Posted by BattleRealmsRevival on May 6th, 2019

by KoMiKoZa, Designer, Battle Realms Revival Team

Greetings!



Huge thanks to everyone who's already tested, reported, appreciated and criticized things concerning our patch. We appreciate the feedback.



We know you find the lack of resolutions disturbing! And that, sadly, turns you away from the patch, but we will add them later on as the time goes. Our next big patch is supposed to be 1.50t where resolutions will be present.



So far, the following issues from 1.50r will be soon adressed in the new hotfix-patch 1.50s that's already in the works:



- Siege bugfix causing massive issues across the game, basically butchering the gameplay element. We haven't thought this one through well. While the technique bugs are fixed, this causes a massive damage decrease for a number of units, so chemists, for example, become useless vs buildings until the technique is researched.



We will balance it out in the new patch. Many people seem to not understand that Siege parameter not working in the game is a bug, game's techniques depend on that parameter as well as some of the units in general.



Same goes for the peasant huts, but about that- a bit later and in detail.



- Heroes not counted as summonned in stats for P3+. We will fix that.



- Shift (queue key) not working while building stables, this is 100% our oversight that we will fix.



- We've detected abnormal Dragon Watchtower stuns, which should not be relevant to our patch at all as we didn't change a single thing concerning that. We weren't able to reproduce the bug in 1v1 or 2v2 games and need videos from other players who report it. Please, help us out here and make sure this bug is not present in 1.50q (previous version) before blaming it on our patch. Test and record videos where as 2-4 diferent players are under an enemy Dragon tower as we believe it directly influences the stun longetivity.



The patch was a bit rushed and came out a little raw, I'm sorry for that. Thank you for the all the support nonetheless! We will make the situation much better in the future, stick around!





One more thing that's important in the online area of BR...







It has come to my attention there's a feedback-statement from the oldest (supposedly) BR Online player by the nickname of Ben who's got a relatively big following on the other side of the community. Personally, I feel the need to address this. Unfortunately, the poster didn't really grasp the idea of what our project is and what the patch is, also there's some misinformation that seems to be spreading around that community. So allow me to be your guest and reply to each of the points one by one. This is also aimed at the people who supported the statement without reading into it. I'll write this as an online-player-modder to other players.



A couple of things for the poster before we dive into it:



1. Please, take your time to get familiar with what the Battle Realms Revival project is. Here or here (This is the actual BR Community Discord that the creator of the game knows about).

2. If you want to advise people against using our patch, perhaps it would be wise to first share your thoughts on the mod page and not your personal space that no people from our team follow. Then we could also give you details so you don't misinform people about the patch.

I encourage all of you "NOT" to use the Battle Realms Revival Patch at the moment because I personally believe from playing this game for more than 17 years that this patch ruined many player's game play, particularly professional players. If you want to test the patch, go ahead.

I would say this is a really bold claim. People are always resistant to change, especially those who've been playing the same game, the same way for 17 years straight, but going as far as saying we've "ruined" the gameplay for "particularily professional players" is a tad bit dramatic.

I do respect the Revival Team for trying making the game better. I was excited and expect a bug fix, not a change of game. When I mean basic bugs, I mean the bugs that we know and popular, such as smoke spam, shift rice and water, super push, and some unit not reloading on tower and on horse, yin cheat from lotus, townsquare cheat. Fix that, and not changing the game we know it. Most players are happy with the current Battle Realms as it is, they only dislike the bug that we mostly talked about. That's why it's only good to fix those bugs.

Battle Realms is not only ridden with bugs, but also imbalanced and broken in many aspects. Many professional players may tell you about the disbalance, the rest you can't see because you're a player and not the modder/developer. You're used to what Battle Realms has been for a long time and I understand that changing it now may not be appealing to you.



Before expecting anything, it's important to read what our project is about and follow our progress, or perhaps even participate in it. 1.50r is mostly about bugfixes and not game changes.

"Most players" might be an overstatement considering you're talking about the online part of the community which is only a few players. A lot of them, by the way, have left the online scene because the game is imbalanced/bugged/broken. I wouldn't go as far as saying "most" either.

It's not "only good" to fix THOSE bugs. It's good to fix its bugs and rebalance the game so its every unit is viable, so there's a lot of opportunities for different battle strategies. Now the online gameplay is shallow and mostly comes down to 3-4 meta tactics for each clan, as well as replaying the same maps and doing same things over and over.

