[mlepinski]

Originally posted by LintMan:
Some of the other Posts have pointed out some down sides for the Van, but I wanted to address this point. I don't think it's a great idea to push for nerfs and boosts on the basis of just comparing against a handful of other races' equivalent units. Dom2 (thankfully!) doesn't have unit-by-unit balance among the races. Some races have fantastic cavalry, some do not. Some have awesome missile units, and some do not. Same thing with mages, etc. Every race has some benefits and tradeoffs. IMHO, if you don't look at the bigger picture when comparing race's units, you risk either throwing the overall balance out of whack, or homogenizing all the races.

An excellent post and I agree wholeheartedly. Yes, Ulm has excellent heavy cavalry for the cost, but they need to have strong national units (like Black Knights) because their magical options are severely limited. Similarly, it's reasonable for Marignon's Knights of the Chalice to be expensive, because Marignon has a variety of solid national units, excellent priests and useful mages. If Marignon was able to field Knights of the Chalice in large numbers (which they could easily do if the cost were lower), then they would likely be too strong.

For the specific case of the Red Gaurd, (which was the orginal topic of this post), it's very possible that the Red Gaurd could be strengthened without unbalancing Tien Chi.

However, in general, I feel that the homogenizing the empires is the worst thing that could happen to Dominions 2 and we should be very worry of unit-to-unit comparisons taken without the greater context of their respective empires.

- Matt Lepinski :->