I am of the opinion that either the number of horses/wargs you get per turn should be decreased or their cost for trained units should be increased. Currently, if you build even a single stables, you will have so many horses that by turn 100 you won't even care anymore about your horse number (and you can trade them to AI without a source of horses for absurd amounts of money). No other resource is like this - crystal is in dire supply almost all the time, and is exceedingly hard to get in decent quantities, and metal is only about half the problem (as it is much easier to use up).
Right now, every single game ends up with a surfeit of wargs or horses in your inventory and they're so plentiful that a single source can supply your entire army forever. If it's not like that for crystal or even metal, this seems unbalanced.
I dislike the fact that this means that once you get a source of horses, there is no reason to build foot soldiers ever again for any reason, because putting your units on horses has absolutely no downside, material or otherwise.
I like the idea of both reducing the amount of horses/wargs gained and having an income cost (in horses) associated to the created units. This could either be a hard cap per resource (i.e. one horse pasture supports 'x' horse units) or a continuous drain. The second option rolls both solutions in to one, as having a horse units cost .02 horses/turn as upkeep creates a cap (that can be temporarily surpassed if you have an abundance of horses/wargs) and also reduces the horse/warg income as the player builds more horse/warg units.
So yeah, would love to see a horse/warg special upkeep for mounted units. It is silly that you reach a point where everything is mounted and infantry pretty much cease to exist.
^ This.
Imo, an excellant way to address the issue.
But this should resolve in late game. Also, there will always be city militia.
it could/should also take considerably longer to train cavalry (increase their production cost?). I think that would be somewhat realistic and cut down on the availability of mounts using existing game mechanics (in addition to reducing the number of mounts from resource nodes, which I support).
I really think the easiest solution is maintenance. In this way it can be tweaked and modded easily.
This is another thing that bugs me. Training up a cavalry squad takes a comparable time to an infantry squad. Now, this just doesn't make any sense to me - in addition to all the drills and maneuvers and such that your mounted units have to go through (just like your infantry), they need to learn to do all of these things on a horse! Some additional labour cost should be required.
SBFMadDjinn's suggestions above do seem good to me. I have always thought the bonus structure on mounts was a bit off.
Well this has been done to death and it would be quite encouraging if the devs would respond one way or another. The resource production would have to be reduced significantly so that it was actually a practical limit. Something like 0.1 horses per turn at 1st level, and 0.25 at higher levels. No need to double up and require 2 horses per cavalryman, that is just confusing.
Good ideas here about increasing armor capability of wargs, horses, warhorses (in that order).
Also like that Cav can't defend and are vulnerable to spears. All this needs to be tempered by the devs and fit in with their other combat plans (hope there are other changes to come).
I agree. Food upkeep would make sense.
I suggest a resource cost increase for horse 10 horses per unit. It costs 30 pop for pioneer (3 people represented), why not 30 horse for (3 calvary represented)
I think that it would be balanced if mounted units would get:
+ 2 initiative (horse) or + 5 initiative (warg)
+ 2 movement (horse) or + 1 movement (warg)
- 20 dodge vs. melee and ranged attacks (horse and warg)
Charge: + 3 movement and + 40 dodge vs. melee and ranged attacks for 1 turn, cooldown: 2 turns (horse) or 4 turns (warg)
upkeep cost will balance everything.
for random noobs who post about skath and spider mounts - you cant set this mounts for units, this champion only feature.
single stable shoud provide horses\wargs for only one stack of units, if you want second mounted stack, you need one more horse\warg resource location.
champtions shoud not cost any upkeep, this will make champions significantly stronger and will return infantry back to game.
Mounts need some downside, so that you want a mix of units. Classically infantry holds the line, and calvary charges. I'd think that's a good basis for how the units roles should be defined.
I would try to do stuff like the following:
- make infantry the only units able to have "guarded" status. The theory being mounted units do not actively defend or hold the line. Calvary stays out of combat with superior speed if they don't want to be engaged.
- give mounted units very high dodge versus ranged units any time they move 3+ tiles away from their location last turn. The theory being they are moving around, they are hard for ranged to shoot at. They lose the bonus if they aren't moving.
- Do NOT give large initiative bonuses for being mounted; rather give reduction to initiative penalties from wearing plate/chain. I.e. we don't want a a mage wearing leather armor getting 2-3 times as many turns just because he's on a mount; but we do want heavy plate wearer to not be penalized as much when on mount.
- give mounted melee a penalty for attacking infantry units holding melee weapons stacked two rows deep. Calvary doesn't like to charge direclty into formation.
- give mounted ranged weapons a 25% penalty to accuracy; its harder to fire a well aimed shot from a horse or worg. Besides ranged should be slow; gives infantry something to protect and calvary something to mow down. Plate and chain should effect both accuracy and initiative of ranged weapons.
- give maces a chance to dismount. Currently all mounted units are 100% immune to prone, and currently everything is mounted by mid game, denying maces a chance to use their passive effect. If dismounted, unit should suffers large initiative penalty until next turn, in addition to being prone and losing mount for remainder of battle.
This is exactly what I have been thinking with the addition of adding a limiting factor to the total number of horses supportable this would greatly balance mounted units.
Actually, this is a really fantastic idea. I think it would help balance out mounted units a little bit, as it would give them a downside. As many people, myself included, have pointed out, currently mounted units have no downside. This is silly. Fix!
I would really rather not have a resource cost upkeep. There would be so many complications with that approach. I would need the option to be able to discard or cap the resource if I am being charged too much.
Still in agreement with SBFMadDjinn for how to implement the fix...
yeah, there's no need to give upkeep costs a whack when an easy to do solution is right in front of you. Start with that, and then move to more complicated items if it's not helping.
sxyz123 has a couple idea's that are complimentary to my list, but a few might not work too well:
So basically boost mounted with the double swarm bonus, but only if there's infantry there? Seems a bit of a push/force to have mixed units, but does make a little sense.
