Combat Rebalancing

Greetings dear Settlers,

As most of you might know, BB is currently performing tests for a new combat system. Don't worry though, as our current one will continue to be a part of "The Settlers Online". In order to give the new combat system a solid foundation, they decided to do a much needed general overhaul, especially to the balancing. The following systems are affected:

• Attack Order
• Player unit attributes
• Enemy unit attributes
• Skills
• Resources and Costs
• Adventure and General Changes

To give you the possibility to test these changes early, BB has deployed the first version containing the balancing adjustments on the regular testserver.

1. Attack Order

The order in which units attack and the priority with which units get attacked has changed. The new order is:

Melee units - Ranged units - Special units - Boss/Elite units

This means that melee units get attacked first, then ranged units, then special units and finally elite and boss units. There is one exception however: When a unit is flagged as being "weak" and an attacking unit has the skill to attack weak units first, the weak unit is going to be attacked from the skilled unit first, no matter the unit type.
If there are multiple targets that fit these specifications, the unit with the lowest HP is attacked first.

2. Player unit attributes

All unit values have been reworked. The new values are as follows:

3. Enemy unit attributes

Just like the player units, all enemy units have been reworked as well. The balancing of these is still pretty much work in progress, though, so I want to give you only a general overview over what we want to achieve with these changes in the end:

4. Skills

The skills also underwent some minor adjustments. First of all, all units now have splash damage (enemy and player units). This means, that all undistributed damage is now given to the next unit.
Additionally, we added some new skills. The following skills are now part of the combat:

• Splash Damage - Undistributed damage is given to the next unit (all units have Splash Damage now)
• Bonus Armor in tower - Some units have armor in special buildings, called towers. This Armor has to be decreased before the actual HP are affected. The amount of armor is depending on the building. Generally, tower buildings are leader camps, most hard camps and some medium camps. You can see which units are affected in the enemy camp window.

• Armor Penetration - Units with this skill ignore a certain percentage of the armor from the skill I explained above.
• Additional damage against unit type - Some units do additional damage against specific enemy unit types. This only applies to player units.
• Attack weak unit first - Units with this skill first attack units with a weak flag. Weak units are usually units with low HP and/or ranged or first strike units.

5. Resources and Costs

To better fit the overall balancing, we also adjusted some of the resources and costs:

Melee unit weapons:

Ranged weapon costs:

Unit costs:

6. Adventure and General Changes

BB made some changes to the adventures. For the initial test they changed 2 aspects:

1. Rewards: We removed all weapon rewards from the adventures. We will adjust the remaining rewards later on, when we are done with the unit rebalancing and we have a better idea of the overall losses players will have in these adventures.
2. Adventure types and icons: Adventures will now have a distinct adventure type, a corresponding icon and different difficulty colors.
   
   Our current adventure types are:
   • Mini
   • Follow Up
   • Resource
   • Experience
   • Epic
   • Heroic
   • Coop
   • Special
   
   The difficulty colors are:
   • easy - white
   • medium - green
   • hard - blue
   • very hard - purple
   Example:
   The icon shows that this is a heroic adventure (purple color), meaning it is very difficult.

Additionally, we made some general changes:

• As mentioned before, all units have Splash Damage now.
• Miss Damage is now in general "1" for normal units and 50% of the damage value for bosses.
• First and Last Strike were removed as skills. Instead all units now have an initiative stating in which phase the unit attacks. We have 4 initiatives, where 1 replaces the old "First Strike" and 4 the old "Last Strike".

These are the changes BB made for this balancing test.
Please keep in mind, that this is only a first iteration, and BB will very likely still adjust these values and changes based on the general feedback.

Lastly, here is a short overview about what hasnt been changed yet, but is currently still being evaluated for possible adjustments:

• General adventure balancing (unit deployment and camp positions)
• Cavalry costs
• Unit beer costs
• Adventure rewards besides weapon removal
• Balancing of Generals

Official BB Forum message
Some places for responding:
 - Official BB thread
 - Started by manulili1968
 - Started by Evil_J
 - Started by durin

Cheers!