1. Spawning support units automatically is an interesting variation. However, you're taking away an opportunity for the player to make a choice: the player has 3 rangers on the field, the enemy has a lot of units week to rangers. Does the player build a support unit to boost their rangers, or do they build a third ranger? In general, more player choices like this are good. Even if the choice is obvious.
2. Long range is like armor, it means you can take more strikes against the enemy before they can hit you. It's particularly effective if you can kill the unit before it reaches you. So at the very least to prevent rangers from dominating melee, you should make sure that they do little enough damage so that a single melee unit will land at least one attack vs a single ranger.
3. I want to enumerate what the choice that melee does not participate in the main RPS loop should mean. It should mean specifically, in a battle where one side is pumping out melee units as fast as it can, and the other side is pumping out one of the 3 main types as fast as they can, two things should be true: 1) the side pumping out the 3 main types should win. 2) all three main types should win by approximately the same advantage. This is a very testable design objective.
4. If you make tank armor effective against melee as it is effective against rangers, then tanks will be strong against melee too. This is good if you want to keep melee out of your RPS main loop.
5. A more traditional RPS system, without mages is archers v melee v cavalry. Archers beat melee because they can mow them down before they are reached, melee beat cavalry with long pikes, and cavalry mows down undefended archers. You're trying to have a RPS system of horse archers vs melee (tanks) vs archers (mages). Not only is this going to be more difficult to balance, but I gotta ask: where's the cavalry? Not horse archers, knights. You're missing a staple combat unit.
6. I agree that it's a good idea to have heroes fight with their matching unit type; tanks in the front, ranged power attackers in the back.
7. I don't think that having attacks cancel each other is a good mechanic. It makes units stay on the field longer. It's the same problem as healing. I think you want your units to die quickly, so the game is closer to RPS than an effort to build an army.
8. Why those 5 units? Would like to understand what led to these 5 specific unit types.
9. Totally agree that a fixed gold per minute is better than getting gold for kills. Gold for kills just ends the battle too quickly.
10. Formations falling back might work if it's automatic. If you make it a player choice, you're back the problem that it's an advantage to stay back and build up troops.
11. Fighting better in your own lands might have the consequence that your strategy would need to change depending on how deep you are into enemy lands. Not sure how desirable that is.
12. We've been giving minor suggestions here an there, but perhaps a better approach is to establish more clear design objectives. Ideally testable objectives. What this amounts in this game is, different ai strategies and how they perform against each other. Done right, some strategies will be balanced, while others will dominate. You want to balance the player experience going to be like when he himself used one of these strategies. To start off with, specifically, you have one strategy focusing on each of the units. One strategy that cycles the main rps loop evenly. Now you gotta decide, who will win: balanced or one-sided? Is it a close? What about all in on one unit type, plus the associated hero or support type?
13. If you're going to be tweaking 50 individual units eventually, then you're going to want to set up good automation to test that they are properly balanced.
14. Another design objective should be managing how much luck matters. In other words, with any given strategy combo, what are the odds that the underdog wins? Make this too high, and the game stops being strategic. Make it too low, and the game becomes too predictable.
15. I think one specific design objective should be that an ai that reacts to the units the enemy sends out should dominate one which doesn't.
16. In general, you want battles to be long enough for a player to change strategies if one is not working. But for testing design you want the opposite: you want the test to be exactly long enough to show a strategy is inferior.
17. With regards to buildings, right now I'm not sure what they add specifically. Why do you want buildings, instead of an open battle field? What feel are you trying to achieve? It would help to identify the design goal here.
18. You mentioned 50 unit types for 10 factions. What's odd about this choice is that the player can only play as one faction at a time. So there's a lot of gameplay that a player won't see in a single playthrough. I suggest keeping the variation between factions small, or have much fewer factions.
19. Will there be a campaign mode? That effects the design quite a bit because then it's important to provide a way to ramp up the difficulty, whereas otherwise you want to make all the player choices obvious and apparent from the start.

Quick note: I have seen and read your comments @merkutsam and @King Mir, but as it is already past 0 am, I really gotta go to sleep. I will reply tomorrow (actually today)!

Formations falling back might work if it's automatic. If you make it a player choice, you're back the problem that it's an advantage to stay back and build up troops.

Fighting better in your own lands might have the consequence that your strategy would need to change depending on how deep you are into enemy lands. Not sure how desirable that is.

