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Range cliffing - standpoint


Rondine

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Back in PvP, cliffing or to "abuse" cliffs with long range ground units (e.g. Firedancers on Lajesh) was often called a lame move and mostly you got a really negative response from your enemy when you did it. On the Forum, it was about 50/50 people saying its against the code of honor and shut not be abused, and also those who defend it saying: as long its possible and not considered a bug by defs, its legal and strategic
Whats your opinion, should it be considered bad manner? Or do you accept or even use it as a main strategy on certain maps? Would be interesting to see what we will encounter once we can PvP Brawl it out again.

Personally... i did it some time as a rocky as fire, until realized its hated and also switched to pure shadow.
So i avoided it mainly, and i guess i will too in future

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I think its a main strategy because of 2 simple points:

1- Its in the game and if it was a bug it was very obvious ( would be fixed)
2- If you think, in real life wars people also use cliffs etc to have an advantage.

To me its completely fine

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[quote='JoseAlmeida' pid='9065' dateline='1437649723']
I think its a main strategy because of 2 simple points:

1- Its in the game and if it was a bug it was very obvious ( would be fixed)
2- If you think, in real life wars people also use cliffs etc to have an advantage.

To me its completely fine
[/quote]

This is not "real life war".
This is a videogame where people want to play against each other
and both people want to have a chance at winning by playing better than their opponent.
Cliffdancing is based on maprng and heavily swings the game in favor of the cliffdancing player
without him having to play better than his opponent.

About your first point.. There were a lot of things in the game that turned out to be overpowered and not
fun to play with or against. For example a mine dealing full damage to wells or naturesplash deepone what enabled
liveweaving do in shadow nature.

Pure fire (who should be most affected by a change to cliffdancing) is perfectly viable without it
but gets a freewin from time to time. Thats not by any means a healthy mechanic in a game.

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[quote='JoseAlmeida' pid='9069' dateline='1437651341']
Well its not "real life war" but its a "war" game, and the cliffs are tactical. Thats just my opinion :)
[/quote]

A tactical option should change the way both players play the game to make the most profit out of it.
I dont know your amount of experience of playing against cliffdancing but the amount of counterplay
is very limited on many maps. If only one of the two players can profit out of that tactical option
and the other one cant really answer to it there is no point of having this option in the first place.

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Well, how would you suggest combating this? Because there will be those who use it as long as it exists in the game. Should we edit all maps, so that dancers can't reach the well/orb? Or nerf dancer's range? What about cliff Drakes? Is that lame as well?

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[quote='Hirooo' pid='9071' dateline='1437651781']

A tactical option should change the way both players play the game to make the most profit out of it.
I dont know your amount of experience of playing against cliffdancing but the amount of counterplay
is very limited on many maps. If only one of the two players can profit out of that tactical option
and the other one cant really answer to it there is no point of having this option in the first place.
[/quote]

I didn't PvP much in the old BF and therefore don't have a lot of experience agaisnt cliffdancing, but I don't see what the issue is with cliffdancing... I more or less see that it could be annoying sometimes, since a player with less skill can easily destroy your base base without leaving you may options to counter it.

This being said, why does the range of the firendacer have to be nerfed ? Why don't the maps have to be changed so that cliffdancing won't work, so that dancers can't reach your buildings without taking a significant risk ? Are we considering firedancer to be an OP card ?

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[quote='ladadoos' pid='9078' dateline='1437655737']
[quote='Hirooo' pid='9071' dateline='1437651781']

A tactical option should change the way both players play the game to make the most profit out of it.
I dont know your amount of experience of playing against cliffdancing but the amount of counterplay
is very limited on many maps. If only one of the two players can profit out of that tactical option
and the other one cant really answer to it there is no point of having this option in the first place.
[/quote]

I didn't PvP much in the old BF and therefore don't have a lot of experience agaisnt cliffdancing, but I don't see what the issue is with cliffdancing... I more or less see that it could be annoying sometimes, since a player with less skill can easily destroy your base base without leaving you may options to counter it.

