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Originally Posted by Radio_Star
It looks like wardancers are going to be very hard to balance. Out of the box they are absurdly good at wasting your gold and giving the enemy xp, but that changes really, really, really fast. A little clever positioning of your excellent arrowcatchers helps out from turn 1. A W9 bless is pretty much a given with the sacreds as they stand, bringing dancers to a disturbing 21 defense and 22 mv... and 4 attacks a round. Admittedly, those 4 attacks are for low damage (except that now brutal first strike). Thankfully, you've got some earth access and can cast things like strength of giants which will proc 4 times a round instead of 1. Weapons of sharpness. Rust mist. Iron bane. You're still arrow bait, but you've got significant air magic. Arrow fend. Storm if you want. Mass flight? Fog warriors? All the classics work. Wooden warriors, elemental buffs, you name it, you can cast it.
In summary, you've got a lot of damage potential balanced by significant weaknesses, but you've got natural access to the paths to eliminate all your weaknesses and multiply the bejeezus out of your strengths. I like the multiple attack sacreds for thematic reasons, but the multiplicative effect when buffed looks tough to balance.
Highborn are .. unmounted with a lance and hoof attack? Mounted with an old graphic and mv value?
Again, loving the mod but I think it'd be healthy to have a good conversation about balance on the wardancers.
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I'll fix the highborn. I decided to switch them late in the game, so I didn't check everything exactly. Should be unmounted, when I get home I'll fix it.
Also, I'm not sure what to do about wardancers. I could conceivably cut earth magic from the regular elves, but I have no idea what to replace it with (and if I don't replace it with something, that would leave them with 1 major path, 1 medium strength path, and 1 very minor path). I was looking at them as essentially slightly better battle vestals (better stats, no shield), and almost everyone universally says the vestals are horrible. I could give them 2 weapons instead of 1 weapon with two attacks, which would make them hit less (but would make the charge more devastating). Alternately, I could remove the charge attack but just give a 1 use weapon that has higher damage (in the tabletop game, they get bonus strength, essentially damage, on the charge). Any suggestions would be welcome, i think they're pretty close in feel to the tabletop but not quite there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kianduatha
Ah, that seems much better. I think this is going to be a turmoil-luck nation, just for the glory of getting Orion second turn like I just did in my test game. Then he got Heroic Quickness, and after he soloed Bogus and Co. he got Boots of quickness. He was personally killing at least 150 units a battle.
Force of Natures have an attack sprite that is smaller than the normal sprite, so they look like they are doing squats or something. It is very silly.
Frankly I am terrified of Elf's lategame abilities. They have very odd stats, and that means other nations basically have to go through hoops to find counters to their stuff. And you never know whether Elves will teleport in thugs(though they thankfully don't seem to have a terribly good chassis for them until lategame), directly assassinate your commanders or bring in a seemingly invincible army buffed up beyond belief.
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I'll get on the Force of nature sprite when I get home. And I had hoped Orion was a bit weaker (although I guess getting the boots and heroic quickness helped). Although in the tabletop game he's pretty much unkillable in woods, and he is a demigod so I don't know if I want him too weak. Might need to cut him down a bit more though.
And I tried to match the feel from the tabletop. It's hard, since even though the vast majority of their troops lack armor, they aren't that easy to kill. It's just when something does hit them, they die horribly. I'm worried any strong buff to base units will make them too good, but if I hit the base units too much they will be worthless. I might could also work on magic paths (cut down on the air access?) to make everything not quite so easy. But at least in my testing I found getting much diversity hard, and the spellsingers to be pretty bad overall (which I intended). Research seems a problem, especially with no access to research boosters. And the spellweavers are already quite expensive (of course, from a lategame perspective the gold issue isn't much of one).