Now that we have released our third suite of changes to duelling, it is time to turn our attention elsewhere. For now our focus remains on fixing bugs, however the next major project is clear: adjustments to the fort battle formula! We plan to focus on five priorities here:
- Improve the balance between attackers and defenders.
- Improve the balance between all four classes.
- Maintain or decrease the chance of battles reaching fifty five rounds.
- Decrease the importance of health.
- Bring the maximum attacker to defender ratio closer to 1:1.
For this we wish to bring back an old approach from a couple of years ago. The attackers currently enjoy a significant advantage because by placing attribute points in strength, they gain points in both health and their strongest aiming/dodging/resistance skill. Clearly this is unfair for the defenders, who must choose between the two. It also leads to weird flow on effects in battle strategies, which increases the importance of duellers (sniping through the gate) and decreases the effectiveness of workers (not mounting fortifications). Simply removing this advantage should, at least in theory, reverse the series of unfortunate events. With that in mind, we intend to swap the following skills:
- The attackers will use hiding instead of stamina.
- The defenders will use setting traps instead of hiding.
These two changes will mean health and leadership become the lone fort skills in their respective attributes, while mobility and dexterity each contain two fort skills. We anticipate this will mean a decrease in the attacking team’s average health and therefore the length of battles. It would also increase the desirable attacker to defender ratio for a balanced battle from about 1:1 back closer to 1.2:1, although likely not quite as high as before. Hopefully the better team will be joyful and triumphant and not always the largest.
Of course, any major changes will undergo significant testing before they reach your local worlds. We are also mindful of avoiding disruption to the fort battle championships. However, in the meanwhile we’d love to know your thoughts!
1) The attacker need to be more because all defenders shots and act first.
2) The attacker need to be more because the defenders starting on bonusplaces (towers, walls, …) and therefor hit and dodge better.
When changing who shots and acts depending on stats, or alternate defender/attacker there is no need for more attackers.
With the formula we currently have, an attacker with full red is compairable to a defener on a tower!
So only change the “all defenders shots first” and you can set the ratio near to 1:1.
That is an interesting idea. It was originally the case that all attackers moved first until it was swapped for balancing purposes under the 2009 formula.
I agree with balancing character classes but I dont understand why changing skillpoint for fort formula. What you do with stamina from sets(Bart, Dalton, Deadwood etc) ??
Hey,
if the aim is to reduce the need of skilling healthpoints i will support this changings. at the moment you only have to skill 100% red-skill + 100% health – the rest of the battle-skills then only comes from equipment and it’s enough. thats boring and you dont have to think mutch about your skill.. but it’s the only way to win at the moment. health health health.
i think it’s also importaint to push the worker-charakter – nobody likes this char in fortbattles – there have no relevant special skills. the poor bastards.. :/
but no – i don’t think that the attackers have an advantage at the moment. cause no one realy skills on endurance or hiding. leading and health thats all. maybe it’s bedder then to think about decoupling demage from leadership or adding endurance and hiding to the demage-formula?
hm hm hm… tricky
with best regards from Leipzig, Germany,
Rabbi Shlomo
Howdy,
in my opinion the current situation leaves a lot to be desired. The HP-stacking escalated so much it is not fun anymore and it is something that I think even kills this game.
Let me link two of the fights I recently led on the attacker’s side.
https://www.westforts.com/en19/battles/battle/30899
https://www.westforts.com/en19/battles/battle/30909
Just to give some background information about that – our side is a fairly newly formed pact of alliances still figuring things out, so a lot of things went wrong in the second fight, but the first fight is a prime example why the current meta is totally broken.
We started with a disadvantage of 100 thousand HP, this is ridiculous considering that we pretty much had the same amount of players. We managed to turn it around in the end anyway due to amazing teamplay but were forced to flag-rush when we were 30 vs 20 as the clock was running out. I really don’t like ordering flag-rushes and have so many of my troops die but had no other choice if we wanted to win. In the end it came down to a coin-flip and we lost that. I am not particularly mad about that, but we were roughly 10 people ahead and they still had double our HP although being cornered.
