In the veign of the recent comparison threads, I thought I'd throw this old classic into the mix.
One of the games I regularly enjoy playing is Warlords III: Darklords Rising (note the avatar).
I've been giving the old Warlords campaigns a go over the last week or two (with my trusty XP laptop - it won't run on my Vista laptop despite numerous hoops tried). I woudn't consider myself a top player by any means, but I do enjoy the mechanics.
I don't think I'd qualify Warlords as a true 4x game (4x lite at best), due to the fact you don't do much with cities other than conquer them, fortify them, and build units with them (sometimes razing them just for fun). But you build army stacks and conquer the opposing factions in a turn based setting, which a lot of other 4x games do as well.
Warlords III has an interesting combat mechanic, that being that different units each bring different stackwide bonuses to the table. The 'biggies' are Leadership (-) Chaos, Morale (-) Fear, and Siege (-) Fortify. You can have a modifier of -1 to +5 in each of these three categories, with the overall modifiers limited to -3 to +5. This overall bonus is applied to the attack strengths on each side, with the goal being to maximize your bonus while reducing the opponent's bonus. Yes, opposing stacks could each have +5, due to bonuses in different categories. With combat values falling between 1 and 9, that 8 point bonus/penalty range can have a profound effect on combat. BTW, combat is (normally) determined by both sides rolling a D20, and if the rolls is equal to or less than the modified combat value, you may have scored a hit (units have 1 to 5 hits, depending on toughness), depending on if the opponent scored one as well. Combat is conducted with the lowest ranked units on each side facing each other one on one over multiple bouts, with the survivor then facing the next ranked opponent, until one side or the other remains standing.
Other abilities come into play as well, such as Bless/Curse, Trample, Poison, Disease and so forth. Warlords has a wide diversity of units of varying combat strengths, from Ghosts to Griffons to Dragons to Elementals, as well as the usual Elves/Dwarves/Undead/Giants/Etc. Most units have unique bonuses (Ghosts have -4 Curse, for example, which translate a 40% chance of putting a curse on the opposing unit. lowering it's effectiveness/ countering Blessings). Blessings come from visiting shrines, which gives units a +1 to Attack strength. Shrines are tied to specific cities usually, so units built in that city are automatically blessed if the Shrine is functional (Shrines and other sites may of course be razed, and later rebuilt if you have the cash to do so).
Incidentally, other sites provide some unique bonuses. A site tied to a city might provide a +1 to Attack, +1 Hits, or +2 to Move of any units built in that city. Throw in the gold bonus sties and shrines, and some cities become quite choice targets. Not all that different from Elemental in this respect, although the sites in Elemental function in a different fashion/provide other bonuses than those iterated here.
Heroes in Warlords are quite important, as they gain bonuses and abilities as they gain levels. Heroes by themselves, especially at lower levels, can be killed somewhat easily, hence why they tend to be ranked last in stacks. BTW, in Warlords, a stack is up to 8 units. Cities can have 4 stacks in them, and provide bonuses to Fortify (+1 to +3 depending on city size/level of fortifications). Add on items and of course some heroes have spells, and it is possible for higher level heroes to add several +5's to a stack, and offset enemy bonuses. Stacking heroes is a mixed bag, as if you have too many heroes you may not have enough 'buffer units' to prevent their loss. Up to 5 heroes are allowed at a time, but they don't appear all that often, so if you lose the ones you have, you may go in 'light' into the next chapter (the top 3 heroes get to advance, others are discarded).
BTW, bonuses in Warlords normally do not stack (items do stack onto abilities, but only the highest bonus item carried by a hero is added to his stats in each category), so having 8 ghosts is pretty much the same as having just 1 from a bonus perspective - hence this is why you want to mix up your units a bit when practical.
Mixing unit types is rather important in Warlords. a 9 attack strength can easily become 6 if the enemy can outclass your bonuses, and Dragons can quickly become cannon fodder in that situation. But mix a stack with say a Cave Worm (+2 to Siege), Fire Elemental (+2 Chaos), Demon (+4 Fear), a good mid level Warrior (with say +5 to Leadership and +2 Morale, with a handful of items adding additional bonuses), and some Infantry to boot, well that 3 Attack Infantry is now 8, standing toe to toe with those formerly 9 attack Dragons, now 6... Hence, producing a diversity of units can lend itself well to a winning strategy.
