Experimenting with the Well

I've long had a theory that the Well is responsible for much of the imbalance between factions in Heroes II.  Two extra Peasants or Goblins per week basically don't matter, but two extra Dragons or Titans is a huge advantage.  Project Ironfist finally gave me the chance to try this out.  I've modified the code to disable the +2 growth from the Well, enabled with a new command-line switch /disable-well.

Disclaimer: I've not playtested this, so I fully expect to have to tweak this further.  If you'd like to try it out, the pull request is here: https://github.com/jkoppel/project-ironfist/pull/106

Nice work! I commented on your PR. I agree that the well is unbalancing; good chance we'll use a variant of this in the final version. We had made well-compensating changes in the precursor to Ironfist: https://www.celestialheavens.com/forum/7/8724

Yep, I remember UndeadHalfOrc's balance mod. I used to play with a simplified version where I just set base Dragon and Titan growth to 0. That change alone made a big difference. Now that the hooks are in place, we should be able to make changes pretty easily. We can change the Well's behavior per faction or even per creature if need be.

One other idea I had was to make the Well's growth relative instead of absolute. For example, what if it was +50% growth instead of +2? Centaur growth goes from 8 to 12, Crusaders and Cyclopes 2 to 3, but Dragons and Titans would still be 1.

Hmmm. Interesting thought. That's kinda like how H3 does it.

Your change also has me thinking about the plague. You have me considering removing it as a feature altogether. It's a great example of anti-fun: http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=293417

To make the game - very difficult, I played Heroes 2 Gold, with increased prices of level 5 and level 6 creatures. I increased the prices of level 6- 4 times, and the price of level 5 - 2,5 times. The Black dragon is 17500 gold and 2 sulfur. But even so, if I have much gold, I use level 5 and level 6 creatures. Because 3 Black dragons do 150 damage, while 5 minotaurs do 50 damage. Cyclops costs 3750 gold and 1 crystal. But 4 Cyclops do 96 damage, while 6 Ogre lord do  42 damage. I think, the Base growth of all weak units must be increased for Balance. If you want the game to be hard and difficult, it is better to increase the weekly growth of the weak creatures, an not to decrease the growth of level 5 and 6 creatures. If you decrease the growth of level 6 creatures, the game will become easier. So the growth of lv.5 may become 7-8. The base growth of lv. 4 creatures may become- 10-12.

It's very interesting, it would be nice to be able to change the growth from the well by script and independently for each creature.

For example +1 growth for Titan, +2 growth for Archmage, +3 growth for Roc, etc.

In my opinion the +2 well is not good way. The difference between +2 low/high tier creatures is too big. Still I would be not so rash to compare titan and crusader growth to strictly say its too bad to be knight
The different price of all units here plays great role too, as you will probably have enough gold to buy 4 crusaders every week for 4k GP, but 15k for 3 titans? Aside from other creatures?

So to determine proper well bonus...
Lets say, the price of all creatures is more or less balanced. (The peasants are an exception, they should be for free at most  ) I would propose, that one castle with statue should earn enough money to buy all creatures born each week with base growth value (8750GP). With well, weekly earnings should not be enough, so you have to support it with spare money. For example, new units of one knight-castle cost weekly 5500 GP / 7375 GP when upgraded. With well, its now 8540 GP / 11 665 GP when upgraded.

I would set the base growth 2/3/4/5/8/10 for a knight to the slightly higher value, 2/3/5/7/10/14, which means weekly cost 8655 GP. The well could then go with some +1/+1/+2/+3/+5/+7 values.

Its +50%, which would let you play with low tier creatures in stacks against high tier ones in mid/end games. This will probably set the game difficulty higher, as it will increase mortality rate in battles

Yes, there are subtleties in Heroes 2, from small maps to very large maps, and so on.

This gives the game many ways to play and that makes it beautiful and replayable.

Yes, the Knight Castle is not always at a disadvantage and offers many strategies to explore depending on the situation.

Every player has his vision of how things should be changed, so a chance to change things in his own way would be welcome.