The second fight is just an example of being completely overpowered. We did not manage to kill even one defender. Yes, we had a lot of offliner not targetting correctly and the enemy rotated properly, I have to give them that, but they started with 110 thousand HP on just the ST. That sight is highly discouraging.
Anyway, enough of that, I just wanted to show why I think it so important to reduce the impact of HP. Swapping the skills needed for fort-fighting around a little bit is a good start but my co-leader pointed something out as he will be heavily affected by this. He is a purely-dedicated builder just now getting into fort-fights and is already handy-capped due to the poor worker’s bonuses, removing stamina from the formula will just make it even harder for him as that is pretty much the only skill he gets from strength besides a little bit of HP. This will screw worker’s even harder and increase the need to balance that class.
I generally think that character class bonuses should be reworked completely. High-HP advents ghosting around with that high of a percentage is a pain, dueller’s crits hurt a lot (but would also become less impactful when reducing the importance of HP) and soldiers are just stacking right now. Just that list shows how much fort-fights are centrered on HP right now and this is not what I think should decide which side wins.
I would very much welcome the complete removal of HP bonus for soldiers, that would take out a lot of HP from fights (and probably generate a huge shit-storm quickly (; ) and think that another thing to consider is a cap on how much HP you can have. Either simply say that people may only have a certain amount of skill-points set into HP (maybe be able to further buff this with clothes, would make the choice of equipment more important once again) or make the HP skill-points decline in usefulness the more you have skilled very much like it is with the other fort-fighting relevant skills. Right now we are unable to do proper shoot-outs as we are running out of time even when we have worked ourselves into an advantageous position.
Another thing I would like to ask you to consider is removing the shoot-through gate. What kind of defender would leave that open in a fight in real-life? I also am not very happy with the sector-design inside a fort, it makes moving around and bailing a near to impossible task if you have the inner part of the fort filled with offliner.
Just some input, which I would be more than happy to discuss or at least hear your opinion on. 🙂
– Drake
One important thing I forgot to mention is, that I would welcome the re-introduction of having attackers move first. In the real world the attacker is always the one acting and forcing the defender to re-act, it should be the same in the west. This would make fights in general more interesting and responsive but also give more of a tactical aspect to flag-guarding and rushing. Right now as an attacker you have to either already firmly control one half of the fort or pray that the defender is too slow in blocking.
I would welcome a less health dominated fort build. as it stands the skills are almost useless. lets reduce the health requirement and increase the skills component. the idea of replacing already set skills is going along the way but swapping hiding for setting traps is useless as there is no trap in the game to start with … yet the building of forts states barbed wire and traps. why not utilise them instead of shifting skills.
I have seen attacks defeated by the smaller force in the fort and also seen small attackers take a fort from a larger force. HP is at the moment the dominant force, but it does little against the better organised team.
lets try to change the formula towards more skills and less hp driven battles please. forget playing with stamina as there are workers out there with little defence other than that. forget the changing of hiding to setting traps, unless you are thinking of completely restarting the formula from scratch and giving all players a completely free rebuild of skills for it after it is set.
just one bit I read in another post by Dr4ke .. in the real world the attackers may get first shot but that all depends on the alertness of the defenders. there is a lot of evidence of defenders firing first as they spot attackers before they are also spotted. I cite stalingrad … the great fortified city in world war 2 as just one case. defenders fired first on attackers who did not think they were close enough to be fired upon first.
I would welcome more complicated formulas, ex. damage could include aiming, shooting and leadership…
Hi there,
I will support any move that leads to lowering health effect in battles.
Some ideas :
– Adjust health effect to the power of 0.4 or 0.6 (as it it for other battle skills)
– Swap shooting order (as already suggested above)
– Expand battle map with 4 extra big sectors (north, east, south, west) allowing faster movements from one side to the other of the fort, and making life harder for advent blockers. Attackers sometimes spend 40 rounds just to get to advance to the next sector while 2 or 3 defenders are used to block.