I'd disagree with this thought line. Cavalry will charge where I tell it to, and that's right into a formation (as all units are formations). Plus, it's metagaming exploitable.
This I can agree with, given that there's traits and commanders to boost accuracy. Though, I don't know anyone that plate armours (or any actually) an already slow ranged unit (bow has the big initiative penalty).
This I don't like as it's not really true in any sense. Ie, If I swing a hammer at someone on horseback, I'm more likely to kill them than dismount them (or kill them while dismounting them). If anything, the mounted unit should count as an easier target to hit for hammer units ->give them increased accuracy vs. mounted.
But maybe to keep it simple, hammer units can 'daze' mounted units, instead of making them prone.
Keeping in mind that not every single weapon type needs to work vs. mounted and vice versa. I'd be ok if spears are the pro anti-mounted units while maces are the pro anti-infantry units. Swords get counter attacks (vs. anything but spears and special attacks) and axes get splash/multi-target hits.
Also keep in mind when talking about mounts that they aren't all the exact same. There are Horses, WAR Horses and Wargs. WAR Horses should be better than either horses or wargs, given that it's a trait choice to have them. We need to balance out the actual mounts as well, which can bring them in-line with infantry types at the same time (but they should ALWAYS be better, just in different ways).
In the real world infantry does (did?) have a defense against cavalry. They formed a hollow square.
A reasonable change would be to give infantry extra defense against (non-ranged) cavalry when equipped with pikes.
I admit spears are more "anti cavalry in a realistic sense. But spears got so many bonuses already -- armor piercing, immune to counter attack, multi-target impale ability and kraxis has one handed ones.
As for realism of maces knocking you off a horse.... Yah, its a little unreal for a foot soldier to probably do it, since he's so low to the ground. On the other hand, if the other guy is swinging a mace or flail also on horse back, those were great weapons for forcing the other off his horse - it would depend on the height they are swung at to force a dismount. But anyhow, my suggestions are more based around my perception of balance than realism.
Maces were historically really good against heavy armor, because they created impact hits that affected you even in your armor. And the sharp points on the ends, e.g. the spikes on flails were good at puncturing armor because of all the weight behind them. But spears got pierce attack, in this rock/paper/scissors division of weapons in game.
yeah, I somewhat agree that spears seem to be a little much without encumbrance around to balance things.
With encumbrance, you needed horses to get extra capacity to fit the heavy armour (in game), without it, there's not a nice benefit.
With the other changes happening as well, I'd be very happy to switch over the spears bonus vs. armoured to the mace. But that's a little off topic.
This is kind of all I meant. I just want SOMETHING to be good against mounts so I have some justification for not making everything on horse/wargback.
I would support each horse and warg resource only giving 0.25 per turn and then having a very late boost to 0.5 per turn. Although 0.2/0.4 per turn might be worth trying, as with one resource you would have only 20 mounts produced each 100 turns until late in the game, drastically reducing how much cavalry you could have.
I also agree with having a very big increase in maintenance cost for mounted units on top of normal maintenance costs - probably in gildar as it just gets too complicated if you need horses (for example) and you run out of horses when you have horse-mounted units already in the field.
The real issue is too many horses/wargs that are too inexpensive to maintain/train.
Cavalry training is traditionally expensive/time-constraining.
I would try to do stuff like the following: - make infantry the only units able to have "guarded" status. The theory being mounted units do not actively defend or hold the line. Calvary stays out of combat with superior speed if they don't want to be engaged.- give mounted units very high dodge versus ranged units any time they move 3+ tiles away from their location last turn. The theory being they are moving around, they are hard for ranged to shoot at. They lose the bonus if they aren't moving.- Do NOT give large initiative bonuses for being mounted; rather give reduction to initiative penalties from wearing plate/chain. I.e. we don't want a a mage wearing leather armor getting 2-3 times as many turns just because he's on a mount; but we do want heavy plate wearer to not be penalized as much when on mount.- give mounted melee a bonus for flanking an enemy adjacent to a friendly infantry unit. Encourages unit mix.- give mounted melee a penalty for attacking infantry units holding melee weapons stacked two rows deep. Calvary doesn't like to charge direclty into formation.- give mounted ranged weapons a 25% penalty to accuracy; its harder to fire a well aimed shot from a horse or worg. Besides ranged should be slow; gives infantry something to protect and calvary something to mow down. Plate and chain should effect both accuracy and initiative of ranged weapons.- give maces a chance to dismount. Currently all mounted units are 100% immune to prone, and currently everything is mounted by mid game, denying maces a chance to use their passive effect. If dismounted, unit should suffers large initiative penalty until next turn, in addition to being prone and losing mount for remainder of battle.
I agree with these points
- make infantry the only units able to have "guarded" status
- give mounted units very high dodge versus ranged units any time they move 3+ tiles away from their location last turn.
- Do NOT give large initiative bonuses for being mounted; rather give reduction to initiative penalties from wearing plate/chain.
- give mounted ranged weapons a 25% penalty to accuracy;
In addition to those I would do the following to fix mounted units from being the only sane choice and encouraging a good unit mix
-as numerous people have said, decrease the amount of horses/wargs that comes from a node. I think a 50% reduction would be good
-increase labor cost for using horses or wargs by 25-50%
- remove armor piercing from spears and instead give it to maces.
- give dismounted units with spears a 50% bonus against mounted units
-add in a new defensive trait to counter charge. Call it steadfast or dug in or something. 20 labor cost. Adds 3 or maybe 5 armor on the first turn and gives ANY weapon +1 counter attack on the first turn
Agree indeed.
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