That's the advantage of HP as a defense.

The inconvenient is that it's much less efficient as a defense versus regular attacks, because our well-armored creatures don't have much less HP than our poorly armored ones. (Drakes are in the 300, all dragons are above 400 or even 450).

Unless you've got extremely efficient armor negation (which is really rare), an unarmored target will go down MUCH faster. Believe me, a bear falls to early game troops in a blink, because 300 is maybe 4 rounds of bashing for 4 gilden warhammer units. If the bear had even 10-15 armor (which is nothing), you'd DOUBLE that figure. Even against spears, you'd increase that figure by more than 50% (66%, actually).

tested the iron golems

the +0.5 tactical Scale Multiplier on the steel talon is overkill as the standard golem is really big already, if you really want to make the steel talon the biggest golem, than you should make the other golems smaller.

overall: you keep your line for specializing unit for different tasks:

tempered steel with its stat boost becomes better against single strong units, although he is missing  defense against any non physical attack, it would really need it for that role

mechanized warrior: overpower is always good against numbered enemies, even if its only 50%

Steel talon: i see their main strenght to be strategical, you can quickly get them where you need them with their 6 moves

I like the mechanized warrior and the steel talon, they make the golems quite useful, the tempered steel is not that much of an improvement since the golems are already good against physical damage, they miss any sort of defense against elemental damage and magic

So that is what happened. Steel Talon is supposed to be -.5 to scale. It's a smaller, lighter mech. I will add it to the next update. An apt analysis of the new traits. I am happy to see our intended feel to each golem was so easily recognized. Mech Warrior is just brutal though against larger, endgame units. That is +50% damage per solider in the unit. So a party takes +150% damage. A Group, 200%; Squad, 250%, Company 300%. This was added to give golems relevance all the way to the endgame. Give it Golem Shield and Sledge to see a veritable bashing powerhouse against light infantry companies. Early on Steel Talons can make up your whole frontline. They are excellent for taking down monster hordes. Tempered Steel is a good choice for killing strong units of one. The default defense of golems is now 50 from 60. Tempered Steel gives you a nice boost to deal with the high likelihood of armor piercing enemies. Finally, the counter to golems is magic. That is the intended design. If your enemy has mages, don't send a golem to do a Warlock's job.

Well, i was hoping for some fire resist against those evil dragons and the even more evil ignys...

Edit: wait, does the damage from overpower add to the bash percentage ? that would be really huge

There seems to be a bug with the Regeneration spell: you have 2 Versions, one strategical and ond tactical. The tactical spell has in his description that it regenerates per season, and it doesn't have any effect in tactical. Quite useless that way .

Tac Regen deleted, thanks.

[Edit] We are going to rebalance it. Expect a tactical regen for Path of the Healer. It will boost armored unit power.

I think you just beautifully illustrated why HP is a better damage sink...

I can cast a simple low cost, level one spell and give that ball of hp a huge increase in effective hp.

Cast that same spell on a high armor unit and the effect is not as pronounced.
If you believe that there are not hundreds of easily accessable, cheap, and effective ways of negating armor then you really need to sit down and play again.

I guess your minds are firmly set on the bizarre hp values which is a shame.  I'll try the next release before a verdict and I'm willing to be surprised.

Since i'm testing various builds:

Path of conjurer doesn't add the listed 3 level to the summon

prayer has a casting time of 4 turns, should be cooldown of 4 ?

sweep does no damage, only the 33% chance to knock someone down works (if that's intended than it's a bad attack)

flurry is broken, i activated it and Verga attacked the ground (animation plays before i can select a target), but nothing happens

Verga doesn't get mana blast if you go the path of the mage (yeah, i know, but he is a surprisingly good mage with his high initiative once he gets access to arcane bolt)

speaking of arcane bolt: it does really a lot of damage (33 damage at level 4 for only 5 mana and the damage goes up very nicely with levels), when resisted it does only 3 damage instead of half the damage, the description says it does %d damage)

If you're talking about regen... it's the opposite. It's much better on low HP, high armor units.

I think he's talking about stoneskin.

Well, you do have a tactical regeneration spell in path of the Healer at level 11: mass regeneration for 4hp/turn + 1/life shard.

Evade would also disproportionately reward high HP.  Basically any defensive buff will.  That goes for champion passive abilities like those found down the command path as well.

The discussion now is how to balance the multiplicative effects of adding two defense types together. Resistance to normal weapons has the same problem. Adding elemental resistance to an armor, Hp, or Dodge build would also be very strong.

How do you balance so many defenses and attacks?

After some digging, I suspect this is because the ModType is Unit, instead of being Player like all of the other abilities that add to summon levels.  I have not tested to confirm that yet.

