Recruitable Unit Rebalance Version 7.51 Released.

[Boron]

Lol seems you don't like Rome Total War Arralen .

With Pangenea : If you take high Turmoil you can't really afford many Pans anyways .
Even with Mass Protection the Maenads have only Protection 10 and are still crappy .
They have only claws + 10 strength so they can't really hurt any of their targets . 10 Mech Men e.g. will beat 500 Maenads .

Since there is no Mechanism in starving included like first the cheapest troops like militia get no supply the need not eat ability for maenads and militia would be great because they would be the first ones who get rationed their food if it is scarce .

[Saber Cherry]

Arralen said:
Barbarians

What about making all Barbs berserkers?
(Thinking about it - AFAICR they where berserkers in DOM1, wheren't they?)

I'm pretty sure they weren't. Regardless, that's a good idea... I've been thinking about it a bit, and the only troublesome thing is that Barbarian leader descriptions say, "All barbarian leaders can berserk," implying that non-leaders cannot. However, I might just go ahead and modify the description=) If leaders retain their +3 berserk and normal barbarians get +1 berserk, it should all be ok, and Illwinter won't get mad, right?

Arralen said:
Arrows do more damager per shot, especially against troops with light armor and without shields. Slingers are actually better against troops with shields than archers, as they still cause full shock damage even if the projectile is caught with the shield, because of it's greater mass. Furthermore the volume of fire from slingers is considerably higher due to the easier availability of ammo ... .

The problems with slingers in Dom2 is actually their abysmal accuracy (-3 IIRC), which is IMHO not supported by ancient sources.

Longbowmen are an entirely different matter. In Dom, either their damage is too low or they should have "armor piercing" qualities.

More damage for longbows sounds reasonable, since historically they defeated fully-armored knights. How about reducing longbow damage to 4 and making strength additive? Then with longbowman strength 11 they'd end up at 15 damage, able to hurt heavy infantry regularly. I don't want to make them AP simply because that edges in on Crossbow turf.

As for slings, I could modify them to fire twice per round (I think)... were slings CERTAINLY much faster firing than bows? Are you (or anyone else) fairly sure about this?

Boron said:
A few suggestions :
You should make the ryleh freespawns upkeepfree.

Excellent idea, I didn't realize they had upkeep=)

Militia could be need not eat to reflect that they only get surplus food but in times of need they don't get food and can starve. 1 Gold Militia would also make the "good" free militia events less troublesome.

Another good idea, although I'll have to give it some thought. 1 gold AND need-not-eat would be too much, though. The problem is... if militia are need-not-eat, they will NEVER starve and get diseased... and what fun is Dominions 2 without starving, diseased militia? But I want to set militia pricing so that free militia events are, at worst, neutral.

Maenads could also be need not eat because it is ridicoulous after 10 turns with 5 Pans you have like 500 Maenads . Their combat value is still almost zero but with need not eat they would at least be a nice "fodder horde" .

I gave them forest survival, which will hopefully help somewhat... At any rate, I generally find a use for them. Pangaea should have a high growth scale and plentiful nature magic, anyway. I think that "need not eat" is an extremely powerful ability, and while it does solve the problem that Doms 2 has no "food priority system", it would introduce its own problems and mess with realism as well. Maenads may not be good against mechanical men, but they are very good against super-heavy-infantry, for example. 500 maenads against 50 Ulm black plate infantry... in order to kill the maenads, even at an impossible 1-hit-per-kill, the infantry would generate 100 fatigue each and fall asleep.

Do you intend to reduce resource costs also or will they be unchanged ?

I don't plan to change resource costs unless I change a unit's equipment (like Ghoul Guardian) or find an error.

I am anyways looking forward to your mod.

Thanks, me too


P.S. I just combat-simulated harpies (which are similar to but even worse than maenads) versus Ulm heavy infantry, and found a roughly 5-to-1 equivalance:

Code:

---

'50*Pan Harpy' versus '10*Ulm Inf Hammer 1'  in 40000 bouts.



 ~ Attacker's Deathmatch Statistics ~



Score: ----------------------  587

Wins: -----------------------   58.73%

Losses: ---------------------   41.28%

Kills per battle: -----------    6.96

Kills per round: ------------     .52

Deaths per battle: ----------   42.16

Life expectancy (rounds): ---   32.11

Life expectancy (battles): --    2.39

Avg. Rounds Elapsed: --------   13.46

Avg. Rounds to Win: ---------   13.61

Avg. Rounds to Lose: --------   13.25

Hit Rate: -------------------   71.29%

Evade Rate: -----------------   56.54%

Damage done per swing: ------     .26

Damage done per hit: --------     .36

Damage taken per hit: -------   17.02

Hit damage taken per life: --   17.46

Total damage taken per life:    18.41

---

The Ulm troops are dying from fatigue. Please note that the difference between the last two numbers is due to repel damage (I think).

