I dunno, guys...

[PvK]

Suicide Junkie said:
...
But if the details get stomped out by the big beasties, I suppose it dosen't really matter in most games.

If you were trying for a more conventional tech mod/map, with little to no magic available, I imagine the fine training detail would be useful though.

The players who say things like that tend to be exaggerating, or playing certain styles of games. As in SE4, if you play low-magic sites and/or slow research rate, or if you play smaller maps or use an early conflict strategy, the mortal troops can be very important. Conversely, if you play with big maps, lots of magic sites, fast research, and/or wait till you have all the most powerful magic before starting to fight seriously, etc., then the magic can dominate and make mortal units seem fairly unimportant.

Many of the D2 forum posters though tend to get fixated and opinionated and will post massively overstated and often contradictory opinions about something being super-great or super-lame or broken or the best thing or whatever, because something worked well or badly in a specific instance. Generally, they just don't have enough experience and are used to simpler games that are much easier to analyze.

PvK

[deccan]

PvK said:
Many of the D2 forum posters though tend to get fixated and opinionated and will post massively overstated and often contradictory opinions about something being super-great or super-lame or broken or the best thing or whatever, because something worked well or badly in a specific instance. Generally, they just don't have enough experience and are used to simpler games that are much easier to analyze.

Ouch. It's one thing to claim that something is super-great in the sense that it's a guaranteed game winner. No one seriously claims that. On the other hand, as Zen's pretender and spell balance mods have indicated, there are clearly things (pretender chassis, SC chassis, battlefield spells) that are super-great in the sense that they render competing options of roughly equal resource costs / difficulty of obtaining invalid because choosing the super-great thing is such a no-brainer, in the same way that in stock SEIV choosing the beserker trait is a no-brainer (and that you've tried to address in your own balance mod).

I'm ok with your statement that the usefulness / uselessness of national troops depends heavily on game settings, but it would be nice if the army buffer spells were easier and less expensive to cast and resistance wards could stack properly.