Alright, I understand the basis, and I like the tactical implications of a system like that, but the values need some serious reconsideration.  Right now, bears get nine moves on the map and in battle.

Have you done much unit-vs-unit combat testing?  A cave bear can pretty reliably kill almost anything on the map.  It's to the point where your intended effect--a dangerous world full of nasties that require forethought and tactical mastery to defeat--is actually reversed compared to vanilla.  I just need one spiked collar or a beastmaster sovereign and then I can steamroll every stack I come across.  This isn't hyperbole!  Cave bears will absolutely ruin trolls, troll warriors, drakes, heroes up to level 10ish and probably higher, but I haven't gotten that far yet.  They are so easy to acquire early that a savvy player will not find much challenge anywhere in this world.  I think you're on the right track, but you should scale back the HP bonus that most units get compared to vanilla.  Not just cave bears.  It really destroys a lot of the balance for spells, poisons, etc.  What's the value of a 30HP heal spell that costs 17 mana when most units, excluding heroes, have hundreds?  It's a good idea but it feels like you didn't fully consider all of the ramifications... how all the numbers end up working together in concert.

A lot of human units seem to have outrageous hitpoints as well.  I can make squads with 300hp each.  These guys will not ever die.  Once they are built, they are permanent because they have so many HP that its very easy to retreat them a few squares if they get anywhere close to low enough health that they could be eliminated.  Then after combat send them off to heal in town.  Its just very difficult to do enough damage in a round to actually eliminate one, because attack values are not scaled or really changed much from vanilla while HP was increased by a factor of ten in some cases.

This means that those high armor units are actually much easier to kill than a defenseless sack of HP like the cave bears.

I don't know man.  I reaaaaaaaaally love mods like this, so please understand that criticism is meant to be constructive.  I tend to be blunt because that is what I look for in critique of my own work.  I've got a lot of experience in modding going all the way back to Civ2.  Me and Kenata made a nice mod for the original Elemental that sought to differentiate weapons.  It was quite popular I believe, although I grew frustrated with the sheer scope of what was needed to 'fix' that game and how rigid and limited the modding capabilities were that I left soon after the second release.  If you're interested in help, anything from testing to content design, or even just want someone to bounce ideas off of, let me know.

I'll try to compile a list of broken tooltips for ya--but I really hope you go back and reconsider your numbers, and make sure that the practical outcome matches your intended goal for gameplay.

Regarding: beast lord.

i do not use it ever, i like challenge  

Regarding poison: it is useless. It would be nice to re-think it to be useful somehow. Damage never scales and soon 1-2hp/turn is nothing. Even 8hp/turn is bad. 

Well this mod takes an already broken and overpowered ability and cranks it up a notch.  Make that ten notches.

And spiked collars have the same effect and are quite common.

Perfect, except for the drake. Although it seems weird that it could take down a drake, unless the drake is verrrry unlucky.

We're open to feedback, of course, but strong cave bears don't seem off to me - our version is supposed to be monstrous, supernatural creatures with strength comparable in power to elementals.

As for units with lots of HP and healing - have you seen healing in vanilla? 8 hit points. 8. HPs.

Units that reach 300 HP in our mod are 7-men, late game units with lots of buffs. Early/mid-game units have 75-150 HP, and 25 HP can make the difference on a small, 3-men elite knight unit. They're not meant to be wasted on pikemen. But you're right - we might increase the value to ~40 ish for a greater mana cost.

We're aware that a lot of balance (and tooltips :p) are off. Give us time, the game is 2 weeks old and we've done a HUGE. FUCKING. LOT.

I'm just wondering if you've sat down and played a game with the numbers as they are now.  Right now you can start a game and the instant you find a spiked collar you can start waltzing around the map without a care in the world, completely untouchable.  I shouldn't be able to defeat virtually any army with a unit I can acquire in the first few turns.  You say that you want the world to be monstrous, but in practice the changes have made the game ridiculously easy. 

I'm not saying that vanilla HP would work better in acheiving your goal--just that the HP inflation is so outrageous that it overshadows everything else.  Cave bears are just the easiest way to point out the flaw, they aren't the problem, just a symptom.  You would be a lot closer to acheiving your desired effect--that of requiring different tactics for defeating each monster--by giving the HP boost a bit more subtlety.  Say, a formula that would give a Cave Bear around 150 hitpoints.  Even at that level they will be POWERFUL units but not the eaters of worlds that they are now.

