Crumbling has zero impact as a weakness for Undead. Undead are effectively unbreakable.

#210289

Daemon instability does 132-256 damage per second.

Crumbling does a whooping... 10-21 damage.

You can outheal crumbling with a 0.1% heal aura.

One of these things is not like the other.


This is a problem because almost all undead units now have stats or leadership comparable to mortals, which is resultig in horribly uninteractive games, particularly in domination mode.

We are seeing it be a particular issue with vampire counts and tomb kings, vampire coast are somewhat hampered by their reilance on weaker chaff undead and ranged units.

Vampire Counts in particular are so oppressive in domination mode that global bans were recently introduced so they don't get played at all in tournaments.


So if you like playing Vampire Counts, should probably hope this gets addressed soon. Otherwise they will just never see play except against cheese plays in mulitplayer.

The_real_FAUST#6885

Crumbling has for the longest time been so weak as to be a joke. So MA y threads have been done analysing and pointing out how much better it is than routing

The damage is absolutely tiny and the leadership buffs recently were uncalled for. As you say they now have mortal leadership with no downside and an abundance of healing

Reym#7442

Crumbling should go up in WH3 yeah, in wh2 it was bearable because regen auras didn't compensated for it and units were on large not ultra.

Now it should probably go in a middle ground between the current crumbling and the daemonic version of crumbling.

turrehund#8512

Vampire Counts balancing seems to be going completely against how they are supposed to function. On TT their entire army depended on having their Lord or some necromancer heroes alive or the entire army crumbled to dust.

With TWW3 their leadership is ridiculously high and even if they should start crumbling it's barely even noticable, especially if the unit has regeneration.

As a minimum crumbling should deal a percentage of HP per second instead of a flat number, and it should be way more noticable than it is now.

Pippington#5795

At the current rate of crumbling, for a unit of zombies to crumble out from full HP takes 10 minutes. I can't believe that any thought has gone into calibrating the crumble rate if that's the number they've arrived at.

mightygloin#2446

This does not inspire confidence regarding the future balancing of the game, does it? Wonder what random madness they have in store for other factions.

The_real_FAUST#6885

Pippington said:

At the current rate of crumbling, for a unit of zombies to crumble out from full HP takes 10 minutes. I can't believe that any thought has gone into calibrating the crumble rate if that's the number they've arrived at.

Thanks for working the figures.

That is utterly damming

#568367

Just turn Lords/Heroes into lynchpin that holds the entire army together.


Give Vampires and Necros FAR greater universal leadership buffs, but greatly nerf the leadership values of all undead units to the point where they rely on their lords and heroes to exist.

saweendra#3399

GreenColoured said:

Just turn Lords/Heroes into lynchpin that holds the entire army together.


Give Vampires and Necros FAR greater universal leadership buffs, but greatly nerf the leadership values of all undead units to the point where they rely on their lords and heroes to exist.

Would be thematic but i doubt its gonna be fun.

BloodyStream#7178

GreenColoured said:

Just turn Lords/Heroes into lynchpin that holds the entire army together.


Give Vampires and Necros FAR greater universal leadership buffs, but greatly nerf the leadership values of all undead units to the point where they rely on their lords and heroes to exist.

Might work but only if all their characters got campaign settra style extra large leadership circles

ThibixMagnus#8300

would it be too much to raise crumbling at the same level as daemons, if only for consistency? Alternatively, raise the crumbling threshold for undead so they hold better but get wiped sooner.

Then maybe indeed buff leadership auras (amount and/or radius). The issue I see however with blanket moves is that TK and VP don't seem to be at the level of VC, whatever game mode. TK at least could use higher leadership on its chaff cause lore, while VP could get some cost buffs.

mightygloin#2446

GreenColoured said:

Just turn Lords/Heroes into lynchpin that holds the entire army together.


Give Vampires and Necros FAR greater universal leadership buffs, but greatly nerf the leadership values of all undead units to the point where they rely on their lords and heroes to exist.

Might be pretty interesting not to mention loreful. You could finally add speed buff etc. to vampires along with it.

But blanket buff to LD of everything is way easier and lazier sure..

