Reminder that Sovereigns don't scale

I have to agree, Sovs (on both sides btw), are pretty weak. It's pretty much GG if you get to melee range or archers start to focus fire on you. 

Also, Fireballs doing 4 dmg don't help too.

They should be able to teleport all over the place, and freeze to place anyone that comes too close. Would at least make you think twice before taking the Sov's army. Right now it's just free and good exp.

Sad when you can kill the ennemy Sov with a basic archer.

I find it amusing that the sovereign can pretty much immediately summon and control creatures stronger then he is, and he never catches up to them.

Copy elementaldefs.xml to your mods folder, go into it and change the part that has to do with sov level up points from 1 to 3 or so. Should fix the scaling issue.

If done properly, the Sov can be much better than a pushover.  But, they really are weak compared to other units.  I pretty much use my dragons for damage late game and the Sov is a taxi.  All the champions are weak really.

The scale in auto-combat, just keep upping Int and have at least 20 mana or so. All the mage champions scale fine if you have shards in your empire, but again, only in auto combat at this time.

Sov's (and heroes) shoud have increase of his stats automatically each level, this will help later in the game.

Caster ability is great in battlefield but heroes still are too weak.

I like the idea of switching the points per level from 1 to 3.  That may help somewhat.

I just remember heroes from MoM being really cool, especially "The Chosen" (from a life book spell).  Those guys rocked.  I also feel like heroes and your sovereign in particular are the stars of the show in an rpg strategy game.  They are the "rpg" part.  The fact they take a back seat in this game doesn't sit well with me.  Right now, one experienced big group of dudes with warhammers and decent armor can wipe the floor with heroes.

I also am not sure what the options are as far as creating unique magic artifacts in-game (a really cool part of MoM), but that would help heroes.

A serious change needs to be made to bring heroes and the sov back to the forefront and be THE elite units of the endgame.  Otherwise, this is just an rpg in the first half of the game.

We were told that the sovs would be like LOTR heroes by the end game. This is not (yet) the case.

I think the exponential growth in unit hp, attack, and defense scores, are the biggest problem. The elite training techs multiply hp and so does squad size. A full size squad with the most advance training has 36 times as much hp as a regular one-man unit. If the champion is to retain his comparative strength his hp would have to increase 36-fold as well, I can't see that realistically happening. Attack and defense scores are worse. A starting unit has an attack of 3 and 2 defense at best, eventually they can have 480 attack and 672 defense. I can't see a champion multiplying its attack by 160 or its defense by 366 - it's not doable.

Champions would remain useful if they were balanced around 12-man units from the start, but it can't be done without making the champion overpowered in the early game.

The only solution is a systematic change of the combat system, where the basic defense value of a unit is multiplied by the amount of attacks directed against it, and the exponential increase in hit points for large well-trained units is removed or at the very least made far less significant.

Are points for heroes in there too (at work and can't check right now)?  I'm thinking 2 for heroes, 3 for sovs, to try to keep everyone relevant.

I think you nailed it, Norhg.  While the basic units should improve with those techs (squad size and training), a direct multiplier is ridiculous.  Thinking of MoM, a unit of hammerhands for instance (dwarven unit), could be improved with mithril weapons if built in a city near mithril.  They could achieve elite status, etc, but there was nothing like having a unit's attack multiplied by 36.  That's just crazy.  It was a solid unit when you could finally built it, and it could get better, but not THAT much better.

The basic mechanic MoM used of having 4-9 "individuals" in a unit made more sense too.  As a unit took damage, individuals would drop out (lowering the attack proportionately).  The attack was directly affected by the number of individuals in the unit, as was the health, but the defense was NOT.  As the unit healed, individuals would come back (simple but effective).  This system was simple and elegant, and it worked well.

The EWoM mechanic of having four people fight as a unit with exactly four times the attack AND defense of four similar separate units does not work.  Just do the simple math - four units with 5 attack and 5 defense don't stand a chance against a unit with 20 attack and 20 defense.  Not "they'll get beaten by", but "they will get steamrolled".  The four-party unit will fight at full strength, even with 1 hit point left.  It's a mechanic that simply does not work.  It's a mechanic that seriously messes up army scaling. 

I've just been talking about the four party unit.  Add the full size party, together with the max training, and you've got a system that is VERY WHACK (technically speaking).

bah my 4000+ combat rating sovereign begs to differ

seriously though once they fixed the stupid ring and amulet stacking champions and sovereign needs to scale better, my favorite would be skill trees.

OMG, you can edit the attribute points available after leveling up!?

D:

THANK YOU!

T_T

Heh, I can't help but think that the entire scaling problem of sovereigns/champions would go away if you could give them some kind of commander functionality. Essentially add a squad to them so you get to keep their abilities but gain the hp, def and attack of the squad.

