no spawns. I amassed a city of 40 hearthlings with tons of wealth. Finally connected the city to another island.

Well, as soon as I did enemies started to spawn.

Problem was I had one level 6 footman, a level 1 knight, and an apprentice cleric and a level 5 cleric.

Yeah, it took some work and heavy reactions. But I managed to hold off impeding forces with the use of some clever tactics and farming mobs during the day to level up quick.

Its all part of the fun, trying to survive in an unforgiving world. Especially in hard mode.

#6

Sorry, but where’s the point to encase myself on a safe island and not being forced to build up my military force to fight enemies? The point of this game is not being safe for like 50 days, amass all the ressources you need and then start fighting enemies. With that tactic, it’s quite obvious why you don’t struggle. Try to start a hardmode game and fight enemies right from the start. No reloading if you lose any soldiers. You will see that it will be impossible for you to make a comeback if you don’t use cheesy tactics (like abusing fences or settling on a small island).

My suggestion is based on many hardmode playthroughs where I fought enemies right from the start. I didn’t use any walls or safe islands to make my life easy. And I think this is the way the game is meant to be played. If the devs want you to have enough time to get 40 citizens and enough military strength without having to face any enemies, enemies wouldn’t appear right from day 1. So I think my suggestion to remove restrictions is quite reasonable if there is no way for a comeback once you have lost your soldiers in mid game. And if there is a better way to solve that problem, I’m all up for it.

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#7

Mercenary! with cool names like the Bloodcore/ Death Dealers/ Sheepslaughters

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#8

Again, I was without spawns for a majority of the game to the point my combat force was severely weak. As in, only one had a full set of iron armor. The rest didn’t even have armor. Cause they were all so under leveled. However, I still managed to fend off a force of 2 ogres, 4 kobolds, and 4 kobold wolfs.

Yes, it was on Hardmode.

Again, half the fun of the game is trying to survive. When you lose your soldiers, you make due and try to recover. If you can’t, you lose. If you don’t want a chance at losing, then place an easier mode, or even peaceful mode. There is ALWAYS a way to come back. Always

Also, an item to use as a Mercenary call for X amount of gold would be awesome.

#9

Sorry, but you acutally didn’t “manage” to survive. Yes, your military strength was weak, but you had 40 hearthlings in your backhand, so losing 1-2 is no problem, especially if you had all the ressources you need to recover. If you had faced the enemies right from the start (and that’s the whole point about hard mode), you had to use much more ressources on military strength.

For example: You need 2 footman to survive the first 10 days, until day 20 you should aim for a cleric and maybe a 3rd footman. After day 20, you must promote at least one knight and one archer to be able to tank and to deal enough damage. This costs alot of ressources and most of the time you wont have enough citizens to cover all jobs. So after my mason reached lvl 3 and build a smith hammer, I promoted him to be a farmer and I promoted my trapper to a herbalist. Without the farmer, I wouldn’t had have enough food and net worth for new citizens and without the herbalist my soldiers would lose more health in battle then they could have recovered in between the battles. So it requires alot of micromanagement if you face the threat right from the start. Playing it safe on an isolated island is as easy as peaceful mode, since you can decide to face the threat whenever you (and not the game) wants it.

Also: Why do you think the devs decided to implement an enemy that can break doors? Because you are not supposed to hide all the time from your enemies. I think (and hope) that they will introduce flying units at some point, that can easily fly over walls and attack and I also hope there will be enemies that can break down fences or even walls, if you decide to hide to long, otherwise the game would become cheesy, because it would be to easy to avoid strong enemies at all.

That said, I dont think it is a good design choice if you are not allowed to lose 1-2 main soldiers because it will result in game over. There should be better ways to recover.

Additional idea: You can smith strong militia weapons which need to be stored on weapon stands. If you activate the town alarm, all citizens assigned to militia run to the weapon stand and pick a militia weapon and fight with it. They do damage, but they have weak defenses and therefore die fast. But at least it would be a viable way to survive some time until you have some new soldiers when you have lost your main force.

