Re: Balance Machaka
After trying out some of the armor and weapon changes, I'm more or less content with Machaka's baseline troops.
2 mapmove Hoplites(with lighter armor and correspondingly nicer defense) are good all-around troops that have minimal losses in standard fights. They're incidentally a bit easier to mass with a slightly lower resource cost, too.
Your standard armorless troops can take a better beating--they do their job much better with parry 6 shields. They can even tie up knights for a bit with their 15 defense, too.
With the Great Hide Shields on your Warriors, I can justify giving Militia javelins--they need them to stay competitive, and this will make your PD not suck quite so bad.
Spider Knights methinks should have spear and lance instead of just a light lance. It makes them a decent amount more dangerous, too.
As a question, which do you think should come first on Great Spiders and Hunter Spiders? Web or Bite? Right now they have Bite first, which seems somewhat nonsensical. I'll have to do a bunch of testing to see which is more effective overall, too.
My overarching thoughts are that there are some little things to do for Machaka still that can make all the difference. Better recruitable troops(and correspondingly better province defense) help a lot.
Another idea is to give Ears of the Lord a small (~25%) chance to have 1S. The rough idea is that this saves you having to burn death gems on Spectres and gives you general Mindhunt resistance(especially since the buggers are stealthy!). It even makes sense that the stealthy guys might get some Astral in their travels.
Try it out--between these changes and CBM's 80 gold Black Hunters, I think most of Machaka's pure troop worries are resolved. I'd still like some cool stuff like a national Arrow Fend-type spell and a late-game summon, but it's a start.
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