[1.01] Making Units Unique And Balanced

Disagree with everything except I would like more armor earlier and more racial stuff.

Out of curiosity, why not just limit yourself to two traits max?

I actually disagree with every point you made other than the lack of heavy armor in the early game. I would like to have a light and heavy armor upgrade path option

I disagree with essentially everything here, and in fact I almost NEVER take the strength trait.  Horses are not very far down the tech tree, give you the strength trait for free and a bunch of other incredible bonuses.  To boot, horses are practically everywhere in a dense material world (so I'm assuming they aren't hard to get in other options- which I usually don't play) and adding them to units costs nothing but your horse count.  I'm ALWAYS trading my horses for tech.   I like Potential I, II early game and later III (when it shows up).  You can get get ridiculous levels with extra XP.

The whole game is based on weapon initiative.  it is in fact one of the better implementations of tactical combat, I feel, that I've ever seen.  Homogenizing all the weapons initiative leads inevitably towards simply picking the weapons that does the most damage.  I find having to make the choice based on more than one variable far more challenging and rewarding, thank you.

Actually, I was thinking in this morning that I would like to see initiative rolls implemented, you know, roll for initiative with modifiers to see "who goes first" each round.  It would add a little bit of uncertainty to the battles.

As for the use of one large army -- in context that's pretty much how pre-modern campaigns were run.  I think we take "damage" a bit too literally sometimes.  Army damage could be anything from death to wounds to supply shortages to morale.  An army might be beat-up after a fight, but over time the army gets the ball rolling again and is able to move and fight effectively.

How about:

1.  Remove the unit editor.

2.  Develop interesting unique units for each faction.

Have to add that I too disagree with 90% of this post. Strength trait exists to multiply the cost of using heavy armor without horses, and also to use one of those trait slots which is very valuable.

Also, and this is nitpicking, I want less 'racial' traits and more custom faction traits. Only Quendar can take slaves is ridiculous to me.

We all seem to want more weapon options and armor options early game. I agree with that as well. Right now its all...

Leather, Leather, Leather, Heavy Armor, and then I've won before I need the bigger badder armor and weapons.

Its a tad droll.

I save and reload enough!  (Yes, I'm a save scummer). 

Heck no!  That would take away half the game for me!!!

Now that's an idea -- how about breaking out all of those racial traits into individually selectable ones for custom factions.  That would add some spice to faction creation.

I think it would be cool, if ability to design units was resercheable technology. No need to place it really far, maybe somewhere around warg riding. It will force player use predefined troops for a bit, which is nice unique racial touch.

Except it wouldn't. You would still get initiative penalties, just from encumbrance and not directly. So there would be a trade-off between heavy weapons and armour.    

But it doesn't. Compared to armour the strength trait costs absolutely nothing. All it does is make some units un-upgradable and add some pointless micro. 

I'm talking about unit traits unlocked through race, not faction traits. Like Quendar breathing fire. I totally agree with you about the Quendar and slaves. 

The reason why the strength trait shows up on every unit is that the weight capacity of a unit without either muscle or strength is so low that if I want to put a full suit of armor on my units, I:

1. am using only leather (15 total weight, plus 5 for Wooden or Round Shields, 10 for a kite shield, or 15 for a tower shield), in which case I can use daggers with any shield, shortswords with any shield but the tower shield, any other one-handed sword or any one-handed spear or an axe and either Wooden or Round Shields, or a Warhammer or a Mace and no shield; as for two-handed weapons, greatswords, mauls, and battle-axes are all heavy enough that I cannot equip them on a unit with a full suit of leather armor that doesn't have at least one of the weight capacity-boosting abilities/equipment. I can also use bows, in this case.
2. am using only chain or masterwork chain armor (20 total weight, plus same as above for a shield), in which case I can add no more than 10 weight units for the weapon and shield. This blocks warhammers and maces completely, and rules out tower shields and two-handed weapons other than spears. Of the remaining weapons, I can take broadswords, longswords, and axes, but will not be able to equip a shield; or I can take shortswords and be able to use Wooden or Round shields, or a dagger and use any shield but the tower shield. However, all of these weapons are nearly useless against a similarly-equipped AI unit, because chain armor is great against cutting weapons, so I'd stick with spears as the only particularly reasonable option here. I can still use bows here.
3. am using light plate armor (30 total weight, so no shields for me), in which case the only weapon I can use is the dagger and I cannot equip any shields. If I face any armor better than leather, I'm completely screwed, because daggers do almost no damage to any other kind of armor, unless they happen to have attack-boosting traits that apply for this particular fight. I can no longer use bows while remaining within the weight limits with this armor.
4. cannot use plate armor (40 weight for a full set), so I must drop at least two pieces of armor in order to use any weapon at all in this case, and that reduces my unit's defense by at least 10 points (or at least 20 against blunt attacks). Also, armor is the only thing in the game that has weights which are not divisible by five, so you're looking at some rather strange total weights after you start removing pieces, and you might need to remove more pieces than you'd expect in order to

Moreover, if I design a unit which is not mounted on a horse and doesn't use Champion Plate (which increases weight capacity by 20), there are some equipment combinations that I simply cannot make use of, even if I take the Muscle trait. This already exists, and is a strike against maces and warhammers, which are the only one-handed weapons in the game which I cannot use for a unit in full plate with a tower shield unless I'm playing as the Trogs.

I think that rebalancing all the weights to make up for Strength being removed would take too much effort to be worthwhile when there are other things in the game I'd much rather see addressed (for example, mercenary costs).

