Making a thread to pull the information out of the disparate threads which have a different topic, but happen to mention swarm.
The swarm mechanic is a nice idea, but it needs some serious balance and limitations applied to it.
Due to swarm, a unit can attack up to 8-10 times in an initiative round now, thereby removing the 'wear heavy armour and do less overall damage' balancing act that FE had.
With swarm, units combine their attacks when (all assume the units are next to each other):
- a normal strike from an ally is taken
- a counter attack from an ally is taken
- when they themselves can attack
- when they are dazed or otherwise prevented from attacking
edit:
To bring up points from the thread -
the design is that swarm reduces the enemy defense (allows more damage), but there is code that shows +attack/ally. Both could be right, but otherwise it still fulfills the above statements.
The damage output from two armies in a line against each other is overly silly. Whomever strikes first is likely the one to win. Also, whomever still has that 1 HP unit still on the line is also gaining excess damage output.
I think the first thing to fix is to remove swarm boosters on counter attacks and when units are dazed/otherwise can't attack for some time. It's the dazed part that is a big issue, as you can rush in a bunch of hammer units, perform crushing blows with each of them, then have a spear/etc unit trigger a swarm attack with each unit that is supposedly dazed.
The likely next step is to trim down the swarm 'extra' damage being given.
