Opened 8 years ago

Last modified 5 years ago

#3778 new enhancement

[PATCH] animal stats counter-intuitive

Reported by: Palaxin Owned by:
Priority: Nice to Have Milestone: Backlog
Component: Simulation Keywords: patch
Cc: Patch:

Description (last modified by Palaxin)

Currently animal stats are quite counter-intuitive in some cases. E.g. a bear is a 50 hp and 40 attack glass cannon while a wolf is a tanky beast with 100 hp and 20 attack. I can't imagine this is intended... I would like to make a balancing patch for that.


The patch will be applied in several steps: #3786 - footprints and cleanup #3918 - DPS balance TBD - armor balance TBD - HP balance TBD - wiki documentation

Attachments (6)

animals_comparison.jpg (171.2 KB ) - added by Palaxin 8 years ago.
animal_calculations.ods (19.8 KB ) - added by Palaxin 8 years ago.
animals_comparison_2.jpg (215.0 KB ) - added by Palaxin 8 years ago.
animal_calculations_2.ods (30.0 KB ) - added by Palaxin 8 years ago.
animal_calculations_3.ods (30.0 KB ) - added by Palaxin 8 years ago.
3778_v1.patch (47.9 KB ) - added by Palaxin 8 years ago.

Download all attachments as: .zip

Change History (20)

comment:1 by Palaxin, 8 years ago

Description: modified (diff)

comment:2 by Palaxin, 8 years ago

I did some maths and assumed that animal hp and food supply scales with the square root of real life animal weight which in most cases is quite a good assumption as you will see in the attached table. In Atlas I also put all animals together in the order of real life weight which does not fit well to their model size. There are three main reasons:

  • The models do not have exactly the same scale. E.g. the rhino appears quite small to me especially compared to giraffes (which are too big). Note that male white rhinoceroses weigh up to 2.4 tons and are the second largest animals on land.
  • For some animals there are very broad variations in size and weight depending where they live. E.g. polar bears are 5 times heavier than southern European brown bears. I always tried to pick the species which live in central/southern Europe, near/middle East or North Africa
  • Some species like the North African Elephant do not live any more. Also there have been tigers and lions in the near/middle East where you can't find them anymore. Of course these species might deviate from those who still live today.

My HP calculations are quite good in most cases but they yield too much HP for whales and to less food supply for chicken because they are so light. What do you think?

Last edited 8 years ago by Palaxin (previous) (diff)

by Palaxin, 8 years ago

Attachment: animals_comparison.jpg added

by Palaxin, 8 years ago

Attachment: animal_calculations.ods added

in reply to:  2 comment:3 by elexis, 8 years ago

Nice research :) Rearranging / reordering the HP and food values from figures actually found in the animal kingdom while keeping most of the balance as is sounds like a mostly good idea to me (Average HP change: 50%, average food change: 10%). Formulas like this one can reveal potential imbalances in the templatess/gameplay.

Primarily it is a balancing decision, so it can be a guideline but not a rule (otherwise we'd specify the weight in the templates and automatically derive the food from that). A comment about this guideline should be added to some parent template.

Balancing:

  • Reducing the chicken food by half will make the first 3min much slower.
  • Increasing the whale HP by factor 5-6 might make them a bit annoying to gather, in particular in obstruction-rich areas.
  • Due to their attack damage, making walrus three times stronger will reduce their usefulness (might be okay though).
  • Some animals like crocodiles, wolves, tigers and lions can't be used to gather food currently. Is that accurate? Maybe share some recipes?

Replying to Palaxin:

The models do not have exactly the same scale

More tables coming?

comment:4 by Palaxin, 8 years ago

Thx for looking at my calculations :)

I don't remember which source that was, but it said that southern brown bears are quite small (about 70 kg in the Mediterranean, increasing towards Asia) so I thought this would make sense for most civs. I was wondering myself about that small bears and have changed that HP now because I prefer to include all Eurasian brown bears. The sources are next to the table now so re-checking is simple :)

To allow more freedom I made more parameters and split the hp(weight) and food(weight) functions. Additionally you can weight the influence of each animal on the deviation, like that:

  • HP are not important for domestic animals, because they can be slaughtered (factor 0)
  • they are more important for hunting animals, it's basically the time how long you need to chase them (factor 1)
  • they are even more important for animals fighting back because they add to their combat strength (factor 2)
  • food is not relevant for fighting animals, because they provide none (factor 0)
  • most animals just provide food (factor 1)
  • domestic animals are important because they decide how fast you can get food in the first few seconds to minutes (factor 2)
  • sheep are even more important because they can be infinitely trained at the corral (factor 3)

Regarding your balancing concerns:

  • with the additional parameters I somehow managed to not change chicken food supply
  • whale HP are now "only" increased by a factor between 3.0 and 3.8 - which in my opinion is not that bad because you shouldn't hunt whales with fishing boats but invest really hard to get that large amount of food (I also doubt whales where hunted 2000 years back... so you could see them as some decoration with the ability to theoretically kill them with war ships); possible balancing: reduce whale movement speed
  • walrus is now "only" 2.4 times stronger; possible balancing: reduce attack rate/damage
  • sorry I forgot about the animals which don't supply any food; I fixed that with the 0 factor as described above
  • actually smaller tweaks can be done with armor and/or attack damage/rate if something feels not balanced

All in all I have to say that it is extremely difficult to find good parameters. There are always trade-offs, so you have to try a lot and think what may be the best solution. I actually could make a professional data analysis with a plotting program but I think in this context it's not just maths. As you said the gameplay should not be forgotten.

