Initiative is a broken mechanic

Broken mechanic? Hyperbole. Initiative is huge but it's hardly so powerful that other stats are useless.

A difference of 7 initiative in the game is a significant advantage but will not necessarily equate to a 2 for 1 action ratio every turn. Also, your example of sword user versus maul user assumes low defense. Against armor of 30+, even longsword attacks by companies are hardly one-hit-kills. The maul user gets to crushing blow them next, and THAT can be a one-hit kill.

Look to the mongols - did their speed and range advantage possibly work out for them? Chariots, cavalry? Speed matters in ancient warfare.

Don't anchor your perception to just the games you played before. One could have a preference against this game, but saying this game "offers so many choices which are absolutely meaningless" is just a blithe dismissal.

I gotta go with the OP on this one.  not that initiative is "broken", but it is overall twice as important point for point as any other statistic in the game, hands down.

and i also agree that there are a lot of meaningless high level traits.  so many that I spent days modding them so they made more sense, even adding the features that come with mods like heroic pursuits.

no, a LOT of those original traits make no damn sense at all.  OP is absolutely 100% correct.

Calling it broken is a bit of a stretch but it's a valid point.

This is probably correct though yeah.

I like the whole initiative mechanic - including the fact that if you're fast enough you might get to have an action more often than a slower unit.  But it almost feels like it needs to be a bit more granular..... if the "base" initiative for everything was 40 (rather than 20) the difference in initiatives would be less significant and then other factors would come into play more (like weapon abilities, damage they can cause, etc).  That might work better?

Edit, more thoughts....

I guess the other way to make Initiative more granular (i.e. less dramatic impact) would be to:

i) reduce the difference in iniatives across the weapon types (so maybe your average sword is +1 init, axe +0, maul -1 that kind of thing)

ii) tweak unit design traits and items, eg. reduce "Fast" from +2 init to +1, or make Fast -2 init AND -10% attack or whatever so it has a drawback

That'd probably be another way to go that might help.

BTW if anyones interested there's a great explanation from tjashen on how (he thinks, and it sounds about right) Initiative works in reply #15 in this thread:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/445840/page/1/

@abob101: thanks for that link.

@davrovana: when my entire army can act once before yours, it doesnt matter at all wether or not one of my unit one-shots on the enemies. Thats ~40% of the enemy army dead with only using melee. Then they can act once, then my fast units act twice before them. 

And then come the heroes: Its the casters that make such a huge difference. Having 2 mages being able to cast before the enemy army and ADDITIONALLY have my other units act before results in such a roflstomp its not even funny anymore.

And i mean that. The game is just no challange anymore, which takes the fun out of it for me. Especially with fireball, earth grasp (is it called that?), blizzard, despair and whatnot OP spells I havent used yet.

Add a commander on top of that, who tells my mage to cast again before anyone has even a chance to pull out their weapons. 

Don't get me wrong, i see the use in maces and crushing blow. But even those units need as much initiative as possible. 
- equip mace
- soldiers boots
- every +init item you have

beats any other mace-setup any day. 

Have you tried upping difficulty? What level are you winning on?

Don't think so, Shockwave maybe?

Yeah in addition to my thoughts above, wouldn't hurt to scrap some of those + Init accessories and soldiers boots.

Also, have you tried playing against the units you've created?

So if you create a bunch or uber-unit designs with your favorite faction and then only use that faction, you have a big advantage because the AI is stuck with the default unit designs.  But given that the AI will use unit designs you create in future games... if you have played a bunch of factions and created (good) unit designs for them... the AI will be able to use them in future.

Also, maybe you might want to try DsRaiders AI+ mod or Blood & Mana mod, which have some improved unit designs for all factions and some AI tweaks.

AI+

https://forums.elementalgame.com/450634/page/3/#3475476

Blood & Mana

https://forums.elementalgame.com/451769/page/2/#3475863

Part of me disagrees with this.

I've made a request to have Crushing Blow ability nurfed to only 50% additional attack instead. (It's already been turned down...so this is mute)

In any case, the reason I made the suggestion is because I design troops with high initiative AND maces. Even if the opposing force has twice as many actions as me, all I need is one set of actions and the Crushing Blow ability destroys the opposing force.

Moral of the story: Extra actions don't help you if your dead.

Personally, I feel that the problem that the initiative system has is more that the minimum possible value (4) of initiative is too low relative to the maximum possible value (~32) (minimum and maximum values are for trained units fresh out of a fortress and including the potential bonus from Aura of Grace in the maximum; you can further modify values with Amarian Blood + fire shards, Slow/Haste, a Commander with at least one level of Tactician, Wraith Blood's Zealot trait - which despite being an 'as trained' value I've ignored because it costs you too much for what it gives you, or that Air spell that permanently boosts a target unit's initiative, and perhaps some other stuff that I'm forgetting). The ratio between the typical minimum value (10) and the typical maximum value (25-27) is also too great, as this ratio results in the fastest units acting 2.5-2.7 times more frequently than the slowest units (and this is more the difference between a unit in plate armed with a maul and a unit in chain armed with a sword, dependent on what traits you choose to go with the weapon/armor combination, rather than something silly like dagger + leather compared to plate + crossbow). A more reasonable initiative range, in my opinion, might put the maximum possible as-trained value at no more than twice the minimum as-trained value, so perhaps something like 12-24 or 15-30, with the base initiative value being perhaps 1.4 times the minimum (meaning that the maximum is about 1.4 times the base value).

The somewhat ironic thing is that the very spell that players use to further distort the initiative levels into their favor - Aura of Grace - has the potential to reduce the initiative disparity if only the computer would produce its units out of a fortress with two or three essence and enchanted with Aura of Grace rather than seemingly building units at random within its empire, even if we were to change nothing about how the initiative system works or increase the initiative for the default unit designs the computer factions use. A unit with 13 initiative instead of 10 is in a much better place relative to that 25-27 initiative unit the player has, even though it's still not in a great position, and the superior defense that the slow unit has might be sufficient to allow the army as a whole to make up for its lower average initiative.

The AI tends to use low initiative units, largely because of the unit designs it has available. Fix that, and large initiative disparities become more rare.

On higher difficulties, many "weak" monsters have their initiative ratings boosted well beyond 20. So monsters certainly don't have problems beating the inaitiative of your own units, if you play on expert world difficulty or higher.

Erm, we are all playing against the AI here.  The point of a discussion like this isn't to sling words it's to make suggestions to fix the problems or come up with alternative solutions.

Hulk smash!

 Sounds reasonable. I'll look into that.

I am currently on hard. Just finished my game last night (with patchwork mod) by doing the world quest or whatever. I got even one of my cities conquered there (then i conquered 6 of his)  - the enemy had superb units and tech.

Its just... my heroes alone pretty much killed anything in their wake.

It was mausolos, some commander, some mage, my souvereign (assasin) and that beggar dude. My whole team acted at least twice before any enemy unit most of the time (hello there albeix).

I never used celerity, so... 

The AIs army consisted about 50% of archers. Which are annoying, no doubt, but are no match for anything except militia.

Try expert/expert. AI will get bonuses but they are not dramatic bonuses, as on ridiculous and insane. By endgame archers willl likely have the ignys longbow, and can do serious damage.

Exactly, units produced in Forts are much tougher then normal. Even just Aura of Grace and the Strike Garrison make a huge huge difference. Until the AI starts building units from Fortresses with buffs their units will always be much weaker then players' and easy to kill.