This being said, why does the range of the firendacer have to be nerfed ? Why don't the maps have to be changed so that cliffdancing won't work, so that dancers can't reach your buildings without taking a significant risk ? Are we considering firedancer to be an OP card ?
[/quote]

In certain situations fire dancer was a OP card e.g. building a wall near an enemy base and shooting over the wall at the enemy base.
On certain maps cliffs could be taken advantage of to kill wells. 
However a lot of cards could be OP in certain situations (War Eagle) But thats why people play those fractions for the 'Good' cards. I think we should focus on cards such as Brannoc first..

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Even if i don´t use it (its hard to do with shadow^^) its okay for me, its just another "thing" you have to keep in mind and prepare for f you pvp, since like ultrakool said correctly, as long as its possible they will do it.

Cliffdrakes, seem perfectly fine, since its there advantage that they can fly. what would be the point of a flying unit if it would have no advantage.

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[quote='Destoyerfros' pid='9081' dateline='1437656323']
In certain situations fire dancer was a OP card e.g. building a wall near an enemy base and shooting over the wall at the enemy base.On certain maps cliffs could be taken advantage of to kill wells. However a lot of cards could be OP in certain situations (War Eagle) But thats why people play those fractions for the 'Good' cards. I think we should focus on cards such as Brannoc first..
[/quote]
If we are going to use your example of something being OP because you could build a wall near an enemy base and then shoot over the wall at the enemy base, there are a lot of others cards that are OP too... Sometimes it's not even the cards, sometimes it's the maps itself that causes imbalances.. There was a map, I don't remember the name of it, that wasn't symmetric. This meaning that some archers on the wall reached the wells, while the same archers on the same wall on the other half of the map couldn't reach the well...

What's the big problem of taking advantages of cliffs to beat your enemy ? It might be lame yes, it might show that you don't have a lot of skill.. but that is just how tactics work...

There are indeed a lot of others cards that could be OP in certain situations, War Eagle like you mentioned, Skyfire drake... Even energy parasites could use cliffs to their advantage...

Anyways, I think that this is going a bit off-topic and if we wanna talk about card balancing we should go here :
http://bfreborn.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=379

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[quote='Hirooo' pid='9068' dateline='1437650984']
This is a videogame where people want to play against each other
and both people want to have a chance at winning by playing better than their opponent.
Cliffdancing is based on maprng and heavily swings the game in favor of the cliffdancing player
without him having to play better than his opponent.
[/quote]

This exactly the point about cliffdancer. You don't have to play better than your oponent to win the game and certain maps.
This is not what pvp should be about. Cliffdancing is just very very frustrating to deal with and (near)autolosing is not acceptable in any game with a well made pvp.

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[quote]
Anyways, I think that this is going a bit off-topic and if we wanna talk about card balancing we should go here :

http://bfreborn.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=379
[/quote]
First of all:
This is the PvP forum and a thread to a topic that only really touches PvP is not offtopic.
The thread you linked to is an overall what do you think is op thread while this one discusses a specific aspect.
To have only one thread for cardbalancing in general is not efficient for discussion.

[quote]

This being said, why does the range of the firendacer have to be nerfed ? Why don't the maps have to be changed so that cliffdancing won't work, so that dancers can't reach your buildings without taking a significant risk ? Are we considering firedancer to be an OP card ?
[/quote]

Nobody here said that.
Firedancers are too strong when used to cliffdance.
A change to not make long ranged groundunits able to shoot over walls or cliffs would be enough.

[quote='ladadoos' pid='9083' dateline='1437657064']
[quote='Destoyerfros' pid='9081' dateline='1437656323']
In certain situations fire dancer was a OP card e.g. building a wall near an enemy base and shooting over the wall at the enemy base.On certain maps cliffs could be taken advantage of to kill wells. However a lot of cards could be OP in certain situations (War Eagle) But thats why people play those fractions for the 'Good' cards. I think we should focus on cards such as Brannoc first..
[/quote]
If we are going to use your example of something being OP because you could build a wall near an enemy base and then shoot over the wall at the enemy base, there are a lot of others cards that are OP too... Sometimes it's not even the cards, sometimes it's the maps itself that causes imbalances.. There was a map, I don't remember the name of it, that wasn't symmetric. This meaning that some archers on the wall reached the wells, while the same archers on the same wall on the other half of the map couldn't reach the well...

What's the big problem of taking advantages of cliffs to beat your enemy ? It might be lame yes, it might show that you don't have a lot of skill.. but that is just how tactics work...

