Career Rework

[The Soldier]

Right off the bat, I understand that with UG:CW so deep into development, what I'm going to say has about a 1% chance of happening - but it's always good to throw it ideas and see what bites.

So, something I'm not a fan of is the current Career system.  It takes a long time to actually get anything noticeable or tangible, as all the skills need 10 points before they're maxed out.  This pretty vastly increases the understanding required early in the game.  There's also very little, if no, short-term goals because the bonuses you get for putting 2 or even 3 points into a skill is minimal at best.  What I suggest is rather heavy rework of how the skill system works, as well as the General-in-Chief system overall.

First off, and most importantly - all skills now max out at 3 points, with proper buffing to each skill point.  I'll not go listing out all the skills, but for example, Politics with 1 point might give +10% Recruits / Gold, 2 points +10% Recruits / Gold, and 3 points might grant +15 Moral for all Units (stacking bonuses).  Also; the rank of the General-in-Chief should instead affect Army Organization rather than points (I'll go more into why next).

Secondly - well, it's more than just the second thing, as all these tie together.  The General-in-Chief is now capped to how many Career Points he can use.  However, the General-in-Chief can now be replaced at will (by any general officer).

This reduces the amount of understanding required to know how the Career branch works, as each point does something meaningful and tangible, deepens the position of General-in-Chief, and allows the game to ease the player into seeing how it works, since you don't immediately have to know how switching out the General-in-Chief will affect the game.  This means, after careful management of the General-in-Chief position, you can have multiple General-in-Chiefs that specialize in different tasks - for example, you might have P.G.T. Beauregard with maxed out Logistics, and having him command the Battle of Fredricksburg would be a wise idea.  However, for Chancellorsville, maxed-out Logistics isn't not be the best - you might have Robert E. Lee with maxed out Politics and Recon to get the most moral for your men assaulting Chancellorsville Farm and know how the enemy fares as you pound them to mush.

If this gets enough interest, I'll expand on it more.

[Wandering1]

From a game design perspective, probably the reason why the Career system (or otherwise, skill point system) is there is to give the player a measure of growth overall. When you have... what, 15-ish major battles and 30-ish minor battles per faction, if you want every battle to matter, right there you have at least 45 'skill points' to allocate.

Which inevitably means that if you want to force the player to make choices on the skills instead of eventually maxing all of them, you have to start stretching the number of skill points to max a skill.

Now, obviously, one might counter-point that the minor battles need not give a skill point, but rather just give money/troops/reputation, and only give skill points to the major battles. I would argue however, that for those that have plenty of those resources in stock would not have any incentive of running the minor battles, especially considering the armory only replenishes after every major battle (which means, fighting minor battles reduces the armory stock, meaning you may not be able to replenish all the guns you want if you lost too many of a particular type).

As another argument, if the point is to reduce obscurity on the Career point system, effectively having lots of General-In-Chiefs simply produces a different obscurity; that of the ideal choice for every major battle. Which a new player would not know anyways until after playing the battle once (if we're working under the assumption that not every player needs to know about every battle of the ACW).

[The Soldier]

If I'm going to be honest, don't actually understand many of these arguments (aside from the game design bit at the start, which I can't say much to since it's up to the guy designing it).  Sorry.

[Wandering1]

To elaborate more on the points:

For the second, if you have, for this particular example, 45 skill points, and you only have 15 points worth of skills to spend them, it means there's no strategic choice of skills, only tactical. So there's no real 'choice' in the skills, just when you get them.

The third, is a two fold argument: first, the idea of progression, as your general gains experience. If you remove the skill point gain from the minor battles in order to reduce the number of skill points overall, then there is no progression for doing the minor battles. Second, it would actually be to your disadvantage if you engaged in the minor battles, because of the limited gun supply.