The thing is, you cannot manipulate HP as easily or extensively as you can improve, reduce, or remove other defensive stats.  It's a one way street and it will always be best to have that large HP pool than to have a small pool and stacks upon stacks of the easily manipulated stats.

The first way we are going to deal with Hp growth is to limit some of ways you get it. Fortress bonus levels are fewer. Level 3 is now +2 init. Level 5 is +10% Fire Resistance. Any Constitution type bonuses will reduced weight capacity. The rate at which trained units gain XP is being reduced by 25%. The choice will be high armor or high Hp, but not both. Units will gain XP slower, allowing for few level 10 units. This will be tried for a while to see how it plays. The difficulty is that Hp from leveling is just going to add lots of Hp to well armored units. We can reduce it a little, but the overall balance is set to allow the player get those kinds of advantages over the world. By the end of the midgame, you should be on equal footing with most of the world. The AI should be too, but it needs lots of unit designs. To that end, I have been compiling my designs. Playing each faction once through is essential to a competitive AI until I can get a full database.

Trogs get a new design trait that stacks with the normal Constitution to give some new tactics to Trog warriors. The intention is to make their early and mid game more akin to barbarianism. They will get a trait with Heavy Armor which allows them to carry more, but they take a -5 init. penalty. They are going to use the multiplicative effects of Hp and armor, but be extremely slow in battle. I am curious to see how that will play out. It should make them extremely vulnerable to mages.

Those sound like good changes across the board.

But I think you misunderstood my last post--the problem isn't in the ways you can add HP to armored/regenerating/evading units but in adding armor/evade/resistance to high HP units.

It's much easier to add defenses to a unit with a huge HP pool than it is to add HP to a high armor unit, and not only that but high HP units benefit more from armor and other defenses than adding more armor or more evade more whatever to the lower-hp-high defense units.

Version 1.0.013 is up. Changelog updated.

The way I see it, Hp just needs a better counter to even it out with the other defenses. To that end, I will think up some poisons and spells that reduce Hp by a percentage. You will be able to make a great Hp and armor unit. But your enemy can wipe out one or more of those defenses with a poison or a curse. So then we will have a balance between life magic, which increases Hp, and death magic, which can reduce it in kind. Rogues are more powerful now as well. They should pick up some of the slack as far as dealing with high HP armies. It's something I am glad we started discussing. I think the balance is alot tighter in this latest build.

In the long term we are working on more independent tech trees. Civ will keep large Hp bonuses and large units. Warfare will get better armor with smaller units. We are doing alot to reduce the multiply defenses, but some of the changes in this build are going to have to be rebalanced once the tech changes are made. Any ideas are always welcome on how to further limit defensive power.

Yeah, more effects like that would go a long way toward solving the problem.

Similar to how anyone can get armor piercing with spear units, perhaps you need to add %HP damage to an existing weapon type, or even a new weapon type. Perhaps this could be the role of daggers? They're currently just like swords but faster with less damage.

I would have a weapon that does a very small amount of flat damage combined with a reasonable amount of damage as % of current HP. This has worked very well in League of Legends as a solution to HP stacking champions. This weapon would be great for the first few hits on a high HP unit and allow units with normal flat damage to mop them up once weakened.

Poison could be a good way to do this as well. Have a rouge type unit that applies a poison that does 15% of current health as damage every turn (value subject to adjustment). A unit with 300 HP would take 45 damage the first turn 38 damage the second, 32 damage the third and so on. The poison would take a very long time to kill the unit on its own, but combined with standard attacks would be an effective way to mitigate high HP as a defense.

"-Disney no longer owns Lucas Arts." 

Wish we could mod that in real life.............

Regarding HP, i i don't really see a balance problem if bears and similar units cannot be tamed. The high hp low defense mechanic works just fine as long as the human player cannot use those beasts and add spells etc. imo. I don't think %HP damage would be a good idea, a weak enemy with 100hp shouldn't need the same ten hits as the dragon endboss enemy with 1000hp (extreme example, just for illustration)

Generally, i don't think the other beast high hp units are overporwered - the bear is this good because he can deal an ungodly amount of damage in addition to his high HP, all other beasts are not dealing enough damage compared to heroes and mid to high end  trained units.

I'm not certain if this is intentional or not, but you've got Path of the Conjurer set to only add 1 level to summons now.  If it is intentional, you need to update the description, since it still says +3.  Otherwise...

I wanted to have have summoning level determined by the caster. In that case it should be +3 to each summons. Instead it is being done as a global ability, so +1 makes more sense. Each spawn rating increase adds alot of power to summons. Has anyone gone the Resoln Conjurer route yet? It can be very strong. At any rate, I'll update the description.