Yes, some of the balancing still needs a lot of work. One big issue that hugely affects champions is the fact that a unit group simply pools all of its stats and treats it as one. So if you have 10 units with 10 damage each, on an attack the game just rolls 0-100. This is obviously bad when your single champion only has 30 hp. What should happen is each of those 10 units rolls 0-10 and the champion is then given a defense roll for each of the 10 attacks.

This change alone would make single champions infinitely more balanced against a squad.

yeah i agree, champions arent really improved from beta

i was hoping for good skills but its not the case

the main issue is not really balance, is that there is not an idea behind, they are not characterized at all

just a pool of "slightly" better stats

CONFUSED stats cause they all are too much "balanced", not clearly warriors or caster or anything

same goes with sovereign though

if they could all cast they would be too much powerful, i know but right now they are not fun

imo they should have AT LEAST 1 personal skill/spell enough powerful to mark them

also like i pointed out in the beta, the imbue is to rework completely

I agree that it should work like that, this would greatly improve champions and big monsters, but also give more importance to armor and weapon techs.

Actually I do not think it is true. If you have defense higher than attack, it does not mean that you are immune, there is some chance that unit will still hit you. I do not know how exactly it is calculated though.

A good way could have been the following. Both roll attack and defense, one is 0-10 and another is 0-40. Then one checks which one is greater.

In this particular case there is about 1/8th chance of attack roll to be higher than defense roll, and that means that you will get 1 or 2 hits out of 10, with average being about 2.5, which gives you on average 4 points loss from single attack of stack of 10 units with 10 attack each to your 40 armor. I think this may be good.

A lot of us have been saying that split attacks might be a better implementation than a single combined attack.

It would be nice to have the necessary code available so that I could mod group-units to have split attacks (if its possible, I'm sure its possible?)

Yeah, I know, we've been pitching the idea in various threads for a while Of course it's possible to change it, but not for us I think this is something that's likely to be seriously looked at now that the game is released, and hopefully tweaked in an update. I'd be a bit surprised if it's left as-is. As modders we'd only be able to change it if the relevant mechanic is exposed to python scripting down the line, and at the moment there's no guarantee of that.

Bah, the combat system from Dominions was great at modeling how big units would fare against a hoard of little guys.  I don't understand the reasoning behind the current implementation, and I don't understand why every designer thinks they have to invent their own system.

I hope that the combat system is either modable, or simply changed to something a bit more reasonable.

I like the Champions how they are. They shouldn't be able to take on armies single handed, they're not gods. You can easily hit around the 50's for attack and defence though which makes them pretty respectable compared to the other single creature units. You can then let your own army deal with the grunts while your champions go off to duel the enemy champions.

Health is an issue though. You need to either dump all the points into health, or watch them smack a dragon down to 10 HP and then be killed by it's retaliation. I think automatically increasing health every level would fix that (with the option of putting points in for extra health of course).

its not the brute strenght the issue but the charisma

they lack personality and sometimes fun

you care them, you feed them, and they dont repay your love enough, imo

They are going to have to change the 'parties act as one' mechanic.  Makes stacks way OP.

While I'm all for making the groups attack multiple times it's going to take a lot more than splitting the attacks to balance it. A few scenarios to consider.

You've got a group of 10 guys with 10 attack fighting a dragon with 100 defense and 100 attack. The formula I keep seeing posted for combat is something like.

Attack Roll - Defense Roll = damage if > 0 else "Miss"

Currently you'd have  1-100 vs 1-100

In the new system you'd have 1-10 vs 1-100

Chances are that group of units would never hit the dragon, 90% of the outcomes for the dragon defense roll ends in a miss for the infantry. In the current system they are on equal footing for this scenario.

Now face the other direction, the dragon is attacking the group of 10 guys, currently it has the ability to kill them all in one attack. With the proposed system they'd simply die one at a time, lots of overkill for the dragon in melee. What took 1-2 turns before took 10 this time, and the dragon was never in any danger whatsoever. Shouldn't a dragon be able to hit more than one unit at a time anyway? tailswipes over large areas, breathing fire, etc etc.

In order to make this work you'd need to implement a system that had target limits for attacks based on the size of the unit, rework the attack/defense system and implement a damage/armor system as well. Example:

Base attack and defense of every creature in the world is 100, Modifiers include race/size/abilities/items/spells/stats etc etc...

Ancient Dragon

Attack 150 (50 from size)

Defense 50 (-50 due to size)

Armor 10 (+10 from ancient dragon scale)

Melee: 15 Physical Damage Max Targets (3)

Fire Breath: 8 Fire Damage Limited Use Max Targets (10)

200 HP

Squad (6) of Dragonslayers

Attack 110 (10 from amulet of accuracy)

Defense 85 ( -25 from heavy armor +10 from mount)

Armor 7 (5 vs Fire) (7 from full masterwork dragonslayer  Plate)

Melee: 12 Physical Damage Max Targets (1)

Charge: Granted by mount melee damage +5 must cross 3 tiles before attack to execute

10 hp each

Combat would play out similar to this:

Dragonslayers charge:

Rolls:

110 vs 10 (Critical Hit 150% damage)  25.5 damage vs 10 armor 15.5 damage

82 vs 36 (Hit) 17 vs 10 = 7 damage

98 vs 45 (Hit) 17 vs 10 = 7 damage

76 vs 20 (Hit) 17 vs 10 = 7 damage

56 vs 34 (Hit) 17 vs 10 = 7 damage

20 vs 50 (Miss....yes he missed a giant dragon) Scold him or something?

43.5 damage applied to the dragon

Retaliation by dragon for the attack is melee:

Melee gets 3 targets due to size so the rolls go like this:

150 vs 60 (Critical hit 150% damage) 18 vs 7 armor 11 damage

120 vs 72 (Hit) 12 vs 7 = 5 damage

73 vs 85 (Miss)

Dragonslayer I dies

Dragonslayer II is at 50%

and Dragonslayer III wet himself

That's just a minor example of how a combat would go, all the numbers need to be tweaked and whatnot but the general idea remains.

Attack/Defense for hit/miss only

Damage vs Damage resistance

Modifiers due to size/spells/special abilities/racial features/stats

Str = Bonus damage/attack

Dex = Bonus defense

Con = HP/slight armor bonus

Int/Wis = Elemental/spell resistance

Cha = ...... I don't know

Thoughts?

Imbuing is way too expensive to turn every champion into a spellcaster. And not every champion should need to be a spellcaster either, warriors should be effective as well.

They are, if used correctly. But not every champion should be in combat in the first place; only thieves contribute anything to your combat result, adventurers are useful for an extra move point. They're the only one's you want in an army, the merchants, nobles, sages et al are much better safe in the cities where they can boost your economy without getting killed or lowering the XP gain for everyone else.