Right now, I'd prefer they finish up the major changes, before they trickle down to finishing off the balance.

In the meantime, just edit the XML files and change what you don't like - that is the true beauty of games like this.

My next XML change will include a free 3 Farms at every capital city to give every faction a big head start. It should make for some big cities and good fun.

While I was not directly saying this, it is in fact true that balance is not required for fun. A simple proof of this is MOO2 where in you could build an unbalanced ships, but the underlying game was a lot of fun. In general, the term balance is thrown around a lot when talking about strategy games, and there are several good arguments for why one would desire such a thing. Yet, balance usually is just a mask over the real idea that some mechanic or system feels unfair from one perspective or another. In the case of Elemental, maybe you built a bunch of spear guys only to find out that your opponent has built battlehammer units, or your level 5 axe men are now woefully outmatched by groups of spearmen. Any way you look at it, you are really talking about scaling back unfair encounters, which is supported by your proposed changes.

I think in general you have misunderstood my point of view. While I think that adding abilities is one part of making tactical combat more interesting, it is not the whole picture. From your point of view it seems that choices on what units to create and how to form parties equates to tactical choice. This can be an interesting and fulfilling part of any strategy game, but it does not lead to real tactical choice. In general, balancing numbers to one play style or another is a worthwhile endeavor but it always is about personal choice. While you min max your units and parties and come up with something resembling balance, you still enter combat only to find you have one small set of choices, move and attack. For every weapon, there is only the one way to use it, default attack. Again, this is not tactical choice. Consider a modification to tactical combat, where in every weapon have multiple attack choices. For example, A long sword could have three distinct attack choices - high dmg/low acc, mid/mid, low/high. In this example, the user is then able to choose how he confronts his opponents. While this example is fairly simplistic, it illustrates my point about giving real tactical choice. Until real tactical choices are added, balancing numbers feels moderately meaningless, since it does little to add strategy or promote player ability. All you find is a system where min max results in the best outputs.

I think increasing the HP is a mistake, because this makes the combat spells less powerful.

Increasing the weapon damage would reduce the power of the strength stat. If you have an attack of 10 a strength of 20 would give you a 50 % damage bonus (+ 5), but if you increase the attack to 15 the damage bonus is reduced to 33 %. It would be better to reduce the total armor value to 75 % of the weapon attack of that tech level.

Instead of increasing the Defense a Shield should increase Dodge.

Wait, what's preventing Stardock from raising the power of combat spells as well? 

From what I've read in a post by a dev', there's also a hard low cap a 50%, meaning you can't roll below half the max value.

That's actually fine. Armor is here for damage mitigation, not blocking. That's what dodge is for.

But yes, you understood my point perfectly. When you play Age of Wonder 2, you realize quickly that part of the reason the tactical battles are more fun that Elemental's (for now... ) is that it's rare to kill a unit in one round with a single enemy (unless the difference of power is huge), and one-hit-kills never happen. And there's no cheesy armor that soaks all the damage either.

That allows for real tactics, not just moving stuff around to see pretty colors and dudes waving swords. Because big combats are going to last a few rounds, and because your basic units will survive long enough to justify you've built them - because they'll survive past the first round and will have a chance of inflicting some minor damage on the big dudes, even.

Elemental doesn't need to be exactly like AoW - it shouldn't, in fact. But the basics cannot be that far apart if it wants to make sense, and the first step in doing so is to think carefully about the number ranges, the extreme, and what should be obtained. 

And having hit points much lower than both weapon and armor values can't work, because those time damage goes through, it'll be 1-hit-kills. EVEN with veterans. Having those armor values vary immensely, making most weapons ineffective, cannot work. Hell, they were chosen at a time when the system actually made sure that even weapons with a much lower attack value had a decent chance to go through: the 1-N linear rolls.

It's not fun to have weapons which can't event scratch the armors of the next era (hell, even civilization doesn't have that). It's not fun to have your units not last more than one round or one blow in battle, against opponents that aren't vastly more powerful than they are. It's not fun not being able to play quantity vs. quality. I believe that this, more than anything, kills choice and variety.

That was exactly my method. I chose a baseline for armor, then looked at where I could go from there. I decided that against a normally armored duded with decent hit points, it should take 4-5, sometimes 6 hits to kill him. That's only 2 rounds of combats, so it's actually very reasonable. I decided that going a step further in armor shouldn't suddenly make all weapons obsolete. I decided that for a weapon and an armor of the same generation, there should be no "blocked" result... or at least they should be exceedingly rare.