Before you judge me as a bugger of this game, read first what I would be willing to fix instead for the Battle Realms Revival Patch if I am the developer of it.

It's interesting how you have to adress it in the first place. But "willing to fix" doesn't make you less of a bugger if, in the end, you resort to those bugs.

For now, I will start with why I believe this patch has failed…

We've just started working on the project. This is also one of many patches that are yet to come. For you it failed, for others it didn't. We'll adress the general issues with it, but not everything that you claim "shouldn't be changed".

To get started, Kabuki Warriors + Horses + Whirling Spear = LOTUS DEAD. Yes, there is a way to avoid this, but Lotus is very slow. That's okay if we want balancing Lotus vs Dragon.. but....

Dragon Tower Stun, before ~7 seconds, now 10+ sec Army Dead. You may already know, Dragon vs Serpent in long game is already hard for Serpent. Powerful healers, high resistance monk, long ranged Arah, and inescapable Dragon fire. Dragon is already hard for Wolf as well in long game. Doing this will make dragon more powerful as a clan.

Dark Canopy protecting from Battle Gears was a bug that we've fixed in the patch.



Dragon Tower Stun is not related to our patch and we didn't make it longer than it is by default (6 seconds ). I don't think you've tested it yourself (because I, for example, can't reproduce this bug).









And instead listened to the players we played a test 4vs4 match with. It indeed happened there (we had 8 witnesses), but there were always big quantities of units from all 4 players under the Dragon towers. Test it yourself, record videos and show it to us (down in the comments to this post) if it occurs more.

The Dragon Watchtower stun was already bugged in the game and could've stunned for a very long time. We believe it may be dependent on the number of players and their armies, or it's another random bugged/underdeveloped function in the game.

The Lotus being a slow clan will be adjusted in our further rebalancing stages just like the others.

The patch Peasant's production rate bonus will not increase anymore beyond 6 peasant huts. I understand that the original developer of Battle Realms may have had said they intend to limit the peasant production rate to 6 hut. They said this, but they did not play the game like we do. We played this game for many years and realized that building peasant hut to increase peasant production speed is a skill. I am telling you, players are better at accessing the balancing of the game than developers, while developers made the game, we are players, so we know what is good and what is not, and I can be better at accessing the balancing of the game than almost anyone who are currently playing Battle Realms.

This is a big one. First of all, this is also a bugfix.

It wasn't just "may have said they intended", they stated that it's limited in the game by default, it was in their original F.A.Q for Battle Realms that was posted on the official BR site by Ubisoft.







Peasants huts are indeed supposed to increase the peasant production speed. But each hut is supposed to give less of a bonus. Also, there was a hut cap, 6 was stated to be "enough" but no further info was given on that, we decided to cap it like that since the value is the same for all huts (and we don't plan to change it). In 1.50q (last official version), not only all peasant huts give the same speedup bonus (doesn't matter how many you already have), they will not cap and you can have around 30 of them aside from the main clan buildings, with all of them giving the same speed up boost each. That led to games where no matter if your micro is good and you destroyed your enemy's main army, they can still quickly recover by simply rushing units while enjoying the hut speed boost. And that would really favor agressive gameplay more where you would create the same units over and over to attack and lose them, then train again just to wear down your opponent who loses units and doesn't have the boost.



Or if you keep your enemy base "sieged" where your opponent has to gather army/resources where as you constantly keep it under attack and meanwhile have time to mindlessly build more and more huts.



All of that would also often lead to absurdly long games.



Thinking that this removes the "skill" factor or calling other players "lazy" or "unskilled" because they're not interested in building the huts (and exploiting the game glitch) is a very poor judgement.



You may call it "skill", but many would beg to differ. This actually makes "skill" more obsolete and combat less decisive. We call it "abusing the game's behavior" or "exploiting a glitch".

To support this further, here's a statement from the Battle Realms Designer Diary #1 by Ed Del Castillo who is the main creator of the game:

RTE?! What's an RTE? RTE stands for real-time economy, and it's what you usually play when you think you're playing an "RTS." Think about it - how many games have you played where the combat was relatively unimportant, and the game was won based on how quickly you built units, not on how well you used them? The formula is mindless: grab your units, throw them at the enemy, go back to your base, build more units, and repeat. You quickly learn that if you try to maneuver your soldiers, they'll just get slaughtered. The only important thing is outproducing the enemy. Battle Realms is real-time strategy - featuring line of sight, advantages for being mounted and for occupying high ground, battle plans that go beyond simple formations, and unit balance that allows a single well-positioned soldier to do grievous damage to many opponents. You will spend most of your time fighting, not managing your resources. Suddenly the battlefield matters.