Pippington#5795

TW doesn't play like tabletop. If you shift this stuff onto character auras then you'll just get blobbing and lord sniping being dominant, which is pretty close to how vamps already play.

I think it's good to have some distinction between undead with fodder stats who crumble slowly, and daemons with elite stats that crumble fast - but the numbers for undead crumbling are just ridiculously low at the moment. The baseline crumble rate just needs to shoot up if they want to keep these stat buffs - you could multiply them by 6 and they'd still be crumbling only half as fast as daemons.

I would say a good conservative number to shoot for should be that a half health unit of zombies (i.e. one that's been beat up and abandoned to crumble out) should be gone in 1 minute. That's a long time in a battle, but means you'd have to multiply the current rate by 5.

Spellbound1875#4610

I think it's important to actually look at how crumbling and daemonic instability work to determine why crumbling is so much less impactful than daemonic instability.

First, crumbling actually did get a damage increase in the move from game 2 to game 3 (at least the in game numbers suggest it did). In game 2 every 1 second one entity would take 12 damage, whereas in game 3 one entity takes 21 damage every 1 second. This is clearly insufficient on live but crumbling did become about twice as impactful in the move across the games.

Daemonic instability on the other hand deals 66 damage to 4 entities per second which makes it substantially more impactful both in terms of direct damage dealt to an entity and in total damage dealt to the unit. 66 damage is substantially more likely to cause an entity to die outright. 21 is actually quite a bit more than most undead entities regenerate per second even at the 0.5% margin which would be about as high as you can stack passive effects but the way damage is distributed means it rarely impacts combat.

A zombie has 77 health per entity, so to fully regen the effect in a second we'd need around 27% regeneration per second, but with 160 models the chance of a single zombie being hit enough times to die without other damage sources is much less than 1%. Even with only 1 HP regeneration per second (.013% regeneration) the zombie will be fine nearly indefinitely, since crumbling takes ~10 minutes to destroy a zombie without a source of healing.

So, how do we fix this? Just increasing the crumbling damage is unlikely to work since short of killing a zombie (or other entity) in a single tick (~77 damage) we still need to roll the same zombie twice to have a meaningful impact on the unit, which is very unlikely. I think a better approach that also keeps crumbling and daemonic instability distinct would be to lower the damage dealt by a tick of crumbling and to massively expand the number of entities hit. Say, 1 damage per second to 160 entities (160 damage a second scaling down with entity count). You can scale the numbers a bit for performance but right now we seem to be struggling with multi-entity balance primarily. As suggested this would largely negate passive healing on multi-entity units.

Some potential problems:

This change hits the vampire counts the least out of any of the undead factions given that they have far more sources of passive healing. This can be partially controlled for through leadership values (which are already higher for the other undead factions) and access to ranged units but at base crumbling is already less of an issue for the counts than for the tomb kings and the coast because they have easier access to healing. Leadership nerfs for some units may be necessary though I'd hold off on those until after we see the effect of a nerf through crumbling damage increases does.

This change is a buff to SEM's and monstrous infantry since they have too few entities to take the current damage value of crumbling. I don't see this is a huge issue given currently we're struggling with multi-entity units being too durable primarily and the damage on crumbling was so small that SEM's didn't notice it anyway, but providing the SEM's and monstrous units with a different penalty more suited to their design might be prudent.

The_real_FAUST#6885

Wouldn't a % of HP per second attributed to each model of the unit not be better.

A tick to each model of something like 1-10 hp is tiny particularly with SEMs

Whereas each unit entity taking a % of damage would ensure it scales to monstrous infantry, cav and SEMs

Spellbound1875#4610

If CA can get percentile damage to work setting Crumbling to a percentage value is an option, though I think finding a single percentile value that works for all unit classes is a bit harder than it appears.

Going with a 1% value results in lords taking 40-50 damage per second, crypt Horrors taking 112 (~7 per entity) damage per second, blood knights taking ~72 damage per second (~1.2 per entity), and zombies take ~112 (~0.7 per entity).

I tend to think that's a bit low for the zombies and a bit high for the lords/blood knights at higher percentage values. Currently the issues with crumbling are primarily seen in cheap units who are now much more resilient. A flat damage value with a very high entity count better targets these cheaper units without undo impact on the pricier options.

