So i have been thinking about heroes and army units in Elemental this part week while i have been playing other games to tide me over in between patches. I'm looking forward to Fallen Enchantress and I hope the separate development paths work out - people have said that it worked well for gal civ 2.

     Speaking of which, I've fired up Gal Civ 2 and poled around in it a bit (I have no expansions at moment but we will see in February when i get a new credit card. Impulse is denying my current card. I can see how Elemental evolved from Gav Civ 2 and i think it is a neat evolution of the company and its game engine. There are a couple of ideas that can be derived from it which can potentially improve Elemental.

Basic Army Units

      Ah. The humble peasant. How much I loath thee and how much i need thee. I don't think you can fully appreciate the expression "Beating a Dead horse" until you've attacked a spider on ridiculous setting using only peasants. 12 peasants and the bug still has a decent chance of winning. Yes I know it is on ridiculous setting  but i'm pointing something out here that a lot of people already know. Armour is King. Tech is your friend.

     Balancing out the way equipment is used is part of fixing this, but the way army units are currently leveling up is only exacerbating the issue. Units need to get more than just a few hit points when they gain a level. Heck there is even a branch of warfare tech that gives freshly made units more hp than units with several levels under their belt. That's just Tomfoolery. (A fun word more people should use it.) To better balance this I think army units should have a maximum level they can reach, perhaps level 10. At each level units could get stat bonuses such as

STR +0.25

DEX +1

CON +1

INT +1

WIS +1

CHA +1

Then at special levels they could get  a weapon based bonus, a faction based bonus, armour based bonus or an equipment based bonus. These units should still be useful despite new technologies becoming available. I do realize that if we are given the ability to upgrade our troops equipment then it makes what I am saying here problematic.

One type of traditional weapon that is missing from our list is the pick class of weapon. These are knight killers. They peel open armour like a can opener on a tin can. They should probably do less baseline damage than a club type weapon but ignores a percentage of armour so against high armour troops they do more damage than a club or sword type weapon.

So with this in mind for what our baseline unit looks like and how he can evolve over the course of the game we can factor in faction and racial bonuses such as +2 to str, -2 to int or +10% to hp or +1 to sight.

So we have more choices involved when it comes to basic heroes. Our base line hero is probably going to be higher than the baseline army unit. The hero won't be 10 in all their stats, some will be higher, some lower and will probably have more hp than the army unit.

Administrator heroes would have lower base stats than Warrior/ Army support heroes.

Heroes spawned by lv1 lv 2 and lv 3 adventure tech would have stronger base line stats and abilities available to them.

I have some more notes in point form that i want to go through before continuing - plus my wife is watching Xena at the moment and Calisto just appeared for the first time. So it's a little weird writing about heroes at the moment (and Calisto sure can shriek)