Hey. Enjoying this game a good bit so far, but there are some pretty significant balance factors that annoy me. The top 5 on my list are: how it's practically impossible to get a decently leveled hero if you ever use more than 1 in a stack, the extreme disparity between damage spell mana cost and usefulness, the Arcane Monolith spell, the way Defense and spells like Heart of Fire work, and lastly, spears. Fortunately, most of those things can be modded, but I feel that the spear thing in particular merits some thought.
Almost every post I have seen on the matter says unilaterally that spears are the best weapons. I agree, for several reasons, and I would go so far as to say the rest aren't even in the same ballpark. Most obvious is the armor penetration, which is quite strong alone. Then, there is the Impale ability, which seems silly, misplaced, and poorly conceived to me - I can make sense out of Cleave, but literally spearing straight through an entire army into a second one behind is a bit hard to believe. Add to those the fact that spear base damage is relatively high, and the fact that spears are the 2nd-highest initiative weapon, with only swords being higher, and there is a pretty obvious disparity.
Personally, I never use anything but spears anymore, unless I have to; I either rush Enchanting for the ice spear if I have decent crystal or blacksmithing for the boar spear if I don't, and, with a few staff-mage units, that's my army for the most of the game. I've gotten rather bored of this, frankly, since it's pretty much the same for every faction I play - almost all the faction weapons are meaningless to me. Heck, I don't even build archers with Tarth. The only weakness spears seem to have is that they are 2-handed, but even so, the Defensive trait (described by someone else on this forum as the best in the game) lets you onehand them, so.. so much for that.
So, it would seem clear that something should be done. What exactly is another question; I have a few suggestions, of course (why make a thread like this otherwise!) but I just hope that something is done one way or the other, to make weapon choices feel a bit more impactful on how the game plays. Axes and hammers both have their interesting points, but the lack of armor pen and the initiative penalties make them rather undesirable, and, frankly, swords are just boring.
Anyways, my suggestions for possible changes - the first 3 sort of go together, so I'm grouping them apart:
-Remove the current Impale from spears, rename it Piercing Blow or something, and make it a champion ability in the Assassin tree, leading off max-level Precise Strike. Or wherever else it may fit - Defender, Warrior, artifact ability, whatever... no point wasting a coded ability!
-Severely nerf the base armor pen on spears, starting from 20% for low tech and maxing at somewhere around 30-35% for high level spears. Add an initiative penalty.
-Make a new Impale ability, that doubles the armor pen on the spear for an attack and possibly adds a bit of damage based on tech level. 2-5 turn cooldown. This would make a heck of a lot more sense than spearing straight through (non-fatally, I might add) two crowds of people.
In my mind, those 3 changes would bring spears more inline with other weapons, fit the archetype better, and feel better overall. Possibly add some sort of Set Spears ability to increase damage/defense vs mounted units.. and hooray!
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Other possibilites if the above isn't appealing (most of these would be easy to mod in manually, but hey):
-switch Axes and Spears in the initiative-tree: spears/pikes are big weapons, and should be slower, really. A straight penalty to spears would work as well as a switch.
-Lower base damage to compensate for armor pen - currently, spear damage is barely below other weapons, and ends up much higher thanks to the armor pen... plus the other benefits.
-As has been suggested before, add a bonus vs cavalry to counter mount spam. This is an interesting idea, but spears are already the best weapons in the game, so making them a must for fighting horsemen would be counterproductive imo
-Add new traits (or mod some of the current useless ones) to add damage bonuses when using certain classes of weapons, to encourage using other types. Or, change certain races to get small bonuses with certain weapon archtypes - ie. Men could get a small bonus from swords, Gilden-folk from hammers, and so on. This is something I feel should be done regardless of how devs view the current weapon balance, but again, hopefully it can be modded.
