Custom units/commanders - assigning cost ?

[velk]

Originally posted by Zen:
P.S. The reason Niefel Giants are 500 gold is they are insta-supercombatants. They have Water Paths so can go underwater and have access to Quickness and if given a small set of equipment, become terrors in and of themselves.

So what would *you* give them as a gold cost if they had no magic paths ?

Just removing all their magic? Or their magic, holy levels, and sacred status? Or a unit with comprable stats and no special effects? And for Jotun still?

[velk]

Originally posted by Zen:
Just removing all their magic? Or their magic, holy levels, and sacred status? Or a unit with comprable stats and no special effects? And for Jotun still?

Magic including holy.

Is the nation the unit is for relevant to how much the unit should cost ? I honestly had not considered that given I am trying to create a new nation from more or less scratch.

Well if you took away all their magic and their holy (but left their sacred) I'd consider 250ish. They lost a total of 8 Magic Levels (including the Holy) and now are regulated to being on-land without the help of a magic item. Though for Niefel this might be too low. Since they could churn them out and equip them with a Rainbow fairly quickly and cause alot of havok with minimal cost (250 Gold and a Wraith Sword would probably do the trick fairly well, Boots of Quickness, and a Ring of Regen would complement it nicely).

The cost dependant on the nation is primarily a "What would Zen think" and not a "Game mechanic" argument. The Nations I like use all their troops just for different purposes or different combinations. Thus if you had a big beater like the Giant I'd hope the cost would be modified with how easy it is to abuse and either adjust the stats or the cost to make it balanced vs opponents and in the internal structure of the nation.

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by velk:
I have been playing around with some custom units, but I have been having great difficulty coming up with a good way to assign resource and gold cost to them. How do you guys decide on these values ?

If you download the combat sim, and put a new unit in the "UnitTypes.txt" file (specify armors and weapons), it will autocalculate the resource cost for you. Or you can do it manually by reading the sticky thread about equipment stats. Those resource costs are for size-2 units: the armor resource value scales with size.

[PvK]

Holy is a big reason to increase cost, in my book, since:

1) They will cost half to maintain, and maintenance cost is about as important as purchase cost, in the long run, particularly for units that might survive a long time.

2) Holy units can have various beneficial spells cast on them that others can't, most obviously, blessings which can add large improvements to their stats.

PvK

[General Tacticus]

If you look at Pythium's two themes, Hydra cost 250 gold in normal theme and 300 gold in serpent cult, where they become sacred. Likewise, Hydra hatchlings go from 50 to 60. On the other hand, Serpent Cataphract stay at 60 gold.

I think part of a unit cost is dependant on nation, with some nations/themes having deliberately lower cost for certain units (like Ulm paying 10 gold for his heavy infantry, where similar units are 15-25 gold for other nations). Still, sacred costing +20% gold seems about right to me...