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#10

I think that the levelled equipment is very good. Later in the game, new guys earn more ep faster anyways, so i think it is possible to level them up quickly. I had a lvl0 footmen fight against ogos army (alongside my strong soldiers) and he was lvl 4 by the end of the fight. No joke or exageration.

#11

Considering my combat force had only one footman fully geared, the rest in no gear or one being in bronze armor. A knight in basic knight gear, and 2 clerics.

The point is, you can put up a fight and come back with a small force. My loses in the play were hard, but I recovered fast and managed to level up new hearthlings during the days before another raid came.

Note: My Torrik city is just one play through cause I wanted to test out the biome. So I understand how things work in the other biomes and fully deal with it. To the point at times I’ll start a settlement at the top of the mountain just to make it harder. (Can’t trap or grow crops ontop of mountains)

So yes, I can say without a doubt, even if at some point say 14 hearthlings into the game you lose a couple of level 6 footmen. Or a level 4 knight. You’ll be fine. (Note: If your strategy was banking on having a small fighting force to where losing one or two soldiers is a tremendous loss, then you might want to re-evaluate your strat.)

Here is a great example. I had 6 fresh apprentice footmen. Used them with a couple of higher level footmen and a knight and some clerics. Killed ONE large zombie. They all went straight to level 2.

After that just took out some goblin camps and crypts as they spawned during the day. Bam, got them all up to level to deal with raids.

#12

Have you read my post?

Maybe I clarify what I said: I didn’t even had enough citizens to cover all jobs and had to promote my mason to farmer and my trapper to herbalist. At that point I had 12 hearthlings and 2 of them were footman and 1 cleric (so pretty early game). Losing them means only 9 hearthlings left and promoting 2 of them to footman and one to cleric is nearly impossible without breaking your economy. Losing them = game over.

So while you farmed ressources on an isolated island for like 30-40 ingame days (should be that much if you had 40 hearthlings) and didn’t have to use any ressources for your military force, I had to find a balance between having a good economy and a working military force right from the beginning. I had to reload 1-2 times because the enemy got me (archers are really terrible enemies) and managed to survive so far, but I think there should be more viable ways to have a comeback without reloading after one of your soldiers died.

#13

Hi everyone!
So hopefully I don’t get in too much trouble talking on here. Game design is a very subjective thing and obviously there’s lots of wiggle room for improvement and changes. I can only talk about what the intent was behind adding level restrictions and the issues we were trying to solve.

So here goes:
It used to be (back in A15) that equipment had no level requirements. This made it so that footman level didn’t really matter because the highest level equipment could make up for lack of perks. As long as you had a level 6 blacksmith, all your footmen could wear the best gear and trivialize combat. This led to certain “life hacks” such as immediately promoting everyone to footmen when combat was starting (so you could get like 30 footmen in your 40 people town because the talisman is cheap to make). Then, the footmen that had all the best gear would be able to handle anything in their path. Once done with combat, demote footmen back to worker so they can build/mine, etc.

We didn’t like this model because:

  1. it trivialized combat
  2. there was no reason to invest in leveling up combat classes

We want all classes to feel like they are getting more powerful as they level. We want commitment for each hearthling to their specific job as well – like it should be a meaningful decision to change a hearthling’s job.

That said, I do think lowering level requirements across the board would be acceptable. EG: reducing all level requirements by 1. The initial pass for level requirements was just trying to spread out all the equipment such that a unit had one upgrade per level, but since we’ll add more upgrades in the future, it’s probably fine to have lower level requirements for the current stuff.

Thanks for reading this rant. As always, I am open to suggestions :slight_smile:

Thanks
-Yang

4 Likes
#14

@yshan n Thanks for your kind reply. I thought so that this was the reason, but I think we need to have something ingame that lets the player recover from a heavy setback (losing his main military force).