The last, again, is two fold: first, if the reason to revamp the skill system is to make the skill point choices have clear, tangible benefits unlike the minute percentage gains that is present, then what you're really doing with that solution is changing where the unclear benefits lie; that is, which skill is actually needed for the battles, because you don't know what the optimal skills are for the battles (if you are specializing generals for particular stats). Second, if the solution of either system is experience with the game, then there's no difference in either system as far as a new player is concerned.

[The Soldier]

45 minutes ago, Wandering1 said:

For the second, if you have, for this particular example, 45 skill points, and you only have 15 points worth of skills to spend them, it means there's no strategic choice of skills, only tactical. So there's no real 'choice' in the skills, just when you get them.

No - I mentioned that the maximum amount of skill points you get get on any single General-in-Chief is capped (to some reasonable number below maxing out every skill, I haven't worked out what would be good yet).  Hence also the ability to switch out the General-in-Chief, and if you do that wisely, you'll have a strong set of General-in-Chiefs to pick from when the need arises.

45 minutes ago, Wandering1 said:

The third, is a two fold argument: first, the idea of progression, as your general gains experience. If you remove the skill point gain from the minor battles in order to reduce the number of skill points overall, then there is no progression for doing the minor battles. Second, it would actually be to your disadvantage if you engaged in the minor battles, because of the limited gun supply.

I didn't say to remove skill point gain from minor battles?  Career point gain would remain the same (just linked to whatever General-in-Chief is commanding at the time of the battle).

45 minutes ago, Wandering1 said:

The last, again, is two fold: first, if the reason to revamp the skill system is to make the skill point choices have clear, tangible benefits unlike the minute percentage gains that is present, then what you're really doing with that solution is changing where the unclear benefits lie; that is, which skill is actually needed for the battles, because you don't know what the optimal skills are for the battles (if you are specializing generals for particular stats). Second, if the solution of either system is experience with the game, then there's no difference in either system as far as a new player is concerned.

Reading the description of battles before you enter them helps.  I did that with all the Grand Battles my first time playing them, so I had a general idea of what to expect before I even started the minor battles and prepared accordingly.  Also; it will help new players, as I said, it reduces the initial level of understanding required to make a good skill point decision (or at the very least, won't be as bad if they put them into a not-so-good place).

Edited March 18, 2017 by The Soldier

[A. P. Hill]

On the topic of skill points, the career screen shows that there is that capability to "revise" skills by having both a plus arrow to the right and a negative arrow to the left, but the ability to negate skill points to put them back into the pool to be drawn from for other skill points doesn't seem to work except only for the skill points you're dealing with at the moment and before you hit the "Save" button. Once the player hits "Save", those skill points are forever in stone.

What I'd like to be able to do is, have the ability to adjust the points, by having these skill points as a "living document" where as the player matures, assuming he's made bad choices for points early on, to be able to shift those points between the entire group of attributes, allowing him to try different approaches to the game.

[Wandering1]

10 hours ago, The Soldier said:

No - I mentioned that the maximum amount of skill points you get get on any single General-in-Chief is capped (to some reasonable number below maxing out every skill, I haven't worked out what would be good yet).  Hence also the ability to switch out the General-in-Chief, and if you do that wisely, you'll have a strong set of General-in-Chiefs to pick from when the need arises.

I didn't say to remove skill point gain from minor battles?  Career point gain would remain the same (just linked to whatever General-in-Chief is commanding at the time of the battle).

Reading the description of battles before you enter them helps.  I did that with all the Grand Battles my first time playing them, so I had a general idea of what to expect before I even started the minor battles and prepared accordingly.  Also; it will help new players, as I said, it reduces the initial level of understanding required to make a good skill point decision (or at the very least, won't be as bad if they put them into a not-so-good place).

Well. I would question whether the descriptions of the battles tell you the entire story; Antietam is a mess with regards to supply for CSA, whereas Fredericksburg is a joke for supply.

