Promotion and Reward System

[garvisus]

I was thinking a good idea could be a promotion and reward system for successful units. A unit that is able to win 5 battles could possibly be rewarded with some sort of rank (Lieutenant, Captain, Colonel, etc.) and bonus ( +1 strength, +1 move, +1 to one of the bonuses the unit already has or possibly a +1 leadership gained from being a veteran of battle). Every 5 battles could give the unit another rank and another bonus, the unit could also receive some kind of medal or insignia that shows what rank the unit is.

There would have to be rules in order to limit what units can receive promotion. Here are a few of my ideas.

Does not apply to Heroes.

Does not apply to units stacked with a Hero, unless the rank was given before being stacked with a Hero and then could not rank up as long as unit is with Hero.

Wins do not count when capturing an unoccupied building.

Wins do not count if you are defending a city.

Wins do not count if your chances of winning the battle are over a certain %. (A stack of dragons getting wins by killing crows and scouts).

I’m not sure if this is something that is feasible, but it would be cool to have veteran units get rewarded for surviving through a long campaign.

[Moonknight]

Some sort of system would be nice, more of a Medal of Honor that increases strength by x (similar to Warlords), up to y medals. For Warbarons, it could be +2 strength with maximum of 5 medals?

Maybe if a unit wins a battle that he is 20% or less likely to win? I don't think it has to be restricted to units fighting outside of hero stacks only if done this way.

Adding to bonus features seems like it would take a lot of balancing work or adding Leadership skills to non-heroes makes heroes less needed.

Here is another thread topic based on Unit Experience: http://www.warbarons.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=648&sid=552a8194595a805f77f503978168f723

[LPhillips]

The medal system sounds nice. Especially if the enemy can't see it. Increasing your stack's overall strength by up to 10% with invisible bonuses is pretty cool.

Moonknight,
Awarding medals only when units win a battle they are 20% or less likely to win gives units fighting suicidal battles a 10% chance or less of gaining the medal (they have to win, and only 10% of the outcomes where they win are not rejected by the simulator). We'd almost never see the medal, because most players don't fight suicidal battles if they can avoid them. What do you think about awarding it 50% of the time when units win a battle they had less than 50% chance to win? So if 3 of your units survive a 45% victory chance, there is a 50% chance of each unit acquiring a medal.

Adding Leadership bonus to units wouldn't stack with the hero's leadership ability, so it just amounts to a small morale bonus. Shouldn't do a thing to heroes. Unless you mean that silly thing where people buy tons of heroes and use their base +3 value; that's an inefficient way to use heroes and it would indeed make that misuse even less effective. Leveled heroes should be entirely unaffected.

[KGB]

I'd prefer to just see a simple system similar to DLR.

1) All units in the game have a base medal chance depending on their type. Pure military units like Hv Inf would have a higher base chance like say 50% while creatures like a Kraken or Medusa or Crow would be low like say 5%. Other units like Archons, Devils, Giants etc would be somewhere in between.
2) Heroes would add to the base chance with different heroes giving different values (a Paladin might add 10% while a Thief might only add 2%). The medal chance a hero provides could be something you upgrade with your secondary points (the ones spent on learning/UL etc, maybe +10% medal chance per point spent)
3) When combat ends, the winning UNIT (that is the unit currently in combat) gets a chance to roll for a medal based on adding its chance to any hero chance.

Each medal could add say +3 strength.

KGB

[Chazar]

Hm, I think such a system would make the game unnecessarily complicated. Obsessive players may use it to gain an edge by tracking battles and shifting units with more battle experiences towards the safer positions in the stack, while those players uninterested in such micro management will loose out.

Even if medals are awarded by pure chance without tracking the number of battles - is a player then allowed to reorder the stack (inviting micromanagement)? Are medal units always at the front or the back (annoying players that like micromanagement)?

Even more confusion arises if the enemy cannot see the medals in battle (as suggested above). If some units with several medals would give me a constant beating, all I could have for an explanation would be my incredible bad luck, which can easily be frustrating, as opposed to seeing that one was loosing in accordance with the odds.

[LPhillips]

Chazar,
The things you have cited as negatives are the very reasons this is being suggested.
1) A way for players to benefit from careful troop management. Of course this can still be defeated by superior strategy; micromanagement won't win Warbarons.
2) A way to partially obscure unit strength so that players are less likely to micromanage specific battles by calculating exact outcomes.

It's good to see that some people, like you, value different things in the game like simplicity and a reasonable level of predictability. It's a pretty solid point. To me, medals are completely unnecessary icing on the cake. Maybe even undesirable, as they aren't reflective of player skill nor conducive to strategy. I think I'd come down on your side in this case: What do medals really add? They seem like something that makes a player briefly say "neat!" and then later is obscure and mildly confusing at best.

[Moonknight]

It's definitely a "nice to have" and nowhere near necessary, but I think the nice to haves are what set games apart.

I agree that 20% might be too low, but I was just putting a low number out there as I wouldn't want medals being passed out left and right. It seemed like about every other battle I'd have in DLR would give a unit a medal. Maybe it just seemed that way though since I only played the AI.

[garvisus]

I see the point of keeping the game simple. Being relatively new to Warbarons, this system probably wouldn't help someone like me after all. I struggle to compete in most ladder matches, advanced players would have another feature to exploit newbies with.

I do like the "idea" of a system like this though. I sometimes wish my unit of giants that have somehow managed to survive through a long game could be given a little something extra for their work.