Best way to find out unit capture weight/how capping works?

DaBoyzAreBackInTown#9604 · June 2022

What is the best way of finding out the different capture weights of different units? Do you have to crack open the game files or can it be found elsewhere? Having capture weight on the unit card like mass might be something worth thinking about as it is currently quite opaque and difficult to find this out. I'd also be interested in knowing how many points are needed to cap a point if anyone knows.

@CA_Ben @CA_Duck @WilliamCA Are you able to point to any resources on this or shed any light on the best way to find it?

Spellbound1875#4610 · June 2022

Yeah this would actually be a good resource to have in game. I'm just able to find values that content creators gave us but I'm confident they don't fully understand the system given that they've made statements which contradict performance seen in actual battles. I'd recommend adding capture weight like mass, where hovering over part of the unit card brings it up.

Current values provided by content creators

6: infantry/monstrous infantry
3:cavalry/war beasts
2: SEMs
1: Artillery
0: flyers

No idea on the amount necessary to capture, I assume it's counted per second. Also no idea how or if it's impacted by damage taken.

DaBoyzAreBackInTown#9604 · June 2022

Spellbound55 said:
Yeah this would actually be a good resource to have in game. I'm just able to find values that content creators gave us but I'm confident they don't fully understand the system given that they've made statements which contradict performance seen in actual battles. I'd recommend adding capture weight like mass, where hovering over part of the unit card brings it up.

Current values provided by content creators

6: infantry/monstrous infantry
3:cavalry/war beasts
2: SEMs
1: Artillery
0: flyers

No idea on the amount necessary to capture, I assume it's counted per second. Also no idea how or if it's impacted by damage taken.

Cheers, great stuff.

I assume chariots come in at 3 capture weight as well here. I wonder if it might be good for overall gameplay to bump Cavalry and War Beasts up to 4? So that way 2 cav units would outweigh 1 infantry instead of just equalising with it?
It would still leave infantry as top dogs of the capture weight world which is good for balance imo while making late game cav play on points a bit more viable.

It is tough though cause this could get insanely complicated very easily. I initially liked the idea of having "tiered cap weight" based on chaff/mid tier/elites but now I think it would just be too much additional complexity on top of having to manage unit balance and everything else.

OdTengri#8235 · June 2022

Spellbound55 said:
Also no idea how or if it's impacted by damage taken.

My understanding was that damage did reduce capture weight... I haven't noticed in practice though.

Spellbound1875#4610 · June 2022

@DaBoyzAreBackInTown I do think the capture weight of fast movers does need to be better, but whether they should move up, infantry should move down, or both requires some knowledge about how capturing occurs. My feeling is that an individual cavalry captures a bit too slow currently but knowing the exact time they take, and the relative time it would take two cav to cap at 4 against a single infantry unit would be nice before jumping to conclusions.

I have heard exactly 0 comments on chariot capture weight but I'd assume it's the same as cavalry. It hasn't felt notably different, though admittedly I haven't spent a lot of time capturing points with chariots.

I'm not certain a tiered system would be a problem necessarily if it's multiplier based. I think the 1.0, 1.5, 2.0 system works fairly well, and given the relatively pricing differences between units it still gives a capture weight edge to chaff which is appropriate.

@OdTengri Yeah I've heard similar statements about damage having an impact. I think some of the content creators are under the impression either health or entities interact with the values but I haven't seen any evidence of that, nor seen any official statements on the topic.

From what i've seen it looks like a units value is set and the if it's close enough to the point and not routing then the value is added, regardless of the remaining health of the unit. One of the reason Kislev's passive is so irksome. For 30 seconds after a leadership shock the units capture weight is effectively locked in short of wiping the unit.

Not sure this is a problem though, as trying to scale capture weight based on health sounds like a nightmare from a balance standpoint.

DaBoyzAreBackInTown#9604 · June 2022

@Spellbound55 Yea good point about needing more info, probably worth waiting for IE to see how capture weight is distributed in other factions before making any changes.

A tiered system might be okay but there are lots of units at the margin that might be problematic. Ironbreakers/Exalted Plaguebearers/Chosen/maybe Black Orcs being a few examples off the top off my head. I think if cap weight was tiered then it could end up being too much of a buff for especially durable elite units while not helping damage dealers nearly as much.

DaBoyzAreBackInTown#9604 · June 2022

I've heard through the grapevine that non-lord/hero SEMs cap at infantry capture weight but that it is lower for lord/hero SEMs. This apparently applies to things like Hunter on Stonehorn mount vs Stonehorn. Quite an interesting way of making the non lord/hero version of monsters more appealing but I haven't been able to verify.

