Making leadership matter

[kianduatha]

Unfortunately I am fairly sure that what you propose is quite impossible to implement in a mod. The closest that can be managed is giving all national commanders a hefty Standard effect, but I'm not sure that would change anyone's behavior.

Traditionally the solution to "making leadership matter" is to simply run NI games to force players to use national commanders.

[fantasma]

Originally Posted by thejeff

True. Most of the spell effects seem overpowered though. Other than maybe on expensive capital only commanders.

Might be a nice concept to base a mod nation around.

You think a single cast of sermon of courage at the start too powerful? If it were iron warriors or body ethereal, then yeah, maybe. But then again there is always a price.

[thejeff]

Not sermon, though I'd rather use Standard for that.

The other suggestions, Strength of Giants and Legion of Steel would be a bit much, I think. At least as an add on to an already balanced nation. As I said, a mod nation balanced around such troop boosts would be interesting.

I also don't think the small AoE effects, like Iron Warriors or Body Ethereal fit very well. They're most likely to affect the command and/or a couple of others and would probably be used to boost thugs rather than normal troops, which misses the intent. I'd rather see larger area, lesser effect, even if the total effect is more powerful.

[LDiCesare]

Standard's about the solution to the issue, if it exists.
The problem is that leaders you send to do the fighting (thugs) tend to die, so you have to rely on others leading the troops. There's little way of changing that.

However, I strongly disagree with the proposition that there's never a lack of leaders.
If you manage to trap an army somewhere and assassinate its leader, you may pin it for quite a while by repeatedly killing whatever commander is recruited in that province before he can move (through a combo of assassins, seeking arrows, earth attacks...). This doen't happen very often, but when you can paralyze an army without nearby commanders, you can reap a huge tactical advantage.

[WraithLord]

I repeat my suggestion, perhaps clearer. To make it worth while to recruit national commanders give them a retinue upon recruit. It's not a novel idea, I saw it in one of WH mods. It's a nice perk and has the psych. effect to encourage the player to recruit a commander.
Ex. recruit an emerald lord, get 1-5 emerald guards depends on dom strength, only once, only when recruited.

[Squirrelloid]

commanders who cast #onebattlespells are an interesting idea actually...

[rdonj]

The biggest problem with the idea is that there's no way to mod spells to affect only "human" or "atlantian" units. So any commander you have is going to be exactly as good for any units you have. Giving commanders sermon of courage isn't too bad, but you have to be careful to not make priests superfluous. Then you run into problems like it not being possible to give +attack skill modifiers below +4, or defense without quickness. Things like that. So the number of things you could give these commanders would necessarily be very limited, or very powerful. There's no real in-between.

[fantasma]

I didn't find a list of possible spell effects beyond the limited table in the modding manual. Do you have any?

In case of too powerful, you can always increase gold cost and then you still don't recruit a mage.

[llamabeast]

I can help out with resources for spell modding if you're interested. But basically, you can do any effect which any spell currently in the game does, but you can't do any new ones. For example, there are spells which increase strength (and MR, and attack) by 4, so you can do that. But you can't increase strength by 3.

[thejeff]

You can also change range and AoE, right? So you could make a spell that did +4 str in a 10 AoE centered on the caster. Can you then make that a #onebattlespell? I have some vague memory of only being able to do that with existing spells.