Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - Beta Suggestion for Depleted Population Pool

Just want to start by saying that the game is great fun! It's a unique spin on the typical RTS formula that is just a blast to play!

One thing however that has been bothering me is the mechanics behind the population pool, specifically what happens after it runs out. The design intent seems to be that it's supposed to be a game ender. However I find it can also cause the game to come to a serious stall, where neither team can field an army strong enough to break through the enemies defences.

My suggestion is that, after the maps population pool is completely depleted, that only the player/team which controls the most construction sites will continue to produce population, but at a significantly slower rate than normal. This rate is increased depending on how significant their lead over the enemy is.

This fixes a number of issues:

- Controlling the map remains important throughout the game. Currently after population depletes you have little reason to care about controlling additional construction sites or recruitment citadels. You likely don't have the Population to utilise the extra production power or support cap. With this change you likely still won't be able to utilise those bonuses, but at least they'll count towards something else of importance that will be worth fighting for.

- Helps break through turtles. Currently one of the most effective strategies after population depletes is to turtle your remaining army in your strongest base, and hope your opponent wastes forces and attacks you where you are strong, so you can clean up and win afterwards.

- Prevents stalemates. By giving bonus population to the leading player, this will force the other players to be aggressive or inevitably lose. The leading players gain is rather slow however so the other players don't have to go into a complete panic rush or instantly lose, but they will at least need to come up with aggressive plans.

I feel this will prevent annoying stalemates. But still stay true to the "end game" where population is extremely limited and every unit counts. The leading player still won't be able to make careless attacks, or they risk losing the bulk of their army and having the map control taken away from them.



Here are some numbers on how I envision such a system could be implemented.

The game keeps a tally of each players "points". points are given as follows. All construction sites count whether they have a building on them or not.

Construction Site - 10 Points
Naval Construction Site - 10 Points
Resource Construction Site - 10 Points
Turret Construction Site - 2 Points
Recruitment Citadel - 10 Points (20 Points total if you include the construction site itself.)

Each player/teams points are then totalled up. Whoever has the lead will be given the bonus population production depending on how much they lead by. I suggest 1 Population every 10 seconds for every 10 points they are leading by (Rounded up.)

For example. Lets assume a simple 1v1.

Red Player has 72 Points.
Blue Player has 56 Points.

72 - 56 = 16

Red Player will receive 2 Population every 10 seconds. (16 rounded up to 20.)

In the case of a team game just split the population gain between the players on the winning team.



Well that sums up my suggestion. What are other peoples thoughts/opinions on this matter?

The game does have a stalemate timer - at least in Skirmish mode, that is indeed a possibility. I don't know what happens to units left on the Strategy map if a stalemate occurs.

At the moment I do not really agree with the population growing after depletion, that is the entire point of the limited population system, but I haven't had a chance to play with people yet and experience how such a stalemate feels.

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This is only tangentially related, but after a battle on the Strategy map, the population pool for that country will be depleted, which is a really nice touch. But it seems to bounce back really, really fast. After the turn's end, the population for a country is displayed as two numbers - a white one, plus an addition in green, which is how many the population has increased since the battle's end.

It seems that the population boosts back up too quickly - there isn't even one full turn without a battle and suddenly is almost back up to where it started from. I think it should take longer for populations to return to normal. I like the idea that repeated battles in a single country could drastically change how it plays because there are fewer and fewer people left. It might even be interesting to get down to 0 population so that the country is just a battlefield and all your resources are the troops you brought and the few you can scavenge from selling buildings (recruiting the staff of that building).

Yeah the pop recovers by the next turn. It would be nice to see it bounce back more slowly. That war-torn country is eventually near 0, so basically, no units can be produced, so it up to armies to bring in their own forces (tokens and mercs) to take the country easily. Holding it while it recovers would be challenging too. Might add a lot more strategy to tokens.

I was not aware that a stalemate system already existed, how exactly does it work? I've always just surrendered pretty quickly in stalemate type circumstances since I didn't think anything would happen and I didn't want to wait around for no reason.

I mainly made this post from my experience against the insane AI in skirmish mode. In many matches against them I find myself in control of the majority of the map, but unable to finish the AIs main base because they just turtle in them. The AIs as a whole just seem to turtle really hard and never mount any reasonable assaults. They seem to always keep at least half of their total supply at base at all times. They do send out lots of small assault parties and take undefended bases but that's about it.