So, anyways, how is this relevant to the situation in Elemental? Well, it's the unit mixes. In Elemental, I find that the game rewards maxing out your combat values with the biggest baddest units, without much thought to what other bonuses a unit brings to the table. Sure, we have some different combat abilities and such, but these generally translate to 'things that let this unit do more damage every so often', not a stackwide bonus. Hence, while some thought is given to mixing things up a bit, generally uber stacks are uber stacks. Racial abilities tend to almost be afterthoughts, with some scaling better into the late game than others. Amarian bonuses grow as more shards are acquired, while Tarth's 3 or less ability tends to become less effective in the later game (a +3 bonus to attack doesn't mean much when your weapon already has a 35 attack strength...).
However, IF there were a number of unique bonuses and penalties that different creatures and races brought to unit stacks, well then things could get interesting. Let's start with the Shards (this is Elemental, after all). Assuming that Elements have natural opposites:
Fire versus Water
Earth versus Air
Life versus Death
And let's consider having Elemental creature providing 'global' stack bonuses. Say Minor Elemental giving a +1 and an Elemental Lord giving a +4 to say Attack Strength (only highest bonus is counted). Now say that you have a Fire Elemental Lord in an army facing an army with a Minor Water Elemental. 4 - 1 means an overall 3 bonus to attack strength in this case. To make things more interesting, mixing opposing Elements in your own stack might offset/mitigate your own bonuses, i.e having a Minor Water and Minor Fire Elemental in the same stack means no bonus (1-1=0). I think this makes for a nice wrinkle.
Carrying this concept further, if Heroes had abilities that added to the attack/accuracy/defense/dodge of all units in the same stack with the hero (again capping the bonus to the highest in play in that stack), well then Heroes become much less interchangeable with other units, as you will WANT to have at least one powerful hero in each stack to maximize it's potential. This makes sense to me, as Commanders should lead armies to glory, armies by themselves not so much...
Finally, if an array of modifiers is well thought out (Leadership/Chaos, Morale/Fear, Bless/Curse, etc.) that different units might bring to the fray, well then mixing unit types, and sometimes different races, becomes more important. And those 'unit producing sites' in Elemental suddenly become much more interesting. Why have a Wildling in your stack? Because they have Chaos bonuses...
Of course, overall attack values would need to be scaled back a bit ([particularly the higher ones) to take the emphasis away from weapons a bit to focus more on the ability bonuses. But I think that going to a model along these lines could make Elemental much more compelling from a unit standpoint.
One other point. In Warlords, bonuses remain in effect for the duration of the combat, due to the '1v1' combat approach. In Elemental, with it's battlefield mechanic, well having global bonuses go away when units are killed/incapacitated adds a new wrinkle to targetting. I.E. normally you might hold off on taking out the Elemental Lord in favor of clearing the cannon fodder first, but if he is nerfing your combat abilities, making that cannon fodder much harder to kill, well you may decide to focus on him first... this does happen to some degree already with spellcasters and such, but in this case I think the more variables in play, the more interesting combat becomes...
There are some other notable concepts in Warlords that could translate well into Elemental: Smaller cities/cities further apart, with more squares on a map, with associated higher move values, sites that provide more direct bonuses to units (such as a site that 'toughens up' infantry, or allows stronger weapons to be built), and a better use of terrain/terrain move modifiers. Example: Dwarves in Warlords are cool, as they move through rough terrain much faster than other units do (other than fliers). Elemental maps generally don't have enough squares to really flesh this out, and cities are generally much closer together, so you usually don't have a lot of different terrain types between individual cities. But the focus of this particular post is on unit differentiation/bonuses. Warlords has ships too, of course, which generally ony appear as needed/when units are being transported, but I don't think that magically appearing/disappearing ships translates well to Elemental (I enjoyed building them back in the E:WOM days). Although... you could have battle maps configured as ship decks...
The Warlords Questing mechanic is also rather interesting, and something I'm pondering currently...
I've been tinkering with something along the armywide bonus lines in E:LH already (essentially an army wide +2 move bonus when stacked with Sovs, +1 when stacked with other Champions), and am branching off into other bonuses to atack/defense/etc., but with my associated ideas on combat rebalancing this will take a while. Plus, the 'max bonus comparison' mechanic isn't something that is really built into Elemental as far as I can tell (i.e. if 3 units each provide a +3 to attack to the army, I think you end up with a +9, which isn't the goal here), so such a concept would need to be incorporated into the next iteration, should it gain any traction.
Hence this post. AOW3 seems to do a good job at unit differentiation and encouraging finding the proper mix, at least from what I've seen in reviews, Warlords III did so very well back in the day, and I really think that Elemental needs to step things up in the next iteration. This could be one path to that goal...
