Realistic?! Man, have you ever read a fantasy novel in your life? The ability of a hero, or anti-hero, or antagonist, to defeat large number of inferior foes is a central aspect of much of the fantasy genre. Have you ever read or seen Lord of the Rings? Aragorn wasn't magical. Neither was Gimli, or Boromir. Or really even Legolas (besides a few bits and pieces of magic here and there, but largely his strength came from his training and his elven heritage). The carnage those characters inflict in the movies is not really a departure from the books. Their training, the status as the heroes of the story enabled them to face and defeat overwhelming numbers over and over. Brad keeps telling us that the adventurers that we can recruit as our heroes are the pesky adventurers you play in D&D like games, the characters in fantasy novels that stir things up in the kingdoms, while we are the sovereigns governing those kingdoms.

Realistic in this world? No. Realistic in the vast majority of fantasy worlds? Hell yes.

Couldn't have said it better myself. And like I said before, how can Dragons be the overwhelming powerhouses that he wants them to be if we can't actually swarm them with huge numbers? Without the ability to pit quantity vs. someone else's quality, quality will always win and the person with the Dragon will be undefeatable unless by someone else with a Dragon.

Edit: OMG_BlackHatHedgehog:

Very good post, there isn't a single thing in there that I don't agree with wholeheartedly!

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConservationOfNinjutsu?from=Main.ConservationOfNinjitsu

I understand. and the stories that do make fun of this trope are few and far between. Wheel of Time's Lan is one of the best swordsman you meet for the first half of the series or so. He gets faced with 7 ordinary thugs and he thinks to himself he will probably die and looks for a way out of there. 

And I'm perfectly okay with Champions destroying legions of men over the course of a game and coming out fine. It fits the genre. I'm just saying it's not realistic in the real world :3 I'm just saying it's silly in some ways. 

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Also, XP needs to be split! Holy crap I didn't know it wasn't. 

You should buy Doms3. It's amongst the top3 TBS fantasy strategies, but it's not the best game for singeplayer fans, because the AI is bad. That is the only problem with the game.

Dom3 has just a few spells more, a few factions more, a few UI improvements and a random map generator; everything else (95%) is the same. I don't know if it's enough to buy it (I did because I lost my Dom2 CD).

Best thing would be for him to try the demo.

Well, like I've been saying since the beginning, I have no problem with powerful champions, but how powerful they are has to be balanced against how many of them you can have, as well as the (admittedly dreaded) army limits. You can't just say "Imbued champions should be Sauron-like!" with no consideration for the fact that if you can get a bunch of those into the same army, no limited mundane army can ever kill them and if the other player doesn't have his own army of super-champions then he just flat out loses. The game mechanics have to be considered when talking about how powerful something should be, and for the most part people haven't been doing much of that when pushing for super-champions.

There are a bunch of factors to consider:

- Game length (map size)
- Number of imbued champions easily attainable
- Mundane army limitations
- Whether or not Champions are part of army "stack" limits
- Whether or not you can have more than one champion accompanying an army

In short, there's nothing wrong with having powerful imbued Champions, as long as the game mechanics don't allow them to be horribly abused (like sticking 10 along with a conventional army and laughing as your opponent can't do anything). The mechanics have to guarantee that their number is both more limited and more irreplaceable as you make them increasingly more powerful.

As for xp, I would definitely support an XP split so it wasn't so easy to level up a bunch of Champions really quickly. There should be a trade-off between having few and many, such as if you have few they're generally higher level due to less xp split.

Well I applaud you for not making the Tactical Battles RTS there are too many RTS games in the market as is.

I do have a question, Can we set the Tactical combat to always start no matter how many units are particapating. For me one of the funnest elements of the game is the tactical combat as it was for all the AOW and MOM. Without this I would probably just stick to CIV.  And please allows us to scale the lenth of the tactical combat (put a setting that says 'It's over when it is over') I perfer no time limits on tactical combat

3 minutes is a bit too short for the tactical combats. You can't get anything done in 3 minutes. Well hopefully they will allow us to set the time on the combats

Well, as long as they are well planned, well resourced and have a good risk/reward ratio.  I don't think creating a large empire has ever been simple.

Best regards,
Steven.

Don't confuse "City Spam" for expansion. I have no problem with a measured and gradual expansion of your empire, allowing for lots of cities and vast empires on the really big maps. "City Spam" refers to just placing a lot of cities very quickly. It's kind of meaningless to have a vast empire if you had it only a couple hundred turns into a game, right?

I agree...in fact AoW2-SM was much better than MoM...this is my subjective opinion of course.

So then play out the whole battle. I'm not sure what your trying to say here. Either you Auto resolve the battle (Which I will never do because it is not fun.) or you fight the battle there is no other choice.

Just to be clear on this, 3 minutes is a target for how long they want a typical fight to last. It's NOT a hard timer (or a timer at all). If you want to spend 30 minutes in battle, the game will not stop you.

The goal is that combat should move at a pace that for a typical player, a typical engagement mid game will take 3 minutes.

That is odd. It must be a Conspiracy!!! sssshhhhh, don't tell anyone or they'll call you crazy

On a side note, I hope all went well at the Hospital.