Playing the game for many years doesn't give much credibility in this case. You "realized" it's a skill where as you actually just made it up. As you see in the statement from Ed, that basically destroys all of your points, the game was planned to be like that.

Dismissing developers like that is also a very bold claim. They created the online aspect, the gameplay aspect and the way you play it now. Not the other way around. We here, at Battle Realms Revival, are also players, me, in particular, being a frequent online player, we know what's good as well. Based on your claims in this message, and the overall reasoning, you would not be better at balancing the game than the developers, and not us either.

I noticed only professional Battle Realms player do this because they have the skill to do it while attacking and defending, this is call multi-tasking. Limiting peasant production rate to 6 hut just removed one the factor to become a professional Battle Realms player. Now I understand that the game only intend to have low number units and focus more on micro. Do we already have this? This game is all about micro. It doesn't really matter how much units you have, we still have to do good micro control to win.

This is overall irrelevant. It didn't remove any factors to becoming a professional player. If you understood that, you wouldn't write this part in your message.

Your point about Starcraft or "real world" is very irrelevant as the two are very different games. Battle Realms can't be compared to any of the existing RTS games. Because Starcraft or other strategy is like this or that, doesn't mean Battle Realms should be as well.

To make Battle Realms good, we need both micro and macro, not removing the aspect of macro from it. Also in the real world, it makes more sense that more building means more people.

Battle Realms macro aspect lies in building combat buildings, upgrade (BG) buildings, towers and the Keep as well as its alternatives being Dragon Fire, Warlock's Tower and The Necromancer's Throne. Not building a lot of huts to gain a speedup to the unit production. This may be a shallow macro aspect, but Battle Realms doesn't need more as it's not the focus of the game. :)

Fixed a bug that allowed peasants to tame horses without a stable. This is not a fix, this is a ruined of controls. Now with the patch, you can't shift to get horses anymore while you are building a stable or a wolf's den.

As stated earlier, this is an oversight on our side. I agree with this point and it won't be there in our hotfix.

A horse is a usable wild animal in Battle Realms, we should be able to click on it anytime we want. We can't make use of it anyway if we don't have Stable or Den, but it makes more sense that we can select it. I think it like that. We should be able to select the horse even we have no stable. That should be the fix. You can only do this in the original version 1.50q if you use shift. It's just like you can gather the rice and pick up a bucket of water without a peasant hut, you can't use that rice or water anyway because you don't have a peasant hut. Horse should be that way too. To touch the horse without a stable is not a bug, it is only a bug if you can use and ride the horse if you have no stable

You can use the horse, that's taming (while not having stables).



It should only be usable when you have Stables, that was the original intention of the developers (another thing is if it's questionable). Shift is a very well known "bug key" and just because you can tame horses by holding it doesn't mean it's a game feature that should be there or is another "skill factor". It was not documented anywhere and was found out by players just like many other bugs.

This can also be used to one's advantage in multiplayer by taking horses early on, mostly in team games. Concering your comment - you should be very well aware that preventing an enemy from stealing horses is not always possible and is not that easy.

Now, what I would do more besides the fixed above:

We perfectly know what to do. I think it's important to note that the fixes are not easy to do. Especially those that you'd listed there. We are very well aware of them but can't yet fix them. But we will.

My thoughts on making Dragon vs Lotus balance. Just make whirling spear works under DC, and also horse trample works under DC (That should help serpent a little bit, But I consider Serpent vs Lotus is currently balance in the original version 1.50q). AS for Wolf vs Lotus, is pretty much balance right now until Lotus have keep.

As stated earlier, that was a bugfix and won't be reverted. The point about balance was talked about earlier in the message.

To adress one more point from one of the comments:

In conclusion, please do not limit this game. There are so much thing to do, limiting hut and not letting to select horse without stable is a skill limiting aspects. This sucks.

Limiting skill and limiting the game are two different things. By fixing its bugs, we're not limiting the game. If that affects your vision and you don't want to play BR with our patch, we're sorry, and it's your right. We also love Battle Realms and this is not us "butchering" it. :)



I think I've covered everything and listed proofs where I could. No further reply will be given by me concerning the matter.



Until next time!