I agree completely. It just seems like very poor balancing to have initiative penalties for encumbrance and again for armor.

Hopefully it's just a placeholder system until they can get the values balanced a bit.

I prefer -4 Init, -8 Init, and -12 Init, -1 Move for penalties. Can't really reduce Moves by 2 because the unit will be unmovable. We would probably need to play beta 3 and look at all the new stat definitions before more can be said. Maybe some traits that only work when lightly encumbered to add some incentive for unarmored units?

nvm, I see you have it as I would have suggested SeanW (at least according to your system)

tac move penalty was for values going *over* 100 encumbrance.

-X% Initiative is an interesting idea, as opposed to -C initiative .... but honestly if we are working from the standard of 20 initiative (and if that initiative rarely goes up) I doubt we will have too many modifiers to initiative other than Encumbrance , so I doubt it will matter, therefore -C initiative should work just as well. The only kink in the system would be something silly like a +6 or +8 initiative dagger I suppose. (+initiative should probably only come from hero-traits and rare hero-only equipment ... not daggers imho. And I think Initiative should be more important to mundane fighters, not magicians ... but alas we can't have it all)

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As an added detail, I think either the way initiative works should be changed, or Impulsive should be outright removed and casting times should be decreased to pre 0.86 levels.

Because Impulsive just takes the whole "balanced spell system" and throws it out the window.

We do not deserve to have our spells nerfed to the cold hells of Hyboria just to balance around Impulsive. Therefore fundamentally change the way Initiative works, or Axe impulsive and rework casting times.

That is all

It does occur to me that daggers and Impulsive are a glaring issue. Daggers would be equally logical to give a bonus to Strength or Shoe size. The light weight of the dagger already reduces the encumbrance of the unit. No need to add even more Initiative to this. Daggers should be better at Crits, plain and simple. No one has even argued the point, so to speak, as far as I can recall. The weapons that should be doling out Initiative are magical weapons IMO. I don't like that swords all get a bonus to this. Hopefully with swords doing counterattack, it will leave room to remove those Initiative bonuses. Guess what my mod will do...

Impulsive needs to go too. It seems it is currently bugged, as is Haste, so that you get an immediate second turn. That would be fine for an Assassin, but not for a Mage. It needs a Path of the Assassin Prereq or delete it with extreme prejudice. 

The encumbrance can also go too far. I was playing a game where I RP'd my factions units as spirits. Weak beings. Hordes of little green meanies. I gave them two weaknesses to portray they are summoned rather than trained and equipped. And being only partially in the physical world, I wanted them much weaker than normal units. But the encumbrance was a killer. Arm them with a single weapon and they've maxed out their weight. In that situation I think encumbrance goes too far.

In general, I'm not really on board with the encumbrance system. It feels like its whole purpose is to justify different armor types. If that's the case, then I'd prefer the mechanic be dropped, and focus be on armor saves versus weapon type. With some armors having some movement and dexterity limitations. I don't know. But I don't think I'd be missing encumbrance. It just seems contrived, and having little fun purpose. 

Mostly encumbrance feels contrived because it serves so little purpose in latest builds. originally it was a much more important part of the game and was more fun because it wasn't just that annoying background mechanic that lowers initiative.

Even without strength lowering encumbrance, it is not a useless system, in fact it is a much more interesting and balanced system than item initiative modifiers because it makes overall weight past a certain threshhold lower initiative and other stats instead of every single item just lowering or raising inititaive.

Right now daggers are much better than staffs for magi becuase even basic daggers give +6 initiative while staffs give -4. The bonuses staves give to spells does not compare to a difference of 10 initiative. A well balanced encumbrance could fix this problem by looking at the overall weight of staff and light robes instead.

The problem with this is that to balance we get stupid things like -1 on some pieces of chainmail and not others. Also it would be very simple to make even the strongest champions not ignore the encumbrance system.

Per item initiative penalties are just a lazy and less comprehensive version of encumbrance and it makes no sense to have both except to limit how many items a unit can carry, which is not how it is implemented anyway.

I think the initiative system should either be built around encumbrance ... OR encumbrance penalties kept minimal with encumbrance ONLY being a measure of how much you can carry.

So either decision A, and 3 different armor types are distinguished by initiative penalties vs bonuses.

OR decision B, where all equipment is linear, and having more encumbrance just means being able to have more awesome equipment.

I don't know, I don't think heavy armor is that great and still all in vain, still get killed by epic, what is good of heavy armor anyway? I think it's silly to make heavy armor lose "their" turn, that's no fun at all. Moving mabye but lost thier turn? no thank, I don't think one should punish to one who want heavy armro to be safe, but still get killed in one or two hit, this game, 8.6 beta based kill them before they kill you, so heavy armor isn't that great as in war of magic, war of magic, heavy armor is great.