If you combined that while simultaneously increasing the defense values of monsters that you want to rely on armor, double the regenerative qualities of trolls, etc, you will be a lot closer to a game that adds tactical depth to combat.  Right now the bonus HP just outclasses the other survival mechanisms due to the sheer scale of the bonus.  It is just an objectively better survival tool.

I upped poison to a solid 3 per poisoned blade trait. That damage can Crit. Crit chance for Assassins has been increased. They also have more Initiative. There is a new Acidic Poison trait for Deathdealers that does a strait 2 poison damage per hit. So, that's 9 poison, which is typically undefendable, per turn and it will have at least 20% chance to Crit. Using a Dagger is essential for Assassins to raise that Crit to 30%. Find a poisoned Dagger and you can do crazy damage per turn. It can be hard to see these strategies. I suggest playing each Path a few times before writing it off. For one thing, the poison damage was not working until this latest version. MeleeAppliesSpell is very buggy.

You are of course correct. We haven't had time to really play the current numbers. Looking back, .005 had a world so dangerous not even the masters could compete. Now it is a little too tame. It's a problem of pacing monster lair upgrades with a reasonable expectation of player skill. If you are veteran of WoM, I am guessing you are masterful in many respects. Could you please give me an idea of how you play so I can get some better context for your perspective?

Well, I don't think you can destroy "virtually any army". A cave bear can be defeated by 4 units of spearmen/macemen/axemen and archers (the starting ones, with 3 soldiers per group) with 1 or 2 units lost. It has no armor - don't get too unlucky with maul and it'll lose 15-20 HP per hit. And yes, we've played it a lot. And I've never looted a spiked collar.

I mean, remove the "monster avoid cities" changes you've made to city hub, and you'll start sweating again.

Do i still use terraintypes.xml from ecomental?

With a cave bear I can defeat the vast majority of camps.  There are definitely some that stay off limits--syndicate doomstacks, dragons that are not solitary, some of the elemental stacks, probably many that I'm forgetting or haven't run into.  This is compounded by the nine strategic movement that bears get--you can defend your entire civilization with this single unit acquired at the start of the game.  There's nothing that the AI can build until well into the mid game that could challenge a city with a cave bear and militia.

I feel like the example is becoming the point of contention when the intent was just to lend specificity to a larger problem.  That specific issue--getting a cave bear and running roughshod over the world--could be easily addressed by removing Beastmaster and the spiked collar item.  That would address the example and would certainly be a good step regardless of any other balance concerns, but not fix the problem.  Hell, taking out that trait, and removing or decreasing the drop chance on spiked collar would be a good step for any mod that seeks to improve the game!

The problem is the drastic undervaluing of HP as a defensive tool, which led to assigning HP pools that are way too high, and the resulting dominance of units that rely on that stat.  Alternatively, overvaluing armor, resistances, regen, etc, and resulting comparative weakness of units that rely on those stats.

I can give you a point-by-point AAR for the first 100 turns of a game if that would help.

I believe that Flurry is bugged currently.  Tooltip at level-up screen reads simply "Flurry" and it seems to never hit.  At least I've never had it deal damage, so either remarkably poor luck or something's wrong!

Hope you guys understand that critique comes from a sincere desire to see the mod succeed!

Flurry works. I did not test it yet for the very newest version though, in all other versions it worked as a dream.  

Yea, beast master is overpowered. But i like collar. I have never tamed anything really big though, like bear. And they are not that common. In past three games i found 3 of them, one per each game. 

My concern at the moment is that AI is loosing with the world. Best part of the mod is that you have to fight your way through the world to establish your civilization, it is very said if you succeed and there is nobody there left ... Right now i am playing expert/expert and i have at the moment my pr around 100, with one faction having 90, rest under 40, with two already dead. Perhaps i have to test expert/ridiculous. 

By the way, healing is great. It profits also with the damage to spell bonus, so it can go higher than 30. It saved my butt countless number of times ... 

Yes, healing is a good spell for some units, but for others it is useless because of the huge range of HP values.

I just confirmed over 20 attempts at flurry none of them landed a single hit or inflicted any damage.