As a result of all this I'm rarely under threat of actually losing to them directly, but they regularly put me in these stalemate type situations. In about 10 games played against the Insane AI, around 5 of them got stuck in these stalemate situations where I had no population left to make a big enough force to defeat them, but the AIs would just always leave most of their units in their base.

To be fair they probably aren't true stalemates, the AI PROBABLY could win after I lose most my forces if they mounted a proper attack instead of always leaving most their units in their base.

However I still think stalemates will be a common occurrence simply from how the game mechanics are setup, and this will be even more true after the turret buffs in the recent patch. It's just generally going to be pretty cost inefficient to take out a properly defended base, and it seems like a very likely occurrence for this to be true for both players, leading both to want to turtle.

I strongly feel like some system needs to be implemented that keeps the importance of controlling bases throughout the game, currently as soon as population pool runs out, the entire map essentially becomes pointless, all you need is to hold one main base and the rest of the map can be safely ignored. This just doesn't feel true to the design intent behind node based RTS titles.

If the population pool is out, you have to finish the battle, that's all you can do. No point in taking controll, the forces (except the Insane IA one) won't increase anymore, you have to win with your troops and recruits... That's a great mechanism making the RTS part faster.

The IA on the other hand should make bigger attacks, I agree with it.

We're in Beta, and the AI isn't even finished yet. They're probably tuning the AI using player vs. player data.

I'm not great enough to 1 v 1 Insane AIs, or rather I don't feel like it. But in 2 v 2 with all Insanes and me? A right army combination, devastators with zeppelin support, unit abilities and forcing chunks of their army to go after you at a time followed by a full dragon supported assault leaves me winning with manageable casualties all the time.

Beta is the perfect time to point out problems, that's the whole point of beta isn't it?

The main focus of this thread wasn't really about the A.I, I just brought it up to give some background to my feelings towards the population pool. Those 10 games I was just experimenting with a wide variety of ideas, some worked and some didn't. But the fact still remains that I ran into a ton of stalemates, typically in an RTS if you employ a poor strategy you should just die for it, not get stuck in a stalemate.

Also while there are indeed cost effective ways to defeat the AI. that's only because the AI doesn't react to some strategies properly. The AI is hopeless against Juggernauts for example, you can sit 3 juggernauts bombarding their base and they'll just continually lose thousands upon thousands of recruits to them. The AI responds VERY poorly to Juggernauts. However obviously a player isn't going to just stand around and let this happen, and should be able to respond in a reasonably cost efficient manner.

Imagine a PvP game that had been very back and forth the whole way through, and the population pool has run out, both players own 10 Armours and 6 Anti-Ground Turrets. This is a no win situation for either player, whoever makes the attack will lose the game because the other player will have the assistance of turrets. While that's just a very simple example the game just greatly favours defence as a whole. Instead of building those 10 armours at all an even better tactic would be to have built nothing at all, and simply waited to see what the enemy produced with their remaining reinforcements. Once you see what they create you can easily mass create whatever counters his composition way before they reach your base, giving you an even bigger advantage beyond just the turrets.

Now what happens if both players realise all this, the population cap has ran out, and they own no units but have 200 Reinforcements each. In this situation the best course of action is for both players to do nothing, because who ever makes the first move will lose...

I strongly believe that even if it's not the suggestion I provided that is used, that something needs to be done about the end game of a match when the Population Pool is Deleted. Everyone mentions that it's supposed to end the game, but how does it end the game? All I see it doing is stalling the game into an awkward stand still of nothing. The only logical strategy to do as soon as the Population Pool depletes is to turtle, it is statistically going to give you the highest chance of victory, because controlling the map is irrelevant, and attacking the enemy directly is inefficient. But if both players just turtle on 1 main base, how is the game going to end?

In Skirmish mode a stalemate seems to exist if no one has attacked or capture a building in quite a while. You get a 1 minute warning to quit stalling or else a stalemate will occur.

Taking enemy bases is certainly quite difficult, but there are options. The Shaman has skills that can lower damage you take and remove enemy units from the equation, the Warlock has skills that can remove single enemy units and bomb static defenses, there are Kamikaze troopers, and of course there are Devastators with siege mode.



That's a highly unikely scenario. Yes, it is possible, but if you screw up your planning so much that you're stuck with 0 money at the end, that's kinda your own fault.

If this scenario is a Skirmish game, both players can sit and do nothing and get a stalemate.

If it's a campaign game, then both sides losses will be high enough that pretty much no one will have any survivors worth noting on the Strategy map anyway. Yes, you might lose a country for a turn, but the enemy will have lost most of his attacking forces as well.