Some closer looks on the rhino convinced me it is actually a black rhino (smaller than white), so it's model is not that much out of scale than I had thougt. But the horse for example is really small. I did a better research and corrected some weights so my new comparison should look a little bit better now. A big problem with domestic animals is that the different breeds have extreme variations so its kind of arbitrary which value you pick.

Last edited 8 years ago by Palaxin (previous) (diff)

by Palaxin, 8 years ago

Attachment: animals_comparison_2.jpg added

by Palaxin, 8 years ago

Attachment: animal_calculations_2.ods added

by Palaxin, 8 years ago

Attachment: animal_calculations_3.ods added

comment:5 by Palaxin, 8 years ago

patch summary

  • adds a comment to each animal template: "guideline for hp and food supply at http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/3778"
  • changes HP and food supply of animals according to the calculations in "animal_calculations_3.ods" with the formulae HP(weight) = 5*weight0.5 and food(weight) = 25*weight0.4; it may be noteworthy that chicken have unchanged food supply (40) and sheep now cost 75 food, give 150 food and train time is 50 (50/100/35 before)
  • dps (= total damage / repeat time) changed for some (not all) animals, so now we have: wolf and boar - 15; lioness - 20; lion, tiger, bear, crocodile, rhino and walrus - 25; north african elephant - 30; asian elephant - 40; african bush elephant - 50
  • armor set to 1/1/15 for most animals (unchanged); 2/2/10 for crocodile, walrus and rhino (hack/pierce armor increased due to though/thick skin, but less crush armor); 3/4/5 for elephants (unchanged); 1/1/1 for whales (less crush armor due to their size)
  • elongated instead of circle footprints: 2:1 for land animals and 4:1 for whales and sharks; fish footprint adjusted to the actual size of the swarm
  • some cleanup und fix of whitespaces

open questions

  • whales HP have been changed from 200 to 850 and 1200, respectively - do they need a special nerf? (I think they don't because AFAIK harpoons etc. did not exist that time which would make whale hunting easy/possible) EDIT: I may be wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_whaling
  • is the big footprint for fish intended (for better support of multiple gatherers)?
  • other suggestions?
Version 6, edited 8 years ago by Palaxin (previous) (next) (diff)

comment:6 by Palaxin, 8 years ago

Keywords: patch review added
Summary: animal stats counter-intuitive[PATCH] animal stats counter-intuitive

by Palaxin, 8 years ago

Attachment: 3778_v1.patch added

comment:7 by mimo, 8 years ago

I don't think adding the comment line on each template is a good thing. If we would do that to support all choices of template values, that will make a lot of comments! Why not rather add a page in the wiki with the relevant info (once the patch is commited, to have uptodated info). While being guided with these calculations is good in general, we should keep balance in mind. For example, pigs and sheeps have currently the same food amount, and that could allow us for example to make some corrals (like the gaul one) to produce pigs instead of sheeps without having to bother with balance. So i would think that having only a few different resource amounts (even if not completely realistic) will simplify balance. Finally your patch starts to have a lot of unrelated modifications, which will make it difficult to be commited. Why not split it: keeping the original amount+hp for this ticket, and opening a new one for the other changes you propose.

comment:8 by Palaxin, 8 years ago

Ok I made a start with the footprints and whitespace fixes (because there is not that much to be discussed) in #3786. I will do further work when that patch is committed.

comment:9 by Palaxin, 8 years ago

Keywords: review removed
Milestone: Alpha 20Backlog

comment:10 by Lionkanzen, 8 years ago

Some animals can be nice have an resource more beyond than food.

comment:11 by Palaxin, 8 years ago

Hm... I don't see why animals should provide wood, stone or metal...? Also I think it's not technically possible to gather more than one resource type from an object. Perhaps it could be implemented with the looting mechanism (you kill the animal, instantly get a few resources and then collect food from it)

comment:12 by Palaxin, 8 years ago

Second part in #3918 deals with DPS balance. As with the first part, I will continue when it's fixed.

Last edited 8 years ago by Palaxin (previous) (diff)

comment:13 by Palaxin, 8 years ago

Description: modified (diff)

comment:14 by Imarok, 5 years ago

Component: UI & SimulationSimulation

Move tickets to Simulation as UI & Simulation got some sub components.

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