Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - General Stalemate in naval battles? and possible solutions

I just got dragon commander, and I am having a pretty good time, but I just came across what is essentially a stalemate situation with naval battles. in part 2 of the game, I decided to send my 5 ironclads against 5 juggernauts and 2 ironclads. when the screen that lets you choose the general appears, the a.i. decided to include with his fleet a mercenary card that summons 4 shamans. I begin the battle and I destroy his fleet mainly by dropping mines and luring the juggernauts into them, sustaining 0 casualties on my side. I am sitting there waiting for the victory screen, only to realize that the ai's 4 shamans are still floating around above my fleet.

so what ends up happening is my fleet that owns the map has to retreat from the field all because 4 "land" units in a NAVAL battle are keeping me from winning. and to add insult to injury, when I retreat from the battle, the game doesn't even take into consideration the fact that I destroyed his entire fleet, and somehow those 4 shamans magically took out 3 of my 5 ironclads, and half of the enemy fleet suddenly returned to life.I am quite surprised that nobody thought of this sort of thing before.

from my perspective, there are a few things that can be changed in order to remedy this situation.

1. make it so that instead of killing every single enemy unit, you only have to destroy non-mercenary units.(this could make sense lore-wise because these are mercenaries after all, and when they watch the main army get creamed they probably don't want to stick around and fight to the death)

2. if in naval battles neither side has damaged each other in the past a non-specific amount of time, you should win by default. or if that doesn't work, make both sides retreat from the battle with only the units they currently have on the map.

3. make a more realistic retreat mechanic. I remember in Star Wars: Empire at war, if you could not win the battle, you could choose to retreat, and then all of your units would make a b-line for the nearest map edge to escape the fight. something like this would fix both the stalemate and the the fact whatever happens in the battle view does not affect at all what happens to your units in the retreat report.

once again, I am loving this game so far, but I am quite surprised that something like this got past the Q/A department.

Similar situations can come into play with Fighters and Juggernauts if the Fighters don't have the ground attack upgrade. I'm pretty sure Ironclads are capable of attacking Shamans because Shamans have been a fairly regular feature in all my naval battles and something's been killing them.

Anyway since stalemates can happen without mercenaries that can't be a fix. Also if you auto won when neither side had attacked in so long you could just give your opponent a run around. I don't know if there's a mechanic for units on both sides of an engagement surviving but that would be ideal. If you get to the edge of the map all surviving units survive. It would need coding from scratch though.

I fear realistically the only solution is going to be make sure you send a mix of troops with a range of attack abilities to every encounter on the seas.

And what exactly is stopping you from building units to attack the shamans?

Don't you start off with a blank location that you can build a factory on to build troopers or something?

certain naval maps are out in the open sea, there are no places to build any new units.

Ironclads can't hit shamans or warlocks.

So yes, that is quite the stalemate situation that needs fixing. IMHO, pure naval battles should start you with 20 recruits, so you can use your dragon at least once.

A simple fix would be to dissallow non-naval mercenaries on such maps?

Slightly off-topic: Anyone else wonder what happens to the recruits that we "spend" to make the dragon appear?

Human sacrifice.

That's no fun. Shamans are a nasty thing to have to deal with when they're upgraded, it adds some interesting flavour to naval matches.

Besides, as Rack pointed out, Imp Fighters with no bombs versus Juggernauts is also a stalemate, mercenaries or no.

Maybe like this: Put 5 (or some other number of) control points on the map. They're a bit like construction sites, but with no buildings to construct, and the type of unit that can claim them depends on the terrain.

When your side gains control of 80% of the control points, a countdown starts from 60 seconds. If your side loses that control, the countdown ends. When control is more than 80%, the countdown goes at double speed. Completing the countdown wins the battle.

Air control points? Maybe not, no more than 5% of the map's control points. Far easier not to have it, both visually and logically.

Pure naval battles (no land in map): Naval control points only.

Pure land battles: Land control points only.

Land battles with lakes/sea: 0-20% naval control points.

Naval battles with land: 0-20% land control points.

Island/coast battles: 50-90% land control points.

More important than the numbers: Using control points, most land territories should be winnable with ground units only, and all ocean territories should be winnable with naval units only.

GUI: Include with the tug-o-war display of military strength (coloured bars on top during RTS) a similar indicator of the number of control points held, contested/unclaimed control points being a white space inbetween. (Left team x% | contested/unclaimed | Right team x%)

That solution seems really complicated. A simpler one is to have some kind of stalemate timer, after which any surviving units both retreat.

Can you actually retreat without losing all your units?

Every time I've tried to auto-retreat, I lost everything.

Yes, you can indeed retreat without losing all your units. You can even retreat from the RTS mode and not lose all your units. Most of the time you will lose most or all of your units, but it's at least a chance to salvage some of them instead of a guaranteed loss of all of them.

Since you also "spend" recruits to make functioning buildings, I assume that they're being used as staff there. Likewise, with the dragon "preparing for battle" I figure that they're your pit crew. (Someone has to strap that jet pack on and a single imp engineer sure isn't going to be able to manage it.)

Stalemate timer forcing mutual retreat: Mutual retreat is essentially defender victory, isn't it? Although with some possibility of surviving units on both sides. It might make defensive run-around a winning strategy.

Landless battles don't require you to have buildings (which couldn't run), so I'd expect evasion/stalemate-exploit to be possible. But the AI wouldn't exploit that(?), and humans competing in good sport shouldn't, so maybe that's good enough.

However, a terrain-based stalemate resolution, complex or simple, would more fairly judge a coast battle where the defender holds only the sea or air (with no ability to attack ground) and the attacker holds all land.

Maybe it is that simple. Each battlefield has a main terrain (land, water), and if one side has units on this terrain and the other does not, the side with these units is judged the winner of a stalemate, forcing the other to retreat. If neither side has this advantage, they both retreat, and the area of the battle does not change owner (land tiles: defender keeps it).