Ennemy threat level evaluation & reward scouting

Feature Requests and Game feedback
1

Hi,

I was thinking about what could possibly influence traistone drops and what SHOULD influence traitstone drops.

Sure, everyone agrees, higher difficultyshould mean higher rewards, but that would lead to problems because fighting a single troop on Warlord 4 is often easier than fighting 4 troops on Hard, and thus, should give lower rewards.

That’s why, in my opinion, the game should be able to “analyse” the strength of a team and place a number on it.

It should analyse the initial stats of troops (considering all boosts like difficulty, troop bonus, kingdom bonus), spells dangerousness (considering mana cost + number of colors usable to charge the spell), number of mana colors used and banner selected and finally, traits.
This means you would have to place a value on the threat a spell poses.

Example of evaluation (this is an actual defense deck I’ve encountered) :
Brown / Blue banner
Winter Imp : 20Att ; 12Arm ; 32Hlth ; 8Mgc ; spell threat : 45 ; 1 trait unlocked
Boar Rider : 17Att ; 14Arm ; 30Hlth ; 8Mgc ; spell threat : 40 ; 2 traits unlocked
Autumnal Imp : 17Att; 17Arm ; 33Hlth ; 12Mgc ; spell threat : 30 ; 1 trait unlocked
Goblin Rocket : 13Att ; 14Arm ; 29Hlth ; 6Mgc ; spell threat : 50 ; 3 traits unlocked

(Arbitrary numbers ahead you may skip this part)

Attack threat evaluation :
1st troop Att * 4 + 2nd troop Att * 3.5 + 3rd troop Att * 3 + 4th troop Att * 2
→ 217

Armor evaluation
1st troop Arm * 1.8 + 2nd troop Arm * 1.5 + 3rd troop Arm * 1.2 + 4th troop Arm * 1
→ 77

Health evaluaion
1st troop Hlth * 2 + 2nd troop Hlth * 1.9 + 3rd troop Hlth * 1.7 + 4th troop Hlth * 1.5
→ 221

Individual Spell threat evaluation
(spell threat * magic) / (mana required - mana bonus given by banner affecting this troop)
→ 32
→ 36
→ 33
→ 34

Global spell threat evaluation :
Total Individual spell threat evaluation * (Nb of different mana colors used / nb of mana colors in the game)
→ 135

I think traits evaluation should be done in depth as, for example, siege trait is of no use for the defense team, or beast bond cannot be used by Boar Rider in this team composition. Let’s say this team’s trait evaluation gave 70.

TOTAL threat evaluation :
→ 720

This calcul considered the Zaejin bonus and Primal bonus as the stats they give were directly added to the troops. It would work the same with difficulty (though it does not consider wether AI combo breaker is active or not).

Of course, there were a lot of arbitrary numbers in here and I didn’t put in as much thoughts in it as I wish devs could, but these are the basic guidelines to what a team threat evaluation would look like. Of course, no matter what are the number used, you’ll definitely end up with some teams having lower threat values that other teams whle being more scarry, but this would give a general idea of how strong a team looks like on paper.

Now that we can evaluate a team’s strength, we can define the rewards accordingly and have greater chances to drop better traistones on harder battles.

Let’s put this simply in images becase everyone LOVE images.

There would be a new button indicating how strong the ennemy is below it’s team (only when scouted)

1366×768 1.22 MB

A button you ask? Yes, clicking it would lead to this screen, showing what are the traistones rewards for this battle.

1366×768 1.17 MB

What do you guys think?

8 Likes
2

I love it! Especially the second image. Well done!

3

I like the idea of analyzing power levels for the purpose of determining awards, though I’m not sure I like the idea of giving you the actual power number; I think the game is more rewarding when you have to make your own assessment. As to showing what kinds of traitstones you might get, again I’m not sure breaking all that down is really a good idea, mainly because you’re probably not going to determine which battles you fight based on that very often, and thus having to go through that screen (unless you make it optional) would be more a hassle than anything.

4

Hmmm, agreed that the actual threat value should probably not be displayed.

Of course, going through that new screen is optional, since you can’t even access it without scouting !
But I’m pretty sure that, at the moment, a lot of us would consider fighting monstruous decks on Warlord 4 if they would knew for sure they could get celestial traistone on a daily basis… If they can defeat these decks !

5

I think this happens already… the only time I’ve gotten a Celestial or Arcane traitstone is when I fought a player who was vastly higher than me and had a more potent/buffed team (me 156 vs 500-ish).

6

I don’t know, from what I’ve read, only the difficulty settings can influence the drop rates.

Besides, I think that if there were such an evaluation of the teams, it would be used by the matchmaking system to pair you with people as strong as you.

It seems matchmaking is only using your level as criteria to determine who you’ll fight, as I seem to encounter as much people with full ascended / traited / leveled teams as I encounter people with only one unit in their defense deck…

7

“He’s over nine thousAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNDDD!!!”

2 Likes
8

Yup, I can definitely see my self say that when I encounter someone with a threat level over 9000 :stuck_out_tongue:

EDIT : it should even be an achievement if you beat him xD

9

A 4x goblin team with level 20 on all troops and full traits:

2 Likes
10

That’s the spirit !
(Although I think you’d need to go on Warlord 3 at least to reacch the 9000 with my draft of a threat evaluating system ._. )

11

You forgot to factor in the power of automatic extra turns. That alone is OVER 9,000!!!

1 Like
12

It could be a two-fold comparison. An initial level comparison for the matchmaking team and then when you win, and additional comparison/check for the difficulty/team composition to determine the drop.

