Post-General Balance Issues

Anyone else progressed the survival game past the point of defeating the General? If so, I’m curious how you find the balance.

Specifically, it feels to me that post-General mob spawns are too heavy, too frequent and often too close to my town (Screenshots available upon request). That mixed with the currently-limited combat AI means I spend almost all of my time babysitting my military and workers to ensure they don’t trigger a full scale land invasion and/or get themselves utterly slaughtered.

This means I stop playing a game, and really just become an AI nanny. As a player, I refuse to allow a veteran hearthling to die purely from stupidity. As a result, I’ve found I’ve stopped evolving my town.

What have your experiences been so far? Do you agree that this stage of the game needs some balancing, or has it been fine as is?

I don’t want builders working in less secure locations, and there is no real way to reduce or eliminate hostile spawning short of building something or placing stockpiles everywhere. In Minecraft, torches served that purpose. No such construct exists in Stonehearth other than buildings or stockpiles, and using stockpiles to artificially inflate my borders feels more like a bandaid than an intentional game mechanic.

Thoughts?

The main problem I had was collecting loot.

Something would spawn so I’d send my military out to greet it, the military would kill the enemy and go back home, then the squishes (unarmed, unarmoured civilian workers) would be out in the wild trying to collect the loot and the next wave would spawn on their heads and slaughter them before military could get back.

To try to help, I started using my military to lure the enemies back to my town gates before killing them. This helped some, but is painful and can’t work for things like crypts. The other thing I did was turn military into haulers (by turning off their “job”), which only helped slightly (after a fight they’re more likely to walk past all the loot on their way to food/sleep, or just stand there doing nothing) and means you need to micro-manage them.

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The main thing I think that needs to happen is that your hearthlings need to recognise there being archers in the raid and adjust there tactics to counter this. There is too much micro required to get your hearthlings to do the logical thing.
The post general combat hearthling AI needs a rework/improving. If this happened so that you didn’t have to babysit each fight because of the archers, then the game would be fine and I’d even go as far as saying that the raids aren’t frequent enough. I have had stretches of several days without being attacked.

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Hmm, I can’t help but feel like every non-trivial battle should involve some micro. But I agree that you shouldn’t have to babysit the military all the time.

What do you think would be the best tactics when there are archers involved? I think after all that are left are archers, the easiest way to bring them down is to attack them one at a time. Your own archers slow them down, your military can then catch up to them and whack them while they run.

@Brendan: what does your military makeup look like?

@Moai
The way I do it when there are archers in a raid is, I let one of my knights aggro all of the non archer units, then have every other hearthling target the archers, I split my hearthlings that are targeting the archers into equal groups so that all the archers are kept as busy as possible so they do the least amount of damage.
When one of the archers dies that group of hearthlings moves onto the next closest archer until they are all dead, only then do I concentrate on the melee that my knight is in.
I have one of my clerics concentrate on the melee knight whilst the others run around healing the other hearthlings that are killing the archers. Never lose anybody fighting this way.

Hmm. That sounds like a lot of micro, assigning groups of hearthlings to each archer. I have 3 clerics, 4 archers, 2 knights and 2 footmen. I’ve yet to run into an enemy that can kill my hearthlings faster than my clerics heal them. After the enemy tanks are gone, I chase down each archer one at a time. The one I’m chasing is too occupied running to be shooting at me, and the other ones are usually trailing behind and shooting clerics, who just heal each other.

I haven’t played this far into the game yet but I think it’s fitting here. I feel that the enemies faced run away too easily. Half of the issues I have is that especially enemy archers flee half way across the map with a large party chasing after them which is so tedious with the later game mobs.

You can either focus fire one archer at a time while getting wailed on by the other archers or you can focus on more than one but get your military spread across the map.

Interestingly I’ve noticed that when your archers are hit by kabolds arrows they stand in place but when kabolds are hit by your archers they run away. . . . So annoying . . .

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For that kingdom, the military was about 22 hearthlings, and would’ve been 4 clerics, 4 knights, 4 footman and a bunch of archers; were most where cross-trained in multiple roles (e.g. trained as level 6 footman, knight and archer) for extra HP. The military didn’t have any trouble killing the enemy. The problem was that the enemy didn’t have trouble killing civilians before the military could arrive.

A carpenter would be away from my fort collecting a hunk of stone left by a demolished crypt, a pack of ogres and high level archers would spawn at the same location as the carpenter. The carpenter would be dead within 5 seconds. The military would either be back at the fort waiting for the next wave or off in a completely different direction killing something else, and it’s impossible to get the military to the carpenter fast enough to prevent the carpenter’s death.

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Impressed with the size of your military. I face the same issues. The way I solved it was to moat my entire village so no hearthlings can wander out and kill themselves.

Whats missing is the Hearthlings AI does not have a sense of the village and what is safe or not. They don’t run when they see the enemy, they don’t warn their neighbors, and the military doesn’t react to a villager seeing an enemy.

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The Engineer now produces a lockable door (and there’s regrettably not a 4-wide version of it yet; only 3-wide so far). I haven’t had time to retrofit my perimeter to test it yet. I think using those to help control when and how Hearthlings can wander will help this, but to @Brendan’s earlier point, the issue of the teleporting raiding party is a real problem.

Agreed. Solving these AI complexities will go a long way to fixing the current need for the player to nanny the AI instead of play the game.

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