With regards to buildings, right now I'm not sure what they add specifically. Why do you want buildings, instead of an open battle field? What feel are you trying to achieve? It would help to identify the design goal here.

If the gameplay is more strategic and less arcadey those three points make sense.

The battle goes back and forth, one player has an advantage and the other retreats to his land. When the enemy formation is within the range of defensive engines the defender may recover the advantage beating them back.

Buildings may be used to consolidate advances. A formation stops in the no man's land and builds an advanced outpost. This will help to defend the gained territory. I am thinking in something like WWI trench warfare because the 1 dimension confrontation is similar.

Formations being controlled by players instead of advancing to their doom is another desirable mechanic in this context, but it's possible to make it automatic too. If a formation is badly damaged it can retreat automatically. If there is some type of strategic AI, it can decide whether to advance, retreat, defend...

All this may be well beyond the intended scope of the game but I think it is interesting to consider them.

I think the important this is not to have a game with one killer strategy; that's specifically a problem with the game as it stands. So as you consider things like placed fortifications, it's important to make their placement a true choice, and not always be part of the inevitable strategy.

merkutsam said:

King Mir said:
I don't agree that percentage of hit points are a particularly unrealistic mechanic. It's basically a way to represent a unit that overcomes armor. To such a unit, an unarmored foot soldier or a fully clad knight look like they take the same amount of hits. It's suitable for a unit that deals blunt damage.

Only if all units have the same amount of hit points. If a mage has less points, or a cavalry has more points, then that counter-armor unit will do it worse or better than a normal attack against those units.

@logende

I've been thinking in your game development. I'm guessing so I may be wrong.

First the game was about sequence, unit X beat unit Y, then unit Z beats unit X, then unit Y beats unit Z, and the full circle X beats Y.

This was a waste if an expensive unit beats another one only to be defeated by a cheap one. So you added a formation mechanic. Now units in the front protect weak and expensive units in the back.

But this was a constant meat grinder. Front line units wiped out, and new replacements sent non stop. So you added the missiles cancel each other mechanic.

Now both formations fight as a whole, every unit adding its attack to the struggle until one formation's firepower overcomes the other's. Once this happens, the other formation is wiped out and this is pretty much game over.

In the end what you have been saying is that you prefer a more complex gameplay, one army defeating the other combined army as a whole, not piece meal. Probably not what you want but here you have a few ideas.

• Formations may fight in an abstract way calculating the different combined attacks and defenses, and taking a percentage of their units health, and they may recover health when not in combat.
• Formations don't need to be destroyed everytime they are defeated. They may fall back to their defensive positions if they are losing.
• Formations may advance and retreat, may entrench and fortify, may besiege and assault.
• Formations may fight better in their own lands, and worse in enemy lands
• Formations may change their composition, retiring some units and adding others.
• Formations may apply different tactics for different situations.
• Support units may add different capabilities to formations. Workers, engines, cavalry, spies and counter spies
• Ranged units may have different attacks. Bowmen bombard formation with weak area attack. Crossbowmen like snipers against expensive units. Musketeers piercing attacks anti armor
• Heroes don't need to be combat units, they may be characters leading a formation with different capabilities derived from their traits.
• Mages don't need to be damage dealers, they may be support. They may add buffs and debuffs to attacks and defenses, they may increase healing rate or movement
• Economy may be based on maintenance instead of a fixed # gold per time. One player can maintain a given amount of units. If he uses more expensive units he will have less gold for other units.

The main line of thought you described is quite accurate. Now, there are two possibilities: 1. keep going with the “missiles destroy missiles” mechanic. If this way is chosen, it would, probably, make sense to see a formation as one entity and consider your points to enhance gameplay with a formation. Thanks for your creative formation ideas @merkutsam . I like, for example, the one with different types of ranged units (e.g. musketeer and crossbowmen). One important point to consider, additionally, is, that the gameplay keeps being somewhat readable, understandable and to some degree even predictable. The player should have a feeling of control and knowing what he is doing. 2. disable the “missiles destroy missiles” mechanic, because it is not needed, if the game design is good enough (that is what I hope)

King Mir said:

1. Spawning support units automatically is an interesting variation. However, you're taking away an opportunity for the player to make a choice: the player has 3 rangers on the field, the enemy has a lot of units week to rangers. Does the player build a support unit to boost their rangers, or do they build a third ranger? In general, more player choices like this are good. Even if the choice is obvious.
2. Long range is like armor, it means you can take more strikes against the enemy before they can hit you. It's particularly effective if you can kill the unit before it reaches you. So at the very least to prevent rangers from dominating melee, you should make sure that they do little enough damage so that a single melee unit will land at least one attack vs a single ranger.
3. I want to enumerate what the choice that melee does not participate in the main RPS loop should mean. It should mean specifically, in a battle where one side is pumping out melee units as fast as it can, and the other side is pumping out one of the 3 main types as fast as they can, two things should be true: 1) the side pumping out the 3 main types should win. 2) all three main types should win by approximately the same advantage. This is a very testable design objective.
4. If you make tank armor effective against melee as it is effective against rangers, then tanks will be strong against melee too. This is good if you want to keep melee out of your RPS main loop.
5. A more traditional RPS system, without mages is archers v melee v cavalry. Archers beat melee because they can mow them down before they are reached, melee beat cavalry with long pikes, and cavalry mows down undefended archers. You're trying to have a RPS system of horse archers vs melee (tanks) vs archers (mages). Not only is this going to be more difficult to balance, but I gotta ask: where's the cavalry? Not horse archers, knights. You're missing a staple combat unit.
6. I agree that it's a good idea to have heroes fight with their matching unit type; tanks in the front, ranged power attackers in the back.
7. I don't think that having attacks cancel each other is a good mechanic. It makes units stay on the field longer. It's the same problem as healing. I think you want your units to die quickly, so the game is closer to RPS than an effort to build an army.
8. Why those 5 units? Would like to understand what led to these 5 specific unit types.
9. Totally agree that a fixed gold per minute is better than getting gold for kills. Gold for kills just ends the battle too quickly.
10. Formations falling back might work if it's automatic. If you make it a player choice, you're back the problem that it's an advantage to stay back and build up troops.
11. Fighting better in your own lands might have the consequence that your strategy would need to change depending on how deep you are into enemy lands. Not sure how desirable that is.
12. We've been giving minor suggestions here an there, but perhaps a better approach is to establish more clear design objectives. Ideally testable objectives. What this amounts in this game is, different ai strategies and how they perform against each other. Done right, some strategies will be balanced, while others will dominate. You want to balance the player experience going to be like when he himself used one of these strategies. To start off with, specifically, you have one strategy focusing on each of the units. One strategy that cycles the main rps loop evenly. Now you gotta decide, who will win: balanced or one-sided? Is it a close? What about all in on one unit type, plus the associated hero or support type?
13. If you're going to be tweaking 50 individual units eventually, then you're going to want to set up good automation to test that they are properly balanced.
14. Another design objective should be managing how much luck matters. In other words, with any given strategy combo, what are the odds that the underdog wins? Make this too high, and the game stops being strategic. Make it too low, and the game becomes too predictable.
15. I think one specific design objective should be that an ai that reacts to the units the enemy sends out should dominate one which doesn't.
16. In general, you want battles to be long enough for a player to change strategies if one is not working. But for testing design you want the opposite: you want the test to be exactly long enough to show a strategy is inferior.
17. With regards to buildings, right now I'm not sure what they add specifically. Why do you want buildings, instead of an open battle field? What feel are you trying to achieve? It would help to identify the design goal here.
18. You mentioned 50 unit types for 10 factions. What's odd about this choice is that the player can only play as one faction at a time. So there's a lot of gameplay that a player won't see in a single playthrough. I suggest keeping the variation between factions small, or have much fewer factions.
19. Will there be a campaign mode? That effects the design quite a bit because then it's important to provide a way to ramp up the difficulty, whereas otherwise you want to make all the player choices obvious and apparent from the start.