1 Like
13

I’m actually a big fan of this sort of thing. Nice concept art. Only issue is that calculating things might prove difficult…

While my first thought was obviously ‘please, traitstones, come to me’, it does solve another problem, that of the super difficult defense teams. People would actually have an incentive to try to invade, say, those Mythic 10/12-traits Goblin teams.

14

Yeah, it sure would be a nice feature, but calculating such threat level is difficult.

But I actually think my draft wasn’t missing much.

The longest part would be to put a threat value on every single spell in the game but also (in opposition with what I did up there) a scaling ratio.
Indead the spell “hit one target for X damage” won’t scale as much as “hit all targets for X damage”.
The calcul for one’s spell threat would then be
(spell threat + scaling ratio * magic level) / (mana required - mana bonus given by banner affecting this troop)

I didn’t add everything I came up with while posting my draft such as this previous tweak to the calculs, but if I may add a couple things.

Thoughts on individual spell threat :
The calcul I just updated up there consider mana bonus to be he same as having a lower spell cost. It’s kind of true when you are charging through gem matches, but it’s not when you are destroying gems through another spell or charging your spell through Sunweaver.
Calcul should then lower a bit the impact of the banner.
→ (spell threat + scaling ratio * magic level) / (mana required - 0.8 * mana bonus given by banner affecting this troop)
Besides, the division in that calcul means that “the faster you charge your spell, the more dangerous it is”. But you can’t charge it in less than one turn, so, just by security, it should go like this :
→ (spell threat + scaling ratio * magic level) / MIN(1 ; (mana required - 0.8 * mana bonus given by banner affecting this troop))

Thoughts on global spell threat :

Global spell threat evaluation should consider the order of the units : the first troop tends to die first, so it won’t use it’s spell for as long as the last troop, so I should have added a multiplier to every individual spell threat instead of making a raw sum.
(I guess people figured out why I had higher multiplier for first units when dealing with armor / attack / health : your first troop stats ar more important than the others as they will define wether or not you’ll take the advantage early game, the revere thing can be said about spells).

Thoughts on traits :

The traits are actually not that hard to take into consideration, most traits are stats mdifier and should simply be considered as stat bonus (blessed and cursed should be considered to be a bonus to all stats of all troops divided by 4).

Other traits influence the mana gathered (elemental links) and should be considered in the same way a banner is considered with only one difference : the link doesn’t work anymore when the unit dies.
Spell threat should then depends of these traits and the place of these traits, becoming something like this :
(spell threat + scaling ratio * magic level) / MIN(1 ; (mana required - 0.8 * mana bonus given by banner affecting this troop - 0.8 * mana bonus given by this troop - 0.7 * mana bonus given by links given by troops listed after this one) - 0.6 * mana bonus given by links given by troops before this one)

Other traits influence your defensive skills to skull damages and should then be considered as armor / health multiplier depending on the position of your unit : for example, stoneskin will work better on your first unit than your last, because your first unit is sur to take in skull damages while your last… Not so much depending on what the opposing deck is playing.
These defensive traits (agile / stoneskin / armored) should then multiply your armor / health threat.
For example, let’s take health calcul :
→ 1st troop Hlth * 2 + 2nd troop Hlth * 1.9 + 3rd troop Hlth * 1.7 + 4th troop Hlth * 1.5
Here, we take each unit’s health and multiply it by an arbitrary number that changes according to the position of the unit.
Let’s say one of these troops has stoneskin.
Stoneskin base muliplier should be around *1.6 (because I’d say only 20% of the damages inflicted are done through spells) but, as we said, it should be considered stronger on the first units than the last ones, so it also has a “positionnal muliplier”, let’s say it’s 25% less effective per position.
If the first unit is the one with stoneskin, the calcul would become :
→ 1st troop Hlth * (1.6 * 100%) * 2 + 2nd troop Hlth * 1.9 + 3rd troop Hlth * 1.7 + 4th troop Hlth * 1.5
While if it’s on the last troop, it would be
→ 1st troop Hlth * 2 + 2nd troop Hlth * 1.9 + 3rd troop Hlth * 1.7 + 4th troop Hlth (1.6 * 25%)

  • 1.5

Other traits influence your damages over some troop types.
Let’s reconsider this calcul :
1st troop Att * 4 + 2nd troop Att * 3.5 + 3rd troop Att * 3 + 4th troop Att * 2
And let’s consider the 2nd troop has knight slayer.
It would then become :
1st troop Att * 4 + 2nd troop Att * (2 * number of knights in the game / number of cards in the game) * 3.5 + 3rd troop Att * 3 + 4th troop Att * 2

As for the rest of the traits : from what I remember, I miss inscribed, daemonic pact, immunity to status effects and ability to deal double damage to troops suffering from a status effect. In my opinion, they should all have their own arbitrary threat values / position multiplier.

TOTAL threat evaluation thought :

I just made a sum of every other threat results and TADA, here was my total threat evaluation. Actually, I think some arbitrary multipliers can be added here and there at this moment to balance things. Because when I look at my spell threat evaluation and my attack threat evaluation of the team I took as example, it tends to show me that my calculs make the spells seem quite threatless while they actually where threatning. This tends to show my arbitrary numbers may not have been good somewhere and I needed to balance my evaluations.

In the end, the hardest part is to assimilate each spell / some traits to an arbitrary initial threat value / positionnal threat ratio / scale ratio and to determine what multipliers should be used, where and why.

And as this is just the kind of math I like to hurt my head on, I figured I’d give it some thoughts xD