There are indeed a lot of others cards that could be OP in certain situations, War Eagle like you mentioned, Skyfire drake... Even energy parasites could use cliffs to their advantage...
[/quote]
So as you said you did not play a lot of pvp.
To compare the effect of energyparasites/skyfires being more mobile on maps with cliffs to the one of cliffdancing is wrong.
You could counteract to those fairly easily. Walls near your own wells or monuments you could block by summoning a unit there.
Interesting option since it made you for example play a t1 unit while going t2 etc.
I dont realy get how you want to use cliffs with skyfires anyways besides playing around gravity surge.
Micro against gladiatrix etc was interesting but not something suddenly broken by having a few more cliffs around you.
Cliffdancing is very different to this.
You take that wall a screen away from your opponent and you win.
You build that well or rallying banner right there and you win.
Thats not how tactics in a videogame should work no.
As I already said before in this thread the tactical option to win a game instantly by using it should not be in the game.

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There are cliffs in the game and there are walls in it too. Also there are units which can shoot over it.
To prevent for exapmle cliff dancing, you have to prevent or remove one of those three facts. This would be impossible for the devs or just unlogical. Surely you could nerf every card that can shoot over cliffs but then those cards would be too weak in ever other situation.
I see no way you can "fix" this strategy without breaking other things.

I think the best solution is to create more counter to this strategy so every colour have a way to couter it.

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[quote='JoseAlmeida' pid='9089' dateline='1437660948']
Maybe not remove range cliffing , but nerf it.
[/quote]

i suppose its not able to get nerfed. I mean, how do u want to do it? The only way would be to check if there is a cliff/unpassable terrain between the unit and the building...
But what about cliffs where any unit can shoot down (The PvP map with the 4 Wells + Orb in the middle and one cliff northern, one cliff soutern).

And btw my opinion is, this is some kind of competitive game, not like a war. We want to play fair and be treaten fairly.

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Normally i'm not a fan of ,,it's not imbalanced, just play better.'' But here i'm surprised that nobody, not even a player like Hirooo, mentioned the possibility of avoiding getting cliffed. Again, i'm not saying cliffdancing is fair or balanced, but i got cliffed with firedancers in one match out of hundred, if not less. Of course it's not as easy to avoid in 2vs2, but 2vs2 is another dimension anyway.
Dont take well near cliffs
I wrote this a while back and it always helped me not getting cliffed:

by VendettaT | on 30.08.2013
how not to get cliffed:
Elyon:
if you win the midfight take a well in the middle and dont let him take a well where he can wall-dance you, push him to the outside. If he overwells you by a wall-dance-well, he can't attack efficently, he will be in a 175 power disadvantage.
Wazhai:
Take the first well in the corner and watch out for enforcers walking to a cliff position, you have to react fast enough, for example if you are F/N send ghostspears asap, dont wait for the cliffing to begin.
Simai:
dont take the middle, its absolutely unnecessary to have a 4 well cluster that can get cliffed or destroyed by phoenixes if there are enough other spots.
Layesh:
Getting both corners normally means the win against any colour, be careful with the walls, if you are insecure pull them up yourself, after 5 -10 minutes in the game 25 or 50 power spent in walls dont make that much of a difference (regarding power levels)
Uro:
the only deck having problems not getting cliffed here is Frost/Nature. Because Frost/Fire and pure frost can easily defend cliffdancers and every other deck has the chance to move a swift to the trhee well cluster in the beginning. After you took control over this cluster on your side you control 4 spots that cant get cliffed now. So if some non-frost player tells me cliffs on Uro are OP i wonder wtf he is doing.
random maps:
there are always enough spots that can't get cliffed
And dont forget: have fun not getting cliffed !

I was never pro so i might have forgotten situations back then but i'm the living proof that it's possible to not get cliffed if you just keep thinking: he starts with a scavenger ! I should consider him being pure fire !
I wouldn't cry a tear if walldancing/cliffdancing gets a treating, but i somehow always saw it as a strategical aspect in terms of mapcontrol wich you can deal with and not as something randomly OP depending on the map.