I welcome criticism. I regularly PM the harshest critics of Elemental and ask them to give me some feedback. This is no holds barred modding. If you hate something, feel free to complain. If we don't change it, yell some more. If we still don't, do it yourself for your personal game. We don't all have to agree. Not everyone has to drink the kool-aid. I don't want to stifle innovation at all. You are respectful and criticize politely. That's all I really require.

So you think Hp is undervalued as a defense stat? Okay, that is going to be a hard thing to sell, but I am listening. As to bears, my tinkerer just came up with a plan for that. We are moving Cave Bears to a new creature type called Great Beast. We will update all +damage vs. beast abilities to also do damage against this. We will not allow these types to be tamed. It will effectively limit many problems. I don't want to rag on the XML, but you would not believe the things we can't do because of buggy tags. Or maybe you can if you modded WoM. The devs aren't going to fix them, so we have to work around them. Wonder why Bears have 9 moves? Because we wanted to prevent bear kiting. Wonder why we didn't just add it to tactical? Because the xActions tag to do that is bugged. We could put it in a spell, but battleautocastspell is buggy too. We have to limit the number of those. I would rather we have Tac Moves and Strat Moves, but the devs didn't do it that way. So I gave bears 9 moves to fix the kiting issue. Monster AI is limited to 1 move per turn. Problem solved? But then the devs debugged Beastmaster and added Collar after that. I never use them, so I didn't see the problem. So yeah, everything is a work in progress and there is a ton of stuff we have not yet encountered. I'll enter the fix for the next build.

And since I am discussing the nitty gritty, we won't be working on making special units faction based. They are pretty much hardcoded to be based on race. I spent way too much time on it for no change. If someone wants to figure it out and send it to me, I will add it. Until then, races decide what you can train. The next update will cut out the training faction traits and balance the faction points. I notice that vanilla has set the default number to three. That means I need to remove the free point from the weakness options. 4 points would be insane. Fair warning, I don't play custom factions, so they are not going to be a huge focus of my work. If you run into imbalances or have an idea for some new traits, make them and we will consider it for the next build. I am mostly interested in adding new weaknesses. The sadist in me I guess.

Back to Hp. On turn one, you get units at 46Hp. You can have 3 and they are almost always killed in battle. The endgame has units with 300Hp and massive armor. That is the intended design. Where I am willing to change things is where a particular part of the game gets too easy or gives too much advantage to high Hp units. In truth, the imbalanced thing would be having lots of armor and Hp. There are probably a few points where you can make units far too strong by leveling. We are more than happy to release hordes of WTFPWN monsters on people at those points until balance is reached. Pacing monster strength is easily the most difficult thing to balance. Keep in mind though, that a level 5 Fortress trains units at level 7 with a Command Post. So even early game units you have been leveling are going to be near equals to a new army later in the game. Really, if we are going to make a change we need specific theory on why Hp is so much better.

For instance, A unit with 300Hp against an axe takes 5-10 damage. A unit with 150Hp and 10 armor takes 2.5-5 damage. That means they are of the same overall defense. Hp is only as good as the weapon that is being used. A spear is better against armor than Hp. A mace is best against Hp. The middleground is the axe, which can sunder armor down to 8 points and has a middle of the road attack value in cutting.

There are actually 5 types of defense if you count regeneration. Trolls are the weakest ones and get +8 per turn. That is equal to healing one attack from an early game unit. Considering that they have bash and do great damage, I would say they fit the early game challenge we designed them for. Troll Warriors get more Hp, armor and 16 regeneration. They are pretty great at reducing light and medium troops to piles of bloody bones. The difficulty of a troll army is that you have to focus all your attacks on one troll at a time.  That means controlling the field so that you have all your attacks on one unit. If you get stuck in one on one situation, you are almost sure to lose to their regenerative powers. They are countered with fire. I don't see a hole in this balance. Less Hp would make them extremely easy. Even with more regeneration, mages would just wreck them too quickly. A mage counter is supposed to be several trolls rushing your mages while you hope and pray they die before getting a solid bash in.

Flurry multiplies Accuracy by .75. That means a very low accuracy on most units. But it gives you 3 immediate actions. Try using them to use special abilities that have 100% chance to hit or use resistance instead of accuracy. I just checked the spell and the code is exactly the same as before when I used it to get hits. If you are missing that much, check your accuracy. There may indeed be a bug here.