1. While this is true, I hesitate to add 3 (or more) additional units buttons the player can click, just because of support units. Right now, the human player can choose between 5 units and up to 5 buildings (might change from buildings into siege machines). Those support units would increase the complexity for the player and overcrowd the GUI. Therefore, with my current understanding, I prefer adding some kind of “multiple units of the same type automatically get stronger” versus the player can manually choose between different support units
2. Good point. I need to find a good way to balance units out, even on this low level (1 unit vs 1 unit). In Age of War, for example, attacks seem to be synchronized and, basically, the units of both players attack at the same time (making it possible, that both units land a deadly hit at the same tick and both die). Hopefully, if the ranges and cooldowns are chosen properly, this already balances units out enough
3. True and also a good hint that automated unit tests should be added, which test certain game design objectives
4. Yeah
5. In which context do you think we are missing cavalry? Because they could be fast and reach the enemy quickly, making them strong against long range enemies? We could, actually, give melee units a mount and turn them into cavalry. In that case, Tanks (melee) would be effective against melee (cavalry)
6. -
7. I agree that the “missiles destroy missiles” mechanic creates difficulties. Once the rps system and other mechanics are decided on and implemented, I hope, the game is fun and does not need this mechanic anymore to not be boring
8. There are no deep thoughts behind these 5 units, it is just how the game evolved. As a learning experience before creating this game, we worked on a similar game (but sidescroller instead of strategy game), which already featured some of the animations and tribes (short gameplay video: link). This game contained most of our current tribes, including units, attacks and more. Because those tribes had around 5-8 units each, we decided to just go with 5 units for the strategy game. After quick brainstorming, we thought, those 5 unit types would be cool (hero, tank, melee, ranger, mage). Each has certain advantages and disadvantages and that's it. Talking with you guys in this forum has already made me realize, that more thoughts should be put into game design, than I previously had anticipated
9. -
10. Formations falling back might be worth a try. It should be made sure, that it is not confusing for the player, though
11. This one could also be confusing for the player
12. I agree. Sophisticated automated tests are very useful and important here
13. Same as in 12
14. Hm, right now, the game is deterministic and, for example, every unit has a set amount of damage and there is nothing, such as criticial hits or missed hits.
15. Yep
16. Good hint
17. The main objective of buildings was, to increase the time of one match and to split it into several “stages” or “chapters”. Example: the player has to break the first wall of defense, which is defended with a firethrower building. This takes already some effort and units will die. Once this is done the player has to destroy the second wall of defense, until he finally reaches the castle and is able to attack it. Every stage/sub-chapter could be a little more difficult, than the previous one. If this would work out, it would make one match more exciting. Yet, buildings certainly make the game more difficult to balance. Buildings close to the castle (or in the castle) make sense, because they can support the castle, even when the castle is being attacked and the weaker player has no units on the field. Other buildings, however, have the effect of slowing armies down, which is not always a bad thing for those armies. If, however, the “missiles destroy missiles” option is disabled, this should not be as much of an issue, as with the option enabled
18. Quick note regarding those 10 factions and 50 units: The idea is, that the player is able to unlock the units of a tribe by defeating that tribe (every time a tribe is defeated, one random unit of the tribe is unlocked). The player can customize his army by selecting one unit of his choose of each unit class (hero, tank, melee, ranger, boss). This way, the player should, actually see and experience many of the 50 units
19. A campaign mode might be added later, but in the beginning, the following is planned: the player can fight against a tribe of his choice, if that tribe is unlocked. He unlocks the tribes step by step, beginning with the zombie enemy tribe. Every tribe will be increasingly difficult and the maps increasingly complex. For example, the first tribe would not build any buildings and the player can not build buildings either. However, over time, more game elements are introduced. Every time a tribe is defeated for the first time, the player will have the choice between two permanent upgrades/options. Those upgrades could be a wall, which is placed in front of the castle every match, or unlocking a new building, or even an improved castle. Besides those permanent upgrades, the player can unlock units of other tribes (as mentioned above). So, yes: difficulty should increase over time.

merkutsam said:

Formations falling back might work if it's automatic. If you make it a player choice, you're back the problem that it's an advantage to stay back and build up troops.

Fighting better in your own lands might have the consequence that your strategy would need to change depending on how deep you are into enemy lands. Not sure how desirable that is.

With regards to buildings, right now I'm not sure what they add specifically. Why do you want buildings, instead of an open battle field? What feel are you trying to achieve? It would help to identify the design goal here.

If the gameplay is more strategic and less arcadey those three points make sense.

The battle goes back and forth, one player has an advantage and the other retreats to his land. When the enemy formation is within the range of defensive engines the defender may recover the advantage beating them back.

Buildings may be used to consolidate advances. A formation stops in the no man's land and builds an advanced outpost. This will help to defend the gained territory. I am thinking in something like WWI trench warfare because the 1 dimension confrontation is similar.

Formations being controlled by players instead of advancing to their doom is another desirable mechanic in this context, but it's possible to make it automatic too. If a formation is badly damaged it can retreat automatically. If there is some type of strategic AI, it can decide whether to advance, retreat, defend...

All this may be well beyond the intended scope of the game but I think it is interesting to consider them.

