I cannot understand the reason for this design decision. It seems to add needless complexity and discomfort for the player without being fun or making any sense.
First, the making sense part. Champions are people who become developmentally handicapped in the presence of other champions. They are smart as a whip sitting back and letting 6 squads dismantle the opposition, taking notes and learning the ways of uber-pwnage. But with two champions, what happens, is there only one pen and paper for the entire squad? Do they have to take turns writing and split up each other's notes afterwards?
I know this rule was instituted when it was discovered that champions were so powerful that you could beat the game with them without ever building units. This strategy offended those in power long ago, and since then champions were neutered with exp split, general exp decline, and spiced up with that just three to six crummy levels til I get the cool ability feeling. At the same time, units got an extreme buff, and now you can beat the game easily without ever using a champion (or having a champion be useful), but there is no outcry. What gives there?
Now there is the effect on the player. Players have to build an army for each champion, or resign themselves to just having fancy backstories to their unrest reduction in some city. The player must manage these multiple armies, which will never have enough map to level them all, all the while wondering, is this how Peter Venkman felt when Egon told him to never cross the streams? I mean you CAN use them together to win that hard battle (maybe against a giant marshmallow man), with all that juicy exp... which gets split up to the point its just one more stride on the long mile to level 10 or 12, or whatever level a champion actually will feel heroic at. Fellow champions are each other's kryptonite, which makes it a difficult strategic decision whether to use them together, but it's like a choice between crummy or crummier to the player.
This forces a player who knows the split exists to play with far more micromanagement and complexity in the hope, in my experience in vain anyway, that your heroes will eventually be, you know, heroic. I mean make it to the level ups that are fun (the ones that aren't +1-3 to a stat that doesn't make much difference). Players who don't know it exists will just wonder "why are the trees so long"?
I know this is a negative post, but hey, I strongly feel this is a bad decision through and through. The game will be better and more friendly and logical to every newbie, at the least. But I think it may even make people who are strategy diehards have fun teaming up heroes without having to worry about fighting 2-5 times as many battles to get where almost no champion but the sovereign gets in a normal game now. It makes sense and it is a fun, simple strategy to band champions together, and it is bad design to discourage logical, simple, fun gameplay. It is not unthinkable there was another way to encourage more complex gameplay without killing the fun rpg parts of the game or forcing players to juggle making and using many armies.
Btw, I think the game is great and should get deep and wide acclaim, but I think decisions like this endanger it to a possible dilution with "meh" because it doesn't pander to the most visceral and powerful source of fun in games with rpg aspects, the ego identification with heroes and the player's character. I have posted about this before, but basically every game that has ruled this genre has been at best a decent strategy game suped up with a fat layer of ego satisfaction. I think this is a great strategy game that has been drowning out its own ego attraction in the name of balance.
@parrotmath:
I wasn't saying the quest locations should reset instantly. I was saying that perhaps after a few seasons or years (depending on the quest location type - higher-difficulty quest locations should take longer to reset than easier quest locations, and an inn that just had a hard quest should take longer to get its next semi-random difficulty quest than an inn that spawned an easy quest, and possibly include a failure penalty in the reset time) the quest location (which hopefully would have stayed on the map all this time) would get a 'new' quest that you could take (or not) as you wanted. Preferably, this would be at least somewhat randomized, and would also still leave Altar as the only default faction with on-demand quests. Then we could have a smaller number of these resetting quest locations spawn on map generation, and more monster lairs or one-time-only quest locations. Plus, you could then make it so that certain quests have a chance to destroy the quest-spawner, rather than there being little real difference between saying "yes, I will save this inn from the fire snakes attempting to destroy it" and "no, I'm getting out of here - I just remembered important business at the capitol that I need to take care of ..."
