Taking London 3.0.0 is here, with completely new battle mechanics!
After the first few PVP spats, it's become clear the battle script - while technically complicated - lacks a practical depth, meaning the game has essentially devolved into a numbers game surrounding the infamous "cannon-phract" meta. Despite the predictable results, the battles were taking a significantly long time to process, ruining the flow of some of the PVP action. So, it's time for a shake up!
New battle mechanics
The battle mechanics have been totally reworked to solve some of the issues - namely that it was almost impossible to get a good result against an army significantly outnumbering your own, and that the vast majority of troops were irrelevant due to the power of cannons and cataphracts. The main reason for this was the "1-to-1" model of the battle script:
Troops attack each other on a 1-to-1 basis, meaning each individual troop you send will attack a single individual troop in your opponents army. While a cool idea, it was computationally intense and did not add much depth to battles; since damage received would be spread evenly across all opposing units, durable troops such as cataphracts could become effectively immortal in large enough numbers, as no single cataphract would ever receive enough damage to die. The only solution was to use troops that did high damage to individual units, namely cannons - however, since cannons require 4 times the population of a cataphract, so a given city can only have 1/4 of the number of cannons as an opponent might have cataphracts, there was no real counter to the "phract smack" from a similar or larger city than your own.
The changes to alleviate this are as follows:
The fatalities are now calculated simply as "total damage dealt divided by health of the target unit" - guaranteeing even the strongest troops take some fatalities from a decent sized opposition
The reload mechanic has been replaced by a "damage per second" system - the reasons for this are complicated and boring but the long and short of it is that you couldn't get decent value from a "cannon tradefire" against a city, such as London, that had a huge fleet of cannons that you could not simply outnumber.
Troop stats have been tweaked to make each better at their intended niche and encourage smart army compositions; all ranged troops have been nerfed, infantry have been buffed and cavalry and cataphracts have been adjusted so cavalry may be the more viable unit in some scenarios
The army max troop cap has been reduced, to encourage smart warfare and not simply winning by superior numbers
The cap on maximum march speed bonus from mayor combat has been significantly increased to allow "hit and run" attacks and encourage defenders to set up a defense rather than simply hide troops from an overwhelming force
This is a large shake-up - perhaps the biggest since the game launched - so naturally there may be teething problems. I aim to monitor the situation and work closely with the community to fix any major issues (be that bugs or balance patches) as soon as they arise - please get involved by joining the discord, the link for which can be found in-game under the "Forums" button on the main menu!