Mod: Conceptual Balance 1.21

[Amos]

Sorry, I meant the low moral of the monkeys will not allow them to hit pikemen with animalawe.

[Endoperez]

Amos said:
Sorry, I meant the low moral of the monkeys will not allow them to hit pikemen with animalawe.

I meant that pikeneers could have a niche besides animalawe. Sorry about that.

[cleveland]

DrPraetorious said:

The effect would (ideally) be:
swordsmen beat pikemen beat cavalry beat swordsmen

This is a really neat idea, but probably not workable via animalawe.

I propose an alternate solution: give heavy cavalry trample, and pikemen size 3.

Since trample only works against smaller units, sz-2 cavalry can smush sz-2 swordsmen, but not sz-3 pikemen, whose repelling long weapons will make them a cost effective counter against trampling heavy cav.

Thoughts?

[DrPraetorious]

So the phalanx becomes resistant to cavalry because of its loose formation ?

That's worth trying (remember to make the pikemen resource size 2 and to lower their food consumption by 1 unit) but has a lot of other clumsy effects.

The ideal solution would be to give pikes and some other weapons an anti-cavalry identifier with the following game mechanics:
* Ignores the defense bonus for mounted units.
* Repel attacks against mounted units inflict full damage, *and* gain a charge bonus to damage based on the attacking mounted unit's AP.

That'd give the heavy cavalry serious second thoughts about charging a pike square, and would also encourage tight formations of pike squares (for more attacks.)

[vfb]

Or you could make the pikemen triple size-three units like the Skavenslaves. Now they look like they have a tight formation, and they resist trampling too. When a triple is reduced to a double or single, then it's easy for the cavalry to trample it.

The main thing broken about this is that after a battle, 12 leftover single-pikemen units could not recombine into 4 triple-pikemen units.

[Amos]

gain a charge bonus to damage based on the attacking mounted unit's AP

I like that. But what about non-pike units with animalawe? They are still being attacked by the cavalry. I think that, whether you give pikes animalawe or not, all cavalry should be animal.

[llamabeast]

Also AOE effects can kill a maximum of 1 pikeman/skavenslave per square, which definitely bothers me.

[quantum_mechani]

Not to mention the weirdness with stuff like soul slay, afflictions, and gift of reason.

[Saulot]

"gain a charge bonus to damage based on the attacking mounted unit's AP "

I could see that. Where both the pikemen and the heavy cavalry get killed when the cavalry hits with the charge.

In this case, the 'vs cavalry' bonus would be tied into an enemy unit having a charge attack and not a mounted identifier.

However, adding a new unit ability would probably best be done by Illwinter and not by modding. Anyway, it's an intriguing idea that should be carefully examined in a myriad ways by the community (Possibly better outside the modding section of the forum).

[DrPraetorious]

The point I'm making is that any solution we achieve through modding is inherently somewhat clumsy. Personally, I like the "animal awe" one best.

It's unlikely that KO is going to implement an entirely new weapon ability; but it's at least conceivable that, if there were consensus:
a) That pikes and longspears (and similar weapons) *should* have an additional bonus against cavalry (the repel attacks actually do help somewhat under the current rules,) and
b) what exactly the bonus should be.

he might.