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[quote]
Normally i'm not a fan of ,,it's not imbalanced, just play better.'' But here i'm surprised that nobody, not even a player like Hirooo, mentioned the possibility of avoiding getting cliffed. Again, i'm not saying cliffdancing is fair or balanced, but i got cliffed with firedancers in one match out of hundred, if not less. Of course it's not as easy to avoid in 2vs2, but 2vs2 is another dimension anyway.
Dont take well near cliffs
I wrote this a while back and it always helped me not getting cliffed:
[/quote]
I agree with you that it is possible to avoid some cliffpositions. Overall the advantage on some maps given by cliffing is way too huge without any good reason for it. Some maps like Uro or Yshia even come close to freewins in cliffable matchups.



[quote]
Wazhai:
Take the first well in the corner and watch out for enforcers walking to a cliff position, you have to react fast enough, for example if you are F/N send ghostspears asap, dont wait for the cliffing to begin.
[/quote]


So Wazhai. What you needed to do to avoid getting cliffdancered is to 
[list=1]
[*]Get the wells near your t1 which offer 0 mapcontrol at all besides stoping him from cliffing from there
[*]Dont fight for the middel because those wells can be instantly cliffed
[*]Build corner well+monument
[/list]So now he can "only" cliff you from a rallybanner to your 2/3 spawnwells or if he takes his t2 at the side.
Or if he puts a rallybanner near your t1 at the other side.
Or if he puts a rallybanner near your t2.




[quote]

Simai:
dont take the middle, its absolutely unnecessary to have a 4 well cluster that can get cliffed or destroyed by phoenixes if there are enough other spots.
[/quote]

And also dont take the other 4 well cluster above the middel.
And dont take the monument next to those. With giving those up its possible to avoid being cliffed.
You dont have any chance to build up pressure against pure fire now and your t3 spot is easily blockable.


[quote]
Layesh:
Getting both corners normally means the win against any colour, be careful with the walls, if you are insecure pull them up yourself, after 5 -10 minutes in the game 25 or 50 power spent in walls dont make that much of a difference (regarding power levels)
[/quote]


Also dont take any of the clusters with 2 wells or the middle since both can be cliffed.
Maximum extra well amount is 4 now.



[quote]
Uro:
the only deck having problems not getting cliffed here is Frost/Nature. Because Frost/Fire and pure frost can easily defend cliffdancers and every other deck has the chance to move a swift to the trhee well cluster in the beginning. After you took control over this cluster on your side you control 4 spots that cant get cliffed now. So if some non-frost player tells me cliffs on Uro are OP i wonder wtf he is doing.
[/quote]


You can get to your 3 cluster in time thats true.

If your enemy instead goes t2 in the middle and takes a well/banner at your t1 you are dead because the doublewellspot reaches to your startwells.
Also if your enemy gets the middelpoint you dont have a t3 spot accessible or are allowed to take control of one.



Some people wanted to have Yrmia back in the ladderpool but if you look at the way the map is build fire has way too much mapcontrol here too.

Looking at 2n2 maps:
Danduil you need to take care of never giving up your startpositonwall but thats manageable.
Nadai t3 spots where endangered but that was fine since you could not have control there anyways because no wellspots so t3 was allways delayed by walking. And cliff vs t3 doesnt work.
Fyre is fine too since you could block those walls easily.

Zahadune was bad since your startposition is cliffable completely.
Also your twowellcluster was but that wasnt such a big deal compared to your whole startbase.

[url=http://battleforge.wikia.com/wiki/Map:Yshia]Yshia[/url].. Yshia is a joke. 
So player 2/4 could walk up to the monument in the open take that play a dancer and attack the opponents startingmonument.
Good luck counterplaying that.
That of course also worked with a rallybanner at many places around any spawn.

Turan you couldnt play the middel what was kinda fine since you could get t2/3 elsewhere.
If you took care of not getting walled at the section next to your base you where also set for wells.

Koshan was another ugly map but not as bad as Yshia.
There were 2 wells in the middel you could not take because of dancers.
You could not take either of the clusters at the end of the map that where close to your opponent so t3 was always in direction of your mate.
Your t2 was 100% cliffable(the hill behind it..) if you could not stop your enemy from getting inside your "area". The wall there was around 75 e iirc what loses you the complete midgame if you really keep that one up.