But this isn't really something I expect to see show up in the game. Rather, it's just something that kind of bothers me - I go around 'helping' random people ... and apparently burn down a whole bunch of inns while doing so. It'd be fine even if these just became purely decorative (but preferably destructible, if I decide to remove them) map features after clearing the quest, really, since it's more of a feeling of "where did everyone go? I cleared out a Sand Golem from the area and people move away? I killed a dragon here and the inn closes?"
I can mod in these suggestions into the game, so you could see it in the game if you would like. But it would definitely require a lot more quests to be made...
What I'm going to write into the game is randomly infinite spawning monster lairs... just figuring the appropriate mechanics for this and make it difficult enough, but not too easy either.
If you are going to add quest markers that replenish, why not tie them to city buildings? Instead of trecking out to an inn or workshop in the middle of nowhere, have certain buildings in cities trigger quests. A pop up could appear indicating "Rumors abound in the city of _______", and this would enable to a new option to heroes stationed in the city called "Investigate" or "Quest". The difficulty of these could be tied to city level or building improvement level (workshop to mason, for example).
This would encourage heroes to travel home, strengthen ties to a city, and provide a convenient way to measure what level quests are appropriate to give.
This can be done as well in the current system of the game if you so desire. Given the current system you can set it up so that when you build an "inn" in your city it will spawn quests every so often for you to investigate via a rumormill type situation. But again this would require people to make a lot more quests because 80 +35 is just not enough to handle this load of quests.
No, I choose challenging. Always.
It's unusual I agree. I caught him pants down in the countryside ; he had an army a little inferior to mine. (one militia, one speraman vs 2 spearmen I think) ; and the game did pop his capital city quite close to mine. I say turn 30,it might have been turn 40, but it happened very very early.
I just had to rush to his city after my victory.
I don't use such tactics ; but I think the idea is smart and not unfair. The AI has other advantages that are unfair, such as total awareness (won't let me pass through his territory when I may not even see that some of his units are corssing mine.) Furtermore, I've seen monsters ignore AI units fairly often. They never forget me! Yves
...
Moreover, level 10 really is fairly low-level. The trait trees are designed so that each class has at least 25 traits available to it, plus 9 general traits and 4 spellbook levels per magic type. A mid-level champion should be somewhere in the 15-20 range (maybe a little higher, even) rather than the 7-12 range with that number of available traits. High-level champions (champions who have more or less all of the traits available to them) being rare is fine - I'm not asking for the ability to have every single champion have every single trait - but having more or less all the champions in a game only scratching the surface of their chosen class, and only a handful of champions even coming close to filling out their chosen specialization within their class, doesn't make the champions feel 'legendary' to me. If the trait trees were broad rather than deep, I could at least experiment a bit more with various champions and have each of them feel a bit different, with their own specializations even if they all have the same class, rather than the current system where all champion classes have essentially two lines of development available, with generally short branches that begin deep into the tree.
ok. i see your point. you think the tree has to be filled. i disagree with that. i tend to view the trees as open end. a lazy implementation would have been to just have one tree for each path and everyone can reach the end. the way the trees are shaped, there are multiple (many, actually) ways to move through the trees. aim for the high tier traits, pick up several low tier items, combine path traits with magic spellbooks. all of those options can be viable, depending on what you actually want to use this hero for.
in my opinion, you can't measure "low" level or "mid" level by comparing the levels to the amount of traits in the tree. this may work for other games with more linear trees, but it's quite obvious to me that this isn't the case for this game. i like most of the trees in FH, because they have several viable routes each. you won't fill out the whole tree in one playthrough, you can try a different route next time. i think replayablilty is a big strength of that game, and the tree structure adds to this.
the other thing is that "legendary" is subjective. my champions sure feel legendary to me when they root out that ignis lair 5 tiles away from my capital long before i could have done this with trained units alone, or when they slay a dragon that's going to raze one of my cities. or when they conquer a wildland. it's a matter of perspective, i guess. not really something you can discuss.
i don't think i actually have to explain the properties of dragons. just look them up if you don't know. in short - no, trained units can't deal with dragons. not at the stage of the game when your heroes are level 7, at least. later probably, but that's totally beside the point. can't tell that dragon to wait 100 turns so i can later roflstomp it with companies of mounted pikemen. why would i even want to do that? part of the fun (to me, anyway) is doing the encounters while they are challenging. i'm aware that it's often not necessary. you can, for the most part, just turtle and build up until your troops are strong enough to clear the monsters. but where's the fun in that? you want legendary heroes? use them and do legendary stuff.