-consider adding more initiate and a bit of armor pen to daggers
Well, that's all I got.. Feel free to rage at me, give other suggestions, or whatever!
sounds like you had some fun i guess i should try a proper ridiculous game some time. i'll probably get my ass handed that gold rush event with the titan is pure evil. i got that once back in FE - i was nowhere near prepared for him (happened on turn 100 or so)
Indeed it was insane fun. At no point in the game did I feel like there's nothing left to do or nobody poses any threats. We're still 6 players in the game and world is still super populated
Regarding the gold rush titan: the way I managed the fight was casting haste (I had several air shrines resulting in +8 ini boost for both my assassin and mage, but first one went on mage), which made him able to get 2 actions between titan's attempts to cast, so if first counterspell landed, I could still get a 2nd chance (of course bad luck may happen and not hit either). Regarding his melee wasn't too bad given I landed a shrink on 38% chance to resist on first mage turn, so he was reduced to 50atk - still dangerous, so I was using the tanky unit to absorb counterstrikes then hit with the assassin. It took a while to take him down, was mainly worried about blizzard and fireball spells as I wasn't high enough to level to pick the fire or cold resist buffs with the mage (and I had an fight with a dragon that 1 shotted my 160 hp tank with a critical firebreath - did 450 fire dmg ). So I suppose for this purpose alone, fire resist cloaks on all troops and a pair in each hero inventory become mandatory (suppose they stack with the buff). Haven't met too much in water dmg department, but fire looks pretty spread among wildlands and AI.
Speaking of which, the freaking lord of gold - Kraxis, was assaulting me with en-mass mix of troops. He had full chain on most melee units / archers resulting in ridiculous 50+ defense attributes, also mixed with archers with 3rd tier bows, and fire mages. He had 2 types of those, the basic mage, and coal devotee or something. I even saw some x-bows (and I do use some myself, especially for defending cities since they can AoE in a line easily the attackers).
And a small edit: Be cautious with hasting an already high ini unit (hero mainly), because if you get hit by a dragon and he gets critical poison on you, you will take way more ticks (had my sin die once because I forgot to haste the healer, and he got 2 turns before mage could heal him - no healing poitions left sadly)
regarding dragons wasting your tank units: that's where the defender champions really shine (as it shuld be - we all know that it takes a heroic knight in shiny armor to deal with a dragon ) . dragons have overpower, which multiplies their attack by the number of figures in the target unit. a defender can usually survive a few turns of firebreathing and melee attacks since he's a lone figure and thus immune to the dragon's most dangerous trait.
I finally completed that game Azunai_ I got 2 storm dragons (no idea why peeps say they are weak compared to trained troops), you can use them with heroes or send them on their own on map to clear stuff / take cities. Keep a regen spell on them and they have no problem taking solo a city with deadly threat defenders - which I did, sent a dragon each way to clear enemy cities while my heroes continued to mind their own business doing quests and clearing wildlands. Don't autoresolve vs cities or your dragon will die, AI uses it very badly while I can kill 5 high levels heroes and their army plus the defenders without dropping under 75% hp on the dragon.
Also experiencing a bit with the storm dragon, he could solo the epic swamp boss and his army (did a save and reload on that as I obviously wanted to kill him with a hero for the xp).
The bug with units placement outside of battlefield is very annoying. Had it trigger twice in this game as soon as I got to 9 units. Once, and most annoying, was at arena tournament quest, my Assassin spawned outside every single fight (he has the teleport from air, but was low on mana and I did need the mage heals / buffs more in later waves), and in another case 2 groups of archers and Kulan spawned outside of their defending city. Luckily was attacking with a hero & army who had ranged attacks (despite the message that target is too far away, they still shot back).
OK, looking up Kenata's weapons mod, I see that a few concepts that were subsequently implemented as 'standard' features, such as Cleave. However, Cleave wasn't nearly as powerful as it is now (reduced attack versus three opponents).
The ability I was thinking of was Fortify. This added 15% or 30% to counterattacks, as well as defense. This is how 'set to charge' was simulated in that mod. Duration was set to 2 turns, with a 3 turn cooldown.
And again, to re-iterate what I said earlier, I was proposing a higher attack value for spears on the first attack as opposed to subsequent rounds. So the base value could still be in the neighborhood that it is now, maybe a point lower, keeping in mind the higher value for the first round (+2 or whatever). This would be a 'simple' way to simulate having to get inside the reach of the spears with your own weapons. if you can survive that first contact, that is.
And, if this bonus stacked with mounted attack bonuses, well that might come close to simulating the power of spear-armed cavalry on the charge under the current mechanics. Think +3 on the first attack (instead of +2), and -1 on subsequent attacks with cavalry-mounted spears, using current values. And YES, this should stack with impale, because in fact this is what happens in a cavaly charge, as often the first line is broken, second line is also hit. Unless the defenders have longer pikes, of course...
It'd be cool if weapon reach and facings were implemented in Elemental, but other than giving spears/pikes a longer attack range, this is hard to implement properly under the current system.
Ahh well, expansion fodder I guess.
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