That makes me happy, very Very Happy

It's two armies (one which includes a dragon).

There are some things we've since outlawed (we don't allow two units to occupy a tile between turns anymore) but other than that, that scene should work (though to be fair, few people are going to play the game with the camera at that angle. I'll try to do a video prior to beta 3a so you can see what I mean.

Uh, did we ever get a answer to what is WISDOM used for since the spell changes above?

Wisdom continues to be the one of the sources of a player's spell point storage.

Intelligence is now used to determine your starting essence (and most spells use intelligence to determine damage).

Ahh that makes sense, so the more wisdom you have the more powerful spells you can obtain.

Peoples were going on about army size. So I'll say this.

Brad said time and again various things about 10,000 vs. 10,000.

Will it be mid game? No. Certainly not early game. It may not even be a common occurence (I can't see 10k armies taking anything less than a lot of resources, and thus if I have 10k soldiers they sure as hell won't all be in one place) but for those truly epic we-are-the-kingdoms-they-are-the-empire-war-is-nao battles...yeah.

ONE THING that I am REALLY interested in (curse you Raven! You have me doing it now!) is the prospect of team battles. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to be the owner of multiple types of forces, but when it comes right down to it, the War of the Last Alliance siege on Barad-dur (hope that's the right name...) was so epic because the elven and human armies combined for it. Not one army under one commander, but two armies.

Age of Wonders did it in a very clunky way. If a battle started and you were RIGHT NEXT to one particpant, you'd join in. Battles were autodone and thus happened in a second, which kinda sucked for team battles. Cities were easier - you could put your units into allied cities (to attack, you'd have to take the center of the city, while the 'outskirts' were free for you, or anyone else, to sit in) which would put you into battles.

Mount and Blade, while a real-time and thus without a whole lot of synergy, did battles over time. So if you were wandering the map, you'd see two teams engaged in battle. You could walk up and join the battle, just walk away, or what have you. I hope that AI battles between AI will at least last for a full turn, if only in SP, so that we players can join in.

Also, I hope that we can put units in the cities of our allies. Perhaps allow us to freely do so when at a certain diplomatic relationship (or as a tech, Benevolent Assistance or Benevolent intents, etc) or when we try to move into a city, give the option to just stay in peace or strike foes down...etc.

-N

Correct.  Now, you can also hire Lore masters (by building monasteries and abbeys) to help increase this as well but your wisdom is what will ultimately make up a big part of it.

A player that decides to crank up their other stats and lower wisdom to 5 is unlikely to be able to ever win through spell casting.

so, what, a Legion now takes up the same amount of space on the battlefield as a single man?

//also, I think stat caps on creation should once again be 20, in order to encourage specialization.

Quote from the Hedgehog:

That's why I was saying there is a minimum battle rating in a city. If you have equal to or greater that amount, there won't be a riot or "militia" facing you when you get in. If you don't meet that threshold, then the Peasants arm themselves to fight you, at a rate of 1 free Peasant per 10 pop.

He said something about battlerating in a city. I understand what you mean but then small armies have one less use. In Age of Wonders if you capture a city but don't have enough troops (relative to the size of the city) to prevent rebellion then the city have a 50% chance EVERY TURN to become independent. If you have even fewer troops then there's only a 10% chance for the city to become independent every single turn.

But all that is when you have already captured the city. You can capture a capital with a tier 0 unit (weakest in the game). No defenders = no fight.

I'm not sure what I want and what would work the best but what you want would strenghten high pop cities and weaken early attacks by normal units.

Mwhahahahahaha!!!

Yes, another convert to the fold!!!!

So there would be two sets of truly effective specializations, with a third "all around" sovereign choice?  Namely a strength/dexterity/constitution strong sovereign for direct combat or an intelligence/wisdom/essence strong sovereign for magic.  Or a sovereign that tries to do it all, just none of it specialized.

edit: EGADS!!!!!!!