The initiative systems based on different weapons does have its quirks, for example de-equiping the staff my mage starts with and equiping a +4 dagger asap to allow more spell casting. The non-magical dagger allows me to cast more spells due to a faster initiative. I think the idea of the weight affecting initiative solely through the light-medium-heavy categories more intuitive but would (barring the use of initiative boosting equipment) the initiatives of most units be the same? (thus kinda wrecking the system)

I do like the idea of perhaps starting with only one extra perk on a unit and that expanding to three through tech research, building upgrades or magic. But does the unit creation aspect of the game become too messy?

These are 3 very good ideas^.

Inversely, adding more unit traits to choose from will work too.  The only issue I can see with reducing them to 2 would be amassing an extremely long list of unit designs.

+1

The initiative mechanic being baked into weapons directly really does make little sense, especially as casting is concerned.  Whereas the innate effects that the encumbrance system has on initiative are very logical.  A better relationship between weapons, their weight, and the initiative penalties of the different encumbrance levels makes a lot of sense; and removing the initiative modifiers directly on weapons (except magical) makes even more.

+2

This is the best idea of all, and one that I believe would help solve the "lack of soul" feeling and faction differentiation that some reviewers are attempting to express.

I like the idea of reducing the traits you can pick to 2. Better yet, I'd love it if every trait had its effect tripled; right now the choices you make just don't have a noticeable difference. Think about it, when you face enemy troops, do you examine each one to see which traits they picked? Does it really matter if they have the +2 initiative or the +3 health? Right now you get 3 traits that each add roughly 10-20% to a single stat; if we had two traits added 30-60% instead, it would actually be important and noticeable which ones you picked.

It'd also leave room for adding some very game-changing faction/race-specific traits without them being too overpowered; currently it's difficult to come up with an interesting racial trait that doesn't completely outclass mediocre bonuses like +2 initiative.

Great ideas IMO.  The traits as they stand could use some work because there are a lot of no brainers, and it typically only makes sense to make generalists, which is a shame.

Why make anything other than strong fast mounted tanks with awesome weapons?

Ugh, what?

• Strength is a good trait. What about muscle? Strength is good on units with lighter armour, for initiative bonus. NOT having strength would make the units even less unique. And I wouldn't suggest giving it to all units either, there are other options you can take to make sure you have enough carry weight and initiative.
• Use blood lust instead of precision and produce them from a fort instead. Moot point anyway. 2 allows for less flexibility at the same time as 4 would make your units all end up with the same perks.
• You don't want strength, then you want weapons to weigh more... The meta would shift to mages and ranged units (bows are light, but have high init penality mind you) so fast.
• The races definitely need more substance, but I think that's for a later expansion/DLC or content mod. I would like to see perks come from research as well.
• I don't like this idea at all. Traits and Bloods that add effects per level would become weaker than they already where. Why take Discipline over Precision when you're even less likely to get anywhere close to the 10 Precision provides despite having to work for it. Not to mention an army who managed to get a level advantage over another one would have an even BIGGER advantage, and it would become harder for another army to catch up.
• I guess I wouldn't mind another armour choice. you have a lighter option though magic tech. But I doubt I would use it anyway. Wooden/Lacquered armour could be okay, but nothing equivalent to a 'heavy' set, just different set of strengths.
• Actually I think they heal pretty slow. When I'm steam rolling I always cast regeneration on my vanguard. Specially when I'm taking on wild lands and getting attacked by a lot of enemies.

i disagree with pretty much everything listed here.

when it comes to making super archers, their traits are largely irrelevant compared to their jewellery. you can get about +10 damage from magic trinkets, iirc which is a lot more effective than anything traits can do.

I disagree with pretty much everything in the original post.  My units do not have the same traits, strength is present in only one of my three main lines of units, having fewer unit traits is really bad, etc, etc, etc...

The only thing I agree with is that we need a lot more racial traits.  Hell, take the amount of 'normal traits', add the same number of research-unlockable traits, and to that add the same amount of racial traits for each race... as long as we are wishing, and the developers have fixed all the bugs in the game.

It feels like the whole game was built around it but the implications weren't really taken into account. I mean, if there's going to be 5 different armor slots, then they should matter. For each piece of equipment, there should be a good answer to the following question:

-Why would the player use this piece instead of another?

-How much of a difference does it make in the game's picture?

From a point of view of gameplay depth, unit customization the way it was implemented adds little and has quite a few drawbacks compared to games like Age of Wonders II or HoMM 5/6.

When it comes to traits, a good design decision would have been to make most trait cost 0 and have all unit fill all their trait slots. It's not about whether or not they should have traits, it's which ones should a given unit have. Then, strength would have been less of a no-brainer, because it'd have been either strength, or +10 dodge, or critical hit, or magic resist, etc.

I disagree too.  In fact, I was about to propose to give one more trait (once new traits are added)...

I disagree too. I prefer more race specific traits and more versions of weapons and armor in more stages of the game. For example i wanted to make my Ythril only use axes but there is only one version of one-handed axe and one magic one-handed. And if i wanted to make a heavy hitting unit using a sword there is simply no sword at all at early stages, but only the last weapon tech (if i remember correct)

I think an issue with the unit designer is that the penalties for encumbrance is minor compared to the gains from more armor, at least for melee. A melee unit at 80% encumbrance (more armor) is almost always better than a unit with the same traits at 40% encumbrance and +2 initiative. This leads to armies that are dominated by melee troops with the heaviest possible armor, since they have superior or equal survivability in every scenario.

A possibility is to have encumbrance penalties for other stats, such as 10% hp penalty for medium and 20% for heavy. This will make lightly weighted units more effective against mage units/tactical spells/armor ignoring attacks/curse than their heavier counterparts.