These are just ideas and of course, thinking and testing will still be required…
Cheers,
RG
something stated as possible I referred to but only just realised …
if you change stamina for setting traps not only do you have to re-spec the formula but every fort fighting set out there already. That is a big task that I do not think inno really grasps the implication of.
I am also curious as to fort fighting buffs with these changes. For example, the hushpuppies with a stamina boost, would they be changed to give a hiding boost?
I agree that class bonuses are really unbalanced, my first character was a worker (several years ago) and I haven’t played a single worker again because the poor fort fighting bonus they get, I hope that you think about the Strength attribute for them, because that’s the only thing they have to even compete in fort fights at the moment.
Maybe a free re-skill potion would be helpful if needed, depending on how much the formulas are changed, but as it was said before, the sets and buffs must be changed too, we worked hard to get and upgrade some sets, and I hope that those sets don’t get too affected by this.
Finally, I think that the Resistance and Damage formulas must be revised, reducing the HP but doing nothing about going full Leadership, would render some characters almost useless, getting hit by 800+ per shot (not even a critical hit) with less health would be unfair for some players (won’t someone please think of the workers?).
My questions would be:
a) What is the timeframe for the testing and final changes coming to local worlds?
b) Will Hiding (for attack) and Setting Traps (for defence) be rewritten and replaced on current fort gear that has Stamina (for attack) and Hiding (for defence)? … and same for buffs?
…because for those that have bought those Stam sets like the Ska set (with big stamina bonus) and upgraded them… are they about to get super disappointed?
@njbruce
Can always use a little more hiding eh Bruce 😉
Hi guys. I know it is not the best example, because the attacker made numerous mistakes, but apart from that it is a proof for the attackers not always have advantage and HP is not everything.
https://www.westforts.com/en18/battles/battle/31046
1.8 million HP 140 attackers against 900k HP 120 defenders.. Defenders won.
Apart from the mistakes it just shows the skills taking really important part of Fort Fighting at the moment… I have tested all sorts of different skills and clothes and have to tell you I never got good results from full HP on neither side. I have to admit, at the moment the attackers have more advantages then the defenders, but the bonuses compensate this sort of. The only thing in my opinion is need to get reviewed is the ratio.
But if this new system should go through would be great to adjust the sets for the new skills…
(just for reference, my best dodge, hit and caused damage ratio is coming with a soldier in Bob Dalton set with around 11k HP on lvl 150. Skill points on HP, Hiding and Leadership. All attributes on red.
I’m not an expert but I’ll try to give you a review of that battle (https://www.westforts.com/en18/battles/battle/31046), because it shows the current situation in fort fights:
Attacker vs Defender
* H.p. 1.863.115 (99%) vs 912.665 (99%)
* 140 players (115 online/25 offline) vs 120 players (118 online/2 offline)
– Soldier -> 57 (tanks) vs 42 (tanks)
– Dueler -> 42 (37 tanks/5 hitters) vs 37 (0 tanks/37 hitters)
– Advent -> 31 (tanks) vs 31 (tanks)
– Worker -> 10 (tanks) vs 10 (tanks)
So from those numbers you can see that the attack side had double the H.p. than defense, but still the defenders managed to win with more than 70 players alive!
How is that possible? Well, the attackers have played badly, and the defenders did a good job taking advantage of moving first to make good swaps and staying alive, and all the battle they had the bonus from towers, while the attackers stayed in grass like a bullet sponge party.
All soldiers, adventurers and workers went for a tank build from around 6k to 20k, while duelers stayed around 2k doing the most damage, but oddly enough the attacker duelers were also tanks (and I agree with Pimpa1977 that H.p. is not everything), so the attackers had only 5 good duelers (non tanks) to rely on, while the defenders had 37 duelers on towers that made up to 45k on damage each.
Finally, my two cents to end this rant, at this moment the fort battles are built around having huge tanks protecting the damage dealers, the class bonuses are completely broken (specially the workers that are by far the weakest of them all) and the current skill builds are not that effective against full leadership duelers that hit like a truck, hopefully all of these concerns are addressed to have balanced and fun fort battles, thanks.