Alright this is something I have been pondering overnight and here are my thoughts on it. There are two main questions concerning trained versus heroes as far as I can tell.
What makes a hero heroic, or put differently, what makes it different from a trained unit?
Secondly,
If a unit of trained troops count as a single entity then shouldn't the xp reduction for trained troops reflect that there are three units within such that instead of 50% of total xp shouldn't it be a 33% of total xp to be gained since it is being split three ways initially?
Finally here is a tertiary point that is related to the questions above; since units get their xp split (50% for a unit of 3) but then between units the xp is not split this suggests a system of non split but sub division such that if a unit of trained troops is supposed to stand equal to heroes eventually or possibly superior.
interesting questions (regarding the troops). i think they didn't put that much thought into the XP system for troops. probably because it has a lot less impact then XP for heroes. troops don't compete with heroes due to the levels they may have gained. a level 10 spearman unit is still weak, even though it may now have ~50 HP instead of the initial ~25 and 70 accuracy instead of the original 60. it's the tech upgrades that make the troops powerful, their level just makes them a bit tougher (which is to some extent negated by tech advancement, considering that later on you also unlock a few items that add extra HP to new units and buildings that make them start at a higher level)
Another idea to add to the pile.
Rather than distributing the XP across the whole army for every battle, give it to the unit (be it troops or a hero) which needs it most (in order to gain a level). If need be, add a button in the victory screen to allow manual distribution.
That way, instead of every unit levelling slowly, by default one of them is quickly brought up to the same grade as the rest of the army.
@Azunai_It is funny the way we look at the game and how different our view points are. When I attack an AI city and one shot kill his heroes with my troops. They don't seem all that heroic. A level 7 Hero has only had 5 levels of development (pick class at 2) and the first three or four levels of that is selecting bonus XP traits, though I'm guessing you don't do that. To me, they are just getting started, but you see them as godly because they can help clear an ignis lair, even though you could have done the same thing with standard troops easier. Note that I'm not saying my way is right and yours wrong, I'm just pointing out the differences. You see the scaled up difficulty as fun, where as I see the scaled up difficulty as cumbersome because the difficulty was a by product of unintended consequences. Life is truly funny sometimes.
So what I am seeing over and over again is that the bonuses given for initial training override levels and experience for troops thereby negating the levels gained by experience gained either by troops or heroes until heroes reach a critical mass point depending on their specific class. Each class has a different point where they become more powerful than troops, some do it faster, summoners, whereas some take much longer defender/assassin. Does this pretty much sum the problem up? I think it does, because with xp going to both champs and trained and your trained troops basically not needing levels only new improvements to training methods it makes your champions somewhat useless later in the game.
No, I think that the branch of the tree your champion is specialized in should be able to be mostly filled at mid-level, and after that the champion doesn't really need to progress further, although it could occasionally be nice to have a very powerful champion with a more or less completely filled trait tree even if it comes at the expense of the development of other champions. Instead, we have the ability to mostly fill the specialization branch of one of our champions at the expense of the development of our other champions, or just begin specializing multiple champions.
It's fine if it takes a lot of effort to completely fill the trait tree, but champions more or less stop developing around level 10 or 12, depending on how many you are trying to develop and how much experience is available, and at that point they've barely touched their specializations. Making things worse, the specialized branches of the trait trees tend to be deep and narrow, meaning that all the champions who specialize in something similar end up having mostly identical traits, because there are either no branches to take, or the branches are very short, or the branches only start high up in the tree. It's even worse for your champions if you take anything from the general tree, because the Potential traits don't cover themselves until you'd normally be level 16 or higher and the other traits, while useful for your champion, don't really add anything special or particularly useful (not including developing magic abilities).