DaBoyzAreBackInTown#9604 · June 2022

OdTengri said:

Spellbound55 said:
Also no idea how or if it's impacted by damage taken.
My understanding was that damage did reduce capture weight... I haven't noticed in practice though.

This is correct I believe. Lower hp units seem to have a lot less cap weight but I'm not sure if it is based on hp or models.

DaBoyzAreBackInTown#9604 · June 2022

This was floating around on Turin's discord. Apparently has been confirmed as legitimate.

EDIT: Credit for this goes to Dante's Inferno and Fozin who did the testing.

Spellbound1875#4610 · June 2022

That is quite useful. Knowing that capture weight is modified by entity count rather than health explains a lot of unclear situations.

Given that entity count is a better measure of unit performance than health remaining I like the implementation but it does change how you have to approach removing infantry from a point and it does reduce the effectiveness of ranged units when it comes to shaving off capture weight in general. Missile damage is pretty distributed, though combining missiles with other damage sources like infantry, spells, and artillery should improve their tactical value. I think making capture weight less powerful for infantry may be enough to make missiles feel more impactful but it may be necessary to consider a modification like the wound tag which lowers capture value. Nice to see the pivot towards counting entities rather than health as a representation of power though, hope this gets ported to land battles (assuming something like that hasn't already been done/planned).

The lack of a clear war beast category seems to mean CA is assigning values directly, hence plague toads being infantry while Flesh Hounds are cavalry. Definitely something to standardize.

I really hate the fact that monsters count as infantry but lords count as lord/heroes. The functional difference between the unit categories is an encourage effect so it's weird to privilege some single entities over others. Putting them at the same value and raising it a bit seems like a better compromise.

Finally, the difference in cap time difference when put into time really highlights how useless cavalry is for trying to rush a point. The nature of the system means each additional unit halves the time it takes to capture a point but the values are so high that to rush a capture you need to be able to dump a huge amount of resources cavalry to approach a useful capture speed. 4 Cav units get a ~16 second capture time on an enemy objective, which is on the low end 1600 gold value of units. Within the 16 seconds (which is ignoring travel time to get to the point) in the best case your opponent still gets 80 victory tickets. Not to mention a single opposing cavalry unit being present makes the capture time to about 33 seconds (165 victory tickets), and if a single infantry is present it goes to around 67 seconds (335 victory tickets). In practice trying to rush down a point for a triple cap with less than 1000 victory tickets left (a little over 3 minutes) seems incredibly difficult and far more costly than the come back mechanic at it's current value provides for.

Adjusting the capture values to be closer together helps address this imbalance but this really highlights the need to account for price in some way. Trying to rush points is a bit too slow currently even when dumping lots of gold into multiple cheap units. The fact that expensive units are compensated in any way makes the idea of running elite fast movers questionable for anything other than killing, something which rapidly loses impact as the time runs down. The last 3 minutes of a game at this point seem to penalize the use of expensive units if you aren't already in a commanding position, and even then I doubt they're the optimal choice.

The proposed changes to capture value of with a modifier of 1, 1.5, and 2 based on the tier system in game gives us...

Infantry: 2.5 (40/80 seconds), 3.75 (27/54 seconds), and 5 (20/40 seconds)
Cavalry/Chariots: 2 (50/100 seconds), 3 (33/66 seconds), and 4 (25/50 seconds)
Lords*/Heroes*/Monsters*: 1 (100/200), 1.5 (67/134), and 2 (50/100)
Artillery: 1 (100/200), 1.5 (67/134), and 2 (50/100) (honestly you could set this to basically whatever and it would be fine)
*Lords count as tier 3, heroes count as tier 2, monsters are tiered as appropriate to reflect power and cost.

Would go a long way to addressing some of the issues the current system brings as well as speeding up captures slightly on average, which I think would be healthy. I debated adding flyers in at .5 which I don't think would break the game (200/400 seconds to capture is inconsequential) but it's honestly so small I thought it might be better to put them at lord value with the caveat that it only counts while landed. I do think we should give flyers some capture weight but any reasonable value will make them better as blockers in most scenarios (which isn't strictly a problem). Also as a note, the values this system produces are actually more clean on average than the values for the system in game which is kind of funny.

TLDR: Cool to know, this just reinforces the idea that shifting capture weight to help non-infantry units and adding a modifier for for more expensive units is a good idea.

OdTengri#8235 · June 2022

Monsters have 100% cap rate regardless of health and the highest cap rate of infantry.

Seems... bad.

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