Talk:War Machine

Ballistas

The manual uses ballistas as the plural. So maybe we should use that instead of ballistae? Otherwise we could change cyclopses too. 10:47, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

Capitalization

Is it "War machine" or "War Machine? –Kapteeni Ruoska 07:30, 21 March 2014 (CET)

Debate on Ballista

Is the Ballista actually useless as the article states? I know I've had it on a hero with a fairly high Attack skill and it was dealing around 110-120 damage per round (with Archery, but not Artillery) Even if all it did was snipe two of them, it has paid for its own cost. Depending on a couple other factors, it could be conceivably up to ~200 which is enough to put a couple Naga Queens down. That pays for the cost of the Ballista alone.

Also, if the enemy attacks it directly with a creature stack, that's one turn of it not attacking your creatures. If the enemy wastes a spell on taking it out, same deal. Even if it dies to a chain lightning, it halved the damage for another creature down the line. Not bad for a 2500 gold machine that doesn't take a slot in your army.

The dangers of having one against Magogs, Liches, and Dragons is well-known, but this can be mitigated with good army placement and may not be a factor depending on what you're up against.

This all adds up to: the ballista may be useful to a might hero in the lategame, particularly if they have Archery.

Well, this is of course somewhat matter of opinnion, and the tone of the article is quite strict. However, I would still argue that Ballista is a liability more than advantageous feature. First of all you would have to have control over the Ballista, which means that you would have to "sacrifice" one of the secondary skill slots to Artillery skill. Secondly, in order to do considerable amount of damage (couple of hundred) you would have to have a notable level hero with high level primary skills, in which case the damage of creatures would be measured in thousands (if not tens of thousands!) rather that hundreds. There probably is situations where Ballista would give hero a slight edge, but I would argue that those situations are rare and mariginal. It significantly more likely to benefit from some other secondary skill than Artillery combined with Ballista and Archery. –Kapteeni Ruoska (talk) 14:36, 31 March 2015 (CEST)

I had intentionally discounted Artillery from my considerations, as I agree that taking Artillery is usually a poor choice in terms of opportunity cost. Armorer or Offense would do more for the army, and I'm sure that more 'utility' skills like Pathfinding will make a bigger difference - letting you pick your fights. There's some possible situations where it could be forced on you, but for the purpose of discussion I'm removing it from the equation. I think the trade-off is between what will do more damage: another 2500 gold of the weakest troops my hero is carrying, or a ballista? Of course, that gold could also buy a secondary or tertiary hero some more troops - but the same question applies: ballista for main hero, or more troops for a lesser hero? In the next day so I'll put an update in that section, and I invite you to review it.

I am not sure if I follow you, but what I understood was, that you are suggesting that it would in some case be wiser to invest to Ballista than a bunch of low (1st) level creatures? Interesting thought, though my intuition immediately says no. Even if it would be useful to have one 250hp "creature", the damage would never be in comparison to those of the creatures. But will see from your review. :) –Kapteeni Ruoska (talk) 10:29, 2 April 2015 (CEST)