Like I suggested before: You can smith strong militia weapons which need to be stored on weapon stands (placeable object that holds up to 5 miliatia weapons). If you activate the town alarm, all citizens assigned to militia run to the weapon stand and pick a militia weapon and fight with it. They do lots of damage with those weapons, but militia obviously has still weak defense (only worker clothes) and therefore they die very fast. But at least it would be a viable way to survive some time until you have some new soldiers when you have lost your main force. And it also helps when your soldiers are at low health and need some backup from town.

To make this a little bit more interesting, you could also add militia skills, which EVERY hearthling has, no matter if he has a job or is a worker etc. Only soldiers dont have them obviously. Ofc a citizens only levels up militia skills if he fights as a militia.

  • +25% movement speed when activating town alarm
  • +10% max health
  • Gets encouraged when close to trained soldiers
  • etc.

In the end, a militia unit should still deal less damage then a knight and tank less as an archer. What makes thenm strong are the masses. I think this would be an interesting way to solve this “no comeback possible” problem.

Greetings

#15

This same basic issue was what I was trying to address with this thread here, so maybe something to look at: Combat needs a knockout state

Basically there’s an inherent dichotomy when using level-up systems; the longer it takes to level a character up to max, the harder it should be to “lose” the fully leveled character, and vice versa. You can either have disposable soldiers with a high churn rate or elite soldiers that are very survivable.

Zero level requirements on gear is taking the high-churn-rate approach, which isn’t inherently bad but does have some drawbacks (as spelled out by yshan above). Conversely, high investment of time / long levelling time characters need to be more survivable (and, ideally, recoverable, which is why AD&D has resurrection spells).

Right now the combat is essentially a “permadeath” system, although you can save and reload – top level characters can die quickly over minor tactical errors and there’s no recovery short of reloading.

Another issue is that there are basically two groups of people playing the game: people who want to build fancy things (the minecraft crowd) and people who want to play a RTS (the Warcraft crowd). And everyone playing this game is falling somewhere on a spectrum between those two poles. So there has to be enough challenge to the game to satisfy the Warcraft players, without destroying the game for the Minecraft players when their dudes all get wiped out halfway through their big project. Peaceful mode helps with this of course but that doesn’t solve it for everyone – if you’re building Coolest Fort Ever, there’s no point building it in Peaceful mode!

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#16

As I previously stated

"This is why I leave the artwork up to @8BitCrab " :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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#17

i have no clue why you paged me, as that’s also about as good as my art gets :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

unless you mean voxel models, then there’s this guy,

snap2016-05-06-15-24-46.jpg960×800 52.1 KB

though he’s not that great either…

edit: as to not derail this thread with my model, i’ve also posted it over in my modelling thread,

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8BitCrab's voxel stuff
#18

PLEASE replace the iron helmet with this one in a mod. I beg you. Seriously.

#19

Maybe we just need an Easy mode. =) Normal is too hard at times, esp when you first start getting Kobolds and Ogres. I want the combat and invasions, I just don’t want them to be potential wipe events. I’m fine with there being a risk of losing non-combat Hearthlings - that adds a sense of risk, but losing a single soldier can end a game.

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#20

most of the time I have a level 4-5 blacksmith wile playing TA far before I have a real need or have a knight that is level 6, and besides as @Freedom said:[quote=“Freedom, post:2, topic:21944”]
it stops the old problem of a totally inexperienced footman bossing it out against untold numbers of enemies without consequence,
[/quote]

I have NEVER had this issue. since you don’t just send one person into a fight, you back them up with other units. fist unit is a footman, then a cleric ASAP to help with healing… I end up with at least 6 fighters, 2 archers 2 clerics and 2 knights. since that way the knights and keep pulling ‘threat’ form one another long enguht to let the clerics heal the others…

again as freedom said in point one you would not give your best equipment to a rookie. they need to’ prove’ themselves worthy of better gear

the only way I can think of to best explain a good battle group is nearly any MMO that is out there. you need tanks dps and healers…
knights are ‘Tanks’ since they keep the attacks to themselves . this means they can take a lot more damage.
clerics are healers and keep the group alive as best they can
footmen, archers ( and mages if and when they are released ) are dps, they are the damage dealers of the group

1 Like