Over the weekend I've been playing with Altar's Henchmens (Altarian civil war) to tweak them a bit for balance. The idea isn't really to nerf them, but rather to tweak it so that the AI can put these guys to use a bit better to give them a bit of flavor when not played by the players...
Anyways, here's what I came up with after a few trial runs:
1) Alter Henchmen Tech's prereq to require Heroes (internal: Recruiting) tech and Enchantment tech (instead of just Shard Harvesting), double research cost to fit it into its new tier (16 instead of 8) a bit better. This is primarily to push back the Henchmen rush and make sure the needed accessories, weapons, and armors are available to them when henchmens actually unlocks. I guess you can think of it as needing some nice gear before adventurers will sign up to your cause...
2) Modified the Heroic Trait so that it starts you off with 100 Influence (this is mainly to make sure that the AI has enough Influence to field a few Henchmens - because they don't spam Quest Maps), but completing a Quest only gives 20 Influence (instead of 50), thus reducing the effectiveness of Quest Map spam. So while you can get a couple of henchmens fairly easily, it'll take more work to field an army full of them. Think of it as a sort of "soft cap" for henchmens via cost, 3 completed quest would still allow you to field 3 henchmen, but you have to work harder if you want more.
3) Modified the base Henchmen unit designs as followed:
Bard:
- Traits:
- Air Adept (same - also of note: Air Adept 3 says it unlock Growth when it actually unlocks Storm)
- Water Adept (same)
- Bard (same)
- Weapon
- Staff, auto best ice staff (cold attack only) (instead of overall best)
- Armor
- Monk's Robes, doesn't upgrade (instead of nothing)
- Pants, auto best (instead of nothing)
- Boots, auto best (instead of nothing)
- Add Accessories:
- Ring of Glacier
- Ring of Embers
- Ring of Life
- Belt of Speed
Torchbearer:
- Traits:
- Fire Adept (same)
- Life Adept (same)
- Fast (instead of Cook, Cook is simply too useless to waste a trait slot on)
- Weapon
- Staff, auto best fire staff (fire attack only) (instead of overall best)
- Armor
- Monk's Robes, doesn't upgrade (instead of nothing)
- Pants, auto best (instead of nothing)
- Boots, auto best (instead of nothing)
- Add Accessories:
- Ring of Glacier
- Ring of Embers
- Ring of Life
- Belt of Speed
Shieldman:
- Traits:
- Earth Adept (same)
- Shieldwall (same)
- Muscle (instead of Ironskin - the weight bonus allows him to equip armor, which more than makes up for the lost of Ironskin)
- Weapon
- OneHanded, auto best OneHanded weapons (all damage - swords only for high initiative and counter) (instead of overall best)
- Shield, auto best (same)
- Armor
- Torso, auto best (instead of nothing)
- Pants, auto best (instead of nothing)
- Boots, auto best (instead of nothing)
- Add Accessories:
- Ring of Glacier
- Ring of Embers
- Ring of Life
- Belt of Speed
Basically Bards are ice mages, Torchbearers are fire mages, with only Shieldmans being Melee. These aren't the best designs by far (but those requires babysitting - and often involves exp stacking), but they are far superior to the current designs and helps the AI keep them alive when they are most vulnerable (just trained), which means less injuries and more exp (and more levels - which makes them even stronger). The extra accessories (and mage staves) means they'll require some crystal to field (8-13), but since it's just a single unit, the cost benefit for them is quite high, and well worthwhile. (I originally had them use the best accessories, but the techreq for those made henchmen too far down the tech tree.)
Although the result I witnessed seems much improved, I'm still not entirely happy with it overall. The AI is still quite a bit behind the player with regards to using henchmens. This seems to be mainly because they are unable to properly build their heroes in general, unable to synergize their skill picks with their equipment (I have some ideas on how to improve that, but it's not something that can be done in a quick mod, so I'll write it up in more detail later - in the hopes of it being in an expansion). The AI also doesn't seem to realize the significance of these henchmen units (they don't seem to prioritize building these units in well enchanted fortresses to take advantage of those bonuses - maybe Brad can do something about that... or maybe prereq Fortress, or a <PrimaryFortressPriority> tag?). Also, the EXP stacking trick for players really needs to be addressed (maybe some kind of diminishing returns on stacked bonuses in general).
Anyways, here's the mod if anyone wants to play with it (this is a core file mod, so extract the modified files into your data\english folder and overwrite to install, and extract the original files v1.02 also included to uninstall):
Altar Henchmen Mod
Also of note, while testing I noticed that when mages are assigned a default weapon (with <Equipment>) AND have them pick the auto best staves, the unit design sometimes don't show up until you research a couple of techs down the tree for some reason. Removing the default weapon option and just have them auto select seems to fix this. However, this is not entirely certain, I only did a few tests regarding this problem so I didn't mod any of the mage designs to address it.
PS: and finally, is it too late to say that "henchmens" sounds kinda stupid...? Seriously, can't we just call them... "adventurers"?