Also, it sort of feels a bit odd that I can't upgrade units or add single units together into new squads.

I'm not sure what the problem there is. It's not wholely different in most fantasy games. In D&D (pre-4th anyway, not enough experience with 4th to say as far as that) the critters you can summon at high level are generally far more powerful than the spells you can cast that are direct-damage. I know many of you will bring up "Slay Living" and "Power Word: Kill", however the fine print of those is they only kill weak critters easily, others they do decent damage, but 6D6 damage is pittance when you're up against a 15-20HD monster.

Yes, I realize that 6D6 is way more than 4dmg, but that doesn't really have to do with the Summons being considerably more powerful than the Sov against end-game units which is all I was addressing. Magic does need to be buffed, but saying the summons are more powerful is a bit misleading even if unintentional.

I think a better way of going about it (and this would help Champions as well, honestly, and make them more valuable) would be to have the stats of the Sovereign or Champion that is leading the army somehow augment the soldiers in the army.

i.e. your sov has a strength of 18. Every unit in the army gets a str bonus of 1/5 of the Sov, so in this case: 3.6. This could either apply as a straight attack bonus or as a base additive or something along those lines. You could do similar functions for other stats. Or better yet, have their INT score augment the army's attack and defense, giving the pretense of the more intelligent Sovereigns and Champions being more cunning generals.

Personally I think sovereigns would be fine if they only gained a nice amount of hit points and defense every level.  Maybe 10 HPs and 3 DEF per level, seems it would scale rather well with other units.

I think a way of fixing this is for them to have body guards attach to them. So for example if you have researched Squads then you should be able to attach a unit (of your choice to you Soverign such as Archers or Foot soldiers ext.

Also there needs to be either an ability or tech that will allow your damage spells to scale damage so that you can stand up against bigger units.

I do have a question, is there a way to combine units of the same type if you had already researched the Squad techs? For example if I can now have 4 archers in a Squad can I take 4 1 person archer units and combine them?

Now if we cannot do that then there should be a retrain mechanic in the game to allow this.

Norhg - "Champions would remain useful if they were balanced around 12-man units from the start, but it can't be done without making the champion overpowered in the early game."

Would it be possible to mod the Techs so that when you get the party, squad, and company techs your champions get a % bonus to Att, Def, and HP?   Maybe a x8 boost when players can make companies of 12 soldiers to keep high STR champions from being overpowered.

Or you could give them some kind of exponential return on their stats. Means they would start out weak but each additional level up would grow more and more powerful.

The devs have said that the intended mechanic is to have a four-unit army consist of four guys, each with the same attack and defense.  So when they attack, they roll 4 times at the attack level of a single soldier, and when they defend, they roll the defense roll of one soldier.

Obviously this isn't what happens now.  Based on research done by another guy who posted over in the support forums (but consistent with my observations), the problem seems to be that for a unit of N units with a combined attack of T, the game actually rolls N times for T/N each time, and *doesn't decrease T when soldiers die*.  In other words, as individual soldiers die off, the collective strength of the unit stays the same, so each soldier becomes more and more powerful, until you end up with one guy who has 4 times the attack and defense of an individual soldier.

You can particularly see this if you attack a high-defense unit with a squad.  The first few rounds you won't hit for much if anything, because you can't overcome its defense.  But as members of the squad die off, your to-hit rolls get higher and higher until you're beating down its defense rolls like there's nothing there.

If this theory is right, the current balance is completely unrepresentative of what we'll see once they fix the bug.

But for those of us who despise any sort of Auto combat system in a TBS game this will not address the issue.  I won't use it because it is simply not fun.

This post just remined me about an encounter I had last night. I just recruted a 2nd Level Hero Farmer and next to him was a Shrill Lord.

So Farmer Brown (this is what I named him) was attacked by the Shrill Lord before I could move him.  When the TB screen came up I clicked on the Shrill lord to see what I was facing and to my suprise he was a 60th level creature with over 33,000 Attack  and 29,000 Defense.  Now the game was in it's 75th turn and this monster was only 4 squars away from one of my cities.  Needless to say that my solve spent the next several turns teleporting troops into that town but still my whole army could not even come close to scratching that Creature. 

Any one else encounter creatures that powerful?

That has to be a bug, 33,000 AP and 29,000 Defense is just not possible, and I've faced Shrill Lords before, and there's not that overpowered lol..

Also, does anyone happen to know where to edit the champions for more level XP? I tried looking for the XML file, and it doesn't seem to be in the ElementalDef, so I'm assuming it's someplace else, but can't find it.

Ok good because that is just too powerful.