Let's Help the developers (ACHERON)

I've played a fair few games now, mostly with Ram. I feel like I have the tools to deal with just about any list, though I find the Valk, Archer and Knight set up hardest to counter.

My current favorite build is 3xwarriors, 1xarcher and a Skull Warrior w/hard boiled. With careful maneuvering I try and split up the opponent and overwhelm them with numbers while bouncing from combat to combat with my Skull Warrior.

I also used a 2xgargoyl, skull warrior build that was super fun - using the gargoyls in tandem to isolate and destroy enemy units while marking my oponents with a defensive stanced skull warrior until backup arrives.

I think the necromancer is slightly underpowered for his cost, but is very fun to use. He is probably better in higher AP games where the field is a little more cluttered and he can keep away from the opponent.

I think the necromancer is slightly underpowered for his cost, but is very fun to use. He is probably better in higher AP games where the field is a little more cluttered and he can keep away from the opponent.

I think the developers are bound to make this game incredibly similar to the card game and so they can not make drastic changes on talents.
But if I was told to revamp the necromancer I would make him focussed on permanent high mana costs summons like he can do nothing for the first turn to summon a permanent warrior on the second... or let him do nothing until he has 12 mana and let him summon a bigger guy.
This would make opposite team HAVING to attack the enemy before they summon too much stuff and would also stop the ridiculous draw tactic, you win or you lose.
If necromancer was this way i would be more then happy to have one in my team, also note that this version should be played with a lot of low AP in order to protect the necromancer and going for a late game win after a couple of big summons or a lot of small summons.
All his powers should be like summon warrior(4 mana) , summon dont-know-like something-more-tankish and the last one costing 12 mana should be like summon something-even-tankier-with-about-10-damage.
This is my vision of necromancer, a summoner not an healer-high-range-through-walls dpser...
Like this the necro would be in lore and also fine with people expectations on what a necromancer should do.
This also would justify his AP cost.
I know I am not having respect for the card game itself in this revamp but if people like the idea is perfectly fine imho.

PS. I'd love, btw, to have some clarifications about this... how far can they go from the original game?

[Jigoku]

If I'm not mistaken, Cyanide owns this IP, so "we" could theoretically do everything we want with it.

However, with Dogs of War Online, we'd like to stay as close to the original material as possible (sadly, it's not always possible for a very long list of reasons).

About the necromancer and its "unlimited & permanent" puppets... it was that way in the closed beta for a long time.
There was so much abuse with it, and it ended badly so many times, that we were forced to change it to the way it is now.

But there is still some untapped material about summoning that we didn't use for the time being; we are still considering changes, but we might decide not to do anything to tweak the system in the end. And if we do, we will take careful steps to make sure they are fun, and not gamebreaking in any way, so it won't be seen in the near future of the game.

If I'm not mistaken, Cyanide owns this IP, so "we" could theoretically do everything we want with it.

However, with Dogs of War Online, we'd like to stay as close to the original material as possible (sadly, it's not always possible for a very long list of reasons).

About the necromancer and its "unlimited & permanent" puppets... it was that way in the closed beta for a long time.
There was so much abuse with it, and it ended badly so many times, that we were forced to change it to the way it is now.

But there is still some untapped material about summoning that we didn't use for the time being; we are still considering changes, but we might decide not to do anything to tweak the system in the end. And if we do, we will take careful steps to make sure they are fun, and not gamebreaking in any way, so it won't be seen in the near future of the game.

First of all thanks for the answer.
I started the beta a weeak ago and since then I played a lot so I got some experience and even if the game is still a bit poor (perfectly normal in beta), it is absolutly a great idea and has a very high potential, belive me I know what I am saying, I was playing LoL beta when no1 even knew what a Moba is.