On Gorgash you could take the middel but not all wells which is fine.
Same for the 2er clusters where you could only take 1 if you dont have the whole area.
Fine map.



While you are right there are some points where you can counteract cliffdancing this not the case on many maps
and I dont see a reason why there should be given out a single freewin because somebody happens to have a 50m range unit.

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Cliffdancing and to a lesser extent walldancing(sometimes its so hard to click them) still puts fear into me to reflect on. Sometimes games would be lost in an all out gambit just to secure any ground where the fire player could plant themselves behind cliffs.

[quote='Czechmate23' pid='9073' dateline='1437654842']
Honestly its a part of what makes this game an RTS any game those that have the highier ground on anyone else will have the advantage when both are ground armys
[/quote]

I understand some games give height advantage with damage bonus etc. but these are at ranges far shorter than dancers have. Also, fire dancers can cliff you even from lower ground. It was the fact here that the terrain was impassive which gave such a large advantage, not the fact that elevation played a role. Shooting from cliffs or walls would cause a firedance to have no vision of the target so in reality I would almost think it would be disadvantageous in a real circumstance.

I always got the feeling that the dev team knew had bad of a problem cliff and walldancing was. However, how does one code a fix in? I don't think terrain had any trigger in code that could be able to alter projectiles flying over it. That alone will be the biggest problem in fixing cliffdancing(not saying impossible, just hard), for there should be no argument about how the strategy is "fair". If fire is not strong enough without it then we shall fix fire in other ways.

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[quote='wertyy' pid='9134' dateline='1437672191']
a lame tactic used by 99% pure fire players BUT its in game , you should be noticed when in the other side have a fire player and pay attention
[/quote]

So what shell you do?
You can pay attention more than anything. Like Hirooo showed, on some maps you cannot build anything to get mapcontrol vs fire without being cliffed. Additionally sometimes even the starter base can be attacked by cliffdancers. And to defend those places is not easy vs someone who have Rallying banner.

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@ Hirooo: never thought about some of the points you mentioned. But the main reason i gave some ,,how not to get cliffed''hints is because when it comes to cliffing i encountered endless players that didn't look at their own mistakes but yelled out OP immediately. Even one top 10 player got beaten by my U2 deck because the first thing he did in that match is taking a well next to the cliff by my starting orb (random map with endless wells)- the next day he uploads the replay to show everybody how OP pure fire is...(he played lost, lol)
Also i think in the lower ranks map control is not that important. I feel like at most 1 out of 10 of my matches were decided by it. So that's why it somehow worked for me, i could always give up those advantages in map control and still win the game.
And like i said: I'm totally not against getting rid of cliff/walldancing and i myself always felt ashamed when i did it - but i think most players are overdramatizing, at least that stuff was somehow avoidable most of the times - other things made me rage more...

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I completely agree with Hiroo. Cliffdancers and Walldancers need to get removed. His breakdown of each map is fantastic and was what I was going to do before seeing his post here. The fact that the map-picking RNG could often decide matches because of cliffdancing was a very sad situation.

Now for actual fixes, I'm not sure. I believe(please confirm anyone who remembers) that when playing on Uro, if I was attacking the top or bottom 3-well sections that my Forsaken had reduced range because of the minor cliff. Again, if I'm remembering correctly, archers on top of the ridge/cliff were able to hit my archers while I had to move my archers closer in order to get them to start firing.

Also on Uro, when cliffdancing from the 3-well area on the bottom into the orb position right above it, the firedancer could only attack from certain positions. The large cliffs in the one area completely blocked the firedancer from attacking. These two instances make me believe that there is some kind of height metrics that we could use to fix the problem. It might involve just going into each map and manually changing the parameters on the cliffs to block projectiles from going over them, assuming my memory is correct.

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Cliffdancers are op but you can not remove them without giving pure fire something else to keep balance, in my oppinion they should get the game to work before they think too much about balancing it. I am saying this despite pure fire not being my main deck.

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[quote='claun' pid='9212' dateline='1437686350']
Cliffdancers are op but you can not remove them without giving pure fire something else to keep balance, in my oppinion they should get the game to work before they think too much about balancing it. I am saying this despite pure fire not being my main deck.
[/quote]

On maps without cliffs Pure Fire is not weak. They do not need something to compensate for taking away something they never should have had.

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