This would be possible, but a slightly different kind of game, than currently intended. This would focus more on advancing forward and holding your position by creating buildings. Definitely interesting.

King Mir said:

I think the important this is not to have a game with one killer strategy; that's specifically a problem with the game as it stands. So as you consider things like placed fortifications, it's important to make their placement a true choice, and not always be part of the inevitable strategy.

Yeah and I think this one is difficult to solve. The games needs to be really well balanced to support different solutions, which all lead to a similar result.

The main objective of buildings was, to increase the time of one match and to split it into several “stages” or “chapters”

To increase the duration of battles I suggest to change the way attacks affect units. I think the first unit in a formation is hit by all missiles until is killed, and then the second unit takes the hits. A single unit can't bear all attacks from the enemy side.

Here is a possible alternative:

Divide the combat between melee, ranged and support

Ex: we have assault infantry with submachine guns and grenades, we have short range units like heavy machine guns, light mortars, light guns, and we have long range artillery and air support. The killers are in the back but if there is no infantry in the front they are destroyed in close combat.

1) Melee units in the front of the formation fight united against the enemy melee units, and the damage is distributed among them evenly, though still applying the damage reduction from defenses.

In addition to damage they can cause a knock back effect on the enemy formation if their combined attack is stronger.

The strength of melee is in close combat so when there is no enemy melee in the front they close the gap to engage shooters and support units in melee. Shooters and support are nearly useless in melee so they are quickly overwhelmed.

2)Then the shooters can attack both infantry and other shooters but they can't attack support units unless there is no infantry or shooters before them. In this case, the shooters will close the distance to kill them quickly.

3)Finally, support units can attack from long range but they are the weakest units and will die in a flash against anything else.

In this design, melee units are the main line of defense, shooters are the specialists called to counter enemy units, and support units are the game changers.

Example:

1 Tribal warriors: fast movement, weak attack, medium missile defense and cheap cost

2 Pkemen: medium movement, powerful attack, weak to missiles and average cost

3 Armored warriors: slow movement, medium attack, good missile defense and high cost

1 Bowmen: medium rate of fire, weak area attack, cheap cost

2 Crossbowmen: slow rate of fire, strong single attack against the most expensive unit in range, medium cost

3 Musketeers: slow rate of fire, armor piercing volleys against the most armored unit, high cost

1 Catapult: good vs buildings and useless against anything else

2 Ballista: good vs air or any other support unit but cavalry

3 Cavalry: good against shooters and support, they charge any unit bypassing others and then retreat to the back, enemy cavalry countercharges if present

4 Air units: area attacks, they attack a zone (priority support) but can be counterattacked by enemy air units, ballistas and defensive ballistas

5 Buildings: can be destroyed with catapults only

Melee missiles short range, combined against melee units, knock back effect, lethal versus non melee units

Guided missiles targeting prioritized units

Volley fire targeting specific types like melee or ranged

Area attacks targeting a part of the formation or a unit and adjacent units.

Catapult attacks impacting buildings only

Possible big rolling boulders and other traps for fun

Damage from melee, shooters and supporters must be balanced to allow longer battles. In computer games, ranged units tend to be overpowered because terrain, cover, visibility, intelligence and related variables are usually obviated. When a unit can attack from a safe distance with perfect accuracy it can make other units useless. My opinion is that melee combat should be the most powerful, then shooters should be a complement to the melee, then support should be a gameplay changer, meaning that cavalry would require counter cavalry, air would require air defense or counter air, buildings would require catapults, and catapults would be vulnerable to anything. If you make ranged or support units able to destroy anything on their own then other units are not needed.

In the end, after taking into acount melee, ranged and support attacks the damage should be low enough to allow damaged units to fight for several seconds depending on your preferences. Even considering a passive healing rate and a random choice of targets to allow units to recover from attacks. This will help to avoid the click fest too.

To improve the User Interface change it to pop up menu linked to hotkeys or buttons. One key pops up menu for melee, ranged, support or buildings. In the pop up menu you can scroll up and down, or you can select one option directly with key or button. Once the user learns the keys it can be very fast.

Before tweaking and balancing 2 human players should play to test different tactics. If they find some units too overpowered then adjust them. But it isn't possible to find a perfect balance for the RPS system because there are many variables involved, not only additional units but timing, gold management, sequence...

I think this is a good thing for human vs human play because they usually like complexity and choices to surprise each other. Conversely humans tend to learn the limitations of AI which in turn needs simpler gameplay to be good. But simpler gameplay means less interesting choices.