We have made some adjustments to unit sizes based on our internal betas.  The largest sized group (for now) is going to be around 20 units.

There was too much difficulty scaling/balancing a scenario where a single unit can range from 1 person to 1000 people.  It just wasn't fun.

Hehe. Late game = the best!

Only 20? I can understand that it's hard to balance stuff like this, but 20 as max looks way too low. It should be 100 or 50 at least....

If it will be 20, can we change this number via modding, or is it hardcoded?

20 legions are quite cool to me.

This has me curious now. So, are you saying a "Single Unit" can only have 20 "Individual Soldiers" ? And if so, can we change that with modding?

If we can only have 20 "Units" and each of those Units can only show 20 Soldiers at a time, then 20 x 20 = 400. 400 Soldiers isn't very big for a maximum army size. Am I understanding that right?

Basically what I'm asking, is by the End Game, how many Individual Soldiers can we have in a Maxed Out Army?

Hm...it will work like this?...because Froggie wasn't clear enough I guess. Raven is kinda confused as well.

Good question.

Army=collection of units

Unit=collection of people

There seems to be some confusion on this point.

A city founded in barren land expands Life/Death land type (serving a origin point)?

So now you need wisdom for spell points that lets you learn spells, intelligence for the effectiveness of spells and essence to cast certain spells and calculate your base mana for the number and power of spells you can cast?

Can I suggest a separate mana line so it is evident, something like red for spell points and blue for mana?

A unit = a collection of soldiers, so in beta now squad/company 6/10. It seems he's saying the largest unit is going to be 20 because of balance issues for having them be 1-1000.

He hasn't posted in this thread how many "units" an army can contain that I've seen but somebody linked something earlier where he supposedly stated the largest army would be able to contain 10 units. So 200 soldiers if the units are max size. 191 if you have a champion maybe? Since it isn't clear if they take an entire slot or if they've got their own special slots in the army.

Also, I am disappointed by these very small army sizes

I'm happy with 200 vs. 200... that's up to 400 person's in a battle, which is quite a few.

 Has anyone tried counting up the number of units in that screenie posted earlier... bet it is around 200 and that looked pretty epic to me.

Don't forget that, just as in any war game, an entire battle doesn't have to happen in one "hex". This could be one segment of a long line of battles, composing 1,000 of units. The system is just focusing you on one "area" at a time.

For me, I wouldn't enjoy the micromanagement of recruiting 1,000s of units, and am sure I'll be very happy even with 50 vs. 50 battles.

As long as the number of people per unit can be changed through a mod, it doesn't particularly bother me that by default a unit can have a max of 20 if it works well in context of the core game. But if I'm making an LoTR mod (which of course will get made), the Battle of Helm's Deep will be pretty weak if 10,000 Uruk-hai are only represented by 200 or so

That screenshot was probably around 200 units yea. Its kind of at an awkward angle like frogboy said, seems to be directly behind one side and facing the other. You can see the variation in facing of the forces to judge where the front lines are and try to imagine how it'd look from other angles. It looks cool but also kind of resembles what I'd expect from a realtime system since multiple units seem to be in movement there and both the wizard/dragon are active. I wouldn't expect the turn based combat to be nearly as exciting to watch.

That said it'd be cool if there were animations that could at least create the illusion of a continuing battle, sat two opposing units are facing eachother and had attacked in previous turns, so the animation shows a continuing battle between the two forces (no losses calculated until the turns come about again). So when you're in an engagement it doesn't look so much like everybody is standing around waiting for their turn to "fight" again. Purely cosmetic but I'm sure the people looking for "epic" battles would appreciate something like that.

If we want to take the idea one step further and delve into combat mechanics it would make sense if units that were already engaged with another unit were kind of locked into place. You could only disengage at a cost both in lives and action points. Lets face it, if you're stuck in a large melee your company isn't going to be able to pull out of combat without taking extra losses and time to do so.