What you say about the necromancer seems legit, if you already tryed and this system allowed a gamebreaking use of it there could be compromise... I did not say to make the summons number unlimited because I think it could be unbreaking aswell or the combat map may change also to fix the draw system... but that is not even the point I want to argue, what I want to argue and I hope you will take some time to meditate about this is the following:
League of Legends was inspired by a mod for warcraft III that was called "Defense of the Ancients", now think what would have happened if they would have remained in the lore of warcraft III just because that was the base game inspiring the game... or what would have happened if they maintained the combat system of that ancient mod... they would have this success?
Remaining stuck to a set of game rules, in my opinion is toxic for this business, game must grow and it must only depend on how its comunity grows and changes its meta.
In my opinion, as a game desiner, you must not care at all about the game original material... but if you have doubts about this step why dont you make a poll to see how many of your players really care about the original game?
These are my thoughts about this matter, maybe they re utterly wrong... maybe not.
I thanks you for the patience and attention, good luck with this game, I am on your side hoping this game will have a lot of success.

sorry for my english

i agree with the fact that a game need to involve for staying alive but ( always but) the ancient rules ( in card game ( it was not a card game but a models games) was so simply and so clear and complete that i cant undestand why they havent took it

[Jigoku]

Thanks for the long answer.

The two points I was making in my post were unrelated; in fact, the boardgame allowed you to summon as many puppets as you wanted, as long as you could afford to buy the skeletton units for that.
But then again, there were not that many necromancers that costed "only" 70ish to 130ish AP.
"Good" necromancers always were Characters, which meant... well a lot of AP, and since our AP system is a bit different, it would be even worse for Dogs of War online.

As you can see in this very example, we did not rely on the material, but did what was best for our game, ergo limiting the number of summons.
On a second note, and to answer siriusraine as well: yes, we did change some rules, mostly for two reasons:
First, because many of them didn't fit in the pace we wanted for our game. We didn't want our players to have to stop and distribute dices and divide melees at every turn, because that would have taken ages, and that would not have been so fun, and ultimately, that was not what we wanted.
Though we do recognize that there were some very valid designs made by Rackham that we had to let behind to do so. It was also heavily related by our media restraints.

Second, while we felt that many rules of the original tabletop game were really cool, there were some of them that we did not feel were fun or attractive. Failing 16,6% of the time whatever the odds, and for every action taken in the game, was not fun at all. Being scared and not moving instead of attacking (or worse, running the other way) wasn't fun either; especially when it happened 16,6% of the time (in the best case scenario).
It was made even worse in the videogame, where no one is used to see such drastic player punishment due to randomness. Our tests quickly showed that it was not fun at all and we did not stick with these rules.
And while some might argue that our game has a fair share of randomness, I assure you it is nothing compared to the randomness of the tabletop games in general, and Confrontation in particular.

Game Design is a discipline that evolves, as quickly and as well as many others in the entertainment industry.
What was a given 20 years from now could be inthinkable today. In fact, many things have become totally obsolete in this field (like in any other).

What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that what is good for a tabletop game is not necessarily good for a videogame.
We tried to get the best of both world, but it was a hard work, and it still needs a lot of improvements to work, but hopefully we will get there

What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that what is good for a tabletop game is not necessarily good for a videogame. We tried to get the best of both world, but it was a hard work, and it still needs a lot of improvements to work, but hopefully we will get there

I think that Cyanide has done very well putting the game together this way and the product so far is very promising. The ability to test the changes you make over 100's of games should result in a fairly balanced system. I hope there is some statistical tracking of results to help this rather than relying on community feedback which will be fairly subjective.

In regards to the necromancer, I just don't think it is worth taking him over a bunch of actual skeleton warriors because your actually getting a similar benefit without the downside of losing them if your fragile necromancer dies.

I also get the feeling that the changes made to fear may have impacted on Acheron a little too much, but I can't be sure.

we did not rely on the material, but did what was best for our game

That is one of the top 3 sentences I wanted to hear.

About the randomness argument... yes, it can be frustrating from time to time but this is not a game related problem in my opinion, about what I saw in this game the problem is the current meta, 200 AP or even 300 and 400 AP matches means that you have 1-2 or 3 at best top tier creatures that are the pillars of you army and if those creatures fail some rolls you lose and tactic become less important than luck. But to those who whine about this I d say that while we all, right now, suffer for the frustration of seeing a "Parry" tag that means defeat, they should wait for the game to be fully released, when there will be 2 vs 2, 3 vs 3, 4 vs 4 maps (because it is obviously gonna happen someday, team based play with this game is a WOMBO COMBO of destiny) greater numbers of creatures will make tactic the only important factor.