Suggestion: Mapmove & Armor

[Edi]

This here thread is a suggestion that might get implemented in Dominions 4. I doubt we are going to see much like it via patch because it would alter game mechanics enough that it'd require a fair amount of work from the devs.

Still, I'll toss it out.

Currently, the mapmove attribute is an intrinsic, unalterable part of units. It's set in stone, so to speak, unlike defense, attack and a lot of other things that can be altered by weapons, armor, afflictions and spells. Afaik, the only way to alter mapmove is to put a flying item on a commander (winged boots or flying carpet).

This works fairly well so far, but it can also be a headache from a modding point of view.

I would love it if the different armors in the game had an actual mapmove modifier the same way they have a defense modifier right now. Heavy (body) armor reduces mapmove. So one could make all units of a given type (e.g. Machakans who have mapmove 3 or regular units with mapmove 2, and cavalries with a mapmove of 3) have the same mapmove and depending on what armor they get (e.g. plate hauberks for hoplites), their mapmove would be reduced.

I expect most mapmove modifiers for heavier armors would be -1 and some really heavy armors might have as much as -2, while most light to medium armor would have mapmove modifiers of zero.

Then there are certain exceptions one has to account for, namely undead and constructs that don't eat, sleep or tire and demons and possibly some other creatures who wouldn't much tire either. These would be immune to the mapmove penalty.

The downside, of course, is that the devs or somebody else would have to go through all existing units and armors by hand and do the relevant alterations. Note: This is something I would very much like to see, but do not expect because of the amount of work involved. But I'd love to have it in any case, because similarly to the resource cost of weapons and armor issue, it would increase automation from the development, modding and other points of view once the work was done once. So if not now, in Dominions 4, perhaps?

And while we're talking about weapons and armor: Could we please have the resource costs as visible attributes the same way that attack, defense, length, protection and encumbrance are currently? Pretty please?

Edi