Micro Intensity Replacing TT Randomness

vg45

A lot of people do not like the idea of adding randomness to Total Warhammer, there was a discussion regarding misfires a while back where the option of pressing a button to temporarily increase the damage of a unit at the cost of taking more damage to represent the Skaven's weaponry being more likely to misfire more. Having to activate abilities requires at least two clicks as you need to pick the units you want to use an ability and then another one to actually activate it, this would make the faction harder to play, the more mechanics like this the more difficult the faction would be.

Something like this was actually implemented for Greenskins, many people found the old Waaagh army mechanic to be annoying because it felt random, the new battle Waaagh ability requires the click of a button to activate, while on tabletop Greenskin squabbling and Waaaghing was random 5/6 of the time, with the exception of one turn where I believe it was guaranteed. There is no longer any random chance for things to go wrong for Greenskins, there is no more stupid Waaagh armies, there is only the possibility of the player using their Waaagh too early or too late. Is this a good thing? Should armies that were more random on TT (Greenskins, Skaven) have more active abilities to represent their randomness? Do you agree that more randomness is bad for the game?

I personally hate the stupid Brayherd Beastmen armies because it is another **** stacked on top of a weak faction, but I found Greenskins to be strong enough before their rework that it was no big deal when my Waaagh armies went and did something stupid and I found that to be a positive part of Greenskin gameplay and I think I might come to enjoy Brayherds more if Beastmen were overall stronger. I would also like misfire mechanics for blackpowder units and more wacky possibilities in the casting of magic spells. I do not think any factions should be much harder to play than any other, instead, difficulty should be regulated by difficulty sliders in single player, that also makes factions easier to balance for multiplayer because CA will not have to deal with the headache of a faction doing bad on ladder overall but being amazing in tournaments.

Spellbound55

So this gets into a discussion of what makes randomness good and what makes randomness bad. When discussing this we also need to consider the context of the game itself. Good randomness in tabletop is different from good randomness in an RTS.

Tabletop games have a pretty limited range of random outcomes, involving a limited number of units and therefore dice rolls. Additionally the points at which a roll has to be made are explicitly clear and players can make decisions based on this knowledge. Finally each match in a tabletop game is unrelated to any other games you'll play (some circumstances can modify this). Given all of the above, more extreme random outcomes are less likely to hamper the game because the points at which they can occur are limited and can be played around.

TWW2 has a much wider range of random outcomes, has far more units meaning the chances of drawbacks trigger is higher, and in a campaign every battle is directly related to every future battle. This has the effect of increasing the rate at which random events will impact a players experience, and if those events have the potential to hamper the players experience you're quite likely to generate frustration. Given all of the above, extreme random outcomes are likely to cause a poor experience regularly and as such developers often seek to limit randomness to be either minor or positive.

TWW2 already has a lot of random mechanics that are used to balance units, such as attack rolls, accuracy, armor rolls, AI decisions, random events, etc. Most of these lead to exciting or interesting outcomes, though some are currently just inoffensively there. A few like AI armies make campaigns objectively worse a substantial amount of the time. As the beastmen the campaign assumes you'll be getting brayherds and are able to use the powerspike they provide to make progress. As such when the army up and kills themselves or when you have to shift your behaviors around corralling the Brayherd into being useful the randomness is making the campaign experience notably worse.

On the topic of misfires, I think they're a random mechanic that take a lot of effort for little gain. If you want something as simple as a ranged unit sometimes taking longer to fire it seems like a better solution to balancing the unit would be to adjust their reload time as a whole. Misfires make damage less consistent, and balance is only a reasonable goal if the results are meaningfully predictable. Accuracy and damage are balanced around average outcomes, so adding a system that just makes determining the average damage more difficult doesn't fundamentally change how you balance the unit, it just makes it more of a pain for the developers.

This goes double for Skaven weapon teams. I know some people are attached to the idea of a unit sometimes dying or damaging itself as a balancing mechanism, but using the available tools such as accuracy, missile damage, range, etc. provide a lot of levers to make adjustments without creating situations where negative random events occur. My rating guns missing enough shots to allow a cav unit to complete a charge is pseudo random, but it feels a lot less frustrating than a model exploding from self damage which reduces unit performance for the rest of the battle and can result in turns spent replenishing or a cost of having to recruit a replacement. Finally, if the unit is so powerful that it's balanced around sometimes exploding this means if you don't get a bad result the unit will be massively overperforming, which will be a problem a non-zero portion of the time. Much better to just have the unit be properly balanced at all levels of functioning.

Mogwai_Man

I accepted a long time ago that this isn't really Warhammer. It's first and foremost a Total War game, it just uses a Warhammer skin.

Jman5

Whether you like randomness or not seems to be entirely a matter of personality. Some people enjoy predictability and order. When you do X, you get Y result 100% of the time. When something unusual happens that forces them to react or adjust it upsets them.

Other people enjoy the dynamism and emergent gameplay you get from randomness. No battle or game is the same because RNG creates differences. Predictability is boring and new experiences are exciting.

The first group is the one that always seems to loudest in these conversations, but there are a lot of people in the second category as well. Myself included.

TheShiroOfDalton

It depends entirely on how randomness is included in the game. The WHFB misfire rule where you could lose an entire unit through no fault of your own right at the start of the battle was BS because the only player input here was fielding the unit in the first place. The AoS version meanwhile has all Skaven units fire in a "safe" mode with consistent performance without threat to itself, but you can decide to switch the safeties off to increase performance at the cost of the unit potentially hurting itself. That's risk-reward and I'd be OK with that.

Nyumus

Too much rwndomness take the strategy element of the game away. It is exactly what Spellbound said.

Although, a missfire Button for Skaven would be Fine in my opinion, because It Will bê a calculeted risk, allowing a New strategy option for their armies: you press a Button, they attack faster (or do more Damage) at the cost of their own HP.

About the micromanaging, this game have RTS battles, It is expected to have some level of Micro in here, if someone don't like this aspect, maybe RTS are not the genre for you, and thats Fine since there are many turn based strategy games out there.

Ichon

The only obvious randomness is the dice roll for winds of magic currently in the game. 1 thing to keep in mind is also the number of times weapons shoot in the game vs the tabletop. Weapon in table top might fire a handful of times in a battle so a high % chance of misfire might proportionally only affect 20-30% of the possible damage while a misfire early in a battle in a TW game could -50-80% of the possible damage that weapon could have done in that battle so the % chance of misfire should be proportionally lower or the damage of weapons WAY higher (which wouldn't be good for gameplay on the otherside when weapons did not misfire).

I think a time activated ability of weapons increasing firerate and damage by +50% for 20 seconds with a 30% chance of misfire per weapon where the gun jammed or needed to be cleaned so down for 20 seconds (not totally blown up) might work.

davedave1124

I'm glad it's not a TT game, seeing how much a random dice throw can throw a game off is ridiculous, then rerolls, killing with a single blow, machines exploding randomly.

It's based on TT up to a point but it's still a TW game and that's what TW players want.