[Endoperez]

Maenads surely are easier to have stay in the battle than harpies, but they would still rout sooner or later... BTW, I could run some tests putting Ulm infantry against militia in Dom:PPP Battle Simulator. I don't think we can get closer to unscripted effectivity than that.

[Saber Cherry]

Hmmm... I should note that simulator version 40 has a pretty major bug that somebody noticed and notified me of via email, namely, that attack and defense rolls were not working correctly (probably as a result of my tabelizing statstics to make things run faster). I've fixed it and will post the corrected v41 presently. It's a pretty gross error, and I'm sorry about it=)

[PvK]

Maenads are worth their cost in food. They tend to stay to the death when berserk. They won't be your only unit, but having a mob of them to deal with in addition to other forces, makes them effective.

Same observation for Ulm vs. Maenads. Put shortbows behind the infantry of Ulm block, and the bows can take care of the maenads and let the infantry hold up longer.

As for the comments on slingers... I would like to see the sources which claim they are just as effective as shortbows. Maybe nearly as good, but I think they would rate somewhat lower damage, range, and accuracy than shortbows. There may be some factors to favor slingers (lighter, cheaper equipment), and yes they might supplant their ammo with rocks more readily than archers might replenish their arrows. However, military slingers would I think generally use sling bullets rather than just any rock. I don't think they had a better rate of fire than archers in general. I'm also extremely suspicious of the claim that a sling shot hitting a shield was likely to have a very useful effect.

PvK

[Saber Cherry]

I've integrated some of the suggestions on this board, made some additions, tried to eliminate all the errors that might have crept in, and re-typed the descriptions ofr all the units whose names I changed. Unfortunately, if you rename "Archer" to "Heavy Archer" because it carries a plate cuirass, that deletes the description, which is a pain=) Also, I upped the stats for Soulless... because in my experience, they are harder to get than longdead, yet vastly inferior in every way.

Longbows became armor-piercing (and dropped to 8 damage), mauls became armor-piercing (and dropped to 5), barbarians got berserk 1 (with morale 9, they are unlikely to berserk, though), barbarian leaders get standards so there is a reason to use to lead barbarians rather than normal commanders, villains and pirates get pillage bonus (and villains get better stats), all Jotun units get limited cold protection (25% for wolves and vaetti), bottom-line militia (for the most part) get their cost dropped to 3, xbow range is reduced to 32 from 35 (in RL XBows fire straight rather than in an arc, and have shorter range than even shortbows), jaguars and Cu Sidhe get new attacks that are better than before, Wolf Herders are made cheaper to reflect how weak wolves are, Ctissian predator lizards are made cheaper to reflect their value, assassins get throwing knives, all satyrs get 2 natural protection rather than 1 (goat hide is tougher than leather), soulless that should have natural protection (jotuns, atlantians) now have it (previously only ctis soulless got it), upper-end archers get 11 precision, and many many other changes. I can't list them all here, but I CAN post the completed portion of the mod If you spot any errors, please say so!

Edit: Long annoying post removed, superceded by the beta file posted in this thread.

[Arralen]

There's one little problem with this mod:

It's totally incompatible with lots of others, nation-specific mods. There are some units which are changed in multiple mods, and which changes take precedence seems to be random !?


So I would suggest to make it an "indie troops mod", and incorporate some indie commanders/mounted troops as well, which maybe need some reworking, too. (E.g. mounted archers)

[Endoperez]

IIRC missile precision is changed via #att command.

Other than that and the fact Arralen noted above, great work!

[FrankTrollman]

I'm a little confused. Many of you don't seem to like unshielded militia and I'm just plain surprised. Those things are great. Not a mainstay in the army or anything, but great nonetheless.

You take your militia and break it into groups of 1 and hang them in the front of the army distributed up and down the battlefield. About three of those should make the enemy crossbowmen lose an entire turn (which is actually 2+ turns of the battle) if they are set to "fire closest" - and most neutrals are set to "fire closest" by default.

For 21 gold and 9 resources you can take a province losing only that crap militia. And Slingers are even better, because they count as Archers and will be targetted for death if your opponent is set on "Fire Closest" or "Fire Archers". Some of those crappy naked dudes can give you a serious advantage in archery duels. If you back those losers up with some real troops you can get big enemy archer piles to shoot at your skirmishers.

That and the use as siege bodies (and Fires from Afar soakers) makes those guys eminently worth while when there's nothing better that you can afford resource wise. And sometimes even if there is.

-Frank

[Saber Cherry]

That's a use for a tiny number of the units to confuse the tactical AI... they have no use in bulk, and no "real" use in small numbers, except for castle sieges (and FFA targets).

Even when you can find a use for them, there's always another unit that is better or more cost effective. Unshielded militia die with the first volley, while shielded ones often last several volleys! However, that's really the best place for your diseased / crippled / blind shielded HI - as long as they do not engage in melee, they will generally survive through the battle and be reusable. Arrows are virtually harmless to shielded HI...