Bastilean#7242

Spellbound1875 said:

I tend to think that's a bit low for the zombies and a bit high for the lords/blood knights at higher percentage values. Currently the issues with crumbling are primarily seen in cheap units who are now much more resilient. A flat damage value with a very high entity count better targets these cheaper units without undo impact on the pricier options.

FYI, on TT crumbling produced wounds which were taken from the unit. Lose by 5, and you lost 5 wounds.

Assuming you didn't have troops to spare, on Table Top, crumbling was hell on Lords.


Total War is a lot different in that your Lords and Heroes cannot rob Peter to pay Paul by sacrificing their zombies.

On the other hand, CA has implemented high leadership values for Lords and Heroes, so they should be fine. It's not like a vampire lord should be crumbling when some low leadership zombies are.

Removing the leadership buff to zombies is also good step. If zombies need more leadership, put it on corpse carts, mortis engines, and leaders etc. Similar to Bretonia Peasant and Grail Reliquary working together.

Spellbound1875#4610

My only objection to that is I still think finding a percentile value that's strong enough to hurt chaff while not ruining bigger units is going to be difficult. The 1 to 160 was a conservative suggestion, though it's already greater than 1% of a zombie units health per second. If we wanted to raise that to 2 damage per 160 (so 320 per second total) to further nerf infantry (who are all take less than 1 damage per second at the one percent value) we'd need to set the percentage for crumbling to about 2.6%, which for blood knights is 3.12 per second per entity (187 max), for crypt horrors is 17 damage per second per entity (272 max), for vargeists is 10 damage per second per entity (160 max), and for a Varghul is 214 damage per second. I'm not convinced that's a useful system rather than a flat damage value, potentially with an alternative trait with a high rate of damage if necessary for these other units.

I do think the idea of a reverting the zombie leadership buff and placing that power on support units has merit, though given how VC armies currently look I'm not sure that would have much of a balance impact. Those support units are already present so usually this just makes zombie summons a bit easier to disintegrate which doesn't seem like enough.

Pippington#5795

If you made the damage scale with how negative the unit's leadership is, you'd have an easy way to hit chaff harder than elites, as well as making the mechanic more interactive.

(Although I think there's grounds to be careful before trying to be too forgiving to undead elites - routing has a flat impact too after all)

Asamu#6386

Well, with the recent buffs bringing Undead more in line with normal units, it'd make sense to give them similar crumbling damage to Daemons. I'd much prefer higher crumbling damage with normal leadership than low crumbling damage with low leadership, since the former makes shock damage more valuable vs undead.

#210289

With Patch 2.1 adding additional time, Crumbling still is a big issue that was barely mitigated. Please look at this.

#568367

saweendra said:

GreenColoured said:

Just turn Lords/Heroes into lynchpin that holds the entire army together.


Give Vampires and Necros FAR greater universal leadership buffs, but greatly nerf the leadership values of all undead units to the point where they rely on their lords and heroes to exist.

Would be thematic but i doubt its gonna be fun.

I'd say it's great for gameplay considering how many factions this game have, CA will need to find more and more ways to differentiate each individual factions. Sometimes it might mean leaning hard in a particular direction to make them stand out more.

yst#1879

+100% crumbling damage
-95% disintegration damage

Tharoz

Fixing VC is unlikely to be as simple as modifying the crumbling rate, VC have been the recipients of far too many minor buffs to their passive healing in the mistaken belief that they were too weak, need to start rolling back some of the buffs.

I'd also suggest that maybe reduce the base LD, but give them a LD buff from each friendly unit/hero in proximity up to a set limit.

The_real_FAUST#6885

Absolutely, reduce base leadership back to how it was, increase LD from vampiric and necro hero's - not Wights

Bastilean#7242

TT had a lot of rules around having your necromancers and vampires close by impacting performance and even the ability to run (march move).

I don't think we need to stack hero encouragement or leadership buffs though it would help if CA made encourage more meaningful for Lords and Heroes.

#568367

The_real_FAUST said:

Absolutely, reduce base leadership back to how it was, increase LD from vampiric and necro hero's - not Wights

I'd say Wights providing it is fine as they're literally raised to lead the Vampire's armies for them in their absence