Improving National troops ?!?

[PvK]

* Try playing with slow research, so magic takes longer to get very powerful.

* Try bringing enough priests with your armies so that people using those undead summons you mentioned, get banished to bits.

* If there were an increased penalty for being attacked by many foes, I would not make it a fatigue penalty, and perhaps not an increased defense penalty, but perhaps instead an offense penalty. A skilled defender could then still have some chance of staying alive for a while, but would have a harder time killing enemies while fighting several at once. It would also increase the value of high attack skill.

PvK

[Huzurdaddi]

Since in late game national troops become very very useless (ghost rider, 5 death gems, tartarian gate, 10 death gems, bane/wraith lord 10/40 death gems, and similar summons that vanquish them all) I've some proposes to do:

I have an idea. Let's look at what all of the summons you have pointed out have in common: death magic!

Let's talk about the early summons that people use that are really good: Banes, Wrights. The later on Bane Lords, Wraith Lords and then the summons that you list.

The only other path which comes close is Blood ( demons are simply *really* inexpensive compared to what you get ).

Were it not for those two paths national troops would be effective for far longer. Sure national troops would be dominated by mages in the end, but isn't that what we expect?

[Cohen]

Slow research probably force you to take a strong pretenders, an SC chassis ... because if you don't take and enemy has, in early game you get bashed.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Cohen:
Slow research probably force you to take a strong pretenders, an SC chassis ... because if you don't take and enemy has, in early game you get bashed.

If you aren't taking a strong pretender, then the reason you are getting defeated is probably not due to your national troops, but instead due to a poor choice in pretenders.

[Cohen]

If you go for a scale or bless pretender ... you're beaten by a fighting one.

[Stormbinder]

I like several ideas listed by Cohen. And it is true, that by the end of the competitive MP game the main difference between nations are their national mages, since nobody (with few rare exceptions) using national troops anymore, because summons and SC outclass them, even if nations have decent bless effects.

Unfortunately I don't think most of the Cohen's suggestions could be implemented by devs at this point, because it would require too much changes and rebalancing.

But perhaps some of the more simple ones from his list have a chance of being implemented. Like for example allowing national units to gain exp on different table (or just 2 times faster) than summoned troops. Not a big change, and it could be applied to all nations, improving each national troops a little without massive efforts of rebalancing 1000+ units.

Other equally simple and easly implemented changes could be added as well. The goal would be to give all national soldiers a slight boost, to make tham somewhat usable at the mid/end game, but without nerfing any of 100s of summons and without massive rebalancing efforts between 17 nations.


Perhaps some of more complicated suggestions would find its way to Dom3. For example, some "champion level" (lvl3 or 4 in current dom2 system) that can unlock special abilities in veteran troops would be very nice. Such system was implemented in AOW2 and AOW2:SM, worked marvelliosly. It would make you really care about some of your veteran soldiers.

[ May 31, 2004, 20:52: Message edited by: Stormbinder ]

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Cohen:
If you go for a scale or bless pretender ... you're beaten by a fighting one.

That's not my experience. Many of the bless pretenders can qualify as SCs. An air 9 titan, for example, can work very well. So can an earth mother, or any other unit with a large amount of hitpoints. The equipment that you choose to put on them can make a huge amount of difference in their effectiveness.

As for the scales, they are extremely useful throughout much of the game. National troops only become less useful when they aren't that impressive to begin with. Ulm, for example, has only middle-range troops, and therefore needs to develop magical abilities to overcome this weakness.