[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Jasper:

quote:

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Originally posted by st.patrik:
I'm not so bothered by the 'less useful light infantry' thing as I think the rest of you are. It makes sense to me that you're really only going to make poorly equipped troops if you don't have the resources to make well-equipped troops. This seems realistic to me. I guess it's possible that in general there are too many resources available... do people have this opinion?

What bothers me is that light troops aren't usefull in battle, while they clearly were usefull throughout history. Light troops were not "poorly equipped" troops, but troops used in a different manner -- a manner that simply doesn't exist in Dominions (or any similar computer game for that matter).

One simple way to address this would be to have a battle deployment area that was broader than deep, but with the flank areas marked so that only light/fast troops could be deployed there.

Another would be to allow lighter troops to deploy one man per "square" rather than 3, so that they would be an effective missile screen. Combine this with a slight increase in the accuracy and damage of missiles, and you'd have very good reason to screen with light troops.

Both of these would help allow light troops to be usefull for their traditional roles. I suspect you'd still need to tweak their gold cost down a point or two to make them viable however.

These changes are perhaps too dramatic to actually have a chance at implementation, but IMHO they would greatly improve the variety of viable troops, and the number of interesting battle tactics.

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Yeah, I suggested the "loose" and "wide" formation toggles a while back, but I'm keeping mum now because it will be lost in the clutter, what with all the demo-polishing I hope is going on=)

As for LI being historically useful, that's correct. But my impression is that is less due to their mobility, and more because they were so darn cheap compared to HI. Untrained, give'em a spear and point'em at the battle milita should never cost 70% of a well trained broadsword-shield-platemail HI unit in any respect (supply needs, wages, maintenance, initial deployment cost). For similar reasons, despite having more training and being better armed than militia, an LI shouldn't cost the same amount as an HI.