I'll wait for a new version to make an argument in that case.  I certainly know how buggy tags can cause frustration.  I was really hoping that would not be a problem this time around... but I have yet to get my hands dirty looking at what has changed and how.

Great Beast is a good start.  I think a lot of my impression is colored by how easy the first two games I started were--one as beastmaster and the other acquiring two collars right off the bat.  A bear or two on board in the beginning really ruins the challenge.  I still think that the HP values are going to be problematic.  Midgame I had a stack of six level 10+ heroes and the only stack that I wasn't able to clear was a trio of cave bears because they were each able to do 30+ damage per round, and much more with a string of good hits, and there's just no way to kill something with that many HP quickly, whereas the monsters that use one of the other stats as their defense aren't able to last as long.  Their tactical move of nine meant that no matter what happened they would be able to bum rush the weakest heroes and kill one or two of them on their first move.  Absolutely nothing you can do about it.

I'll shelve it for now and give it another shot on the next release with a fresh game before I commit to a judgement.  I like the concept!

RE: Value of healing spells. 

Path of the Cleric and Path of the Healer have a reduced mana cost for tactical spells. I have it set up so that not every hero is a good healer. You can use the life1 Heal in a pinch to save your ass, but it's going to cost you. Clerics and Healers get more efficient heals. Life3 has a radius heal spell. Having Water or Life can make you a great healer. Getting Mantle of Oceans on a Cleric is pure gold. Get some troops and constantly heal for little mana cost. Of course, you will need to specialize in mana on a strategic level to be able to play a healer hero. It's one of the most powerful builds, but is also very costly.

Right--I was more concerned with how healing with relatively static numbers will interact with the HP ranges.  Makes healing very strong for the high defense/low or average hp units and much weaker for the HP sacks.  The relative worth of each HP is so different between the two.  Not sure if its a problem so much as an example of the kind of unexpected result of changing a number assumed to have isolated effect.

It might be worthwhile to make a heal by percent for the situation you suggest. Still, Greater Restoration is something like +80Hp. Healing is per level of the caster plus life shards. The percent heal would add some nice variety to the Path of the Cleric I think. It has too many spell resistance options and not enough healing options. I might even make a Path of the Apothecary when I add in the level 12 paths. Making potions would tie in well this this line of reasoning.

Agreed.  Excited to see where you take this.  It seems that you are well aware of the ins & outs of gaming systems.

Hi, love your mod (novice player so i usually loose but i like a game to be actually challenging).

Some observations: I noticed the 5xp/turn on the governor path doesn't seem to work. Was really excited to see that feature, would finally make that path usable. Also, there is a starting hero for the empire that already has the governor path at level 1 - but gets to choose another path at level 2, which seems to overwrite the first path. Finally,'i noticed that the minimum distance between two cities seems to be reduced, which can apparently cause some strange behaviour: i'm not able to build in some cities despite having enough free adjacent space, directly next to the city core building - and always that space is in the direction of a previously built close city.

Another way of framing the HP discussion would be to think in terms of 'effective HP.'  The theory is that a certain volume of armor creates a pool of 'effective hp' that approximates the pool of raw hp on critters with no or low armor.

At first glance, this seems intuitive and balanced, right up until you realize that there are a hundred different ways to negate or reduce armor and thus drastically reduce the 'effective HP' pool of armored critters.  There's no equivalent way to degrade the value of raw HP.  So even if your values were mathematically equivalent in terms of raw damage absorption (they're not at all), you'd still have have a huge performance difference.

On Flurry--it definitely does not work for me.  Animation plays but no damage is dealt.

It also seems that "Hold" is bugged.  It casts and will say whether or not it succeeded or was resisted, but the unit still gets to mtake a turn and can attack.

1.009 remarks, most may be valid?

some heroes are overburdened (Tearny is at 106%)
Training costs 0 turn to research
when you create a sovereign, you don't have access to some of the items of the precreated sovereigns.
Courage spell is quite underwhelming (for a hero at least)
can great wolf gives more than a single mundane wolf pet?

not much quests around

dagger is better than assassin dagger

juggernauts everywhere. boring.