And when I put all this in, tactics started to matter. 

Actually, the strength stat works fine in this paradigm, too. I mean... there are weapons with 60 damage in the core XMLs already. Believe me, +6 damage from 22 strength is really really powerful even with 25 base HP (the reason is that damage mitigation from armor will reduce your damage, sometimes quite a lot, so a +6 ends up being sometimes half or more of the damage you actually inflict. Works pretty well for me).

It's not so much a "spiral of power"... it's actually less so than what currently is there.

My point is the following: current figures haven't yet received any tuning: they were leftovers from a previous system and left there because the main focus was on debugging, not making the figure consistent and fun. I'm not advocating for "complete starcraft-like balance", but at some point we need to sit at the table and discuss how to fill those XMLs, because it hasn't been done yet. If we leave them like they are, it's just like throwing some numbers around and saying that's okay.

See, for instance, 1.09o made bows utterly useless because not real game design thought was put into what their power should be and why. 12 for the strongest bow? It won't lay a scratch on anything with more than leather armor (and even leather will almost negate its damage). And that's a late-game bow ! See, it's not about achieving perfect, balance, but making things useful, viable, and pacing the game. 

I've looked at MoM. MoM certainly isn't balance, but it's a hell of a lot more internaly consistent. The number ranges, system, and mechanics are all withing reasonable limits, meaning there aren't the kind of huge discrepancies at every corner we see in Elemental. No super-armor that shrugs off everything. No unit that gets obsolete 20 turns later. No cheesy 1-hit kill (or best scenario: 1-round kill) everywhere. Sure, there's cheese, but it doesn't reach the levels of Elemental by any mean. But that's not because Elemental sucks or whatever: it's because that issue hasn't been the main focus point yet.

But now, it's time to start thinking about. So that's what I did, and I give my results.

I've also mentionned AoW 2. Elemental is close enough to AoW 2 for a comparison to be relevant... and we can compare the number ranges in the two game, the power curve (damage/armor and HPs) and the way combat works there. The power differential between low-level units and high-end ones. I'm not saying Elemental should copy it, but I don't think those item numbers have been put there with the new roll system in mind and with a big picture of how things should work out and with some testing behind to see if they achieve those goals.

I don't know, since the system has changed so profoundly, why should Stardock avoid actually trying to reconfigure the game to fit the system ? When you make changes that are as deep as the ones that have been made, it is important to look at the consequences and reassess the portions of the game affected by this change, or it doesn't make sense. If D&D was suddenly using a D6 for attack rolls (ridiculous idea just fr the example), then all the values for weapon, spells, armor, and circumstantial bonuses should be reworked to actually fit with that system.

Right now, we went from an 1DN vs 1DN system with no dodge (so armor had to play a role of total mitigation) with values that were already not suited to the game (5 HP? lol.). Now, we're going to an 50% min value + square, roll, square root  system, which reduces the variance and gives values in the high end of the range more often, and with a dodge system that makes those "blocked" values undesirable in most cases. So, the rest of the game, the equipment, hit points, statistics for monsters and spells should be redesigned to fit with that system. Otherwise, you're just throwing numbers around with to regards for how it will work out in the end, and the game ceases to be fun very quickly.

Well, in your example, you reworked the armor values massively. That works too. Both ideas work - actually, the good point of yours is that it lets HPs as they are, while mine (decreasing some armor values, but mostly increasing weapon damage) requires a major change in HP values to keep up.

It's all up to the devs, but I hope they're listening to us when we're saying that the current values are not adapted at all and that the changes that are needed are big and need to be made in a big picture fashion.

I mean, Frogboy vs. AI 4 was a clear sign: quantity vs. quality doesn't work. His spearmen, though in huge numbers, only damaged the enemy once (lightly) and got chewed way too quickly if you think about how many there were. That's a clear sign that something is way off: those enemies weren't wearing late game armor.

Small changes to the OP: I didn't mean this to be an "ad'" to the mod and it rightfully bothered some people that I posted a 'mod' in here (it *was* kind of rude of my part. I blame sleep deprivation after playing too much.)

I'll create another topic in the mod forum anyway.