When the MP community generally says, "hey, let's arbitrarily limit enchants and transformations, no matter what it is they actually do or add to the game", and then come up with the number "3" as the arbitrary hard cap for these buffs, that's EXACTLY what the MP community is doing to everybody else! It's a short-sighted restriction of choices that may not even solve the problem, because the restrictions of enchants and transformations makes me want to stack t4/t5 units even harder!!
Sigh, I don't know what you exactly mean when you say "MP community" but I doubt the sentiment is to just throw a limit on and forget about the matter. All the "MP representatives" in this thread treat this issue with nuance.
- or limited number of enchantments (this one is well liked because it also solves the problem of enchantments being bland individually)
Whoever is talking about the proposition with any degree of seriousness will acknowledge that it requires a bottom up redesign of how the enchantments work for the limits to actually improve the game. The game throws so many enchantments at you that it would be hard to even accidentally not end up with some unused ones.
As I said in that post, with no limit on enchantments the devs have to keep the individual enchantment design simple and fairly inconsequential, because
the expectation is that a lot of them can be stacked. Their design can't bee to complex because it will create an incomprehensible mess when six complex enchantments are stacked on the same unit.
With an enchantment limit in place you could be bolder in the design, creating more enchantments that have multiple thematic effects, add abilities and/or change rules of the game in some way (e.g. Searing Blades also grant immunity to ground on fire or make you gain strengthened whenever you're set on fire; Zephyr Arrows grant a "Snipe" ability in addition to the +range; Soulbinders also grant an ability to raise a skeleton or zombie from a corpse).
Additionally, when you can only have X enchantments on your melee, you will be incentivized to not overresearch melee enchantments and instead go for magic or ranged ones, leading to a late game where most of your unit types have a full set of enchantments and thus relatively the same power level. When you don't have one unit type that's obviously stronger than others, you will be more likely to mix units to squeeze extra stack power from their synergies.
And as a bonus Tome designers will be able to finally breathe and not be forced to squeeze an enchantment into every new tome because otherwise it will not be able to compete.
Yes, it's a heckton of work.
As for how limiting enchantments would reduce monostacking, let me quote (and reformat) Ninjew from Discord, he explained it fairly well on a simple example:
the basic thing to understand about the monostacking phenomenon is this:suppose i have 9 tomes in my build path, 2 of each tier + 1 t5 tome.
for simplicity, let us assume that
- each tome provides one enchantment, and that these enchantments each only apply to a single unit type.theoretically,
- a mixed army composition of half shocks and half shields should counter an army of only archers,
both shocks and shields are intended counters to archers (shocks close distance rapidly, shields trivially provide lots of defense against archer attacks).
however, because shocks and shields do not share enchantments in this scenario, there are only 5 enchantments applied to the shocks and 4 enchantments applied to the shields. meanwhile, the archer army gets to apply all 9 enchantments to every one of its units.
on a unit by unit basis, the archers have twice as many enchantments as their opponents do.
because the archers have twice as many enchantments, it no longer matters that the unit roles they are fighting theoretically counter them - 2 archers with 9 enchantments each kills 2 shields with 4 enchantments each, that's just the power of a 5 enchantment differential. the only way the shields can compete is to kick out the shocks and have the build take tomes that give shield enchantments instead of shock enchantments, so the shields can also have 9 enchantments.
"But in the actual game the enchantments don't affect only a single unit type, you *could* have taken shields *and* shocks and they would share most of their enchantments!"
Yes and no. You could take different melee units and have them affected by mostly the same enchantments, but due to the nature of the Tome unlocks, you rarely have access to multiple types of compatible high tier units. You're also incentivized to specialize in other areas in the game, e.g. in faction creation you can take options that favor shocks or ones that favor shields.
As I said in my post, monostacking has multiple causes all roughly categorizable as "power concentration". I believe enchantments are a major contributor, probably the main one.
Will limiting enchantments prevent the monostacking phenomenon from occuring? Probably not, people will find ways to craft a build around a single unit. But with mixed compositions being far stronger - relatively to how they currently are - we can reasonably expect that it would be much less common.
As for "3 is an arbitrary number" - yep, it is. But it's a pretty number and proven to work - we get three spell slots, three hero trinket slots, we had three mod slots in PF (gasp, go play PF then you silly joker you). Three slots to choose from a wide array of options offer plenty of flexibility but impose a hard strategic choice.
With fewer (in the current game's environment) the limit could feel needlessly binding, causing frustration when it's common to have a tome path with 4 enchants for a single unit type. With more, the limit could become limit in name only and people would still elect to max out a single unit type and then not invest in the others (since they're unlikely to max either of them out).
More importantly, with the intended tome path having 9 tomes and there being roughly one enchantment per tome, a player can be reasonably expected to get around 9 enchantments through the course of the game and thus fully enchant all their unit types (assuming the "melee-ranged-magic" split, yes there exist class specific enchants like for Shields or Supports. Not sure how to redesign them atm). Sure, 3-3-3 would be a sunny day scenario, but it would be common to have 4-3-2, 4-4-1 and similar middle-of-the-bell-curve builds. Things like 5-2-2, 6-2-1 would be fairly rare and easy to avoid if so desired.
Mr Ninjew from Discord also made a neat summary on this matter:
i think 3 is mostly just an arbitrary number. it is probably being selected because it's the number that planetfall used.
why did planetfall pick it? well, just my thinking on the topic, but it's a good number because it's large enough to provide a diversity of options while also small enough that it's a meaningful limit. would an enchantment limit of 2 work? it'd probably feel pretty bad, only getting to pick your 2 favorite enchantments for your units, and would pretty well devalue enchantment research if only 2 of them matter at a time. would an enchantment limit of 4 work?
i'm not sure there's a compelling reason to say that 3 and 4 is where the dividing line is, but to me personally 4 does feel a little high if the goal is to curb potential power centration, and might be a bit much to keep track of. (edytowane)
Thank you, Ninjew from Discord, for your wisdom and please consider using capital letters.
The bottom line is, we're not *certain* the ench limit (
with the accompanying redesign) will *solve* monostacking. Or that an arbitrary limit of 3 fits best.
But we have compelling reasons to believe that it would significantly diminish the problem by removing a major incentive for monostack.
the restrictions of enchants and transformations makes me want to stack t4/t5 units even harder!!
Can you tell me why that is? What is the thought process that makes you want to monostack in this scenario? What is it about the current design (unlimited, simple enchantments) that makes you not want to?
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