I think the important this is not to have a game with one killer strategy

Totally agree. The best would be to allow changing tactics several times in the same game

@merkutsam Thanks for your detailed considerations!

Thanks to the help of King Mir, we have now chosen the following main tactical design to go with:

• There 3 main unit types are knight (previously tank), archer (previously ranger) and mage
  • Knight is a mounted heavy melee unit and strong against archer
  • Archer is a fast speed long range unit and strong against mage but weak against Knight, because of the heavy armor of the knight
  • Mage is a medium range high damage unit with a magic attack, which ignores the armor of the heavy knight, therefore, strong against knights
• Besides this main rps, there are melee units (cheap but weak against all three main unit types) and heros (belong to one of the 3 main unit types)
• Further tactical game design is still open for discussion

Also, I like your ideas regarding support units. Support units would make a nice addition. Question is, how the player can produce those support units. Either he can choose between them manually (might make the GUI messy), they are built automatically (support units could be build automatically, based on the kind of units a player builds; could be cool but also a little bit confusing) or something completely different.

Additionally, although the main rps is (kind of) decided, the units of the different factions should still have differences, making your considerations interesting. For example, using knockback as tactical mechanic or units that can target not only the front enemy unit but also units in the back.

Regarding your user interface point: although the short youtube video shows the game played on a computer, the game will target mobile phones (e.g. Android and iOS).

The RPS system combined with a cheap front line unit means it will be a constant spawning of cheap units to keep the front line, plus the second line RPS game of spawning one type countering enemy spawns. The heroes being part of the RPS but in a more powerful version is more of the same. Personally I don't find it interesting but I suppose it's fine for a mobile game.

To avoid clickfest or touchfest you can change the manual spawning to a semiautomatic. For instance, player can set a desired amount of melee units. When that number decreases the game will spawn more units automatically, deducting the cost in gold so the player needs to find a balance between gold income and automatic spawns. This can be applied to other units too, say there is a rule: if melee units below this number and enough gold spawn more, if melee units ok and enough gold spawn more of this unit. Then the player sets the number of melee units he wants, and changes the type of unit to counter enemy units.

My view of support units is they should'nt be automatic because they would be expensive and game changers. Like a critical player choice, which support unit does he need and when to buy it. Then the game has changed and the other player must adapt his game to it. To prevent stagnation the support choices should be scaled. Ex: player A buys cavalry for 100g, then player B can buy cavalry to counter it, but he can also buy the next choice, say eagles for 150g, which not only will defend him from cavalry but it will be more effective than cavalry. Now player A cavalry is defeated and he can choose to buy Eagles to counter enemy or the next choice, say Ballista for 200g... I haven't given much thought to this. They would add some color to the game for sure, if that is all that you want there are lots of possibilities like that unit with knockback effect.

I don't play mobile games, but in general I think it should be possible to make a fast UI. The goal is to avoid too many buttons on screen and too many user interactions. Ideally the player should be looking at the enemy units and managing his spawns with his fingers at the same time. After a short learning time he would not need to look at UI anymore .

merkutsam said:
The RPS system combined with a cheap front line unit means it will be a constant spawning of cheap units to keep the front line, plus the second line RPS game of spawning one type countering enemy spawns. The heroes being part of the RPS but in a more powerful version is more of the same. Personally I don't find it interesting but I suppose it's fine for a mobile game.

Well, of course I want the game to be fun and not boring, but this was the best we came up with, so far. Also, I could imagine that is is, actually, fun, but we need some playtesting to confirm/disprove it.

merkutsam said:
To avoid clickfest or touchfest you can change the manual spawning to a semiautomatic. For instance, player can set a desired amount of melee units. When that number decreases the game will spawn more units automatically, deducting the cost in gold so the player needs to find a balance between gold income and automatic spawns. This can be applied to other units too, say there is a rule: if melee units below this number and enough gold spawn more, if melee units ok and enough gold spawn more of this unit. Then the player sets the number of melee units he wants, and changes the type of unit to counter enemy units.

This is something we could consider if the fight would, actually, be boring and “dumb", but then my first priority would be trying to make the game more fun though.

merkutsam said:
To prevent stagnation the support choices should be scaled. Ex: player A buys cavalry for 100g, then player B can buy cavalry to counter it, but he can also buy the next choice, say eagles for 150g, which not only will defend him from cavalry but it will be more effective than cavalry. Now player A cavalry is defeated and he can choose to buy Eagles to counter enemy or the next choice, say Ballista for 200g... I haven't given much thought to this. They would add some color to the game for sure, if that is all that you want there are lots of possibilities like that unit with knockback effect.