If both sides have 200 recruits left, then those who spends them best will win. In Skirmish, Devastators will help, in Campaign, your researched abilities will help.

I don't see how this amazingly unlikely scenario of exactly equal stuff and money needs to be addressed by the game more than it already is.

Again: In Skirmish, there is a stalemate timer which will kick in.

In Campaign, if both sides have drained the map and their coffers dry, the winning side will get maybe 1 unit back on the strategy map at best.

Well I do indeed appreciate that all this stuff exists, but the defender has access to all these tools also. Defence is always a stronger position to be in, in all RTS games. However generally you have to defend multiple locations at once, which requires you to spread resources. Currently this important point becomes moot as soon as the Population Pool is depleted, you only need to defend 1 location and defence becomes very strong.

I feel like the balance between defence and offence is fine for the main part of the game, it is only after the population depletes where defenders become too strong.

I'm still curious what exactly this stalemate does, I personally haven't seen it. How does it determine who wins if it occurs? It would make sense for the defender to win in a campaign game, but in a skirmish game how does it determine the victor?

I dunno about AI being unable to defend against Juggernauts - for one, it doesn't seem to build naval units other than Transports, and for two, there is a lack of proper naval maps. Most maps, like Fallen Moon, you can effectively win by just rushing in huge hordes of Hunters and Fighters before the opposition has time to react. Also, I see no one has made mentioned of the fact that Jugs can just wipe out entire chunks of unit mobs with their nukes. :P

I also question woofles' assertion that you can just effectively turtle in your main starting base. The skirmish games I've been playing have basically favored all rush assaults at the beginning, and that's because of the units purchased in RISK map mode. In a normal skirmish mode and not Risk Map Game, players won't have the luxuries of starting off with huge forces won't they? So how is one going to just seat on their arses without the benefit of starting off with say... 15 Hunters + 5 Fighters and pump out all the units needed to push into opposition lands? You certainly won't be making as much cash and controlling as much recruit/support points, and if you have powerful units like the aforementioned Juggernaut, you won't be able to pump out enough nukes to overwhelm the mobs of enemies.

If your hypothetical matchup has two literally identically skilled players with literally identical forces and literally identical funds, then the victor is going to be a flip of the coin anyway, so does it really matter?

The answer is to either get more skilled, have better forces, or have better funds.



It's a STALEMATE. Imstead of a red "VICTORY" or blue "DEFEEAT", it's a blue "STALEMATE". No one wins.


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Neither the campaign map nor the RTS map builds any naval units but Transports, so yes, it is no good at defending itself from any Naval attacks.

I don't imply to turtle the entire game, that is a sure fire way to lose. What I mean is that as soon as the Population Pool runs out, you can completely ignore all land you conquered and let the enemy take it all, because none of it matters anymore. You just need 1 base past this point.



I've seen the AI produce both Ironclads and Juggernauts. Not very often or in any reasonable force but I've absolutely seen them used. But I'll agree that they don't seem to have any proper coding. I've never seen them do anything other than sit around near the naval yard they were constructed from and fire at things that come near them.



Before I address this, apologizes if I'm getting on peoples nerves, I seem to be ticking people off with my arguments and it's not really my intent. I guess I'm just passionate that I feel this is a real issue, but that of course is just my opinion.

I don't agree that it's amazingly unlikely, while yes the examples I gave were strictly even. I do believe the same problem will exist in other close games as well. I feel the defenders advantage will be significant enough that even in games where there is an obvious leader, that they will not be able to break through a final defensive turtle and be forced into stalemate.

But I admit this is all just theory at the moment.



Sorry, I feel like an idiot when you put it that way. I suppose I was expecting more of a tiebreaker than strictly a stalemate.

So far I have played only against AI and have not encountered any stalemate situation, but I see the point of this thread.

What about adding one additional winning condition which only applies after the population pool is depleted? For instance one player could win if he/she controls a certain percentage of available construction sites (e.g. 85 %) after the population has run out? In that case no player can turtle in his main base since the other player can then easily capture all the other construction sites and so win the battle.

I like this solution quiet a lot. A wonderful idea. This would stay true to the absolutely no more reinforcements notion, but also prevent the lame strategy of ignoring the map and doing a complete turtle.

I'll just note that each recruitment centre adds 50 to your support cap. Even in stalemate, being able to add some units with the recruits you have left is a boon.