Secondly, most of the general skills are not related to combat at all; only Army Org and Logistics have any impact on the combat portion of the game. The others are related to outcomes of the battle or purchases. Which, at least with regards to Economy and Training, are you going to tell the user to keep swapping between two General in Chiefs every time they're in camp just for weapons or veteran training?

Admittantly, with the proposed system, to force the user to have meaningful choices, you're going to have to significantly change the effects of the skills anyways; it would be rather boring if you had 'ammo general', 'income general', and 'shop general'.

[The Soldier]

43 minutes ago, Wandering1 said:

Well. I would question whether the descriptions of the battles tell you the entire story; Antietam is a mess with regards to supply for CSA, whereas Fredericksburg is a joke for supply.

You know it's a defense - that should be more than enough incentive to get a Logistics Chief.

44 minutes ago, Wandering1 said:

Secondly, most of the general skills are not related to combat at all; only Army Org and Logistics have any impact on the combat portion of the game. The others are related to outcomes of the battle or purchases. Which, at least with regards to Economy and Training, are you going to tell the user to keep swapping between two General in Chiefs every time they're in camp just for weapons or veteran training?

Here to poke holes in my suggestion, excellent! Nope, don't really have much for that, aside from maybe limiting replacing your General-in-Chief to once before a battle, although I dislike that.

44 minutes ago, Wandering1 said:

Admittantly, with the proposed system, to force the user to have meaningful choices, you're going to have to significantly change the effects of the skills anyways; it would be rather boring if you had 'ammo general', 'income general', and 'shop general'.

At least with the Level 3 variants, yea, because you tend to run out of percent bonuses.  But hey, makes them more interesting.

[Wandering1]

1 minute ago, The Soldier said:

You know it's a defense - that should be more than enough incentive to get a Logistics Chief.

Here to poke holes in my suggestion, excellent! Nope, don't really have much for that, aside from maybe limiting replacing your General-in-Chief to once before a battle, although I dislike that.

At least with the Level 3 variants, yea, because you tend to run out of percent bonuses.  But hey, makes them more interesting.

Ah, but that is the crux of the problem; you don't need Logistics on Fredericksburg CSA, and you don't need Logistics on 2nd Bull Run for both sides. Even on Legendary. Which basically means you could have placed in the 'income' general as CSA for those maps.

 

[The Soldier]

2 hours ago, Wandering1 said:

Ah, but that is the crux of the problem; you don't need Logistics on Fredericksburg CSA, and you don't need Logistics on 2nd Bull Run for both sides. Even on Legendary. Which basically means you could have placed in the 'income' general as CSA for those maps.

If I want to get a lot of kills on those battles, I do want more ammo.  I pretty consistently run those 50k stacks of ammo dry at Mayre's Heights, and halfway through 2nd Bull Run my men are gasping for ammo (both as the CSA).  Getting a lot of kills (and looting the corpses :P) is probably just as important as money and manpower, because if you can't arm those men, there's no point in having them.

Also; Legendary is an entire league of it's own, designed to be difficult in every way, shape and form.  Don't balance around that.

Edited March 18, 2017 by The Soldier

[Wandering1]

2 minutes ago, The Soldier said:

If I want to get a lot of kills on those battles, I do want more ammo.  I pretty consistently run those 50k stacks of ammo dry at Mayre's Heights, and halfway through 2nd Bull Run my men are gasping for ammo (both as the CSA).  Getting a lot of kills (and looting the corpses :P) is probably just as important as money and manpower, because if you can't arm those men, there's no point in having them.

Also; Legendary is an entire league of it's own, designed to be difficult in every way, shape and form.  Don't balance around that.

The point in me mentioning Legendary is that Legendary is much stricter ammo requirements than BG/MG because of the massive army boost that the enemy gets.

I don't know how you're burning both of the 50k stacks on Fredericksburg unless you're running several 24 gun batteries; just ran Fredericksburg on Legendary now, and those ammo stacks only hit 25-30k.