At level 10, if you've completely focused a champion on developing one branch of their class tree, you have filled about half to two-thirds of that branch. This makes it feel like the sort of trade-off a low-level character makes - you can drop all of your generalist abilities to get halfway through a specialization, or you can have your general abilities and barely scratch the surface of the specialization - rather than the sort of trade-off a mid-level character makes, where you can drop all of your generalist abilities to more or less completely filling out a specialization, or you can have generalist abilities and get about half-way through your specialization.
How much more linear are the trait trees in those games you're playing? Each of the classes has two, or sometimes three, specialization branches, which either barely branch until you've invested half the levels you're going to have into the specialization, or which have a handful of stubs that don't go anywhere. For that matter, to some degree I'd prefer a lot of short (say, five or six traits), very linear branches to what we currently have - branches 8 traits deep with four or five additional traits strung off of them in random spots, which mostly require the same set of traits to be taken to get to in the first place - because at least then I could start to mix and match pieces of them. Right now, unless I take Tactician at sovereign creation, all my field commanders get Leadership I-III before they can really start to differentiate (and Trainer isn't really that appealing of an alternative to moving through Leadership IV to Tactician, anyways). Governor commanders have a nice variety of choices available, but I don't really want a legendary governor - I want a legendary hero. Damage and curse mages can mix up traits reasonably well, but summoner mages are more or less stuck with one track and the choice between skeletons or high-end summons. Assassins look like they have a nicely branched tree, but dodge bonuses are only really useful early on, and unless I get a good weapon in loot (or pay the ridiculous sums of gold for something from the shop) critical hits are only really keeping the assassin at best on par with the damage dealt by regular troops, and the assassin is generally more fragile than regular troops anyways, and while Executioner might be nice, champions aren't hard enough to kill to make it very useful. Warriors have two very linear lines of development and a bunch of weapon specializations, but weapon specializations are very loot-dependent in utility, the utility of the counterattack bonus is dependent on what you're facing, and the bonus for Mighty Blow is dependent on being able to make use of that ability without over-exposing your warrior to the opposing army, which can depend greatly on the random initial positioning you're stuck with at the start of a battle. And as for Defenders, magic isn't generally a significant enough threat from the AI and monsters to make the spell resistance branch worthwhile (and the spell resistance line also doesn't grant access to plate armor), while the Healer branch is tiny and the Defender branch has only tiny side-branches (which are often only marginally useful).
hm ok. your points are reasonable. i just have a different view of the level expectation. you get enough level ups to beeline to the end of one of the long trait lines, or you can mix and match other perks that seem more useful to you. also, don't forget the spellbooks - they are - in a way - an alternate tree for the paths (though some combinations seem fairly weak and don't really work out - for example, a warrior with water spellbooks).
an example would be a warrior with earth spellbook (i currently play a game where i'm playing around with one of my champs to try that out) - you
can pick up lethal and sword spec, then go for chain armor and aim towards plate (which you may or may not reach); use him as a tank that can kill with his buffed up counter attacks (sword & board)
or you specialize him in killing troops and go for bruiser+decimate
or you stick to the lower tree and make him a deadly "glass cannon" with weak survivability (blade rush, then reap and eventually bloodthirsty and/or uncontrolled rage
or you just pick up some basics (lethal line) and then fill the earth spellbook. you won't get special moves, but you unlock some very nice strategic spells for your faction at level 2&3 and get access to fracture, diamondskin and giant form - all of them are pretty awesome.
i agree that the commander tree is very linear. though there's still the consideration of spellbooks (if he has any); air and life are rather useful for a commander. going for battle cry is not the only option if he has a life spellbook and can go for heal, growth & wellspring, or an air spellbook with guardian wind, titans breath, cloud walk and tornado.
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