Age of Strategy Forums

Also makazwr, poison stacking won't matter against workers, if 2 poison archers atk it to make poison stack - it would already b dead by then without needing poison stack,


But yes against skirmishers it will b EXTREMELY OP to go all out with crossbows and poisons

So we all agree on that part of NO default stack.


Than I'll make my unit...

Refreshing.
Why are people actually against poison stacking?
I returned to the game and one of the first things I was asking myself about was - Why the hell is poison not stacking?
Having poison archers fighting against elephant and horse archers or even just legionaries I noticed, that stacking should happen.
I have 2 reasons:
1. Flavour - unit stroken by 20 poison arrows (elephant for example) should be on the last stand and die quickly. Not parade with venom in their veins like nothing.
2. Balance - poison archer should have some role against fast units (knights for example) - 7 arbalest to kill a knight in one turn, but you need 10 poison archers to do the same. With stacking you would need 5 poison archers. Samurai (also cost 3 unit) loses against knight, but one could be killed with 3 samurais (although you lose 2 of them).
And skirmishers (plus maybe atl-atls) should have halved poison damage (2 points) which should solve lacking counter.

How about just making shield javelin or shielder units like skirmishers, shielders, shielder knights, legionares immune, so they are used more often after poison is stackable with 3 dmg (I didn't include mounted units because their horses are still susceptible).

Why immune? And legionaries at that. Swordsman has shield too, so why not make also him immune.
And 3 damage seems too little.

Flavour-wise: poison delivery was not necessarily by wound - there could been powdered poison types attached to small sack or something behind arrow head. Experienced poison archers could change delivery type depending on enemy.

And coding-wise it is simpler - making poison effect like fire arrows - base 2 damage with +100% bonus on every foot category except U_ANTI_ARCHER_FOOT (sorry but shielder and shield knight has no unique category), maybe +150% on mounted and +200% on elephants.

Well according to unit image, the poison is clearly delivered by arrow tip, there are no sacks to deliver poison powder(Amazonian poison darts work similarly [and I'm not about to rationalize that a nonstreamline sack can be blown out of a tube]). Legionares have very large shields and tactics ment to prevent them from taking damage from arrows.

I think we shouldn't cut corners with poison coding, because it could lead to bad consequences. We can repurpose the U_ANTI_ARCHER_FOOT to the correct units (infantry with wide shields) and then make them entirely negate all poison damage instead of making an equation behind the scene that most novice players won't pick up on.

Also bigger creatures are harder to poison, so it's better to just give elephants and horses straight 3 stackable and their health abundance will do instead of changing bonuses for effects.

Well, maybe, but even a little splash on open wound can be dangerous.
And immunity could straight render them useless. The only use of poison archers is to deal with slow, armoured units and to kill priests and workers with one-hit. And in defence where healing units is much harder.
Well - it can be effective against AI or with hit and run tactics against moving army, but unlikely.
On any other use arbalests, horse archers or longbowmen are vastly superior.
Also thinking of pure strategy:
Somebody closes with 1 anti-cavarly unit (let's say halberdier) to your stables. If building was in full health you manage to train 4-turn cavalier and bam - no more danger. What's more - every unit in stables can damage halberdier severely. And against Lancer there is Lancer.
Somebody closes with 1 anti-infantry unit (arbalest) to your barracks. You train Defender to survive or any faster unit to damage said arbalest. Against cavalry you have pikeman-line. Even against said poison archer with proposed changes defender can survive 2 turns.
Somebody closes with 1 anti-archer unit to your archery. You train poison archer - unit specialised to deal with armoured targets to at least damage him.
With them being poison immune you cannot do anything with this building alone.
You propose to remove the only line of archery defence.

And poison being more effective to units with huge hp poll and less effective against specialised anti-archer units is less weird and confusing than straight immunity. Immunity is also a bad practise in strategies.
And against almost 50hp cavalier even straight 5 stackable is not much and elephants having more hp than defensive structures 6 damage is still laughed about.
To weaken damage I would at most shorten poison to 4 turns (in most tactical situations useless, but allows 1st skirmisher upgrade to survive 1 full damage shot (1+ 2*4)). Infantries would get above initial attack 16, cavalry 20 and elephants 24.

i think we dont need to set up a big background - we should simply turn on stacking as in games i see no one ever makes poison archer because of they extra cost and practically no extra damage...

so i say turn on stacking.
ok?

+1

If it's going to be straight stackable without prior unit preparation, at least turn the temporary effect damage down *to* 3.

it is now -4hp you want it to be -1hp per turn only?

I think puss asks to lower damage down to -3 per turn and per stack.

I think the dev remembers that original poison damage was 5. It was already lowered.

ok i have it set to multiplible, and we will see if it needs nerfing or not.

How about instead of direct, make it 10% of unit HP damage

That way skirmisher with 10 HP gets 1 DMG, swordsman with 20 gets 2 damage, cavalier with 50 gets 5 etc.

With this, 10 stacks will directly kill any unit

Poison archer was never meant to b anti skirmisher, against skirmisher only infantry and cavalry should b effective, if range units r effective then wat is the purpose of skirmisher?

% damage requires coding. By pure effect there could be % bonus to base effect damage against a unit or category of units.

And well, battering rams were supposed to be impervious to arrows, yet there is fire archer. Pikeman were supposed to effective against cavalry, yet there is cavalier who one-hit kills halbeldier (even with blacksmith upgrades advantage). Cavalry were supposed to be effective against foot soldiers, yet maceman or flail deals them 1/3 hp or more.

Poison archer is meant to be DoT against alive units. And it still dies from skirmisher if one attacks first.

please dont change it.
i only accepted to be it stacking, nothing else, also i have alredy changed it.

I m still against skirmisher getting stacked because skirmish has low HP while poison archer out range it

we can not differentiate, and i dont feel it as a problem, we will see in practice.