The issue with that would be, that there would always have to be a “next and better” unit available, otherwise, after some time it just stops and there is no way to continue, except build the same unit. I think, a rock-paper-scissor circle would be more effective, because it never ends. Also, the player should have choices instead of, basically, being forced to always building the next stronger unit.

merkutsam said:
I don't play mobile games, but in general I think it should be possible to make a fast UI. The goal is to avoid too many buttons on screen and too many user interactions. Ideally the player should be looking at the enemy units and managing his spawns with his fingers at the same time. After a short learning time he would not need to look at UI anymore .

True, that is a very important point. I think our UI is quite close to this.

1. We've been talking about this as a strategy game, and even I have been using strategy and tactics interchangeably, but technically everything in a game like this is not strategy but tactics. Not really a suggestion; I just can't help pointing this out.
2. I think you could easily have 10 buttons at the bottom of the screen for different unit types, without cluttering the UI. So I don't think that's going to be a big problem for support units.
3. We talked about having cavalry up front, and foot in the second row, but thinking on it, because knights tend to be wider, it may be better to have the foot in front, with knights reaching through them.
4. My advice to Logende has been to focus on having a good RPS for a very specific reason: it automatically provides at least three additional tactics that a player can use that are balanced against each other. @merkutsam in your 2nd to last post you describe a lot of ways to make combat more complex, but none of this addresses a core problem: how to avoid having one true stategy? How do you make it so that different ways to play, that are effective? I think this is a more important goal than making combat more complex or last longer.
5. I talked about this in discord, but one specific criteria to try to strive for is to have balanced choices that aren't “use this mechanic” or “don't use this mechanic”. The choice of “use this mechanic” or “don't use this mechanic” is a choice a player is going to make based on whether they like complexity. But a choice of playing 1 of 3 units will make the player try to choose the one that fits their desired play style. This specifically applies to real choices where there isn't an “one true strategy”. Not all choices are like this; you might have other choices where the more complex mechanic is better, like using siege, but then using siege becomes automatic in every game that has walls.
6. I think the idea to have touch select the unit to be played when you have enough money for it is a good one. It makes the game more about the tactics rather than click-timing.
7. Human testing has it's place, but ai testing has a huge advantage too: you can run a lot more tests. You can literally test every permutation of anything you can think to vary. So an approach to this might be to have humans play against each other to come up with strategies, then to write an ai that uses those strategies perfectly. The goal is that there will be several strategies that are balanced against each other to be equally effective. You can also test other goals.
8. @logende You talked about how buildings are intended to split a combat into stages, and also how the grant the player a reprise when they are out of units on the field. I think these two goals make for somewhat different kinds of a game. Having "chapters" opens up a lot of possibilities for a long campaign, where the ai is relatively dumb, but has all these building buffs that they player doesn't. So you have a serial game, where they player tries to destroy a progressively more an more powerful castle (with unit power increasing too). On the other hand if the point of buildings is the second goal, it serves more like a “life”. It's sort of each player having 2 nukes that they can use any time to wipe the battlefield clean. But in this case the defenses are balanced between the two players, and it's beholden on you to make the ai equal to the player. Which do you want? I somewhat assumed by the apparent equality of sides in the trailer you showed that you want a balanced sides, but you can go either way.
9. @logende You talk about how you want the player to buy defensive building upgrades that match the progressively more complex castles that each battle with the same tribe will have. The problem I think you run into with this is, because your castles are pretty far apart, the player would never intentionally allow combat to fall back to their own fortification. Unless that's a strategy you explicitly encourage (but then you again have a choice that's “use this mechanic” vs “don't use this mechanic”, which doesn't encourage different strategies). For this reason I don't like letting the player build defensive structures like walls.
10. It sounds like you currently have two major player mechanics in the game: recruiting units, and building buildings. On discord we talked about a mechanic to power up mages that we ultimately rejected. I have also brought up the possibility of player cast “spells”. I think this is a major question you need to be to finalize too: this list of major mechanics. This is after all what your game is all about.
11. Currently you say you have 5 buttons for units and 5 buttons for buildings. But your game is clearly more about units than buildings. So why are buildings so prominent?