Yes, and magical resistance is trivial to overcome. If you are going to be playing a beastlord, you are going to design your sovereign for it, right?  I know I did. 

This means, brilliant for a total +3 penetration(spell mastery) per level and attuned for the early mana boost.  Then use all the penetration items you find, and cast "Meditation" on your cities. Robes that reduce your tactical costs, emerald caps which raise your penetration, path of the mage at level 4. Soon enough you have 3% chance of failure, and need less than 20 mana per cast. 

The rewards from a beastlord are so great, it's A-OK to design your strategy around it as soon as you scout 10 tiles in two directions to see what is available.  Sure, if there's nothing really worth it, you go assassin and use "Inspiration" and "Enchanted hammers" instead of "Meditation".  But if you see great wolves, umberdroths and hoarders, nothing prevents you from picking them up with no risk.  You just wait for the right penetration and enough mana, and collect them.

Guys, I have done it twice, and I gave up on the build.  I didn't do it because I found it too weak, that's for sure.

Sorry Trojasmic, I really don't want to break the fun. But Chiarden came with a nice solution:

Beasts are untamed if they leave the Sovs's army.

This puts a logical limit to the number of tamed beasts: attach the number of tamed beasts to the army size...

I find this coul be a reasonable limit, and is plenty of sense: no mana for upkeep (so BL is different than a magician) but the beastlord is somehow attached to the tamed beasts. They will follow him forever, untill BL replaces them. If they leave the army, the next turn tame disappears, and they will attack.

Yeah, I like this.

I will not talk about the XP, but it should be removed to avoid a tame/untame game...

This is a great solution, and I would love to see it. Unfortunately, like everything but the upkeep idea, it will require quite a bit of extra hardcoding to handle. 

This comes to be an interesting option too. Thinking about it, I would change the threshold to mmm...25 HP?

This way, low beasts are tamed without need of attacking them (and probably kill them...bye bye fun)

For medium beasts, one or two hits might be needed, and big beasts would require a proper army to deal with, and more strategy to keep them (and yourself) alive and ready for the tame. A fair price to pay for a big beast.

I'll add it to the list

I agree at 25HP.  The main reason I was thinking about this, is because I remember how fun it is to board capital ships in X3 because you need to be very careful about how much damage you are doing to the ship in question. I could see getting great satisfaction on taming an Obsidian Golem or something by slowly wittling down its health but trying to keep it alive even while it is attacking you, so you can take control in the end. 

Beta.  There was a time when acrobat was 3 and then 2 dodge per level, dodge I/II/III were significantly higher, and fortify was 30.  Heroes leveled much faster and went to 30-40 on large maps, and it was trivially easy to have untouchable heroes by turn 50.

This is a turn 62 guy in .915, and this was after the first reduction of dodge. He could get 88 once he fortified, which made him untouchable for trained troops.

Yes, Bandit Lord does indeed create a vacuum 

I am playing one now but I had a good start in  a corner to set me up despite the handicap...

as far as expanding the tech tree ....

"Allies" as the first, which includes Mercenaries for all, and Wildlings/Darklings for Empires.

Then it splits into "Strong Allies" and "Reptilian Kin"

Strong Allies gives you either Knights of Asok for Kingdoms or Trolls n Ogres for Empires.

Reptilian Kin gives you Najas/Ophidians ... and possibly Slags/Skathi (Skaths might even be mountable?)

Then, IF we are able to have an OR pre-req ... have either Strong Allies OR Reptile Allies lead into Dance with Dragons ...

if not, then make it off of Reptile Allies only.

I really liked that Serpent-Blood race in the early beta, or what was it ... the one that allowed you to build Naja and Ophidians if you captured their lair

That would be awesome!

I must confess, I have no idea how basic HP reg is calculated exactly but a beast with 20/100HP feels like I need a rest for 5 turns (epic). Healing it during an easy combat might work but thats 10 heals (maybe 8 with enough shards) resulting in something like 50-100 mana...  1 mana/turn upkeep doesnt sound so bad anymore

Unlike the aliens in XCOM beasts in FE (at least the better ones) are quite limited and accidently crit-/maul-killing an umberdroth would realy be a shame. Also unlike in XCOM there is no hunker-down option to pass a turn without counterattacking.

But I guess the most importent point why I dont like the idea is that this is about taming a beast so that it will join your side in the next battle not stunning an enemy to drag him into a holding cell for interregation. Somehow it feels wrong to start your new alliance by beating your future friend almost (or accidently) to death. When I first saw the profession I was glad that it was a beastlord instead of a beastmaster and that the skill was called taming not enslaving otherwise I hadnt even tried it becasue if I want to play an evil slaver there are better options (or worse? well more evi onesl ).

The idea was to come up with something to keep the chance for fail taming to fail higher in the past sov lvl 10, right?

We have:

chance to resist = sell mastery - spell resistance

How about:

chance to resist = base spell mastery + (spell mastery - base spell mastery)*1/beast lvl - spell resistance

Now the higher the beasts lvl the more of your boni for spell mastery you loose, In fact as long as you stick to beasts of your lvl the +3 spell mastery/lvl gets reduced to a fix 3 (total of 73)  and only additional traits (prodigy) and items will bring you above 73 but also with reduced effect.

Not sure if that is doable without hardcoding though. 

Beastlord has some balancing problems, but the drastic solutions presented here would just make it too much effort to bother with anymore.

At the moment it isn't possible to immediately scoop up the most powerful creatures because Tame has a range of 1. That Hoarder Spider, and especially that Umberdroth with all that Initiative, will tear your Sovereign in half like a sheet of paper when you hit the desired range (or more likely, when the beast in question reaches you first). In the former case, at lower levels the spiderling entourage will happy do that job whilst you have the Hoarder webbed up or dazed, and thus requires a decent screening force to splat them before you can make a try for the prize. It can take some specific setup and tactics in order to be getting a hold of decently powerful beasts early on.

With the setup and dedicated intention required for a Beastlord to do its thing, I can also create a sovereign that is pretty much functionally unstoppable by using trained armies of spear-wielding Defensive bastards, or fireballing everything to death, or pooping out a load of Shieldmen, or whatever.

Beastlord needs a smaller tweak to help deal with the snowball effect of minor beasts leading to ruddy great Hoarder spiders and the like, but make the whole thing too much effort and it won't be played anymore.

I could go with the requirement that beasts have less than some amount of health or some percentage of maximum health before they can be tamed, but I don't like the idea of attaching a mana upkeep to creatures (particularly not one which depends on the level of the creature). What that amount of health or percentage of maximum health should be, I don't know. I think I'd rather have a percentage-based system for the 'you can attempt to tame this' threshold rather than a fixed amount of health, although if this is done there probably should be some set amount of health below which you can try to tame the beast regardless of the health percentage.

I could also go with the difference between the Beastlord's level and the Beast's level providing some sort of modifier for spell success chances.

That being said, I'd sooner see it left alone than see many of the changes suggested in this thread.

Lets fix this problem and the Influence is meaningless problem and make beasts cost influence a turn

.. Nah. But Beastlord can go either way. One of the worst things for a beastlord is 'low monster spawn rate'

Personally, I prefer Silver tongue myself. .. Stealing your troops right out from your armies.